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, […]
Who Made the Welcome
The lion began with a schoolgirl’s drawing. Ndeye Mariama Diop drew the character selected through a national school competition. A second student, Ndeye Khady Kristall Coumbassa, supplied its name. Together their contributions became Ayo, the mascot of the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games. Senegal’s education authorities credit them both. The ministry reports more than 500 […]
From Korhogo Cloth to Digital Print: Alia Baré and the Language of Senufo Textiles
The garments in Alia Baré’s SS26 collection move the way the cloth that inspired them never could. Stylised birds, animals, human figures and hatched borders travel across dresses cut long and light, in a fabric made to drape and follow the body. The imagery is Senufo. The fabric carrying it is not. The Korhogo cloth […]
Yemi Alade, In Her Own Name
It is a blazing noon in the second week of March 2026 when the Grammy-nominated artist Yemi Alade presses record on a “Get Ready With Me” video. She begins with a meditative hook, her eyes closed, her hands pressed together solemnly. In the same measured succession, she works moisturising cream into her face before turning […]
Holy Dress Codes: What Comes to Mind When You See the Garment?
There is usually something immediately legible about religious dress codes. When I see a woman in a hijab, a man in a yarmulke, or a Black American Southern Baptist church hat, I have some sense of who they are — their values, their community, their relationship to God, defined largely on their own terms. In […]
In Lagos & Accra, an Underground Queer Ballroom Scene Thrives Again
When Timileyin Olaide Kayode started Pride in Lagos in 2021, he didn’t anticipate how big it would become. He only knew there was a need for queer Nigerians to have a visible, collective space to exist and celebrate themselves. Five years later, it has grown into a major Owambe ball and the very reason a […]
The Brutal History of African Architecture
A cylindrical tower and a stepped concrete pyramid impose themselves on the skylines of Nairobi and Abidjan. Built in the years after independence, both were enlisted to project progress and permanence, giving physical shape to the ambitions of newly sovereign nations. Half a century on, one still hosts the political life of a capital. The […]
Building Around Broken Systems
When Godwin Okoruwa, founder and creative director of GDWN, started his gender-fluid label amidst the pandemic in 2020, he had it firmly at the back of his mind that he had to build purely from his instinct. There was no elaborate market analysis or established blueprint for how the brand would grow. His already decade-long […]
City Codes: Dakar Is Not a Trend
Dakar is forever being discovered as an emerging creative capital, yet its fashion week dates to 2002 and its first world festival of Black arts to 1966. Treating the city as a trend rather than a working system carries a real cost.
The Record Is the Asset
“Get the right person in the room and they can tell you exactly where a record lives.” Adaobi Orajiaku is describing Nigeria’s National Gallery of Art. Its documentation department maintains printed and handwritten catalogues recording how each work entered the national collection. Orajiaku’s company, Atsur, has spent the past two years working with the Gallery […]