Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break No.71

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

Weekend Music Break No.71

By
Sean Jacobs

Credit: Okenyo Facebook

Boima is on vacation this week, so the rest of us scanned the music pages. We can’t promise it will be as eclectic as Boima’s choices. But here we go in short sentences. First up, the Kenyan-Australian singer Okenyo has a new video for her song “Just a Story.”

Fashawn, who sounds like Kanye West, loves his daughter:

De La Soul is working on a new album. While prepping, they just come up with new music, with special guest Nas. It just happens to them like that:

This is just a video of Youssoupha (son of Tabu Ley Rochereau) promoting his big concert in November in Paris:

Then there’s South African rapper Khuli Chana’s “Mahamba Yedwa/Mo Tsipe”:

Then there’s Kenyan singer Fena Gitu and her upbeat lyrics about her “African Jack Bauer” (no politics here):

Finally, The Kyle Shepherd Trio wants to fly without leaving the ground.

* Goodbye to John Shoes Moshoeu, Peter Makurube, Christopher Kindo and our friend Cristina Villeresi. We will always remember you.

Further Reading

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.

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.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.