Africa Is a Country

Tell ’em to skate

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Tell ’em to skate

By
Sonja Sugira

The first, and only, half-pipe in East Africa, built entirely by the youth from the Kampala suburb of Kitintale.

Images: Yann Gross.

The Uganda Skateboard Union has (deservedly) been getting a lot of love lately. They’ve been featured in the UK Independent, GOOD, and now in the current issue of Guernica. Much of that has been facilitated by Swiss photographer Yann Gross, who has also documented the skateboarders. He had initially gone to Kampala to visit a girlfriend.

When I first saw the skate park, I couldn’t believe it… the first and only East African half pipe was located in the middle of nowhere: a field with some goats running around.

I decided to stay a few months in the suburb and every day I went to skate at the park. The kids were still learning how to ride on the board, so I was able to teach them some tricks. Then, we organized a contest in order to promote skateboarding in Uganda, since nobody knew about the game. We visited the local newspapers and TV channels and even invited the National Council of Sports Assistant.

By all accounts, this is the first, and only, half-pipe in East Africa, built entirely by the youth from the Kampala suburb of Kitintale. Now, with some assistance from Birdhouse Skateboards and the Tony Hawk Foundation—who are both sponsoring the park on an ongoing basis—they’ll be skating for a while. Needless to say, I like this.

And I love the photos. For more, you can read their blog here (highly recommended for some great action shots), visit their website here, and see more pictures on Gross’ site here.

Sorry, I’ve had Gyptian’s “Hold Yuh (the remix featuring Nicki Minaj) in my head for a couple of weeks now.

Further Reading

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.