AfricaIs aCountry

Young warriors of light

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

Young warriors of light

By
Tom Devriendt

What is with the increasing use of sci-fi and horror elements in fairly recent music videos and films by African artists.

A still from "Woklow."

Malinese rapper Amkoullel gets some help from Pap G and Young Keitch in his “battle between good and evil.” The track itself is so-so, but it did remind us we should soon try and properly make sense of the increasing use of sci-fi and horror elements in (fairly) recent music videos and films – which would include Matthew Jankes’s Umkhungo, Niyi Akinmolayan’s Kajola and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignants, amongst others.

Further Reading

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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

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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.