AfricaIs aCountry

Found Objects, No. 13

Found Objects, No. 13

By
Sean Jacobs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwe_xNEUgxA

The UK (via Jamaica) toaster, Tapper Zukia’s “MPLA” off the album from the same name. Because the song (and the album) came out in 1975, some made links to the Angolan liberation movement, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, who that same year formed Angola’s new independent government (after a protracted liberation war against Portuguese colonial rule). This fan video–with its Cold War and anti-colonial images–contributes to that myth I suppose. Instead, the song was more about Rastafarianism and a reflection of 1970s London black identity politics.

H/T: Tony Karon.

Further Reading

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.

What Portugal forgets

In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.

Trump tariffs and US Imperialism

Trump’s April 2025 tariff blitz ignited market chaos and deepened rifts within his own coalition. Beneath the turmoil lies a battle between technocrats, ultranationalists, and anti-imperial populists, all vying to reshape—or destroy—American global power.