Africa Is a Country

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°17

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

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°17

By
Tom Devriendt

Rounding up some music videos we’ve been tweeting over the past weeks, this is your Friday Music Break. Produced by the hardest working rapper in Kinshasa, Lexxus (that’s him in the video, scouting for new talent in Kinshasa’s streets), ‘Bo tia K’ is the first outtake from Bawuta Kin’s upcoming album Ba Wu. Great video too:

Next, smooth Kenyan rap from Muthoni The Drummer Queen in ‘Feelin’ it’

London duo The Busy Twist recorded this music video in Accra:

‘Bravo Papa’ (now with English subtitles) makes us look forward to South African artist Jaak’s Galant album:

Aline Frazão plays an accoustic version of ‘Cacimbo’ (that’s Angola’s dry season):

After a long hiatus, South African TKZee artist Tokollo Tshabalala “Magesh” has recorded new kwaito tunes:

Gorgeous Sudanese a capella by Alsarah and her sister Nahid:

I haven’t counted the times ‘Africa’ gets mentioned in this mishmash video for Madlib’s ‘Hunting Theme’ and ‘Yafeu’ (both taken off his 3rd Medicine Show), but it’s a lot.

Maryland’s Kendall Elijah belatedly got a video out for his track ‘The Wild’ (from last year):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBQUzdQN51

And finally, Donal Scannell created this music video for Sahrawi singer Aziza Brahim’s ‘The Earth Sheds Tears’ in which she remembers those who fought to liberate those parts of the Western Sahara which remain outside of Moroccan control. Aziza Brahim resides in Spain these days:

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.