Africa Is a Country

1 month ago | africasacountry.com | Tyler McBrien |Aaron Kohn |Tom Devriendt |Sean Jacobs

In Brazzaville, they appear like apparitions. A plume of dust lifts as they walk—one in a double-breasted canary-yellow suit, another in crimson patent-leather shoes so bright they catch the sun like mirrors. Neckerchiefs whisper softly at their throats. They do not rush. They glide—deliberately, impossibly, like men with nowhere else to be and everything to prove. Children trail behind. Vendors pause mid-transaction. A boulevard transforms into a proscenium. This is not performance. This is La Sape.

1 month ago | africasacountry.com | Emily Riley |Caitlin L Chandler

A growing number of Mauritanians—along with other West and Central African nationalities, such as Cameroonians, Congolese, Nigerians, and Senegalese—are illegally migrating to the United States using Latin American countries as their main gateway. Between January and April 2019, the Mexican police arrested 1,934 illegal African migrants, three times more than the previous year in the same period. In November 2023, 900 illegal Mauritanian migrants were detained in the US, pending expulsion.

1 month ago | africasacountry.com | William Shoki |Sean Jacobs

In today’s multipolar world, economic sanctions have become a primary tool of American foreign policy. While they are typically framed as nonviolent targeted mechanisms for influencing “rogue” regimes, a deeper inspection suggests that sanctions operate as instruments of civilizational warfare—seeking not only to alter policy but to dismantle the cultural coherence and sovereign legitimacy of states in the Global South.

1 month ago | africasacountry.com | Kangsen Wakai |Mohamed Keita

To understand Paul Biya’s seemingly interminable tenure, one must first understand Cameroon, its neighbors, and Biya himself. Despite over four decades in office, he remains an enigmatic figure to many Cameroonians, including his own ministers—an observer who is rarely observed. His speeches are highly scripted, his protocols rigid, and he rarely grants interviews; the last interview he had with a local journalist was in 2002.

1 month ago | africasacountry.com | Ali Khan

Thirty-one years after the fall of administrative apartheid, South Africa stands at an uneasy juncture between the promise of a rights-based democracy and the lived reality of widespread inequality, bureaucratic inertia, and eroded public trust. The 1996 Constitution enshrined administrative justice—the right to lawful, reasonable, and procedurally fair decisions by public bodies—and elevated human dignity as a foundational value.