AfricaIs aCountry

Oh, Canada

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

Oh, Canada

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

Sean, AIAC's editor, reflects, in a drive-buy fashion, on Canada's travel rules and some reasons why Toronto is a great place to visit.

Photo: IQ Remix, via Flickr CC.

A long time ago, in the late 1980s, when there was still Apartheid, I needed a passport to travel by bus from Cape Town to Durban in South Africa. On the face of it, this makes no sense as I was traveling within South Africa. Well, technically.  The bus was traveling a coastal route and going through the “independent homeland” or bantustan of Transkei in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

If you forgot, Transkei was one of the white South African government’s myriad of “self-governing” territories where it banished surplus black people and from where capitalism’s urban factories, farms, and mines got some of its abundant cheap migrant labor.  But just as South Africa’s black “independent” states needed parliaments and national crests, they also needed borders. I can still remember the farce of crossing the “border” and having our travel documents checked by Transkei police in brown uniforms and ten-gallon hats.

Then last week, before a short trip to Toronto, Canada, I received this message from Delta for South African citizens visiting Canada:

Additional Information: – Passports, identity or travel documents of Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei and Venda are not accepted.

I was surprised by this message. Who has even traveled or is still traveling with such passports? I wondered whether it was because I was traveling to a country that offered refugee status to white South Africans from democratic rule in South Africa. I abandoned the quest after a while.

Meanwhile, the trip to Toronto – where I was attending the Canadian Association of African Studies annual meeting – actually turned out to be worth it.

I was on a panel about “South African Modernities: Then and Now” with Neelika Jayawardane, one of Africa is a Country’s regular contributors and on the faculty of SUNU-Oswego, as well as Tsitsi Jaji, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. My presentation was on “Soap Operas, Public Broadcasting and the “Aspirational Viewer” in South Africa.

Other highlights from the Toronto visit: I went to a screening of academic and filmmaker Daniel Yon‘s beautiful new film on Sathima Bea Benjamin (review forthcoming); went to visit some exhibits of the Contact Photo Festival in downtown Toronto (reviews and a possible interview on its way); drove around the Toronto suburbs and went for some cheap, very good Tamil food; met and hung out with scholar and activist John S. Saul and watched a lot of Canada’s version of FOX News.

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.