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 […]
Why Artists Keep Returning to Grand-Popo
When Joshua Gbengene visited Grand-Popo for the third time in December 2025, he was simply keeping a distance from work. After months of working nonstop on a series of creative projects, including a pop-up and an installation, the multidisciplinary artist travelled to the coastal town in search of somewhere quiet enough to slow down, clear […]
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 […]
NAANIYA: The New Language of Modest Fashion
Fashion entered Madina Tangara’s life long before NAANIYA existed. Her father was a sapeur, a man who understood the quiet power of dressing with intention, and her mother carried an effortless elegance and a deep appreciation for style. “I understood early on that clothing could carry meaning beyond appearance,” she says. That conviction became the […]
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 […]
The Game Is Already There
This conversation was recorded in mid-June, as the group stage of the World Cup was opening. Anita Asante remembers the game before it became a career. She was eleven or twelve, back in Ghana on a family visit, playing barefoot with her cousins on whatever ground was nearest, a patch of grass, a stretch of […]
Francis Kéré Builds the Goethe-Institut Dakar from the Ground Up
In Dakar, a new cultural landmark is rising from the soil. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, the new Goethe-Institut Senegal turns earth, memory, and craftsmanship toward a new era of African architectural possibility. In Dakar’s Fann neighbourhood, a baobab tree stands at the centre of a building that appears to have grown […]
The Money Is the Wrong Shape
The year Beyoncé wore her clothes, Sarah Diouf was still, in effect, her own bank. Building the label meant buying fabric before the money came back and paying tailors before the invoices settled, then finding cash for the samples, the shoots, the customs paperwork and the long quiet months between one burst of global attention […]