If in London next Friday. Press Statement from the Victoria and Albert Museum:

On 24 June the V&A presents Friday Late: Afropolitans, a free evening of music, workshops and performance celebrating African photography, fashion, and style. The evening will host the first UK show by South African house musician Spoek Mathambo and band. Mathambo will perform a live set of his own brand of ‘Township Tech’ in the V&A’s John Madejski Garden.

Friday Late: Afropolitans will take its cue from the current V&A exhibition Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography. It will explore how Africans living across the world view themselves and their visual culture.

Visitors can enjoy photographs and video projections by South African photographer Chris Saunders and soak up the atmosphere in a north African-style salon especially created by Morroccan designer Hassan Hajjaj. Ghanaian photographer Sal Idriss will have a Malick Sidibé-esque photographic studio where visitors can have their portraits taken and textile designer Emamoke Ukeleghe will run a workshop to design Dutch wax print inspired scarves to take away.

Further highlights include a guided tour through the display of David Goldblatt photographs Lifetimes: Under Apartheid, a special installation of contemporary African fashion by Minna Salami of MsAfropolitan blog with stylist Ola Shobowale as creative director; and an interactive installation by South African designers Heidi Chisholm and Sharon Lombard. There will also be panel discussions, film screenings and contemporary African house and electro music courtesy of DJ Vamanos from London’s Secousse Sound System.

Further Reading

Slow death by food

Illegal gold mining is poisoning Ghana’s soil and rivers, seeping into its crops and seafood, and turning the national food system into a long-term public health crisis.

A sick health system

The suspension of three doctors following the death of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s son has renewed scrutiny of a health-care system plagued by impunity, underfunding, and a mass exodus of medical professionals.

Afrobeats after Fela

Wizkid’s dispute with Seun Kuti and the release of his latest EP with Asake highlight the widening gap between Afrobeats’ commercial triumph and Fela Kuti’s political inheritance

Progress is exhausting

Pedro Pinho’s latest film follows a Portuguese engineer in Guinea-Bissau, exposing how empire survives through bureaucracy, intimacy, and the language of “development.”

The rubble of empire

Built by Italian Fascists in 1928, Mogadishu Cathedral was meant to symbolize “peaceful conquest.” Today its ruins force Somalis to confront the uneasy afterlife of colonial power and religious authority.

Atayese

Honored in Yorubaland as “one who repairs the world,” Jesse Jackson’s life bridged civil rights, pan-Africanism, empire, and contradiction—leaving behind a legacy as expansive as it was imperfect.

Bread or Messi?

Angola’s golden jubilee culminated in a multimillion-dollar match against Argentina. The price tag—and the secrecy around it—divided a nation already grappling with inequality.