Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break 61

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

Weekend Music Break 61

By
Tom Devriendt

Your weekly collection of new tunes and videos — this week from Zambia, Ghana, Jamaica, Mali, South Africa and the Netherlands, but first: Congo. This year’s Salaam Kivu International Film Festival (SKIFF), which took place in Goma in July, had as its theme “Agizo ya Lumumba — Justice”. The festival’s program included film screenings and dance/media/music workshops around the Justice theme and the following video by the same title, featuring Doris, Dak2, Black Man, DMD, BIN-G, Babu, Wanny S-king, Dj Couleur, M-Chris, Nathan, Jobson Madibo, Darsana, Fal-G, Gaius Kowene and Willy Ston, is a great product of that:

PAP-G is an artist from Mali who raps and sings over a layer of Diabatéba-produced music in ‘Favéla’:

Sarkodie teamed up with London azonto stars FuseODG. The video was directed by Moe Musa (check his YouTube channel for more goodies):

It’s been exciting to follow Stones Throw’s (the label) recent moves into the dub scene. This one features Roman soldiers, Marcus Garvey, and a fiery Little Harry:

“Le Cube” & Liam Farrell (aka “Doctor L”) are working on a new project, the LP “We Got Lost”, some other tracks of which you can see and hear here. Below is ‘Negro P’:

Block Kids on the New (yeh) is a Hip-Hop duo from Pretoria, South Africa:

Another track off the Red Hot + Fela record to get a video — remember Baloji’s –, this one for Spoek. (We’re looking forward to seeing what the Kronos Quartet / Kyp Malone / Tunde Adebimpe collaboration will look like on video!)

Jazzy ‘Beyond Of You’ is the first single off Dutch singer Joya Mooi’s upcoming album Crystal Growth. She talks about her South African dad and the play she has created about her parents here; you’ll find more music by her here.

A new song, ‘Too Much/Happens’, by Sampha Sisay (Sierra Leone to the UK) that deserves your full attention:

And to end, a short musical film by Zambian artist Mumba Yachi, which he dedicates to former First Lady Betty Kaunda:

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.