AfricaIs aCountry

An African Alan Lomax

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

An African Alan Lomax

By
Sean Jacobs

Afropop has a great audio program on Hugh Tracey, who recorded over 250 albums of “traditional” African music around Southern Africa between the 1920s and 1950s. That’s about 20,000 “field recordings” (that’s what the experts call these live recordings) of songs or instrumentals.  Tracey and his team also meticulously catalogued these recordings.  Though Tracey was a “product of his time,” i.e. British colonialism, and had a short association with Gallo Music (a company that rarely did right by black musicians), you can’t underestimate Tracey’s contribution to African music.  In the program, producer Wills Glasspiegel travels to Grahamstown (where the Hugh Tracey Archive is situated), Johannesburg (to talk to musicologist David  Copland and BLK JKS drummer, Tshepang Ramoba) as well as Malawi (where Glasspiegel recruits musician Esau Mwamwaya to make some field recordings).

Definitely worth a listen here.

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Reading List: Barbara Boswell

While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

An annual awakening

In the 1980s, the South African arts collective Vakalisa Art Associates reclaimed time as a tool of social control through their subversive calendars.

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.