Africa Is a Country

Songs for the Blue Sharks of Capo Verde

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Songs for the Blue Sharks of Capo Verde

By
Amílcar Tavares

The first in our Africa Nations Cup 2013 playlists; to drown out the commentator if they are annoying you during the game.

Sao Maria, Cape Verde (Nicola Locatelli, via Flickr CC)

First, it’s Cabo Verde, who have played brilliantly so far and have a huge game today vs. Angola.  Gilyto, aka Mr. Entertainer, and his song dedicated to Os Tubarões Azuis set the scene. It is an official song and captures people’s enthusiasm and affection for the national team. I don’t like it much, but people do, and it’s catchy (it speeds up Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”), and the video’s nicely done. The kids will love it. Plus, with those snippets of local radio commentary, it has the crucial ingredient in any cheesy football tournament song.

The game against Angola today is “the Lusophone derby” of Afcon 2013. It is likely to be a winner-takes-all match. What better day to listen to the great Cesária Évora’s song “Angola,” all about the friendship between Cape Verdeans and Angolans?

Next up here’s Bida di Gossi with “Os tubarões” and Bulimundo’s “Konpasu Pilon;” both are about how everyday life’s difficulties affect people’s lives.

Beach football. Table football. Dancing. Finaçon’s “Si Manera” has it all. This song talks about personal freedom and the struggle of the Cape Verdean people.

We can’t have a playlist for Cape Verde without featuring Mayra Andrade. Here she is: first up “Kaka Barboza”/ “Dimokransa,” and then “Quim di Santiago”/ “Kenha ki ben ki ta bai.”

Finally, two more from Cesária Évora (we couldn’t resist). “Petit Pays” is about our diaspora’s love of and nostalgia for their little homeland. And lastly, “Sodade“. In the 1940s, we had a famine, and many people were contracted to work in  São Tomé and Príncipe (never fulfilled contracts; these people effectively did slave labor). This song is about the nostalgia of those people.

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.