Africa Is a Country

The Guardian of Malawi

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

The Guardian of Malawi

By
Sonja Sugira

IFPRI, via Flickr CC.

If you find yourself at a cocktail party this weekend where you may be required to demonstrate your worldly intelligence to the other guests, then The Guardian‘s “Pass notes” series is for you. A complete (and short!) guide to the most important issues of the day.

Because Africa is sure to be a hot topic (isn’t it always?), you can expect that someone will bring up this week’s conviction of Malawian couple Steven Mongeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga for so-called “unnatural acts.” You, of course, will not be caught unawares, thanks to Pass notes 2,783: Malawi. In less time than it takes to look up the country on a map, you’ll learn that it is known as the “warm heart of Africa,” that celebrities like love the children there, and that negative attitudes towards homosexuality in Africa are your fault. In the event you are not quite sure what to say, The Guardian has you covered on that too:

Do say: “Colonial legacy or not, I object.”

Don’t say: “Do you think they’ll let David and Simon adopt?”

This is not funny.

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.