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 […]
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, […]
Inside the Most Compelling African Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale
For a long time, Africa’s presence at the Venice Biennale has felt slightly out of place. Even as African artists helped shape contemporary art globally, the continent itself often seemed pushed to the margins, present but not always fully seen, its stories and forms framed through a Western lens or treated as something separate from […]
Huguette Tchiapi’s Debut Begins in Yaoundé
Huguette Tchiapi is continuing an existing convergence, building a fashion brand that brings together the intricacies of her Cameroonian roots and the influence of her British identity. Like most emerging designers, she is deliberate about where her ideas come from. She speaks about influence less as something simply absorbed and more as something that can […]
Architecture Learns to Play
A tennis court is already a diagram, with its rectangle and net and service boxes laid out in white before anyone arrives, and Backyard Community Club, the new tennis facility that DeRoche Projects has just completed in the dense Accra neighbourhood of Osu, takes that familiar diagram and complicates it in ways that turn out […]
Africa’s Largest World Cup, Mostly Watched From Home
Ghanaian fans in the stands at AFCON 2023. Photography by Nana Asomani. The visa regime that will keep most African fans out of the stadiums of the 2026 World Cup is the same one that keeps African artists out of biennials, designers out of Paris fashion weeks, and scholars out of the conferences where their […]
If This. Then That: Shoes — Lemaire → Kkerelé
If you understand why the Lemaire slipper sells out every season, you already understand what Tina Akerele is doing in Lagos. IF YOU LIKE LEMAIRE The Piped Crepe Slipper is the most iconic shoe in the Lemaire wardrobe. Two pieces of grained cow leather sewn together at the front and sealed with leather piping. Elongated […]
A Memory of Walls
A Memory of Walls Uche Ibemere photographs the brutalist soul of the University of Lagos The University of Lagos was not built to be beautiful. It was built to be permanent, a concrete declaration that independence would have institutions to match its ambitions. Constructed between the 1960s and 1980s, the campus is one of […]
Maputo’s Modernist Moment
Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, in the city then called Lourenço Marques, a generation of architects produced a body of work
Three African Knowledge Systems on the Loewe Craft Prize 2026 Shortlist
The 2026 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize shortlist runs thirty finalists from nineteen countries. Three of them work with African craft traditions as method