Africa Is a Country

Africa is a Country’s Twitter World Cup

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

Africa is a Country’s Twitter World Cup

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

You can follow us as well as some of our writers - particularly Sonja, Sean and Herman - on Twitter.

Ronaldo scores for Brazil vs Germany in the final of the 2002 World Cup.

The World Cup is three days away, so everybody is writing, blogging, speaking, filming, and broadcasting from or about Africa (well, specifically South Africa, but that does not stop them from making generalizations about 53 countries and territories). Of course, things will calm down—we know this — in a few days when the media realizes that hosting a World Cup is a day’s work for Africans. But until then, they’re relentless.

We can try but can’t keep up with them by giving you long, nuanced, detailed posts. We have things to do, day jobs to attend, World Cup matches to watch (especially this), and sometimes we have small children to put to bed.

Ghana, who has qualified for the World Cup in South Africa, playing the Czech Republic in the 2006 World Cup in Germany (Wiki Commons).

But we can do a lot more on the fly in 140 characters.

You can follow us or Sonja, Sean and Herman on Twitter.

 

Further Reading

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.