Africa is a Country TV is back: We interview Kenyan supergroup Just a Band

Apart from seeing our logo superimposed on a building in downtown Johannesburg, this is a good way to celebrate AIAC TV’s return to Youtube. We (well Dylan Valley) attended STR.CRD in Johannesburg last year. STR.CRD is South Africa’s leading (and maybe only) street culture festival and expo. Dylan sat down with Kenyan “geek afro pop” supergroup Just a Band and chatted to them about playing in South Africa, engaging Kenyan politics (this is quite timely given today’s vote back in their homeland) and their plans for their new album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCILm_KsR0w

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.