Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break 58

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

Weekend Music Break 58

By
Tom Devriendt

Your weekly dose of 10 new music videos. First up, from Kenya, Muthoni The Drummer Queen’s ode to Nairobi:

M.anifest, “Ghana man since 19 kojo-hoho”:

Indocile is a hip-hop crew from Liège, Belgium:

South of Belgium, representing the Congolese diaspora in France, new work by Black Bazar:

Ol’Kainry (representing Benin) and Youssoupha bring their version of that Pusha T & Kendrick Lamar ‘Nostalgia’ video from earlier this month:

Davido’s Skelewu already had an instructional dance video (accompanied by some controversy), but it comes with a new story now:

Cape Town’s winding mountain roads were made for longboarding — assuming you’ve seen this one already:

DJ Kent gets help from pop duo The Arrows on ‘Spin My World’:

Toro y Moi (an AIAC favorite) remixed Billie Holiday a while ago:

And a last South African tune to get your weekend started, courtesy Character, Oskido and Mono-T: ‘Inxeba Lendoda’:

Further Reading

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.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.