On our annual publishing break, we ask: if the opposite of “weird” is normal, what if normal is equally problematic?
A performer descends during the 2024 Summer Olympics closing ceremony. Credit David Goldman for AP Photo.
In the 2024 US presidential race, “weird” has become the Democratic party’s go-to adjective to disparage the policies and worldview of their opponents, the Republicans. It was Minnesota governor-turned-VP-pick Tom Walz who first summoned the term to describe GOP candidate Donald Trump and his VP pick JD Vance. “These are weird people on the other side, they want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room, that’s what it comes down to,” Walz declared. “Don’t get sugarcoating this, these are weird ideas.”
But setting aside the peculiarities of the American right, who can sincerely survey the world today and conclude that it is anything but weird? With no signs of a ceasefire in sight, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed more than 40,000, with more than half of the dead estimated to be women and children. At a rally in Michigan, pro-Palestine demonstrators tried to disrupt Democrat nominee Kamala Harris’ speech with chanting, to which she sharply replied, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” What’s weirder than a cool and indifferent response to a group of people drawing attention to what future textbooks will surely remember as one of the twenty-first century’s greatest horrors?
Any person you talk to today will confidently tell you something to the effect of: the world has gone upside-down, it’s topsy turvy, it’s mad. And yet, no one means the same thing when they say that. The rioters in England and Northern Ireland probably felt their crusade to “take [our] country back” fell on the side of sensible. Those denigrating Imane Khelif cast her as biologically strange and unfit for Olympic competition. In South Africa, the entry of a South African with mixed parentage into a beauty contest set off a nationwide moral panic, resulting in the contestant’s ultimate withdrawal. In other words, where we’re at politically is that whatever common normative frameworks that once anchored public life have irrevocably broken down.
It’s questionable whether they were even there to begin with. Certainly, the West has been exposed for how all its talk of a “rules-based international order,” belies a policy of “rules for thee but not for me (and my friends).” If the moral and political legitimacy of Western powers is eroding, does that mean we should cast our lot somewhere else? In some corners of the internet, there does seem to be enthusiasm for the consolidation of an anti-Western bloc supposedly led by Russia, China, and Iran. As AIAC contributor Zachary Mampilly recently wrote in The Drift:
Juntas in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso have withdrawn from West Africa’s primary economic bloc, framing the decision in a joint statement as a rejection of “the influence of foreign powers” in “the spirit of pan-Africanism.” Whether this is the pan-Africanism of Thomas Sankara, the anti-imperialist former president of Burkina Faso whose memory is regularly invoked by coup leaders, remains to be seen. In general, the vision of a unified Africa has been distorted over time, as enfeebled national leaders continue to espouse notions of continental unity while largely capitulating to desires for foreign capital. Today, African populations are forced to accept the consequences of foreign powers’ race for resources on their continent, and suffer displacement, violence, and the effects of climate change.
At Africa Is a Country, we have been less interested in what rulers think we should do to confront the challenges of our historical moment and more in what the ruled are doing. We have been particularly focused on the unprecedented social mobilizations in Kenya. Thanks to our East Africa regional editor, Wangui Kimari, we have benefitted from insightful pieces detailing not only the significance of the protests but grappling with their long-brewing structural causes (and after joining us as a Nairobi-based contributing editor, Onesmus Karanja has produced striking video commentary giving us direct access to the lives and worlds of ordinary Kenyans). While the continent grapples with its legacy of French colonialism, our Francophone regional editor, Shamira Ibrhaim, has directed our attention to long-ignored discontent in places like Martinique and Cameroon. The #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria protests have their origins in the disastrous social and economic policies of Bola Tinubu in particular and the Nigerian elite in general, and Sa’eed Husaini has brought in an excellent roster of writers historicizing the widespread disaffection before it finally exploded.
From Algiers, football journalist Maher Mezahi has kept us abreast of the latest in continental sport through the “African Five-A-Side” podcast, creating original video content, as well as crafting timely essays—his latest on the Olympics is worth keeping in mind as the global spectacle reaches its business end. From South Africa, Khanya Mtshali has continued to write stellar pieces of cultural criticism in a year when South Africa marked thirty years of democracy and held an election that shook the fundamentals of its self-concept. Through his excellent profiles of African filmmakers (alongside his regular film criticism), Tsogo Kupa has given us a window into how our predecessors faced the dilemmas of the postcolonial condition. In many senses, it’s a case of “nothing new under the sun.”
This is an indictment on us all. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Today’s social dislocations arise in part because we have still not found answers to the basic demands of our human consciousness: how to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and love the stranger. This rudimentary concept of social solidarity is becoming increasingly unintelligible. The global right feeds off of the corresponding despair this produces, doubling down on an ethic of “every person for themselves.”
On our annual publishing break, we want to seriously consider what it would take to undermine this script. Today’s political economy of knowledge is modeled on the reproduction of the idea that things can’t really change, and the future will merely be a slightly modified version of the present. Fredric Jameson once remarked, leading Mark Fisher to coin the term “capitalist realism”––“it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Now, it is easier to imagine the end of the world and the end of capitalism. It is much harder to imagine anything else.
But that hasn’t stopped the thousands in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Sudan, and Palestine from demanding something different. If we have any role to play at Africa Is a Country, it’s to help sharpen our ability to imagine different, to imagine better. This is what the opposite of “weird” should be—because if normal is shorthand for the “status quo,” it is just as problematic and just as weird.
