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.
Culture
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?
Organic intellectuals
In the last video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, we meet the Organic Intellectuals Network.
« ce que font deux hommes »
La longue histoire du classisme et de l'homophobie dans les espaces publics et médiatiques au Cameroun.
‘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.
If only these walls could talk
Street names are political weapons. They produce memories, attachment and intimacy—all while often sneakily distorting history.
Zimbabwe’s second innings
In November 2017, Robert Mugabe was toppled in a coup. Amid this epochal change, life—and cricket—simply went on for Zimbabweans, who are still in search of a better future.
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.
African indigenous religions and queer dignity
Colonialism should take a lot of blame for anti-queer attitudes in Africa. But missing is a frank engagement with how African indigenous cultures also fuel anti-queer attitudes.
Darra
The writer, from Cape Town, reflects on the life of her working class father, who like her friends' fathers worked tough jobs for low pay and hid his vulnerabilities.
A journey to Harar
In Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir’s Faya Dayi, khat is more than an important export product in a capitalist economy; she captures khat’s roles and meanings in everyday Harari life.
Who is the Black man?
The Jamaican born filmmaker, Lebert Bethune, who was close to Malcolm X, made two films that deftly explored Black identity at the end of the 1960s.
Late nights in Lisboa
In our final episode of "Clubbing on the Continent," Africa Is a Country Radio heads to Lisbon, Portugal.
Mission betrayed
The New Apartheid, a new book by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, seeks to define a generational mission in South Africa. Instead, it shrouds our existing one in complete opacity.
Performing Angolaness
In contemporary Angola, the gap between the public discourse on culture and the on-the-ground reality of the arts and culture sector is deepening.
The class contradictions of scholar activism
The radical politics of the professional middle classes—too often found full of rhetoric, but short on action—are explored in Leo Zeilig’s new novel, The World Turned Upside Down.
Beyond the boundary
South African cricket is currently the subject of TRC-style hearings into the racism and nepotism in the game. It makes for riveting TV, but focuses too much on individual instances of racism and discrimination.
Disentangling memory from truth
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?