Africa Is a Country

We’ve Resurrected Weekend Music Break. Here’s No.68

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

We’ve Resurrected Weekend Music Break. Here’s No.68

By
Boima Tucker

Ghanian singer Jojo Abot

Keeping with the weekend’s theme, we’ve decided to resurrect the Weekend Music Break with number 68! For those who forgot (or who are new to the site), this is the place to highlight music that has caught our eye, or landed in our inboxes this week. Enjoy this edition’s selections in no particular order:

First, the video for Rocky Dawuni’s lead single “African Thriller” has been out for awhile, but his new full lenth album Branches of the Same Tree was released just last week:

 

Next we have Kenyan-Dutch musician and filmmaker Festus with a dub reggae track, and video documenting a trip home to Nairobi and Kisumu. It’s beautifully shot glance at the East African landscape and its people (despite a bit of the persistent African Kids music video theme). The track is out last week via his own label Turtleville:

 

Ghanian Hiplife/Azonto star Atumpan moves on from the small girls to focus on the baby mamas with a rural village themed video:

 

UK-based South African DJ and producer Moroka put out a groovy edit of Senyaka Kekana’s early-Kwaito single “Go Away,” as a tribute to the recently passed singer:

 

Finally, BBC1xtra had their annual Destination Africa event this past month. For it, they sent UK-based artists Stormzy, Jay Vades, and New York-based singer JoJo Abot home to Accra to record a collaborative record called, “Mievado”. This week’s release of the song was accompanied by an interactive video that gives you little closer taste of each artists’ perspectives on the city.

 

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.