Postmodernism on Ice

The Winter Olympics features a Russian skaters who dress in animal skin costumes to perform to an "Aboriginal Song." There's more.

Skaters from the Winter Olympics; not the ones in animal skins or the ones coached by a former Stasi informer (Zemistor, via Flickr CC).

So it turns out that tonight at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, in the pairs figure skating finals, Germany will be presented by Robin Szolkowy, whose father is Tanzanian (his mother is German), along with his Ukranian-born partner, Aliona Savchenko. Together they will perform a routine choreographed to the music of the film, “Out of Africa,” which, if you forgot, is based on a Danish writer‘s white colonial fantasy of Kenya.  And, to top it all, as a German friend informed me, Szolkowy and Savchenko’s coach, himself a championship skater, was an informant for the East German secret police. My head is spinning.

I won’t waste any comment on the Russian pair who put on animal skin costumes (think a Broadway fantasy like The Lion King) to perform their “Aboriginal Song.” Australian indigenous leaders objected, but they still continued. They just washed off their face paintings. That’s too easy.

Update: Overall, Szolkowy and Savchenko won the bronze medal for Germany in Vancouver. Domnina an Shabalin, the animal print pair, did not medal.

Further Reading

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.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.