Africa Is a Country

The Indians are coming

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

The Indians are coming

By
Sean Jacobs

Image credit Tourism Victoria via Flickr CC BY 2.0

This is an ad to promote the wares of Willow TV—the California-based portal for live Internet streaming of big cricket matches—ahead of India’s tour of South Africa, a tour that kicks off today. I’ll let the stereotypes of South Africa (Afrikaner farmers, coloured klopse and Zulu fighters) and the idea of cricket as a white sport (at the crease and on the oval at least it is the preserve of white men and boys), impugn itself. Or maybe the client or the creatives behind the commercial were just trying to be honest. (BTW, I am going to hedge a bet: this commercial was conceptualized and made by a South African production company. I hope I am wrong.)

H/T: Omar Karim

Further Reading

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.

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.