AfricaIs aCountry

The Full-Back

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

The Full-Back

By
Sean Jacobs

I am still on my pre-World Cup binge.

Brazil remains odds on favorites to win Africa’s first World Cup two months from now. BTW, it’s old news now but Brazil can also count on local support in South Africa: they’re South African fans’ favorite other team. Brazil play two group matches in Johannesburg–against North Korea on June 15 and Ivory Coast on June 20.  Their final group game, against Portugal, will be in Durban in a stadium named after a great Communist leader of the struggle, Moses Mabhida.  Anyway, this man, Maicon–here scoring a great goal against Juventus for his club Inter Milan in Italy’s Serie A last weekend–will be central to Brazilian plans. And he plays like a midfielder.

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.