NATAAL MAGAZINE ISSUE 2

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A Magazine Celebrating Global African Visual Arts, Fashion, Music & Culture

Issue 2

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77251 5 963002

RADICAL WAVE

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WELCOME This second, annual edition of Nataal roams far and wide in its celebration of contemporary African creativity. Our family of contributors across the globe has pulled out all the stops to uncover and collaborate with talented individuals and initiatives pushing culture forward. And the thread that ties many of these stories to one another is a spirit of collectivism; the belief that through shared voices, energy and activism, we all rise.

In London we meet Neneh Cherry, who embodies this mood. The iconic musician has used her three decades in the spotlight to foster an ever-growing community of artists through her style and music, and continues to inspire successive generations including filmmaker Jenn Nkiru, rapper Little Simz and poet Julianknxx — all of whom are featured in these pages.

We focus on photographers in Cape Town and Joburg, such as emerging talents and twin sisters Noncedo and Nonzuzo Gxekwa, as well as the highly renowned Lebohang Kganye, whose output goes beyond the born free debate to start whole new conversations through an exploration of memory, oral histories and youth movements.

Lagos photographer Lakin Ogunbanwo lenses some of his fellow Nigerian musicians, designers and entrepreneurs, who are among the cultural vanguard and whose work is putting this megacity on everyone’s radar. Meanwhile in Paris, Art Comes First assemble some of the models and influencers who have joined the duo’s diverse menswear movement. Similarly in New York, L’Enchanteur discuss how they use their label as a healing tool for their community.

In Nairobi, director Wanuri Kahiu presents her research into some of the continent’s joyful myths and legends that have influenced her own “afrobubblegum” storytelling. While over in Accra, Sir David Adjaye OBE reveals his plans for Ghana’s first national cathedral, intended for use by all faiths and groups as a centre for commemoration. Lastly, in Abidjan, Nataal hightails it to La Sunday, the essential party for the city’s burgeoning group of innovative creatives. Those who dance together, stay together, after all.

With love from team Nataal

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Richard Mudariki, Reading the Fake News Times, 2019. Oil on canvas, 90 x 90 cm Courtesy of Barnard

FRONT MATTER 3 11 12

WELCOME TEAM CONTRIBUTORS

UPFRONTS

14 AMAARAE This Ghanaian songstress stands out from the pack

28 LA MÊME GANG Six young men whose brotherhood is reenergising music in Accra

16 THE NEST AT SOSSUS A view of this Porky Hefer-designed Namibian nest

30 MISSING SIERRA Exclusive new work from poet Julianknxx

18 SOLA The warped soul of this young singer

32 THE AFRICA CENTER Stepping inside the freshly opened NYC institution with CEO Uzodinma Iweala

20 JENNA BASS This rule-breaking filmmaker on shaking up South African storytelling

33 PRECIOUS TRUST The Amazigh designer showing the sartorial side of Algeria

22 FUSE ODG Building a new Ghana with its leader of afrobeats

34 COCO & GIDEON Two Lagos-based models setting fresh beauty standards

23 KIALA KANZI The jewellery designer crafting complex simplicity

36 DAVID ADJAYE A vision for the National Cathedral of Ghana in Accra

24 CHARLOTTE ADIGÉRY Get acquainted with the stripped back sounds of this soulful singer

37 WANURI KAHIU Tales of joy with the celebrated filmmaker

26 MARIAM KAMARA The architect shaping the future of Niger CONTENTS

38 TYLER MITCHELL A glimpse at the famed photographer’s black utopia

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FEATURES 40 ART COMES FIRST Sam Lambert and Shaka Maidoh on their menswear movement 54 NA CHAINKUA REINDORF Nubuke Foundation curator Bianca Ama Manu in conversation with this emerging artist 68 LADUMA NGXOKOLO This South African powerhouse is taking on the world with MaXhosa Africa 74 LITTLE SIMZ The artist on Grey Area, her thrilling third album 80 BLOKE Meet the winner of the inaugural Emerge ALÁRA award

56 ANAÏS The London-based music maker confronting the Darkness at Play 60 FUCK, YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL A zine on a mission

64 L’ENCHANTEUR Dynasty and Soull Ogun bring forth spiritual healing with their powerful designs

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84 BBZ Tia Simon-Campbell and Naeem Davis have created London’s safest space

88 OGOBAGNAN Documenting the rituals of Mali’s Ogobagnan festival NATAAL

FEATURES 112 JENN NKIRU The filmmaker on recalibrating the black image

96 LUKHANYO MDINGI This fast-emerging designer is grounded in gold for AW19

116 Y�NGYE YENI Capturing the fine art of enjoyment in late 1980s Ghana by Saman Archive

100 LA SUNDAY Step into the party of a generation in Abidjan

120 INUA ELLAMS Thunder gods have been summoned in this wordsmith’s latest literary work 104 EA WAVE 124 FOR THE CULTURE Making waves with Kenya’s most exciting The vanguard shaping Lagos’s creative musical collective scene

108 RUBY ONYINYECHI AMANZE Exploring the playful worlds within the work of this extraordinary artist CONTENTS

136 NORTHERN STARS We profile the new wave of Maghrebian photographers taking control of their own image

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FEATURES 144 AKWAEKE EMEZI The writer discusses their groundbreaking debut novel, Freshwater 148 ODE TO DAKAR A lyrical and visual journey through the Senegalese city

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DIGITAL IDENTITIES AND REAL SELVES An essay on the dissemination of contemporary and digital African mobilities 164 OMO VALLEY Alex Franco's documentation of the tribes of southern Ethiopia

182 BORN FREE? A survey of the Market Photo Workshop

192 LEBOHANG KGANYE Exploring the relationship between memory, fantasy and family history 198 THE GXEKWA SISTERS Photographers Noncedo & Nonzuzo aim their twin talents at each other

168 ABE ODEDINA Looking to the divine through the strong strokes of this empathic artist

170 COMMON THREADS Five London designers shaping the future of menswear

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204 NENEH CHERRY Lessons in standing up and being counted from the legendary singer NATAAL

FASHION

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CLUBE VERDE

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FIRST BORN, LAST BORN

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GOLDEN HOUR

250 WHEN DRY, STYLE AS REQUIRED 260

GOING UPTOWN

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FANTASTIC MOONLIGHT

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SHROUDED GODDESS

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MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

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FIRST WALTZ

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BAFF UP

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INTERSECTIONS

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LOVE BUZZ

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CORSAIR KINGDOM

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CONTENTS

DIRECTORY

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� ON SCREEN Discover our world at nataal.com Follow us at @nataalmedia Photography NICK VAN TIEM. Styling SUZE KUIT. Models ANDILE and MZWANDILE wearing DRÔLE DE MONSIEUR.

TEAM Founder ALASSANE SY

Co-founder & Creative Director SARA HEMMING

RADICAL WAVE CORSAIR KINGDOM by Mous Lamrabat

Design Director BENJAMIN JOHNSTON AT STUDIO JOHNSTON

Operations Manager AMY BARKER

Senior Art Director LAUREN BARRETT

Associate Editors MIRIAM BOUTEBA ANANDA PELLERIN

Designer TIM WAN

Sub Editor EVE MARLEAU Assistants BOLA MARTIN EDWIN BOADU

WRITERS Alexander Aplerku, Adjoa Armah, Alix-Rose Cowie, Benewaah Boateng, Bianca Ama Manu, Catherine E. McKinley, Debbie Shasanya, Emmanuel Anu-Onu Balogun, Emma Gilhooly, Julie Bonzon, Katie de Klee, Leanne Tlhagoane, Mahoro Seward, Mazzi Odu, Mireille Harper, Samantha Small, Ngartia, Sarah Ben Romdane, Stéphane Gaboué, Valeria Costa-Kostritsky, Xuman.

PHOTOGRAPHERS Adama Jalloh, Akinola Davies Jr, Alex Franco, Alice Mann, Almass Badat, Alun [be], Angie Lopez, Anita Ng, Annelise Phillips, Ben Beagent, Beni Masiala, Nuits Balneaires, Danny Kasirye, Christina Ebenezer, Chris Rinke, Clare Shilland, Daniel Obasi, Ed Reeve, Elizabeth Wirija, Hanane El Ouardani, Ibrahem Hasan, James Wang, Jamie Morgan, Jermaine Francis, Jesse Vos, Junior Jimenez, Kristin-Lee Moolman, Lakin Ogunbanwo, Lebohang Kganye, Luca Khouri, Lucie Rox, Maganga Mwagogo, Marianna Sanvito, Matt Kay, Maurice Ascani, Maya-Ines Touam, Mous Lamrabat, Musa N. Nxumalo, Nadine Ijewere, Nick van Tiem, Noma Osula, Noncedo Gxekwa, Nonzuzo Gxekwa, Nuits Balneaires, Ofoe Amegavie, Olga de la Iglesia, Oumayma B. Tanfous, Peter Irungu, Petrovsky & Ramone, Sharif Hamza, Sipho Gongxeka, Stephen Tayo, Saul Nash, Rhea Dillon, Rudi Geyser, Ruth Ossai, Teknari, Tshepiso Mazibuko, Tyler Mitchell, Virgine Khateeb, Wathek Allal, Yasmine Hatimi.

TEAM

STYLISTS Bevan Agyemang, Bryan Emry, Cynthia Lawrence-John, Deborah Bloemen, Gavin Mikey Collins, Hanna Kelifa, Harris Elliott, Jessica Willis, Jide Ali, Karlie Shelley, KK Obi, Lisa Lapauw, Marika Ella Ames, Naomi Miller, Nathan Klein, Ola Ebiti, Saranne Woodcroft, Suze Kuit.

HAIR STYLISTS, MAKE-UP ARTISTS, MODELS, CASTING AGENTS, SET DESIGNERS, PRODUCERS, ASSISTANTS Abbas Mwambakale, Abdoulaye Ka, Adelisa Mangcu, Afi Emily Attipoe, Ajak Deng, Alice Andrews, Ama Quashie, Amber Pinkerton, Andile and Mzwandile, Andrew Moores, Anelisa Mangcu, Anne Sophie, Ariel Oulai, Arnaud Kablan, Ashley Herson, Ashley Smith, Asma Al-Aloosi, Aweng, Ayo Fagboyegum, Ayo Hasani, Aza Mhlana, Babs, Bari Khalique, Bea Sweat, Becky Akinyode, Berlin Williams, Biba, Billie McKenzie, Bos Nooji, Breana Carson, Carolyn Gallyer, Casey Redlinghys, Chantal Amati, Cheikh, Chester Martinez, Chinedu Okoli, Chloe Rosolek, Coco Anetor-Sokei, Courtney Hickson, Courtney Perkins, Cyndia Harvey, Darius, Dennis Okwera, Eddy Liu, Edward Lampley, Elibeidy Dani, Emma Thorn, Emily Carr, Eniola Abiora, Fatima Kouame, Fola Abatan, Funmbi Ogunbanwo, Frankelen, Frankie Daniela, Gabi Besevic-Simpson, Gideon Mustapha, Gonca Akkel, Grace Ahn, Hamed Maiye, Happiness Okon, Helena, Honey, Ivelisse Rosado, Jairo, James Gilbert, James T Emmanuel, John K Emmanuel, James Ukpai, Jean, Jeffrey, Joani Johnson, Joie Duke-Ryan, John Seabrooke, John Vial, Jonny, Jordan, Joseph, Julia Asaro, Kadeem Rodgers, Katty,

Co-founder & Editorial Director HELEN JENNINGS

RADICAL WAVE LOVE BUZZ by Nadine Ijewere & Cyndia Harvey

ISABELA LIMA PRECIOUS OPARA XANTHE SOMERS Shoot Production BAKER KENT BEANSTALK CAT CRAWFORD CLM GENERATION X PROXY PROD

Kennedy Clarke, Keona, Kiela Annie, Kimberly Davidson, Kimberly Patterson, Kite Chuang, Koshin, Laura Bruton, Lauraine Bailey, Lee Kotze, Leah, Lauretta, Lauretta Orji, Lina Sabry, Liz Daxauer, Lizzie Arneson, Lucas Wilson, Lucy Burt, Lucy Sanderson, Luke, Magueye, Marc Alexandre, Matthew Hawkes, Megan Jordan, Michelle Moolman, Mike O’Gorman, Min Sandhu, Nadine Willis, Nathan, Nicole Sumanasekera, Niki Vos, Nisaa Pouncey, Nyakor Riam, Oke Tobiola, Olivier Attia, Olabisi Olaniyan, Olamide Ogundele, Olasunkanmi Abayomi, Pal Berdal, Parvane Barret, Patrice, Pelumi Ogunde, Precious Mbatha, Raph Métamorphose, Ratax & Damien, Rebecca Williams, Rhiannon Powell, Samir, Samuel Ayeloja, Sandra Falase, Sarah Nguyen, Sethu, Shaden, Sharmaarke Ali Aden, Sheldon Shepherd, Shen Williams-Cohen, Shivs Arnold, Sophia, Sosa Yande, Souad, Stanley, Stefano Ortega, Sutchay, Sydfalls, Sylvia McMillan, Temidayo Sanusi, Tommy, Widad Hassan, Yanice, Yann Soumé, Yasmine Sabri, Yoshi Miyazaki, Zara Nelson.

THANK YOU Amina Sarr, AWCA Lagos, British Council, Charlene Prempeh, Design Indaba, Dudu Sarr, Ethan Miller at IMG, Farida Hamak, Francis Kokoroko, Glenn Max, Jarri Van der Haegen, Jefferson Hack, Jessica Murphy, Jimmy Moffat, Juliana Kasumi, Kione Grandison, LED Model Management, Liska Yealland, Maria McCloy, Maria Tkachenko, Monique Kawecki, Oluwaseye Olusa, Olya Kuryshchuk, Peter Jennings, Remi Ajani, Richard Hinzel, Stephen Davies, The Africa Center, Thu Nyugen, Toast PR, Tonia Arapovic.

Events Art Director CONOR CRONIN Print & Reprographics Manager STEVE SAVIGEAR Typeface Design HAAKON SPENCER & MATTHEW FENTON AT BRITISH STANDARD TYPE

PRINTING Approach Print Ltd, Leicester DISTRIBUTION White Circ PRE-PRESS Tapestry NATAAL ON SCREEN Visit us at nataal.com Follow us at @nataalmedia Nataal magazine is published by Nataal Ltd. 92–96 De Beauvoir Road, London, N1 4EN For all enquiries: info@nataal.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, reprinted or transmitted without permission from the publishers.

Although the greatest care is taken to ensure all information contained in Nataal is accurate, neither the publisher nor the authors can accept responsibility for damage resulting from the use of this information. The views and opinions expressed in Nataal magazine are those of the contributors and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright owners of the images and texts in this issue. Any copyright holders we have not reached, or to whom inaccurate acknowledgement has been made, are invited to contact us.

ISSN 2515-9631

CONTRIBUTORS

ALICE MANN

Alice is a South African photographic artist whose work explores notions of picture making as an act of collaboration. Her images have been published in The Guardian, The New Yorker and the British Journal of Photography and her series ‘Drummies’ has won numerous awards including the 2018 Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. For Nataal she lenses a young ballroom dancing brother and sister duo in Cape Town.

LAKIN OGUNBANWO

Working at the confluence of fashion photography and classical portraiture, Lakin creates enigmatic images with an erotic and subversive undertone. The Nigerian artist’s work has been featured in the New York Times, i-D, British GQ and Riposte Magazine and been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia and the Wedge Collection in Toronto, Canada. In this issue he photographs the cultural vanguard in Lagos.

BIANCA AMA MANU

Bianca is a Ghanaian British curator, producer and writer invested in public and performance art and photography. Her recent partnerships include the British Council and the Sheffield International Documentary Festival and she is also curator at the Nubuke Foundation, Accra. Her writing portfolio includes The Guardian, Channel 4 and BBC World Service and for Nataal she speaks to the artist Na Chainkua Reindorf.

LUCIE ROX

The legendary Neneh Cherry poses for Lucie in this issue. The French photographer’s work spans fashion, portraiture, documentary and landscape and what characterises her images are their softness and rich colours. Lucie’s clients have included AnOther, Muse, Sixteen Journal, Loewe and Givenchy. Now based in London, she is currently working on a portrait series exploring black womxnhood.

MOUS LAMRABAT

Mous was born in Morocco and raised in Belgium. His seemingly provocative and offbeat photography opens up a conversation about stereotypes faced

by Arabs, North African and Muslims.

This year he enjoyed his first solo show in Belgium, which was jokingly called Mousganistan. And for Nataal he returns to Morocco to shoot our menswear cover.

NADINE IJEWERE

Nadine is a south east London born photographer. Her work focuses on the subjects of identity and diversity, informed by her own Nigerian/Jamaican background.

She is drawn to non-traditional faces with the aim of showcasing a new standard of beauty and giving life to the uniqueness of disparate cultures. She’s worked for Garage and British Vogue, exhibited with Nataal at Red Hook Labs and this issue captures our women’s cover story.

EMMANUEL ANU-OLU BALOGUN

JULIANKNXX

Emmanuel is a British Nigerian writer, researcher, filmmaker and founder of Visual-Ideation. Fixed upon driving a dialogue between art, anthropology and international development, he hopes to use his practice as a tool for realising positive change. His personal essay for Nataal explores the creation and dissemination of images of African bodies in digital worlds.

Julianknxx is a London-based poet and a multidisciplinary artist. Nataal commissioned him write a poem exclusively for this issue, which he dedicates to his native Sierra Leone. His work explores issues such as mental health, masculinity, love and social justice and he’s published his writing in the book ‘Broken’. In addition, he is creative director for the menswear brand, Labrum London.

Photo by WILLIAM MATHIEU

NAOMI MILLER JULIE BONZON

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Julie is a PhD candidate in history of art at University College London researching the new generation of South African photographers. She has worked for the cultural department of Magnum Photos, The Photographers’ Gallery, The Ian Parry Scholarship and has written for The Eye of Photography. For Nataal, she wrote about the Market Photo Workshop in Joburg.

Naomi is a stylist based in London.

She has lived in Paris, Amsterdam and NYC, and works with clients worldwide such as Theory, Joseph, Tommy Hilfiger, Mulberry and Paul Smith. Naomi is a regular contributor to various publications such as Vogue, Beauty Papers, V and Muse and was a founding member and fashion director at Twin. For Nataal she heads to NYC to shoot our uptown accessories story.

NATAAL

This Ghanaian songstress stands out from the pack

Amaarae

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Words HELEN JENNINGS

Photography LAKIN OGUNBANWO

NATAAL

“One inward desire I have is that the next generation of children will be born to my music. I want to implant my sonic DNA into their tiny hearts.” This seemingly lascivious statement would be expected from Nelly or Miguel, but it in fact emanates from the polite lips of Amaarae.

The young Ghanaian singer, songwriter and producer is often accused of making explicit music but in fact, she points out, there’s nothing racy in her songs. “I don’t curse. There are no sexual overtures. I don’t even say pussy. And most of the time I’m actually singing about heartbreak. But because the production is so watery, and my voice resonates somehow, the music sounds suggestive.”

It’s true. On Amaarae’s debut Passionfruit Summers EP, released in late 2017, her luscious, warm sounds and delicate, butter-wouldn’tmelt voice on tracks such as ‘Fluid’ and ‘Happy Mistakes’ drip with a ripe, bittersweet longing.

Giving cheeky nods to the likes of D’banj and Crystal Waters along the way, it’s music that makes you tingle and, it must be said, does offer the perfect soundtrack for a long and hazy night of lovemaking. Skip Netflix, press play and chill.

“My favourite song on the EP is ‘Catching a Wav’”, she confides.

“It’s about letting go of a relationship but wanting to enjoy spending the last moment with that person. I was inspired by Ja Rule’s ‘Down 4 You’ featuring Ashanti. I wanted to induce nostalgia, and that light, airy feeling that hit me in the chest when I first heard that record.”

Ama Serwah Genfi was indeed born to do it. Raised between the Bronx, Accra, New Jersey and Atlanta, she learnt how to be agile from an early age. “My mom is a very dynamic human being, so we’d spend a few years in a place and then she’d be like, ‘let’s find the next adventure’. That’s made it easy for me to manoeuvre between different cultures, individuals and spaces.”

Her family also steeped her in music. From her father came soul (James Brown, Al Green, Marvin Gaye); from her mother, jazz (Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday); a cousin provided a hip hop education (DMX, Fat Joe, Tupac), and an uncle, alternative rock (Nirvana, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Led Zeppelin).

During high school, Amaarae started making mixtapes, and by 17 she was interning at a music studio. At university, she undertook

UPFRONT

voice training and honed her song-writing skills (while studying English Literature) and by the time she landed back in Ghana in June 2017, she was ready to make real moves.

Since then, Amaarae hit the A-List of Apple Music’s Africa favourite new African artists, and has collaborated on tracks with Šántí (‘Rapid Fire’) and M3nsa (‘S.D.I’), and performed in Los Angeles, New York and Lagos, which is where we meet on the day of her performance at ART X Lagos international art fair. She’s been very welcome here, but it’s at home in Ghana that she shines brightest among the new leaders of the country’s alternative music landscape.

“In Accra we have a variety in terms of rap, R&B/ neo soul and the electronic scene, which is crazy vibrant, and we are daring with our craft,” she reflects after a week of live showcases and publicity opportunities in Lagos. “We certainly have less international exposure than Nigerian artists, but we are more colourful and bolder in our expression.”

The same adjectives could be applied to Amaarae’s personal style. She fashions her cute tomboy aesthetic from bespoke pieces and has become known for her dazzling buzz cut that is dyed in a constantly evolving array of colourful patterns, from pink polka dots to mermaid-y stripes and rainbow swirls. Her look has been hailed by Vogue for being “inventive” and “vivid”, and she was also named among its VogueWorld 100 street style influencers. “I want to differentiate myself from trends I might have spearheaded,” she says of her fun barnet.

The near future promises a full-length record and more international gigs, and that’s just for starters. “I want to put myself in a position where my music is recognisable and respected.

I want to put out that classic project that scoops every award show.

But my ultimate goal is to go into doing film scores,” she says. Rom coms, perhaps? “No — cartoons. I love cartoons with all my heart and soul. Bob’s Burgers, Meet the Robinsons, Ratatouille, Coco…

It would be a dream to voice a cartoon character one day, too.”

We can easily imagine the bright, confident and poetic persona she’d embody.

NATAAL would like to thank the BRITISH COUNCIL’S WEST AFRICA ARTS PROGRAMME and ART X LAGOS. PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANCE PELUMI OGUNDE.

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The Porky Hefer-designed Namibian nest

The Nest at Sossus

“Do you really need to have something that lasts forever? That’s to the owner. I could just point and say ‘look’, so he never had to the conversation of my vernacular architecture,” says South stretch his imagination to understand.”

African designer Porky Hefer, best known for his human-sized Eight years in the making, The Nest at Sossus, situated within nests and monstrously wonderful animal cocoons. the Namib-Naukluft National Park, blends in with its dusty brown His work is playful and dreamlike, and his human bird’s nests surroundings with a thatched roof and rolling outline. Meanwhile have now grown into liveable spaces — manifestations of his inside, carved rooms look out through irregular-shaped windows. fascination with temporality and a somewhat lost, more natural “Think about how animals and rural people do it. Everything gets way of being. As well as a couple of magnificently rustic treehouses hot and things dry and you get holes, and right then the rain in the Maldives, based on the manta rays that used to populate comes, and bright green shoots come up and you use them to the water there, Hefer has recently completed an exquisite private fix the holes. The material is supplied at the time that you need it. lodge in the Namibian bush, inspired by the nests of the sociable Sustainable handcraft is like that.” weaverbirds that can be seen hanging in great numbers in nearby The structure is a kind of love nest: the ultimate hideaway.

Acacia trees. “Everything in the design was obvious,” he says. Originally the idea was to have no furniture, just built-in shapes “It was all right there around us. I didn’t have to explain anything that could be used for different purposes with the odd decorative

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Words KATIE DE KLEE

NATAAL

branch that its imagined avian creator might have found interesting. Of course the requirements of a luxury lodge don’t practically allow for such minimalism, so tasteful fixtures and fittings have become part of the interior landscape. Since completion, the Nest has been awarded the 2019 Wallpaper Design Award for Best Private House.

The ephemeral nature of Hefer’s limitededition architectural pieces is closely linked to what originally inspired his hanging nest furniture — the idea of birth, rebirth and the womb. “The nest is the perfect analogy of a natural birth with security, safety, cocooning,” he says. And indeed his pieces make you feel small, safe and comforted.

“They are like giant masks really,” he adds. “It’s very strange.

People are often nervous to get in there until you give them permission, and then their muscles change as they jump in. And

then they get all brave. It’s like reversing the womb.”

Hefer grew up on a farm surrounded by animals, both wild and domestic, and claims to have crossed many boundaries within the natural world. “We used to have one barn where we kept over 100 ostrich babies at a time,” he recalls. “I’d go in there and because of the warmth of my body, they would think I was their mother and would all jump on me.”

It’s memories like this that seeded his ideas for giant, fluffy animal furniture with a strong sense of childlike wonder. After 16 years in the advertising industry, Hefer founded his creative consultancy Animal Farm in 2007. His pieces, from the nests to public installations and artistic furniture, are handmade in South Africa by harnessing skills and materials that are available in the African context.

His own house in Cape Town is filled like a magpie’s nest with objects that he has collected over the years, none of them made by him.

“I surround myself with a lot of things that are stimulating. The house is full of opening sentences. Little analogue things that inspire me,” he says. Inspiration, like the odd twig needed to fix a nest, is not something that Hefer worries he will run out of anytime soon.

His sketchbooks are full of ideas, collections yet to be made, natural phenomena and shapes he’d like to mimic. “There are so many opportunities. I have so many clever ideas, quickly. You know as the old saying goes, ‘a Boer make a plan’.”

THE NEST AT SOSSUS is available to book on a private basis from EXPERT AFRICA. Image courtesy ULTIMATE SAFARIS.

UPFRONT

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Tune into this singer’s warped soul

Sola London-based Sola was six when she took up playing piano.

“My parents forced me, I hated it, and then one day it all just clicked,” she says. She went on to study music and business at New York University, even though at that time she was convinced that she could not sing. Gaining confidence, she started to write songs and after visiting her father in Nigeria, she began to foster a true relationship with her identity as an artist. “Listening to Fela Kuti gave me something more, it gave me rhythm and made me realise not all songs are just about love,” she recalls.

Through her musical journey, which has also brought her to the space-aged warmth of Outkast, Parliament and George Clinton, as well as the sparse electronics of Burial and Arca, Sola has shaped her own genre called warped soul. “It is derived from soul and jazz and all the music I was brought up on, it’s an underwater-y sound,” she explains. “When undressed and left bare, my songs are essentially mellow ballads.” Her sound is also evidently influenced by Nina Simone. “She taught me how to appreciate my voice and how to be happy being different; that the flaws are what make it more interesting.” So much so that Sola included a cover of Simone’s ‘Wild Is the Wind’ on her debut EP, Wealth Has Come, which was released in late 2018. “That song is extremely close to my heart and it seemed a rite of passage after spending months and months playing it in my bedroom.”

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Words XANTHE SOMERS

The largely self-produced release is about Sola being ready to lay herself bare. “I was struggling badly with depression for many years and writing this EP was my healing process.

It is about self-discovery and learning to be alone.” What strikes you first is her deep, velvety voice, which is reminiscent of Sade, and has the power to fully immerse you in its emotional resonance.

In the song ‘Save Yourself’, her captivating melody wraps itself around you like the mermaid goddess Yemoja, enchanting you with its vulnerability. While in ‘Sacrifice Me’, she laments of being lost to the death-like enthrall of an obsessive relationship.

This song was also a way to connect to home; the video was shot in Lagos with local director and stylist Daniel Obasi and fashion designer Frank Aghuno of Fruché. “The city is so chaotic and moves to its own beat that’s really easy to be inspired by.

There’s so much art and music coming from every corner, with people creating amazing work in spite of limited resources, which I find so freeing.” The video sees Sola in vast landscapes and dark spaces performing soft, expressive movements. It’s this unique energy and honest point of view that makes her one to watch.

(Above) SOLA wears JESSICA BAGNALL bra top, MARIEYAT sleeves, NATHALIE COSTE skirt, stylist’s own jewellery. (Opposite) SOLA wears CHOPOVA LOWENA jacket, jewellery as before.

Styling SARANNE WOODCROFT. Hair LAURAINE BAILEY. Make-up MIN SANDHU at CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT. Photography assistance FOLA ABATA.

