Africa Is a Country

Viva Tanzania

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

Viva Tanzania

By
Sean Jacobs

For all the gross, lurid news stories or the films you see about fatal  violence against, and neglect of people suffering from albinism in East Africa, this one about Tanzanians electing an albino, Salum Khalfani Barwani, to Parliament, is good news.  Barwani, an opposition MP, will represent a rural constituency.  (BTW, a well-known rapper, Sugu, was also elected to Parliament in the elections in which the majority party’s parliamentary shrunk by over 50 seats.)

CNN, BBC and Afronline.

Image: Pieter Hugo, “Portraits of people with albinism” (2003)

Further Reading

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.

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.