Weekend Music Break, your weekly round up of hot tunes and music news from around the African Continent and its diaspora, is here!

This weekend we have Belgium based Congolese artists Badi and Fredy Massamba’s team up “Belgicain”; Show Dem Camp puts out an Afro-House song featuring Iye on the hook; still in the house zone, but in Angola, Maya Zuda and Bebucho Que Cuia present “Dois a Dois”; French-Senegalese rapper Booba heads to South America once again to shoot the video for his song “Tony Sosa”; Nigerian Davido sets his sights across the Atlantic by teaming up with Philadelphia gangsta rapper Meek Mill; Another cross-Atlantic collaboration sees a pair of Americans and a pair of Brits trading verses over a ominous R&B-trap beat; In preparation for the launch of his new album, Sarkodie also launches a trans-Atlantic gangsta-rap collabo this week, here he goes to dancehall territory with Stonebwoy and Jupiter; The Havana Cultura project recently shared “Madres” by Daymé Arocena, a live performance dedicated to the Orixa Yemaya (Yemoja, Iemanjá); Seattle-based Chimurenga Renaissance heads to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe for their track “Pop Killer”; and finally, F’Victeam, a Congolese dance squad, shoots a martial arts themed Ndomobolo/Decale video (embedding disabled so watch it here). Enjoy!

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.