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

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.