AfricaIs aCountry

Dakar Modern

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

Dakar Modern

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWbSVS0AmtA]

I’ve been wanting to post for a while now about the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion.  Primarily the work of the filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris; remember Harris film, “The Twelve Apostles of Nelson Mandela,” about his South African step father. The DDFR is described as an “interactive, multimedia project,” where New Yorkers–mostly Africans and African-Americans–showing Harris their family photos and photo albums and then telling the stories behind the photographs. Great project. In the video above, from the project, Pierre Thiam, chef and co-owner of the Senegalese restaurant Le Grand Dakar in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, not far from my house, gives Harris a look at a newly independent Senegal of the 1960s and 1970s.

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.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

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.