Africa Is a Country

Friday Links

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

Friday Links

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNWagG9U5Vg&w=500&h=300&rel=o]

“Who is the President of the United States of America?”  Side-splitting Nigerian comedy skit.

* The French clothing label, Africa is the Future. Including old man Melvin Van Peebles representing.

* Damon Galgut’s new novel, “In A Strange Land,” reviewed in The Guardian.  (Galgut’s made The Booker shortlist).

* There’s money to be made from gay weddings in South Africa. No surprises that is all about who can get married. It’s all about class and color. [The New York Times]

* If you’re in Cape Town, South Africa, next month diarize the annual Pan African Space Station music festival (September 12-October 12). Detroit dj Theo Parrish is scheduled to make an appearance. Good move.

* An excerpt from Andie Miller’s new book about walking in South Africa. In Hillbrow in inner city Johannesburg. Of course there’s nothing special about walking for the majority of South Africans (working class, mainly black, people), but everyone should be doing it. [EDIT: From Andie Miller: “A small correction–though I’ve just launched my collection of 34 ‘stories about walking,’ the Hillbrow piece isn’t an extract from the book … it’s just a review of the Goethe Institute’s X Homes project which was on a few weeks ago during the World Cup.]

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.