Davido’s jacket
Davido’s appearance at 'Amapiano’s biggest concert' turned a night of celebration into a study in Afrophobia, fandom, and the fragile borders of South African cultural nationalism.
Culture
Empty riddles
Drawing on his forced migration from Rwanda, Serge Alain Nitegeka reflects on the forms, fragments, and unsettled histories behind his latest exhibition in Johannesburg.
Heritage on horseback
A photo essay on Nigeria’s Durbars and the power of royal pageantry.
How much does a Nigerian intellectual cost?
The country that once produced some of Africa’s fiercest moral voices now struggles to sustain independent thought.
The sound of what remains
Jean Maxime Baptiste’s latest film listens to how grief and history reverberate across generations in French Guiana.
Who cares about African heritage?
While the world debates restitution, Africa’s own heritage institutions are collapsing. The question is no longer who took our past, but who is keeping it alive.
The mirror and becoming
In Najaax Harun’s paintings, the self confronts its own reflection—haunted, tender, and unafraid to transform.
Filming what survives
Made just as Sudan descended into war, 'Khartoum' captures the beauty, pain, and humanity of a city shaken by violence—and the filmmakers who became refugees alongside their subjects.
Global Africa for whom?
Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.
The architecture of power
Inside the crumbling walls of Nigeria's Old Secretariat, echoes of colonial governance and national awakening meet the silence of decay.
An island nation, everywhere
When Cabo Verde qualified for the World Cup, celebrations erupted from Praia to Rotterdam. The Blue Sharks’ rise shows how a scattered people built a global team rooted in home.
Leapfrogging literacy?
In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.
Entries, exits, permits
A reflection on traveling through the globalized walled city.
Reading List: Brooks Marmon
The writings of Edson Sithole, Zimbabwe’s forgotten nationalist thinker, reveal both the promise and perils of pan-African politics in the independence era.
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.
Making space for the ordinary
MADEYOULOOK’s 'Dinokana' debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Now back home, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho reflect on sound, place, and why their work is always meant for South African audiences first.
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.
Rethinking the boundaries of blackness
South Africa’s visual culture reveals that its racial categories were never fixed, while the history of indenture complicates the terms of solidarity and exclusion.
Reading List: Olufemi Terry
What does it mean to imagine a city with no fixed essence, only shifting histories and unstable forms of power?