AfricaIs aCountry

Can't Make This Stuff Up

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

Can't Make This Stuff Up

By
Sean Jacobs

Myanmar/Burma’s oppressive junta pulled off two feats this week: first they cooked the elections ensuring a front party win the elections with 80 percent (well, at least they did not say 98 percent like Paul Kagame) of the vote, and then announced a new flag for the country. Okay, so it looks suspiciously like Ghana’s “Black Star” flag. Same colors, but the star is white. Reuters, which has an Africa News Blog but not a Europe News Blog (that’s just news) tried to “analyze” the decision and fails to pass a slew of offensive, objectionable stereotypes off as clever:

Are Myanmar’s generals closet Rastafarians, or is their adoption of the pan-African colours associated with Ethiopian emperor Haile Salassie a tacit acknowledgement that half a century of army diktat has transformed the once-prosperous Asian state into an African-style basket-case?

For real.

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.