Can a Piece of Clothing Bring You Home?
For Kimanzi, a Kenyan living in Riverside, California, home fits inside a scarf. When she left Kenya for the United States at 17, she had only two suitcases and a carry-on. Every item she packed meant another had to be left behind. Among the things she refused to leave was a kitenge scarf that had […]
Echoes of Pain
Echoes of Pain is a series of portraits about migration and the grief that travels with it. Made in a forest in Switzerland, it places children among the trees, weary and watchful, unsure of the way out, as a picture of the state Mike Kure calls being physically present but emotionally suspended. Kure began the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Who Gets to Write the Future of Fashion?
The mopani worm is one of Southern Africa’s most familiar delicacies. It is also, at the end of this month in Cape Town, the name attached to a silk, one of a slate of materials asking whether the continent’s next fibre industry is already here: in its rivers, farmlands and forests, in leathers tanned from […]
The Burden of Silence: Why African Men Struggle to Talk About Mental Health
Femi*, a tech analyst based in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, says he grew up being bullied in his boarding school due to his size, which forced him into depression from an early age and interfered with his grades. It got worse until he asked his parents to help him see a therapist. “One day, after […]