Africa Is a Country

Postcard from Johannesburg

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

Postcard from Johannesburg

By
Sonja Sugira

The photographer Krisanne Johnson believes you can learn many things about a country by the way youth live—from fashion to music to home environments.

Image: Krisanne Johnson.

Like many others, US photographer Krisanne Johnson headed to South Africa earlier this month but, as The New Yorker points out, she didn’t go there for the football. Johnson has been to South Africa several times over the years to document youth culture in Johannesburg, including the culture surrounding Kwaito and, most recently, the fashion movement known as the Smarteez.

On her work, Johnson states: “I believe you can learn many things about a country by the way youth live—from fashion to music to home environments. And this is a recurring theme in most of my work, whether in the United States or southern Africa.” I like this.

You can view more of Johnson’s excellent pictures from across southern Africa and the United States here.

Further Reading

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.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.