AfricaIs aCountry

The Blue Kenyan

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

The Blue Kenyan

By
Elliot Ross

We may not all love Chelsea Football Club (John Terry, their klepto-petro-billionaire owner, John Terry, the list goes on) but we are loving the team’s Brazilian midfielder Ramires right now. And not just for that equalizing goal he scored on Saturday against Manchester United in the English FA Cup. When Ramires played for Cruzeiro in Brasil, fans of Os Celestes (who play in blue) nicknamed him “O Queniano Azul” or the “The Blue Kenyan” because his extraordinary stamina reminded them of Kenyan distance runners. 

A Brazilian TV channel went and did a long feature on Ramires’ life in London after he scored a brilliant lob at the Nou Camp last season. One for the Portuguese speakers, or for anyone who wants to see Ramires and his wife chasing their young son around their house before inexplicably heading to a posh ice bar in London to finish the interview. He seems like a nice fella.

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.