Friday/Weekend Bonus Music Breaks got side-tracked a bit lately because of the Afcon fever. Good times were had by all. Let’s pick up the thread though. Here are 10 music videos you might have missed over the past weeks. Burkina-American Ismael Sankara (remember Mikko’s write-up about Ismael’s surname and possible affiliations) released a new video: above. Tyler the Creator-Yonkers-style, Elom 20nce’s masks imagery, swag lyrics, stir, et voilà. Neat beats. More diaspora music:

Nina Miskina (who was part of the Brussels-based Congolese Héritage project) seems to have put her theatre acting on the back burner to focus on her musical career. Here’s a first video for ‘Un verre de plus’, taken from her debut EP:

Another Belgian-Congolese artist is Coely. When footballer-and-aspiring-record-label-manager Vincent Kompany says we should like her, we’ll like her:

There’s a high-profile (and heavily sponsored) electronic music festival happening in Cape Town, South Africa this weekend. Surprised not to find good old synth-duo Tannhäuser Gate on the bill:

Originally from Bangui, Central African Republic, Idylle Mamba now lives and works in Cameroon. This new video blends all kinds of styles:

Also repping Cameroon (via the Netherlands) is Ntjam Rosie. From the video below, it looks like she’s taking a break from her previous “soul jazz” work:

More funky rock courtesy of the Senegalese Daara J Family (they’ve been around for a while), vintage dancing and ‘celebrating’:

This acoustic session by Gasandji and her band made me sit up:

Cuban jazz pianist Omar Sosa has a new record out. He presented and talked about it at WNYC radio studios recently: a tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, while channelling the “Eggun” spirits:

And finally, this portrait by Vincent Moon of muezzin Saeed Rifai Ali Khaled in Cairo. Watch it:

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.