AfricaIs aCountry

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

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.