Weekend Music Break No.80

Ethiocolor's 360 degree interactive video.

Africa is a Country is now on Break for the weekend, so here is some Music we’ll be relaxing to over the next couple of days:

In this week’s selection: Stocktown directs a 360 degree interactive clip from the top of a roof in downtown Addis Ababa for the band Ethiocolor; An appeal for support, gives the world a sneak peak into the recording sessions of Colombian Salsa super-band Ondatropica’s new album; Fouma System brings electronic dance music to Dakar via the Akwaaba Music record label; Taking a peak at AIAC contributors Hipsters Don’t Dance’s site, revealed this wonderful London Alkaida-ish stomper from Kwamz, Flava and Mista Silva; We interviewed Uno July about his new EP last month, and this week he released a visual to “Skelem”, one of the songs off of that project; 99K and Wanlov release a controversial track and video called “Kasa”; Chosan, releases “Show Goes On’, a song and video that reads like a story of the life of the Freetown via London via New York via Baltimore rapper; Timaya dips his toes into Afrohouse with “Some More”; Becca and Ice Prince smooth things out with their own take on the genre; and finally, Uganada’s Radio and Weasal have been making noise in Cartagena, Colombia of all places. Perhaps their latest video “Juicy” and it’s Caribbean vibes will continue that success for them.

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.