Africa Is a Country

This Is Africa, Dubai Edition

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

This Is Africa, Dubai Edition

By
Boima Tucker

The Mall of the Emirates in Dubai decided on the best way to represent Africa: with a restaurant serving BBQ and burgers.

Mall of the Emirates' "high end" food court.

Dubai is a diverse international city that has become an important economic, immigration, and transportation hub for Asia, Africa, and Europe.  The demographics of the place reflect this as over 80% of the population is non-Emirati.  So when the Mall of the Emirates created a “high end” food court representing its diverse population with cuisine from countries like India, Japan, Lebanon, Egypt, France, and China, they had to make an effort to represent Dubai’s numerous African residents.

So what is Dubai’s premier African restaurant representing an entire continent named?  Tribes of course!  (It’s apparently a chain originating in Johannesburg)  And what food can possibly sum up the continent’s diverse regional cuisines into one?  None other than BBQ and burgers.

For special occasions the restaurant staff will perform a traditional song.  What was the anthem that I heard them performing as I walked by?  None other than the 2010 World Cup anthem, “Waka Waka” by Colombian pop singer Sakira. Oh, Africa!

Further Reading

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.

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.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.