AfricaIs aCountry

Political theater

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

Political theater

By
Sean Jacobs

Judith Stein in Dissent:

Despite its apparent permanence, OWS is mostly composed of part-time participants, who stay a few nights. There is a core of permanent campers, possibly those who run the general assemblies, the key OWS institution. The problem is that if they simply stay in parks, they prove their staying power but nothing else. They must move out. But where? If they continue street demonstrations, they risk conflict with the police. (And the value of street demonstrations and protests may be more limited in the United States than in countries like Egypt.) If they try to hone a message then they become one more voice among many, and a smaller voice than the labor movement or the NAACP. In short, political theater can capture the imagination at a time when politics seem bankrupt, but it cannot solve political problems or short-circuit political organizing.

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.