Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break 63

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

Weekend Music Break 63

By
Ts'eliso Monaheng

We kick off our weekly installment of new music videos with OttawaParis-based Mélissa Laveaux riding the crunchy electronics with flair on her new offering, ‘Triggers’, in a video directed by Terence Nance — remember also this other video he shot for her earlier this year:

Some trippy and transcendental downtempo music from YellowStraps (that’s Yvan Murenzi, Alban Murenzi, Ludovic Petermann and Thomas Delire) alongside Moodprint:

A boom-bap retrospective from Soular Razye, the Zimbabwean duo comprised of Depth and Synik. They’re working on a soon-to-be-released EP:

Eighties-style fashion and joyous dance styles adorn this video from Uganda’s Fantom Lovins:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKv-vCAMUoc

Life suddenly makes sense when this song by Kalawa Jazmee’s Uhuru plays in the club. Oskido, who makes a cameo, is celebrating his birthday today. Bless up!

Still in South Africa, new work by Zola:

A catchy Bob Marley make-over from Senegal. Visuals courtesy of the illustrious Lionel Mendeix.

Robert Del Naja from Massive Attack collides with Congolese musician Jupiter on this subterranean robotic banger. The pair met on the Afrika Express adventure in 2012.

A visual and musical collaboration between dj Khalab and Malian talking drum master Baba Sissoko:

And to round it all off, a bit of kuduro never hurt anyone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTfBFb2Dc1s

Further Reading

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.