Reading List: Lesley Nicole Braun
Anyone who has attempted to describe dance in writing knows how difficult it is. These books on dance on the continent and the diaspora gets close.
Music
Group therapy
South African jazz drummer Tumi Mogorosi’s latest project is a call to black people to share the questions that render our condition one of deep ache.
Faster than the ashes of a burning fire
Hausa poetics of compassion and resistance in northern Nigeria in the age of pandemics and neoliberal democracy.
Father of the nation
The funeral of popular Angolan musician Nagrelha underscored his capacity to mobilize people and it reminds us that popular culture offers a kind of Rorschach test for the body politic.
In sun and shadow
On the last episode of our sports and music series on Africa Is a Country Radio, we visit with Sean Jacobs and Tony Karon of the Eleven Named People podcast to preview the 2022 men's World Cup football tournament.
Newen Afrobeat and echoes of Fela around the Andes
In the third installment on Afrobeat in South America, political scientist Simon A. Akindes writes about Newen Afrobeat from Chile’s capital.
Afrobeat is bigger than Fela
In the second of five articles on Afrobeat music in South America, political scientist Simon Akindes writes about the all women and nonbinary Brazilian band, Funmilayo Afrobeat Orquestra.
Afrobeat futures
In the first of five articles on Afrobeat in South America, Simon Adetona Akindes discusses Abayomy Afrobeat Orquestra and Bixiga 70 from Brazil.
On the track and in the field
This month on Africa Is a Country Radio, we continue our theme of sports and music, and look at the history of Olympic success in athletics of various African countries.
World Refugee Day from the US-Mexico border
For World Refugee Day, Africa Is a Country Radio visited Tijuana, Mexico to talk with Josiane Moukam about what life is like for African migrants at the US border.
Punks of the Witwatersrand
The Rise and Fall of National Wake, South Africa’s first multiracial punk band at the height of apartheid, that sang about state violence and political freedoms.
Sampa The Great’s new chapter
Zambian artist, Sampa the Great, returns to the stage in Australia with "An Afro Future." In an interview, she talks reconnecting with her roots and redefining the future.
Beja music cannot be beaten by any regime
The Dorpa Band from Port Sudan, a city on the Red Sea coast in eastern Sudan, embodies Beja Culture. Their bandleader, writes what drives their music.
The psychological pains of Ethiopian intellectuals
The desire to be absorbed into and consumed by the West, to find solace in its seductive promises, animates Robin Dimet’s film, “Sami’s Odysseys.”
Take it to the house
On this month's AIAC Radio, Boima celebrates all things basketball, looking at its historical relationships with music and race, then focusing on Africa's biggest names in the sport.
El maestro siempre
Maky Madiba Sylla is a militant filmmaker excavating iconic Africans whose legacies he believes need to be known widely—like the singer Laba Sosseh.
The missing pieces
Between melancholy, terror, and disillusion, Petit Pays is a groundbreaking and eye-opening take on one of the darkest pages of African history, one that is often misunderstood in the West.
Hope and optimism howled at full volume
A people’s history of Zimbabwe’s first mbira punk band, Chikwata 263, who wanted a soundtrack for the country’s post-post colonial blues.
An independence revue
This month on Africa Is a Country Radio, taking inspiration from the work of Chinua Achebe, we take a listen to the music of the post-independence era on the African continent.
This is appropriation that’s acceptable
The French Ethio-groove group Akalé Wubé has dissolved. For over a decade they have shown how cultural outsiders can considerately engage in music that is not theirs.