Africa Is a Country

Rhythm like you’ve never seen

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

Rhythm like you’ve never seen

By
Sean Jacobs

No one mixes nationalism, tourism and sport in a feel-good cocktail quite like the South African advertising industry.

I stand corrected, but no one mixes nationalism, tourism and sport in a feel-good cocktail quite like the South African advertising industry. Like in this TV commercial for the South African national tourism authority, where Diski, a South African style of playing football that prioritizes tricks and dribbling – which in real life has only reaped bad results on the field – is roped into promote the 2010 World Cup.

It comes complete with dorky instructional video.

Further Reading

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.