AfricaIs aCountry

Weekend Music Break 62

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

Weekend Music Break 62

By
Tom Devriendt

10 new music videos from Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Kenya, Mali, Burundi (via Belgium), South Africa and Nigeria (via the US and the UK) to get your weekend started. But first up, from Senegal, Daara J Family have a new video out, directed by Lionel Mandeix and Loïc Hoquet. N’Dongo D and Faada Freddy, from Dakar, still bringing it after all those years:

“THIS VIDEO IS SOOOO AMAZING IT HAS A JAMAICAN VYBE PLUS DANCING N FLAVOR I GOTTA LUV MY NAIJA PPL DEM TUN UP LOUD BUSS TWO BLOODCLAAT BLANK FI DIS!!!” And that was just one of the first YouTube comments under this new Burna Boy jam, ‘Yawa Dey’, directed by Peter Clarence:

Here’s another Nigerian jam, by Omawumi and Remy Kayz:

More Pan-African styling courtesy of Nde Seleke in ‘Pelo Ea Ka’. Lesotho house music as good as it gets:

Kenyan director Wanuri Kahui shot this video for South African rapper Tumi — is this the new Pan-African aesthetic?

Compare the above to what Zimbabwean hip-hop artist Orthodox is doing in Bulawayo…

…or what Nigerian-American Kev is doing in Queens, New York (he is part of the Dutty Artz’ L’Afrique Est Un Pays project — check the EP we shared yesterday):

In Kenya, Muthoni the Drummer Queen has released an unusually dark video:

Meanwhile, in Belgium, Burundi-born (but claiming Rwanda as his original home) Soul T knows his Soul classics; this is a first single off his EP Ife’s Daughter:

And now for something completely else, to end, ‘Ay Hôra’ is a great new tune by Malian singer Sidi Touré and band (throwing a good party too):

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.