AfricaIs aCountry

As-Salāmu Alaykum

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

As-Salāmu Alaykum

By
Sean Jacobs

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/13045384 w=600&h=368]

This short clip of Brooklyn’s Mos Def, offering greetings while performing at the most recent edition of a Muslim-led arts festival held annually (in mid-July) on the southside of Chicago, is an appropriate choice to end our break of about 3 odd weeks. We’ll be getting slowly back into the swing of things.

* The footage, by the way, is from the soon-to-be released documentary film, “Takin it to the Streets Live, which focuses on the festival.

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.