AfricaIs aCountry

Can't Make This Stuff Up

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

Can't Make This Stuff Up

By
Sean Jacobs

Myanmar/Burma’s oppressive junta pulled off two feats this week: first they cooked the elections ensuring a front party win the elections with 80 percent (well, at least they did not say 98 percent like Paul Kagame) of the vote, and then announced a new flag for the country. Okay, so it looks suspiciously like Ghana’s “Black Star” flag. Same colors, but the star is white. Reuters, which has an Africa News Blog but not a Europe News Blog (that’s just news) tried to “analyze” the decision and fails to pass a slew of offensive, objectionable stereotypes off as clever:

Are Myanmar’s generals closet Rastafarians, or is their adoption of the pan-African colours associated with Ethiopian emperor Haile Salassie a tacit acknowledgement that half a century of army diktat has transformed the once-prosperous Asian state into an African-style basket-case?

For real.

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.