Africa Is a Country

The Unofficial World Cup Song?

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

The Unofficial World Cup Song?

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM_Ew6zsnDY&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

Is this playful ode to coloured identity,* becoming the unofficial World Cup anthem?

Apparently South Africa’s football team–now finally scoring goals in warm up games celebrate by mimicking the dances associate with “(Show them) Make the circle bigger,” with a guest verse by rap mc, HHP.  The numbers of people using it as their Facebook update or signing off with it, are numerous.  Show them.

Sorry Shakira and K’Naan.

* For those unfamiliar with South African race talk, check right at the opening when comedian Joey Rasdien’s announces that “Coloured is a ou [old] term.’ Also interesting is the celebration–on t-shirts of coloured townships Heidedal (Bloemfontein), Eersterus (Pretoria) and Eldorodo Park (Johannesburg) on t-shirts. This unabashed celebration of coloured identity as an African identity is certainly new.

— Sean Jacobs

Further Reading

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.

The sound of revolt

On his third album, Afro-Portuguese artist Scúru Fitchádu fuses ancestral wisdom with urban revolt, turning memory and militancy into a soundtrack for resistance.