Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break No.74

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

Weekend Music Break No.74

By
Boima Tucker

Here is our weekend round up of audio and visuals from around the African Internet…

Kicking things off, Spoek Mathambo spearheaded band Fantasma premiered their video for Cat and Mouse this week, featuring a collection of young South African ballet dancers.

Alabama neo-trap poster boys Rae Sremmurd saw Fantasma’s video, and decided to head to South Africa for their latest as well. Some over here at Africa is a Country think they’ve spotted a Sean Jacobs doppelgänger.

The Alkebulan project is a series of EPs accompanied by a series of short stories from prominent African artists. They released the first video from the project this week.

Cape Town weirdo rappers DOODVENOOTSKAP jump in-to the Internet and dance around a bit in their video for “Protein Shake”.

13 year-old Kudurista Buriana of Cabo Snoop’s Power House crew brings us the video for “Pica malembe”.

Bebeto Bongo takes us to Burkina Faso and teaches us the Zoungou Zoungou dance.

Ghana and Nigerian dancehall link up on Shatta Wale and PatoRanking’s “Romantic”.

In honor of Afropop’s Hip Deep special this week on Afro-Peruvian music and culture, here is Susana Baca’s classic “Maria Lando” (Lando), live in Buenos Aires.

Nigerian singer Asa launched the visuals for Eyo last week. Here it is for you to enjoy today!

When Bono’s not getting run over on American television, he is promoting an end to poverty through his One organization. Here they assemble an All Star cast of African women performers for their “Strong Girl” campaign.

Further Reading

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.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.