AFRICA IS A COUNTRY

Africa is a country (http://africasacountry.com/) is a collaborative blog which aim is to provide a critical approach to representations of Africa in the Western media by using humorous materials to engage people. A different initiative to combine both amusement and social activism started by the journalist and professor Sean Jacobs. Together with professor Jacobs, other seven conspirators, coming from the field of media academy and communication advocacy, work to continue successfully holding this project. The goal of this online platform is to use humour as a potential tool to promote deeper reflections about what kind of values and images are being transmitted by occidental media when talking about Africa. So, we are in front of an ambitious and original way of fighting for a more democratic society, in which several professionals with really interesting backgrounds are involved. 

Africaisacountry´s offered materials are structured around the homepage of this portal; what easier focuses the Internet user attention. Most of the times, the nature of this contents is an hybrid between audiovisual material – pictures and videos – and descriptive writings in English. Information provided by this texts is conceived as an interactive text in which refereed documentation is available for users just by clicking on the links. Different post are organized in categories such as music, television or art; however, we can also find uncategorized materials, as it is the case for varied news. At this point, I´d like to highlight that the pretension of this kind of news is bringing to the public sphere those informations without a concrete commercial interest for global media conglomerates. Those constantly forgotten informations in Eastern newspapers, televisions and radios because of they seem not to take part in what is established as                  “ occidental public affairs”. 

Finally, it is also interesting their effort to cover subjects from different areas of interest. Both stereotypes and simplifications can be present – as they try to show- in music groups, TV series or news discourses. For instance, on this occasion they have dedicated some space on the blog to criticize the South African music group Die Antwood because they consider that: “in videos they use clothes, gold teeth, spliffs and gangsta gesticulations to convey pretty superficial stereotypes about blackness that already over saturate global popular culture” ( Lily Saint, Guest Blogger). The possibility of freely writing a comment about this and the rest of the published entries is given to anyone surfing the net.