AfricaIs aCountry

The Afrikaans Film Template

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

The Afrikaans Film Template

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

Feature films produced for the Afrikaans market in South Africa, have many distinctive characteristics, including that they're exclusively white.

A still from the Hollywood film, 'Out of Africa,' a colonial fantasy set mostly on a Kenyan farm.

The creatives at South African satellite TV channel Kyknet—which, more recently, also produces feature films—not only blatantly rip off American romantic comedy plotlines but inhabit a South Africa where not a single black face is to be seen. On the other hand, maybe they’re being honest.

Like for “Semi-Sweet.”

 

 

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.