Africa’s Creative Work Is Training AI. Who Makes the Terms Count?
Over six instalments, The Sovereign Stack followed African creative work into the AI systems now being built on top of it: how it is seen, paid for, found, bought, recorded and governed. The season closes on the question beneath every one of them: who can make those systems come and ask, and who will still be there to answer?
Before the House of Vlam, Cape Town’s Queer History Made Space for Ballroom
Editor’s note: Michael van Niekerk is the Mother and founder of the House of Vlam and founder of Keep The Energy. This essay draws on his experience within Cape Town’s ballroom community alongside interviews and historical sources. Cape Town’s ballroom scene is young, but viciously resilient and viciously talented. It is a scene of houses, […]
African Art Doesn’t Need the White Cube
For centuries, African art has thrived through colour, movement and ritual. But as contemporary African galleries rethink how work is shown, the white cube is no longer the only option.
The Protocol Is the Border
The download button is easy to find. The condition above it belongs to every person whose voice is inside the file, and it is the easiest thing on the page to miss. DhoNam is a Dholuo speech dataset stewarded by the Maseno Centre for Applied Artificial Intelligence in Kenya and hosted on Mozilla Data Collective. […]
Young African Photographers Are Looking Back
In 2024, a Nigerian hit found a second life on social media. “Who Get Dat Thing (Remix),” by Dekumzy featuring Slow Dog and Stormrex, began circulating after a group of young Nigerian women recreated the choreography to Stormrex’s verse, dressed in the exaggerated glamour of the late 1990s and early 2000s: fitted tops, low-rise bottoms, […]
The Seedpod and the Skin
In a small room of white walls and warm wood at Singita Kruger National Park, a set of portraits hangs in quiet succession. The men in them appear faceless. Sculptural masks sit where their features should be, and the bodies beneath are still, set against open sky and water. In one, a figure in velvet […]
Before Arthur Ashe Was a Stadium, He Was a Problem for Apartheid
Every late August in New York, Arthur Ashe becomes a place. More than 23,000 people fill the stadium carrying his name. Players walk through its tunnels, and commentators use the name as geography: Night session at Ashe. Meet me outside Ashe. Fifty-three years ago, another country was trying to keep Arthur Ashe out. South Africa […]
Before the Album, Rapsody Went to Ghana
Rapsody did not come to Ghana for a show. There was no tour routing to explain the visit, no announced album cycle. She came to walk the country, and she came with questions about where she was from. Amino’s 2025 film, “Rapsody in Ghana, A Conversation With Joseph Amino,” follows those questions through markets and […]
What Beadwork Is Worth
It took Noormesuku Kereto more than two months to finish the necklace. It was an Enkarewa, the wide beaded collar a Maasai woman wears at her wedding, and this one was made for a safari camp in the Mara rather than for a bride, which changes who will look at it but not how it […]
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 […]