AfricaIs aCountry

T.I.A*

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

T.I.A*

By
Sean Jacobs

What is either a gollywog or coon ornament in a Christmas display of an East 17th Street between 5th and Union Square West, Manhattan store, was spotted by my neighbor, Chinnaya Nwosu, last week. According to Chinnaya there were a variety of these kinds of items in the store, including what looked like Sambos with grass skirts, spears and headdress, etc. “The store owner palmed me off with, ‘They are just crafts made in Thailand.’ I tried reasoning that this kind of imagery was not conceived in Thailand, and that the ignorance of the [people in Thailand] making them cannot justify them being on shop shelves in New York City. The guy said that nobody else had complained- eying me as a trouble making reactionary.”

* This is hopefully the start of a regular series of posts of snapshots– we’ll call it T.I.A. This is Africa–that remind us from Africa or pretend to be of Africa that we encounter everyday.

Further Reading

Empire’s middlemen

From Portuguese Goa to colonial Kampala, Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book shows how India became an instrument of empire, and a scapegoat in its aftermath.

À qui s’adresse la CAN ?

Entre le coût du transport aérien, les régimes de visas, la culture télévisuelle et l’exclusion de classe, le problème de l’affluence à la CAN est structurel — et non le signe d’un manque de passion des supporters.

Lions in the rain

The 2025 AFCON final between Senegal and Morocco was a dramatic spectacle that tested the limits of the match and the crowd, until a defining moment held everything together.