Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break 53

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

Weekend Music Break 53

By
Zachary Rosen

If you don’t know now you know. Weekend soon come. We got music from South Africa, Togo, Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, Kenya, Ireland and Belgium in this week’s music break. So let’s get started:

South African house producer Oskido is always on the hunt for new musical talent. He’s found it now in the energy and sound of Busiswa. Here’s their track with Uhuru called “Ngoku”:

Uniting Brussels (via Kinshasa) and Queens, emcees Aja Black and Big Samir are The Reminders. Check out their interview on the Sway show and see how they use words for ammunition in “If You Didn’t Know”:

Irish hip-hop musician Rejjie Snow returns with a lyrical story of his name in “Snow” and raises the bar for sonic production:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbaAf4aSIQQ

Togolese singer Papou has the formula for a solid dance joint with “AGO”:

A jazz singer from Ghana’s Volta region, Jojo Abot lived in Brooklyn before returning home to sing and act. Check out this live performance/interview footage to see what she’s about. The return has been good to Jojo. She has performed at the Chale Wote Street Art Festival (which is happening again this weekend in Accra — we’ll have some impressions up on the blog next week) and she stars alongside legendary palmwine singer Koo Nimo in the new film Kwaku Ananse directed by Akosua Adoma Owusu.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0tsbjHc1AY

One of the best male house singers in the South African game, Shota, presents the new track “Ben10” off his album THE WARRIOR. This one will do some damage on the floor, but too bad his girl in the video seems more attracted to a strange animated character than she is to him:

Senegalese chanteuse Coumba Gawlo, with Pape Thiopet at her side, will give you a taste of laamb wrestling and kola nuts in her latest mbalax jam “Lamb Dji”:

Young Kenyan rapper Cool Kid demonstrates he already has a taste for the mic in the track “Burn Cool” with Mtapa:

Ghanaian producer and talented vocalist Bisa Kdei keeps the momentum from his hit “Azonto Ghost” as he confronts his enemy with personal strength in “Metanfo” (“My enemy”):

And Zambian crew Zone Fam get into the language of the body with “Translate”:

Share your favorite new videos in the comments below.

Further Reading

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.

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.