The AIAC Podcast

This episode of AIAC Talk is a replay of the launch of issue 78 of Amandla! magazine, a progressive South African publication devoted to advancing radical left perspectives for social transformation. Since 2020, Africa Is a Country has been fortunate to be in partnership with Amandla! and is pleased to expand the range of content shared across both publications. The issue was published on the eve...

This week on AIAC Talk, we chat to Lassane Ouedraogo, an AIAC Fellow and lecturer at Université Joseph Ki Zerbo in Burkina Faso, and Brian Peterson, professor of history at Union College specializing in West Africa, about the trial for the assassination of Thomas Sankara, which resumes in Burkina Faso on the October 25. The dramatic and tragic details of Sankara’s murder by his comrades on October...

In this edition of AIAC Talk, we speak to Adam Tooze, Professor of History at Columbia University, about his latest book Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World Economy . The COVID pandemic is ongoing, and since its outset has provoked unprecedented response from governments, central banks, corporations, and civil society. Although some key fiscal and monetary responses have departed from mainstay neo...

In a widely supported move in July, Tunisia’s president Kais Saied suspended parliament, sacked the prime minister, and assumed emergency powers. In September, he suspended parts of the constitution, announced rule by decree, and appointed Najla Bouden as the country’s first female prime minister. Many Western commentators are now wondering, is this the end of Tunisian democracy? This week on AIAC...

In this week’s episode of AIAC Talk, we speak to Professor Leswin Laubscher and Professor Derek Hook from Duquesne University, who with Miraj Desai, are editors of the upcoming book Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology . From twentieth-century anti-colonial movements to contemporary struggles for racial and economic justice, Fanon remains a cherished source of political guidance—but how have his p...

In the kick off of Season two of AIAC Talk, Will Shoki and Sean Jacobs speak with Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, a professor of international relations theory and law at Cornell University on the recent coup in the West African nation of Guinea-Conakry. On 5 September 2021, the country's first democratically-elected president, Alpha Condé, was deposed in a coup led by the country’s armed forces. When e...

Just over a year ago, we streamed the first episode of AIAC Talk. Africa Is A Country founder and editor, Sean Jacobs, and staff writer, William Shoki, got together virtually to host a show on politics and culture from an African perspective. Beginning during the first wave of COVID-19 transmission in 2020 which saw lockdowns imposed and citizens around the world compelled to remain indoors, it so...

We are talking film again. Viewers will remember that a few months ago, AIAC Talk explored how digital streaming platforms (like Netflix) are changing content production on the continent. On this occasion, we are interested in getting to know more about the cinematic initiatives that are working in this dynamic landscape and pushing the boundaries of what "African cinema" means, and indeed cinema...

In May 2020, Africa Is A Country awarded ten fellowships to young, mostly African, writers and since then have been working with the inaugural class of fellows to support the creation and publication of their original work. In this episode of AIAC Talk, we profile two fellows and their projects: Youlendree Appasamy, a freelance writer and editor from South Africa, whose work explores South African...

On 16 June 2021, Facebook announced that it had removed a network of fake accounts in Ethiopia that had been targeting domestic users ahead of the country's general elections. Facebook linked the accounts to individuals associated with the country’s Information Network Security Agency. The accounts posted positive stories about embattled Prime Minister Abyi Ahmed and his Prosperity Party, while ra...

Anakwa Dwamena, our new books editor, and literary scholar Bhakti Shringarpure join us for a discussion on African books and publishing.

Now treated as a prescient representation of the 1968 generation that forever transformed left-wing politics, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise portrays a group of French students forming a Maoist collective and living together in a cosy Parisian apartment where fierce discussions over politics and revolutionary strategy happen with religious devotion. On the only occasion an outsider enters...

Before the boring neutrality of the “Global South”, there was the counter hegemonic posture of the Third World.  The historic site for the official formation of Third World identity was the 1955 Asian-African conference when delegates from 30, mostly newly independent states descended on Bandung in Indonesia to discuss their mutual ambitions for post-colonial world-making. Then, the affinitie...

