Africa Is a Country

Amsterdam is a Continent

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

Amsterdam is a Continent

By
Tom Devriendt


ZAM is an international multimedia platform celebrating African creativity and new thinking, priding itself on a network of over 500 African journalists, photographers, writers, artists, academics, visionaries, doers and hundreds of peers in Europe and elsewhere. (Which we can attest to.) The original Dutch version of ZAM Magazine has been around for a while but to widen their reach, the magazine has reinvented itself as “an independent, quarterly print magazine on Africa and beyond” that will be launched in Amsterdam today. The first international issue features contributions by Helon Habila, Achille Mbembe, Paula Akugizibwe and Elnathan John; profiles of artists Jane Alexander and Ayana Vellissia Jackson (the portrait on the magazine’s cover, above, is by Jackson); opinion pieces by Kalundi Serumaga, William Gumede, Kassim Mohamed; Africa is a Country (yes); and much more.

Speakers tonight will be Kunle Adeyemi, Palesa Motsumi and Idsis Akinbajo (with visuals by Bouba Doula and tunes by DJ Bamba Nazar). ZAM’s new facebook page has all the details.

(Tonight’s launch is open to everyone interested so if you’re in Amsterdam, shoot them an email confirming your presence at [email protected] — and tell them Africa is a Country sent you.)

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

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.