Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break 59

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

Weekend Music Break 59

By
Tom Devriendt

Oddisee (real name: Amir Mohamed El Khalifa; he has a Sudanese dad) is on tour in Europe this month, so go check him out if you’re anywhere close. Details and dates here. He also has a new video out:

Zimbabwe-born, South London-raised Eska Mtungwazi gives us these visuals for her new work:

Uganda-born Jaqee (real name: Jaqueline Nakiri Nalubale) also shared a new video this week, recorded in Gothenburg:

A happy tune by Belgian-Congolese Karoline Kamosi aka Leki:

Nigerians WizKid and Femi Kuti team up in ‘Jaiye Jaiye’:

A new disco jam from South Africans Muzart, ‘Party After’:

Hipe produced this track for Ill Skillz, also featuring Sandra Amarie and Melo B Jones:

At the Trinity International Hip-Hop Festival, Nomadic Wax gathered top MCs from around the world. This cipher features artists from USA, India, Burkina Faso, and Kenya: MC K-Swift, Mandeep Sethi, Humanist, Mr. Lif, Kama and Lah Tere:

Nana D grew up in Ghana before moving to the UK in 1980. Here’s his latest collaboration with Jordan Crisp, the quite hectic but fun ‘Ngoma’:

And to end, we were very sorry to hear about the unexpected passing of Robo The Technician last weekend. He will be missed in Johannesburg and beyond.

 

Further Reading

After the uprising

Following two years of mass protest, Kenya stands at a crossroads. A new generation of organizers is confronting an old question: how do you turn revolt into lasting change? Sungu Oyoo joins the AIAC podcast to discuss the vision of Kenya’s radical left.

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.