Africa Is a Country

The Presidential Palace

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

The Presidential Palace

By
Hinda Talhaoui

Paris burned in 2005 and it has been left smoldering since. That's the message of Paris Is a Continent, Number 9.

Image by Philippe Leroyer, via Flickr CC.

Watching French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s speak in Marseille (France’s second city) on Sunday night, in what is his second speech since announcing he’s seeking a second term, I was hoping for a reference to how the European financial crisis has hit the banlieueus, where most of France’s poor and minorities (mostly black and Arab) live. I should have known better.

Sarkozy’s words on the European financial crisis referenced the “Greek civil servant with his salary cut” and “the Portuguese retiree with his pension cut” and that “France was not swept away by a crisis of confidence”. He’s talking confidence in the French economy, not in his person. Presenting himself as the country’s savior (“I’ve avoided France from a catastrophe”), he showed himself the ‘respectable’ fanatic people have started to suspect him to be. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is this: there’s not much difference between France and Greece.

Paris burned in 2005, as French-Cameroonian rapper Mac Tyer reminds us in his new ‘Justice‘ video, and it has been left smoldering since. That’s all I want to say.

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.