The District on Cape Town’s “Fringe”
What it means to belong in post-apartheid urban space and how to reckon with history.
Blog
Meeting Sembène
An Interview with Abderrahmane Sissako, director of films like 'La Vie Sur Terre,' 'Rostov-Luanda,' 'Waiting for Happiness' and 'Bamako.'
Pan-African Twerking
That South Africa has a "Pro Twerk Team" may seem like a great opportunity to see twerking from a new, non-American perspective. Or to throw shade.
The battle over the 27th of May in Angola
Why the ruling MPLA wants to control how we remember the murder of dissidents killed right after independence.
Germany’s African “Big Five”
Germany's a new campaign to educate Germans about what development policy is, has little to do with Africa and more with local electoral politics.
The new and improved Africa is a Country is here
After weeks of promising you a new design, we're back with a brand-new and improved blog. This is a big day for us.
Africa is a Country is getting a makeover
If you wondering what this stripped down design on the blog is all about, we’re getting a new look and will be back soon. Meanwhile, you can visit or sign up to our Facebook and Twitter pages till then or stare at this pic of me chasing some kind of pheasant (UPDATE: Neelika says it […]
Papers in order
Weekend Special: The premiere of Mahamat Saleh Haroun's new film "Grigris" and the cover art for the Dutch translation of Binyavanga Wainaina's memoir, among others.
The BBC’s standards of journalism when it comes to South Africa
Read it here. The piece is by longtime foreign correspondent John Simpson. The main claims of the piece (and a documentary broadcast in the UK on Sunday night) are that the white poor number about 400,000 (that would be about 10% of the white population), that there are 80 “white squatter camps” situated around the capital […]
The unfounded fears of a Zulu hegemony
The hysteria around developing isiZulu and the country's other indigenous languages for use in higher education.
The Real Housewives of Harare
It’s election season in Zimbabwe, and so, as before, the State has engaged in ‘urban renewal’ by ‘cleaning the streets.’ Under British rule, today’s Zimbabwean women fought for the right to move about in public. The colonial administration used the “immorality and prostitution of native women” as an alibi for draconian, repressive measures against “native […]
Malawi’s Festival of Forgetting
As Malawians blur the lines of their past, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the country's present.