Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi (right) and Rwanda President Paul Kagame, both wearing military fatigue, are seen on September 24, 2021 in Pemba, Cabo Delgado province, Mozambique, during a visit to the Rwandan and Mozambican soldiers deployed there.
Journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans
What you need to know:
The entire Sahel and large parts of West Africa, including Nigeria, is nearly broken by extremist violence.
Economies are failing at alarming rates, and droves of young Africans continue to make a desperate dash to the Gulf and Europe and enduring a hellish life.
In an interview with OkayAfrica on the re-release of his groundbreaking film Sankofa, Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima launched an extraordinary broadside against crooked African politicians and some of the elite. Haile, who has lived in exile in the US for decades, tells an excruciating and dispiriting story about the struggles of making serious African cinema. He is quite angry, and rightly so, about the state of affairs in Africa today.
“Africans have lost their minds,” he told OkayAfrica. “They have lost their historical context. They do not understand the resistance history of our own people; even when they were peasants and ordinary village people, they made history. And here we are, with all the airplanes we fly from place to place, with all the weapons we have to kill each other, we are still a continent of industry for weaponry, for destruction, guns and killing. We are the industry of disease. We are the industry of displacement and dehumanisation, of human relationship.”