Photography CHRISTINA EBENEZER

NATAAL

UPFRONT

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This rule-breaking filmmaker is shaking up South African storytelling

Jenna Bass

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Words ALIX-ROSE COWIE

NATAAL

When making films in South Africa, director many times where it has felt wrong to put words Jenna Bass believes it’s impossible to escape into other people’s mouths. Most often the cast politics. Whether a film sets out to make have a huge amount to contribute that’s a lot a political statement or not, it’s inevitably better than anything I could write or imagine.” a mirror of a society that’s inseparable Her approach to directing is to guide the from a legacy of political turmoil. “I’d rather project to completion, while the cast and confront than consciously ignore it,” she says. crew are not only acknowledged but also en“Basically, I take entertainment very seriously.” couraged and nurtured. “I think the director In her film High Fantasy (2017) identity is important in the way that the host of a politics gets under the skin of four young party is important. Sure, they decided to South African friends of different genders have this party, and chose who to invite, but and races who wake up in each other’s bodies on a camping trip. eventually it shouldn’t be about them and their ego anymore. You The metamorphic event causes the rage and guilt that’s bubbling just want people to enjoy themselves and have good memories in the pot at the end of the ‘rainbow nation’ to erupt into broad afterwards. Crying or throwing tantrums at your own party daylight. In the tradition of the body-swap film, after spending time because not everything is going your way isn’t how you get people in each other’s shoes, the characters gain perspective and mutual to have a better time.” empathy. But in a twist on the genre the characters have no such Focusing on collaboration and mutual respect is an approach happy ending, and local audiences are left with the question: is it that could be developed and taught to a new generation of possible for us to heal? filmmakers, which is something Bass already has in the works with Bass wrangles originality into her storytelling, while also friend and colleague Lungiswa Joe. Together they are devising an challenging how stories can be told. The majority of High Fantasy alternative film school. was shot on an iPhone 7 by the cast themselves. The decision Bass’s latest film, Flatland (2019), takes aim at the macho was born out of necessity — she didn’t have the budget for high- genre of the Western. Set in the desert landscape of the Karoo end camera equipment — but during filming, Bass realised her in South Africa, the story follows three complex women — millennial characters would naturally be documenting themselves a lovelorn cop, a pregnant teen and a young bride — as they and each other anyway: if you wake up in the wrong body tomorrow, struggle to free themselves from their circumstances. “I realised surely the first thing you’d do is take a selfie? The handheld that though I loved Westerns as much as my father did, I couldn’t footage is broken with sweeping aerial shots of the farm where the identify with them. I knew Clint Eastwood would survive, but what film is based, providing added tension through a scenic reminder about me? What would I do, shot at by enemies?,” Bass says. of the monumental role land plays in the past and present politics “I wanted adventure for myself and for others who were ignored of South Africa. by these films. Women have just as much Another way Bass flips the script is right to be in the saddle, and I was sure that by embracing improvisation. In her debut female audiences had the same desires feature, Love The One You Love (2014), the I had, as well as the spirit to act them out.” dialogue is all improvised by the actors; a Through the risks she takes in her unique challenge in the editing suite when story-telling Bass’s foremost goal is to each take is different from the next. And for surprise, which she believes should be the High Fantasy, she worked together with the most important goal of art. “Surprise is the cast to workshop their characters until each most powerful part of entertainment,” she was a hybrid of her initial vision and the way says. “Surprises are essential in a world the actors saw the people they would embody. where we take so much for granted and our “I have a lot of respect for the art of screenwriting and enjoy writing assumptions easily turn to prejudices about the way things are. scripts,” she says. “At the same time, I’ve been in the situation so Surprise disrupts that.”

Film stills (Clockwise from top left) HIGH FANTASY, FLATLAND, HIGH FANTASY, FLATLAND, FLATLAND.

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Building a new Ghana with the country’s leader of afrobeats

Fuse ODG

If Fuse ODG’s 2014 debut This Is New Ghana an essential destination for the Africa (T.I.N.A) was part-LP, part-mission global traveller was to launch the annual statement, then his follow-up New Africa T.I.N.A festival in Accra in January this year.

Nation is a full-blown manifesto. Call it a “Just like if you’re interested in dance music constitution for re-envisioning Africa by you probably go to Ibiza, or visit Atlanta celebrating the creativity and diversity of because you love hip hop, then you come the continent, while remembering how to to Ghana because you love afrobeats,” he have a seriously good time. explains. “The festival is open for everybody Fuse, aka Nana Richard Abiona, grew to come and enjoy while experiencing our up in south London, raised on a diet of culture — the fashion, the food, the people.” rap, grime, bashment and house music.

Ghana’s official Year of Return in 2019 Following a formative trip back to his has also inspired the singer to look into homeland of Ghana in 2011, he developed opening up borders between Ghana and a new sound based on the country’s soundthe Caribbean. “We’re going to charter a track of afrobeats and highlife. Since then plane, bring some influential people down he has been a pioneer in bringing these and — you know — bring them back home,” sounds to a global audience (he’s even got he says. “One day there’s going to be an Ed Sheeran speaking Twi on the album cut airline offering direct flights, it’s going to ‘Boa Me’) with a dedication to Ghana that goes far beyond music. feel so normal, and we’re going to laugh about it. But we want “We’re building a nation, so I guess it does feel like a to take an active role in making the first flight happen — Damian constitution,” Fuse reflects. The album outlines what a ‘New Marley, Sean Paul, Chronixx — they’re all excited about it.”

African’ represents — loving yourself, loving who you are, loving This isn’t being done on a whim, it comes from the musician’s your culture, and loving the people around you. “T.I.N.A was deep fascination with the historical links between Ghana and more focused on intangible achievements, such as changing Jamaica. He immortalised the iconic Nanny of the Maroons in his people’s mentality. Now we’re using this new mentality to create a own range of African dolls (something he created to counteract better reality.” the predominance of white dolls across the continent, while And when Fuse says it, he means it. The years between his highlighting historically important African women), and she debut singles, ‘Antenna’ and ‘Azonto’ — both of which topped the is a clear inspiration for the New African mindset. Born into UK charts in 2013 and 2014 respectively — and the new album the Asante people, nanny led the Jamaican Maroons — a rebel have seen him not only tease a few tracks, but also develop faction from the enslaved people brought from Ghana to Jamaica. philanthropic music and education models across Ghana. “The Maroons actually got their independence way before anybody He recently opened a primary school in Akosombo, which now in the Caribbean,” he attests. has around 200 pupils, and is currently raising funds to expand Nanny is one of many ancestral guides and pan-African to a secondary school through pledges from his connections thinkers that are namechecked on this confident and empowering and fellow musicians. The idea is that if you sponsor a class then album, which kicks off with the song ‘Bra Fie’, a duet with Damian he will name it after you. So far he’s in talks with Lethal Bizzle, Marley overlaid with a rousing independence speech by President Chip and Wiley, and he’s brought Reggie Yates, Stefflon Don and Kwame Nkrumah. “You know, this is a New Africa, but Nkrumah Manny Norte to the school for visits. already started it, we’re just carrying on the legacy,” he says.

Fuse is dedicated to bringing people to Ghana, spurred on “I couldn’t have done this years ago. We had to have all the in part by his decision to decline Sir Bob Geldof’s offer to take part ears that we have now for us to be able to remind people of the in Band Aid 30 in 2014. Wanting to promote the Africa he knew — leaders from the past who started off the movement that we need one of positivity, power and innovation — against an engrained to now carry on. Out of respect for the people that paved the way — image of suffering and poverty, he’s become an official tourism for Thomas Sankara, Marcus Garvey, Luther King, Fela Kuti, ambassador for the country. “Why don’t we invest in Africa in Miriam Makeba, even Bob Marley — we need to now continue this the long run so people can actually come on holiday and spend mission.” Pausing, clearly aware of the weight this legacy carries, as much as they can?,” he argues. One step towards making he adds, “It’s already been written. I’m just echoing it.”

Words EMMA GILHOOLY Photography JUNIOR JIMENEZ

The jewellery designer crafting complex simplicity

Kiala Kanzi Kiala Kanzi officially launched her eponymous jewellery brand Which is why this fresh talent’s designs are made by hand and then in February 2019, but her love for crafting dates way back. “I’ve lovingly gold-plated. “There’s a radiating element to the pieces, always been creative,” she says. “I started with tailoring, they bring a soothing light,” she says, adding that it’s important shoemaking and product design, and then I realised I was that her approach to design remains unforced and experimental: actually into small things.” Currently based in Barcelona, Kanzi “you can just go with the flow and come up with a different shape has been building up her portfolio for the past three years, all as you’re creating the piece.” Her growing love for one-of-a-kind the while studying jewellery and object design. And as her first pieces has also led her to start developing a bespoke line, which pieces reveal, it’s obvious that despite her minimalist aesthetic, has already caught the attention of British musician Jorja Smith, Kiala Kanzi is about offering the heirlooms of tomorrow. who’ll soon be seen wearing a Kiala Kanzi custom crown in her This ambition stems from Kanzi’s memories of being fasci- next music video. nated by her grandmother’s gold jewellery as a child, Speaking to Kianzi, it’s clear that her versatility which is when she realised the inherent power of the pushes her to continuously test different directions and accessory. “It’s not something you need; it’s something go beyond the simply pretty. “The names of my pieces you decide to wear because you want to.” So she’s now are inspired by spirituality and the cosmos to reflect committed to translating stories into exquisite keepthe idea of searching for meaning in life,” she reveals. ables. Whether it’s a pair of statement earrings, a This explains why she refers to her approach as signet ring or a chain necklace, there is always history “complex simplicity” because, despite the wearability of behind the design, which relates back to her personal her jewellery, there are multiple beautiful facets to her journey as a German-Cameroonian-Syrian designer. brand. For example, each design comes accompanied “So many things have been insensibly appropriated by a poem exploring the messages behind it. As Kanzi and commercialised,” she reflects. “It’s only natural says, “I don’t want to impose limits to what I can do.” that I want to express who I am and reclaim my identity through my work.”

Styling, hair & make-up KIALA KANZI

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Words SARAH BEN ROMDANE

Photography ANGIE LOPEZ

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The many guises of the stripped back soulful singer

Charlotte Adigéry

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Words MIRIAM BOUTEBA

Photography VIRGINIE KHATEEB

NATAAL

“When I’m on stage and I start singing, I get into this place where time doesn’t exist. It’s like a kind of meditation but really dynamic.

I lose all self-consciousness, am impulsive and completely in tune with the audience and the frequencies of the music. It’s transcendent.”

Charlotte Adigéry is talking about the ethereal, psychedelic performances that make the gigs of this Belgian Caribbean talent such a must-see. They’ve also garnered her fans including Neneh Cherry, who Adigéry supported on the music icon’s most recent tour. “I do this Slits cover and it turns out that Neneh was on the recording of that song,” says Adigéry. “She saw me play in Tasmania and stayed for the whole show. When we played that song, she was in the front row dancing and cheering, which was mind blowing.”

Born and still based in Ghent — a uniquely from each angle, Adigéry reveals look in the eyes of the women in the salon: pretty Flemish town that couldn’t really different sides of herself depending on the ‘I’m going to be beautiful in an hour — yes!’ be described as multicultural — to a moniker she chooses. “Charlotte Adigéry And it’s such a nice way to treat yourself.”

Guadeloupean father and a Martiniquan is a little more polished, without being Meanwhile as WWWater, she takes a mother, Adigéry stands out. “It’s fun. plastic. WWWater is rawer with a punk very relatable swipe at social media on her It’s like a village, but sometimes I miss vibe, it goes to the bare essentials — I want song ‘Screen’. “It’s a daily struggle; it’s an diversity and the freedom from having it to be nasty and filthy.” intrusion. It’s not that I think that people to defend or define who I am as a black As the former, her second EP, Zandoli, are being rude or needy — not at all. It’s just woman. It’s exhausting to be walking is danceable, poppy and electronic — a the fact of being constantly available on so around, feeling people staring,” she co-production with fellow Ghent natives many different channels.” And, of course, confides. Adigéry writes music in English, and label bosses Soulwax. Lead single with her success, the level of contact French and sometimes Creole, and re- ‘High Lights’ is a joyous middle finger at with fans and potential collaborators has leases both under her own name and her people who try to shame her for her love of increased. “I appreciate the human feeling alias, WWWater. This multiplicity means wearing all manner of colourful, synthetic behind it, and I would love it if people knew her music is defiantly genre fluid. “I love wigs. Because, rather than being a kind of that I’m super grateful — but let’s all stop, all types of music, but what I am mainly mask — much like her musical personas — please. Let’s all love each other when we inspired by is stubbornness — artists who they reveal alternative aspects of this multi- see each other.” are fearless and create with freedom,” she faceted star. “For black women, wearing says. “I see myself as a sponge. I soak it wigs is part of our culture. It’s a way to CHARLOTTE wears VIVIENNE WESTWOOD vintage corset, trousers, own hat. all in, strip it back and make it minimal, raw celebrate yourself, it’s like, who am I going ZARA Styling SARANNE WOODCROFT. Hair LAURAINE BAILEY. and my own.” Like a diamond that sparkles to be next?,” she reflects. “You can see the Make-up MIN SANDHU at CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT.

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The architect shaping the future of Niger

Mariam Kamara Mariam Kamara is dedicated to designing buildings in Niger that reflect the people and the place. The celebrated architect’s studio, Atelier Masomi, was only established in 2014, yet has already completed a number of projects that demonstrate how in tune Kamara’s approach is with her environment and the needs of her country’s population.

One problem that her work tackles is that many cities in African countries are built in the image of their colonial rulers, not their indigenous history. By contrast Kamara employs vernacular materials and methods.

“The spaces and environments that we create have a profound impact on us at a psychological level, they effect how we view ourselves,” she says. “I realised that architecture was a powerful tool for self-realisation. If you don't have anything that represents you, how are you supposed to have any sense of what you are?

It’s like you don’t matter.”

Atelier Masomi is changing that narrative with its diverse output, from housing complexes and outdoor markets to cultural buildings and schools. “We have a certain introspection about how much more you can do beyond the brief. Not just a building for the building’s sake, but thinking about what the contribution is.

What is the value?”

Kamara uses her local sensitivity and an understanding of behaviours to ensure that the structures she creates feel familiar

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Words KATIE DE KLEE

to their users; that they are something the community recognise and understand. This ensures that her projects have a thoughtful, functional and graceful quality.

As Niger is a desert country, Kamara’s approach is also informed by the extreme climate. What better way to combat this than with materials that have proved useful for centuries? “I only have access to three materials — earth, metal and some concrete.

There is some low-grade glass, but it’s not really worth using,” she explains. “You have to keep things simple, but you can make so many different things from a limited number of materials.”

The Hikma religious and secular complex, a remarkable mosque and library in the Hausa village of Dandaji in western Niger, is her most celebrated undertaking so far. This was a collaboration with Iranian architect Yasaman Esmaili, founder of Studio Chahar and fellow member of the global architecture collective united4design, which the pair co-founded in 2013. As two women from Muslim countries, they were excited to work on a project that redefined the boundary between the everyday and the divine. The poetry of the project is in the interaction between the two structures. On one side of the compound sits an original mosque, which the village had outgrown, and which had fallen into disrepair, now reborn as a library. Just across from it is a new mosque, larger than the previous one yet complimentary and sympathetic in style.

The two façades face each other and a path takes individuals from

Photography MAURICE ASCANI & JAMES WANG

NATAAL

one to the other, manifesting in space and form the collapse of tensions between religious and secular knowledge.

“The current library used to be a mosque, so the link was immediate,” Kamara says of the project. “It was a building that the villagers were really familiar with, and there is a comfort in that.

And then a mosque — no matter how old or new — is a building that is used every day, and there is comfort in that. The two together just made sense.”

The population of Dandaji is young and literacy rates are low, with the local middle school serving children from five surrounding villages. The new library has provided books, quiet spaces and a computer lab in an effort to boost graduation rates. It has also welcomed women’s groups, who now have a civic space where they can meet and run workshops. To renovate the building, Kamara and her team invited the masons who originally worked on the building back to the village to participate in the work, and they also contributed in the construction of the new one. For both they used compressed earth bricks, which are much easier to maintain than the adobe used on the original façade, but have the same thermal qualities. The project won the LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction in 2017, and soon after Kamara was invited to join the Rolex Protégé programme, which entails a twoyear mentorship with David Adjaye.

Kamara has always loved architecture but, being a practical

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person, she studied computer science instead. “I wanted to be an architect since I was ten years old, but I didn’t think it was reasonable. I didn’t know any African architects then,” she says. The yearning never faded however, and several years into her computer-engineering career in the US, she quit and returned to school to follow her vocation, at the University of Washington. “While studying I would have moments at 3am when I would get overwhelmed and just tear up because I felt so in harmony,” she recalls.

Kamara now divides her time between Niamey, Niger’s capital, and Providence, near Boston, Massachusetts. At the moment she and Adjaye are working on a cultural centre in Niamey. During workshops with local youth to develop the project, it became clear that there was a hunger among them for learning. When presented with a series of objects they resonated most with books, which they saw as a means of experiencing worlds beyond their own lives. “The impact and the consequences of what you build are much more impactful in countries that are vulnerable. It’s not theoretical. There is a huge responsibility that comes with the practice,” she reflects. “However, something that serves purpose can also be beautiful.”

With thanks to DESIGN INDABA.

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Six young men whose brotherhood is creating a new music culture in Accra

La M�me Gang I vividly remember how I felt the first day I spent with La Même Gang the people you have to be relatable, you have to sing or rap in Collective. There was a palpable energy that coursed through Twi or Ga’, but our music transcends these ideals.” the dimly lit Villain Sounds studio as they belted out lyrics and Stemming from their own stories, inspirations and lifestyles, adlib over the 808 and bass-heavy song they were making. I don’t Feels appeals to more people than the six friends had anticipated. even remember what song it was. It might have been ‘Bangers’, It is the truth of the young people in Accra. It is a lifestyle they ‘Ikechukwu’, or ‘Lost’. But you could feel the heat in their lyrics and know and idolise. It’s full of the tales they heard growing up, things in their movements. With the AC on full blast, it was hot. The type they’ve experienced and understand. “You don’t have to think too of heat you don’t feel on your skin; that you feel within your soul. much about good music. People focus on making a hit. But good In the eerie glow the desktop produced, as I watched these young music — it just strikes you. You feel it, and you make others feel it men jump and sing, engulfed in the vivacity of the music they had too,” says $Pacely. just created, I knew they were going to change things.

The truth in their sound propelled the collective into the position This was some time in 2016. They weren’t yet a collective. of leaders of Ghana’s new music scene — and La Même Gang are Darkovibes, KiddBlack, Nxwrth, $Pacely, RJZ and KwakuBs were changing the game. “They pushed the envelope further and built a just a bunch of young boys who had coincidentally met at this niche,” explains Kuvie. “Their trap sound isn’t disconnected from studio, each drawn there by their desire to make music. One could the culture; it is the culture.” say it was destiny. This spot in the heart of Spintex, a suburb of After their first headline show sold out in December 2017, Accra, provided a safe haven for them, and it was here that they everyone knew La Même Gang was here to stay. La Même Tape 1 developed an unwavering bond. opened doors that they weren’t even aware existed. They went “We all grew up in Villain Sounds,” says $Pacely. “We lived from being described as Soundcloud artists to being put on together. We learnt to understand our needs and differences. main stages with top performers to recording songs with some This bred loyalty between us. We could be fighting, but we would of Ghana’s best musicians. For $Pacely, having the opportunity never air each other out in public.” RJZ concurs: “They’re my to record with R2Bees was a milestone. “I grew up listening to brothers and I love them. I don’t remember the exact moment I these guys and now I’m in studios making music with them. realised this, but it’s just little things that make me aware.” There It’s crazy,” he says. exists an undeniable brotherhood between La Même Gang.

Their attention-grabbing creative expression could well lead From different backgrounds and different philosophies, it’s so to borderless success. “I see us becoming megastars,” RJZ beautiful to see black men appreciate each other so openly. predicts enthusiastically. “We could be selling out the O2 Arena This bond ignited their relationship with the producer Kuvie. or a stadium,” $Pacely adds. “But it’s not just for the six of us. It’s With a couple of hit songs buzzing on the radio, Kuvie was already for all other creatives too. Like Kwabsmah, Ordartei, Bu and all well sought after, but he chose to dedicate his time to nurture these guys.” these boys. “Most artists are backbiters, but these guys work “It goes beyond us. I’ve never made music for me,” RJZ adds. together so effortlessly,” Kuvie reflects. “They have drive. I’d “It’s about the people.” wake up at dawn and see Darkovibes up and writing. They have a This selflessness is what makes their music expansive, hunger to win.” resulting in a subgenre that goes beyond a blend of music Their close-knit energy is also what fuels their sound, which influences to become a contagious, soulful journey. La Même is aptly defined as ‘Feels’. “Feels is doing whatever we feel like Gang is a band of Ghanaian boys fuelled by their passion to make doing,” explains $Pacely. “In Ghana most people try to box you in music. But it is also a calling for African youth to kill off the status and make you do a specific sound. They say, ‘if you want to reach quo and create their own universe.

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Words BENEWAAH BOATENG

Photographer OFOE AMEGAVIE

NATAAL

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Missing Sierra

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Photography ALMASS BADAT

NATAAL

A poem by Julianknxx written exclusively for Nataal

Backyard sugarcane molasses, music through my teeth.

Morning cockcrow alarms, orange sunsets, kissing me dark.

Showed me a history in blackouts.

Evening cricket blues, all summer years gave smiles, wrapped in dreams – despite war.

This land, a skipping rock, no lion faces in the mountains.

Black bodies targets, black cuffed boys, black girls stripped, black skin grey, Barren borders, all these starlets dreams, washed.

Truth biting our history, our hopes silent, searching change.

Julian wears LABRUM LONDON. Assistance BOS NOOJI.

UPFRONT

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Stepping inside the freshly opened NYC institution with CEO Uzodinma Iweala

The Africa Center Sitting majestically at One Museum Mile Iweala explains. “It’s a multi-disciplinary is The Africa Center (TAC). This splendid approach and a participatory process. We Robert A.M. Stern-designed building has will develop this iterative thinking into TAC’s tantalised onlookers with the potential of its DNA as we grow. If we are transforming ideas 70,000-square-foot, three-storey presence around what the story of Africa is, then we for a while. The non-profit organisation has must remain ready to transform ourselves.” been built on the legacy of the legendary The first art installation came from Victor Museum for African Art, founded by Elsie Ekpuk, who created the site-specific mural McCabe Thompson in 1984. The museum Harlem Sunshine. This was followed by the first opened on the Upper East Side, before exhibition All Power To All People by Hank migrating to Soho and Long Island City, Willis Thomas in association with Kindred until finally setting its sights on its current Arts. There have been theatre performances prestigious location. It was due to re-open by the Hear Word! collective and music from in 2015, but after various setbacks its scope the Chineke! Orchestra, as well as workshops and vision transformed and in early 2019,

by AtWork, an art initiative of the Moleskine TAC opened its doors with a renewed and Foundation and curator Simon Njami. Also refreshingly straightforward vigour. exciting is the arrival of Portals, a shared “Our mission is to transform narratives studio housed in a shipping container that about Africa,” says Uzodinma Iweala (the award-winning author facilitates real-time video interactions between participants in of novels Beasts of No Nation and Speak No Evil), who began similar portals around the globe. “We are thrilled with our varied as CEO of TAC in 2018, joining a board of trustees that includes audiences so far. Some people have been waiting for a long time co-chairs Hadeel Ibrahim, Chelsea Clinton and president Halima for us to open, and some had never heard of us before, but either Dangote. “Our three main tenets are culture, policy and business. way are super excited that a place like this exists for them.”

We’re starting with culture because that’s how you shape Now that TAC is finally open, the next step will be to open narratives. These stories are complex — some are exhilarating a larger performance and gallery space and after that, develop and some are tragic — so this is an opportunity to show what it a marketplace, makers’ space and educational facilities, plus a means to be African, and examine the importance of Africa’s policy institute and business centre. “When it comes to policy, place in the world.” our starting point is thinking imaginatively about Africa’s massive TAC started small but perfectly formed with Teranga, a café youth population. What future are we trying to build in terms and installation space offering casual dining by famed Senegalese of security, employment and the environment?”, Iweala says. chef Pierre Thiam, as well as a line-up of performances, exhibitions, “At a moment when there are so many forces seeking to divide us, discussions, book readings and film screenings. “We have TAC can provide an amazing space for a celebration of creative focussed on building community and relationships through our connectivity and productive debate.” initial programming. As an institution, our people are our collection, so we’re trying things out as a way to gather thoughts and ideas,” Architectural photography ANITA NG at FRAME STUDIOS.

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Words HELEN JENNINGS

Photography OLGA DE LA IGLESIA

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The Amazigh designer showing the sartorial side of Algeria

Precious Trust

“I want to show youth, nature, family, been like a journal, and most of the love stories and everything all references are moments that only I around,” says Wathek Allah, a young would understand. I don’t want to just man on a mission. “I love the North create random clothing, it’s really all African tacky and romantic stuff.” Fed for me.” up with the negative stereotypes that Making use of traditional Amazigh come attached to being Algerian, colours and fabrics, such as plush he uses the medium of fashion to green and rich burgundy wools, Allal spread the word of an underrated constructs modern, sporty pieces and misrepresented country that’s that are built with movement in mind. brimming with culture, tradition, and The look is minimalist and created crucially, romance. without any sense of irony. “I’m inBorn in Syria to Algerian parents, would say ‘Algerian’ in a bad way; the word spired by Algerian costume but it doesn’t at the advent of war, when he was 15 had negative stereotypes attached to it have to be traditional clothing, it could years old, Allal’s family fled to Dubai. about how Algerians are angry all the time. be how Algerian youths wear tracksuits It’s there that his label, Precious Trust, It just became this thing where I was like, and side-bags,” he explains. “And my began. “I liked florals and preppy stuff ‘Okay, cool, I’m not Algerian then’. But then designs are inspired by skateboarding like suit pants, but I could never find it I started finding out about all of the things too — I’ve been skating for about eight here, or it was really expensive. So I made that are happening there.” Reconnecting years — so have made things more myself a floral-covered tracksuit with a with the country, he was especially taken comfortable with convenient pocket really clean silhouette.” A few months with the way that young Algerians express placement.” Also a self-taught illustrator, later he was dropping out of studying to emotion. “People write on walls and have Allal uses imagery to show another side be a pilot and was instead hosting his first these tattoos about each other. It’s over of Africa’s largest country. His previous pop-up store. He sold out of everything the top because they are very, very caring. collections have featured a graphic of and now, two years down the line, and with They act like they’re tough but on the inside a crossword that revealed facts about fans in the UK and Japan, he is releasing they’re really sweet.”

Algeria, and illustrations of local pastries. his third full collection, called Late Night A personal project, this label is an “There are so many amazing things to talk Beach. His most recent offering reflects expression of a young man falling in love about, but no-one does.” on the importance of having somewhere with his homeland. Indeed the name of his inspirational to go that is capable of evoki- brand derives from his first name, Wathek, ng emotion, memory and peace of mind. which translates as ‘trust’ and Precious NICOLE SUMANASEKERA, ASMA AL-ALOOSI, Growing up, Allal would hide his is the nickname he gives to those close Models PARVANE BARRET, WIDAD HASSAN, GONCA AKKEL, heritage. “When I was living in Syria, people to him. “From the beginning my work has ZARA NELSON, LINA SABRY.

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Words MIRIAM BOUTEBA

Photography & Styling WATHEK ALLAL

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NATAAL

Two Lagos-based models setting fresh beauty standards

Coco & Gideon New models Coco Anetor-Sokei and Gideon Mustapha are making waves on Nigerian catwalks. After studying journalism in Accra, Coco has been modelling professionally for just a few months. While science student Gideon began balancing the demands of the classroom with the catwalk after he was scouted last year. Nataal caught up with the two to talk about beauty standards in Nigeria and the rising presence of albino models.

DEBBIE SHASANYA DEBBIE SHASANYA How have you found modelling so far?

How did you start modelling?

COCO ANETOR-SOKEI GIDEON MUSTAPHA I enjoy being a muse and part of a vision. I like working I was scouted at a pageant show in Alausa. It’s been a with different models and artists, it fascinates me that no two great process of self-discovery for me. It turns out that I actually creatives approach things the same way. like working out and exercising, which at first felt like punishment.

DS What was your experience of growing up in Nigeria?

DS Do you see specific standards of beauty, living in Lagos?

CAS For the most part I was sheltered. When people would GM Looking good matters everywhere, regardless of who you sing the ‘oyibo pepper’ song, I usually just sang along are — and we are all beautiful. because I never really thought about why they were singing it. DS Has the rise of albino models paved the way for aspiring I knew I was different, but it didn’t click that I was albino. albino models?

DS How would you say albinism fits into current standards GM Seeing the likes of Shaun Ross succeed has been of beauty in Nigeria? positive. I guess we are trending right now, which feels CAS I’ve only ever been ‘beautiful for an albino’, and that’s relatively good because visibility can add worth and face value. because I don’t have the freckles that a lot of albinos in DS What was your experience of growing up in Nigeria?

Nigeria do. But albinos are albinos. When someone refers to me GM It has been glory all the way. I give thanks to God that as pretty, it’s often followed by how ‘clean’ I am.

I have been surrounded by people who love me.

DS From the annual Mr & Miss Albinism to the catwalk and DS Have you ever dealt with any negative attention? social media. Do you think attitudes are finally shifting?

GM There have been minor incidents. When I’m walking CAS I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but definitely not through the streets of Lagos I get people calling me here in Nigeria. The problem isn’t visibility but ignorance. afin or oyibo, which are Yoruba and Igbo words for an albino/ DS Did you ever see any albino personalities in the media white person. that helped you accept your own albinism?

CAS I’ve always been very okay with being albino. People like (Clockwise from left) COCO wears NACK Tunic. COCO wears XII top.

Diandra Forrest, Mirian Njoh and Mpho Mofokeng have GIDEON wears NACK top.

Styling JIDE ALI. Photography assistance JAMES UKPAI. Models COCO played a huge role in boosting my self-confidence. I see them ANETOR-SOKEI. GIDEON MUSTAPHA at LED MODEL MANAGEMENT. Production GENERATION X. Thanks to AWCA CREATIVES. living their best lives and I think, ‘I can do that too’.

UPFRONT

Words DEBBIE SHASANYA

Photography NOMA OSULA

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An architect’s vision for the National Cathedral of Ghana in Accra

David Adjaye

Sir David Adjaye OBE’s recently concluded exhibition at London’s Design Museum, Making Memory, asked us to consider what constitutes a monument or memorial today. This provocation hoped to elicit a collective questioning of imperial ideas about structures that sanctify a single vision, individual or event, and instead view them as an opportunity to contemplate both personal and societal experiences. “The monument is an experience of time and place that is available to everyone. Whether it’s for a nation, a race, a community, or a person, it is really a device to talk about the many issues facing people across the planet,” Adjaye says.

Among the projects unveiled by the much-lauded British Ghanaian architect was the National Cathedral of Ghana in Accra, which has been commissioned by the Ghanaian government and is due to be completed by 2024. “This is a nationbuilding project that recognises culture

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that is spiritually based and that creates a national space for the celebration of life and death,” Adjaye says. “It was poignant that Kofi Anan’s funeral was held in a commercial hall, showing how deficit the situation was that the country didn’t have somewhere to dignify such a person.”

Adjaye’s design brings Christianity and local beliefs together by taking cues from several sources, among them Akan stools (a symbol of power that is imbued with the spirit of its user) and Adinkra stamps (used to print decorative symbols on textiles related to strength, authority and protection). He also looked at the ancient Christian architectural form of the tabernacle — a portable tent-like

Words HELEN JENNINGS

dwelling — that echoes the large ceremonial umbrellas used to shade Akan leaders, and Baoman canopies.

