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

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.