The Back of the Field
Across Buea, Lagos, Nairobi and Cairo, a running boom is exposing the hidden economics of belonging. Who pays to keep a community free, who profits when it grows, and why not one of six global brands would say what any of it is worth.
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 […]
What Dakar Built
Adama Paris has spent a quarter of a century taking Dakar Fashion Week out of rooms. The Medina show runs on a street closed for the night. It is free, there is no list, and residents watch from doorways and from the ledges of their own roofs while models pass close enough to touch. There […]
Gora and Fadel
Gora and Fadel is a portrait of chosen brotherhood, made at Lac Rose outside Dakar by photographer Morgane H. Gomez and director Tansi Makele. Its subjects are Gora and Fadel Gningue, two young Senegalese designers, stylists and models whose bond is a matter of heart rather than blood. Shot on Kodak Portra 400 across the […]
Dakar Coast
Dakar Coast is a fashion series made across a single day on the Senegalese coast by Paris-based art director and stylist Romain Antonini and photographer Khaled Fhemy Mamah, with model Pape Diouf. It takes the ordinary traffic of that coastline and dresses it: the fishermen and their pirogues, the roasted peanut seller, the beignet seller, […]
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 […]
Heal by Hair: How Communities, Culture, and Trust Are Redefining Mental Health Across Africa
In Siou, a village in Togo’s Kara region, a week before the Évala celebrations, the Heal by Hair Festival revealed a powerful truth: mental health is not only a medical conversation. It is a cultural, social, and collective responsibility. “We speak a great deal about healthcare infrastructure. We speak far less about infrastructures of trust. […]
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 […]