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Africa Is a Country

africasacountry.com

Cultural criticism, politics, and reportage from across the African continent and its diaspora. Sharp, often confrontational, consistently the smartest English-language writing on the region.

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Africa Is a Country

The World Cup Senegal can’t attend

Between the visa bond, the digital surveillance requirements, and the 74 percent rejection rate, the Trump administration has made it nearly impossible for Senegalese fans and journalists to attend the World Cup.

Momar DiengJun 13, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Rock Chalk Algeria

Against a tournament shadowed by visa refusals and bureaucratic hostility, the unexpected love affair between the Algerian national team and the city of Lawrence, Kansas, is a welcome reminder of what the World Cup is actually supposed to be about.

Maher MezahiJun 13, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

South African journalists have a choice to make

Across South African radio and television, anti-immigration framing has become the norm.

Lumka OliphantJun 12, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

The country they never left

Bosnia’s World Cup squad is built on the descendants of war and displacement, players raised across Europe and North America who are finding their way back through football.

Alex ČizmićJun 11, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

The footballing gods

Why are the religious practices of African footballers treated as strange when athletes around the world turn to faith and superstition to navigate the game’s uncertainty?

Buster KirchnerJun 11, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

What Bafana Bafana teaches South Africa about itself

For decades, Bafana Bafana embodied the disappointments of the democratic era. As the team recovers, South Africans are once again projecting their political aspirations and fears onto the national side.

Lee NxumaloJun 10, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Not all empires look the same

Although the UAE doesn’t occupy territory, it arms militias, controls ports, and launders violence through the language of development. Sudan is paying the price.

Cheriese DilrajhJun 9, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

A World Cup without the world?

The exclusion of Somali referee Omar Artan hardens the contradiction at the heart of the 2026 World Cup: a global tournament increasingly shaped by the politics of exclusion.

Maher MezahiJun 9, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

The left does not need priests of purity

If the South African left cannot engage the messy, contradictory spaces where working class politics are actually happening, then it cannot lead.

Mazibuko Kanyiso JaraJun 8, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Nothing left

A much-anticipated “Conference of the Left” was supposed to unite South Africa’s progressive forces. Instead, it confirmed the harder truth: the left doesn’t need unity, it needs rebuilding.

Niall ReddyJun 6, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

What is the World Cup for?

The World Cup was born from imperial rivalry and nationalist aspiration. Almost a century later, it still oscillates between mass hope and elite spectacle.

Boima TuckerJun 5, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

My mother’s buried story

AI tools are built on Eurocentric datasets. For Brazil’s Afro-descendants — whose histories were already marginalised from literature, academia, and media — it poses the threat of industrial-scale erasure.

Guido MeloJun 4, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

The right to belong imperfectly

In South Africa, one of xenophobia’s quieter moral mechanisms is the way foreign wrongdoing is made to carry more meaning than citizen wrongdoing.

Anye-Nkwenti NyamnjohJun 3, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Frames of reference

At the 61st Venice Biennale, the late Koyo Kouoh’s decolonial vision shaped a landmark exhibition, even as questions of representation, solidarity, and cultural authority continued to haunt the African pavilions.

Grace Tabea TengaJun 2, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Who's afraid of Michael Jackson?

The new Michael Jackson biopic turns a politically conscious Black artist into a raceless fantasy figure, erasing the civil rights struggles, global solidarities, and histories that shaped him.

Sherry L. ZaneJun 1, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Walking through the ruins of French Cameroon

A new documentary revisits how Mongo Beti used literature and political writing to confront the suppressed history of French colonial violence in Cameroon

Zahra MolooMay 28, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Anticolonialism in the age of fragmentation

The violence unfolding in Mali reflects a deeper political impasse: how to sustain popular aspirations for emancipation without collapsing into military authoritarianism.

DjiguikôrôMay 27, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Branches without roots

Across Africa, governments are elevating STEM education while sidelining the humanities. But science and technology are never neutral, and technical expertise alone cannot transform society.

Yusuf SerunkumaMay 26, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Against the ropes

In Ghana, women boxers continue to pursue the sport despite the economic hardship and institutional inequalities they face in and out of the ring.

Olaoluwa OlowuMay 25, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Pope Leo and the strongmen

The Pope’s African tour tested whether the papacy can speak to ordinary people without becoming a prop for authoritarian power.

Zahra RahmouniApr 27, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Kenya’s goon economy

Across the country’s urban centers, young men are being recruited into political militias that offer quick cash, fleeting power, and little chance of escape.

Odipo DevApr 29, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

When the peacemaker clocks out

Kenya’s shift toward trade-led diplomacy underscores the difficulty of sustaining regional leadership under conditions of fiscal dependence.

Ethan Woolf MoñinoApr 30, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

From Mubarak to Sisi

What began as a familiar security state has hardened into something new: a unified coercive order that governs Egypt through violence, surveillance, and permanent emergency.

Hossam el-HamalawyMay 1, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

The return of Mwalimu

As debates on industrial policy revive, Nyerere’s legacy offers a critical archive of both the promise and limits of socialist development.

Gussai H. SheikheldinMay 5, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

The new scramble for Congo

Backed by the Trump administration, US mining firms, financiers, and tech investors are mounting an aggressive push into the DRC’s mineral sector, reviving an old imperial logic under the language of strategic competition.

Harrison StetlerMay 6, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

On the Somalia Pavilion

As Somalia makes its first appearance at the Venice Biennale, some Somali artists are questioning who gets to represent the nation — and on whose terms.

Yasmin DualehMay 7, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

The inner life of a revolutionary

Drawing on letters to his wives, a decade-long film project seeks to move beyond iconography and return Amílcar Cabral to the realm of the human, the fragile, and the unfinished.

Feven MeridMay 8, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Blood and nation

In today’s India, stories of terrorism and national humiliation are being reworked into fantasies of decisive power — blurring the line between memory, myth, and politics.

Somdeep SenMay 8, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

An unexpected footballing kinship

If the reception the Democratic Republic of the Congo received at the FIFA intercontinental playoffs is anything to go by, visiting African fans can expect a joyful camaraderie in Mexico.

Ivan PechMay 11, 2026
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Africa Is a Country

Art under siege

From Nairobi to Khartoum, Kampala to Addis Ababa, a new digital magazine maps how the interconnected forces of political repression, class exclusion, and patriarchy are shaping artistic life across Africa.

Silas NyachwaniMay 12, 2026