AFRICA IS A COUNTRY

The blog that's not about famine, Bono, or Barack Obama.

Torture comes cheap for the old imperial powers. Just £2,670 was paid out this...

Cape Town, South Africa, has been undergoing somewhat of an electronic music revival over...

  • Torture comes cheap for the old imperial powers. Just £2,670 was paid out this month to each of the 5,228 elderly Kenyans judged eligible for compensation as the British government finally settled a case it has attempted to block every step of the way (between 2005 and 2011 it insisted that officials had “misplaced” or [...]

  • Cape Town, South Africa, has been undergoing somewhat of an electronic music revival over the past five years. The initial boom happened in the early 2000s when, aided by the pioneering African Dope record label, artists such as Felix Laband and The Constructus Corporation (an earlier incarnation of Die Antwoord) suddenly found themselves at the [...]

  • Recently on a sunny afternoon, fellow AIAC-er Serginho Roosblad and I ventured out to learn more about the history of black people in Amsterdam and the contribution they made to the city since its early days. Surely there must be more to people of color in our hometown than the yearly Sinterklaas parade with his black [...]

  • Cape Town is changing. One recent Sunday morning I took a walk through Walmer Estate, a suburb bordering on District Six, on the edge of the City Bowl, and stopped at one of the corner stores to inquire about buying some koeksisters. Sunday mornings, in the Cape Town of my childhood, are speckled with sweet [...]

  • Welcome to AIAC’s (first?) NSFW post. South Africa has a “pro” twerk team. In what could have been an amazing Pan-African exchange, they came up short and better called themselves professionals. Full stop as I reluctantly throw them a dark haze of shade. I guess everyone outside the southern United States just discovered what twerking/freak [...]

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  • Read it here. The main claims of the piece (and a documentary broadcast in the UK on Sunday night) are that the white poor number about 400,000 (that would be about 10% of the white population), that there are 80...

  • With the gutting of foreign coverage by most U.S. newspapers and the need to populate infinite Web space with content, a new creature has emerged: the foreign affairs blogger. Max Fisher, who hosts the Washington Post’s WorldViews page, is...

  • Late on Monday, the South African Mail & Guardian ran an online feature contrasting how local newspapers have been covering what’s become known as “Guptagate”, the unimaginative shorthand for the bi-national diplomatic and national security scandal unfolding around the...

  • Malian writer, activist, former member of government Aminata Traoré is unwelcome in France, and, thanks to the ‘open borders’ of the Schengen Area, she is persona non grata in pretty much all of Europe. Another dialogue is possible? Not...

  • The historian Margery Perham once wrote that “the basic difficulty” with the British colonial technique of indirect rule, of which she was a major architect, was “the great gap between the culture of rulers and ruled.” “People do not...

  • Al Jazeera Goes French

    April 8th, 2013
    Al Jazeera Goes French

    Once again, the Qatari media company, Al Jazeera has announced it is in the advanced stages of launching a French-language news network. It has already confirmed a 5-hour news block to be aired on its English language network aimed...

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