Africa Is a Country

Europe’s Apartheid

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

Europe’s Apartheid

By
Sean Jacobs

In a recent interview on French television to promote his new book “Sortir de la Grande Nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique Décolonisée,” Johannesburg-based political philosopher Achille Mbembe suggested that Europe “seems to be gripped by an enormous desire for apartheid.” (We blogged about it here.) This is also the implicit theme of a recent lecture by British social theorist Paul Gilroy entitled “Multiculture in Europe: Melancholia or Conviviality?” which I managed to stumble on earlier this week. (Gilroy was speaking at the FORMER WEST Project at the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University in The Netherlands.) One option is to listen to it while you’re cleaning the house. I did.

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Further Reading

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.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.