Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break 46

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

Weekend Music Break 46

By
Tom Devriendt

Electrique DJs, Fena Gitu and Jaaz Odongo have the perfect Summer tune for you. Technically, we’ll have to call it “Kenyan” house music:

Another great video by director Nicky Campos, this time for South Africans Cassper Nyovest and OkMalumkoolKat:

“9 quatrains to paint a reality,” Enyam Scandalocks calls it. The reality he describes is Lomé’s. Koreg on drums, Elias Damawu on trumpet:

Australian Summer looks in Remi Kolawole’s “Sangria” (via pop Radio Afro Australia):

Noah Kin — remember him — from Finland:

I loved the short profile on Congolese artists Jupiter & Okwess International the BBC did a while ago:

Kitu Sewer and Frank ‘Mteule’ analyze the state of the Kenyan nation in “Wanasiasa”…

London based duo Native Sun went to Mexico:

Old Money’s mind is in Mexico too, it seems. From the Dutty Artz stable:

And everybody has seen or heard P-Square’s “Personally” by now, yes?

Further Reading

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

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.