Africa Is a Country

City Press

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

City Press

By
Sean Jacobs


A few years ago during bouts of insomnia, I used to imagine redesigning a newspaper, any newspaper. I’d always get stuck on the Johannesburg newspaper, City Press, historically aimed at black readers.  I hated their ugly design. (I wrote some freelance pieces for them in the early 1990s).  Now the paper is having a design face-over.  That’s the old design on the left and the new on the right. Link to the web page of the graphic designer, Peter Ong, responsible for the redesign.  (BTW, I think the redesign has a lot to do with the fact that it has a new editor, Ferial Haffajee, formerly editor of the Mail & Guardian).

For more on the redesign, see also Charles Apple‘s website as well as The Daily Maverick, which contains some errors.

* Nowadays when I have insomnia, I play computer games.

Further Reading

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.

What Portugal forgets

In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.

Quando Portugal esquece

Em ‘Contos do Esquecimento,’ Dulce Fernandes desenterrou histórias esquecidas da escravidão em Portugal, desafiando uma mitologia nacional construída sobre viagens marítimas, silêncio e memória seletiva.