Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break, N°22

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

Weekend Music Break, N°22

By
Tom Devriendt

I’m taking cues from Africa is a Country’s contributors this week. First up, Boima dropped by Amsterdam’s African Hip-Hop radio’s studio and delivered this set. One of the tracks featured on there is ‘TOHL’ (above) by Togo-born tabi Bonney (real name: Tabiabuè — father: Itadi Bonney), featuring Fat Trel. I don’t believe it was aired on Dutch radio before. Next, Mali-born Abdoulaye Diarra aka Oxmo Puccino (I could have sworn Hinda already featured him in one of the Paris is a Continent posts): 

Etzia is part of the Swedish women’s dancehall reggae movement Femtastic. This is her most recent ‘Same Thing A Gwaan’:

Mikko (he knows his Nordic music) adds: “There’s also the more poptastic Serengeti with their new video, or one of their older ones.”

In ‘Izulu Lelam’ (“heaven is mine”), Cape Town’s Driemanskap family express their trust in a brighter afterlife. This is the first video from their forthcoming second album Hlala Nam:

Then The Weeknd’s saccharine ‘Enemy’ (H/T Dylan) — Abel Tesfaye likes to quote Haile Selassie, but here he channels Morrissey:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3VIh8ZB-M8

Orlando’s piece on Hassan Hajjaj’s work (later reprinted in The Guardian as a wonderful spread) carried a photo of gnawa-player and Electric Jalaba member Simo Lagnawi together with Paris-based Kora-player Boubacar Kafando. Here’s an Electric Jalaba living room gig:

… and another live performance: the new project “Acoustic Africa: Afropean Women” is a collaboration between Côte d’Ivoire singer and percussionist Dobet Gnahoré, Manou Gallo, former Zap Mama bassist, and Cameroonian singer Kareyce Fotso. Siddhartha wrote a feature on them for The Boston Globe this week (they’re performing there). Here they are on stage in Bamako:

Ugochi plugged her latest music video on AIAC’s Facebook wall the other day, calling it “a product of my Naija root and Chicago soul influence”. It takes a while before the actual tune starts:

Football player Vincent Kompany — this is for Sean and Elliot — is getting into the music business. I read in the local (Belgian) press that he has plans to start up a new music label. Belgian-Congolese Coely already got a phone call:

And to wrap up the week: Zambian Zone Fam’s new video, shot in Nairobi. They’re getting big:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HMt7cp4yLA

That’s it, back on Monday!

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.