Q&A: How One Publication Is Reframing Narratives on Africa

Tell us about Africa Is a Country and what problem it is trying to solve. Why the name?

Africa Is a Country was initially founded as a blog in 2009 by South African academic Sean Jacobs, aimed at “talking back” at Western media coverage and its typically one-dimensional characterizations of the continent. The title is a tongue-in-cheek twist on Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina’s famous satirical essay “How to Write about Africa” in which he quips, “In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country.” Since then, it has become less focused on how the West thinks and talks about Africa, and more on being a venue for African, diaspora, and Africa-interested writers to debate and think through the postcolonial condition. We strive to be a platform for creative writing about big ideas from an African perspective.

What is Western media getting wrong about its coverage of Africa?

Many mainstream outlets are still beholden to a kind of old-fashioned “foreign correspondent” model, with an emphasis on eye-grabbing headlines. Africa is generally an afterthought until something “newsworthy” happens. Though they have somewhat graduated from the Afro-pessimist (think The Economist’s “Hopeless Continent“ cover of 2000) and Afro-optimist (think The Economist’s “Africa rising” cover of 2011) extremes, the overall impression is that the continent is seen through a Eurocentric lens.

Even sympathetic coverage can sometimes commit similar errors, where things on the continent largely unfold as “processes without subjects.” In other words, we may hear about the legacy of colonialism or the modern international finance system as topics for conversation, but not necessarily what they mean for people’s everyday lives. Reducing everything to the stranglehold of Western economic and political power can be tempting, but Africans—from the highest halls of power to the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy—have agency and make choices, too. We think it is interesting and important to explore how and why those choices are made.

Who is the primary readership, where are they, and how do they find Africa Is a Country? Who isn’t following it and who needs to?

We have a broad-based target audience that spans continents. Because we publish primarily in English, our audience tends to be from Anglophone countries and urban-educated people from a range of countries, including many across Africa. However, because we often cover issues such as labor organizing, rural activism, LGBTQI, and the politics of religion, we often attract audiences outside of this core demographic and we are read by policymakers and activists, too. We are trying to grow our core audience by making more significant inroads into that metropolitan demographic. We think of our primary role as contributing to rebuilding a lively and vibrant public sphere on the continent, where socially-engaged criticism commands the attention of an expansive and devoted readership.

It may sound romantic but in South Africa—where I am based—there was a time when political and cultural commentary was dominated by a tradition of radical intellectuals and journals. Since the end of apartheid, this has evaporated. Across the continent, you also had a blossoming of media engaged in a Pan-African conversation led by outlets like Transition, The African Review, and others. We think of ourselves as trying to revive these traditions of critique; Third-Worldist in sensibility and orientation but independently-minded and non-dogmatic.

You’ve described that the issues that you write about often come from the margins of society, and your coverage and analysis is meant to influence elites and intellectuals that may not have their “ear to the ground.” Could you talk about your approach to the topics you cover?

One way to think of political polarization on the continent is as a rift between insiders and outsiders. The insider group encompasses everyone integrated into formal society, with jobs in the formal market economy and access to mainstream institutions of government and media. The outsiders are everyone else and encompass what we might broadly define as “the working class.”

Outsiders are almost always completely excluded; spoken about, and spoken on behalf of, usually to give a patina of legitimacy to demands supposedly in the interest of the poor but which are usually elite-serving.

Historically, this has meant the middle class has had an outsized influence in political contestation. Even the anticolonial nationalism that drove independent movements was largely led by elite figures who were Western-educated or trained. At Africa Is a Country, our starting point is to recognize this reality. So, although our readers tend to be urban, educated professionals—i.e., elites and “insiders”—the ideas we are interested in and promulgate are fundamentally anti-elitist since they are about expanding the realm of self-determination and freedom in society and are popular-democratic in spirit.

We do not want to overstate our influence, but looking at some of the biggest movements that have changed the political landscape and captured the public imagination on the continent over the last 15 years (from the Arab uprisings to #RhodesMustFall, to #EndSARS or #RutoMustGo), lofty ideas have driven all of them on subjects as various as democracy, economic sovereignty, policing, and safety, or education. Ideas matter.

Africa Is a Country has said its working to make connections with communities and diaspora in other parts of the world. Tell us about that project.

It is not a project so much as a long-standing and rolling commitment. We have several partnerships with nonprofit media across the continent which we see as a way to strengthen and build capacity in the independent media sector and amplify the work of such organizations to an international audience.

Our partnership with the Tanzanian project, Sauti ya Ujamaa, aimed to amplify grassroots voices on Africa is a Country and featured a series of posts on topics ranging from bus driver organizations to banking cooperatives in Dar es Salaam. The original pieces were transcribed from the author’s Swahili and published in the biweekly Tanzanian newspaper Raia Mwema. Another partner in South Africa is Amandla Magazine, a publication that serves as a forum for debate between social movement activists, trade unionists, and the progressive intelligentsia in the country. In Kenya, we worked with the Mathare Social Justice Center on a text and video-based project to analyze “Capitalism in My City” from the perspective of people living at the social margins in Nairobi. We also have a publishing partnership with the independent media website The Elephant.

We have also organized in-person programming in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (in addition to the United States). We think of these events as ways to build real, embodied, transnational communities of people interested in left ideas from an African perspective.

What are your long-term ambitions for Africa Is a Country?

In the first year of our New African Intellectuals grant from the Open Society Foundations, we were able to revamp our editorial structure and center it on the African continent. Taking a regional strategy for our coverage of African politics and culture, we hired editors to supplement our strengths in Southern, East, and West Africa. Each of these colleagues has brought with them a prolific network of writers, thinkers, and activists who have really started to give a cutting-edge, pan-African dimension to our work.

We were also able to incorporate some of the most exciting writers on the continent as auxiliary staff. Maher Mezahi is an Algiers-based football journalist who, with the help of the New African Intellectuals grant, was able to launch his own podcast, Africa Five a Side, focusing on African football. Khanya Mtshali writes regular, in-depth pieces on politics and cultural issues in Southern Africa and around the globe. Two video producers, Tsogo Kupa and Onesmus Karanja, are creating original short video content in their respective regions of South Africa and Kenya and contributing innovative new multimedia approaches to our text-focused publication.

To foster greater engagement with our material and reach out to newer audiences, we are aiming to expand in two different directions. The first is experimenting with a curated periodical to complement the online blog, in digital format and in print, depending upon resources. The second is to strengthen our audio-visual output so we can be the go-to destination for thoughtful, long-form videos on African politics and culture, whether through feature-length documentaries (we are finishing our first film, spearheaded by our director of operations, Boima Tucker), mini-documentaries, or video essays.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that attention spans are shortening and that content must be bite-sized and snappy, we find that our best-performing pieces—the ones that start conversations, spark controversy, linger, and shape debates—are often some of the longest. We have found that our audiences appreciate long-form content that is challenging and trusts their capacity for thinking and reflection. There is much to be gained from taking audiences seriously, and in our mission to be a leading platform for African social criticism, we want to keep doing that.