Africa Is a Country

Africa Is a Country is a platform dedicated to sharing opinions, insights, and fresh writings from the perspective of the African left. Established by Sean Jacobs in 2009, the site aims to promote diverse voices and discussions. All content on Africa Is a Country is published under a Creative Commons license, unless specified otherwise.

African-American/Black

English

Podcast, Radio Program

Outlet metrics

Domain Authority

Ranking

Global

#482660

United States

#291229

News and Media

#8577

Traffic sources

Monthly visitors

Articles

Hope after liberation

1 week ago | africasacountry.com | Jaume Portell Caño |Magdi El Gizouli |Sean Jacobs

In one of the final scenes of the film No Simple Way Home, Akuol de Mabior sits inside a vehicle, describing the people along the roadside as the car drives by. There, individuals selling tea strive to make a living. These are the ones who, as she puts it, hold everything together and prevent it all from collapsing.
How to unmake the world

1 week ago | africasacountry.com | Riason Naidoo |Juan Orrantia |Leila Dougan

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions. Interview by Riason Naidoo Nolan Oswald Dennis explores what they call “a Black consciousness of space:” the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.
Afropolitans and the fantasy of a digital nation

2 weeks ago | africasacountry.com | Katie Jane Fernelius |Sarah Katz-Lavigne |Jana Hönke

On September 13, 2022, the co-founder of Afropolitan, Chika Uwazie, rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange, loudly announcing their presence on the bullish frontier of Web3 start-ups. To its advocates, Web3 refers to an imagined future for the internet in which control is wrested from the giant tech companies by online communities facilitated by blockchain technologies.
Sanctions as civilizational warfare

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.
Paul Biya, the last Kaiser

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.
An undignified democracy

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.
Art is a place for rehearsal

1 month ago | africasacountry.com | Amina Alaoui Soulimani |Joshua Cohen |Leila Dougan |Tom Devriendt

Interview by Amina Soulimani To do history is what M’barek Bouhchichi remains committed to as an artist from Akka. The construction of history must respect the subjective narration of its storyteller. This conversation is a continuation, a (re)negotiation, and a repositioning of Blackness. M’barek begins from where there has been silence, representational erasure, and the denial of one’s identity.
Will the future of food be genome edited?

1 month ago | africasacountry.com | Ann Kingiri |Matthew A. Schnurr |Jan Bornman |Claire Nasike

In October 2024, Dr. Qu Dongyu, the General Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) took the stage at the World Food Prize to deliver the keynote address. Dr. Qu’s talk revolved around the question of what “the future hold[s] for agrifood systems and food culture.” Key to this future, he suggested, was the “genetic revolution,” and specifically genome editing; a collection of technologies that allow scientists to alter genetic code through direct intervention.
After the uprising

1 month ago | africasacountry.com | Nalova Akua

Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe still vividly remembers one random act of kindness during his 44-day lonely stay at the dreaded State Defence Secretariat detention facility in Cameroon’s political capital, Yaoundé, in 2018: the gift of a Bible. A rare, unexpected gift which helped him weather the ill treatment inflicted on him. “The Bible became my sole companion in the cell—it strengthened my faith and spirit and made me even stronger,” Sisiku Ayuk Tabe tells Africa Is a Country.
Beyond national liberation

1 month ago | africasacountry.com | Christopher J. Lee |Nathan Yardy |Vanessa Burger |Sean Jacobs

South Africa’s swerve from liberation to bungling kleptocracy is not unique—the United States is in the throes of an analogous meltdown—but the speed and extent of that unraveling continue to both perplex and prefigure thinking about the prospects for recovery. The latest book by Vishwas Satgar, one of South Africa’s leading figures on the left, is a trove for anyone seeking a clearer understanding of the country’s hobbled efforts to step free of its past and a beacon for seeing past the gloom.