Africa Is a Country

Germany has a version of GQ magazine

Germany has a version of GQ magazine

By
Elliot Ross

A woman in Germany removes her clothes and poses for a magazine photographer with her famous boyfriend. Her boyfriend’s father happens to be Tunisian and the pictures are reprinted in Tunisia. Three journalists are arrested in Tunis and charged with “violating public morals by publishing a nude photograph.” It would be fair to say that in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, nudity provokes a wide-range of responses. The boyfriend in this story happens to be Real Madrid’s German midfielder Sami Khedira, and the girlfriend is Lena Gercke, a model.

Presumably, it’s not the photograph of the goateed Khedira loafing around shirtless on a sofa in tight white pants (below) that has caused the stramash, but the one, above, from the cover of German GQ in which Gercke is wearing nothing at all while Khedira, standing behind her in a natty tux, has helpfully deployed what can only be described as a one-armed hand-bra.


My initial hope was that the Tunisian police were simply expressing their dismay at the old fully-clothed-man-with-stark-naked-woman magazine-cover cliché, and might demand that in future shoots Khedira should show off even more of his sculpted chest. Sadly it seems their beef was with Gercke’s nakedity alone, and they don’t see that the hand-bra makes any difference.

Further Reading

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Coming home

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Imaginary homelands

A new biography of former apartheid homeland leader Lucas Mangope struggles to do more than arrange the actions of its subject into a neat chronology.

Business as usual?

This month, Algeria quietly held its second election since Abdelaziz Bouteflika was ousted in 2019. On the podcast, we ask what Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s second term means for the country.

The complexities of solidarity

Assassinated in 1978, Henri Curiel was a Jewish Egyptian Marxist whose likely killers include fascist French-Algerian colons, the apartheid South African Bureau of State Security, and the Abu Nidal Organization.