These forms are seen in the cathedral’s majestically swooping external structure, within which a multi-functional auditorium will accommodate up to 15,000 people. The building also houses chapels, a baptistery, music school, art gallery, Bible museum and documentary centre, and sits within a 15-acre garden with multiple spaces for gathering. While simultaneously celebrating and creating culture in its form and intentions, the National Cathedral of Ghana promises to take on an active role in navigating the many voices that make up the country by welcoming all visitors to engage with the site — and each other — in new and open ways.

Photography ED REEVE. Render courtesy ADJAYE ASSOCIATES.

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The Kenyan filmmaker on Africa’s imaginative tale-telling

Wanuri Kahiu “We have to see ourselves as people of joy,” asserts Wanuri Kahiu. “We are not naturally remorseful people. There are stories of joy throughout Africa’s history — our cultures, myths, kingdoms and legends. All we have to do is claim them.” This mantra has always powered the acclaimed Nairobi-based filmmaker and author’s work. That and what she calls “world creation” — imagining new domains through her narratives and then seducing the audience into believing wholeheartedly in them.

Since graduating from The University of California, Kahiu’s award-winning films have included her first feature From A Whisper, the sci-fi short Pumzi and For Our Land, a documentary on activist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. Kahiu is also co-founder of Afrobubblegum, a media-company-cum-global movement that creates ‘fun, fierce and frivolous African art’.

“Why, as African artists, does our work have to be associated with seriousness or subjects considered important? Why can’t it just be associated with imagination?” she insists. But that’s not to say her work does not cause change. Most recently, her sensitively told queer love story Rafiki — Kenya’s first entry in the official section at Festival de Cannes, in 2018 — was hailed internationally, while being banned from cinemas at home for daring to show two beautiful souls of the same sex find each other in an unforgiving society. Nataal met Kahiu at Design Indaba 2019, where she revealed some of the African fables, including her own, that bring hope and happiness.

RAFIKI rivers. Those who worship them receive good luck. They’re also “I’m not an activist, so being thrown into that space once the film allies of people who protect nature. We need to imagine that there was banned was a huge challenge. But we took the classification are more of us who can conjure up water and change nature as board to court for infringing Kenya’s constitutional right of free a result, that there are creatures who show themselves in this speech and managed to get the ban beautifully curious, African way.” lifted for seven days. That was wonderful.

NINKI NANKA Every screening was sold out. And the “Ninki Nankas are glorious dragons from support we received from the LGBTQ Gambia. They have long necks similar to community was really beautiful. So many a giraffe, three horns on top of their heads, queer people said they were glad to see the face of a horse and live in swamps. themselves represented on screen, that There are stories of naughty children who they’d never felt seen or valued before. would get swallowed by Ninki Nankas, That was my biggest takeaway. I want to which also have glassy scales and can add value and I want to continue to be in spit fire. They haven’t been discovered service of the art that is filmmaking.” yet but there is still hope.”

PUMZI AFRICAN PHOTO COMICS “This is a film about a young girl called “These were hugely popular comics Asha who is a conduit for nature. The created between the 1960s and 1980s. idea was to show black women in the They were written in Nigeria, shot in role of Mother Nature. As a fan of Wangari Swaziland and distributed in Kenya, Maathai, someone who was seen as a Ghana and South Africa by Drum magrevolutionary for going out and planting azine. They were about Son of Samson, trees, all I could do was celebrate her Cobra and The Spear, and were brimming courage. Asha lives in the inside world with African superheroes in spandex. The because the outside world is dead, and fact that these were full of pan-African she builds a virtual Natural Museum. One images of joy during Apartheid and just day she receives a sample of soil, she after independence is extraordinary to plants a seed and it starts to grow, so she me. They have such life and help us see decides to venture outside.” ourselves as people of radical hope.”

JENGU “Jengus are mermaids from Cameroon.

They are bushy haired, gap-toothed water With thanks to DESIGN INDABA. WANURI wears KATUNGULU MWENDWA dress. spirits who live in the oceans, seas and

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Photography MAGANGA MWAGOGO

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Step into this unstoppable photographer’s black utopia

Tyler Mitchell

Tyler Mitchell was just 23 when he shot Beyoncé for the September stuff Larry Clark and Ryan McGinley would make,” he reflects.

2018 issue of Vogue. This act propelled the Brooklyn-based “I very seldom saw the same for black people in images — or at filmmaker and photographer into the headlines for being the first least in the photography I knew of then.” black photographer to shoot a cover in the US magazine’s 126-year His work has featured in Dazed, Document Journal and history — and the youngest to do so as well. Since then he hasn’t Nataal, while he continues to work with Vogue. Publishing had time to look back, as his star continues to rise majestically.

El Paquete, a book of photography capturing skate culture in This fresh talent makes use of pastel shades and natural Havana, he has also shown as part of Red Hook Labs, Artsy and light to capture young black people in bucolic surroundings and Aperture Foundation exhibitions, and this year enjoyed his debut against beautiful backdrops. Hoping to redress the balance away solo show at Foam in Amsterdam. from the negative portrayals of people of colour in the media, his images project his subjects as delicate and light-hearted. “I would very often come across sensual, young, attractive white models (Clockwise from top left) UNTITLED (HAT), 2018. BOYS OF WALTHAMSTOW, 2018. running around being free and having so much fun — the kind of UNTITLED (TWO GIRLS EMBRACE), 2018. UNTITLED (TOPANGA, CA I), 2017.

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Photography TYLER MITCHELL

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ART COMES Leaders of the pack Words MAZZI ODU Photography JAMIE MORGAN 40

FIRST NATAAL

“Our original concept was not to sell anything but just create, invoke and provoke comfortable minds to think about things in different ways.

The balance comes from not focusing on the commercial side, but on the creation itself,” says Sam Lambert, who, alongside Shaka Maidoh, founded Art Comes First (ACF) a decade ago. With a handcrafted aesthetic informed by an in-depth knowledge of Savile Row tailoring, infused with the rebellion of punk and a DIY philosophy, the London-based collective now has satellites in several cities, who all share the mandate of celebrating sartorial alchemy.

“We are both married to the art of craft. We have a saying: ‘Music is life, we perform cloth,’” Lambert explains. “Every designer is a frustrated rock star, so since most of us couldn't do music, the scissors are the instrument we perform with.” It thus comes as no surprise that style aficionados and menswear addicts around the globe have embraced the brand with alacrity.

One glimpse at ACF’s Instagram feed reveals several followers with ACF tattoos, the initials purposefully standing for various slogans including Ancient Culture Footstep, Artists Can’t Fear, Always Cut First and Avec Ces Frères.

In an era where collaboration, particularly in fashion, has become a must-do rather than a nice-to-have, ACF’s innate knack for teaming up with choice creatives and brands has been canny. Recent co-creations include a premium jeans line with Turkish eco-brand Calik Denim, and a capsule collection with British heritage sportswear brand Fred Perry, which took them to Jamaica to riff on the country’s rich reggae culture (each shirt comes packaged in an ACF record sleeve).

“I think collaborations, or contributions, as I like to call them, are a great way of experimenting and creating a mix of different worlds, colours, feelings, textures and

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cultures,” Lambert says. “It’s the most beautiful way of visualising a fantasy.

Trying new things that you wouldn't normally dare to do, but at the same time still feeling like you.”

Lambert was born in Angola and sharpened his tailoring teeth on Savile Row, first at Spencer Hart and then at Ozwald Boateng, where he and Londonborn Maidoh initially worked together.

They started ACF by creating conceptual collections and installations, while also offering a design consultancy.

Soon they became known for their monochromatic, refined designs based on essential menswear items — the perfect hat, the suitably louche leather jacket or the cleverly compartmented travel case. Fast-forward to SS19, and ACF have looked to Africa’s coastal cities such as Dakar and Accra for their Surf Afrika collection, which fuses athletic shapes with 1950s Americana classics. Meanwhile for AW19, Electric Church prays to the gods of rock ’n’ roll with its mix of ecclesiastical and on-tour silhouettes.

Over the years Maidoh and Lambert’s shared universe has expanded, as the stamps in their passports have accumulated, with these self-styled ‘black gypsies’ and perennial street-style stars adopting more and more like-minded friends who now form part of the collective. These include ACF’s official photographer David Pattinson, the musician Dani Bumba, who also works as a sound collaborator, and Dennis Okwera, who wears the dual-hat of fit model and muse. There’s also the sculptor Kirrikoo, painter Francis Enfanct Précoce and Dio Kurazawa, who leads on business and sustainability

ART COMES FIRST

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alongside Franck Fanny, who looks after the group’s Africa operations and media.

Currently ACF are working alongside one of their closest compatriots, Amah Ayivi, founder of Marché Noir, the renowned Parisian dealer and designer of vintage clothing, accessories and objets.

He originally caused a stir with his concept store in the Marais, and now Marché Noir exists as a nomadic pop-up, often forming part of ACF’s fashion week showrooms.

Ayivi was an early adaptor of vintage curating, and at a time when the fashion and textile industry is one of the biggest polluters on the planet, his approach to re-imagining archive pieces is especially pertinent. “Amah definitely made us start thinking about sustainability with his amazing process of buying vintage clothes dumped in Africa, amending them with local tailors and then bringing them back to Paris, where they’re still relevant

in this era where sportswear fashion is leading,” says Lambert.

Together, ACF and Ayivi have formed Laboratoire Blacksupermarket, a line that is rooted in the premise of repurposing vintage pieces and adding a contemporary twist that marries both of their design languages. The collection will launch during Paris Men’s Fashion Week in June, and not surprisingly will go beyond the remit of creating clothing. “Laboratoire Blacksupermarket is also our creative agency where we represent up-andcoming black creatives with raw talent in art, music, photography and fashion,” Lambert explains. Their methodology is reminiscent of the guilds of yesteryear, where apprentices would have an opportunity to hone skills and develop knowledge as well as have a platform for their finished work. With entry to market remaining a huge challenge, especially

“Every designer is a frustrated rock star”

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ART COMES FIRST

for younger and minority creatives, the initiative is much needed.

Looking forward, ACF are set to continue their fruitful collaboration with Fred Perry (“The next one is something special that mixes fashion with other art forms,” Lambert promises). They’re also working on a visual project with contemporary artist Hassan Hajjaj and a collaboration with The Mighty Machines motorbike brand in Antwerp. The breadth of these projects speaks to the duo’s insatiable desire to engage with fashion and craft via myriad lenses, and to not be pigeonholed in an industry that thrives on swift categorisation.

Africa may be having a moment in mainstream media, with scores of international publications and outlets shining a spotlight on talent from the continent, but when asked if this in any way affects how ACF works, Lambert responds emphatically: “To tell you the truth, I really don't pay attention to that because our work it not considered African, even though our aesthetic is very much inspired by the continent.

I guess it is not so obvious for most people.” However, as a continent that is undergoing an extensive overhaul in terms of norms, aesthetics and representation, especially in the creative disciplines, ACF’s guiding principle of “destroy, innovate and then create something new that is suitable for now with a tomorrow mind-set,” resonates very well.

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(Above) FRANÇIS, PAUL and DANI wear ART COMES FIRST full looks.

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ART COMES FIRST

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(Clockwise from left) AMAH wears ART COMES FIRST X MARCHE NOIR LABORATOIRE BLACKSUPERMARKET vintage replica collaboration, MARCHE NOIR Batakali.

DAVID wears ART COMES FIRST full look. SHAKA wears ART COMES FIRST full look.

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(Previous spread left and right) MARGI wears ART COMES FIRST full look. DENNIS wears ART COMES FIRST full look and ACF X OLIVER GOLDSMITH sunglasses.

(Opposite) OLIVIER PHILIPPE wears ART COMES FIRST full look. (Above) FATOUMATA wears ART COMES FIRST full look.

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(Below) SAM wears ART COMES FIRST full look. (Opposite) CLARCK wears ART COMES FIRST full look.

Cast AMAH AYIVI, FRANÇIS ESSOUA, PAUL IBOKO, DANI BUMBA, MARGI VAN DOREN, DAVID PATTINSON, OLIVIER PHILIPPE AMANY, FATOUMATA KABA, CLARCK AYESSA, OUSMANE SARR, DENNIS OKWERA at STORM, SHAKA MAIDOH and SAM LAMBERT.

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Words BIANCA AMA MANU Photography TEKNARI

Nubuke Foundation curator Bianca Ama Manu meets with the emerging Ghanaian artist

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Striking and sensual, there’s no denying the allure of Na Chainkua Reindorf’s undulating and multi-dimensional handwoven tapestries, often with freeformed edges, containing thousands of meticulously sewn-in patterns of iridescent beads. Her mixed media works incorporate folds, moulds, weaves and wefts to paint colour fields that enchant you in their process. I can confess so from my own experience: I was introduced to Reindorf through Accra’s Nubuke Foundation and have been an avid supporter ever since, showing her work during ART X Lagos 2018 to great success. Living between Accra and New York State, where she recently completed the MFA programme at Cornell University, I caught up with Reindorf as she was preparing for her solo show this summer at Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts in Binghamton, New York State — the result of three years of conversation between Reindorf and John Brunelli, co-director of the gallery.

BIANCA AMA MANU Your practice often involves an element of constructing and building immersive tapestries or sculptural installations; tell me about your process and how you invite people to engage with your work?

NA CHAINKUA REINDORF I focus on creating an experience rather than just making artwork.

I often craft work that appears to me in a flash of inspiration — usually in a dream — I wake up excited about making it happen.

I’m always thinking about my work and the spaces it will occupy; I like it to play off of architecture and interior spaces to achieve an encompassing experience.

From the very beginning of my practice, I have been obsessed with this idea of making work from scratch.

There is something special about weaving the textile yourself, making it to your specifications and then subsequently transforming it. My sweat, blood and tears are literally imbued within the very fibre of the work. Sometimes a piece can take months to complete.

I often return to the same materials, fibres, yarns, threads and more recently, beads, all of which have loaded histories, especially within the context of African culture. I am interested in finding ways through which we can encounter these assembled materials in the form of my artwork, which allows us to focus on their beauty,

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complexity and intricacies, rather than just their potential for utility. It is an idea of working with materials that have long been relegated to craft, and transforming them into sculptural pieces that are arresting and take up space so that they are noticed, encountered and confronted. It is as much about the work as it is about my hand.

BAM How did you form a relationship with the Nubuke Foundation?

NCR I was first introduced to Nubuke Foundation back in 2009.

I participated in a textile dyeing workshop spearheaded by Kofi Setordji, a renowned Ghanaian artist. I was also the first artist chosen to show in the Nubuke Foundation’s prestigious Young Ghanaian Artist (YGA) programme, which provides a platform for promising artists whose works display a depth of knowledge in their chosen craft.

BAM You seem to love texture: from beading, braiding, baskets and weaving, all of which are strong emblems of West African culture. How do you marry references to traditional West African textiles with contemporary art?

NCR I am fascinated by the craft, art and design divide, and freely admit that my work plays with all of these elements. I like that my work is difficult to categorise. I find inspiration in traditions that have stood the test of time, but have also evolved with the times in ways that are visually evident. A great example is masquerade costumes in West Africa.

If you look closely at some of these costumes, you can see that the materials used to construct them are a hybrid of traditional mixed with more contemporary sources. In one costume, you can find traditional woven cloth, Dutch wax prints,

and more contemporary imported textiles such as sequinned fabrics, combined with synthetic yarn, cowrie shells, western dolls, Christmas tinsel, plastic and glass beads. And these outfits are fantastic.

They are the epitome of exaggeration, bordering on outrageous and bizarre.

BAM You’re a self-professed ‘colourphile’ — as your multiple Instagram moodboards attest. I’d like to hear more about how you relate to colour? Who are some of your influences?

NCR Yes! I am obsessed with colour.

My heart literally starts beating faster when I see something that plays masterfully with colour. I find a lot of inspiration in geometric forms and colour play in unexpected combinations. A great example is sculptor El Anatsui. His work flirts with simplicity and complexity by assembling countless bottle caps into larger-than-life, tapestry-like pieces.

I also have a wide range of influences outside of art, like the architect Luis Barragán, whose buildings are masterful iterations in terms of geometric form, colour and space, and fashion designer Iris van Herpen, whose clothing designs are more artistic sculpture than they are clothing.

BAM Tell me about your new body of work and exhibition with Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts.

NCR I’m focusing on the theatrical nature of the masquerade costume; the artifice, the spectacular, the haunting, the memorable.

I’m thinking about the sheer mastery of the construction of the costumes, and have reduced them to their most basic elements of colour, texture, space and scale.

I read about how the members of the clans that compete in the fancydress festival in Winneba, Ghana, can take up to a year to complete their costumes. Considering that my practice does require a lot of work, I was taken with this idea of a labour of love, with emphasis on the word labour. I’m pushing myself creatively by making intricate, time-consuming work, but also paring back to allow the materials to speak for themselves.

Also, the majority of the masquerade traditions exclude women, so this show is a tongue-in-cheek way of responding to that, a way of inserting myself, a woman, into the history.

Art direction NA CHAINKUA REINDORF.

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The London-based music maker confronting the Darkness at Play

Photography CHRISTINA EBENEZER

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“Music can be a tool to empower people, to make them aware of what’s happening, and to feel able to do something about it”

“When people ask what I make, I call it soul songwriting during high school in Oakland. music. Music for the soul.” No more There was a girl called Antoinette who apt description could be given to Anaïs’ posted that she was creating a girl band. softly spoken yet deeply healing sounds.

I think I was the only one who auditioned.

In person, this emerging artist exudes an I sang an Aaliyah song for her. We never undeniable star power thanks to her eloended up being a girl group, but we quent point of view and reflective openness, started buying beats online. It was super which all inform her impactful songs.

R&B. Then I got into gospel and soul She was born in France to a Senegalese music and rebelled against R&B because father and Italian/French/Senegalese of everyone’s assumption that if you’re mother, and raised across Toulouse, Dakar, a black artist, that’s what you make. So, the Dublin and Oakland, California, before first record had a pop edge, but now I’m studying at New York University’s (NYU) starting to come back to R&B because I’m Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. happy to embrace it and make it what it She’s since relocated to London, where is for me.” she swiftly made her mark with her debut EP Before Zero, which landed in 2018 ON STUDYING AT NYU and set out a strong and honest hand “Martin Gladwell’s book, Outliers, talks thanks to the lead song ‘Nina’, her shiverabout the inherent advantages that ingly good ode to Nina Simone — which we have and how we’re different from was accompanied by a liberating video one another. When I was applying to shot in Senegal.

NYU, I had friends in Oakland from lowAnaïs teased us last year with income families who were super tal‘No Control’, a bluesy, stripped back cut ented, so I’d say ‘If I can get into NYU, about letting go. And early 2019 saw you can too’. I wanted them to see the world the release of the Om’Mas Keith-produced the way I did, that it was okay to accumuDarkness At Play project, which pulls late student debt because one day you no punches as she unflinchingly takes on will succeed and pay it off. But when the world’s woes, from the corrupt bankI got there, I realised how privileged I was ing system and the reparation debate in because I was perceived as French France, to the migrant experience and rather than black American. That rubbed the Israel Palestine conflict, all the while me the wrong way. And living in Harlem delicately delivering messages of and going to NYU Downtown was like hope and belonging. Conscious that the being in two worlds too. The city gives themes she tackles are too immense you the illusion that we’re all together, to bare on the macro level, she serenades but actually it’s segregated. I was one of us with simple truths in such a way the only women of colour in my class. that beauty can still be found in sorrow.

But on a musical level, I learnt so much Next comes her forthcoming debut and appreciated collaborating with album Zero, inspired by the mid-century people from around the world.”

European art movement of the same name, which used light and motion to exON FINDING HER plore new notions of perception. While FEET IN LONDON Darkness is focused in spirit and sonic mood, “London called me because there were so Zero promises to be more playful and many incredible artists blossoming there. shine light on Anaïs’ wide-reaching tastes It’s a trendsetting place in music, so I and preoccupations. had the illusion from over the pond that if you’re talented, and had something to say, Here she speaks to Nataal on nothing else matters. That’s not as true the subjects closest to her heart. as I thought, but it is still a better place for young artists, and structures are in place ON SENEGAL to help you thrive. Things moved really “When I was young and living in France, fast initially and I had the opportunity I’d go to Senegal every summer to to record an album within eight months.” see my dad and to visit my mother’s family in the village. I moved there for a year ON THE MOTIVATIONS when I was 13 and attended an intense BEHIND DARKNESS AT PLAY Muslim girls’ school. They called me “A lot of people want music to be ‘toubab’ — I was the white one, the French escapism, to take them away from reality. one. I couldn’t speak Wolof and felt But music can be a tool to empower, excluded. I hardly visited again until I went to make people aware of what’s happento shoot ‘Nina’, which was a milestone. ing and to feel able to do something To be able to create art in Senegal meant about it. When I was writing this record so much to me… I’m just getting close I was very upset about the condition to the artist community there now. There’s of the world. I was thinking about mass so much going on.” incarceration, capitalism, injustice and the environmental situation. The more ON HER EARLY I learned about the way the world MUSICAL JOURNEY functions, the more hopeless I felt. Then “I have always made music. Playing the I tried to strike a balance between violin, singing in choirs. I started accepting that the world will always be

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unfair and finding a way for that to not ruin my life and my joy. We have to progress and grow. If people 400 years ago said nothing could change, we’d still be in chains. You have to fight for things to be better. A lot of that lies in community building — if you can be empathetic and create community, this can lead to progress. Darkness at Play is saying that we have to be more responsible, we have to do better and to care about the person next to us because we live in this world together.”

ON THE LEAD SINGLE, ‘WOMAN’ “I started thinking about the women in my life — my mum and my grandmother and what they have managed to accomplish, and my friends in Oakland whose fathers weren’t in the picture. I wanted to write a poem about these amazing women — their magic, their superpowers.

I was also reading a lot of Angela Davis and Maya Angelou, and obviously I love Nina Simone, so it kept coming back to me that women are incredible. It wasn’t until after I finished the song that I realised it could also mean I’m accepting myself.

I have to embrace my strengths and my flaws and not be afraid to love all of those things.”

ON THE CLOSING SONG, ‘NEVER BEEN HOME’ “London is the closest thing I have to a home because it’s the place where I’ve been able to do what I love. But nowhere has felt like home because I’ve moved so much, plus I’m a nomad at heart. This song is about my solitude and questioning my attachments. The words are a stream of consciousness and I recorded it in one take, which is very different to how I usually work. But for this one I just let my soul speak. There’s no true form to it, but it was important to have a song like this on the record because that’s how these kinds of thoughts form. They aren’t structured, they haunt you in dreams or in existential moments.”

ON DREAMING BIG “I don’t just make music for myself. I make music for people and I want it to be a healing tool. So if it is appreciated by others, that makes me feel like I’m doing something right and that’s very motivating. This time next year I hope I’ll be very close to releasing a second album, be touring all around the world and collaborating with other artists. I have big dreams. I don’t care about winning awards.

For me, the value is in making music that touches people who believe in what you do.”

(Previous left) Anaïs wears BERTHOLD coat, ZARA trousers, HELEN LAWRENCE jumper, own jewellery. (Previous right) Anaïs wears BERTHOLD top, own jewellery. (Left) Anaïs wears stylist’s own vintage cotton pyjamas.

Styling SARANNE WOODCROFT. Hair LAURAINE BAILEY. Make-up MIN SANDHU. Make-up MIN SANDHU at CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT. Photography assistance FOLA ABATAN.

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FUCK,

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A zine on a mission

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Fuck, You’re Beautiful is the stealthy handiwork of Cape Town-based model agency My Friend Ned and creative agency Jana+Koos.

The limited edition, large-format zine celebrates friends, models and local characters who each have their own special radiance.

“It’s a way to publish some personalities that we feel the world deserves to see. We really want it to have the feeling of belonging to a space completely free of any judgment or fear,” says Ned booker, Candice Hatting, who specialises in championing unexpected and diverse beauty. “The idea was to inspire people to connect with the real; to feel how powerful emotional authenticity is.”

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The publication features an accumulation of images taken by photographers and creatives the duo love, such as Luke Doman, Sarah Hugo Hamman, Jonathan Kope, Gavin Mikey Collins and Quaid Heneke, who together have shot a cross-section of faces who are on Ned’s books, on the scene, or simply just on the streets. “South Africa is the reason we’ve been so inspired by the people we rep,” Hatting says. “The sense of identity here is acute and self-originated, and our youth culture is socially conscious and proud. With Fuck, You’re Beautiful, we really want to honour that.”

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Model MIA DENNIS. Photography SVEN KRISTIAN. Model CHOCOLATE the cat.

Photography KOOS GROENEWALD. Model AZA MHLANA. Photography JONATHAN KOPE. Production MIKHAILIA PETERSEN. Model SARA LAGARDIEN. Photography LUKE DOMAN. Model SUFFERK8.

Photography GAVIN MIKEY COLLINS. Model ROSA. Photography CANDICE HATTING. Model JULIA LILY BUTCHART. Photography DETLEF HONIGSTEIN. Model DANIEL WALTON. Photography QUAID HENEKE. Models BOITUMELO RAMETSI and TEVIN FYNN. Photography BOITUMELO RAMETSI and TEVIN FYNN.

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L’ENCHANTEUR

Dynasty and Soull Ogun bring forth spiritual healing with their powerful designs

Words MAHORO SEWARD Photography OLGA DE LA IGLESIA 64

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Whether it’s Romulus and Remus or Osiris and Isis, twins have been endowed with paranormal significance in almost every culture, received either as a boon or a bane. In Yoruba spirituality, they are a blessing — a harbinger of lives to be lived beneath the watchful eye of the otherwise vengeful Orisha Shango, among the most feared deities in the pantheon. Such is the belief in their closeness to God that human twins are themselves deemed the incarnation of divine twins Orisha Ibeji, bearers of joy and happiness. And so, 5,000 miles away from the land of their paternal ancestors, Brooklyn-born Dynasty and Soull Ogun, joint founders of label L’Enchanteur, have been working to carry forth the mystical endowment of their bloodline since early 2014, forging a fashion practice that darns threads of plural histories, traditions and sciences of holistic spirituality through the fabric of the city they’ve always known as home. Along the way they’ve amassed a loyal fanbase, counting no small number of the most influential creative forces of their time among them: Lauryn Hill and Whoopi Goldberg can be seen donning the brand’s trademark chunky, precious metal rings on Instagram, and the twins recently worked on a collaboration with Solange Knowles’ creative agency, Saint Heron.

Best translated as ‘The Enchanter’, L’Enchanteur describe themselves as a ‘creative incubator’, a laboratory in which the maligned visual leitmotifs of urban blackness undergo alchemical processes: the ridges of a box braid are cast in gold plate for a ring; du-rags are woven in velvets and silks. But far from being some Dapper Dan x Gucci-esque repotting of ‘the hood’ in the high-end, L’Enchanteur’s roots stretch far deeper, drawing upon pools as far-ranging as numerology, tantra, colour theory and New York City itself.

“We tap into certain sounds and vibrations of the city’s unique symphony.

It’s what allows us our raw approach to luxury,” Dynasty tells me. Indeed, the precarious criss-crossing of personal melodies, the haphazard clashes and chords that ring out at the daily intersections of some 8.7 million lives in New York, furnish the duo with an endless resource of raw material to select from. But unlike many other cities of its size, it’s the endlessly varied ethnic topography of New York, the many-fold tendrils of identity that enmesh beneath the city’s neatly gridded streets, that offer them the most in the way of inspiration. As Soull explains: “I know it sounds cliché, but growing up in Brooklyn, we really experienced the full extent of New York’s melting pot. Each neighbourhood has its own flavour.”

District-born identities can be seen from Flatbush, the neighbourhood in which the twins were raised by their Yoruba father and Dominican mother, brimming with bold Caribbean flair, to the Hispanic inflections of Sunset Park, to the cheap, argon Cyrillic that fronts

“We tap into certain sounds and vibrations of the city’s unique symphony. It’s what allows us our raw approach to luxury”

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stores in Brighton Beach. The ubiquitous Brooklyn silhouette born of this macromelee — baseball caps, oversized tees and shirts, loose fit trousers slung low — features prominently in the twins’ ready-to-wear; but it’s through their chosen palette of hues and fabrics that the sisters pay homage to their own experiences. The garments may be “very Brooklyn,” Soull admits, “but the fabrics that we use hail from our heritages, and honour the things we were surrounded by growing up in our household.

You can see West African embroidery details, and florals, which really speak to our Caribbean side. It appeals to a lot of people here in Brooklyn too; so many people have similar blended heritages.”

The most immediately eye-catching aspect of their work is its colour, with garments and jewellery available across a rainbow-like spectrum of tones, each near-photographic in its saturation.

But the value and consideration invested in the choosing of a colour, a stone, even a style of stitching, far surpasses mere aesthetics. Well versed in the teachings of tantra, Dynasty and Soull anchor their practice in spiritual healing.

“Our work is a service that we’re providing to people. There are certain levels to it.

There’s of course the level of business, where we’re producing and selling goods. But there’s also a level where we’re providing healing through specific colours and materials. It comes from our own experiences and personal research of healing, and from trying to help others through similar situations,” explains Dynasty.

“We research things like chakras, which pertain to certain colours. Often we’ll opt for a colour because we want to put

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something specific out into the world,” black identity so intertwined with how continues Soull. She recalls episodes on easily it’s discarded, the sisters set out to the subway that seem to support a belief recast the rag as an item worthy of care, in a common energy that actualises through pride and preservation: something you’d fashion, even if unconsciously: “It’s funny, rest well to know that it might one day be sometimes on the train I’ll notice that worn by your grandkids. What’s more, cut I’m wearing a weird blue or green from the richest of velvets, silks and perhaps,” she says. “And I’ll see so many people wearing that exact shade that same day. And it’s not always fashion-y people, it’s just people going to work in a restaurant, in a cubicle or wherever. It proves that we’re all somehow connected.”

