Kente and the Politics of Being Read
On June 8, 2020, a group of Democratic lawmakers knelt on the floor of the United States Capitol for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the duration then believed to mark how long a Minneapolis officer had knelt on George Floyd’s neck, later revised at trial to nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Several of them wore […]
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, […]
All Roads Lead To Dakar Fashion Week
On Saturday, May 23, 2026, the road to Dakar Fashion Week officially began with the launch of the Guzangs Expérience in Dakar, the first event of the Road to Dakar Fashion Week and Guzangs’ first on-the-ground activation on the African continent. Conceived in celebration of Dakar Fashion Week’s 25-year legacy, the Guzangs Expérience set the […]
The Woman History Could Not Contain
More than a decade in the making, conceived by Ivor Ichikowitz and directed by the late Mandy Jacobson, a Netflix docuseries produced by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s granddaughters, Princess Swati Mandela-Dlamini and Princess Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway, returns her story to the family that knew her first.
After the Applause: Heritage Textiles and the Economics of the Runway Moment
Florentina Agu went back to the wood carving workshops she had visited as a child, and many of the artisans her family had once worked with were dead. The ones still alive were in difficult circumstances. Agu’s father had run a wood carving studio in Nigeria that produced parquet flooring and carved objects for sale […]
At BAKUS ORAYA, Cotton in Its Final State
BAKUS ORAYA is the kind of house that builds its identity by what it leaves out. Since founding the label, Abdoul Manane Bakary has approached fabric as origin rather than ornament, and Coton Brut, the collection he has been refining across multiple shows, has been the long case for that position. The final chapter, presented […]
Huguette Tchiapi’s Debut Begins in Yaoundé
Huguette Tchiapi is continuing an existing convergence, building a fashion brand that brings together the intricacies of her Cameroonian roots and the influence of her British identity. Like most emerging designers, she is deliberate about where her ideas come from. She speaks about influence less as something simply absorbed and more as something that can […]
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 […]
Nigerian Women Are Dressing Against the Code
Two decades ago, Y2K marked one of the most expressive moments in Nigerian fashion, shaped by the rise of internet culture and the influence of Nollywood. Visibility, then, felt intentional and confident rather than excessive. A version of that sensibility has returned, carried by a generation that dresses for how it wants to feel rather […]
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 […]