Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break No.90

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

Weekend Music Break No.90

By
Boima Tucker

A traditional Parang group from Trinidad

To wrap things up for 2015, next week Africa is a Country will have a few best of lists and long form posts for you to ponder into the New Year (as we take our annual December break). But for now let’s have a briefer interlude with our weekly music break, the last one for this year.

Our selection of tunes this week is honestly a bit of a (holiday work party?) grab bag, but at Africa is a Country we only deal in quality. You won’t be disappointed.

Kicking things off we have Badi and Youssoupha’s ode to the Congo of many names, peoples, and political geographies, so appropriately they just use the telephone country code 243 to signify exactly where and what they mean; To follow up we have the grandmaster of Ndombolo style of the rumba-soukous-decale axis, Kofi Olomide, who proves he can be relevant in the social media age with “Selfie”; Mr. Jayvic brings us uptempo dance vibes from Ghana; and then, Yungsal brings us nice Ghana-inspired downtempo vibes from Sierra Leone; Philadelphia, USA’s Doelife turns up for their squad with “Moment”; and then as promised in a previous music break, we said when the clip arrives we’d once again share Scotland’s Young Fathers’ “Old Rock N Roll”, live from Malawi; Boyzn Bucks members Cassper Nyovest and Riky Rick turn in a dark Cape Town tale with “Le Mpitse”; Afro Lisboa’s Black Sea Não Maya crew releases one of the few videos coming out of that scene, hopefully many more to come; And finally, we take a holiday pan-African turn to the Caribbean with some Trinidadian-Venezuelan Parang-Soca and Puerto Rican Parranda-Salsa vibes. Happy holidays, and see you at the next music break in 2016!

Further Reading

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.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.

Whose game is remembered?

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.