AfricaIs aCountry

If Africa really is a country …

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

If Africa really is a country …

By
Sean Jacobs

One of our readers took our title literally.

Photo Credit: Matthieu Paley.

From a reader: ‘… If Africa really is “a country” for many Americans, then that country is somewhere few outside the military have even heard of … Djibouti: AFRICOM (much of it apparently run out of a rural base here in Britain), drones-ville, the only Japanese military base in the world outside Japan, the EU’s anti-pirates clogging up the port, luxury swimming pools and bars. Throw in the Chinese Navy, mix with the still-smoldering fag-ends of the French empire, all sorts of private military outfits now cashing-in on the anti-pirate boat-protection (insurance) racket, some significant slices of both Somali and Dubai capital, add the entirety of Ethiopia’s imports thundering the place … stir at 40o celsius …’

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.