Africa Is a Country

Right in front of your eyes

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

Right in front of your eyes

By
Rui Sérgio Afonso

Claudio Silva emailed fellow Angolan, photographer Rui Sérgio Afonso, to tell us about his favorite images.

All images by Rui Sérgio Afonso.

Saying that these are my five favorite photographs would be an injustice to all the others I have taken. Perhaps these five all have different reasons to be included here, like the one above with the children and their improvised sailboats that remind me of the imports that my country is subject to, and that I call “import-export Lebanon China,” the two groups of foreigners that are most common in Angola. The former with their warehouses that supply us with our basic needs such as beans and fuba (ground manioc), and the latter, the new foreigners, that I believe are here to stay, our new colonizers from the Far East.

From the echo the stone makes as it strikes the mabanga (a type of shellfish) that sustains the fishermen of this metropolis that grows right in front of your eyes …to the relative calm of the fisherman’s boat ready for another day at sea.

From the remnants of humanitarian aid that we are subject to every year, so apparent on the improvised boats of Tômbua village in Namibe…

…to the joy of our children as the rains arrive.

They’re all moments that carry me to my childhood where everything was more fun, more honest, realer — that time where they taught us that socialism was the path to follow for the good of our people, the people that I love so much.

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.