The impressive debut album of the Malcolm Jiyane Tree-O marks the arrival of a unique genius in post post-apartheid South African jazz.
Latest
What’s happening in South Africa?
After unrest in July and municipal elections in November, it’s clear South Africa is in the midst of a serious social, economic and political crisis. What are the roots of it? Listen to this episode of AIAC Talk to find out.
Music makes the past alive
Africa Is a Country Radio is back with a new season. Each show will be inspired by the work of a different African author. First up, we explore the Ethiopian Tizita with Mukoma Wa Ngugi.
South Africa needs power, not apologies
In both the rebuke and lionization of F.W. De Klerk, who recently died, there is an attempt to squeeze power into the zone of emotional sentiment.
Simply filming people’s lived experiences
How the film, ‘I am Samuel’ about a gay Kenyan couple was banned by the Kenya Film Classification Board.
Reading Africa, Africans reading
This week on AIAC Talk: 2021 has been declared a great year for African literature, but what does that actually mean?
AIAC RADIO
In our final episode of “Clubbing on the Continent,” Africa Is a Country Radio heads to Lisbon, Portugal.
Culture
Musically, Congo is the mothership
The documentary, Rumba Kings, offers a commendable and tireless argument for both an intangible cultural heritage case and a centering of the Congolese way.
Gangsters as people’s champions
In a country like South Africa where government trust is low, gangsters and criminals who provide assistance to their communities are seen as the people’s champions.
Organic intellectuals
In the last video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, we meet the Organic Intellectuals Network.
‘What two men do’
The long history of classism and homophobia in public and media spaces in Cameroon.
Colonial accountability in transition
The mass atrocities of the 1899 French invasion of what is Niger today are finally being treated with the gravity and consequence they deserve in Western popular histories.
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 last video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, we meet the Organic Intellectuals Network.
In the third video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, Gacheke Gachihi visits a site of environmental injustice.
Politics
Kenya is Europe’s dumpsite
On the back of a failed COP26 climate conference: how e-waste dumping by European countries in Africa contribute significantly to climate change.
If only these walls could talk
Street names are political weapons. They produce memories, attachment and intimacy—all while often sneakily distorting history.
You came here on a fucking boat
Xenophobia and questions of belonging haunt Indian South Africans. What does that mean for solidarity with Black South Africans?
Policing the colony
We have to become more open to the possibility that what our society needs is not better policing, but less. And ultimately no policing at all.
The war in Ethiopia
Will Ethiopia’s civil war blow up its dream of a single state, and in the process, blow up Western notions of statebuilding?
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.