Africa Is a Country

T.I.A*

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

T.I.A*

By
Sean Jacobs

What is either a gollywog or coon ornament in a Christmas display of an East 17th Street between 5th and Union Square West, Manhattan store, was spotted by my neighbor, Chinnaya Nwosu, last week. According to Chinnaya there were a variety of these kinds of items in the store, including what looked like Sambos with grass skirts, spears and headdress, etc. “The store owner palmed me off with, ‘They are just crafts made in Thailand.’ I tried reasoning that this kind of imagery was not conceived in Thailand, and that the ignorance of the [people in Thailand] making them cannot justify them being on shop shelves in New York City. The guy said that nobody else had complained- eying me as a trouble making reactionary.”

* This is hopefully the start of a regular series of posts of snapshots– we’ll call it T.I.A. This is Africa–that remind us from Africa or pretend to be of Africa that we encounter everyday.

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.