Africa Is a Country

Mapo do mundo

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

Mapo do mundo

By
Sean Jacobs

Remember the Mapping Stereotypes Project and the Afrographique project? (The former maps popular national stereotypes from around the world, while the latter turns any set of data about the continent into a graphic, including a series of maps.) A reader of this blog points us towards this “map” of stereotypes that’s been circulating online among Brazilians.

Here’s a translation for those who don’t speak Portuguese.

Canada: polar bears
USA: fat people
Central America: Pirates of the Caribbean
South America: llamas, stash, humble people, us (Brazil)
Greenland: Wally’s house
Europe: mustache, pasta, money
Africa: The Clone (Brazilian telenovela), desert, kuduro, “I like to move it” (Madagascar, the movie)
Middle East: Mohamed
Central Asia: bin Laden
China: many people and a lot of rice
India: cows
South East Asia: Rambo
Japan: weird people
Australia: weird animals

* Thanks to Tom for the translation.

Further Reading

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.

What Portugal forgets

In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.

Trump tariffs and US Imperialism

Trump’s April 2025 tariff blitz ignited market chaos and deepened rifts within his own coalition. Beneath the turmoil lies a battle between technocrats, ultranationalists, and anti-imperial populists, all vying to reshape—or destroy—American global power.