Music Is My Ammunition

Congolese Musicians Sing Out for Peace and Justice

Mar 11, 2025

AfricaFocus Notes on Substack offers short comments and links to news, analysis, and progressive advocacy on African and global issues, building on the legacy of over 25 years of publication as an email and web publication archived at http://www.africafocus.org. It is edited by William Minter. Posts are sent out by email once or twice a month. If you are not already a subscriber, you can subscribe for free by clicking on the button below. More frequent short notes are available at https://africafocus.substack.com/notes, and are also available in an RSS feed.

Editor´s Note

First, due to technical problems with Substack last month, most of you did not receive the last post on Make Apartheid Great Again, or you received it late through a Gmail app that lacked the full formatting possible in Substack.

Please pass this on to all your contacts who might be interested. In the incident with Substack, many subscribers were lost due to an Substack algorithm removing subscribers, and I need to start building up the list again.

That post is now available of the web for you to see:

Make Apartheid Great Again?

Mar 6

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An excellent additional article that was brought to my attention since then by subscriber Adekeye Adebajo is “Trump’s attacks on South Africa are a punishment for independence,“ by Achille Mbembe and Ruth Wilson Gilmore in The Guardian.

Music Is My Ammunition

This week´s post, with more music that words, was prompted by a question last week by my friend, neighbor, and comrade Luci Murphy. I first met Luci when I moved to Mount Pleasant in 1982. Luci is an accomplished musician and an indefatigable social justice advocate who one can count on to lend her voice to almost every progressive gathering or demonstration in Washington, DC. She asked me to suggest a Congolese revolutionary song suitable for the Women´s Day demonstration on March 8. So I searched for relevant songs, one of which Luci also located herself on the web.

In the process I accumulated a longer playlist which I hope you will find of interest. For more background about the Democratic Republic of Congo, see the website of the DC-based Friends of the Congo at https://friendsofthecongo.org/. This post, however, is about the music and musicians.

First from Luci herself, in a song composed by Isaias Guerrero:

Next is a song from Playing for Change, featuring Congolese musicians Mermans Mosengo and Jason Tamba. This is an original composition by Mosengo and Tamba, bringing in other musicians including Stephen Marley.

Then short interviews with both musicians, and their journey from Congo to South Africa and then, since 2006, their worldwide travels with the Playing for Change band.