Politics
Stuff White People Do
Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, for all the people he's helped, lacks critical self-reflection.
Everyone Gets a Vuvuzela
This plastic instrument will generate controversy where it will sound, carrying along to the new continents the singular experience that was the World Cup in South Africa.
Time and Time again
Alex Perry's work is Exhibition 1,000,003 of the kind of laziness that's allowed when you write about Africa.
World Cup Diary 2010: South America’s World Cup?
On the field, Africa’s World Cup has disappointed: Nigeria faltered, South Africa and Algeria couldn’t finish, Côte d’Ivoire were unlucky, and Cameroon underwhelmed.
World Cup Diary 2010: Plastic Horns
Researchers claim to have found evidence that vuvuzelas can lead to permanent hearing damage. But it won't stop the "tradition." Neither will FIFA
A new scheme to end poverty
This is so cynical: let people in poor countries send money to nonprofits in rich countries.
The Nandos Plot
The chicken fast-food chain’s latest television commercial, riffing on the World Cup, satirizes stereotypical Africa yet risks reproducing the very tropes it mocks instead.
Vamos a ir a Sudafrica
Mexican broadcasters are no different from their Euro-American counterparts, in peddling outdated stereotypes about Africa.
The only appropriate response now is silence
Lara Pawson's blog post about the way elites and media in the West talk, write and act about the African continent and its people, though hardly to them, is worth reposting here.
Coca Cola Boy
Commercials tied to the 2010 World Cup sell brands through a tired global template of African-ness: poverty as texture, hardship as atmosphere, resilience as spectacle.
The Missionary Position
The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who has made Africa his beat, lectures poor Congolese about their leisure time.
Mandela’s Children
Alexandra Fuller highlights the deeply ingrained sociological, economic, and political problems that still persist in South Africa as a result of apartheid.
The Model and The Activist
The one about the black model we all love to hate and the white activist we all just love.
Two Annoying White Men
When Canada's Globe & Mail newspaper thought it was OK to get two white, Irish men to edit a special issue of the paper on Africa.
Cavemen among us; but not in Africa
Researchers find Europeans and Asians share 1% to 4% of their nuclear DNA with Neandertals. But Africans do not. What to do with this information?
Have a Coke and Smile
Coca-Cola’s ad trivializes Cameroon’s 1990 World Cup breakthrough, ignoring its transformative global impact.
Political Economy
Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. — whom I first met in 1995 and often joke is “always right” — on what political economy means for cultural studies.