A similar creative process is adopted in the production of the brand’s jewellery, spanning inscribed amulets, ‘Midas Touch’ finger caps, and substantial precious metal bands and rings. Harnessing the energetic qualities of specific metals, gemstones and crystals, each piece is intended as much as a healing tool as it is a beautiful object. Take the malachite medallions, for example, carved for signet rings: it has stunning visual impact, it’s cool, spearmint-green set within 14-carat gold. But it’s on account of the deeply cleansing, transformational potential of the stone that it has been chosen, resulting in a product that introduces a grain of spirituality to the balancing of function and form.

Fashion may be an industry hardly denims, adorned with crystals and floral known for its support of holistic self-care, embroidery, a piece once deemed but the twins, two queer black women, ill-suited to ‘polite company’ is promoted hold the belief that there are few better to the level of the silk tie: “We’re trying positions from which to rally against to elevate the du-rag to something you oppressive walls than from within. can take pride in. Joe Bloggs might walk There is also the issue of fashion’s into the office with his tie on, but this embarrassingly unsustainable product is our tie, this is our suit!,” exclaims Soull. cycle, reliant on manufacturing “For too long we’ve been what Fifth desire for new objects, rather than Avenue’s getting inspiration from. We know producing ones to be cherished. that we’re on everybody’s moodboards, As an antidote, the twins seek to that there are pictures in boardrooms reappraise the value of heirlooms, where they’re trying to recreate our with Soull noting that “in our proposition of what luxury is. But the new cultural niche, we rarely speak luxury is attainability, it’s feeling like about heirlooms, or about things you’re being invited in, rather than kept we want to hand down to our out,” she continues. child or grandchild. It’s not that As such, the pair readily affiliate we don’t have those things, but themselves with the new generation of they’re just rarely spoken of.” Enter New York creatives of colour — among the brand’s runaway success: the them brands such as Telfar, Pyer Moss, humble du-rag. and Gypsy Sport — that are rebalancing “It summarises exactly what the premium fashion market through we’ve been talking about. Du-rags narratives of radical inclusivity and embody this mentality that our lives heightened visibility. But yet more crucial are disposable, and that made me is L’Enchanteur’s adamant rejection want to design them even more,” of the idea that they are creating value in professes Dynasty. Long available in Brooklyn-native culture. The borough’s throwaway packs of twos and threes rhizomatic communities of which Dynasty for a couple of dollars a pop, the and Soull are inextricable products, headwrap so readily associated with have always carried wealth in their roots — the black man in urban America and as those roots further entangle, that is marked, at the very instance of wealth only grows. L’Enchanteur doesn’t purchase, by its destiny to be thrown “add value to the culture — it’s already away. Recognising the perversity here. What we’re doing is guaranteeing of having such a key motif of urban that it’s getting seen and preserved.”

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LADUMA NGXOKOLO This South African fashion powerhouse is taking on the world

Words LEANNE TLHAGOANE Photography ANNELISE PHILLIPS Styling NAOMI MILLER FEATURE

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Laduma Ngxokolo is a formidable force in fashion thanks to his Xhosa-inspired knitwear

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and entrepreneurial spirit, but his star has always shone brightly. The designer grew up in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape and studied locally at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, where he won the International Society of Dyers and Colourists Design Award for his innovative use of South African mohair and merino wool.

He launched his label, MaxHosa by Laduma, in 2011, and went on to complete a Masters in Material Futures at Central Saint Martins in London, while building a reputation for boldly patterned premium menswear that takes its cues from his community’s Xhosa crafts and traditions.

Ngxokolo continues to win the hearts of many with his easy silhouettes and expansion into womenswear, and with showcases and stockists across the globe. His many accolades include the 2015 Vogue Italia Scouting for Africa prize in Milan, and the 2017 Pride of Africa award in Barcelona. He’s also just collaborated with IKEA on its limited edition Överallt homeware collection. An agent for change, Ngxokolo is now focused on rebranding as MaXhosa Africa — a lifestyle brand with infinite potential.

LEANNE TLHAGOANE Tell us about the rapid expansion of MaxHosa.

LADUMA NGXOKOLO Right now the priority is the affordable luxury aspect of the brand. Creating broader access for our younger customers is critical, and we would like to grow and go far with them. We foresee this as a developing consumer segment in Africa and we are starting to reach out with mobile-phone cases, our very popular socks and other accessories.

In future, men’s ties and bags will be available. And in the next two years the intention is to grow our sales channels across the continent, possibly opening more stores.

LT You own your own factory now too, which must be crucial for meeting demand.

LN I was a client of the factory for three years before the owner decided to sell it to me. I absorbed all the staff, too, which brings my total number of employees to 30. Of course, there have been difficulties since then

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with increased overhead costs, but we were prepared, and it did not deter us from achieving our goals. We maintain the highest standards of quality in our factory. For example, we use shell and coconut buttons, not plastic, and very specific hand sewing and finishing techniques, all of which speak the language of bespoke luxury.

LT What is your take on modern African luxury?

LN It’s the most exciting thing happening in fashion globally right now. Luxury has a lot to do with the time taken to create a garment. And we will continue to produce slow fashion to maintain the luxury values of the brand.

However the direction is still vulnerable, with designers having to buy fabrics, at times extremely expensive ones, that have long lead times for delivery, as opposed to creating their own textiles.

I believe international luxury standards need to be applied across the board, and that there should be organisations in each country that interrogate the brands in terms of values, processes and models. Perhaps a similar body to The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode in Paris.

LN What can we expect from your womenswear offering?

LT Over the past six months we have been working on rebranding to MaXhosa Africa. This new direction will see aesthetics from different parts of the continent incorporated through design.

And the new womenswear collection will express this. It will showcase how we’ve informally communicated with other cultures within Africa through fashion and traditional outfits.

LT Why is heritage so crucial for you?

LN It’s the root of why we do what we do. It’s very important for me to tell the story of the brand’s cultural heritage so that others can know about its authenticity and origins in Africa.

LT How important is collaboration to you?

LN Very important.

In my last show I walked my finale walk with my entire family because I wanted the people who buy into the brand to see that it’s not about the ‘singular’ — it’s not just me making all the decisions.

The brand is built by all of us — my family, my employees and the public as a whole.

LT How do you plan to maintain your success?

LN By keeping my finger on the pulse of the world.

I will always listen to what my heart says.

I will always go where it leads me.

I will always be honest — at all costs.

Trusting this process is what will ensure the evolution of MaXhosa Africa.

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Models PRECIOUS MBATHA at 3D MODEL AGENCY and COURTNEY HICKSON at BOSS MODELS.

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The artist on Grey Area, her thrilling third album

Words MIRIAM BOUTEBA Photography ADAMA JALLOH Styling CYNTHIA LAWRENCE-JOHN

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“Sometimes the UK has this thing where it makes you feel as though you have to apologise for being great, but with the US, it's like the-world-is-your-oyster type shit, you can do whatever you want,” says musician and actress Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo, aka Little Simz. “But I don't let that mentality stifle what I'm doing, just because I live in the UK and I’m from here.

I’ve got big ambitions.”

Speaking to this confident young artist is a breath of fresh air; she comes across as frank, smart and unfailingly polite. At only 25 years old, the rapper and singer recently released Grey Area, her third album in four years, all of which have been via her own label, Age 101.

This is impressive enough, but during that time she’s also been busy curating sold-out festivals at Camden’s Roundhouse, touring with Anderson .Paak, Gorillaz and Lauryn Hill, has kept one foot in the acting world and added a whole new string to her bow with photography, having shot the sleeve images for each of Grey Area’s singles, including ‘Selfish’, for which she photographed her childhood friend, actress Letitia Wright. “I think I’ve always had an eye for photography, and enjoyed different art forms,” she reflects. “I want to be respected and not just because I’m Little Simz. I want other photographers to see my work and think it’s sick. I’ve been fortunate enough to have people around me encouraging me to do it because I get in my head a lot.”

Surrounding herself with the right people is something that this polymath has a knack for, which could help to explain how, despite the success she’s enjoyed, Little Simz remains a grounded, hardworking north London girl. “Growing up in Islington is wicked, man,” she says.

“There’s a very strong sense of community, everyone knows each other, and when they see me, they just see Simbi.” And so it was to another childhood friend, now famed producer Inflo, to whom she turned to work on this latest album, which is her most personal to date. “Flo's known me since I was nine, he knows my family, we both went to St Mary's Youth Club,” she says.

“He’s seen my growth and my journey, is just as versatile and diverse as I am, and when you get chemistry like that, it's one in a million.

It’s like Missy Elliot to Timbaland, Dr Dre to Eminem.”

Unlike her last album, Stillness in Wonderland, which was more of a conceptual piece, Grey Area embraces emotional rawness and honesty.

Some of the songs were written in taxis and on flights, as they came to

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“I don't feel the need to do anything to please anyone or to fit a mould. I’m very comfortable in my own skin”

(Previous) BERTHOLD coat, TOPSHOP earrings.

(Clockwise from Above) KAIMIN coat, WOLFORD body, BETHANY WILLIAMS trousers, NIKE trainers, TOPSHOP earrings. ISSEY MIYAKE coat, KALEOS sunglasses, TOPSHOP earrings.

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her, exploring her grief over the murder of her friend, model Harry Uzoka, the ramifications for her community following the incarceration of another friend, and a particularly painful break-up. “At the time of making it, I wasn’t thinking about who's going to hear it, I was just spilling. It was only when the album was done that I realised that everyone is going to know my business. It puts me in a vulnerable space, but it actually makes me stronger,” she says. “It was challenging to tap into places that were right on the bone, but also very freeing. The studio was a personal space where I just bared my soul. Sometimes I would leave so upset and crying, but it wasn’t all serious, it was also mad fun.”

As each song explores different emotions, she remains as technically flawless as ever. Full of bravado, Simz compares herself to Picasso on the rousing single ‘Offence’, and gets philosophical on ‘Wounds’ — a collaboration with Chronixx — while on ‘Flowers’, she ruminates about depression. On ‘Selfish’, featuring the soulful Cleo Sol, her inimitable swagger is back: ‘I'm a woman who can teach you a little something about class, diamonds will forever be a girl’s best friend.’

Little Simz is frequently — and lazily — lumped together with UK grime artists, but her music is a delicious dish full of flavours. Citing Lauryn Hill, Nas, Fela Kuti

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and Bob Marley among her influences, her sound is experimental, taking in jazz, funk and soul to form her unique brand of hip hop. This misunderstanding of her stand-out sound used to annoy her, but not anymore. “I would get really angry, but then I decided not to place my energy there. It’s cool and it doesn't affect me because I know what I’m doing and I know my sound.”

Being sure of herself means that she’s always had the confidence to release music independently, and she doesn’t feel pressure to look a certain way, something that often hinders young female artists. “I don't feel the need to do anything to please anyone or to fit a mould. I’m very comfortable in my own skin,” she explains. “I've always worn what I want to wear and always moved how I want to move. I think it’s because I've had such great examples of strong women around me. My mum and my sisters have taught me to always be myself.”

Born to Nigerian parents and the youngest of four siblings, the home of this superlative talent was filled with positivity.

“Everyone in the family has a really good ear and I was put onto great music from very early on,” she says. “My family definitely pushed me to dream big and encouraged me to write music, so I’ve always had a good foundation of support.”

Looking back she laments that Islington’s St Mary’s Youth Club, where she first found her voice and future collaborators, has now closed due to crippling council cuts. “It saddens me man, I don't know what I would be doing if I hadn’t had that place. It was where kids could go to be creative and channel what they were feeling into something positive. People think kids don't get stressed, but kids get stressed. Then you wonder why there’s knife crime.”

Today the artist works her stress away on stage. “I feel free, I feel fearless and at home,” she explains. “I’m in my element. I don't think about it too much, I let the music take me wherever, let my body do what it's supposed to do, and the words just come out.”

Given that even as a child she imagined playing to huge audiences, even that doesn’t

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(Clockwise from left) BERTHOLD coat, TOPSHOP earrings. BERTHOLD coat, CELINE trousers, TOPSHOP earrings. BERTHOLD coat, BETHANY WILLIAMS trousers and jacket, NIKE AIR MAX trainers, TOPSHOP earrings.

Hair LAURAINE BAILEY. Make-up BEA SWEAT using GLOSSIER. Photography assistance RHIANNON POWELL. Styling assistance LAURA BRUTON. Make-up assistance FRANKIE DANIELA.

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faze her now. “I don't feel pressure, it's a lot harder to make an arena filled with 20,000 people feel intimate, but you just have to make sure that everyone is engaged.”

Her knack for always standing up for herself, for example calling out the people who refer to her as a ‘female MC’ (“What does my gender have to do with it?”), means she is able to stay true to the vision that she has for herself.

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve said what’s on my mind. I don't think I’m a rude person but I’m quite sure of myself.

I know how to say no to things, and I think that's a super important quality to have as an artist, because people are forever trying to make you into what they want you to be,” she says. “In the same beat, I am open to trying new things and being experimental, but there are some things that I will not budge on.”

It’s rumoured that the artist is set to appear on TV crime series Top Boy, and with a wealth of tour dates coming up, there’s no sign of her slowing down.

With Grey Area, she’s found a voice that’s relatable. “I think my sound has opened up a bit, it feels like it can appeal to so many different types of people and not just one particular demographic, which is cool,” she says. “I can make something for everyone.”

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Words & Styling HELEN JENNINGS Photography LAKIN OGUNBANWO

Meet the winner of the inaugural Emerge AL�RA award

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Faith Oluwajimi, founder of androgynous brand Bloke, is the winner of the inaugural Emerge ALÁRA award. The prize is part of the Lagos concept store’s commitment to nurturing young creatives, and Nataal was among the judges who selected Oluwajimi for his innovative approach to knitwear, a category largely overlooked in contemporary African fashion, and therefore ripe for experimentation.

He’ll now receive funding and mentorship and present his SS19 range, A Collection About Nothing, at ALÁRA. “The collection expresses Dadaist ideas around the concept of ‘nothing’ being an entity in itself,” Oluwajimi explains.

“If you assume absence is a relevant substance, then using the Bloke ethos, informed by the avant-garde movement’s negation of accepted laws of beauty, then nothing is ever black or white but the grey matter in between. It’s about viewing things in their essence.”

Fine gauge, silky knitwear such as elongated jumpers and cropped vests work with satin shirts and shorts and organza patchwork suiting in varying shades of bright white and soft grey.

Details including poppers, stitched circle motifs and distorted lines of printed poetry by writer and performer Lanaire Aderemi — plus chunky leather sandals and body bags — add to the expressive attitude. “Every season I experiment with new knitting techniques and brush

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EMMANUEL and JOHN K EMMANUEL at LED MODEL MANAGEMENT. Photography assistance PELUMI OGUNDE. Styling assistance SOSA YANDE.

up on my field. I want my work to be able to stand up anywhere in the world, no excuses,” he adds.

Oluwajimi was born in Ogun State and studied agriculture before relocating to Lagos in 2015, where he set about establishing Bloke, having taught himself to knit on a domestic machine. He’s since collaborated with contemporaries including Maxivive, Abiola A. Olusola and Orange Culture, and been featured on BoF, Vogue Italia and Vice.

In 2018 he made his catwalk debut at Lagos Fashion Week, and now he looks forward to making the most of the award win. “Getting on a platform like this gives me international exposure, but it’s also reassurance for me as a designer and artist, and for my wellbeing as a person.”

With thanks to the British Council’s West Africa Arts programme.

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London’s most exciting party-people and curatorial collective

B BZ Words MIREILLE HARPER Photography RHEA DILLON

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“We’ve tried to create an ethos and policy that speaks to all marginalised folks within the people of colour and queer communities”

“I’d had enough. I felt like I was putting my money into the hands of people who didn’t give a shit about my representation or my experience.” These words from BBZ co-founder Naeem Davis could strike a chord with so many who have experienced either subtle or open racism or homophobia in a host of different environments.

And it was these feelings that prompted Davis and fellow South East Londoner Tia Simon-Campbell to set up their clubnight cum curatorial collective in 2016.

“BBZ is a space that centres queer, trans and non-binary people of colour, and was borne of frustration at how white, misogynistic and racist clubbing spaces and the contemporary art industry can be,” Davis adds.

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The pair are both arts graduates — SimonCampbell studied fashion photography, and Davis, digital film production — but having been out of university for a couple of years, they found themselves in need of a new direction. “I wanted to show and create, but didn’t know how to get my foot in the door. I was disheartened at having gone through the education system and come away without the tools to find work effectively,” Simon-Campbell says. This, coupled with the lack of a support network or representation, pushed the duo to establish a monthly arty party. Since then, BBZ (Bold Brazen Zamis, or Babes) has evolved and broadened its scope of inclusion. “As time has gone by, we’ve become more intersectional,” Davis explains. “Originally it was meant to be a black lesbian party, and then we saw other people were vulnerable, people we love and care about. We’ve tried to create an ethos and policy that speaks to all marginalised folks within the people of colour and queer communities.”

When I ask them if they would describe BBZ as a community, Davis affirms that there’s a “strong sense of accountability and respect for one another, which extends beyond borders”.

This means that while people of all persuasions are welcome (as long as they come correct, of course) the focus is on ensuring that those who identify as QTIPOC should feel special and needed when they enter a BBZ club night.

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BBZ’s other happenings have included a Valentine’s Day pottery class, a party in a chicken shop with Balamii radio, recreating their childhood bedrooms at Afropunk London, and taking part in the Tate Exchange residency at Tate Modern, a multidisciplinary four-day event that resulted in the digital directory of black queer artists, BBZ.BLK.BK. The collective members now include Rhea Dhillon, Shy One, Kai-Isaiah Jamal, Yewande Odunubi and Bernice Mulenga. Wherever the crew pop up, rest assured you can let off steam to the best DJ sets around taking in hip hop, afro house, afrobeats and R&B classics.

Davis describes it as “black British nostalgia mixed with queer identity and general free-upness.”

It was through diversifying their environments that Davis and SimonCampbell came to terms with their own personal identities. “When I was younger I didn’t identify as queer,” explains Simon-Campbell, who is of Ugandan, Jamaican and St. Vincentian descent.

“I was never exposed to spaces where I was allowed to say that, or even fully understood what that meant. When I was around 16, I began moving in circles that exposed me to different types of people.” Davis, who identifies as a transmasculine non-binary queer person, grew up in a Jamaican household and shares the sentiment. “I came out when I was quite young, but it was travelling and university that gave me language around queerness and queer theory.”

BBZ art shows are about creating platforms for new artists to showcase their work, especially those who haven’t exhibited before. The aim is to create an atmosphere that is house party-esque within which everyone can decide on the energy they bring. This kind of informal set up is turning art world norms on its head. People who don’t usually interact with contemporary art, or who feel excluded by the highbrow white cube, can access art in a place of celebration.

Their early collaboration with gal-dem at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2016 helped to cement their curatorial prowess.

With more than 300 people in attendance, they showcased four artists in the Fashion Gallery and commissioned 15 artists to create animations. For BBZ, however, it’s not all about the volume.

Davis reflects, “every collaboration, party or space we have occupied and every acknowledgement we have received has been so affirming.”

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Next, BBZ are hosting The Sisterhood at Glastonbury Festival — a women’s only (trans and non-binary inclusive) event — and their Alternative Graduate Show is making a return in August. Premiering at Peckham’s Copeland Gallery in 2018, they put out an open call for graduates from practicebased arts degrees of QTIPOC identity to apply. Co-curated with sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, the ten artists selected all went on to have solo shows. This year, it’s also open to people who haven’t studied at university.

With all of this on the horizon, it looks like we’re going to be hearing a lot more from this dynamic collective. Like SimonCampbell says, “There is such a necessity for what we do. We want to keep collaborating with others who are doing similar things all over the world.”

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A festival celebrating tradition while reclaiming the hereand-now with the Dogon people of Mali

Words ASSIGUE DOLO Photography CHRIS RINKE

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Inaugurated four years ago, the Festival Ogobagnan takes place over one week in January on the banks of the Niger River in Bamako, Mali. During this time many Dogon people and members of other local ethnic groups dance, attend concerts featuring national and international artists, exhibit hand-crafts and masks, and take part in gatherings about traditional medicine and Dogon culture.

Festival attendees get dressed up to show their belonging to various cultures and traditions. Visitors to the festival include people from the Fulani, Bozo, Songhoy, Tamashek, Senoufo and Bambara tribes, all of whom join the Dogon for seven days of celebrating, feasting and knowledge-sharing.

The most accepted theory about the Dogon people is that they are of Manding origin. But after refusing to accept a new faith that had come to West Africa — Islam — four brothers and their wives arrived at the Cliff of Bandiagara (now a UNESCO World Heritage site, also called the Land of the Dogons), around the thirteenth century, where they established their first settlement. To this day the Dogon people are known their pride and deep animistic beliefs.

The Dogon’s main economic activities are farming, gardening and tourism. However since 2011 the kidnapping of tourists has increased in Mali, with rebellions and jihadists occupying the northern part of the country. In 2012 there was a military coup in Bamako. As a response to this upheaval, in 2016 the Ginna Dogon Cultural Association decided to organise the first edition of the festival Ogobagnan in Bamako for economic and cultural development.

The goal was to offer an opportunity for social cohesion among the different ethnic groups, to create a bridge between the city Dogon and rural Dogon, and to show a different side of the area to the world.

The following photos were taken during the 2019 Ogobagnan festival

by Chris Rinke, and marks the beginning of the German-Peruvian photographer’s documentation of the Dogon.

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Words LEANNE TLHAGOANE Photography JESSE VOS

LUKHANYO MDINGI The fast-emerging designer is grounded in gold for AW19 FEATURE

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Lukhanyo Mdingi enjoyed a milestone There is a strong sense that he is unwilling moment for AW19 with his debut solo to be boxed in by labels such as ‘African presentation at New York Fashion Week: luxury’. Instead, he prefers to circle back Men’s (NYFWM). Aptly titled Perennial, repeatedly to ideas of materiality and the collection reaffirms the South African intention. “Luxury is using time, considdesigner’s belief in the natural order eration and ingenuity as a means to create of things in a constantly shifting world. quality,” he says. “Our aim is to take “There’s a riff-raff within the space that the label up to the level that we envision we’re immersed in, it’s fast consumption, it should be at.” The outcome of this and sadly at times it has very little dedicated practice is expressed in beautisubstance,” Mdingi explains. “By contrast, fully crafted clothes imbued with integriwe wanted to use our previous offerings ty that captivate his customers on a sensory as reference to create a strong body level. Looking inward is an imperative. of work.” Putting time and talent towards The foundation of the collection is the creating something with value equates choice to use the highest quality, locally to a collection rooted in considered and sourced fabrics including angora, kid intelligent design. At the core of the mohair and merino wools in rich brushed process is his determination to infuse a tobacco and ivory, as well as other natural sense of soulfulness into his work. Therein fibres including silk and linen. “I sense lies the secret sauce to longevity and that the considered consumer who modern refinement. chooses to make an investment in our

pieces wants honesty. And I see using sustainable textiles as a modern approach to meeting this need,” says Mdingi.

Aesthetically, the collection respectfully balances African and Asian influences to form utilitarian garments that shimmer and glisten, while striking the right notes of strength and ease, simplicity and sophistication. Long coats, track pants and column dresses are paired with snood-style knitwear and matching skull caps to create a uniform for lovers of classic splendour.

Mdingi grew up in the small town of East London on the Eastern Cape, and studied fashion at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, where he was a finalist in an Elle design competition during his final year. He launched his label in 2015 and garnered international attention for his gender fluid, inky-hued SS16 offering.

He’s since created collections with fellow Capetonian Nicholas Coutts — with whom he showed at Pitti Uomo in Florence — and continues to collaborate with local creatives on consistently stunning visual stories that go beyond the basic lookbook to sum up the mood of each season.

Purposefully stepping back and slowing the pace of business over the past two years is a decision he tells me has sometimes meant tough times.

But in the end it has proven an invaluable opportunity to reevaluate the challenges of running a fashion label in South Africa, and he has developed an “intentionally steady and solid rhythm” towards his designs, which land either as mainline or essential collections, catering to both men and women. “Being able to face your strengths and weaknesses and the adversities that inevitably come into play has given me the confidence to make key decisions about the future,” he says.

When the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) first approached Mdingi about NYFWM, it was 2017.

Although a meaningful engagement, the body decided not to support the label.

“In hindsight we weren’t ready,” he admits. But fast forward a year and a new conversation with the CFDA last December yielded positive results. “Showing at NYFWM could not have come at a better time. It is a true testament to pure passion coupled with perseverance and hard work,” he reflects.

“We’re not perfect, and it’s not easy, but with a solid foundation in place, we now feel grounded and ready for gold.”

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Grooming MICHELLE MOOLMAN. Fashion assistance ANELISA MANGCU. Model AZA MHLANA at MY FRIEND NED.

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The party of a generation in Abidjan

LA SUNDAY Words STÉPHANE GABOUÉ Photography NUITS BALNÉAIRES 100

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Until dusk slightly cooled that sweltering Sunday in February, the Club House Le Vallon was what it has always been, a complex where well-off families can swim, play tennis, or enjoy a meal in tranquil Vallon, one of the most coveted neighbourhoods in Abidjan.

As the last families departed, one tennis court remained brightly lit, its clay surface covered with colourful woven rugs, low armchairs and decorative plants, its air streaked by water misters; with mammoth sound-systems emitting propulsive beats to the delight of the hippest crowd I have ever seen in this bustling Côte d’Ivoire city.

Almost no one in the Ivorian creative scene right now would have missed this new dance, simply called La Sunday.

Kader Diaby, the photographer and designer behind the menswear brand Olooh, came wearing one of his own deep V-neck shirts. Fanta’ Styck, a lively Unicef executive who moonlights as an It-girl, danced around, her torso outlined by a lace bodice. The photographer and stylist Louis Philippe de Gagoue came crowned by his signature gilded headpiece. Tony Sant’Anna, who’s quietly been making the move from modelling to photography, was there, as were Milc Magazine’s Joel Williams and Elle’s Lafalaise Dion.

Yannick Konan, an international Ivorian model, came dressed in Balenciaga.

The Btendance editor, Patrick Edooard, probably the most connected man in Ivorian fashion, discretely observed the scene. Young Nouchi, a vintage fashion expert, licked a yellow ice cream that matched the smiley pin on his Burberry shirt. Dadi, the in-demand photographer known as Nuits Balnéaires, documented the scene for this magazine. The hunky influencer Saint Kacp, who occasionally paints his nails black, checked the door.

DJs Asna, Faye, Undee, and Badgalmelv had been invited to perform, as an honour to women.

La Sunday has given the city’s indie movement, which had been simmering for a while, a place to call home — and judging from the wild sing-a-long when Sheck Wes’ ‘Mo Bamba’ played, it has found it’s unofficial hymn, too. “People in Abidjan are used to going to nightclubs where people have to pay enormous amounts of money for Champagne.

La Sunday is bringing something new,” says Patrick. “People can come dressed as they wish.”

And yet, this game-changing event was founded almost by accident. Late last summer, Jeune Lio, a twenty-something Cameroonian, arrived in Côte d’Ivoire to work in advertising, after studying in Paris and working in Dakar. He barely knew a single soul there, but met Fayçal Lazraq, a Frenchman who, after working for nightclubs across the world, settled in Côte d’Ivoire in 2016. One day they thought, ‘Why don’t we launch a cool party, just a chill Sunday afternoon

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(Previous spread left to right) OLIVIER wears NACKISSA BATIK suit. LOZA MALÉOMBHO, fashion designer. (Above) LOUIS PHILIPPE DE GAGOUE, photographer and stylist.

reunion with our friends, something like Sunday Groove in Paris?’

They enlisted Black Charles, an Ivorian DJ and marketing exec, Aurore, a former colleague of Fayçal at the Yoyo nightclub in Paris and Aziz Doumbia, a pivotal figure among the Abidjan crowd.

By then, Aziz had opened the Dozo concept store in Vallon, which had become a kind of Warholian factory where artists, models and designers flocked to buy pieces by local designers and also to gossip, smoke, drink, eat, or work. The first party took place last December on the pavement near the store and the very busy Rue des Jardins.

It was to end at 10pm, but the guests partied until 1am.

“We thought it would be great if each of us could bring five or ten friends, but it ended up being 150,” remembers Aurore. Charles and Lionel were anointed resident DJs, offering a mix of soul, makossa, coupé décalé, hip hop and electro.

The team also found a mascot, Ahmed, an 18-year-old tea street vendor, who was hired to provide complementary beverages for the Sunday revellers.

The following party attracted an even bigger crowd, which overflowed onto the large road, crossed by speeding cars.

Faced with an obvious space problem, they shifted the third party to Club House, first on a half tennis court, and then a full court.

The success of La Sunday speaks volumes about Abidjan right now. “The art scene is thriving. We can see that in many sectors, from cinema to circus, to painting and dance, to music and photography,” says Isabelle Zongo, an art critic and founder of the original Foundation,

(Above left to right) ASNA, DJ and visual artist.

KADER DIABY, photographer and fashion designer. (Right) OLIVIER and ARIEL wear OLOOH CONCEPT.

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“I’ve worked with almost everyone and owe my success to my creative friends” a digital organisation that promotes African art and culture. “These artists are supported by many private initiatives and embassies, as well as the Ministry of Culture.”

In fashion, brands such as Loza Maléombho, Yhebe, Olooh and Kente Gentlemen are creating a new style.

A significant number of them used to be based in Europe or the US, but decided to take the plunge and contribute to their country’s development. “When I first arrived around 2012, there were not that many things happening in the fashion space. Maybe it was just Laurenceairline here,” says Loza. “Winning an Arise Magazine Fashion Week prize encouraged me to move back home. I’ve since encouraged other people to do the same.”

In a similar vein, Frederique Guei decided to move back from France and together with Francis Yapobi, runs the luxurious concept store Le Comptoir des Artisans. In fact all the La Sunday members have lived abroad at some point, and their work shows the influence of events at Wanderlust or Café Barge in Paris. Also noteworthy is the fact that all members of this community work closely together. “There are a lot of interactions among us,” says Dadi, who recently exhibited at Unseen Amsterdam. “I’ve worked with almost everyone and owe my success to my creative friends.” Many of these deals are struck at Dozo, where, during my stay in Abidjan, I attended cheerful dinner parties and an emotional talk by art photographer Joana Choumali.

