Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break, N°39

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

Weekend Music Break, N°39

By
Tom Devriendt

This year’s turning into a good year for quality music videos. Here’s another selection of 10. First one below is a single from Durban’s Nandi Mngoma’s new album (she has a fancy blog though there’s more chance of catching updates via her Twitter account): South African dance as you know it.

Next, finally here: the first video for OY’s debut record — remember Boima’s recent write-up — delivers. Shot in Accra, Ghana. YouTube notes tell us the dancers are Bugi Bust. Well here you have it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJM_0ghPd80

Also shot in Accra is this video for Tawiah’s “FACes”, off her upcoming mixtape album, FREEdom Drop (yes, that’s Wanlov and Mensa in the clip):

There’s Josephine, born to a Liberian mother and Jamaican father, describing herself as having “enjoyed the advantages of a colourful West African culture as well as feeling intrinsically British”. Can’t possibly do wrong:

A beautiful oddball by SKIP&DIE whose singer Catarina Aimée Dahms, aka Cata.Pirata, is South African:

(They know how to throw a party too.)

New video for Afro-Panico’s “Matimba”. Filed under: Afro-House | Kuduro | Pantsula:

Brazilian Pan-African rap vibes from Ba Kimbuta on “Consumo” (over a Mulatu Astatke sample):

Mo Kolours also released a new video for his “Promise” tune:

There’s Outspoken & The Essence’s “own interpretation of Hip-Hop”. The track, called “The SlaveMasters Whip,” is a first from their upcoming Nomadic Wax-produced album Uncool and Overrated: God Before Anything:

And finally, on high rotation ever since it came out this month: “Azamane Tiliade” from Bombino’s album Nomad, produced by Dan Auerbach. Play it loud:

Further Reading

After the uprising

Following two years of mass protest, Kenya stands at a crossroads. A new generation of organizers is confronting an old question: how do you turn revolt into lasting change? Sungu Oyoo joins the AIAC podcast to discuss the vision of Kenya’s radical left.

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

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.