AfricaIs aCountry

The Wedding

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

The Wedding

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsG49zXF8xk&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

Driving in Soweto, film maker Dumisani Phakathi reflects on next month’s World Cup:

[The World Cup] is like a wedding … You organize the wedding between you and your partner. The event is amazing, the photographs get taken. Everybody remembers the day. But the trick is about what happens after. What do you carry with from that day of the wedding into your life with your partner? Because if you don’t, that was just for show, the wedding just a spectacle. We can’t afford for this World Cup to be a spectacle.

Phakathi also talks about the connections between the 1970s American professional soccer league and professional football in South Africa:

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

Via ThisIsAmericanSoccer (h/t Chimurenga.co.za)

Further Reading

Empire’s middlemen

From Portuguese Goa to colonial Kampala, Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book shows how India became an instrument of empire, and a scapegoat in its aftermath.

À qui s’adresse la CAN ?

Entre le coût du transport aérien, les régimes de visas, la culture télévisuelle et l’exclusion de classe, le problème de l’affluence à la CAN est structurel — et non le signe d’un manque de passion des supporters.

Lions in the rain

The 2025 AFCON final between Senegal and Morocco was a dramatic spectacle that tested the limits of the match and the crowd, until a defining moment held everything together.