All this is happening at a particular moment in the country’s political history.

The coalition formed by President

Styling STÉPHANE GABOUÉ. Hair RAPH MÉTAMORPHOSE. Make-up KIELA ANNIE. Production assistance YANN SOUMÉ.

Photography assistance ARNAUD KABLAN. Models FATIMA KOUAME, OLIVIER ATTIA, ARIEL OULAI, MARC ALEXANDRE.

(Above) BLACK CHARLES, DJ and visual artist. (Below left and right) PAPI, painter, fashion designer and creative director.

MAMY TALL, architect and visual artist.

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Alassane Ouattara and former president Henri Konan Bédié in 2010 has dissolved, fuelling fears for the upcoming 2020 presidential elections. And yet, this new generation of creatives seem to exist in their own orbit. “We don’t believe in politicians anymore. We just hope our country won’t explode,” says Aziz. “We trust our movement, and what we can create with it.

We earn more by doing things on our own. We even get international clients.”

Dadi agrees: “There have been actions from the state in favour of culture, but we have the feeling that culture is not strongly supported here.

Young people shouldn’t wait for the state to do things. This generation has a lot of possibilities, thanks to the internet.”

Other creatives complain about the lack of production facilities and access to financing. However when I speak to Hervé N’koumo, director of books and visual arts at the Ministry of Culture, he asserts that there are two funds available, one for cinema and one for arts, which includes fashion. “The thing is, people need to apply with a coherent project, and if their project gets accepted, it may take about six months to get the money,” he says.

La Sunday has faced its own hurdles.

At its original location, the rambunctious parties bothered the neighbouring Swell bar, where well-to-do executives like to smoke cigars. The City Hall also sent Aziz a letter saying the noise angered the neighbours. “We arrived like savages,” admits Aziz. “We knew it wouldn’t last, but for the tiny amount of time it was possible, we had to do it.” As this article goes to press, the team has just announced that the party is moving to the art gallery Fondation Donwahi.

But the organisers remain undeterred, and they now feel ready to transport the party to neighbouring countries.

One of the conundrums of such niche events is how to widen the influence while keeping it cool. Growing means accepting more people, yet the magic of La Sunday lies in the fact that it’s about a gathering of like-minded friends. “We know we’ll have to restrict it.

If we don’t, we’ll lose the vibe,” says Aziz.

“It’s not about social segregation, it’s about having the same mindset. When you want a cultural revolution, you need people who follow the same ideology.”

By the end of this particular La Sunday in February, a few friends linger with the party organisers as the DJ played some last tunes. “Now I recognise La Sunday,” says Kader with a smile.

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EA WAVE 104

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Making waves with Kenya’s most exciting musical collective Words NGARTIA Photography PETER IRUNGU Styling BRYAN EMRY

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We’re congregated at the edge of Nairobi’s central business district in a first floor apartment. Somehow, the ground looks closer than it should. Outside, the sun is scorching. But it’s cool inside — literally and figuratively. The room is minimally furnished. Someone later comments that it’s a “Pinterest apartment”. A bed.

A desk. A chair. A three-seater sofa.

A bookcase a quarter full. A vintage record player with a matching speaker set. All the makings of a musician’s home. A string of Edison bulbs are alight on the wall, more for their aesthetic than their illuminating qualities. Even without the glaring sunlight crushing through the window, the room would still have been bright.

From the easy jokes, laughter, banter, and overall camaraderie at work, Sichangi, Nu Fvnk, Hiribae, Jinku and Ukweli are a tight brotherhood. This is an EA Wave type of cool.

Watching this five-man DJ/ producer collective try on outfits as Irungu, a quiet photographer, and Emry, a restless stylist set up, throwing an instruction here and there, is surreal. I feel like a trespassing voyeur; watching young virtuosos outside Soundcloud, almost as if they’re unaware that they are redefining a whole section of the Kenyan sound with their genre-fluid take on electronic music.

Then as they slip into pink vogue suits, high-waisted retro trousers, du-rags and bandanas under a puffed up afro, the band’s star quality is suddenly accentuated.

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This is their world. Here, different rules apply. Society's constraints are shut out. They wear what they want for the photoshoot, including skirts, in complete disregard for the bounds of masculinity.

Here, if it’s dope, it’s dope. There is freedom. Music rules. East African Wave thrives.

A trained chef, Hiribae has an endearing, youthful earnestness to him. He makes you want to lean in and listen to his dreams. His music feels like a soundtrack to unblemished optimism, seeping from declarations such as, “We want to put East Africa on the map”.

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“If someone gets to know about Kenya through us, our job is done” Sichangi started off playing piano, switched to guitar, and ended up producing. He says randomly profound things like, “everything beautiful comes from the mud,” and, “falling in love with a process is an ugly thing”. He has this introspective vibe, as if he’s perpetually ruminating on a deep thought.

It is a requisite, I presume, for a person who defines himself as “someone who manipulates sound for what it is and its properties”.

Jinku flips between illustration and graphic design. Once he starts talking, you want to believe. He has that raw charisma of a natural-born leader.

EA Wave doesn’t have a hierarchy, but if they didn’t function horizontally, it’s easy to see him as a frontman, shouting, “If someone gets to know about Kenya through us, our job is done!” to a packed stadium.

Ukweli used to paint, then he got a camera from his mum and is now into filmmaking. He is laid back. Not in your face, yet not disappearing in a room. When he talks, you listen.

He expresses his thoughts with an easy eloquence that reflects his stage name — Kiswahili for ‘truth’. You can hear the honesty when he says, “I make music because I genuinely enjoy it... it is not work for me.”

Nu Fvnk wants to be everywhere: fashion, film, music… he doesn’t mind doing the boring, barely credited work, as long as he is on set. Nu Fvnk is the kind of artist you want to play every morning. He doesn’t look or talk like he ever has bad days. He sounds like he

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believes in every step he takes. He’s sure about the collective. He’s sure about the strides they’ve made.

About the future being open for the taking.

One thread runs through them: an intense love — obsession even — for music.

When Jinku touches on being more acknowledged outside Kenya, it takes me straight back to Just A Book, the collection of essays, notes, sketches and other odd bits and pieces trailing the path Kenyan musical breakout stars Just A Band beat through unmapped thicket. These musical forefathers had to deal with the same reality. I ask Sichangi whether it bothers him. It doesn’t. It would be dope to be acclaimed both at home and internationally. But it is not necessary for EA Wave.

Some would label this collective as saviours of the music scene. In which case, Just A Band would be the John to their Jesus. Something Hiribae is not shy about.

When I ask him who they look up to, his answer is “Just A Band!” Like the giants on whose shoulders they stand, they’re preaching a new musical gospel as part of the renaissance in Nairobi. This urgency in the arts is characterised by more collaboration. More flavour. More courage.

It is a wave of change. A new wave from a new Nairobi. Or NuNairobi, if you are with it. East African Wave are the crest of that wave. They do not care whether Kenyans keep sleeping on them, they are going for the global ear. From producing for fellow Kenyan alternative musician Karun, to working with Ghanaian artist Jojo Abot, from performing in Uganda and Sweden to their own local monthly residency Surf Inn, and with their latest release Alango, featuring Makadem, these young men are riding their own very wavey wave.

For a collective whose average age is 22, they move with a confident ease that usually comes with experience, but with an additional cocky gait. They know they’re good. The future is theirs. In the last few years, as the collective coalesced, through the internet and in-person meetups, they’ve pushed the envelope on what the Kenyan sound is. They know the world is not ready for them, but they damn sure are ready for the world.

(Previous spread right) SICHANGI wears METAMORPHIZED jacket, model’s own t-shirt. (Clockwise from above) JINKU wears KATUNGULU MWENDWA shirt dress and model’s own trousers. KELVIN wears stylist’s own top and trousers, WARDROBE BANTER durag. HIRIBAE wears stylist’s own shirt, MARVIN OTIENO trousers. UKWELI wears KATUNGULU MWENDWA Harakati handwoven jacket, model’s own t-shirt and black jeans.

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Enter the wonderful worlds of this extraordinary visual artist 1

Words CATHERINE E. MCKINLEY Photography OLGA DE LA IGLESIA

RUBY ONYINYECHI AMANZE 108

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“To invent a world for oneself with its own set of rules / non-rules is both a revolutionary act and a playful one”

Visual artist ruby onyinyechi amanze creates spirited and fluid worlds with her drawings and works on paper. She was born in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria, and spent her childhood in the UK before relocating to the US where she studied at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Since graduating in 2006 her work has distinguished itself by its open-endedness and mystery as much as its mastery of lines and strong, unforgettable characters — which are often animals.

Exhibiting around the world, the artist currently lives part-time in Philadelphia and part-time in New York — a city that seems to want to lay claim to her. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum, an Open Sessions participant at the Drawing Center 2015— 2017, and has shown everywhere from the Studio Museum of Harlem to Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. The city is indeed seeing a lot of amanze of late. She was the featured artist for the Deutsche Bank VIP Lounge at Frieze New York in May, where she showed new works including drawings from a recent show at Cape Town’s Goodman Gallery titled, there are even moonbeams we can unfold. Also upcoming this autumn is a two-person exhibition with her dear friend, the similarly accomplished artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji, at Fridman Gallery in Manhattan.

Here, amanze catches writer and curator Catherine E. McKinley up on life and work.

CATHERINE E. MCKINLEY In 2012–13, you received a Fulbright Scholars Award in Drawing to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, the site of production for many of Nigeria’s most formidable mid-century artists whose work is now much sought after. Tell us about that period.

RUBY ONYINYECHI AMANZE I went to Nsukka to be as close to the centre of that conversation as possible from a drawing perspective, as opposed to painting. Lagos is the new centre of Nigeria’s art world, but at one point it was Nsukka and I was well aware of that distinction and history. My Fulbright year was a period where I meant to explore what was happening in contemporary drawing in that old centre. Did it exist as its own entity, separate from painting? Was there an experimental branch of it in terms of materials, themes and applications?

Which artists were at the forefront of the medium? These were some of my questions, but I also went there to have a studio practice and to teach drawing. It was great for me to be in Nigeria. It was the beginning of this current body of my work and I formed some beautiful relationships with other artists who I continue to collaborate with. I wasn’t there as an observer or a documentarian. I was there as an artist amongst other artists, and in so many ways, this feels important to where I am now.

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RUBY ONYINYECHI AMANZE

I’ve been excited about your work since you debuted. I first fell in love with the animal forms and their interplay with female forms — the open narratives, the spare-ness and nonlinear space. What are the things that most deeply inform your recent work?

ROA I’d say architecture/space, play/ magic and hybridity — in that order.

First and foremost, everything is driven by an ongoing quest to bend space within a two-dimensional plane. I want to make drawings that move and overlap and transcend the perceived limitations of the page. Which I guess brings us to magic.

To invent a world for oneself with its own set of rules/non-rules is both a revolutionary act and a playful one. The characters in the work exist firstly to support the notion of inhabitable space, and secondly to reinforce the magical power of existing freely. So much so that even gravity becomes a myth.

Together both of these things relate to hybridity for me. The hybrid is part of multiple worlds/spaces that have merged, collided, overlapped. And the hybrid, with feet in different spheres, is able to decide for themselves who/what they want to be.

They’re able to shape-shift and morph.

They’re able to be elusive. I think magic is part of the hybrid’s nature. It seems inherent that such beings get to play with and bend ideas of reality.

CEM Can we talk about notions of home and of identity expressed by the figures in your work.

ROA I grew up never having to identify with any particular single country. The narrative of identity was always a mash-up of several things — where I was born versus where I lived, where I grew up, where my parents grew up, etc. The visibility of my art career was largely connected to the resurgence of ‘Contemporary African Art’ in the

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mainstream art world. At that point, it seemed there was no space for non-nation in the way that I so closely identified. All of a sudden, the thing written about me was that I was ‘Nigerian’. I wasn’t opposed to this label, because I am Nigerian, and I feel deeply connected to that land and Nigerian people. But from the beginning, I questioned what it really means to claim a country as an identity, especially one that I’ve spent so little time in. My drawings speak of a place that exists without name or borders. The inhabitants — ada the alien, audre the leopard, pidgin, merman and others, are not from anywhere. They have no nation, but they’re not without kin.

CEM Do you still love or need these characters?

ROA ada stays for now, as does audre.

It got tricky quickly because people gravitated to those characters and became a bit attached. The drawings were about them initially but I moved from that necessity a long time ago. They stay because I want them to and because they reinforce the spaces, but it’s ultimately about the space, not the characters.

My work was entirely abstract and void of the figure for years prior to this series.

Sometimes it feels like having a figure in the work is a box of some sort, but I also feel like that’s ridiculous. I want people to remember that I’m an artist, which means I’m ever curious and evolving. I can change my mind.

CEM What is going on in your studio right now?

ROA Currently I have plastic samples and iridescent films lying around.

It’s a new material for me and I’m not quite sure yet how it’ll unfold. But I’m drawn to the transparency in conversation with the paper, much like the watery inks I use.

Another ongoing thing for me is exploring ways to be even more intentional about the mounting, framing and installation elements that go with the work — they are all one thing.

CEM Where might your work go next?

ROA I’m excited by the drawings becoming more and more three dimensional. It’s new territory for me and comes with elements of discomfort and uncertainty that are so good for an art practice. I get to make a lot of mistakes and ask a lot of questions. It also forces me to open up the work to other voices in the sense of collaboration. I’m not a builder and to think structurally is not my strength.

But in conversation with people who live in that space, it turns something on in me.

I love that kind of exchange — I live for it!

To sit at a table with an architect, a poet, a dancer and a sculptor and talk about drawing — where will we end up? What happens when all of those different ways of thinking and seeing are in sync for a single purpose — to transform paper into something with weight but that still stays paper. Outside of the actual act of drawing, this is where my joy lies.

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The element of dance sounds very stimulating.

ROA I’m excited at the possibility of spending some time doing movement/dance research. I’ve practiced Gaga (the movement language) informally and infrequently for some years now. I’ve been thinking a lot about doing an intensive course this summer and spending some time exploring space with my body. I’ve been an athlete all of my life, but to align with a dance language is a recent chapter for me and one that informs so much of my drawings. I’m eager for time to pretend to be a dancer.

CEM What is something that people may not know about you that is important to your practice?

ROA That I’m a runner. Running and drawing feel like two sides of the same coin to me. They’re both analogue and they’re both steeped in mental, physical and spiritual realms. My whole life I’ve been pulled by these two forces that at the surface seem so disparate.

RUBY ONYINYECHI AMANZE

I competed as a college athlete and spent hours at races or on the road. But just as often I was in the studio trying to make sense of the relationship between form and content. Running, particularly distance running, takes a similar endurance and mindfulness to sitting on a huge blank piece of paper and drawing with a pencil.

In some ways they’re equally absurd, but I love that. Things that are so much about time and process take you to places you couldn’t have anticipated. The way I approach long runs is to have a general idea of the direction I’m going and approximately how many miles I want to run.

And when I’m drawing, I never see the end of it until I arrive. They’re one and the same thing to me and I’m interested in that intersection.

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Swimming in pink gave birth to the moon [when the heart’s prisms were beyond enuf], 2016.

The Pool, 2018.

Canopies, Lungs and Effervescence, 2018.

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JENN Kamasi Washington — Hub-Tones, 2018.

The filmmaker determined to recalibrate the black image

NKIRU Black To Techno, 2019.

Words ALEXANDER APLERKU

“My journey is the brute force of my dream. I just refused to allow anyone to tell me no” Since graduating from her MFA at Howard University, Jenn Nkiru has rapidly built a name for herself with her radical, magical short films. The south London-born director’s first film, En Vogue (2014), is a stunning portrait of New York’s vogueing and ballroom scene shot with Bradford Young and Arthur Jafa. Nkiru followed up with the award-winning Rebirth Is Necessary (2017), a video art piece in association with culture video platform Nowness, that unpacks the black experience through jazz, Afrofuturism and a mesmerising patchwork of archive footage.

Soon followed her 2018 collaboration with Beyoncé and Jay-Z, working as second unit for director Ricky Saiz’s ultimate tour of the Louvre in their video to Apeshit. She’s also fed her love of music by directing cosmic videos for Neneh Cherry and Kamasi Washington.

Now the British Nigerian filmmaker’s latest offering, Black To Techno, explores Detroit’s invention of the titular musical genre in the 1980s, the people who birthed it and the praise the sound receives in Berlin. Part of Frieze and Gucci’s Second Summer of Love series, it’s a glitchy, multi-channel, deep dive into this industrial town and its own unique breed of protest music, which attests that techno “is not just a musical gesture but a philosophical, sonic and anthropological one.” After a busy few months, Nkiru has escaped to Bangkok for a well-deserved break, but still finds time to talk to Nataal…

ALEXANDER APLERKU Can you elaborate on what Rebirth is Necessary means to you personally?

JENN NKIRU The film came out of a need for a new way of seeing things. I was thinking about ideas of being born again, of life and death, and life occurring through death. It came at a time when there was so much going on politically, racially. It was such a loaded period — it weighed on me, so I wanted to speak about it in my own language. To add to that, I’m a massive J Dilla fan. He had a mixtape called Rebirth of Detroit and track 13 is a song called ‘Rebirth Is Necessary’. Whenever I make films, I usually make playlists — not necessarily tracks that will appear in the film, but tracks that I can listen to when I create a piece. Rebirth Is Necessary kept popping up over and over again, almost by divine intervention, and I would always get ideas about the film whenever I heard it.

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Neneh Cherry — Kong, 2018.

Black Star — Rebirth Is Necessary, 2017.

JENN NKIRU

Movement appears to be one of the most important pillars of your work. Would you say this is true?

JN Movement is definitely integral, and it’s featured in all things that I have created so far. It’s an additional language, a tool to use in the visual filmmaking process. Movement is an idea that I’m looking out on multiple levels; one being the movement of people, the movement of bodies. The Peruvian choreographer Victoria Santa Cruz, whose work focused on the lineage of movement within black cultures, once said in reference to the middle passage that black people were never enslaved, because you can never enslave their inner rhythm. For me, that’s something that I’m always interrogating in my work.

AA You look at queer identities in both En Vogue and Rebirth Is Necessary. Do you plan on revisiting this theme again?

JN Absolutely! I would like to think that all of my films on some levels are queer. I’m on a mission to recalibrate black images, which are oftentimes centred on cis black males, in order to create something with fullness, that is representational and inclusive of all of us, images of women, images of queer identities. And this isn’t something I seek to be applauded for because I feel like in order to get us where I want us to be, these are the kinds of approaches we all need to be taking. It’s funny because at the São Paulo Film Festival, they gave Rebirth Is Necessary the LGBTQ film award, and I felt like an imposter accepting it as I don’t identify as queer — I didn’t want to take the space of someone else.

But the organisers put me at ease when they said, “It’s not about you being queer or not. It’s about your work giving a voice to queer people.”

AA Do you feel there’s an onus on you to show black people their magic and spiritual roots?

JN I do, and it’s self-imposed.

I’m such a curious person and, I’ve heard Nina Simone say this as well, one of my central preoccupations is to make people — all people, but particularly black people — curious about themselves. So in turn, that means curious to feel some pride in themselves. I‘ve always felt that at our essence, at our roots, we are a people who harbour a lot of spiritual privilege — in the most beautiful way — and I really believe that freedom lies inside that, so I’m constantly getting people to think about spirit and nature in my films.

The closer we get to ourselves spiritually,

the more liberated we will become as a people.

AA So do you make your films for black people?

JN My most direct audience is black people. I would hope that my films create space for all people to come in and see themselves on some level, but there will always be a particular group who will naturally have the fullest experience, because their experience is a mirror of my own.

With Black To Techno, I would imagine that the direct audience would be black folk in Detroit, but it doesn’t mean that no one else can come into it and get an experience.

Black people can go into a movie theatre and see a white cis man saving the world and still be able to see ourselves in that. I’m interested in what happens when you make the saviour a trans person or black woman, or even a child.

AA The US features a lot in your work, why do you think that is?

JN I guess on some level I’m constantly looking at Africa’s diaspora and trying to figure out how to realign us all.

But a lot of my commissions tend to come from the US, so in turn, the US features in my work a lot. Also I went to film school at a historic black college in Washington DC, which has influenced my ideas.

However I want to feature British culture in my work more. I mean, I could easily move to the US, but one reason why I’ve stayed in the UK is we have such a rich culture that remains untapped, that deserves more attention and appreciation, and that’s something I’m focused on.

AA Can you say more about Black To Techno?

JN The film looks at the black roots of techno and its relationship to its fandom in Berlin.

It premiered at the Paramount during the inaugural Frieze art fair in LA, which was really surreal. The response was incredible. That film was commissioned in September so I’ve spent the last few months putting it together, a labour of love.

So much went into it, which is why I’m in Bangkok right now, the reason why I’ve run away. I’m taking my time before I commit to the next project.

AA How conscious are you of your impact on rising black women directors?

JN I don’t know how conscious I am of it, but I’m in communication with a lot of black women filmmakers and black filmmakers in general, I kind of see

Black Star — Rebirth Is Necessary, 2017.

Black To Techno, 2019.

Neneh Cherry — Kong, 2018.

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it as a communal thing. I have no interest in being one of very few, that’s really boring to me and it’s not an industry or world I want to be in.

The more of us, the better.

Often when people ask me to do something and I can’t do it because of scheduling conflicts, I give them a list of ten great filmmakers who can, and most of the time those lists are 100 per cent black and 90 per cent women.

There are other things I like to do very quietly, like mentoring.

AA Do you feel as though you got that treatment when you were rising up?

JN No, I didn’t. I know what it is as a person to want something and to go for a dream and not have the support. I went to film school and I had amazing people who I could talk to, but outside of that I’ve never had a mentor. I’ve had to build paths because I’ve never had them made for me.

I don’t come from a rich family, there’s no nepotism here. I grew up on a Peckham estate. My journey is the brute force of my dream. I just refused to allow anyone to tell me no.

AA What do you enjoy about collaborating with musicians?

JN Music is my first language, and a central preoccupation in my work is the relationship between sound and vision. Music videos are a great gateway to explore that, and to experiment with ideas — trying out concepts in the short form as opposed to making a feature film, which can often take years.

AA What music are you listening to at the moment?

JN I listen a lot to Kamasi Washington, I love jazz. It unlocks my creativity.

I’ve also been listening to J*Davey a lot.

It’s so funny because Jack from J*Davey came to that screening in LA and I was thinking about the randomness of it.

I used to listen to J*Davey all the time on Myspace. I’m listening to Jill Scott and Marvin Gaye again too.

AA What is your holiday reading?

JN The first one is Barracoon

by Zora Neale Hurston, an account from an enslaved man from Benin brought to the US during the transatlantic slave trade.

Then I have If Beale Street Could Talk, which I’m reading because of the film. Then I have Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard — a philosophical book on architecture.

The final book is one that my friend gave me, You Can't Touch My Hair

by Phoebe Robinson.

Y�NGYE YENI Adjoa Armah revels in the fine art of enjoyment in late-1980s Ghana, as documented by her ongoing project, Saman Archive

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The thing about Ghanaians is, from the day you are born, to the day you die, it’s a celebration. Every country has its own distinct celebration traditions, but Ghana, with its sometimes week-long burials, stands out for doing life right through to the end. If you’re really lucky, ten years after you pass, your loved ones will come together to mark your life once again.

You don’t really stumble on an Akan funeral; before you see anything, you will hear the faint hum of the drums or sound system, a gentle noise that will grow into all consuming sound. Eventually, you’ll feel the bass of huge speakers — stacked in groups of four or six — in your bones, and know that you are part of this too.

Then come the mourners. A sea of bodies in red and black, maybe white, depending on who the deceased is and what is being marked. There will be wailing — sometimes not even from close family — that will stop you in your tracks.

There will also be dancing and singing.

Yes, there are hymns, but also songs of Chiefs and Queen Mothers, histories of the land and songs for lovers.

As much as celebration is about the drums, DJs, dance and drink, it is a thing to be seen. The Twi term for enjoyment, gye w’eni, literally translates as ‘to take one’s eye’.

Y�ngye yeni ‘Let’s take our eyes’ Inhabitants of the former Gold Coast, rich in minerals and textiles, have never shied away from wearing wealth on our bodies. Beyond the traditional textiles and gold of royalty, showing out, coming well-dressed, matters. Anything else is tantamount to disrespect.

To do life well-dressed is to do life well. Period. That does not mean being showy or extravagant, necessarily.

Just come correct.

Y�mb� life ‘Let’s hit/kick life’ (to show out, come well-dressed) For big life events, it’s not enough to cut your coat according to your size; you cut everyone else a coat too, so they can all be matching for your party.

Give life something to talk about, not as an individual, but as a unit. Those with the means have a responsibility to provide for those without.

Enjoyment isn’t just for adults either.

Celebrations are a generational affair.

Growing up in a Ghanaian household outside the country, celebrations are the clearest frame for kids to understand what it means to be Ghanaian. The memory of a plate of jollof rice with chicken and salad, bottle of Supermalt in hand, Daddy Lumba’s Aben W��ha* in the background, all the aunties and uncles adhering to the colour code, and probably several female cousins in huge party dresses they don’t

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want to be in, is seared into the minds of many of my generation who were kids the 1990s. From London to Toronto, Basel to New York City, it’s an almost identical picture.

When all these diaspora kids descend on Ghana for the December festive season, Accra swells in size and becomes the party city.

A backdrop for a relentless social calendar that includes everything from huge family functions to beach parties — naturally with all-white dress codes — and crowded clubs.

If you just want to take it easy, Ghanaians are very good at slowing things down to a snail’s pace, too.

One thing is for sure: come to Ghana and you will enjoy, whether you are in a big city like Accra or a village like Agbozume.

The images you see here were taken in Agbozume, in the Volta region, near the Ghana-Togo border between 1989 and 1991. They are part of Saman, a vast archive of photographic negatives I began collecting across Ghana in 2015, and which now forms part of my doctorial research. In the period before most of the neighbouring villages had access to a sound system, there was a monthly party thrown in a house, known as Offer Home, in Agbozume. Teenagers and 20-somethings from neighbouring villages would wear their trendiest clothes to hit Offer Home for a regular night of mischief, music and dance.

Lucky for me, there happened to be a photo studio next to Offer Home, and there was always someone on hand to document the enjoyment. Photocity would open as late as people wished to party, and according to one of the photographers, “That was a great time to take pictures. Young people don’t want to misbehave in front of their elders, but I was young then too. We really enjoyed.”

Eventually more people got their own sound systems and there was less reason to come to Offer Home, so the parties — and others across the country like it — stopped, but the enjoyment didn’t. Travelling around Ghana to collect, I time my trips to coincide with festivals. Beyond the funerals, weddings, outdoorings, birthdays, the parties just-because, there are hundreds of local celebrations across the country and enjoyment to be had at every turn, a bass to be consumed by, something to catch your eye. *It’s lit here

Y3NGYE YENI

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The polymath wordsmith summons up the thunder gods in his latest literary work

Words ANANDA PELLERIN Photography DANNY KASIRYE

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The secret to Inua Ellams’ success is “And that’s when I thought, okay. This ‘All the Boys of Plateau Private School’ getting 1,000 words down a day. So says was an opportunity for me to critique and described him as being the ‘half-god the London-based writer, performer and colonisation, by setting it during the of rainfall’. self-professed ‘jack of all trades’ whose Nigerian Civil War,” he continues. “I could Like many of Ellams works, Half God new play in epic verse, The Half God look at colonial history and the role of is already destined for other things. of Rainfall, was recently published by the Soviet Union and the British in that Originally spawned from a Kiln Theatre Harper Collins. conflict. Also, I have two sisters and commission, the verse play is being The admission comes as no surprise: I’m the only male child so I thought, if shit staged there from April. “It’s also going once you get Googling the Nigerian-born gets difficult, I can just write about my to be an audio book, and hopefully a radio wordsmith and all-around creative force, family, and that’s totally what I did.” play, and I think it might make an you’re in for a wild ride through the worlds The newly released The Half God of awesome video game…” of theatre and poetry, fiction, graphic art Rainfall sees Ellams once again taking on Ellams is keenly aware that audiences and participatory programmes. ‘Prolific’ the big guns, this time by summoning the for theatre aren’t always the youngest, is a word often thrown around, but in thunder gods of myths from around the or the most diverse. It’s a difficulty he tries Ellams’ case, it’s a good fit. world — from Zeus in Ancient Greece to to tackle first hand. “Whenever I work “I’m strict, I put a lot of pressure on the Hindu Indra to �àngó, the most feared with established organisations, one of the myself,” he tells me at the café-bar Yoruba god, in all their lightning-sharp things I do is give fifty per cent of my on Deptford High Street in Southeast wrath. “The more I got into it, the more tickets away for free to people who might London where we meet to chat. “There’s I wanted to find out about as many of the otherwise never come,” he says. “Also the financial need to work when you thunder gods as possible — there are whenever people give me free tickets to live in a city like this, but also, especially hundreds of them,” Ellams says. “There’s things I put them on Twitter — I’m like: in theatre, there are many people and a scene where �àngó heads off to invade ‘I have a free ticket for whoever wants to schedules that depend on you hitting your Mount Olympus, he’s charging from come.’ So, you know, I’ve had a couple target, so if you don’t, there’s a trickleNigeria to Greece like this massive black of awkward blind dates.” down effect.” If he doesn’t hit his daily thunderbolt, and the other thunder Yet another project that Ellams is mark, the 34-year-old plays catch-up. gods are like, ‘oh this is so embarrassing developing is called Alcohol, City Light On the day we meet he’s looking at could you not do this?’ It’s been really and Slow Songs — the title is a lyric a backlog of 3,000 words, but he’s not fun to write.” from a Drake song. “It’s because I don’t sweating it. “I’m also a workaholic,” But there’s more to the story than get alcohol,” he says, as he explains that he admits. “I love what I do, my job is ancient myth. Ellams — who moved to the this play focuses on what it’s like to be my hobby.”

