Bairro 6 de Maio
On a cold morning on the outskirts of Amadora, northwest of Lisbon, the ground gives way to rubble. Women roast corn on improvised grills, and residents sit in their doorways with morna playing low, the slow Cape Verdean music the islands call the sound of the soul. A handful of houses still stand among the […]
At MoMA, a New Exhibition Celebrates West Africa’s Modernist Architectural Legacy
In 1960, 17 African countries gained independence in what became known as the “Year of Africa.” For many of these newly sovereign nations, political freedom was only the beginning. They were confronted with what an independent African nation actually looked like, a question that stretched beyond governance and infrastructure into the continent’s creative life: art, […]
The Index Is the Institution
Ask a machine where to find African design and it will answer without hesitation. It returns names, a few studios, an archive or two, a marketplace. The answer arrives as though it were a window onto everything that exists. It is closer to a door that someone else hung, opening onto the rooms they chose […]
Aṣọ-Òkè: The Cloth We Inherit
I am standing before a portrait in Nigerian Modernism, the survey at Tate Modern. It is Akinola Lasekan’s 1957 oil of Justus D. Akeredolu. Lasekan and Akeredolu were both first-generation Nigerian modernists who once shared a studio in Lagos, and Akeredolu is remembered as the pioneer of Yoruba thorn carving, so the painter here is […]
Diarra Bousso Builds Fashion From Mathematics, Technology, and Craft
Diarra Bousso’s first breakthrough arrived disguised as a mistake. It came not in an atelier or a studio but late one night in a classroom at Stanford University. Stacks of algebra assignments covered the desk in front of her. She was grading papers, tracing her students’ attempts to graph linear equations, absolute values, and quadratic […]
A Goalkeeper Went Viral. It Took a Congressman to Get His Mother to the Game
Last Monday, in the first World Cup match in Cape Verde’s history, a forty-year-old goalkeeper named Josimar Dias, known to everyone as Vozinha, faced a Spain side that produced twenty-seven attempts and still left Atlanta without a goal. Seven of those efforts forced saves, and the reigning European champions, widely expected to brush aside an […]
Puma Brought the Continent to Downtown LA. The Postcards Were the Tell
A week before the 2026 World Cup, Puma turned its Salehe Bembury launch in downtown LA into a study in designing an African football moment for the diaspora — and the postcards, not the product, told the real story.
Marriage Was Always the Plan for These African Men. Until It Wasn’t
The average African man is often assumed to want marriage, or at least that is the expectation many grow up with. For centuries, marriage has been positioned as one of adulthood’s defining milestones, a marker of success and fulfillment against which many men are quietly measured. In many communities, that expectation begins early. Almost as […]
If This. Then That: World Cup Edition — Dressing the Team — Loewe → Ibrahim Fernandez
If you understand why Loewe’s suit for Spain matters, you’ll recognize what Ibrahim Fernandez did for Côte d’Ivoire. IF YOU LIKE LOEWE Loewe is the LVMH-owned Spanish house, and it signed a four-year deal to dress Spain’s national teams off the pitch. The wardrobe, designed under creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, runs to […]
How Dakar Moves
The Ancien Palais de Justice has no business being as beautiful as it is. It is an abandoned colonial courthouse out on Cap Manuel, the sea right behind it, the concrete going soft at the corners, the kind of building the city has been meaning to deal with for as long as I have been […]