AfricaIs aCountry

Weekend Music Break N°32

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

Weekend Music Break N°32

By
Tom Devriendt

Friday/Weekend Bonus Music Breaks got side-tracked a bit lately because of the Afcon fever. Good times were had by all. Let’s pick up the thread though. Here are 10 music videos you might have missed over the past weeks. Burkina-American Ismael Sankara (remember Mikko’s write-up about Ismael’s surname and possible affiliations) released a new video: above. Tyler the Creator-Yonkers-style, Elom 20nce’s masks imagery, swag lyrics, stir, et voilà. Neat beats. More diaspora music:

Nina Miskina (who was part of the Brussels-based Congolese Héritage project) seems to have put her theatre acting on the back burner to focus on her musical career. Here’s a first video for ‘Un verre de plus’, taken from her debut EP:

Another Belgian-Congolese artist is Coely. When footballer-and-aspiring-record-label-manager Vincent Kompany says we should like her, we’ll like her:

There’s a high-profile (and heavily sponsored) electronic music festival happening in Cape Town, South Africa this weekend. Surprised not to find good old synth-duo Tannhäuser Gate on the bill:

Originally from Bangui, Central African Republic, Idylle Mamba now lives and works in Cameroon. This new video blends all kinds of styles:

Also repping Cameroon (via the Netherlands) is Ntjam Rosie. From the video below, it looks like she’s taking a break from her previous “soul jazz” work:

More funky rock courtesy of the Senegalese Daara J Family (they’ve been around for a while), vintage dancing and ‘celebrating’:

This acoustic session by Gasandji and her band made me sit up:

Cuban jazz pianist Omar Sosa has a new record out. He presented and talked about it at WNYC radio studios recently: a tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, while channelling the “Eggun” spirits:

And finally, this portrait by Vincent Moon of muezzin Saeed Rifai Ali Khaled in Cairo. Watch it:

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.