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, […]
How Lusaka Moves
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In Mwangola, Gelmira Gourgel Exhibits the Music That Fueled Angola’s Independence
Gelmira Gourgel, an Angolan architectural designer and curator, wants people to see Angola in all its depth, not as the country that rarely enters conversations about Africa, but as a nation whose rich cultural traditions, enduring craftsmanship and creative resilience have long shaped the continent’s artistic imagination. In her own words, it is a politically […]