• Wamuwi Mbao

While there is much to mourn about the passing of legendary American singer and actor Harry Belafonte, we should hold a place for his bold statement-album against apartheid South Africa.

• Madosini

The South African musician known as Madosini passed away in 2022. She was one of the last of a generation who learnt to play traditional Xhosa instruments, in so doing sharing the spirituality, dignity, and joy of Xhosa culture through her inimitable song.

• Valmont Layne

A new film by French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis uncovers how American jazz giant, Thelonious Monk, was disrespected by French media at the end of his European tour in 1969.

• Fungai Machirori

The music and art of Lauryn Hill and Chiwoniso Maraire combined sexiness with political consciousness, offering Black women a way out of rigid categorization.

• Liam Brickhill

Zimbabwe is not Mugabe, Nkomo, Mnangagwa or Chamisa. A new Afro-electronic music duo is giving the country’s complexity a soundtrack.

• Wayne Marshall

Does Afrobeats come from the continent or the diaspora. This reviewer of a new book on the genre's history and rapid takeover of our airwaves and playlists, argues we need to center Africa more.

• 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.

• Mpho Ndaba

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.

• Ousseina D. Alidou

Hausa poetics of compassion and resistance in northern Nigeria in the age of pandemics and neoliberal democracy.

• Marissa Moorman

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.

• Boima Tucker

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.

• Simon Adetona Akindes

In the third installment on Afrobeat in South America, political scientist Simon A. Akindes writes about Newen Afrobeat from Chile’s capital.

• Simon Adetona Akindes

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.

• Simon Adetona Akindes

In the first of five articles on Afrobeat in South America, Simon Adetona Akindes discusses Abayomy Afrobeat Orquestra and Bixiga 70 from Brazil.

• Boima Tucker

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.

• Boima Tucker

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.

• Chris Webb

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.

• Zayaan Jappie

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.

• Noori

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.

• Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes

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.”