AfricaIs aCountry

#GhanaDecides Playlist

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

#GhanaDecides Playlist

By
Sean Jacobs

Results of today’s parliamentary and presidential elections in Ghana are expected at the earliest by Sunday. (BTW, in areas where “the biometric verification machines did not work” voting has been extended till tomorrow.) Once you’ve checked out our elections preview (yes, our Dennis Laumann predicts incumbent President John Dramini Dramani Mahama will win a tight election), keep up with the elections through this bunch of sources: Al Jazeera English; the BBC (check out their Ghana elections FAQ); the crowdsourced (Ushahidi-clone) Ghana Votes 2012, which provides raw reports from polling stations; and the consortium of bloggers at Ghana Decides (though their site can take a while to load; they’re also posting videos on YouTube). Someone even created an exit poll on Google docs. If this is all too much work, just follow the #GhanaDecides hashtag on Twitter or befriend a Ghanaian on Facebook. Oh, and we have a playlist of fifteen songs (link below) to keep you occupied while waiting for the result.

Here.

 

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.