During the 2008 US presidential election, a rumor spread that VP candidate Sarah Palin believed Africa was a country. (Some say spread by McCain aides.) Whether true or false, red or blue, it’s disheartening to realize there are adults who don’t know the difference between a continent and a country let alone the variety of cultures that exist throughout Africa. If you want to understand how ___ (fill in the blank with politics, art, literature, TV, football) is evolving in Africa, read Africasacountry.com, a smart site with a disputatious, pointedly erroneous name. Founded by The New School’s political science professor Sean Jacobs (a native of South Africa), it’s “a media blog that is not about famine, Bono, or Barack Obama.”
Jacobs has a good eye for editorial. When the “father of African literature” Chinua Achebe died last week, Africa is a Country published a poignant article written by Mukoma Wa Ngugi (also a novelist, now teaching at Cornell, a regular contributor to the site), whose own father–the writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o–was sometimes mistaken for Achebe. Ngugi wrote that Achebe never accepted the title “father of African literature” that so many are now bestowing on him. He strongly resisted the title because “it’s risky for anyone to lay claim to something as huge and important as African literature.”
