AfricaIs aCountry

Adopting Africa

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

Adopting Africa

By
Sonja Sugira

We should talk about American celebrities' obsession with adopting African babies. The mostly unfunny comedian Pauly Shore is not our guide.

A still from Pauly Shore's film "Adopted."

Proving yet again that Africa always comes to the rescue of those Hollywood celebrities in need of relevance, yesterday saw the straight-to-DVD release of a mockumentary on the celebrity African adoption craze from, wait for it, Pauly Shore. Both CNN and The Huffington Post give it the full treatment. Neither is worth your time.

Suffice it to say, this one won’t be getting a review from Allison.

In any case, this has been done before, and much better:

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.