Vinyl reissues are about engaging in a fight against forgetting much more than just music and transcendent of repressive daily conditions, which still exist in places like South Africa.
Latest
The exilic geographies of the South
Dugmore Boetie was part of a wave of South African writers who fled Apartheid. His exile and future literary notoriety, however, took a different path to some of the more classic refugee peregrinations.
Wolf in shepherd’s clothing
Kenya’s elites, including the church, use ponzi schemes for predatory accumulation and Kenyans will continue to see their dreams deferred if the law doesn’t change.
A terrifying vision of South Africa’s future
If South Africa’s Left can’t find a way to channel popular discontentment into the building of mass progressive movements, it will instead morph into anarchy, nativism and, inevitably, authoritarianism.
Freedom and the struggle for dignity in South Africa
Within a context of spiraling poverty and inequality in South Africa, the lessons of uprisings in the 1980s are well worth revisiting. For millions of people, their socioeconomic demands remain unfulfilled.
South Africa’s fatigued and narcissistic nation-building discourse
Springbok rugby projects itself as progress, but preserves the way things are in the popular consciousness of South Africans.
AIAC RADIO
Africa Is a Country Radio continues its season focused on African club culture. Our next stop is Nairobi with Kenyan journalist and radio programmer Bill Odidi. Listen on Worldwide FM.
Culture
Who will start another fire?
An interview with Kate Gondwe, Founder and President of Dedza Films, on a groundbreaking distribution initiative committed to supporting the next wave of emerging filmmakers and communities.
Postfeminism is only for wealthy Nigerian women
To have—or, at least, claim—a sense of self that is “already empowered” or happily unencumbered by power relations, requires a fair bit of material privilege.
What is whiteness in North Africa?
What happens when we take the study of whiteness from settler colonial contexts into the postcolony?
The longest shadow
We tell our stories when we are ready. This story is about the child sexual abuse I experienced at the hands of Anglican priests in South Africa.
On failed states and the pitfalls of Western commentary
The tendency of Western commentators to dress up African tragedies in the patronizing logic of relativism.
Capitalism in My City
The Mathare Social Justice Centre has partnered with Africa Is a Country to produce a series of posts and videos to document everyday capitalism in Nairobi. The project is funded via the Shuttleworth Fellowship awarded to Sean Jacobs.
In the second video from our Capitalism In My City project, Dennis Esikuri talks to everyday Nairobians about the current employment opportunities in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic.
In the first video from a series for the Capitalism In My City project, Brian Mathenge decodes what everyday capitalism looks like from the margins of Nairobi.
Politics
Appeasing disgruntled critics
Israel’s success in getting observer status at the African Union is also a sign of the growing lack of interest among African leaders in the Palestinian issue altogether.
What is Black Conservatism in South Africa
South African politics remain fertile ground for new orientations: mainly conservative and black.
Análise da gestão da COVID-19
Em Angola, o governo de Presidente Lourenço não conseguiu resolver a pandemia de COVID-19 devido a corrupção e incompetência.
Mobilizing in disorder
Post the looting and failed insurrection, what would it mean for the South African left to undertake a populist political strategy? And should it look to South America for inspiration? A long read.
South Africa’s gaping wounds
If there is no material justice and investment in healing the generations of harm enacted onto South Africans, the rot in the country’s wounds will overcome them.
Technology
Nigeria’s Twitter ban and the resistance politics of VPNs
Anyone who cares about civil society, free speech, and human rights should find the state’s digital silencing of its citizens deeply troubling.
Silicon Valley in Africa
Western tech companies in Africa often claim to be "social entrepreneurs." But do their models reduce or contribute to inequality?
WhatsApp and anti-capitalism: should you stay or should you go?
Facebook and its “family” of services are a one-way street towards greater integration, data exploitation, and erosions of privacy by an increasingly monopolistic company.
More widespread than we think
Today's social movements rely on tech collectives to organize safely. But few know the history of other technologies used by earlier liberation movements.