Africa Is a Country

Soundcloud Africa

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

Soundcloud Africa

By
Boima Tucker

Africa is a Country hosted Chimurenga's pop up Pan-African Space Station transmission. It's archived here.

Lamin Fofana and Thanu Yakupitiyage. Image: Zach Rosen.

Last November, Africa is a Country teamed up with Chimurenga’s Pan African Space Station library-of-people installation at the Performa 15 Hub in New York City. We were able to curate three panels over the course of a weekend, hosted by: academic and writer (and non-academic soca specialist) Rishi Nath; immigrant rights activist Thanu Yakupitiyage, otherwise known as DJ Ushka of Brooklyn’s Dutty Artz collective; and AIAC photography editor Zachary Rosen.

We wanted to make sure to archive the conversations, so you could listen if you missed them when they went live. So here are the embeds via our Soundcloud for you to enjoy again and again.

Block The Road: The Sound of Afrosoca:  An exploration of the recent explosion of cross-Atlantic exchange between Caribbean and African musicians, with Rum N’ Lime Radio co-hosts – Queens-based writer and academic Rishi Nath, and DJ, producer, and Trinidadian Soca ambassador DLife.

Adrift: A soundtrack for migration: A current and former member of the Brooklyn DJ collective Dutty Artz, DJ Ushka (Thanu Yakupitiyage) and Lamin Fofana, talk about Fofana’s recent EP as a jump-off point to discuss migration — from what the Western media has dubbed a European “migrant crisis” stemming from Africa and Syria — to other examples of being “adrift.” The two draw on their personal experiences as immigrants to the U.S from Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone respectively to discuss how they’ve incorporated heavy themes of (im)migration into their work as musicians and activists. What turned into a two-hour podcast, features both Ushka and Lamin’s musical selections as a soundtrack to being adrift – both physically and geopolitically.

Seeing voices: Reflections on African photographic portraiture: Zachary Rosen moderates a discussion with Delphine Fawundu, a Brooklyn-based photographer. In her work she focuses on identities through cultural expression; incorporating themes of social justice, music and history.

Further Reading

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.