AfricaIs aCountry

Hold On To Your Hat

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

Hold On To Your Hat

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL3tRBZv7QA&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

South African football fans (well, boosted by corporates) have brought the world the plastic vuvuzelas. There’s one other invention of local football that might catch on: Makarapas, the elaborately decorated construction hard hats that now come in national colors.

There’s an interesting history about the origins of makarapas and the man who invented it, Alfred Baloyi.

Above, Heineken, in an ad for the Dutch portion of its global market, sends up the hat’s origins.  Apart from the twist at the end, the narrative is close to the real thing, as you will discover in this story–reported in more journalistic fashion; don’t worry about the cheesy music–by Yahoo Sports:

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/12711845 w=500&h=281]

And as a bonus, also a link to a high energy version of the Makarapa story by one of the young reporters of the Sony-sponsored FevaCasters:

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

— 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.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.