Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break 44

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

Weekend Music Break 44

By
Tom Devriendt

Here’s your weekly round-up of new videos and tunes to get the weekend started. First up, Gaël Faye giving us another video off his “Pili Pili sur un Croissant au Beurre” record, and reminding us of everything that’s good in Bujumbura. Pick your dish:

‘Burning’ is the lead single off Silver Bullet’s “Afrikans in Denmark” EP, featuring Afrikan Boy:

From earlier this year: Ghanaians Gemini and EL (and Wanlov):

Art Melody and the band he toured with in France recorded this “live” footage:

‘Kioo’ is a new X Plastaz song and video by Tanzanian rapper Ziggy, shot in Stockholm (Sweden):

Zimbabwean rapper Synik–remember Amkelwa’s interview–released a video for an older track of his:

‘The Sun’ is the dreamy lead single off Malawian (London-residing) artist Dziko’s “Afro Electricity” EP:

Dirtmusic (that’s Hugo Race and Chris Eckman) wrote a song for peace together with Malian singer Aminata Wassidje Traore:

South African Simphiwe Dana held off from releasing the ‘Mayine’ video for an older song, blaming “perfectionist me”— we don’t see why she should have:

And to end, a song by Ghanaian Jojo Abot (who lists Simphiwe as her inspiration):

Further Reading

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

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.