Africa Is a Country

Like a weary protest song that has been marching since the 1960’s

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

Like a weary protest song that has been marching since the 1960’s

By
Boima Tucker

Kae Sun, who we’ve featured on this site before, has just released a new single. With an organ vamp that registers like an extended Prince intro, the interrogative lament wanders over handclaps, and rolling snare drums to give the feel of a weary protest song that has been marching since the 1960’s. Fittingly, the song is called “l o n g w a l k,” and it’s impatient yet resigned feel seems right on time in light of recent mainstream headlines.

The song will be part of Kae Sun’s forthcoming self-titled EP. Follow him on Soundcloud, Twitter, or check up on his website to stay in the loop on when it drops.

If you find yourself in the US’s Northeast this March 28th, head over to Yale University’s Africa Salon Concert, where he will be performing alongside Just a Band and Jean Grae.

Further Reading

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.

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.