In the collective consciousness of global football, Zaire and Haiti—which both qualified for the 1974 World Cup—are remembered for their dismal performance. But is this legacy justified?
Latest
The United States is not a country
The US federal system is a patchwork of states and territories, municipal and local jurisdictions, each with its own laws and regulations. This complex map provides ample opportunities for shell games of “hide the money.”
Organized irresponsibility
On this week’s AIAC Talk, a discussion with historian Adam Tooze on the history and future of the COVID-19 crisis.
Post-apartheid symptoms of morbidity
Ordinary working-class people have been forced to the belief that there can never actually be real solutions; stripped of the confidence that fundamental change can happen.
Probing the depths of the CIA’s misdeeds in Africa
The CIA committed many crimes in the early days of post-independence Africa. But is it fair to call their interference “recolonization”?
God was everywhere in the street
Renowned Ghanaian highlife musician, Nana Ampadu, died on September 28, 2021. In this interview from 2007, historian Jennifer Hart talks with him about the music that made him famous.
AIAC RADIO
Africa Is a Country Radio continues its season focused on African club culture. Our next stop is Lagos. Listen here and on Worldwide FM.
Culture
Africans and the creation of the modern world
Europe would have been a marginal player in world history without Africa’s natural resources and centuries of cheap African labor.
Growing pains
For all the grief Afropunk gets, including its commercialization and appetite for expansion, it still manages to bring people, mostly black, together over two days for a pretty great party.
Some kind of personal comfort
Kyle Shepherd’s new music blooms brightly from out of the shadow of pandemic and considers what it means to be South African, African, and human.
The cry of Black worldlessness
Poet Mongane Wally Serote’s 40-year lament, still haunts Black South Africans: “it is only in our memory that this is our land.” The land haunts our memory, and, in turn, we haunt the land’s memory.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s skepticisms
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels offer a skepticism against the cultural politics of packaging African stories for global circulation and consumption.
Capitalism in My City
The Mathare Social Justice Centre has partnered with Africa Is a Country to produce a series of posts and videos to document everyday capitalism in Nairobi. The project is funded via the Shuttleworth Fellowship awarded to Sean Jacobs.
In the second video from our Capitalism In My City project, Dennis Esikuri talks to everyday Nairobians about the current employment opportunities in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic.
In the first video from a series for the Capitalism In My City project, Brian Mathenge decodes what everyday capitalism looks like from the margins of Nairobi.
Politics
What happened to land grabs in Africa?
More than a decade since the surge in large-scale land acquisitions worldwide, many land deals remain in limbo. They nonetheless have far-reaching consequences for those who depend on land as foundational to life.
The end of Tunisian democracy?
On this week’s episode of AIAC Talk, Will Shoki speaks with Maha Ben Gadha about the changing political landscape in Tunisia.
Not mere intellectual dissenters
Why is South Africa’s draft Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill contradicting the constitution and proposing to shield academics and scholars who propagate racist and bigoted ideas?
The secret offshore world of the Kenyatta family
The Pandora Papers connects Kenya’s ruling family to secret accounts in offshore companies and tax havens. But, state looting started with Jomo Kenyatta.
EndSARS, workers’ power, and war
The working class that organized #OccupyNigeria should collaborate with #EndSARS. If these two boiling points burn together to produce the fire next time, a new Nigeria will be possible.
Technology
Nigeria’s Twitter ban and the resistance politics of VPNs
Anyone who cares about civil society, free speech, and human rights should find the state’s digital silencing of its citizens deeply troubling.
WhatsApp and anti-capitalism: should you stay or should you go?
Facebook and its “family” of services are a one-way street towards greater integration, data exploitation, and erosions of privacy by an increasingly monopolistic company.
More widespread than we think
Today's social movements rely on tech collectives to organize safely. But few know the history of other technologies used by earlier liberation movements.
What is whiteness to a cyborg?
Tracing the digital contours of the settler colony helps us understand how old inequalities will shape a future with artificial intelligence.