Africa Is a Country

Our People

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

Our People

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0mPUpojd84&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

This past summer at least three prominent figures of the Cape Town jazz scene–the saxophone players Robbie Jansen and Ezra Ngcukana and, most recently, pianist and historian Vincent Kolbe–passed.

For me, this recent live recording of “Os se mense” (Our people) by a representative of the next generation of Cape Town jazz musicians, Kyle Shepherd Trio, is a fitting tribute to these men.

* BTW, it is worth reading the historian and photographer John Edwin Mason’s separate tributes to these three giants on his blog.  Mason also includes a link to a film of Kolbe by Rio Allen.

Further Reading

Sinners and ancestors

Ryan Coogler’s latest film is more than a vampire fable—it’s a bridge between Black American history and African audiences hungry for connection, investment, and storytelling rooted in shared struggle.

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.