AfricaIs aCountry

The Poors

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

The Poors

By
Sean Jacobs

The Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” site has also published Reuters photographer Finbarr O’Reilly’s widely circulated series of a group of 450 poor whites shack dwellers living in a camp in Krugersdorp close to Johannesburg.   As I suggested before I am not surprised at this.  The number of poor whites are obviously quite small when compared to the number of black poor. The site quotes O’Reilly: “… Researchers now estimate some 450,000 whites, of a total white population of 4.5 million, live below the poverty line and 100,000 are struggling just to survive.” But once the racial safety net for whites, in the past provided by the Apartheid state, wears off, they will increasingly get to experience how the majority of black people live in South Africa. And that there’s no reverse apartheid going on.

Here‘s a link to the series.

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.