AfricaIs aCountry

Africa is a Country’s Twitter World Cup

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

Africa is a Country’s Twitter World Cup

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

You can follow us as well as some of our writers - particularly Sonja, Sean and Herman - on Twitter.

Ronaldo scores for Brazil vs Germany in the final of the 2002 World Cup.

The World Cup is three days away, so everybody is writing, blogging, speaking, filming, and broadcasting from or about Africa (well, specifically South Africa, but that does not stop them from making generalizations about 53 countries and territories). Of course, things will calm down—we know this — in a few days when the media realizes that hosting a World Cup is a day’s work for Africans. But until then, they’re relentless.

We can try but can’t keep up with them by giving you long, nuanced, detailed posts. We have things to do, day jobs to attend, World Cup matches to watch (especially this), and sometimes we have small children to put to bed.

Ghana, who has qualified for the World Cup in South Africa, playing the Czech Republic in the 2006 World Cup in Germany (Wiki Commons).

But we can do a lot more on the fly in 140 characters.

You can follow us or Sonja, Sean and Herman on Twitter.

 

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.