How Lusaka Moves

Commuters at a covered bus stop on a street in Lusaka.

There is a particular way Lusaka reveals itself. You can spend an entire afternoon convinced there is nowhere to go, only to find yourself scattered around town because the errands dragged you to new places. For years, Lusaka has been described as a city of work and little play. In administration, politics, and commerce, it […]

How Lagos Moves

Ugonna-Ora Owoh in a red jacket and red wide-leg trousers on a Lagos kerb, a passer-by blurred in the foreground

There are two words I’ve long used to describe Lagos: beautiful chaos. They may read like an oxymoron, but they are the closest thing the city has to a definition. To understand Lagos, you must first allow that contradiction to settle in your mind. Only then does the city begin to reveal itself, not as […]

How Dakar Moves

A woman reclining in a painted wooden fishing pirogue on the Dakar coast, sea cliffs behind her

The Ancien Palais de Justice has no business being as beautiful as it is. It is an abandoned colonial courthouse out on Cap Manuel, the sea right behind it, the concrete going soft at the corners, the kind of building the city has been meaning to deal with for as long as I have been […]

The Image Belongs to Us

Sope Dirisu as Folarin walks a red dirt road holding hands with his two sons in My Father's Shadow, directed by Akinola Davies Jr

There’s a moment early in My Father’s Shadow where Lagos doesn’t announce itself. It just… is. A street. The quality of afternoon light on a wall you’ve definitely seen before. Children doing the specific nothing that children do in cities that haven’t been built for spectacle. I was in Cannes when I first saw it […]

A Memory of Walls

Upward view of a massive concrete cantilevered overhang supported by columns at the University of Lagos, with vertical fins and a palm frond visible against the sky.

A Memory of Walls Uche Ibemere photographs the brutalist soul of the University of Lagos   The University of Lagos was not built to be beautiful. It was built to be permanent, a concrete declaration that independence would have institutions to match its ambitions. Constructed between the 1960s and 1980s, the campus is one of […]