The AIAC Podcast

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 well as Indira Govender, a medical doctor and public health medicine specialist based at the Africa Health Research Institute, Somkhele campus, in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Indira is currently working on projects related to TB infection prevention and control for The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and joins us to discuss COVID-quackery and denialism.

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 resurgent COVID-19 cases, the government is closing beaches in at least two provinces and placing a 11pm to 4am curfew.)

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 the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Ethiopia In Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production,1964–2016 (Brill, 2019) among other published works.

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 towns beyond the city, with Bolivian or Paraguayan blood, perhaps with Indian blood.” Maradona has turned that insult on its head. The late Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, once described Maradona as “… a short-legged bull, [who] carries the ball sewn to his foot and he’s got eyes all over his body.” Today, December 1, we will dedicate our program to the G.O.A.T, the greatest of all time. We plan to discuss his football legacy, talk about him as a leftwing figure and revisit the cottage industry debate about who is, indeed, the G.O.A.T.

For today's show we are joined by Colombian multimedia journalist, writer, translator and author, Pablo Medina Uribe. Pablo has covered politics, sports, culture and their intersections, and has published in Spanish, English and Italian. His work has featured in Al Jazeera, Sports Illustrated, Fusion, Roads & Kingdoms, Africa is a Country, Latino Rebels, Play Too Much, Deutsche-Welle’s Generation Change Podcast, La Silla Vacía, Señal Colombia and L’Undici to name but a few.

Later in the show we are joined by Tony Karon, who teaches on the politics of global soccer in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School in New York. He is editorial lead at AJ Plus and before that spent 15 years at TIME magazine, where he was a senior editor.

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 think hip hop support for Trump is particularly astute, I also do not find it so surprising. If getting paid is the aim, then capitalism is the game, and that by its nature will lead to all kinds of relationships to power. Second, it is a call for interrogating what really are our visions of liberation. If, as the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, capitalism requires inequality, racism enshrines it, then can we really financially plan our way to freedom? Can we all be billionaires? And should that even be our goal? Simply put, can we get rid of racism if we don’t also get rid of capitalism?"

Su’ad is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, a scholar-artist-activist whose work examines the intersections of race, religion and popular culture. She is the author of “Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States” and has a deep commitment to public scholarship. She is also Senior Editor at Sapelo Square, an online forum that celebrates and analyzes the experiences of Black Muslims in the United States, creating a space in which to reflect on the vitality of Black Muslim Life and the long tradition of Islam in Black America.

Su'ad is joined by Tseliso Monaheng and Warrick Moses. Tseliso, a longtime contributor to the site whose writing has appeared in print and online in Chimurenga, The Guardian, The Fader, Red Bull and Rolling Stone as well as New Frame, joins us from South Africa to give some perspective from the continent.

Warrick Moses received his PhD in African and African American Studies with a secondary field in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University in May 2019. His dissertation project, "In the Mix," explores expressions of “mixed race” or “coloured” socio-political, linguistic, and cultural identity in Cape Town-based hip hop music. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the CIPHER Hip Hop Interpellation project at University College Cork, Ireland.

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 Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times not so long ago, “Everything we’ve seen in the last four years—the nativism, the racism, the corruption, the wanton exploitation of the weak and unconcealed contempt for the vulnerable—is as much a part of the American story as our highest ideals and aspirations.” No group of people know the nature of America as this paradox of lofty dreams and failed state—open to all but selectively so—more than the people who desperately try to get in, and who in turn, America desperately tries to keep out.

Joining us on this week’s episode of AIAC Talk to speak about African migration to the United States are Abraham T. Zere and Aya Saed. Abraham is a US-based Eritrean exiled writer/journalist and Aya a Bertha Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights challenging unlawful detentions, counterterrorism practices, the criminalization of dissent, and systemic unlawful policing practice.

Why are Africans treated as the biggest threat, and not only in Europe where their dangerous journeys for a better life are much profiled, but in America as well, where little is spoken about them at all?

How has Trump’s presidency emboldened entities in border control and immigration enforcement like ICE so much so that they’ve become a logic unto themselves? Who else is empowering them? How has their evolution been enabled by successive US presidents, and why are they so hard to reign in?

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 extrajudicial killings, starting to mirror the thugs and gangs they were supposedly meant to be targeting, but instead being fond of brutalizing Nigeria’s urban youth.

Although Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari disbanded SARS on October 11, the demonstrations have persisted and have come to represent more than simply opposition to police violence, but a deep frustration with the status quo and the political class defending it. Driven by Nigeria’s youth, the protests are a seminal moment for discrediting widespread stereotypes that they are lazy and complacent, and reflect the disillusionment of young people globally who see the post-Cold War political-economic settlement as delivering nothing but inequality, joblessness, climate catastrophe and downright misery. They want something better.

Joining us to discuss these demonstrations and where they’re next headed are Sa’eed Husaini and Annie Olaloku-Teriba. Sa’eed is a political scientist based in Lagos and contributing editor to Africa Is a Country, and has previously appeared on AIAC Talk to discuss Nigerian politics, where he touched on some of the mobilizations which have preceded this moment such as Occupy Nigeria in 2012, the Take It Back Movement of 2018, as well as the #RevolutionNow movement started in 2019. How do these protests movements inform what we are seeing today? Considering that the #RevolutionNow campaign had protests as recently as August and is co-ordinated by a party platform, the Coalition for Revolution (CORE), how does its existence and efforts compare with the rapid growth of #EndSARS, which for now steadfastly remains a decentralized movement?

Annie is a British-Nigerian independent researcher based in London, working on legacies of empire and the complex histories of race. On a recent op-ed for Al Jazeera, Annie wrote that “The movement is being supported financially not only by the large diaspora and Nigeria’s biggest stars, but also by foreign celebrities, such as American rapper Noname.” Adding to this list are Cardi B, Rihanna, Drake, Trey Songz, Kanye West, Lewis Hamilton as well as football stars like Marcus Rashford, Odion Ighalo and Mesut Ozil. How do we make sense of this level of global attention, rare for protests happening in Africa? Does this express a newfound global consciousness around issues of police violence on the heels of #BlackLivesMatter international, or does their susceptibility to celebrity and corporate attention also make them easy to co-opt?

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 mostly teach works by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and J.M. Coetzee. The majority of writers that make the cut are from Nigeria and South Africa. In short, only a few canonical texts continue to dominate curricula.

Join us as we speak with Bhakti Shringapure and Lily Saint to discuss their findings.

Later in the program, they will be joined by Mukoma wa Ngugi, himself a novelist (author of six books) and Associate Professor at the newly renamed department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.

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, political scientist Christopher McMichael, from South Africa, will speak on the spread of right-wing ideas, conspiracy theories, and political movements on the continent, especially in South Africa where there is a significant white minority.

For more visit: http://africasacountry.com