AfricaIs aCountry

Akon’s Africa

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

Akon’s Africa

By
Sean Jacobs

The Senegalese-American crooner's uninspiring "Oh Africa" reminds of bubblegum South African pop from the 1980s.

Akon and Keri Hilson in a still from the music video for Akon's "Oh Africa" song.

The R&B singer, Akon has released his own 2010 World Cup song with the original title “Africa.”  Akon is the second R&B or rap artist in the last who has a song that is World Cup related. The other, K’naan, saw his song about refugees and war commandeered by Coca Cola. We are still waiting to see how Coca Cola’s desire to sell a lot of sugary drinks (with little regard to the health consequences like diabetes, obesity) will clash with K’naan’s lyrics.

As for Akon, he is joined by the singer, Keri Hilson, dressed in a zebra top (it’s Africa, remember).  In the music vodeo, two world class footballers (Didier Drogba and Fernando Torres) kicked balloon balls that explode into splashes of paint which, magically, morph into portraits of other soccer stars (Messi, Kaka, etcetera). This may be enough to excite some people, but  the song sounds a lot of like the stuff South African singer P J Powers or the apartheid Ministry of Information would come up with during the Info era.

I’ll take a pass.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

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.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

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.