AfricaIs aCountry

Reality TV

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

Reality TV

By
Sean Jacobs

The practice of renting out Cape Town’s “scenery” and its cheaper film crews can have its misunderstandings. Take “Safe House,” the new “action thriller” starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds, that’s really set in South America. I can only imagine the cliches about South America for which South Africa stands in here. Anyway it sounds more like “Training Day”:

A movie starring Denzel Washington was a little too thrilling for a Cape Town neighbourhood that has experienced gang violence.

Callers to talk radio said they feared gang fights had returned to the township when they heard the sounds of automatic gunfire overnight.

Denis Lillie, head of the Cape Film Commission, said today the producers had been authorised to film a sequence involving car chases and the firing of blanks, and had informed residents in the immediate neighbourhood. But he says the sound carried further than expected.

Lillie says the Cape Town community is getting “used to the fact that people want to film here”. The movie, Safe House, is described as a crime thriller.–SAPA.

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.