Africa Is a Country

Music Break. Bonus Friday Edition

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

Music Break. Bonus Friday Edition

By
Tom Devriendt

5 for le weekend.

“Propaganda” one of a series of songs/videos made by The King’s Will –one half of the UK duo is Musa Okwonga, whose family migrated from Uganda. The song is a homage to PR and advertising pioneer Edward Bernays:

M.E.D.’s “Blaxican.” L.A. identity politics:

A scene from “Coz Ov Moni,” “the world’s first pidgen musical” by Ghanaian duo Fokn Bois. They’ve been posting clips from the film on Youtube. This is the most recent one in the last few days:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ETwfWFX9JU

Clips one and two here and here.

A parody of rapper Drake’s “Up All Night” by Toronto-based Nigerian Femi Lawson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9p7UWx5NH0

Sweden and Senegal collaborate. Sousou and Maher Sissoko:

Video for “Rain On My Lips” by rapper Pepe Haze (Burundian) and singer Steph McKee (Kenyan). They’re based in Nairobi, Kenya. The video is described as “the first ever African music video that is entirely in stop motion animation.”

See you Monday.

H/T: Kweligee and Welfare State of Mind.

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.