Africa Is a Country

Demba Ba

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

Demba Ba

By
Sean Jacobs

Demba Ba has a habit of falling to his knees post-goal and praying.

Via FIFA.com:

Premier League matches without defeat represents Newcastle United’s longest unbeaten run in the English top flight since 1951. The surprise sequence has taken the Magpies up to third, with over six months having now passed since they last tasted league defeat. The star of their unlikely rise has been Demba Ba, who has already become the first Newcastle player since Andy Cole to score multiple league hat-tricks in a single season – a feat that not even Alan Shearer managed during his time on Tyneside. The Senegalese striker has proved to be one of the Premier League’s most prolific predators since moving to West Ham United from Hoffenheim last season, accruing 15 goals in 18 starts for his two English clubs.

See also Goal.com on Ba announcing his intention to play for Senegal in the 2012 African Nations Cup in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon from January 21st to February 12th, much to the dismay of his club, their fans and the Newcastle sports media.

Further Reading

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.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.

Whose game is remembered?

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.