Africa Is a Country

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°5

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

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°5

By
Sean Jacobs

One of my favorite MCs / hip hop producers, Damu the Fudgemunk. I always check for his new work. (Reminds me of Madlib.) The video, below, is from 2009’s Madvillian. And this link is to his latest work.

So the main rapper on this Tanzanian track is a teacher and the featured artist is his student. The kid, Dogo Janja, is considered a star for the future. The song talks about the lack of pay and respect for teachers–no prizes for guessing the name of the great teacher whose pic flashes at the conclusion of the video.

Nigerian wedding music from Nigerian-American Eldee: Golden Arrow buses, Table Mountain, colonial statues in the company gardens. Is Cape Town the honeymoon spot for cool newlyweds or for shooting music videos on budget? Hey Europeans and Americans do it already.

http://youtu.be/VS4aFoeQG6A

A video preview of Chief Boima collaborator DJ Lamin Fofana’s latest:

http://youtu.be/mY6HNGWHzKE

Finally, some Yoruba soft jazz by Dipo (no not Diplo obviously) with “Be Your Man.” There’s also the freestyle version with Ghanaian vocalist Enya.

Further Reading

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

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.