Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break 56

Weekend Music Break 56

By
Tom Devriendt

Three South African videos to start with. Cape Town rapper Youngsta moves between the city’s neigbourhoods of Wynberg and the CBD:

…while fellow Cape artist HemelBesem went for a stroll in Utrecht, Netherlands earlier this year. EJ von LYRIK who was on tour with him gets a cameo:

Mafikizolo seem to find a lot of fun in creating retro-styled videos lately:

A Nomadic Wax production for Diamondog, an MC from Angola, currently based in Berlin, Germany:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJMXM3SC908

From Jumanne’s archives: Kali Kwa Wote Unit from Zanzibar, ‘Tatizo Coins’ (an older song):

Baloji (who no longer needs an introduction) has two songs on the latest (and great) Red Hot compilation, both Fela interpretations. Here’s one of them:

Dinozord — from Kinshasa — could be seen dancing in a KVS-sponsored production recently but rapping is still what he does best:

A new album and a sweet video for guitarist Hervé Samb:

Rap from Québec, Canada: Webster (real name Ali Ndiaye — he has a Senegalese dad):

And another one from Angola: Puto Português and ‘Minha Passada’:

Further Reading

Take it to the house

On this month’s AIAC Radio, Boima celebrates all things basketball, looking at its historical relationships with music and race, then focusing on Africa’s biggest names in the sport.

El maestro siempre

Maky Madiba Sylla is a militant filmmaker excavating iconic Africans whose legacies he believes need to be known widely—like the singer Laba Sosseh.

Madiba and Mali

There is a remarkable connection between Mali and South Africa, dating back to the liberation struggle, and actively encouraged by the author’s work.

A devil’s deal

Rwanda’s proposed refugee deal with Britain is another strike against President Paul Kagame’s claim that he is an authentic and fearless pan-Africanist who advocates for the less fortunate.

Red and Black

Yunxiang Gao’s new book takes a fresh look at connected lives of African American and Chinese leftist activists, artists and intellectuals after World War II.

The Dar es Salaam years

In the early 1970s, Walter Rodney, expelled from Jamaica, took a post in Tanzania. In Leo Zeilig’s new book, he captures those exciting, but also difficult years and how it formed Rodney.

Rushing to boycott

The cultural boycott of Russia turns to the flawed precedent of apartheid South Africa for inspiration, while ignoring the much more carefully considered boycott of official Israeli culture by the BDS Movement.

The party question

Marcel Paret’s book, “Fragmented Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa after Racial Inclusion,” tries to make sense of politics in South African urban informal settlements.

The missing pieces

Between melancholy, terror, and disillusion, Petit Pays is a groundbreaking and eye-opening take on one of the darkest pages of African history, one that is often misunderstood in the West.