Africa Is a Country

Africa’s oldest liberation movement is 100 years old

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

Africa’s oldest liberation movement is 100 years old

By
Sean Jacobs

Does South Africa's ruling ANC still fight for the same values it championed 100 years ago?

Jubilant crowds listening to the speech of President Nelson Mandela. 10/May/1994. UN photo credit Sattleberger.

This week 100 years ago, South Africa’s current ruling party, the African National Congress, was born. It would go on to dominate resistance politics against Apartheid. Many assume today’s ANC is very different from that of its founders or its high points in the 1950s and later through the 1980s and 1990s. “Does South Africa’s ruling ANC still fight for the same values it championed 100 years ago?” was the theme for Al Jazeera English program, “The Stream.”

The producers invited me help answer this and other questions about the ANC so I traveled down to Washington D.C. The show is presented by Derek Ashong. Remember him? He is also a rapper. He was joined by guest host Latoya Patterson (she’s also a blogger at Racialicious). The show is live, fast paced and incorporates social media. Unfortunately technical difficulties meant it was hard to hear the inputs of the other 2 guests – Keith Khoza, ANC spokesperson, and journalist and commentator Karima Brown – linked to the studio via Skype. The video, above, of the show also includes a 10-minute post-show which was streamed online after the TV channel returned to its regular programming. It’s riveting stuff, if I should say so myself.

Thanks to producer Melissa Giaimo for inviting me. My wife should take credit for suggesting I wear the nice pink shirt.

Watch it here.

 

Further Reading

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.

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.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.