AfricaIs aCountry

'Welcome to South Africa'

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

'Welcome to South Africa'

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYrSn3pL8Ws&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

It’s hard to describe the vibe here. Yes, there’s the unreasonable expectations around the team (captured well by my man Tony Karon on Time magazine’s World Cup blog) and the vuvuzelas may be annoying. But yes you can feel it. It is the World Cup. And away from the big stadiums and the tourist districts and downtowns–I spent some time today in central Cape Town with my 4 year old and shouting out Chilean and Algerian fans–there is a lot of spirit (gees, the Afrikaans word for spirit, is the preferred term here) as this short video by The Fader show. The magazine has some deal with Nike to produce an online documentary series on “… the music, art and culture of South Africa in 2010.” Blk Jks and some local groups are thrown in for good effect.

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— Sean Jacobs

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

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.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

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.