In this episode, our monthly interviews with artists, we talk with the director of a new film on a Libyan dissident and discuss a new exhibition on the global black experience.     In a lecture delivered at the University of Toronto in 2002 called “The Foreigners Home ,” the late American writer Toni Morrison offers a reflection on the inside/outside blur that can enshrine frontiers...

This episode of AIAC talk is devoted to Palestinian solidarity. For international spectators, the case for Palestinian liberation often exists in the heady space of argument, a realm of abstractness. And while there are the visceral images of horror and brutality we are exposed to on our TV screens, when the ceasefires are declared and the violence paused, it can cause us to forget that another vi...

It’s hard to begin to summarize the complicated legacy that Bob Marley left behind. While no one questions the brilliance of his musical output (achieved primarily with his band, The Wailers ), it is the fact that Marley wasn’t just a musician that leaves us missing not only his eclectic sounds, but wondering about what would have become of his political and cultural trajectory if not for his unti...

On May 5, Karl Marx turns 203. As ever, the legacy of the political-economist, philosopher, and activist remains contentious. Social media routinely produces declarations that reading Marx is unnecessary, that Marxism constitutes a racist body of thought, or that in the public sphere, Marxists themselves are on the fast-track to terminal obsolescence, out of step with contemporary academic and lit...

April 27th is a significant date for two countries on the African continent, separated by more than 5,000 km across the Atlantic ocean. On this day, both Sierra Leone and South Africa celebrate emancipation from minority rule. For Sierra Leone, it was becoming freed from the British in 1961, and for South Africa, the end of apartheid in 1994, some several decades later.  The period between th...

For most football enthusiasts, the last year of matches and competition bore the stamp of something most people think should be kept out of the sport: politics.  But as former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson once said, “There is more politics in football than in politics.” Rather than separate from society, sports are often a mirror of it—a testament to the prevailing attitudes,...

To face the worsening political, social and ecological crisis before us (that most acutely affects the poor and working-class), requires effective and coordinated action from South Africa’s progressive forces. What should be the vehicle for this? As Niall Reddy  recently wrote  (his was the inaugural post in a  series of republications , as part of Africa Is a Country’s partnership...

As the literary scholar and a regular contributor to the site, Bhakti Shringarpure, recently wrote on Africa Is a Country , “Decolonization has taken over our social media timelines with a vengeance. With hundreds of thousands of ‘decolonize’ hashtags, several articles, op-eds, and surveys on the subject—and plenty of Twitter fighting over the term—one thing is clear: decolonization is all kinds o...

This year marks 10 years since the Arab Spring began as a protest movement in North Africa and the Middle East, transforming the region and ushering an era of social upheaval still with us today. Much of the anniversary-related commentary on the legacy of the Arab Spring fixates on how this challenge failed. We are told to look at Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and especially Libya—things haven’t changed...

For most South Africans, the 29th of March is an unremarkable date, a day like any other. Few recognize the name Dulcie September, or know of her brutal murder in Paris on this day. September was the ANC chief representative for France, Luxembourg and Switzerland in the 1980s, and was the only high-profile ANC member to have ever been assassinated outside of Southern Africa. As Rasmus Bitsch and K...

The roots of International Women’s Day originate from the Socialist Party of America organizing a “National Women’s Day” in 1909 to honor a 1908 garment workers strike, and inspired by this, at the International Socialist Women’s Conference the following year, a group of German socialists (including Clara Zetkin, Luise Ziets, Paula Thiede and Käte Duncker) proposed an International Women’s Day. As...

It’s no surprise that streaming services are growing on the African continent. Although Africa is treated as the final frontier of global internet connectivity, its fortunes are fast changing, indicated by heightening efforts to improve digital infrastructure and make data and broadband more readily available. So, as more Africans become digital denizens, streaming services are taking notice – the...