How DJs Helped Take Afrobeats Global
Trill Xoe, a Lagos-raised DJ and producer who studied in Mauritius and has worked with Native Records, remembers hearing Afrobeats there, thousands of miles from home. Hearing the sound playing loudly from a DJ set felt like more than a surprise. “Just being in a foreign man’s land where they don’t speak English, and just […]
What the BBC’s Documentary Left Out About the Nigerian Civil War
On 1 June 2026, the BBC released a documentary on the Nigerian civil war titled Surviving Biafra: Voices from the Nigerian Civil War, an exploration of the 30-month war fought from July 1967 to January 1970, following the declaration of independence by the secessionist state of Biafra in the eastern part of Nigeria. This secession […]
Adirẹ and the Wrapper-Wearers
My relationship to adirẹ is perhaps an unusual one; it begins not with indigo, but with cassava. In 2024, I returned to Nigeria for a two-month residency with the G.A.S. Foundation to study cassava’s role and cultural significance in the country. It was the longest I had spent in the country since leaving at five […]
How Lagos Moves
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 […]
Six Days on the Zambezi: A Traveller’s Guide to Kuomboka
There is a version of Kuomboka that lives in photographs: a black and white Nalikwanda gliding across a flooded plain, hundreds of paddlers moving as one, red uniforms catching the light. It is genuinely a spectacular image, and it is also, in a real sense, only the final hour of a six-day event that most […]
The New Stewards of El Fenn
It requires remarkable restraint to be uncharmed by El Fenn. Hidden behind rosy, sun-drenched walls inside the centuries-old medina, the hotel has long existed as one of Marrakech’s defining creative addresses, where the cedar doors and tadelakt walls feel less like a hotel than a private home opened to the world. From the rooftop, the […]
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 […]
Why Artists Keep Returning to Grand-Popo
When Joshua Gbengene visited Grand-Popo for the third time in December 2025, he was simply keeping a distance from work. After months of working nonstop on a series of creative projects, including a pop-up and an installation, the multidisciplinary artist travelled to the coastal town in search of somewhere quiet enough to slow down, clear […]
If This Then That: Sculpture — John Chamberlain → Gonçalo Mabunda
If you understand why John Chamberlain’s crushed cars matter, you’ll recognize what Gonçalo Mabunda built from the weapons of a war. IF YOU LIKE JOHN CHAMBERLAIN John Chamberlain transformed crushed automobiles into sculpture, showing that industrial scrap could carry the same expressive force as bronze or marble. Rather than erase the material’s past, he preserved […]
How Nigeria Was Everywhere and Nowhere at the World Cup
Where the 2026 World Cup rank in recent history is discourse for another time, there’s no doubt that it has uniquely taken its place as a cultural tentpole. A reason for this? The host nations, particularly the United States, which, months before the tournament kicked off, was speculatively doomed because of anti-immigration sentiments, ICE crackdowns, […]