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About the UNPLUGGED Updates

Which Africa?

67 percent of all Africans live in cities like Abidjan, Bamako and Dakar. Urban youth culture in these seemingly remote metropolises is aesthetically and culturally plugged in to the global networks and connected to the contemporary music scene.

An update by Rüdiger Wischenbart

Large parts of Africa are among the last pieces of uncharted territory on the map of the world of Internet and telecommunications. There are a mere 1.5 million Internet hook-ups—most quite slow—for individual persons on the entire continent. Of these, almost half are concentrated in South Africa, 300,000 are in North Africa, and thus the remaining 350,000 are divided among the 49 states in between. Nevertheless, Internet cafés have been sprouting up lately in the larger cities, and each of their hook-ups can often claim dozens of users. The flow of news that the new communications media have set in motion is mighty enough to culturally integrate at least young people in the cities into the great global network.

Unplugged Urban Africa at the Ars Electronica Festival will showcase several music styles from this scene—Senegalese HipHop, Zouglou from Abidjan in West Africa, and pioneering examples of electro-fusion like Techno Issa from Mali, as well as Kwaito, the club mixture of House, HipHop, Ragga and traditional popular township rhythms that emerged in the ‘90s in South Africa.

read more (german)





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