AfricaIs aCountry

‘Really you’re African?’

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

‘Really you’re African?’

By
Sean Jacobs

Filmmaker Shola Ajayi (she’s also a media studies student at The New School in New York City) is one of the people behind this humorous, but sharp, web series on “the African experience in America.” The point behind is to “refute negative portrayals of Africans in the media but it will also work as a window into the lives and traditions of individuals from different parts of the continent of Africa.” Here‘s a link to the trailer and below we’ve embedded the first three episodes. The first features Olajuwon Ajayi (Shola’s sister?) and people messing up her name. The second video includes the question, “Really you’re African?” to a Ivorian who people confuse for someone from the Caribbean.

And here are links to episode 4 and episode 5.

For more information, see the series website, its vimeo channel where you can watch newer episodes and on soundcloud for audio interviews.

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.