The Masters Africa Can Still Afford
Ayo Adeyinka left finance to deal in modern African art. As his gallery takes Lamidi Fakeye to Frieze Masters, he makes a case for buying the continent’s masters while they remain within reach, and giving their work a life beyond private collections.
The Commercial Life of African Culture
Ownership, rights and distribution shape who profits from the African creative economy, from wax print and photography to Afrobeats.
The Protocol Is the Border
The download button is easy to find. The condition above it belongs to every person whose voice is inside the file, and it is the easiest thing on the page to miss. DhoNam is a Dholuo speech dataset stewarded by the Maseno Centre for Applied Artificial Intelligence in Kenya and hosted on Mozilla Data Collective. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]