In early July, a Twitter account called The Zimbabwean posted a thread highlighting the popularity of country music across Africa. The posts included videos – mostly phone footage from bars and weddings – that persuasively made the case for the claim. A man in a cowboy hat moonwalking to Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler; a group of women blissfully line-dancing to Kenyan country star Sir Elvis covering Wagon Wheel, a 2013 hit for Darius Rucker.
These snapshots of country music woven into the fabric of everyday African life sparked a nearly unanimous response: surprise and delight. The thread quickly gathered thousands of retweets and a stack of amazed replies. But many across the diaspora may have felt it stirred something deeper. I’ve spent years tracing my love of country music across generations and found it to be an underappreciated thread in global Black music and in Black British heritage.
