AfricaIs aCountry

Occupy Africa

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

Occupy Africa

By
Sean Jacobs

How do Africans–ground zero for resource extraction by the world’s 1%–feel about the now global ‘Occupy’ movement? Thus far it’s mostly restricted to South Africa (according to OWS’s own data collection) and to small once-off protests by mostly white, middle class South Africans.*  But now they’re joined by Senegalese musician Baaba Maal. That’s Maal above–in the video sound bite–talking about 99% with Okayafrica’s Allison Swank.

BTW, Maal could have added that Africans have been going on about global Apartheid for a while. If you take the anti-privatization social movements of the early 2000s in South Africa, the role of activists like Dennis Brutus, the various World Social Forum meetings held in Dakar last year and Nairobi before that, the AIDS movement, the films of Abdourahmane Sissako (‘Bamako‘) or the protests against Shell in Nigeria, etcetera.

* Note: Race and class is as usual at the heart of protests in South Africa. It is useful to watch the video taken at a protest in Johannesburg and read the Malala.co.za post about whites and OWS. My two cents: In South Africa when black people protest about the effects of capitalism and their government going along with Wall Street dictats (when it comes to policy prescriptions around transforming the most unequal country in the world), it is usually dismissed as in the service of power struggles between the ruling party and its allies, between ruling party politicians or as “service delivery protests.” (Just last week a few thousand, young black protesters marched to protest economic Apartheid in South Africa; the march was led by Julius Malema. Predictably his presence became the only lens through which to view their very real grievances.) We’ve rambled on about that here countless times. Anyway, for now, let’s enjoy Baaba Maal especially since Africa is not just South Africa.

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.