The Back of the Field
Across Buea, Lagos, Nairobi and Cairo, a running boom is exposing the hidden economics of belonging. Who pays to keep a community free, who profits when it grows, and why not one of six global brands would say what any of it is worth.
The Machine Has Started Shopping
A hotel in Dakar can lose a booking before anyone at the property knows a traveller is coming. The traveller asks an AI assistant for four nights near the water, under $250 a night, with breakfast and a cancellation policy forgiving enough to survive a changed flight. She does not compare twenty tabs, study three […]
The Game Is Already There
This conversation was recorded in mid-June, as the group stage of the World Cup was opening. Anita Asante remembers the game before it became a career. She was eleven or twelve, back in Ghana on a family visit, playing barefoot with her cousins on whatever ground was nearest, a patch of grass, a stretch of […]
The Money Is the Wrong Shape
The year Beyoncé wore her clothes, Sarah Diouf was still, in effect, her own bank. Building the label meant buying fabric before the money came back and paying tailors before the invoices settled, then finding cash for the samples, the shoots, the customs paperwork and the long quiet months between one burst of global attention […]
The Index Is the Institution
Ask a machine where to find African design and it will answer without hesitation. It returns names, a few studios, an archive or two, a marketplace. The answer arrives as though it were a window onto everything that exists. It is closer to a door that someone else hung, opening onto the rooms they chose […]
A Goalkeeper Went Viral. It Took a Congressman to Get His Mother to the Game
Last Monday, in the first World Cup match in Cape Verde’s history, a forty-year-old goalkeeper named Josimar Dias, known to everyone as Vozinha, faced a Spain side that produced twenty-seven attempts and still left Atlanta without a goal. Seven of those efforts forced saves, and the reigning European champions, widely expected to brush aside an […]
Puma Brought the Continent to Downtown LA. The Postcards Were the Tell
A week before the 2026 World Cup, Puma turned its Salehe Bembury launch in downtown LA into a study in designing an African football moment for the diaspora — and the postcards, not the product, told the real story.
The Machine Can See You. It Still Can’t Pay You.
Somewhere in a court-approved spreadsheet, nearly half a million books have become line items. Whatever a book once was in the making of it, the years of revision and abandonment and recovery before it ever reached a reader, it now exists in that file as an eligible work with a claim status, a payout estimate, […]
What Roland-Garros Inherited from Central Africa
Whenever I tell people I was born and raised in Cameroon, the first thing they bring up is the football. The Indomitable Lions. Roger Milla dancing at the corner flag in 1990. Samuel Eto’o at Barcelona, scoring goals against teams whose names we learned to pronounce just for him. The 1990 World Cup quarter-final against […]
Architecture Learns to Play
A tennis court is already a diagram, with its rectangle and net and service boxes laid out in white before anyone arrives, and Backyard Community Club, the new tennis facility that DeRoche Projects has just completed in the dense Accra neighbourhood of Osu, takes that familiar diagram and complicates it in ways that turn out […]