Africa Is a Country

The Afrikaans Film Template

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

The Afrikaans Film Template

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

Feature films produced for the Afrikaans market in South Africa, have many distinctive characteristics, including that they're exclusively white.

A still from the Hollywood film, 'Out of Africa,' a colonial fantasy set mostly on a Kenyan farm.

The creatives at South African satellite TV channel Kyknet—which, more recently, also produces feature films—not only blatantly rip off American romantic comedy plotlines but inhabit a South Africa where not a single black face is to be seen. On the other hand, maybe they’re being honest.

Like for “Semi-Sweet.”

 

 

Further Reading

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.

Sovereignty or supremacy?

As far-right politics gain traction across the globe, some South Africans are embracing Trumpism not out of policy conviction but out of a deeper, more troubling identification.

From Cape To Cairo

When two Africans—one from the south, the other from the north—set out to cross the continent, they raised the question: how easy is it for an African to move in their own land?