Africa Is a Country

Can't Make This Stuff Up

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

Can't Make This Stuff Up

By
Sean Jacobs

Myanmar/Burma’s oppressive junta pulled off two feats this week: first they cooked the elections ensuring a front party win the elections with 80 percent (well, at least they did not say 98 percent like Paul Kagame) of the vote, and then announced a new flag for the country. Okay, so it looks suspiciously like Ghana’s “Black Star” flag. Same colors, but the star is white. Reuters, which has an Africa News Blog but not a Europe News Blog (that’s just news) tried to “analyze” the decision and fails to pass a slew of offensive, objectionable stereotypes off as clever:

Are Myanmar’s generals closet Rastafarians, or is their adoption of the pan-African colours associated with Ethiopian emperor Haile Salassie a tacit acknowledgement that half a century of army diktat has transformed the once-prosperous Asian state into an African-style basket-case?

For real.

Further Reading

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.

Whose game is remembered?

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.

Sovereignty or supremacy?

As far-right politics gain traction across the globe, some South Africans are embracing Trumpism not out of policy conviction but out of a deeper, more troubling identification.

From Cape To Cairo

When two Africans—one from the south, the other from the north—set out to cross the continent, they raised the question: how easy is it for an African to move in their own land?