arts-culture-media

Culture

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Armed with October

From Sudan to Toronto, a revolutionary poem echoes across time, showing how people’s movements confront militarism, mining, and imperial order with the enduring force of collective struggle.

The sound of revolt

On his third album, Afro-Portuguese artist Scúru Fitchádu fuses ancestral wisdom with urban revolt, turning memory and militancy into a soundtrack for resistance.

O som da revolta

No seu terceiro álbum, o artista afro-português Scúru Fitchádu funde a sabedoria ancestral com a revolta urbana, transformando memória e militância em uma trilha sonora para a resistência.

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.

What do we want?

In her latest novel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie examines the contradictions of women’s desires, while leaving her own narrative blind spots exposed.

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.

Enemies of progress

Delayed, underfunded, and undermined, this year’s Women’s Africa Cup of Nations has exposed not just neglect but active sabotage from CAF and national federations.