Africa Is a Country

Friday Music Break, N°12

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

Friday Music Break, N°12

By
Boima Tucker

I’m taking over the Friday music break this week. First up, the prolific Azonto producer E.L. surprises us this week with a 25 track debut album. He had so many songs stored up he decided to release a video for one that’s not even on the album. Check his Swagga.

Kanye and Jay Z team up with Romain Gavras who capitalizes on images of our global instability. Will marrying Hip Hop with riot chic help out Angolan protesters? Probably not.

In a video that is a little more grounded than your average commercial Hip Hop video (and especially contrasting with the one above), Nas, who has collaborated with family members before, releases a song and video tribute to his daughter!

Trying to deliver on the promise to incorporate more Afro-Latino-ness on the blog, here’s Colombian Pacific Coast Hip Hop group Choquibtown’s latest “Hasta El Techo.”

http://youtu.be/azYcDY7mnco

And, Maga Bo’s “No Balanço da Canoa” featuring Rosângela Macedo and Marcelo Yuka. The remix album for his Quilombo do Futuro project dropped this week.

Nos vemos a primeira feira!

Further Reading

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.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.

Whose game is remembered?

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.