Africa Is a Country

On Safari, Summer 2016 Edition

On Safari, Summer 2016 Edition

By
Sean Jacobs

Don't worry, we'll cook up some stuff for the fall and we'll be back on September 1. In the meantime, you can go potter around the website and catch up on our archive.

Sean Jacobs.

While we would like to go full steam year round, the fact that we have day jobs (for example, I work as a professor), means we have to take a break from the site every summer. To recharge our batteries. Officially we went on break Friday, July 16th (we set up you up with a Sierra Leone-connected mix). However, in honor of one of our patron saints, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (not the Hollywood version, but the more radical, contradictory Mandela) whose birthday it is today (he would have been 98 years old), we’re making the break official. Don’t worry, we’ll cook up some stuff for the fall and we’ll be back on September 1. In the meantime, you can go potter around the website and catch up on our archive. If you have really bad withdrawal symptoms, check in occasionally at our social media media (Facebook here, here and here, Instagram and Twitter here, here and here). See you in the Fall.

Tuti Beach. Khartoum, Sudan. Image credit Jedrek Burak via Flickr (CC).

Further Reading

A power crisis

Andre De Ruyter, the former CEO of Eskom, has presented himself as a simple hero trying to save South Africa’s struggling power utility against corrupt forces. But this racially charged narrative is ultimately self-serving.

Cinematic universality

Fatou Cissé’s directorial debut meditates on the uncertain fate and importance of Malian cinema amidst the growing dismissiveness towards the humanities across the world.

The meanings of Heath Streak

Zimbabwean cricketing legend Heath Streak’s career mirrors many of the unresolved tensions of race and class in Zimbabwe. Yet few white Zimbabwean sporting figures are able to stir interest and conversation across the nation’s many divides.

Victorious

After winning Italy’s Serie A with Napoli, Victor Osimhen has cemented his claim to being Africa’s biggest footballing icon. But is the trend of individual stardom good for sports and politics?

The magic man

Chris Blackwell’s long-awaited autobiography shows him as a romantic rogue; a risk taker whose life compass has been an open mind and gift to hear and see slightly into the future.

How to think about colonialism

Contemporary approaches to the legacy of colonialism tend to narrowly emphasize political agency as the solution to Africa’s problems. But agency is configured through historically particular relations of which we are not sole authors.

More than just a flag

South Africa’s apartheid flag has been declared hate speech by a top court. But while courts are important and their judgments matter, racism is a long and internationally entrenched social phenomenon that cannot be undone via judicial processes.

Resistance is a continuous endeavor

For more than 75 years, Palestinians have organized for a liberated future. Today, as resistance against Israeli apartheid intensifies, unity and revolutionary optimism has become the main infrastructure of struggle.