AfricaIs aCountry

Europe’s Apartheid

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

Europe’s Apartheid

By
Sean Jacobs

In a recent interview on French television to promote his new book “Sortir de la Grande Nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique Décolonisée,” Johannesburg-based political philosopher Achille Mbembe suggested that Europe “seems to be gripped by an enormous desire for apartheid.” (We blogged about it here.) This is also the implicit theme of a recent lecture by British social theorist Paul Gilroy entitled “Multiculture in Europe: Melancholia or Conviviality?” which I managed to stumble on earlier this week. (Gilroy was speaking at the FORMER WEST Project at the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University in The Netherlands.) One option is to listen to it while you’re cleaning the house. I did.

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Further Reading

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Leapfrogging literacy?

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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.