UK when he was 12 and who refers to young today. “Hangovers have always From the most illustrious stages to himself as a ‘third-culture kid’ — is waking been the deterrent for me. So I'm trying to the most exploratory of personal projects, the gods in order to explore hybridity write about that — about political apathy Ellams seems unafraid to take on any and the multiplying of identities, something through the lens of young people who live challenge — a strategy that’s paid off. he knows from his own experience of in a city and drink a bit too much. It’s Barber Shop Chronicles, his study of moving around and adapting. The play’s also about trying to get to grips with what masculinity in a global age, is returning action centres on what happens when it means to be British in the twentyto London this summer, to the Roundhouse, a young man’s court skills rouse Zeus’s first century.” after two sell-out runs at the National anger, and his mortal Nigerian mother I ask Ellams, who has done multiple Theatre and a world tour. He’s also steps in to protect her son. “I thought of writing workshops and worked in schools, adapting his one-man-show Black T-shirt that cliché ‘making it rain’, which is if he has any advice for young people Collective, about a pair of Nigerian foster said when someone is a good shot in to help them find their confidence, to trust brothers whose lives are torn apart basketball, then I created Demi, this that they have a voice worth sharing. when their clothing brand goes global, figure who is half mortal, half god and “I try to focus on how finite life is,” he says. for American television network NBC. And who is a good shot. When it came to “You’re only alive now, only you see the he’s writing a book on his phone called thinking about his ethnicity, I decided world as you see it, your perspective Fuck Forty Five: “it’s gonna be forty five to make him half Nigerian and, because is entirely yours and you have nothing to poems that are all subtle ‘fuck yous’ — I am a huge fan of Greek myth, I made lose in sharing it — especially with poetry, to Donald Trump, Tommy Robinson, him the son of Zeus.” which can be easy to create and if you Shakespeare, Kipling — very lyrical,” The writer is no stranger to fantastical don’t like it — you just throw it in the bin.” he explains. Or there’s his R.A.P (rhythm thinking. Last year on BBC Three’s This tenacity is the real secret to and poetry) parties, which pop up The Essay, Ellams recounted his discovery Ellams success, and perhaps the reason regularly across London; a mix of music of Terry Pratchett’s comedy-fantasy behind his dedication to those everand readings, a celebration of hip hop Pyramids, which was the first book “with important 1,000 words a day. It’s a quality and the spoken word. no pictures that made me laugh out he attributes to his upbringing. “Nigerians One big project on the horizon is his loud — there was something about the can’t be last,” he says. “We have the spirit adaptation of Chekov’s Three Sisters, alchemy of it, so I began to read more to make something out of nothing, make which opens at the National Theatre this Pratchett and he introduced me to British a dollar out of fifteen cents, or just stand autumn. Seemingly un-phased by taking humour and I thought, okay, maybe I with a sense of entitlement — even if we on such a canonised play, Ellams found can find a way of living in England.” have no reason to be entitled. I had that in his way into the project by drawing As for the genesis of Half God, it bucket loads. I grew up with black privilege connections between the 1900 Russian started as a lot of Ellam’s projects do — in Nigeria and when I came to the UK, classic and more recent events — some of with an image. “This image usually I never felt like less than anyone, so I talked which are close to home. “When I first becomes a metaphor for something,” he to my teachers in a way most of my black read Three Sisters I was like nah, I don’t explains. “I question it or find a narrative friends didn’t, because they grew up in think so, these are just some middleor concept to attach to the metaphor. a racist society. But I was like, this is just class Russians,” he says. “But the second In this case there was a kid who I was at who I am. And I kept that intact. I still time I read it I picked up on the internal school with in Nigeria. His party trick was have it.” architecture, how it was a bit of genius, to spit as high as he could and catch and the third time I read it, I thought ‘ahh, the saliva in his mouth. It’s kind of gross, Read an excerpt from The Half God they’re just over the top, this is so Nigerian!’” but I wrote about him in a poem called of Rainfall on the next page.

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An excerpt from The Half God of Rainfall by Inua Ellams Published by Harper Collins (2019)

Zeus, who had been glorified on film, song and stage, felt this keenly, grew vengeful and sharpened his bolts.

That lightning lord, that God-father, whose ancient rage once frightened kings, whose influence, whose merest hopes were turned to laws, and laws supreme, realised too late this dwindling servitude of men and hurled volts.

He killed them. Other Gods grew benevolent, cooled down, conserving power, but Zeus smote those who strayed from him, bolts asunder, this way, that, so thrice through �àngó’s wide window Zeus’ terrible aim flayed the walls and �àngó had enough, thundered, vexed, sped towards Mount Olympus. As he charged, his way was watched by other thunder-gods: from Egypt — Set, Chaac — Mayan, Indra — Hindu, from China — Feng Lung, Whaitiri — Māori, Thor — Norse God and the rest too numerous to count watched �àngó’s raging run to Olympus knowing chaos would come. �àngó’s first bolt hit the doors with such force Hera’s throne spun.

Hera — Queen of the Greek Gods, screamed to Apollo — God of Archery to take arms against �àngó, as Ares — God of War, sat back to watch the show.

Artemis — Goddess of Hunting, grasped her long bow but �àngó burned it to ashes, his black fire wild in his hands. He hurled it at Hera, grasped low its shaft when it struck her throne, whipped back its fire at Apollo. With the two archers down he hewed from a distance. He struck column after spire after pillar after stone. �àngó’s anger stood down every attack, slaying their weapons until Zeus arrived in a thunderclap, primed for a feud.

You dare attack my home, �àngó? �àngó laughed, thrilled, for Zeus’ arrogance would sweeten his vengeance.

Let he without fault throw the first bolt! How d’you feel?

Find yourself ... wanting? Zeus? Thrice you’ve struck my palace! / My aim was not for you! For men! Those bolts I threw to smite them. / Zeus, killing innocents is callous.

And my palace is wrecked. Redress is what I’m due! / And of all the ways, �àngó, furnishings? You crush furniture? Are we men or are we Gods? yelled Zeus Choose better! He turned, snapping his fingers, the lush beauty returning to the halls as though �àngó hadn’t happened. Zeus, weakened by the effort, flushed.

Your power dwindles �àngó said You’ve turned yellow.

Are you well? / Of course! Zeus snapped Let us settle this as Gods. A race! My kingdom to yours. Your might thrown

For thousands of years, Gods enjoyed full dominion over the lives of men. From the northernmost poles to the southern, from the east of the sun’s rise down

against mine. The loser answers the victor’s whims for an age, and the victor can take a mortal from the loser’s world. / Done! �àngó hissed, his bolt swift

to the west of the sun’s set, men promised their souls and gave their all in penitent servitude but this century marked a change. Their lives, from sole

in his grip. Hera rolled her eyes at how mortal Gods could be, how like men to reduce disputes down to sporting feats, but it was done: the stakes, awful,

god-worship, turned to fleshy pleasures and the glut of property. As prayers which fed and assuaged the might of Gods dwindled, they felt their power cut.

the route to run, Zeus in his great and golden crown, in a monstrous gold chariot, �àngó displeased on his black bolt, face frowned, awaiting the countdown.

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Words HELEN JENNINGS Photography LAKIN OGUNBANWO

These Lagos leaders are moving Nigeria’s creative industries forward

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“It’s vibrant, it’s diverse, it’s fresh, it’s energetic and it’s organic. It’s very much for us, by us,” says Lakin Ogunbanwo, the pioneering photographer behind this story with Nataal. For him and his peers on the cultural vanguard of Lagos, Nigeria’s (and Africa’s) most populous city is now being defined by the undeniable dynamism emanating from the visual arts, music and fashion scenes. After bubbling up for the past decade, this megatropolis is now part of the global creative conversation — thanks in no small part to the endeavours of the individuals profiled here.

The socalled ‘Lagos hustle’ is real, and despite, or arguably because of the significant infrastructural, political and social challenges facing its inhabitants,

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there is a devotion and belief that drives the artists and entrepreneurs who are proudly pushing things forward. It takes a certain verve to maintain one’s vision and to refuse to give in to mediocrity here.

As such, those who have stayed true to promoting what makes Nigeria unique are rightfully rising to the top. From art fairs and music festivals to beautiful objects, films and sounds, it’s about looking inward to build outward.

“Lately I’ve felt the strong need to document my culture as I see it, and not how the West wants to engage with it,” adds Ogunbanwo.

“It’s important to recognise the people who are birthing these new conversations.

To see how they constantly drive and thrive is very exciting.”

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Chin Okeke “I believe that creativity in Lagos is fuelled by the energy at its core. It’s not something you can explain but those who know, know,” says Chin Okeke. “Not everybody can harness and channel it but those who can are the ones we’ve been seeing succeed over the last decade.”

This entertainment entrepreneur is one of those people. He initially worked in talent and brand management and then co-founded Eclipse Live events. In 2014 his team established Gidi Culture Festival, which has gone on to become West Africa’s biggest music festival. This year’s edition featured a line-up of stars from across the continent such as Patoranking, Blinky Bill and Moonchild Sanelly, alongside a host of new talent, continuing to offer an inclusive

environment for the city’s urban youth.

Okeke’s latest initiative, The Echo Music and Arts Foundation, is a non-profit organisation aimed at further building the native music industry.

It set sail with Lagos Music Week and the Echo Music conference, a series of happenings in April anchored

by Gidi Fest.

“We see a commerciallyviable music ecosystem in Nigeria where professionals are equipped to succeed locally and in the international music market,” says Okeke.

“Our wider challenges are to do with structure, collaboration, data and transparency, but I hope that what we’re contributing now will give us a stronger sense of identity and allow us to offer an authentic representation of our culture globally.”

CHIN wears EMMY KASBIT shirt and trousers.

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Falana With her signature pom-pom braids, audacious fashion sense and soulful voice, Falana is spearheading a brave new sound in Lagos.

Born in Toronto, she studied music in Havana and released her debut EP, Things Fall Apart, in 2014.

Subsequently relocating to Lagos, she took her time to develop a deep appreciation for Nigeria’s musical legends.

“I’m inspired by music from the 1970s and have spent some time mentoring with Odion Iruoje, who has worked with the Lijadu Sisters, Fela Kuti, Chris Okotie, Sonny Okosun and many more greats,” she says. “My current style and sound sit at the intersection of contemporary and vintage, both sonically and visually.”

This year has seen the much-anticipated release of her sophomore EP, Chapter One, featuring the

singles ‘Ride Or Die’ and ‘Repeat’. Its positive, sultry lyrics speak about love and perseverance, while the syncopated beats and live instrumentation take us on a journey from Etta James to A�a, via Lauryn Hill.

Having hosted intimate live events and sung for Orange Culture at Lagos Fashion Week, Falana is among the figureheads of the city’s alternative scene.

“Our creativity is fuelled by a passion for our culture and a dedication to exploring ways to present it on the international stage on our own terms, in our own words, and in our own way,” she says.

“I hope to make timeless music that stretches the understanding of the Nigerian sonic landscape, and to become a role model who incites younger generations to be unconventional and disruptive.”

FALANA wears ORANGE CULTURE dress.

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Papa Omotayo Not many cultural moments go on in Lagos country we call Nigeria. I’m constantly without Papa driven by the Omotayo’s guiding idea that through hand. The architect investigation, is CEO and creative collaboration and director of MOE+ pushing that Art Architecture, a little bit with every design studio rooted new project, in a reinvention you’re achieving of African modmore positive ernism. He’s results.” also the founder of Omotayo A Whitespace wryly notes that the Creative Agency, speed at which offering consultancy, the city’s creative artist representation, scene has grown film production and over the past few event activations, years has in some with clients such as ways been selfNataal and ART X destructive: Lagos. And that’s “The hustle was just the start of it. starting to The agency also choke and make hosts the Big60 arts everything feel festival, which saturated and has travelled from regurgitated, even Lagos to London before we’d and this year heads really begun,” to New York. And they’re he comments. “Thankfully, currently working on a public we’re now finding room for new space project along the independent voices and MacGregor Canal on Lagos more inclusive dialogue. There Island that will open by the are incredible women creating end of 2019. world-class platforms that “My desire is to build viable, will exist long after the now. sustainable spaces that have And there is the sheer crazy a strong sense of openness and recklessness and ’by force’ generosity towards sharing,” energy of the young population he says. “Our work is inspired by driven by the frustration and this amazing city we love and a lack of representation from the this maddening but addictive political classes.”

PAPA wears EMMY KASBIT suit.

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Tokini Peterside Having worked as a strategy and marketing consultant for the creative sectors in Nigeria for several years, Tokini Peterside identified a critical gap for an annual contemporary art fair in Africa’s second largest art market. Now as founder and director of ART X Lagos, she looks forward to its fourth edition in November 2019. Highlights have included keynotes from Yinka Shonibare MBE and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and the fair has expanded to include the ART X Prize in support emerging artists, as well as ART X Live!, which brings music, street art and pop culture into the art fair’s experience.

“I’ve always wanted to change the way the world sees my city, my country and my continent, and in turn, elevate the way we see ourselves,”

Peterside says. “The businesses and brands I am now building are centred on celebrating our collective identity, and the brilliance that exists within it, through our creators.” Being a frontrunner means that she’s often had to build the necessary infrastructure from the ground up, but alongside accordant events such as the Lagos Biennial, LagosPhoto and Art Summit that all happen around the same time each year, she is helping to make Lagos a serious destination.

“The city comes alive,” she says of this culturally rich time of year.

“This fuels its growing reputation as a cultural capital and enabling the thousands of creatives living here to engage an increasingly international audience.”

TOKINI wears MAKI OH dress.

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Amaka Osakwe “The kids are really not playing.

If Lagosians want it, they go for it,” states Amaka Osakwe.

“The creativity and tenacity out here is so inspiring.

It’s been years of this, but 2019 is showing that the world cannot sleep on Lagos.”

This designer is one of the main reasons we’re wide-awake.

Osakwe launched her label Maki Oh in 2010 and has found acclaim with her reinvention of adire. Traditionally made by Yoruba women in southwest Nigeria using indigoresist dye techniques, she turns it into silky, sensual womenswear that whispers its mischievous messages through cut and cloth.

Osakwe was shortlisted for the 2014 LVMH Prize, has had pieces acquired by major museums, shown at New York Fashion Week, and counts Michelle Obama, Solange Knowles, Lady Gaga and Lupita Nyong’o as fans.

She’s also recently moved into menswear, and from her exquisite, tucked away atelier in Lagos, she’s quietly planning further expansion. “Maki Oh 2.0 is in the works.

I’m drawing more, making art, wanting to learn and wanting to make change,” she says. “I want young Nigerians to know that they are enough and that they can never dream too big!”

AMAKA wears MAKI OH t-shirt and skirt.

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Arie Esiri Arie Esiri is one of the vital voices in Nigerian film that are breaking away from the Nollywood mould. He started out assisting on Biyi Bandele’s 2013 adaptation of Half Of A Yellow Sun, and soon after had his film B For Boy premiere at the London Film Festival.

His short Goose was selected for the LA Film Festival and he recently directed a fashion film for Maki Oh’s debut menswear capsule, Because Men in Silk Shirts on Lagos Nights.

“Right now I’m in postproduction on a feature film I co-directed and produced with my twin brother,” he reports. “Set in Lagos, it’s a socialrealist drama that follows two characters, an electrician and a hairdresser, in search of greener pastures.

But the ultimate goal for me would be to create something that resonates politically.”

While Esiri does not deny the problems holding the industry back, such as the lack of government grants and facilities, and the deficiency of quality film schools, he has confidence in the irrepressible attitude of young creatives. “Improved connectivity is allowing Gen Z to stay clued up on what’s happening globally and find like minds to collaborate with,” he says. “They’re creating content with an amount of freedom that I didn’t have when I started out. It’s producing a wealth of self-taught talent in the visual arts space here – they’re great at forming opportunities for themselves.”

ARIE wears MAKI OH shirt, own trousers.

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Kenneth Ize This burgeoning menswear designer has impressed with his dedication to reviving aso oke, the storied Yoruba handwoven fabric. He crafts his own take on this luxurious and colourful textile and then turns it into relaxed yet inventive silhouettes that are stocked worldwide.

“I relate strongly to my heritage so it’s important to express who we are and where we are from through the label,” says Ize. “We work with local artisans to promote and build their communities and to nurture their traditions. It is about opening up these techniques so that they form a territory for future traditions.”

Notable clients include Naomi Campbell, Childish Gambino and Beyoncé, and in 2019 he has been shortlisted for

the LVMH Prize, and launched a womenswear line during Arise Fashion Week in Lagos. Ize has also collaborated on an accessories collection with Sagan Vienna, and is working on moving into bespoke prints, lace and embroidery to further expand the brand’s scope.

“Fashion is playing a central role in the growing local design and arts scene,” he says.

“This community is contributing to the new cultural infrastructure. The exposure we’re receiving has made foreign audiences more aware of the nuances of our culture, and the connections that are now being made can lead to creative spaces that we can explore together.”

KENNETH wears KENNETH IZE shirt and trousers.

Make-up LAURETTA and SUTCHAY. Prop styling CHINEDU OKOLI. Photography Assistance PELUMI OGUNDE. Production FUNMBI OGUNBANWO.

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(Above and opposite) Photography HANANE EL OUARDANI.

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Meet the new North African photographers who are taking control of their own image Words MIRIAM BOUTEBA FEATURE

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A new wave of women artists is emerging from the Maghreb.

Bright, opinionated, determined, talented — and very different in their styles — they represent the present and future of this often misunderstood region in all its rich and varied glory.

To understand their work in context, we spoke with acclaimed Algerian photographer Farida Hamak — who has been a driving force in her field since the 1980s — about what it means to be North African, and a woman, working in photography now.

“For a long time images of the Maghreb were created by westerners and not by Arab photographers,” she says. “The recognition of Arab contemporary photographers brings freshness and dynamism to the world of photography and art.”

“Women photographers today enjoy both fragility and great strength,” she adds. “It’s a daily struggle, first against your own fears and then, against the prejudices of others. But a woman has a considerable advantage because it’s easier to approach other women and develop an intimacy with the people we photograph.”

Here we meet four blazing members of this new guard whose work can be seen as a very beautiful ‘fuck you’ to anyone who might have preconceived ideas about them or where they’re from.

“When I look at my sisters I see immense talents,” Hamak says. “Their work deserves to be seen.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

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Oumayma B Tanfous Born in Tunisia, Oumayma B Tanfous was ten years old when her family moved to Montreal, and just over a week into joining her new school, 9/11 happened. “As the new brown girl in the neighbourhood, I didn’t feel welcome. I understood quickly that I had to work harder to get what I wanted,” she recalls. Her early love of art stemmed from a natural inclination for photography. “I remember googling the 100 most influential photographers and going to the library to look at photography books. I was a nerd!” Tanfous abandoned a career in graphic design and even dropped out of a university course in photography, eager to get started, and went full-time four years ago. Her work has subsequently appeared in the pages of Dazed and Vogue Espãna, and this year she’s relocated to New York to continue with her trademark documentary-style fashion photography.

Spending her childhood on both sides of the Mediterranean has given this talent a culturally rich outlook. “My family travelled and lived in European and North African countries before settling in Tunis, so my cultural background is a mix,” Tanfous says. “As a kid in Tunisia, you understand quickly about inequality and the huge gap between the rich and the poor. Then when we moved to Canada, it was the opposite, we went from being the privileged ones to the hard-working immigrants.”

Her understanding of these nuances means that, while being a fashion photographer, her work is about more than just pretty clothes. “I try to create informal portraits, often of teenagers and sub cultures,” she says.

“I find ordinary people fascinating to watch and I’m interested in ideas of community and how a group of people can recreate the concept of family in a subjective way.”

This approach means that representation informs the type of people she shoots. “I don’t exploit Tunisian aesthetics in my work, at least not directly, but it comes naturally to me to photograph the people of colour around me, that’s who I am, and it represents the people in my life.” In line with this, she has advice for those looking to use and abuse North African style. “It can be flattering, but to be honest it quickly falls into trendy clichés and it’s always disappointing to come across art that exploits a Maghrebian aesthetic made by Europeans,” she says. “Why not collaborate with local artists to help you understand the complexities and subtleties of it?

Get out of your comfort zone and find them. It’s time to give Maghrebis the opportunity to tell their own stories.”

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Maya-Ines Touam The starting point for French Algerian photographer Maya-Ines Touam’s portraits of women landed close to home. “During my years of study, I looked at the affiliation between women in my own family, starting with my grandmother,” she says. “Then I felt the need to talk about other Arab-Muslim women, not confining myself to my own experience.”

This helped shape Touam’s mission, which is to represent Algerian women as they are.

Graduating from the National School of Fine Arts in Paris in 2013, where her thesis focused on the representations of Maghreb woman in orientalist discourses through to the present day, she then travelled to Algeria to confront the ways that women were seen by French colonialist photographers.

“Their images fantasised these women, sometimes showing them as lascivious or emphasising their ‘native’ side. I wanted to photograph these women in their realities, not as other people wanted them to be.”

And so her photo series, Revealing the Fabric, was born. “Following the manners of humanist photography, I built a studio devoid of reference as a way to exclude any social inequalities. I also wanted to compel the viewer to look only at the central subject.”

Last year Touam was presented with the LCC Program Award and her first solo show, Ready Made, opened at La Chambre Claire in Casablanca, which paired her portraits with interviews with the women.

“I want the viewer to question their own ideas of Algerian women, oriental fabrics and the veil, and have them understand, through the interviews, the history and evolution of Algeria.” Meanwhile Touam’s boudoir-style still lives include everyday items, such as a tin of mackerel or a coffee pot, making them swift rebuttals to this time-worn, sexually charged set-up that is often the product of the western male gaze.

Touam is conscious of the fact that there is no single ‘Algerian woman’. So she has been photographing many of them — 200 across six different regions for one stint. “For about four years I travelled from the capital to the Sahara, passing through farmland and coastal regions, seeking to translate the femininity of a country,” she says. “This territory has a great ethnic wealth, from Amazigh and Touareg to Chaoui and Arab.

There are so many nuances that define a multifaceted nation, we must not be Manichean in our view when the world is full of shading.”

“I wish the viewer of my work to question their own ideas of Algerian women, oriental fabrics and the veil”

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Yasmine Hatimi “Morocco is not just about deserts, camels, misery and couscous. Nor is it just about women who are victims, stay-at-home mothers or oppressed by their husbands.”

Yasmine Hatimi is talking about how her sentimental portraits of young Moroccans are changing the narratives about her homeland. Born in Casablanca to a Moroccan mother and Moroccan German father, who both worked in the TV and film industries, creativity runs in her blood.

“At 18 I travelled to Madrid to study cinema and photography. After ten years there, I realised I wanted to tell stories and the place for that was in my own country.

I struggled at first; I couldn’t find my angle, my vision.”

But she set upon her poetic angle soon enough: the exploration and reframing of masculinity. “I tend to have a romantic

“I asked myself, ‘What would it look like to have a feminine vision of a patriarchal country?’”

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vision, my images have been described as ‘feminine’,” she says. “Men are told that they shouldn’t be vulnerable or sensitive, or show their weaknesses.

They are supposed to play a role in society, just like women have to. So, I asked myself, ‘What would it look like to have a feminine vision of a partricarchal country?’”

The answer to that is delicate, floral and really quite dreamy.

Hatimi is especially inspired by the work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. “There are pieces of art that ignite something inside you, that change and push you,” she says.

“Tarkovsky’s Polaroids moved me to tears. At first glance they appear quite simple, but they emit such gentleness.”

The same could be said of her own images, which play on the dichotomy between genders to question the boundaries of identity. “When I’m taking a young man’s portrait, I create a new space where we can each be ourselves without judgement; where we can be equals,” she explains. “I believe culture and art can help society to break down barriers. When taking photos, I let sitters show me their vulnerable side or romantic side or more masculine side.

Sometimes all three at the same time.”

It’s this intuitive vision, fuelled by negative headlines of her homeland, that propels Hatimi to keep doing what she’s doing. “After the terrorist attack in Barcelona, the cover of Jeune Afrique featured a photograph of the perpetrators with the title, ‘Terrorism: Born in Morocco’,” she says. “This image will haunt me for a long time.

Deep down I think this is exactly what motivates me to work. I want to show a more accurate vision of Morocco.”

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Hanane El Ouardani Recently graduated with a BA in Photography from the Royal Academy of Arts at The Hague, Hanane El Ouardani might be just starting out, but she’s already making an impression with her beautifully rich imagery. Born in The Netherlands to Moroccan parents, every summer she would travel to her mother’s village in the Rif Mountains. “I am Dutch, I am Moroccan; a child of emigrants,” says El Ouardani.

“I feel European; I feel like a citizen of the world.” This multitude of identities is something that she explores in her work. “I envy those who are attached to a clear and strong identity, but at the same time I like to be on the outside. My method is to infiltrate a group and then put the reality at a certain distance, which allows the viewer to relate to it.”

Inspired by representations, stereotypes and ideas of home, El Ouardani’s work approaches these subjects with the emotional subtlety of a young woman carefully navigating her own way.

“When I started studying, I only worked on things that didn’t have any relationship to me.

It was because of anxiety that I couldn’t touch my own identity.

But at a certain point I became more confident and looked at photography as therapy.”

When she started her project The Skies are Blue, the Walls are Red, El Ouardani was writing her thesis about photoshopped studio backdrops.

“This came out of my fascination with super kitschy photos of religious phrases that I receive from my family via WhatsApp,” she says. “I looked down on them. But was this my western view of what is considered beautiful? Or just my class? I don’t know, but I wanted to appreciate where my family’s ideas of beauty were coming from.”

But her photography is not only governed by her heritage alone.

“Speaking as a North African woman artist, it’s like I can’t ever avoid the political and religious layers of my identity. When I talk about my work I always feel that it is more about my position as a woman of colour living in the West than actually the content of the work itself.”

She believes her focus won’t always be just on her parents’ homeland, though there is plenty left there to explore. “I’ve always been interested in contradictions between the East and West. Morocco is a part of me that I’m still trying to completely understand.”

“I am Dutch, I am Moroccan; a child of emigrants.”

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AKWAEKE EMEZI The hotly-tipped writer discusses their trailblazing debut novel, Freshwater

Words HELEN JENNINGS Photography ELIZABETH WIRIJA FEATURE

From birth in Nigeria to near-death in knowing that it’s a novel; that the book Brooklyn via eternal existences in is not me, and I am not the book.” the afterlife; from self-harming to the Emezi, who was raised in Nigeria by surgeon’s knife via the bottom of a Malaysian mother and Nigerian father, countless tequila bottles; from deep and received a Master of Public Adminisanxiety to spiritual transcendence tration (MPA) degree from New York via acceptance of one’s multiple selves; University, has been widely applauded from celibacy to dangerous sexual for this accomplished and brave work, encounters via marriage and divorce, both by fellow authors such as NoViolet and from Catholicism to Igbo faith Bulawayo and Taiye Selasi, and by traditions via dancing with demons, reviews in the New York Times, New Yorker Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel covers and the Guardian. Freshwater was also expansive, disruptive ground in its nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal concise 202 pages. for Excellence in fiction, the Aspen Freshwater is the somewhat autobioWords Literary Prize and the Center for graphical tale of Ada, who grows up Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and shortlisted struggling with both the realities of human for the Lambda Literary Awards in the life and love on this earth and with the transgender fiction category, and for wayward spirits that possess her mind the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the first and control her will (meet the insatiable work by a non-binary person to have As�ghara and urbane Saint Vincent). made the list. Clearly, this is a story that “The Igbo ontology that Freshwater is resonates universally and personally. rooted in is incredibly complex… but I will “As a work of storytelling outside of say that the book is about embodiment time, I think that first of all, it’s written as an ogbanje, an Igbo nonhuman entity well and it’s a good story,” Emezi says of that’s born to die,” Emezi says. “The the book’s runaway success. “I also protagonist is dealing with the repercusthink it gives people access to another sions of this embodiment, what it’s like way of being, perhaps one that’s a familiar to be trapped in flesh while experiencing secret to them, or one that’s brand new. a pull towards death and the spirit world, Each reader probably has a different and the effects that has on one’s mind.” reason why the book struck a chord with Commenting as much on strict them, I’m just grateful for all of it!” definitions of identity and gender as on Has it resonated especially well in accepted notions of mental health and Nigeria? “I haven’t been to Nigeria since organised religion, Emezi’s book propels the book came out there, so the responses you along an often heartbreaking I’ve seen are limited to social media, rollercoaster of a tale, and wills you to but I do hope it’s speaking to the readers forget about right and wrong as it delivers there who need a book like this to affirm you into a non-conformist, blurry yet their own ways of being.” ultimately revelatory space. Spellbinding Emezi has already finished their next to read, yet no doubt painful to experience, two books — Pet, a young-adult novel this book has also been a thoroughly to be published in September 2019, and therapeutic exercise for the author. the following year we can expect the “It was definitely cathartic but also next adult novel, The Death of Vivek Oji. immensely difficult because it’s an “Pet is about a young girl who meets a autobiographical novel, so reliving a lot of magical creature that emerges from one the trauma in it was a challenge,” they of her mum’s paintings to hunt down a say. “I did gain invaluable insight into the monster in her community. It’s set in the nature of my embodiment by using the US, in a future where everyone believes lens of Igbo ontology to examine my life; there are no monsters anymore. the experience of writing the book The Death of Vivek Oji is set in the changed me in unexpected but welcome late 90s in Southeastern Nigeria, and it’s ways. It’s been a little strange knowing about the mysterious death of a young that my story is now available to so many mixed Nigerian man and his mother’s people, but there’s some distance in search for the truth about his life.”

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An excerpt from Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi Published by Faber + Faber (2018)

We came from somewhere — everything does. When the transition is made from spirit to flesh, the gates are meant to be closed. It’s a kindness. It would be cruel not to. Perhaps the gods forgot; they can be absentminded like that. Not maliciously — at least, not usually.

But these are gods, after all, and they don’t care about what happens to flesh, mostly because it is so slow and boring, unfamiliar and coarse. They don’t pay much attention to it, except when it is collected, organized and souled.

