Designer Moctar Ba transforms discarded materials into premium accessories while proving sustainability can drive African luxury In his Dakar workshop, Moctar Ba holds up a vibrant advertising banner that once promoted a telecom company across Senegal’s capital. Within weeks, it will become a €250 backpack sold to customers in Paris and Brussels. This transformation from […]
In a world seduced by speed, surface, and spectacle, Data Oruwari moves like an ancestral drumbeat — steady, sacred, and impossible to ignore. Known as The Ancestors’ Scribe, she is not merely a visual artist, but a sound alchemist, a spiritual technologist, and a living archive of African ancestral cosmology. Through glyphs etched in ink […]
ENTER THE COMMUNITY GIVEAWAY You’re reading one of our reader favorites. Guzangs is built around the voices, stories, and creative perspectives of our community. If you’d like to be considered for a feature, introduce yourself below. Expand to enter for a chance to be featured on Guzangs via the form below. Loading… Loading… Part I […]
When we first sat with Ibrahima Gueye in August 2024, Bledard stood as a declaration—a brand born from memory, migration, and the radical act of reclaiming language. It was young, self-aware, audacious. A name that once stung with stereotype was reappropriated and worn with pride, transforming into a banner for a new generation of African […]
In the liminal spaces between displacement and defiance, between Addis Ababa and Mogadishu, between woman and warrior stands Hibo Elmi, the artist known as DJ Hibotep. She is not merely a DJ, nor a filmmaker, nor a cultural force. She is an alkemist. One who melts borders. One who distills pain, memory, and ancestral rhythm […]
In Ouakam, a seaside neighborhood in Dakar where the Atlantic wind carries stories from centuries past, a quiet revolution is unfolding. Not in protests or politics—but in fabric, form, and rhythm. Tucked into a side street, far from the chaos of car horns and vendors, sits a boutique with no neon signs, no loud displays—just […]
A Letter From Tounes is part of NOT A FAD, a long-term initiative from Fashion. Art. Development. (FAD) — a platform founded in 2020 to honor heritage not as something fixed or nostalgic, but as a living practice. Through design, artisan partnerships, and storytelling, FAD connects ancestral craft with contemporary aesthetics to reclaim narratives across […]
Some artists paint what they see. Modou Gueye paints what stays with him. Born in 1990 in Pikine, Senegal, and now living between Dakar and Barcelona, Gueye creates from a place where memory meets ritual, and where the ordinary is reborn as sacred. His work doesn’t seek to explain, it seeks to remember. Not with […]
Naëtt Mbaye isn’t interested in categories. Not in art, not in identity, and definitely not in career paths. She’s worked as a producer for Chanel, styled shoots at WAD Magazine, and shot analog portraits that feel more like memory than documentation. She’s also acted, written scripts, and quietly made her mark as one of […]
He did not grow up with skincare. What he knew of skin was shaped by routine—dust washed off with water, dryness soothed with whatever lotion was available, often borrowed from his sister or left behind by an aunt. Skincare, in the way it is spoken of now, was a language he was never taught. […]