Africa Is a Country

'Developing the First World'

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

'Developing the First World'

By
Sean Jacobs

You couldn’t miss this trailer in front of The New School’s West 12th Street building in the West Village last week:

The Ghana ThinkTank Mobile Unit is a custom-built teardrop trailer designed to journey into the so-called “First World,” where it collects issues of concern from various local communities. The collected problems get sent to think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Serbia, Iran, Afghanistan and/or other countries, where strategies are developed. The trailer then rolls back into the previously visited communities, this time as a workstation, cooperating with community members to apply the strategies received from this global network of think tanks—whether they seem impractical or brilliant—for effected communities. Ghana ThinkTank thus reverses the customary flow of knowhow from “developed” to “developing” countries in playful and provocative ways.

Photo Credit: Amanda Ghanooni

Further Reading

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.

What Portugal forgets

In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.

Quando Portugal esquece

Em ‘Contos do Esquecimento,’ Dulce Fernandes desenterrou histórias esquecidas da escravidão em Portugal, desafiando uma mitologia nacional construída sobre viagens marítimas, silêncio e memória seletiva.