Africa Is a Country

Hold On To Your Hat

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

Hold On To Your Hat

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL3tRBZv7QA&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

South African football fans (well, boosted by corporates) have brought the world the plastic vuvuzelas. There’s one other invention of local football that might catch on: Makarapas, the elaborately decorated construction hard hats that now come in national colors.

There’s an interesting history about the origins of makarapas and the man who invented it, Alfred Baloyi.

Above, Heineken, in an ad for the Dutch portion of its global market, sends up the hat’s origins.  Apart from the twist at the end, the narrative is close to the real thing, as you will discover in this story–reported in more journalistic fashion; don’t worry about the cheesy music–by Yahoo Sports:

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/12711845 w=500&h=281]

And as a bonus, also a link to a high energy version of the Makarapa story by one of the young reporters of the Sony-sponsored FevaCasters:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJYJyO-zbAs&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

— Sean Jacobs

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.