Africa Is a Country

This is not about Jacob Zuma's sex life

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

This is not about Jacob Zuma's sex life

By
Sean Jacobs

On Monday tens of thousands of young South Africans marched in Cape Town, South Africa, to demand access to a quality education; that is for “… stocked libraries, running water, electrical connections, sports facilities, computer centres and sanitary toilets.  In other words, all the infrastructural facilities that students need in order to learn and thrive.” For a sense of the appalling conditions under which the majority of mostly black elementary and high schoolers learn in South Africa, see here.  The organizers were profiled by The New York Times a while back. The media there and here–with a few exceptions–chose to either ignore or downplay the march’s significance because it was not about the buffoonish Julius Malema, Kenny Kunene, Jacob Zuma’s sex life or his children’s business dealings, the media statements of the ANC Youth League, and no damage to public or private property was reported.

More here and here.

Further Reading

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.