Africa Is a Country

Krusty the Clown's Activism

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

Krusty the Clown's Activism

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3OoeAeZM5Q&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

The opening episode of the new series of “The Simpsons” features a convoluted plotline where the character Krusty the Clown ends up in the Hague tried for war crimes. This is a clip from the episode.  As the South African blogger Chris Roper summarizes it (in an equally convoluted blog post):

“[At The Hague] … Bart and Homer need to find some saving grace in Krusty’s past, and this turns out to be Krusty’s refusal to play Sun City in 1990. [Remember in the 1980s, to protest Apartheid, a number of US artists refused to play Sun City, the gambling resort built in the Bophuthatswana bantustan where whites could “mix” with blacks and pretend they’re in Las Vegas.] Three days after his refusal, Nelson Mandela is freed from prison. This congruence of events leads to Krusty being pardoned, and released. …Krusty’s refusal to play Sun City [it turns out, is] not a political statement, but a protest about the kind of potato chips in his dressing room.  Krusty makes his heroic statement (“I ain’t going to play Sun City”), and then turns to his band and says, “Vuvuzela me out of here”. The band swops their instruments for vuvuzelas, and the discordant sound of the World Cup serenades Krusty from the stage.”

Further Reading

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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.

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.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.