By the time she (our body) struggled out into the world, slick and louder than a village of storms, the gates were left open. We should have been anchored in her by then, asleep inside her membranes and synched with her mind. That would have been the safest way. But since the gates were open, not closed against remembrance, we became confused. We were at once old and newborn.

We were her and yet not. We were not conscious but we were alive — in fact, the main problem was that we were a distinct we instead of being fully and just her.

So there she was: a fat baby with thick, wet black hair.

And there we were, infants in this world, blind and hungry, partly clinging to her flesh and the rest of us trailing behind in streams, through the open gates. We’ve always wanted to think that it was a careless thing the gods did, rather than a deliberate neglect. But what we think barely matters, even being who we are to them: their child.

They are unknowable — anyone with sense realizes that — and they are about as gentle with their own children as they are with yours. Perhaps even less so, because your children are just weak bags of flesh with a timed soul.

We, on the other hand — their children, the hatchlings, godlings, çgbanje — can endure so much more horror.

Not that this mattered — it was clear that she (the baby) was going to go mad.

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An excerpt from Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi Published by Faber + Faber (2018)

We stayed asleep, but with our eyes open, still latched on to her body and her voice as she grew, in those first slow years when nothing and everything happens.

She was moody, bright, a heaving sun. Violent. She screamed a lot. She was chubby and beautiful and insane if anyone had known enough to see it. They said she followed her father’s side, the grandmother who was dead, for her dark skin and her thick hair. Saul did not name her after his mother, though, as perhaps another man would have. People were known to return in renovated bodies; it happens all the time. Nnamdi. Nnenna. But when he looked into the wet blackness of her eyes, he — surprisingly for a blind man, a modern man — did not make that mistake. Somehow, Saul knew that whatever looked back out of his child was not his mother, but someone, something else.

Everyone pressed into the air around her, pinching her cheeks and the fatty tissue layered underneath, pulled in by what they thought was her, when it was really us. Even asleep, there are things we cannot help, like pulling humans to us. They pull us too, but one at a time; we are selective like that. Saachi watched the visitors flock around the baby, concern sprouting in her like a green shoot. This was all new. Chima had been so quiet, so peaceful, cool to Saachi’s heat. Disturbed, she looked for a pottu and found one, a dark circle of velvet black, a portable third eye, and she affixed it to the baby’s forehead, on that smooth expanse of brand-new skin.

A sun to repel the evil eye and thwart the intentions of wicked people who could coo at a child and then curse it under their breath. She was always a practical woman, Saachi. The odds were good that the child would live. At least the gods had chosen responsible humans, humans who loved her fiercely, since those first few years are when you are most likely to lose them. Still, it does not make up for what happened with the gates.

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DAKAR Senegalese rapper Xuman pens a poem about his beloved city to accompany this visual essay for Nataal FEATURE

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Dakar dans mon ADN Dakar la timide, Dakar la capricieuse Dakar la coquette, Dakar la tumultueuse Dakar traditionnelle, mais Ouverte au monde et curieuse Pour certains même, Dakar est une terre Sainte et pieuse

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C’est le Sénégal en miniature Y’en a pour Tous les goûts et de toutes les natures Un pied dans la tradition mais la tête déjà dans le futur Dakar comme un thièp est un formidable bouillon de cultures

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Insomniaque, DAKAR ne dors pas sur ses lauriers Pour conquérir son cœur il faut du métier Être un pêcheur Lébou de Soumbedioune, Une vendeuses matinale du marché Sandaga, Un cordonnier de la Médina, Un vendeur à la sauvette de l’autoroute, Une fleuriste du marché Kermel….

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Quand vous déambulez dans les ruelles du village de Ngor C’est la mélancolie qui vous envahit Laissez l’odeur du poisson fumé vous enivrer, les pieds dans le sable de la Pointe des Almadies

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Et la nuit, quand Dakar se pare de ses plus beaux atours Elle sublime ces Cendrillons en recherche d’amour, elle masque les laideurs de ses ruelles, elle cache aussi les larmes de ses rebelles.

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Regarde la comme elle aime se mirer dans l’océan Sa seule rivale c’est elle-même… la lune en est témoin Blaise Diagne, Lamine Gueye, Cheikh Anta Diop, Senghor Y ont laissé les traces de leurs héroïques efforts Bienvenue à Dakar la villes aux milles couleurs la villes de la rencontre de toutes les saveurs Dakar ne vous laissera pas indifférent, son sourire est une fleur Dakar vous marquera comme un tatouage sur le coeur

Poem XUMAN. Production ABDOULAYE KA KASY PROD

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(Above) IB KAMARA and KRISTIN-LEE MOOLMAN. (Opposite) AKINOLA DAVIES JR for CYNDIA HARVEY, This Hair of Mine.

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A look at the dissemination of contemporary and virtual African mobilities in the work of Ib Kamara, Stephen Tayo, Alun [Be], Akinola Davies Jr and Saul Nash

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As Congolese philosopher VY Mudimbe states in a 2004 essay for the journal Public Culture, “Africa as a name, as an idea, and as an object of academic discourse has been and remains fraught.”

We know Africa as the contrast between “what it is and what it could be”.

The distant possibility of socioeconomic development for Africa has been widely discussed and imagined by both Africans and non-Africans living in the hinterlands of African life-worlds.

What will define the future of Africa? This is a question I reckon with at the wake of day and the dark of night, and each time the answer is the same: liberation!

Africa’s panacea for historic economic challenges is often technology.

As digital communication tools such as mobile phones and ICT are becoming increasingly common in both rural and urban communities across the continent, new patterns of social exchange have been further enabled. Africa’s growing youth population, burgeoning middle class and flourishing consumer story are a few of the factors that frequently drop the region at the top of the international development agenda: the continent is surely rising.

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(Above and below) IB KAMARA and KRISTIN-LEE MOOLMAN.

African populations in myriad forms have found themselves in a new age, where social media platforms and communication applications are the dominant channels for disseminating information about Africa — and, it could be argued, to unbounded heights.

While news charting elections and trends in political life are exchanged via commentary and videos shared on numerous online platforms, it is the visually focused platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr that are the cyberspaces where Africans and non-Africans alike choose to exhibit the idea of Africa that they wish to see, but that rarely exists for real.

In allegiance to racial, cultural and social solidarity, transnational communities disjointed by scattered histories are uniting and thriving.

People in Africa, Black America and diaspora communities across the world are coming together in online worlds with the aim of digitising — and affirming — their contemporary African existences.

Through this exchange and flow of images depicting diverse forms of Africa, not to mention fantasies of blackness, new identities are being formed.

Many of these identities are born from a need to see the continent and its affiliations through filters of triumph and glory; scenes involving black bodies create fresh notions of Africa in realms that are both real and imagined. While historically, prevalent narratives defining the continent as a single site of underdevelopment, corruption and famine were rife, they are diminishing in lieu of constructive depictions declaring a new order — a new time.

The continent’s exponential growth and promises of yields on private investment are affecting the way various media has taken to branding Africa.

This is evidenced by the work of a contemporary creative set from the continent and the diaspora — namely Ib Kamara, Stephen Tayo, Alun [Be], Akinola Davies Jr and Saul Nash. Through conversations with these makers, as well as examinations of cult, popular and consumer-driven, image-based culture, we can start to dissect how the contemporary images of Africa and Africa-in-the-world came to be.

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‘NEW AFRICA’ OR FANTASIES OF BLACKNESS? Born in Ekiti state but now based in Lagos, Nigerian photographer Stephen Tayo is fascinated with framing the relatable and the mundane as a way to write a history for fellow Africans. As living creatures, we recount half-truths through subjective memories, and endure feelings cast by spells from yesteryears — our past lives remain alive through truth in sight:

by photographs. By the vivid framing of community elders, brothers, sisters, children, women and men in passing — very often people unknown to him — Tayo works his way out of the void of remembrance to offer his subjects a photographic rite of truth.

Photographing them outside their homes or in the backstreets of cities such as Lagos or Kano, Tayo captures his subjects’ vulnerability and disdain.

His work urges the spectator to engage with the sentiments of local and ordinary people, shown in their day-to-day environments. He focuses his gaze on all types of people, regardless of their creed.

Shining a light on the characterful hands and faces of elders, he presents old age as something to be revered. Framing matriarchs in his community, Tayo captures the resilience of their seniority.

Elsewhere he has captured the innocence of young children playing, wearing smiles under the sun. The photographer is discursive in his choice to capture both consenting models and unknowing street-hawkers busying themselves in the city’s grind, and he perceives his

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(Clockwise from above) STEPHEN TAYO.

depiction of the continent as both a personal and profound obligation. He is committed to building a body of work that is not time-bound but true in its duty to share his country and reaffirm Africa’s place in the world. “It’s the way I see Africa,” he says. “We wait for the West to say nice things about Africa, it gets to me a lot.”

As institutions, commercial brands and agents urge further enquiry into the processes that breed new representations of Africa, there is an understandable concern about whether depicting and branding Africa through international publishing efforts and products-sold is fuelling the fire that keeps age-old fantasies of blackness, fetishism or wanderlust alive.

On a similar mission to Tayo, the illustrious Sierra Leonean creative, modern dandy and i-D fashion editorat-large Ib Kamara has set out to probe these questions by positioning overlooked or denigrated communities in scenes of glory.

Hell-bent on creating and circulating nonconformist African identities, Kamara’s rampant imagination is catapulting African individualism to a new point of promise.

The photos series 2026, which he styled and was shot by his close and long-term collaborator, Kristin-Lee Moolman, envisions an Africa of the future by capturing a young man, Fakamatah, adorned with vividly coloured clothing, fine jewels and finger gloves, and presented in the rugged foreground of a derelict street in Johannesburg.

Often capturing young black men posing in urban sprawls in Freetown, Lagos and Kinshasa, among other African epicentres, Kamara disrupts the codes of still-life photography, costume design and fashion to upend stereotypical notions of gender, sexuality and functional dress.

“It takes a lot of nerve to stand out visually or to be brave in Africa”, he says, referring in part to the opposition that queer citizens living on the continent must contend with, including the

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religious, ethnic and national forces that invalidate queer life in Africa — which is predominately still taboo.

Using the power of dress to amplify muted voices, Kamara’s work strengthens identities that are regularly policed or demonised as deviant. He repositions alternative communities into moments of marvel, gaining followers and fans in the digital sphere. The imagery he creates provides a means of freeing unresolved desires, which no doubt resonate with others who are experiencing the same alienated fate. “It is an extension of me, what I pass on, the work I do,” he says. “It is what I think I want to be, but I’m fearful or afraid to be because I’m a little more reserved, or my African background doesn’t let me project that 24/7.”

Whether we create, trade or offer images of ourselves in real life or in staged situations for editorial or social media consumption, the making of something other than ourselves relieves us of the grief of hiding our truest selves.

Speaking about life in Lagos and Nigeria, Tayo thinks “we are built to hide ourselves, even from our loved ones”. Day in, day out, we conform to survive.

Kamara’s work and growing success are signs that the digital offers a new dimension for being. “I create a character so I can live through that character for an hour or two or a day,” he says.

“It gives me a good feeling; I think a lot of people like me growing up in Africa, or in the West, want to be somebody else, sometimes. We are all working towards being successful, or trying to achieve something.”

In a different vein, Kamara has made use of digital realms to tell the tales of risky

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(Below) AKINOLA DAVIES JR for CYNDIA HARVEY, This Hair of Mine.

situations. In an unpublished series he depicts sex websites featuring migrant African male communities. Unpacking the sobering reality that is the business of survival, the series reveals cyber worlds that are a market for sex work among young black men who have no other means of subsistence. Within this series Kamara highlights an underworld experienced by both heterosexual and queer subcultures, where scantily clad black males and pubescent African bodies are sold to desiring clientele.

Historically, black bodies have been subject to systems of control through violence and indentured labour. We must question whether the digital is yet another site that holds black bodies in similar systems of subordination, or whether it can be a tool for empowerment. Is it possible that we have come to a point

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where the black individual can seek to gain from the marketing or branding of their physical assets and identities?

As images of Africans circulate the digital sphere, audiences and imagemakers must interrogate why some depictions of Africa are considered the most relevant, or are the most remembered.

More often than not black bodies are exposed and stylised to shock and seduce consumers; revellers are lured by fantasies of race and power. We must continue to question who is set to gain.

THE DIGITAL PROPAGATION OF AFRICAN INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS Speaking about inequity, access and the privilege afforded to self-elected elites in African locales, Londonbased Nigerian photographer and moving-image artist Akinola Davies Jr reflects on the double-edged sword that slices African outsiders. Black individuals living in London are in part defined by the double-barrel status of being British via a place or nation beyond the United Kingdom’s borders. A similar claim has been made about the status of African Americans. Davies Jr believes that “the black African and the black man are inhibited and often policed”.

Speaking beyond realities such as racism and prejudice, and the socioeconomic and structural violence endured by black — and other ethnic — communities in the UK, the US and elsewhere, Davies Jr hints that returning to Africa as a creative is not always an easy move.

As a new wave of creative practitioners shuffle between established cultural centres in the West and thriving epicentres on the up such as Accra, Lagos, Johannesburg and Nairobi, returnees are met by a stark truth: they can be foreigners, and thus outsiders, in their ancestral homes in Africa, too.

As African creatives such as Kamara and Davies Jr reside outside the continent, their works are often informed by the desire, love and lust for going home.

Looking to keep his cultural ties to Africa alive, Davies Jr’s work interrogates the patriarchal gaze. “The stiff narrative of what it means to be a man was never questioned when I was growing up,” he says. “I am seeking to open up space for other people; I see other worlds in gender. Certain acts are more permissible in European spaces than they are in African spaces. I am concerned

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(Above) AKINOLA DAVIES JR for CYNDIA HARVEY, This Hair of Mine.

(Below) SAUL NASH.

with why we aren’t having certain conversations about the homogenous nature of men in Nigeria, for example.”

In 2018 Davies Jr participated in group shows in Accra, Cape Town and Lausanne. Moving on to display his work in solo exhibitions in Basel and Washington DC, while also collaborating on videos with vanguard musicians such as Blood Orange, Klein, Larry B and Farai, Davies Jr is steadily succeeding as a creative conduit for his community.

A running theme in his work is the epic moment of celebration, crystallised by material culture.

For example his music video for British-Nigerian musician Klein’s ‘Marks of Worship’ is an examination of the ritualistic redemption enforced on African communities by religious sects. This is bolstered by the ironic presentation of a party scene where young Africans swathed in traditional Nigerian wear are carelessly throwing money into the air.

They are held by their own merriment, shooting champagne corks and foam everywhere — a scene mimicked in a music video that Davies Jr directed for emerging artist Larry B. This mirrors the images of African people in states of merriment, success, wealth and glamour that permeate online realms.

As creatives in the African diaspora continue to tell stories of their own lives, the future looks bright for collaboration between artists on the continent and artists from or living elsewhere.

To Senegalese photographer and architect Alun [Be], we are at a juncture where “for the first time in history, we have visual narratives that are

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being told by Africans, and not for Africans”. Maintaining a working relationship between Senegal and Europe, his catapulting across continents has informed his belief that an artist’s locality needn’t be the definitive measure of the nature or quality of their work.

“Your potential won’t come out of your surroundings, it will come from within you,” he says.

Alun [B]’s photography is less consciously stylised than the works of Kamara and Davies Jr — as they race through the grids of fashion and artistic realms.

He is fixed instead on debunking prevalent notions of the continent, not only through the presentation of changing consumer trends and material culture, but also by positioning technology as a mirror, revealing the potency of its potentiality.

In his photographic series Edification, the artist explores the impact of technology on societies in Africa. Inviting an open discourse on the fate of humankind, Alun [Be] urges a confrontation with the imposing nature of modern technology; the effects of which are often more intensely felt in less technologically progressive parts of the world. In this series young children in nondescript locations in Africa are seen wearing Virtual Reality headsets. This form of wearable technology can simulate a place from the viewer’s existence — far from their truth. For Alun [Be] the VR mask is the contemporary version of the traditional decorative or ceremonial mask, worn in Africa in numerous variations. “The mask is a spirit that deals with the idea of the invisible world,” he says. “It reveals the tension between who we are and how we are being portrayed.”

“Africans are now viewing themselves differently,” he continues. “They are mirrors. This is a necessary step to make them more aware of what they have.”

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(Above) SAUL NASH.

Building on the need for communities in Africa and elsewhere to find a space for self-expression is Saul Nash, the young dancer and designer whose work is helping to overhaul prevalent approaches to fashion design — and the Londonborn creative is one the city’s most sensational talents. Having taken a more lateral route to fashion design, Nash did an MA in Menswear at the Royal College of Art after completing a Bachelor’s degree in Performance Design at Central Saint Martins. Pushing the potentialities of utilitarian dress and performance as lines of communication, his work proves that functionality and ergonomic design can be more impactful than standard seductive brand communications featuring sexually charged imagery.

Although Nash says that his mixed Mauritian, English, Bajan and Guyanese heritage is not his central focus, he firmly believes that “your culture, your journey or your influences inherently influence the way that you perceive the world or your work in particular”. Urging the importance of expressing a diversity of backgrounds, he is now focused on researching the performance of identity online.

“I wanted to show men on Instagram in their true expression; presenting these identities that are dependent on the place they’re in… the real and tangible is key for me, it enables people to connect and feel something.”

The work of these four makers shows that there is a need to be conscious of who is leading the discourses about certain communities, and to ascertain what their intentions might be. Whether these are thought leaders or locals on the ground in Africa, onlookers or commentators in the diaspora who have African ancestral ties, one must not assume each purveyor’s goal is to positively contribute to the cultures they seek to document. This consideration should not be one for Africa alone.

The digital sphere is a fast-paced common ground, allowing for unity among Africans and diaspora communities, while the blurred lines

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that merge racial discourses about black communities with those about Africa is a justified concern.

Black communities in the UK, the US and elsewhere have certainly experienced similar adversities to the ones that often define African communities, and this highlights the need for African studies to move beyond the confines of area studies. As we continue to see a rise in black imagery across the arts, television, social media and other forms of popular culture, these new spaces present both opportunities and pitfalls for discussions about black and African communities.

The promise of global reach only heightens the potential for conversation and controversy, while representations continue proliferate and influence the public consciousness.

There is a strong need to move away from stating in digital and non-digital spaces what African communities in the diaspora and on the continent should be; the imperative is to declare what Africa is.

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(Above) POTENTIALITY from EDIFICATION series. © ALUN BE. (Below) CULTIVATION from EDIFICATION series. © ALUN BE.

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Photographer Alex Franco spent several months in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley to document members of the region’s diverse tribes including the Hamar, Daasanach, Bana, Mursi, Bodi, Karo, Aari and Arbore. Most of his pictures are from market days but also from weddings and rites of passage ceremonies, and what he was initially struck by was the ways in which his subjects incorporate second hand clothing into their everyday looks.

The Omo Valley tribes are at risk of being displaced by the construction of the Omo Kuraz Sugar Factories project and by the Gibe III dam, which will reduce the biodiversity they rely upon. With these images, London-based Franco shares the inherent style, self-expression and community he found among these under threat people.

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Words VALERIA-COSTA KOSTRITSKY

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Looking to the divine through the strong strokes of this empathic artist

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Opening the door to his south London to seek it out, whether physically, mentally home wearing his signature blue overalls or ideologically. and spectacular spectacles, two rambunc“Paradise is a lovely idea that we invest tious dogs barking at his heels, Abe in. Most cultures have some notion of this Odedina offers to put on some coffee and other place; the promised land. My sense we instantly launch into a discussion is that paradise is running very close to about his paintings and the inexplicable our normal lives, and available to us when meanings of life that they investigate. we hit the right note. It might come with a “What I want to do is ask the questions that message on your phone. Finding the right we all ask,” he profers. “We are hemmed shade of lipstick. Even a good cup of coffee. between two massive mysteries. We don’t In bed sometimes we get a glimpse of know where we came from and we don’t the divine when we have a good fuck. That know the details of how we’re going to go magical moment just before sunrise is out. So we deal with that gap in between, paradise and it happens every day.” in marvellous ways if we’re lucky. This The show’s namesake painting is a pretty hopeless situation is the human rare self-portrait showing the artist having condition that unifies us all.” a tattoo done, something he did in real life Odedina shows me through the house, every Friday for over four years until his which reveals itself to be a welcoming entire body was covered in small works of shrine; every surface covered with splendid vernacular art. The idea was not to objects of joy. Haitian Vodou flags, Mexican masterplan a perfect breathing canvas, votive paintings, West African barbershop but to explore the physical plasticity and signs, wonky ceramics and ritualistic freedom of expression of one’s body — sculptures of every persuasion all hang out a vivid example of one of his own personal harmoniously together. Meanwhile at the paradises. end of the garden sits Odedina’s humble Odedina came to painting relatively studio where his paintings — acrylic on late in life. Born in Ibadan in 1960, he sturdy plywood — are unceremoniously moved to the UK to study architecture and piled up. went on to establish his own practice.

Striking in their use of contrasting Then on a trip to Salvador in 2007 with his colours, seemingly simple in composition family he was confronted with Candomblé, and utterly wondrous to behold, his works a religion fusing Catholic and Yoruba draw on folk art, magic realism and the beliefs that spoke to him deeply. “I knew traditions of African studio photography a lot of these gods to create inquiring and playful scenes. from growing up Most of them feature a dignified figure in Nigeria so when doing something intriguing — levitating, I saw how dancing, shooting a bow and arrow, phenomenal they juggling, playing the fiddle, swallowing a were in Brazil and sword, riding a huge sea creature, pointing how they offered a telescope to the heavens. They’re at people so much once honest and baffling, blunt and beguil- comfort, strength ing, and together they create a world of and beauty, it was dreams that feels delectably close to home. one of those points “The figurative traditions that influence where I realised my work most powerfully come from the life had to change makers across Africa. Central to those for me,” he recalls. is using the figure to represent many “There was also complex ideas around cosmology, daily something extralife and our aspirations,” he explains. ordinary about “Even though I make distinct and strong the vigour of the paintings, they are images of ambiguity. popular arts in Each one embodies a mystery that daily life inspired dissolves while you consider what the hell by these deities. it means, and then begins to stretch in all That search for directions. It’s a call-and-response harmony was worth between the work and the viewer.” paying attention to.”

The paintings here today are from And so his current body of work, Birds of Paradise, Odedina went for which was recently presented by Ed Cross a divination and Fine Art at London’s Copeland Gallery discovered that his and curated by Katherine Finerty. For two orishas were Odedina, these iridescent feathered �àngó, god of friends who go about living their best lives thunder — who for with glee, reflect his ongoing preoccuhim represented pation with the human endeavour to find the future — fulfilment in whatever form that might take, and Ogun, the and against all seeming odds. In these primordial god of current troubling times, the idea of utopia iron and war. He may seem remote and even damaging, bought a second but Odedina believes we remain hardwired home in Salvador,

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started painting, and soon enough his new passion became his everything. These and other Yoruba deities and their related iconographies now live in his works and help him to further investigate the universal struggles and hopes that feed our shared humanity. “Why are we looking for the differences between science and belief?

As twenty-first-century creatures we can go beyond empirical information to have a word with all of these wonderfully poetic constructions and have full reign to pull ideas out of them,” he says.

Another one of his myriad inspirations is Frida Kahlo, whose artistic voice he embraced after visiting her home in Mexico City. His diptych painting, The Adoration of Frida Kahlo, was nominated for the BP Portrait Award in 2013 at the National Portrait Gallery, and helped him make the transition to being a full-time artist.

Since then he has enjoyed solo shows at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, The Department Store and Brixton East, and has joined group exhibitions at Stephen Friedman, Knight Webb Gallery and The Royal Academy. With plans to show in Los Angeles and Lagos next, this deserved success speaks to the emotional intelligence of the work and the man who makes it. His paintings celebrate our triumphs, tragedies and flaws with a true heart. Now, how about that coffee?

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Five London designers shaping the future of menswear Words MIRIAM BOUTEBA Photography RUTH OSSAI Styling KK OBI

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419 COLLECTIVE Three’s a charm for Olubiyi Thomas, Foday Dumbuya and Daniel Olatunji, as these like-minded but distinct designers have come together to form the 419 Collective. Anyone familiar with Nigerian slang will know that 419 refers to the part of the country’s criminal code that deals with fraud, and is also a by-word for scammers. A joke between the three of them, the name has its origins in Thomas renting a Paris Airbnb for the SS19 presentation of his eponymous label, unable to afford an official showroom. Dumbuya, showing his label Labrum, and Olatunji, with his label Monad, joined him for AW19 and it became the (un)official 419 collective space, bringing together these three ventures with LVMH Prize finalist Kenneth Ize and artist and fashion designer Leyman Lahcine, who joined in too.

Their tongue-in-cheek moniker nods to a DIY mentality. “These guys have skill and make their own opportunities,” says Dumbuya. “We’re riffing off that and using 419 as a euphemism for punk, but from a West African or diaspora perspective.” To which Thomas adds: “Fashion can be political and there’s a lot of bureaucracy. We knocked on certain doors and they didn’t open, so this is us creating our own door.”

But what was born of necessity has become something altogether bolder.

They held their first joint show at LFWM AW19 and plan to do so again for SS20. “After the show we had conversations with people who wouldn’t usually speak to us, but who were interested in what the 419 is all about,” says Dumbuya.

“It’s like my mum always says, ‘If you want to get somewhere quicker, go in groups’.”

They also showed as part of 1 Granary’s Void exhibition at LFWM AW19, which involved a preview shoot that was pure 419. With photography and art direction from Olu Michael Odukoya, and styled

by Ib Kamara, the collective produced womenswear worn by all-white models posing with a flashy sportscar. “The story had nothing to do with what any of us do and that was the whole point,” says Olatunji. “You see this really glossy, sexy fashion label, and it’s like a 419, it’s just the lights to draw you in”. This façade attracted people into the Void art installation, where they were confronted with reproductions of Kano’s Kofar Mata dye pits, each filled with

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“We’re using 419 as a euphemism for punk, but from a West African or diaspora perspective” indigo, to highlight the quality and heritage of West African cloth. “We wanted to talk about these hand processed fabrics and the whole idea of African textiles, and the fact that indigo had been used in Africa for many years before the Japanese discovered it,” Thomas explains.

Fabric is something of an obsession for Thomas. Inspired by Victorian tailoring as much as Malian textiles, the Central Saint Martins graduate crafts masterfully deconstructed and elongated silhouettes from sustainable, antique and artisanal materials. His fellow CSM alum Olatunji, with his mind somewhere in the Edwardian period, focuses on creating future heirlooms. He only began Monad after London boutique Hostem requested that he make an exclusive capsule for them, and is adamant that his is not a fashion brand. He produces tiny runs of his signature raw-edged pieces each season, but reimagines them each time in either handsome deadstock or hand woven and hand-dyed Nigerian textiles. Dumbuya is similarly anti-hype. This skilled designer’s aim is to create detail-driven, contemporary tailoring that can be easily worn and enjoyed. It’s an attitude that has the brand counting Samuel L Jackson among its supporters, and Asics among his collaborations.

“Foday has an awareness of the industry, which is a big strength for Labrum. Dan’s stuff is heavily artisanal, just a guy fixating and sewing and coming up with all of these genius ideas. And I’m somewhere in between,” Thomas reflects. “We each take a lot of inspiration from vintage garments and have a good eye for textiles.

You’re not going to see a straightforward poplin.

Everything is really textural, which is a common thread that runs through everyone’s work.”

Going forward, Dumbuya says they’re planning to grow their group of creatives and continue to pool resources for the greater good. “We want to champion fresh talent and give them advice because that’s something we didn’t receive,” he says.

(Previous spread) CHEIKH wears OLUBIYI THOMAS full look. (Left) BABS wears MONAD full look. (Opposite left to right) NATHAN wears LABRUM full look. BABS wears MONAD full look, MONAD X CONVERSE shoes. CHEIKH wears OLUBIYI THOMAS full look, EMILY FRANCES BARRETT jewellery.

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BIANCA SAUNDERS “I’ve been thinking about the Jamaican dancehall scene recently and how it’s full of pageantry. The contrast between the country’s hypermasculine stereotypes and how those men are actually presenting; the coloured hair, cornrows in a ponytail, the super groomed eyebrows and how they wear really tight tops is fascinating to me.” Bianca Saunders is talking about researching her forthcoming SS20 collection. Following the acclaim — both critical and commercial — of her previous offerings, this designer remains focussed on repositioning black male identity through her work. With an emphasis on detail and construction, Saunders mixes textures and manipulates materials to create seemingly classic silhouettes that reveal delicate flashes of skin and evoke a sense of vulnerability.

Coming from a large Jamaican family in south London, her stylish father taught her the importance of smart outerwear and accessories, while her mother’s occupation as a hairdresser meant that Saunders spent her formative years in the salon leafing through magazines. Her work now fuses these influences with conversations that she has with her array of male friends.

Like an anthropologist, she conducts interviews with them about representation, community and contemporary concerns to help her shape each season.

For AW19, Unravelling, she moved these conversations to a more intimate setting where her subjects were able to be totally unguarded. “It was easier to interview them in their bedrooms,” she says. And that consideration certainly paid off. An interplay between femininity and masculinity, cotton shorts and see-through knits present a softer side, while heavy leather jackets offer a tough shell. Recreating her interview scenarios for her LFWM presentation, the bedroom was also relevant to the type of sensuality that she wanted to show.

“It could have been raunchier, but that’s not the kind of sexiness I’m portraying,” she explains. “It’s about making someone feel sexy. It’s a reveal that’s for the wearer, rather than for his audience.” As such Saunders is debunking stereotypes of the hypersexualised black man, instead allowing complex emotions and selfexpression to shine through. Much like the designer herself, the collection is thoughtful, understated and utterly convincing.

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(Opposite) JEFFREY, SETHU and JAIRO wear BIANCA SAUNDERS full looks, EXFINITAS boots, stylist’s own ties.

Her research-driven approach and desire to evolve her narrative with each collection comes from undertaking the Menswear MA at the Royal College of Art. “We were taught to adopt an artist’s practice, to have a continuous thread — you’re developing an idea more and more,” she reflects. “I use people I know and base my ideas around identity, but as it goes forward, I think you’ll see more of me come out too”.

