AfricaIs aCountry

Eastern Highlands

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

Eastern Highlands

By
Serginho Roosblad

This Weekend Music Break features a number of strong women performers: Nosiwe, Rina Mushonga, Alicious Theluji, and the 95 year old Tututa Evora, who just passed away.

Austin Neill, via Unsplash.

We kick off this Weekend Music (Number 67) break with an artist who has been away from the scene for a while: Cape Verdean rapper Vieira Nkosi. This week he uploaded a short freestyle video (in Dutch) entitled “I Am Legend“. Vieira was forced to take it slow, due to an illness, but judging by this video, he’s doing much better, and his new album “Kralienge State of Mind” is finished, he says. We’re happy he’s back.

There’s never a shortage of songs from Naija. Burna Boy released his video for “Na So E Suppose Be.”

South Londoner Kwabs, originally from Ghana, is on about everybody’s ‘who to watch in 2014’ list, which is not so surprising when you listen to him. This track “Wrong or Right” will be featured on his EP that’s coming out this weekend.

DRC’s Alicious Theluji had a smash hit in 2012 with her single “Mpita Njia” together with Ugandan singer Juliana Kanyomozi. But she is fully capable of doing it on her own as she proves on her zouk track “Posa ya Bolingo.”

We’re expecting a lot from Zimbabwean-Dutch singer Rina Mushonga in the near future. Her highly anticipated first album is supposed to come out in February 2014. “Eastern Highlands,” from her self-titled EP she released last year, is promised to be an indicator of what we can expect. We’re counting the days.

An inspirational song from Kenyan rapper Octopizzo, featuring his little daughter Tracy singing the chorus on “Blackstar.”

Three years ago Kenya’s Just a Band shot a video for their single “S.W.E.E.T”. At the time they weren’t happy with the result so they left if for what it was. They seem to have changed their mind, and showed the world what they initially rejected, so you can judge yourself.

Norwegian-South African Nosizwe is no stranger to the music industry. Her brother Tshawe had a smash hit a few years ago with the track “Beggin” as part of the duo Madcon. Nosizwe has taken a different, more alternative route. Her track “The Beat” proves that the musical talent really runs in the family.

To end: this week, Cape Verde, and the world, lost piano legend Epifânia de Freitas Silva Ramos Évora, better known as Dona Tututa or Tutura Evora. She died at the beautiful age of 95. We’d like to pay homage to her with this performance recorded in 2009 on the occasion of her 90th birthday. R.I.P.

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.