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

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.