Africa Is a Country

"Wow, Africans on skateboards, so cool"

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

"Wow, Africans on skateboards, so cool"

By
Sean Jacobs

Yan Gross, the Swiss photographer and skateboarder–in an interview with South African journalist, Sean O’Toole, in Frieze (January/February 2011)–mocking the reaction of journalists, photographers and filmmakers, who flocked to Kampala, Uganda, after his self-published photoseries of a small group of local skateboarders, gained attention outside Uganda. “It was hard to deal with all these people. The suburb wasn’t meant to become a touristic place or a zoo.”

Source.

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.

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.