Africa Is a Country

'Afropolitans'

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

'Afropolitans'

By
Sean Jacobs

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

Sovereignty or supremacy?

As far-right politics gain traction across the globe, some South Africans are embracing Trumpism not out of policy conviction but out of a deeper, more troubling identification.

From Cape To Cairo

When two Africans—one from the south, the other from the north—set out to cross the continent, they raised the question: how easy is it for an African to move in their own land?

The road to Rafah

The ‘Sumud’ convoy from Tunis to Gaza is reviving the radical promise of pan-African solidarity and reclaiming an anticolonial tactic lost to history.

Sinners and ancestors

Ryan Coogler’s latest film is more than a vampire fable—it’s a bridge between Black American history and African audiences hungry for connection, investment, and storytelling rooted in shared struggle.