Africa Is a Country

Viral Culture: Matt’s dance

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

Viral Culture: Matt’s dance

By
Sonja Sugira

A brand of football trickery and showmanship have only reaped bad results on the field for South African teams, but is also a great dance.

Screenshot.

We’ve been going on about Diski, but I couldn’t resist sharing yet another Diski-related video. Earlier this year, no less an authority than The New York Times defined Diski as “… football in township slang.” The site’s editor, Sean, doesn’t like Diski; he says in real life, this brand of football trickery and showmanship have only reaped bad results on the field for South African teams. In any case, this time featuring Matt Harding, of Where the Hell is Matt fame (you know, that guy that got paid to go around the world making ridiculous dance videos?) Not particularly interesting, but precisely the stuff that viral sensations are made of. Well, Matt has resurfaced in South Africa, where he was  apparently invited to come learn the diski dance.

Watch him not (completely) screw it up. Rhythm like you’ve never seen before, indeed.

Further Reading

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.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.