Africa Is a Country

#WhiteHistoryMonth: How Unexpected

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

#WhiteHistoryMonth: How Unexpected

By
Dan Moshenberg

From this week’s Washington Post Travel Section:

How unexpected: There was more modernity than I expected, such as extremely modern infrastructure (roads, etc.) in many places, although there is still poverty there. Also, the rate of exchange, coupled with the reasonable prices, meant that meals (and wine) were a fraction of what they are here in the United States. The quality of the beef was outstanding — and we’ve tasted beef from Argentina, Brazil, Chicago, etc. This was the best!

How unexpected. Roads.

Image: Africa is a Country

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

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.