Africa Is a Country

Africa is a Country is getting a makeover

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

Africa is a Country is getting a makeover

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

We're updating our design and will be back soon with a fresh new look. Stay tuned.

The author in Kirstenbosch, Cape Town.

If you’re wondering what this stripped-down design on the blog is all about, we’re getting a new look and will be back soon. Meanwhile, you can visit or sign up to our Facebook and Twitter pages until then or stare at this picture of me chasing some kind of pheasant in Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town a few years ago. Update: Neelika says it is an Egyptian goose.

Image: Sean Jacobs.

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.