Decolonize Your Mind With Africa Is A Country

Students protest outside the University of Johannesburg during a nationwide shutdown of public universities, March 15, 2021. [Reuters / Sumaya Hisham]

By Samantha Grasso

When South African writer and New School professor Sean Jacobs started a blog named after 16th century traveler and writer Leo Africanus, Jacobs had no idea that the 2000s internet boom would transform his site into Africa Is a Country.

While the name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the casual ignorance of Westerners (check out this classic and brilliantly funny 2005 Granta essay by early AIAC contributor Binyavanga Wainaina on the same topic), the publication itself seeks to do something important and serious: promote the ideas, perspectives and innovations of people from the African continent, with a leftist lens.

Jacobs had been a journalist in his hometown of Cape Town, South Africa, before enrolling as a graduate student at Northwestern University — which is where his journey into American misconceptions about Africa began.

AJ+ recently started collaborating with AIAC to increase our variety of coverage, and I sat down with Jacobs over Zoom to discuss the challenges of running an independent media project with an international perspective. Here are the main takeaways.

A response to how Africa is written about in the West

I arrived in the U.S. a couple of days before 9/11. Africa, for a long time, was [considered] this kind of “dark continent.” The thinking was that there’s always war, famine, and it's difficult to explain it, and if we have to explain it, it’s because of innate differences among the local people, tribalism, ethnicity and so on.

Africa was then implicated in the “war on terror,” because prior to 9/11, Al Qaeda bombed [targets] in Kenya. It turns out that many of their operators were also in Africa. And [the U.S.] was also using some African countries to host black [site] jails.

For four or five years, I was just writing a blog – I used to call myself Leo Africanus. I imagined myself as this 16th-century African diplomat who tried to explain Africa to Europeans.

And then, in 2009, one of the things that I realized was that some people implied that they thought Africa was a country. I thought it was just catchy. I started inviting other people to work with me on the website. So Africa Is a Country basically started as a response to the way that Africa was being written about in the West.

The Internet allowed Africans to be heard

As social media became more ubiquitous, the site became more and more a place for opinion pieces, and we began to comment on politics, on economics and on social life. I began to also realize that the internet was democratizing in the way people were getting information.

Africa Is a Country couldn't assume that it was speaking for people in Africa, so it had to bring in all these people who work and live on the African continent, which I had always done, but now it was way more explicit about promoting ideas from people who live in African countries. The site is also trying to critique Africa's place in the world, trying to understand, how can you make the world better for Africans? And it comes at you explicitly from a very leftist view.

“The Global South is ground zero for new ideas”

Historically on the left, I think there's a tendency to privilege ideas and experiences that mostly happen in the West. But in Africa, there have been wild experiments coming at the challenges facing the world from the left and insisting on the notion of public goods, publicly-owned services, whether it's education or health. So for example, [in] Burkina Faso, you had Thomas Sankara who led a revolution to make his country and his people self-sufficient and was murdered for it; the stuff that people did in Mozambique under Samora Machel; and the African socialism of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. These things aren’t perfect, they’re not flawless.

In South Africa, you have these exciting social movements that happen after the end of apartheid, with the movement around AIDS, the Treatment Action Campaign; people that fought around eviction issues; the student movement in South Africa between 2015 and 2017 that argued for free and equal education [and] also argued at the same time for the removal of racist symbols, like statues — [calls that] then got picked up at Oxford, and got picked up in the U.S.

There are so many interesting ideas coming out of the Global South… It's ground zero, often, for new ways in which people exist. Like when Ebola arrived, you can go look at what happens if a pandemic comes, how you react to it, what you need — you need a strong state, you need a strong health care system. That's the only way Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria could deal with Ebola. I think it's important that we have ideas that come from those places.

Mainstream papers in the West are in crisis

I think the mainstream papers in the West are in crisis because the idea of the foreign correspondent is a pre-internet idea. There’s empirical evidence that the number of foreign correspondents have declined. Africa has [more than 50] countries, you can’t just have one correspondent [based in Johannesburg]. You won't read much about Africa in Western media because they don't have people there and they’re struggling to open up to the idea that they can employ locals.

There's definitely the privileging of a certain set of countries. The Financial Times, for example – they’re more interested in countries where multinational corporations have major investments. Countries that have large diasporas in the West, they get a lot of attention. These countries are also often connected to the internet way more than others.

Changing the language

There are some people who use a lot of anecdotal evidence about coverage of African countries to say, “It's terrible, still.” I don't think it is. One of the most interesting pieces of research is by a guy called Toussaint Nothias at Stanford. He did a study where he interviewed a number of foreign correspondents, and he also did a research analysis of their writings on Africa. And he's found that journalists writing about Africa as the “dark continent” isn’t happening anymore.

For independent media, partnerships are key

We're mostly interested in getting ideas to people, and then that means that we have to rely on funding from foundations – we've got funding from a number of sources, including the Open Society Foundations, the Shuttleworth Foundation. I work for the New School [in New York], which is very supportive of Africa Is a Country. The New School actually provides a lot of the administration and the human resource part of the project.

I think the other part is to constantly form partnerships, because that takes the pressure off you. If we all work together, all these different independent media, and we make some links to the mainstream or those are deep pockets, I think that helps us survive.

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