Africa Is a Country

Not what the mainstream image is

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

Not what the mainstream image is

By
Tom Devriendt

If you can't get Coldplay's stadium rock out of your head, try these 10 (well, eleven) tunes.

Eritrean dancing in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada (Kurt Bauschardt via Flickr CC).

First up, Sean’s five year-old daughter prefers this remix by Dead Prez of “Beautiful Girls” to the original by B.o.B. and Bruno Mars. Some sample lyrics from the remix: This Hollywood world so pretentious / Every other girl got a perm or extensions.
But you dont even really wear lipstick / Still your beauty is a natural mystic / Indigenous strong cheek bones from your lineage / Not what the mainstream image is / Natural hair is your heritage / But to see it without chemicals is rare as the pyramids.”

The French soul singer Ben l’Oncle Soul’s “Petite soeur”:

Tiombe of the East Village “spaced-out RnB acid house revivalist outfit” Cubic Zirconia channels Josephine Baker (You remember the video Kahlil Joseph directed for the “Black & Blue” track Cubic Zirconia did with Spoek Mathambo, right.):

 

Belgian rapper Akro (of local Mundele fame) recorded this video in Kingston, featuring Jamaican singer Stacious.

Since it is getting cold, it’s worth revisiting the remix of “Your Summer Song” by Exile, featuring one J Mitchell on vocals:

The next clip is not a music video, but one of many trailers for “Hit Me With Music,” a new documentary about dancehall:

 

More smooth grooves. Oakland’s Raphael Saadiq’s “Movin’ Down the Line”:

Brazilian rapper Parteum takes a trip down memory lane on the streets of São Paulo and São Caetano do Sul:

Finally, number 11, the intensity of the late Cape Town rapper Devious is on full display in this video shot in Amsterdam in 2001 by Thomas Gesthuizen. We thought of Devious last week, when Contro’Versy, another Cape Town rapper, passed:

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.