Africa Is a Country

Gaddafi’s voluptuous Ukranian nurse

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

Gaddafi’s voluptuous Ukranian nurse

By
Siddhartha Mitter

On the usefulness of WikiLeaks and the self-destructive personality of its founder, Julian Assange.

Julian Assange.

Anyone who has done any kind of archival research will know immediately the use of the WikiLeaks cables, and also their limits. Now that the superficial and the obvious are out of the way, the truly interesting material is coming to light; specifics of diplomacy and statecraft in an era where those arts are in decline.

2. For instance, I have an interest in West Africa. Cables that the press outlets have presented in the last few days have given me new insight into efforts to stop the spread of Salafist groups in the Sahara; the influence game of oil majors in Nigeria; how mercenary-piloted Ivorian aircraft bombed the French base in Bouaké, and with what consequences; and how Moussa Dadis Camara was sidelined, clearing the way for elections in Guinea. This level of material is where the substantive value of this information concentrates.

3. Almost nothing that has been said in American political and media circles about WikiLeaks in the last ten days merits dignifying with a comment. Most of it has been factually wrong. Glenn Greenwald, a voice in the wilderness, has been keeping track.

4. Julian Assange is obviously a loose cannon and a narcissist. That should make it all the less surprising to learn that his sexual ethics were challenged. There is a particular form of privilege — white and male privilege — that at once underlies sexual and other forms of behavioral license and gives an agitator the needed room to agitate. The next step is to find ways to keep pushing the envelope against entrenched authority while at the same time treating one another with dignity.

Further Reading

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

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.