The Indians are coming

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 people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

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.