Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break No.71

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

Weekend Music Break No.71

By
Sean Jacobs

Credit: Okenyo Facebook

Boima is on vacation this week, so the rest of us scanned the music pages. We can’t promise it will be as eclectic as Boima’s choices. But here we go in short sentences. First up, the Kenyan-Australian singer Okenyo has a new video for her song “Just a Story.”

Fashawn, who sounds like Kanye West, loves his daughter:

De La Soul is working on a new album. While prepping, they just come up with new music, with special guest Nas. It just happens to them like that:

This is just a video of Youssoupha (son of Tabu Ley Rochereau) promoting his big concert in November in Paris:

Then there’s South African rapper Khuli Chana’s “Mahamba Yedwa/Mo Tsipe”:

Then there’s Kenyan singer Fena Gitu and her upbeat lyrics about her “African Jack Bauer” (no politics here):

Finally, The Kyle Shepherd Trio wants to fly without leaving the ground.

* Goodbye to John Shoes Moshoeu, Peter Makurube, Christopher Kindo and our friend Cristina Villeresi. We will always remember you.

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.