AfricaIs aCountry

The dancing Senegalese man

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

The dancing Senegalese man

By
Sean Jacobs

Senegal voted this weekend. Abdoulaye Wade is gone after 12 years. Macky Sall, once Wade’s protege and variously prime minister and minister of mining under the old man, is now in charge. Only Senegal’s fourth President since independence in 1960. So not a clean break with the past (though the two did fall out over the role of Wade’s son Karim in government affairs). We hope to have a few post election analyses posts up in the next few days. Till then enjoy the exuberance of “the dancing man” filmed (with a cellphone?) by Al Jazeera journalist Azad Essa in Dakar last night.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

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.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

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.