The AIAC Podcast

The campaign for global immunization against the SARS-CoV-2 virus is proving tougher than everyone anticipated. The simple reason is that the world was never prepared for something like this. A combination of underfunded and disjointed health systems, dwindling vaccine supplies, and emerging variants compromising the efficacy of the available vaccines have complicated the roll-out for most countri...

Cornel West, the American philosopher: “There were two great men in apartheid South Africa. The first one was the architect of the apartheid system, Hendrik Verwoerd, and the other great figure was his prisoner, Robert Sobukwe.” This edition of AIAC Talk - coinciding with the anniversary of Sobukwe's death in 1978 - explores the latter's life and legacies. Derek Hook, a South African-born professo...

Who exactly is Bobi Wine? Setting aside the system he rejects, what does he stand for? A new podcast series hosted by the Sudanese-American rapper Bas, and produced by Spotify, Dreamville Studios and Awfully Nice aims to probe exactly these questions. The Messenger follows Bobi Wine’s rise from his upbringing and his artistic career all the way to his political prominence. This week on AIAC Talk w...

Israel's main ally is still the United States. But Israel is also looking to shore up its support elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. In the second half of 2020, Israel partially or fully restored diplomatic ties with the UAE and Bahrain in the Middle East, as well as Sudan and Morocco in Africa. Despite Trump’s exit, Israel’s campaign for normalization is not finished yet, and...

This week’s AIAC Talk is devoted to the life, thought and legacy of Amílcar Cabral. Cabral was the complete revolutionary: an astute theoretician, fierce fighter and gracious politician (with a professional background as an agronomist to boot). Part of a generation of anti-colonial leaders who were “gone too soon”—which include the likes of Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and Samora Machel—Cabral...

How do we make sure that the COVID-19 vaccine is a public good and that we all, regardless of where we are in the world, have access to it. For the first AIAC Talk show of 2021, we are joined by Achal Prabhala, coordinator of AccessIBSA, a tri-continental project set up to expand access and speed up the discovery of new drugs in the developing world, specifically India, Brazil and South Africa. As...

Wrapping up 2020, we decided to make our last AIAC Talk show of the year festive. So, we will host a rotating cast of guests that appeared on the show this first season. (The show’s title, #Dezemba, is taken from the colloquial South African term for the annual holiday season, usually a feast of travel by migrants, BBQs (braais, tshisa nyamas) and long days at the beach. Though there, because of r...

This week on AIAC Talk, we discuss how Ethiopia helps us make sense of and work through questions about the nature of the African state: whether development as an emancipatory goal or not; what does it mean to alleviate poverty; and finally how do we create constituencies that support pro-poor policy in the face of rapacious capitalism. Our guest is Elleni Centime Zeleke, Assistant Professor in th...

In Argentina, a country where issues of race and class are not far from the surface, someone who comes from the Buenos Aires slums is known scornfully as “El Negrito.” As the writer Colm Tóibín wrote in a profile of Diego Maradona in Esquire in 1991, El Negrito also refers to someone with darker skin than the ruling class (basically white Argentinians): specifically someone “… from the shanty town...

After the high drama of the US election and a week off from AIAC Talk to collect ourselves, we're back to discuss hip hop and its relationship to politics. Today's episode looks at the relationship of hip hop to politics, both on the continent and in the US. Taking as a point of departure Su'ad Abdul Khabeer's article on the site, The Hip Hop President? in which she writes: "First, while I don’t t...

Today, America heads to the polls in what is being billed as its most important election in recent memory. For good reason, as it presents the chance to vote out of office Donald Trump, an incompetent demagogue whose callous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic provides final testament to the disaster that has been his presidency. But is Trump really the worst thing that’s happened to America? As Jam...

In October, protests erupted in Nigeria calling for the government to #EndSARS. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad was a federal policing unit established in 1992 to respond to a wave of crime that came about in Nigeria’s largest cities like Lagos and Abuja. But, increasingly, these officers (who did not wear uniforms but operated in plain, civilian clothes), became accused of harassment, torture, and...

Corruption is a serious problem—but is anti-corruption a serious politics? Guests Benjamin Fogel, Wangui Kimari, Sabatho Nyamsenda, and Elisa Greco discuss with hosts Will Shoki and Sean Jacobs.

What if you survey African literature professors to find out which works and writers are most regularly taught? Literary scholars Bhakti Shringarpure and Lily Saint sought to find out for their article “African Literature is a Country”, the first in a series on the site that asks how we decolonize African Literature studies. The co-authors sent out a survey to their colleagues and found they mostl...

What ideas influence the new right and how is it spreading around the world, including in Africa? This week on AIAC Talk we have Chelsea Stieber, a scholar of French and Francophone Studies, who will speak on the ideas that inspire today’s violent, white, right-wing populism, and how they draw inspiration from an obscure 1970s racist, apocalyptic novel from France, Camp of the Saints. Then, politi...

In this week's episode we talk to Michelle Chikaonda, a Malawian essayist, who wrote recently about the elections in Malawi for Africa Is a Country, and Jimmy Kainja, a media scholar, about what we can learn about the future of democracy from the Malawi example. We will also interview legal scholar Sohela Surajpal on reimagining what we mean by feminist justice.

On March 6, 1957, Nkrumah, the newly elected Prime Minister of Ghana, declared, “the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.” That night Ghana was celebrating independence from its former European colonizer, Britain. It was the first African country south of the Sahara to win its independence. This week coincides with his birthday, Nkrumah w...

September 12th marked the anniversary of the day that Biko, arguably the most exciting leader of his time, was murdered by apartheid police in 1977. Biko’s ideas have continued to resonate long past his death, and have especially shaped the convictions of the new generation of activists emerging from the #feesmustfall and #blacklivesmatter movements. This week we kick off our inaugural season of o...

We talk football on today's weekly livestream show, featuring Algerian football writer, Maher Mezahi, South African sports journalist Njabulo Ngidi and academic Martha Saveedra, longtime friend of Africa Is a Country whose most recent collaborative project covered sport and development in Cape Verde, Nepal and Timor-Leste, and African athletic migration to the European Union.

Africa Is a Country founder Sean Jacobs and Staff Writer William Shoki discuss the crisis in Mali with invited guests Madina Thiam, Gregory Mann and Cherif Ag Mohamed Ibrahim. For more visit http://africasacountry.com

Africa Is a Country founder Sean Jacobs and Staff Writer William Shoki discuss Race and International Relations with scholars Samar Al-Bulushi and Oumar Ba.

Join us as we discuss the topics that everyone is talking about (or should be talking about). We speak with guest, award-winning filmmaker Dylan Valley, whose latest VR 360 project "Azibuye - The Occupation" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and more recently at vNAF, the virtual National Arts Festival in South Africa.

Join us for a journey through Nigerian politics with Dr. Sa'eed Husaini.

Will Shoki (Staff Writer) and Sean Jacobs are joined by Dr. Grieve Chelwa and they discuss decolonizing the economics curriculum, amongst other things.

Politics in Kenya with Dr. Wangui Kimari from our pilot season of AIAC Talk.