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. […]
Who Made the Welcome
The lion began with a schoolgirl’s drawing. Ndeye Mariama Diop drew the character selected through a national school competition. A second student, Ndeye Khady Kristall Coumbassa, supplied its name. Together their contributions became Ayo, the mascot of the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games. Senegal’s education authorities credit them both. The ministry reports more than 500 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Machine Can See You. It Still Can’t Pay You.
Somewhere in a court-approved spreadsheet, nearly half a million books have become line items. Whatever a book once was in the making of it, the years of revision and abandonment and recovery before it ever reached a reader, it now exists in that file as an eligible work with a claim status, a payout estimate, […]