Africa Is a Country

Found Objects, No. 13

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

Found Objects, No. 13

By
Sean Jacobs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwe_xNEUgxA

The UK (via Jamaica) toaster, Tapper Zukia’s “MPLA” off the album from the same name. Because the song (and the album) came out in 1975, some made links to the Angolan liberation movement, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, who that same year formed Angola’s new independent government (after a protracted liberation war against Portuguese colonial rule). This fan video–with its Cold War and anti-colonial images–contributes to that myth I suppose. Instead, the song was more about Rastafarianism and a reflection of 1970s London black identity politics.

H/T: Tony Karon.

Further Reading

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.

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.