AfricaIs aCountry

Postapartheid Ideology

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

Postapartheid Ideology

By
Sean Jacobs

The video for “Go Getter,” by Johannesburg’s MB featuring Malika, which I saw playing once or twice on a TV in the background (TV’s are always on in people’s houses there) while in South Africa earlier this year. Pay attention.  Here’s the refrain: “You need to let it go/go get it/go get it.”

Let it go? and go get what? That’s when you notice that for the people they actually show, this sort of positivism may not be, er, realistic: the ice cream man, the street sweeper, and the people standing against the wall, checking the paper for…wanted ads?

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.