AfricaIs aCountry

The new and improved Africa is a Country is here

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

The new and improved Africa is a Country is here

By
Sean Jacobs

After weeks of promising you a new design, we're back with a brand-new and improved blog. This is a big day for us.

Photo: Gary Benbridge, via Flickr CC. (This is not our redesign, just an image to illustrate the post.)

June 12th is a momentous day in African history. To take two events: in 1964, Nelson Mandela – whose passing now seems imminent – and seven other African National Congress leaders were sentenced to life in prison for terrorism by an Apartheid South African court. Twenty nine years later, in 1993, three years after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, an election took place in Nigeria, the results of which was annulled by a military junta led by Ibrahim Babangida, who has since reinvented himself as a democrat.

But to more mundane and fleeting matters. June 12th, today, is also the day when after weeks of promising you a new design, we’re back with a brand-new and improved blog. This is a big day for us. We had to transfer our files from WordPress (we can talk about that frustrating process another time) so that took time.  Don’t worry, the whole archive is here too (hopefully we’ll transfer the older archive of Leo Africanus, the blog’s original name, over here too at some point), so you can go back and read your favorite posts. Expect some glitches (minor ones we promise have to do with formatting). You can also read the blog in blog view: either click here or type this URL into your search engine: https://africasacountry.com/blog.

Now bookmark that.

Finally, this redesign is the work of Jepchumba, graphic designer and digital content creator (she’s also behind the excellent AfricanDigitalArt blog) whom we owe big time. So for today, find your way around the new site as tomorrow we’ll be back with our usual snark and cheerfulness.

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.