AfricaIs aCountry

Postmodernism on Ice

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Postmodernism on Ice

By
Sean Jacobs

The Winter Olympics features a Russian skaters who dress in animal skin costumes to perform to an "Aboriginal Song." There's more.

Skaters from the Winter Olympics; not the ones in animal skins or the ones coached by a former Stasi informer (Zemistor, via Flickr CC).

So it turns out that tonight at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, in the pairs figure skating finals, Germany will be presented by Robin Szolkowy, whose father is Tanzanian (his mother is German), along with his Ukranian-born partner, Aliona Savchenko. Together they will perform a routine choreographed to the music of the film, “Out of Africa,” which, if you forgot, is based on a Danish writer‘s white colonial fantasy of Kenya.  And, to top it all, as a German friend informed me, Szolkowy and Savchenko’s coach, himself a championship skater, was an informant for the East German secret police. My head is spinning.

I won’t waste any comment on the Russian pair who put on animal skin costumes (think a Broadway fantasy like The Lion King) to perform their “Aboriginal Song.” Australian indigenous leaders objected, but they still continued. They just washed off their face paintings. That’s too easy.

Update: Overall, Szolkowy and Savchenko won the bronze medal for Germany in Vancouver. Domnina an Shabalin, the animal print pair, did not medal.

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Reading List: Barbara Boswell

While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

An annual awakening

In the 1980s, the South African arts collective Vakalisa Art Associates reclaimed time as a tool of social control through their subversive calendars.

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.