AfricaIs aCountry

Just add some Africa

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

Just add some Africa

By
Sean Jacobs

An ad for multinational Orange to grab customers in a Middle Eastern country for some strange reason features a weird narrative of Africans happy that their homes get flooded. What does this have to do with the Middle East? (Or with Africa, for that matter?)

Perhaps all the commercials around the World Cup in South Africa has now made  ‘Africa’ such an empty sign  that it can just be appropriated and used whenever some feel-good effect is desired.  It’s becoming a recipe: take a product, add African kids, bare feet, smiles, sunshine, glamourized poverty – and voila, there you go.  Your product will change the world.  For the better, of course. Because you care.

-Herman Wasserman

 

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.