WORN OUT — Part III: Return to Sender
How African Designers Are Reclaiming Waste and Rewriting Fashion’s Future The bales arrive as they always have — compressed, labeled, shipped across oceans like cargo without conscience. They still overwhelm ports and markets, a visible symptom of a system that hasn’t stopped. But something has shifted in how they’re received. Across Accra, Cairo, Dakar, workshops […]
WORN OUT — Part II: How African Governments Are Responding to the Textile Waste Crisis
Western wardrobes don’t end in Europe or North America. They spill quietly, devastatingly onto African soil, packed into shipping containers and sold in open-air markets under the guise of “donations.” But from Accra to Kigali, Dakar to Lusaka, something is shifting. The bales keep arriving. The markets keep choking. But across the continent, a patchwork […]
Legacy African Fashion Houses That Defined the Continent’s Style Future
Fashion across the continent has always been rooted in craftsmanship, talent, and boundless creativity—and nowhere is that more evident than in the pioneering legacy houses that rose to prominence from the 1980s onward. These houses wove an African narrative that resisted reductive stereotypes and demanded global recognition for its innovation and cultural depth. Their ateliers […]
WORN OUT: The True Cost of Your Donated Clothes
Part I — The History of a Heap Kantamanto doesn’t sleep. It breathes, wheezes, and heaves under the weight of foreign fabrics. Bales arrive daily—tightly bound, often soaked in chemical stench or rainwater from cargo ships—marked “donation” in faded marker. They are not gifts. They are transactions. They are waste. And they are profitable for […]
WORN OUT: A Series on Africa and Secondhand Clothing
A three-part Guzangs series on the secondhand clothing trade and the African economies absorbing it. An estimated 15 million used garments enter Ghana every week, most of them shipped from the UK, the US, and China, and a global secondhand trade now worth more than five billion dollars a year treats the continent as its […]
From Artifact to Agency: Inside The Met’s New Chapter for African Art
On May 31, 2025, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) reopened its Arts of Africa galleries with a celebration that felt less like a formal unveiling and more like a long-awaited homecoming. The newly redesigned space, part of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, brought together artists, curators, collectors, and cultural leaders from across […]
Women’s Day Through Their Eyes: African Image Makers, 1950s–1980s
From the 1950s to the 1980s, as Africa waged its fight for independence and self-definition, a quiet revolution unfolded—one captured through the eyes of African women behind the lens. Defying colonial legacies and patriarchal gatekeeping, they reclaimed photography and film as instruments of power. Thérèse Sita-Bella, Felicia Ewurasi Abban, Safi Faye, Awa Tounkara, Ifeoma […]