AfricaIs aCountry

Good doses of pan-Africanism

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

Good doses of pan-Africanism

By
Sean Jacobs

Since it first came out last year I’ve had Nas and Damian Marley’s concept album Distant Relatives on repeat. There are some lapses on the album, but I really like the track “The Promised Land.” Basically Marley and Nas updates Dennis Brown to big up Africa.

 

Nas doesn’t make much sense, but Damian Marley stays true to Brown’s sentiments:

Imagine Ghana like California with Sunset Boulevard
Imagine Ghana like California with Sunset Boulevard
Johannesburg would be Miami
Somalia like New York
With the most pretty light
The nuffest pretty car
Ever New Year the African Times Square lock-off
Imagine Lagos like Las Vegas
The Ballers dem a Ball
Angola like Atlanta
A pure plane take off
Bush Gardens inna Mali
Chicago inna Chad
Magic Kingdom inna Egypt
Philadelphia in Sudan
The Congo like Colorado
Fort Knox inna Gabon
People living in Morocco like the state of Oregon
Algeria warmer than Arizona bring your sun lotion
Early morning class of Yoga on the beach in Senegal
Ethiopia the capitol of fi di Congression …

Okay, I know, what with “Magic Kingdom inna Egypt”? Or maybe that’s deliberate going by the video for another track “Patience.” (That video is something to behold with its mix of Egyptology, “The Never Ending Story,” Indiana Jones, Shaka Zulu, and “Coming to America” references.) And why model African cities and countries only after the highly unequal glitz of North America?  But we’ll forgive them those lapses. To the Promised Land.

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.