AfricaIs aCountry

Inbox

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

Inbox

By
Sean Jacobs

It has come to this. Don’t focus too much on the ‘your scholarship’ line. An email from an American lawyer in my inbox:

I am writing to request your help in a matter based on your scholarship on South Africa. My immigration law firm is currently representing a family of white Afrikaner farmers who are seeking asylum and withholding of removal based on allegations that they are the victims of discrimination based on their race and political affiliation. We are seeking an expert witness who could testify to the current situation in South Africa and confirm that this family would indeed suffer similar persecution if they were to return … If you or anyone you know would be able to give us an expert opinion, please let me know. Your assistance in this matter is greatly appreciated.

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.