After graduating in 2017 with a collection named after Lord Kitchener’s calypso classic, ‘London is the Place for Me’, Saunders officially debuted her label for AW17 with Personal Politics.

She presented the collection of twisted street tailoring as a one-day exhibition incorporating a lookbook by Adama Jalloh, a zine by Seye Isikalu, Caleb Femi and James Massiah, and the film Permission by Akinola Davies Jr. “When you have a mutual understanding, you can have ideas and everything comes together really simply,” she says of her collaborations.

Similarly for SS19 she came up with a T-shirt design with Troy Michie, whose sculptures and collage-based pieces explore race, sexuality and gender. “I came across his work and was literally obsessed!”

While she has her sights set on working with Joshua Woods and Deana Lawson in the future, Saunders (who can now count Opening Ceremony and Matches Fashion among her enviable stockists) is ready to reveal her more experimental side.

“I feel like I’ve got the whole wear-ability factor down, while at the beginning should be when you get to go wild and do random stuff. I can’t wait for the next collection to be more creative and have more fun.”

Dancehall kings had better get ready.

“It’s about making someone feel sexy. It’s a reveal that’s for the wearer, rather than for his audience” COMMON THREADS

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MOWALOLA OGUNLESI

Making use of slick vinyls, high-shine, hand-painted leathers and the skimpiest of proportions, Mowalola Ogunlesi isn’t just creating sexy clothes, she’s designing the world that she wants to see — one of liberation and selfexpression. “I want to start from scratch with what people actually want,” says Ogunlesi. “Things become better in the world when we embrace who we really are and we’re not afraid of each other.”

which were worn by women as well as men — but her aim is not to shock or tease. “I want to stop the oversexualisation of black bodies and of them being seen as too much,” she reveals. “I want to normalise that kind of gaze so that it’s not judgemental. It’s a ‘free the nipple’ kind of situation — we don’t need to get so wrapped up in nakedness.”

This line of enquiry breaks down broader stereotypes around masculinity, too. “There’s more than one way for someone to be a strong man. Being vulnerable and unapologetic about who you are is probably the biggest strength you can have. If we push and champion those things, it’s so much better for everyone,” she says, adding that it’s often easier for her to change perspectives through fashion than through conversation.

“I’ve found it really difficult to argue with my Nigerian aunties and uncles, but when they see my work they can understand my point of view so much more.”

Born in Lagos to a family of fashion designers, Ogunlesi moved to the UK to attend boarding school when she was 12 years old, and went on to study menswear and print design at Central Saint Martins.

Her 2017 graduate collection, Psychedelic, was inspired by Nigerian 70s rockers and petrolheads, and saw her work with likeminded photographer Ruth Ossai.

The pair have continued to develop projects together, including Nkata Anyi Abughi Out (our discussion is not the same), a series of images taken in Ossai’s hometown of Nsukka in Southeastern Nigeria that Nataal exhibited at Red Hook Labs in Brooklyn in 2018. They’ve shot music videos together there, too. “Her community is so strong and close-knit,” she says. “We filmed with a band that usually just plays at weddings and birthdays and dressed them in my clothes.”

It is this collaborative and positive approach that has also seen Ogunlesi work with other London-based creatives such as Ib Kamara, Rhea Dhillon and Larry B. “I want to show black people the way that I see us — I want to celebrate who we are and just be happy,” she says. “It’s important for me to focus on creating the kind of media that I want other young black boys and girls to see. I feel like if I was growing up now with all of these different images of blackness, it would have changed the way that I felt about myself.”

Her approach has won her heavyweight support from Skepta, Dev Hynes, Drake, Kanye West and Solange Knowles, and she collaborated with Nike on a With her on-schedule catwalk debut collection for Nigeria’s World Cup team. under the Fashion East umbrella at Now she’s thinking about new avenues London Fashion Week Mens (LFWM), through which to spread her effervescent the designer’s super-charged AW19 messages. “I just like making things that collection, Exposed, presented teeny-tiny I envision, and clothes are a good medium, miniskirts, low-slung trousers (with visible but I’m excited to design other things thong straps), thigh-high boots and and to not be in just one bubble,” she says. unbuttoned shirts in a colour palette that “I’ve been thinking about a Mowalola pulsated. There’s an unapologetic car for about a year now — I need to make eroticism running through these pieces — this happen.”

“It's a free the nipple kind of situation — we don’t need to get so wrapped up in nakedness”

(Above) AWENG wears MOWALOLA full look, MOWALOLA jewellery, PAULA CARDEMARTORI bag. SOAU’D wears MOWALOLA full look, MOWALOLA jewellery. KEONA and BIBA wear MOWALOLA full look, MAWI jewellery.

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NICHOLAS DALEY

two about looking sharp. “There are West Nicholas Daley’s eponymous brand is a Indian ideas about making sure that you sartorial representation of everything look smart, that your shoes are polished that’s great about modern Britain. From and that those shoes are Clarks,” he says. the richness of its cultural diversity to “It was to the point that my dad put trouser its manufacturing heritage, the designer creases into my jeans. I had to go into both celebrates and reconfigures what school on non-uniform day — which is it is to be British thorough the art of a big day when you’re 14 — and had these exquisite menswear. “I’ve spoken a lot huge creases down my jeans!” The about multiculturalism because I am legendary Don Letts walked for Daley’s multicultural. I’m proud to be half Central Saint Martin’s graduate show in Jamaican and half Scottish,” he explains.

2013, which set the tone for the designer’s “I was brought up to have an open mind subsequent multi-sensory, music-driven and to embrace all kinds of culture, presentations. The likes of Yussef Dayes, and that informs me as an individual and Mansur Brown, Alfa Mist, Shabaka me as a designer.”

Hutchings, Obongjayar and Cosmo Pyke Born in Leicester, the self-proclaimed have all taken part in his events since the “Midlands lad” explores his dual identity label launched in 2015. And since joining through the wealth of references that go the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN into his beautifully constructed garments, programme for SS18, he’s also worked and in how he casts the models for with Japan’s Kuumba Incense to developed his shows. “The world is getting smaller scents for each season, too. and people are getting more diverse — AW19’s Black Ark, named after Lee cultural exchange is the only way to move Scratch Perry’s Jamaican recording forward,” he explains. “When casting studio, saw young crooner Puma Blue with Campbell Addy at Nii Agency, we try perform while Daley’s models walked, to get a representative group that reflects followed by a DJ set from British producer what I believe in. I’m showing the people Dennis Bovell, aka Blackbeard. “We’re of my community.” quite complex creatures so it’s good to A finalist for the 2018/19 International Woolmark Prize, Daley creates handsomely have as many different ways as possible of communicating a feeling,” he explains. tailored, no-nonsense pieces that are built to last. Everything is produced in the “My ultimate objective is to invoke an emotion. It’s impossible to please UK using bespoke textiles such as tweed everyone with your clothing but I think and herringbone, and he has developed telling an authentic, cohesive story accessories with traditional makers means people can walk away having had such as George Cox and Christys’ some sort of experience.”

London. Nothing makes the final cut that This consistency means that his first he himself wouldn’t wear. “I’m a big collection can sit confidently alongside believer in personal primary referencing.

There has to be a narrative and sometimes his more recent work, so much so his signature double-pleat trouser — developed that’ll come from my family, like my dad’s while at university — remains a bestseller. commando uniform from when he was “I try to be aware of the product lifeline in the Royal Marines,” he says.

His parents’ influence runs deep — they and while I’ve moved forward, as a nucleus there’s always a correlation,” he says. “I see ran a reggae nightclub in the 1970s that Daley recreated for his SS19 presentation, every collection as a cousin or a brother.

They’re all offshoots of one another.” so it’s little wonder he knows a thing or

“The world is getting smaller and people are getting more diverse — cultural exchange is the only way to move forward”

FRANKLYN, LUKE, JONNY and SAMIR wear NICHOLAS DALEY full looks including WOOLMARK collaboration.

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MARVIN DESROC

An underwear campaign from the 1950s and the late great Tupac Shakur may not be natural bedfellows, but they come together in the avant-garde work of recent Central Saint Martins Menswear Masters graduate, Marvin Desroc. Born in Martinique, he grew up Paris with his hip hop-loving brothers. Naturally creative and expressive, he was deemed ‘not black enough’ at home and ‘too black’ outside. Now, existing within an emotional grey area is what informs his pretty menswear. “I mirror blackness and whiteness, putting them on the same level,” he says. “I always felt that I didn’t fit into either world and would get called Oreo, coconut and Bounty. My aesthetic comes from me wanting to mend my relationship with and celebrate these two cultures.”

Desroc’s designs are at once buoyant and voluminous while still delicate and dainty — boundary-defying pieces that create their own liminal space. “I’m inspired by the idea of being caught in between masculinity and femininity, sensuality and sexuality,” he says. “As a gay black man, I tend to look at a lot of stereotypes, I was very much obsessed with the idea of the perfect white woman.”

For Desroc this mythical perfection is to be found in mid-century ideas of femininity and beauty. Delving into old issues of Vogue as part of his research for AW19, he found the quintessential 1950s pin-up waiting for him. “I loved the way there were all of these lingerie pages — with the girdles,” he says. “I could see

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(Above) STANLEY and SHADEN wear MARVIN DESROC full look, stylist’s own eyewear. (Opposite) JOSEPH and STANLEY wear MARVIN DESROC full looks.

Hair YOSHI MIYAZAKI. Make-up BARI KHALIQUE. Casting CHLOE ROSOLEK. Fashion assistance KENNEDY CLARKE and AYO HASANI. Models JEFFREY at SELECT MODEL MANAGEMENT, SETHU NCISE at STORM MODELS, JAIRO at PREMIER MODEL MANAGEMENT, JOSEPH B at PREMIER MODEL MANAGEMENT, STANLEY BRYAN at NEVS MODELS, SHADEN at SELECT MODEL MANAGEMENT, KEONA CRAWLEY at D1 MODEL MANAGEMENT, AWENG at NEVS MODELS, SOAU’D SWARAY at NAMED MODELS, BIBA WILLIAMS at PRM MODEL AGENCY.

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similarities between the lace and string vests associated with Caribbean men, which made me think about how I could make lingerie for the male body… Western beauty has always been deemed higher, so by finding similarities I’m creating parity.

It’s about celebrating my blackness, my double nationality, my diversity.”

Other references on Desroc’s moodboard include Prince and a host of famous rappers. “I find something very romantic about the way that hip hop artists would sag their baggy jeans.

The way that the fabric would gather on the floor is what inspired my crushed suit,” he says. This and other outlandish looks including denim bow-fastened shorts, clingy string/lace tops and tulle knickers are certainly flirty. But he’s careful to avoid objectification. “When it comes to the black body, society and fashion tend to show it as naked and wild,” he reflects. “My pieces are sensual rather than sexual — and a lot more intelligent than just an oily guy with his abs out.”

Next season his attentions may turn to Tennessee’s most famous export.

“Weirdly, I’m very attracted to Dolly Parton right now — the pink, the big blonde hair, the ruffles,” he says. Meanwhile in real life, one of his looks has been picked up by Years and Years frontman Olly Alexander.

So, who would he like to see wearing a Marvin Desroc original next? “Because she’s Miss Caribbean, Rhianna would be fabulous in my clothes.”

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BORN An exploration of the Market Photo Workshop

Founded in 1989 by internationally renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt, the Market Photo Workshop is principally a training ground designed to provide visual literacy and technical skills to emerging photographers excluded from previously designated ‘white’ art schools and training institutions. By giving access to image making practices to those who are usually represented by others, the Market Photo Workshop challenges the mainstream photographic coverage of black and mixed-race South African communities. Located in Newtown in Johannesburg city centre, the institution started with informal training on documentary photography in the rehearsal rooms of the anti-Apartheid Market Theatre, before moving to the old Newtown post office, where a darkroom was installed. In the 2000s, it relocated so as to incorporate computer rooms and gallery spaces. The Market Photo Workshop’s infrastructures, mentorship programmes and curriculum, including the Foundation course, the Intermediate course, the Advanced Photography Programme and the Documentary Photography Programme, were designed in response to changes in the practice and subjects of photography.

One of the most defining moments in the development of the school was the first South African democratic elections in 1994, which were accompanied by the lift of cultural boycotts, South African reconnection with a global economy and the international art market, the development of the internet and new technologies. The notion of an ‘identity’ focused decade in the 2000s has commonly been used to describe works by photographers questioning their place, affiliations and belonging in this ‘new’ South Africa.

Market Photo Workshop’s alumni including Jodi Bieber, Zanele Muholi, Nontsikelelo Veleko

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FREE? Words JULIE BONZON

and Sabelo Mlangeni have photographically reflected on socio-political barriers and changes in the country since the formal end of Apartheid. The next generation of students coming from the Market Photo Workshop, such as Musa N Nxumalo, Matt Kay, Lebohang Kganye, Sipho Gongxeka, Phumzile Khanyile and Tshepiso Mazibuko have contributed to local and international photography debates surrounding notions of identity and representation through portraiture. Born shortly before or after the first democratic elections, some of these students have been affiliated with the ‘born free’ discussion.

‘Born frees’ gained visibility during the 2014 elections and especially after the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall movements. Through collective actions and strikes, the young generation demonstrated its political and historical awareness by calling into question memory, nation and (de)colonised identity. The terminology ‘born free’ should be used cautiously, however, as it tends to over-generalise political affiliations. Nevertheless, the expectations inherent to the assertion of freedom have given rise to various oppositions. Incoherence between the government’s promises and everyday struggles led the new generation to voice their concerns in the public and online domains.

While their parents witnessed tangible progress, young people are now uncertain of what remains possible in a country where the legacy of struggle is more apparent than direct experience of conflict. Young activists reference figures from the past or from elsewhere to question their present moment and place in this country. In the ‘born free’ debate, and in the photographic project of the Workshop’s students discussed in this piece, youth, identity and belonging appear as key and conflicting notions.

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Alternative Kidz by Musa N. Nxumalo Musa Nxumalo, a student at the Market Photo Workshop between 2006 and 2008, is primarily known for his photographic series Alternative-Kidz, representing a community of young black South Africans immersed in rock music and punk culture. Alternating self-portraits with sceneries from Soweto nightclubs, Nxumalo’s photographs break with the stereotypical understanding of ‘punk’ as solely European and North American-based and fed. He elaborated his series with the wish to explore what ‘subculture’ represents in contemporary South Africa. Photographing everyday practices of self-fashioning, Nxumalo witnesses the impact that the consumption of commodities has on shaping contemporary subjectivities. In this series, Nxumalo acknowledges the agency of young South Africans to engage with complex and fluid systems of representation, both locally and globally.

JULIE BONZON How did the Alternative Kidz series start? Why have you decided to focus on this specific subject?

MUSA N. NXUMALO It was very close to me, it was very personal. I worked in different places, but mostly where my friends lived, in the East Rand and in Soweto. I would photograph my friends in their own personal spaces. As my work developed, I started photographing at festivals and in clubs. I started mixing up with other people, not only close friends, but people who would have the same ideas about music, about culture.

I wasn’t interested in the classical subjects of documentary photography.

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I wanted to photograph fashion, rock and roll… I wanted to document youth culture, and I wanted my work to feel like it.

JB It seems that there is a clear difference between the photojournalistic, black and white photographs of protest, and your photos.

MN My pictures are more ‘trashy’, that’s how I consider them, or that’s what I’ve always aimed to achieve.

I don’t follow the formal rules of photography. As I grew as an artist, I started using a point-and-shoot camera, and I would be on the dancefloor, dancing and photographing at the same time. They are trashy snapshots in an conscious way, trashy as if I am giving the images an attitude.

JB Could you tell me more about music and fashion in Alternative Kidz?

MN We used to listen to a lot of alternative music, especially Bloc Party, and we listened to hip hop, anything that would be alternative to music that typically played in the township at the time, like kwaito and house music.

This was related to the idea of being young and wanting to be different. Music was accompanied by fashion. Around 2005–2006, very skinny jeans were not meant to be worn by heterosexual guys.

We would dress up in very tight jeans, dirty fake Converse sneakers, paint our nails with black nail polish, stretched our earlobes — break boundaries.

JB Can an alternative identity be shaped through mass media tastes?

MN Yes, I guess, when you are hungry for something different to what you are always bombarded with, you are most likely to rebel against it. I wanted a different image to what you would typically see in everyday media, and I didn’t care whether or not I would get published or hired for photography gigs.

JB What do you think of the term ‘born free’ today?

MN It has a different meaning for different people. For me, I think it means exactly what I did with Alternative Kidz. Young black people are still struggling, however, in terms of thinking, the mind — the idea of being ‘born free’ makes sense. I was born in 1986, so I am not really ‘born free’, but I make choices about what I want to do with my life, to become an artist when it feels alright, and work a nine-to-five job when I need to. I guess I have been privileged enough to be an artist, and at some point in 2017, I wanted to work for a commercial art gallery, to curate exhibitions and art fairs, and that’s what I am doing. I guess you can say I am a ‘born free’ because of these opportunities.

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Alternative Kidz by Musa N. Nxumalo

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Skeem’ Saka by Sipho Gongxeka

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Skeem’ Saka by Sipho Gongxeka Born in 1989, Sipho Gongxeka studied at the Market Photo Workshop between 2011 and 2013. He developed his series Skeem’ Saka (a vernacular term meaning ‘brotherhood’, ‘sisterhood’ or ‘friendship’) in collaboration with photographer Pieter Hugo. Skeem’ Saka is a photographic series mainly focused on Soweto-based South African men. The gangster is the cinematic character addressed by each portrait, oscillating between the visual tropes of fashion and documentary photography while revealing the performance of a certain type of masculinity enacted in Soweto. At the beginning of the project, the protagonists were photographed in a series of stereotypical actions: hiding, smoking, drinking alcohol; sometimes they were depicted covered in blood.

Gongxeka decided to focus on the theme of gangsterism, but to tone down and interrogate its visual rhetoric.

JULIE BONZON How did Skeem’ Saka come to life? What is your main subject of interest as a photographer?

SIPHO GONGXEKA I am interested in investigating youth culture, from fashion to the vernacular we use, to the way we walk, the way we talk — basically every conceivable influence. I am interested in investigating why I am behaving the way I behave in terms of my attitude towards people, my home language, my street language; what influences these — is it the media, or is it the people around me? And adding the fashion side, not to focus on crime specifically, but to look at what connects people. Clothes to me came first. I started looking at how we dress in my neighbourhood and why, and I found that it is mostly what we see on TV. How can TV create my identity?

JB Where do you locate those mass media influences?

SG With Skeem’ Saka I specifically focused on criminals and gangster fashion — it has local and international references. Just by looking at movies, you get influenced by the way gangsters talk, by the way they dress, the women around them. I am focusing on Soweto, my city, my hood. Hopefully, I will take this project out of South Africa. If someone from Springs or from Cape Town can get what I am saying, I think this project could be exported somewhere else.

JB What is the relationship between fashion, mass media and gangsterism?

SG I initially wanted to do still lifes of real gangsters, but as I was shooting, I realised that there was

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this gap between fiction and reality.

When I approached real gangsters in my neighbourhood, they didn’t want to have their pictures taken. I decided to use my friends and stereotype them as gangsters. None of us are gangsters, but since gangster movies came out, such as the series Yizo Yizo, the body language and the clothes changed in Soweto. I started picking up how reality feeds fiction, and how fiction merges into reality. I was questioning who gets to be a gangster — also my neighbourhood is full of gangsters, and I really pick on them. My work is a combination of what I see on the TV and what I see in my everyday surroundings.

JB Despite these cinematic references, it seems to me that the men photographed in your series are also breaking away from a stereotype.

SG In movies, the way gangsters look is always stereotypical and limited. Also, how gangsters relate to women is problematic, because there is always violence involved. But with my work, I tried to twist that a bit; for instance, there’s a picture of a guy with his baby sleeping behind him, which also raises questions about the humanity of gangsters.

JB How would you position your series in relation to the ‘born free’ debate?

SG ‘Born free’ is quite huge, but I think that we are a generation that challenges things, and in most cases we become rebellious.

We are a generation that asks questions.

We want to know why we live like this, we want to know why we dress like this, why we behave like this, we want to know where that comes from. I hope Skeem’ Saka will open questions about masculinity.

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The Front by Matt Kay Matt Kay studied at the Market Photo Workshop between 2011 and 2013. During the shooting of the series The Front, Kay was mentored by former director and founder David Goldblatt. The Front offers a glimpse into various activities taking place on the Durban beachfront, and how people are making the space of the beach their own. The seashore, a segregated place and iconic photographic theme during the Apartheid era, propelled Kay into a political discourse on photography he did not feel comfortable engaging with. How to elaborate a contemporary visual narrative distinct from the iconography of the past, while photographing a place criss-crossed with violent and painful memories, former knowledge and contemporary challenges?

The beachfront that Matt Kay photographed is a place where local activities unfold and international tourism escalates. The memories of the place are sometimes washed away, and at other times they erupt to the surface.

JULIE BONZON How did you start this project?

MATT KAY I met David Goldblatt and said that I was interested in the beachfront as a stage, using it as a metaphor for that purpose with these different ‘actors’ as they are walking in and out of it, who are also performing for you because you have a camera.

The way I had originally thought of it was,

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from the promenade to the beach front, at a 35 mm view, what happens in this space? Depending on who is in it, it is a completely different play, but the space remains the same.

JB What were the difficulties encountered in photographing The Front?

MK I knew that I was going to shoot a very political space, a space I was not really part of, doing a project I was not quite sure of. In South Africa all work is political, but I never made any special effort to deliberately politicise the work, which was important because a lot of my other work has been very personal.

When I was shooting this project, I didn’t know the space; I didn’t really know what I was doing and was still trying to get my head around it.

JB How did you engage with this historically segregated space today?

MK I was really trying not to show and tell these separations and hammer down this ‘South African’ narrative. Especially coming from the Market Photo Workshop, I was so aware of my position as a privileged, young white straight male, going to spaces that I was not part of. I didn’t want to dominate the story, I didn’t want it to be ‘my’ perspective on race in South Africa, or like a political explanation of Durban beachfront as rewritten by Matt Kay. I wanted to be soft about it.

JB Were you influenced by the iconography of the ‘struggle’ years of the 1980s and early 1990s while shooting this space?

MK While working in South Africa today, you see a lot of those stereotypical images happening in front of you. And you almost take them. As a photographer, subconsciously you are referencing so many images that you are seeing all the time while you are working.

It is hard not to just copy something that you have seen. The difficulty about this project was to try not to be political in a very political space, try to be respectful in a space where it is very easy to not be.

JB In your other works, you seem to be focused on portraiture and adopting a more lyrical or intimate approach.

MK In South Africa the most important work at the moment is personal work, stuff that deals with your own spaces, because this is the one place where you can have your real voice without rerunning the same narrative over and over. It is a difficult space, but this is where you have to work, I think.

It’s not for everyone, but I believe that for white South African photographers right now, it is the most interesting space to engage with.

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The Front by Matt Kay

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Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe by Tshepiso Mazibuko

Tshepiso Mazibuko, a student at the Market Photo Workshop between 2014 and 2016, produced this series of photographs under the mentorship of John Fleetwood, director of the Market Photo Workshop between 2002 and 2015.

Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe comes from a Sesotho proverb meaning ‘to expect something that will never happen’. Born in 1995, Mazibuko elaborated her series in reaction to the terminology ‘born free’. Political and family expectations cast upon young people considered as ‘free’ contrast with everyday realities and apartheid remains.

The series compiles elusive portraits of young people with glimpses of daily scenes in the streets of Thokoza.

The series is imbued with a feeling of disillusion, while, at the same time, capturing alternative schemes of references — fashion, media taste, youth — casting a light on what young people might share.

JULIE BONZON How did you start this specific project?

Tshepiso Mazibuko My idea was to deconstruct the whole ideology of what it means to be ‘born free’. I started photographing academics writing on that topic, and then I realised that the project was a very personal one — it was about self-discovery.

I wanted to think about a shared reality with the people that I was photographing.

What does democracy mean? What does it mean to be ‘born free’?

JB ‘Born free’ seems to be an overused term cast upon a whole generation, how do you feel about it?

TM This is one of the reasons I created the project. I did not agree with the idea that, because you are

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born after 1994, everything is fine: this is ridiculous for me. But the project grew from a place of anger to a place of empathy. These two forces joined together to make something really nice.

Conversations with John Fleetwood have been very interesting as well, because we come from very different backgrounds.

I’m truly happy with how it turned out.

JB Who are the people you photographed?

TM Mostly they are the people that I grew up with, or members of my family. I realised that I was battling with the term ‘born free’. I started taking portraits of people around me while asking them how they felt about this ideology. Within our differences, the project took shape. I started making more connections in my own community in Thokoza — these are people I photographed every day. I didn’t have to start from the point of being an outsider. The intimacy was already established, I just had to capture the moments in between.

JB The pictures you created in the context of the Of Soul and Joy project (Encounters, 2012) seem very different from the ones in Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe: turning to colour, taking pictures of people outdoors, moving from domestic and intimate settings to street scenes.

TM I had to explore other ways of photographing and new perspectives, not only be the fly on the wall, as I used to do in my practice, but to challenge myself and stay out of this comfort zone. For this specific project, it was about taking walks in the morning and in the afternoon, trying to find the picture, meeting the people that I knew and going with the flow.

JB Have you thought about including self-portraits within the series?

TM I am not really interested in photographing myself, I already impose a lot of myself when I take the image to begin with, I hold so much authority in selecting what goes in and what gets left out of the frame. Also there are no captions in the series because I don’t like to control the reading of the image. I believe that the image should be a dialogue between the viewer and the author.

JB How have you come to terms with the term ‘born free’ in your photography?

TM Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe evolved as a journey for myself and for the people I am close to. It started becoming more like an autobiography. The work does not have so much weight as to say that it is a ‘born free’ project, but it is a project shot through a young person’s eyes.

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Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe by Tshepiso Mazibuko

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Words KATIE DE KLEE

LEBOHANG KGANYE

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The visual artist exploring the narratives and relationships between memory, fantasy and family history 192

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Johannesburg-based visual artist Lebohang Kganye uses her work to explore her relationship to family and history. Her practice also opens its audience up to their own connections to their past and their sense of belonging. “My journey seems to be a deep response to loss and mourning — not just of different individuals, but of history, language and oral culture,” Kganye says. “My work is about memory, fantasy, identity formation and performance, and provides a means for reconstructing my identity by reconnecting with family members (both alive and dead) and exposing a wider common history.”

Through these investigations, Kganye reflects on the fact that identity is as intangible as a photograph: a site for the performance of dreams and the projection of narratives that are embedded with half-truths, denials and hidden facts. “Photographs record history, but it is only a history imagined.

I choose which part of the fantasy to take with me and claim as my story.”

Growing up in Joburg, Kganye, who now works in multiple mediums including film and installation, started out in photography, though not on purpose. Her initial interest was in studying journalism, but after failing to get into Wits University she applied for a year-long photography programme at David Goldblatt’s renowned Market Photo Workshop in 2009, hoping to pass the time until she could reapply for journalism. Sometime during her studies, she found she had a talent for visual storytelling and ended up completing the Advanced Photography Programme three years later.

“I got into photography without thinking about becoming an artist, per se. So I feel like it kind of just happened by itself. It’s something I never really chose — it chose me.”

Soon after her studies Kganye won the Tierney Fellowship Award, which led to one of her best-known series Ke Lefa Laka (2013). Created in response to the death of her mother, it is formed of two parts: FEATURE

Her-story and Heir-story. For Her-story, Kganye found old images of her mother, many of which were taken before Kganye herself was born, and recreated the scenes from these images with herself in her mother’s place — often also wearing the same clothes. She then superimposed that image of herself, somewhat like a ghost appearing half-visible, over the original photograph. “It became quite a therapeutic process, a renewed connection with her. It allowed for a certain mourning to happen and a celebration at the same time,” she explains.

The series also brought her closer to her sister and grandmother, who were involved in the creation of the images.

Her sister stood behind the lens, ensuring that Kganye was perfectly recreating the original image with her body position and expression, while her grandmother told her who the other people in the photographs were, where they had been taken, and what occasion the pictures were capturing.

Kganye found herself reflecting on the ability of a photograph to prompt mourning, denial and longing. This passing, melancholic state can be healing, but it brings to our attention our own transient lives. “We look at the person and see their life trajectory and the fact that no matter how alive they look, the photograph points at all our mortalities — that the essence of my mother that I identify in these photographs is, in fact, my essence, my constructions, my memories of this person whom I knew in only one capacity: namely, mother.”

Even the curation of the images begins to create its own kind of false narrative — things that are included, things that are omitted. Different threads appear to run through the images, but perhaps only because we want to put them there. Family photos, Kganye believes, are much more than the documentation of personal narratives.

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They become prized possessions, representations of how we want our ‘family-ness’ to appear, and therefore are not the preservers of reality, but the eroders of it.

The second part of Ke Lefa Laka moves from a focus on her mother to her grandfather. Scenes are formed from cardboard cut-outs and Kganye still appears in the images, but this time in the costume of a grandfather. He was the first person in the family to move from di’plaasing, which means ‘homelands’, in the Orange Free State to the city in Transvaal to find work, with the rest of the family eventually following suit. “My grandfather represents the central patriarchal figure 3 in the project. He passed away before I was born but I grew up in his house in Joburg and everyone has stories about him,” she explains.

Through Heir-story Kganye traces these ancestral roots, which began as an investigation into the original spelling and origins of her family name. Her grandfather was Khanye, grandmother was Khanyi and her own surname is Kganye. The word, in its various spellings, means ‘light’ in Sotho and Zulu.

“While the project straddles generations of my mother’s family, it also resonates with the history of South Africa, in that my family was uprooted and resettled because of Apartheid laws and the amendment of Land Acts. These stories reflect my family moving from place to place during the Apartheid era to find refuge, and then creating temporary homes in those spaces.

This had a direct impact on the identity of my family as a whole,” Kganye explains.

This story of displacement and migration, of searching for home or a sense

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of belonging, is a story that transcends the South African experience. It is a universal human preoccupation, especially in our present troubling times. “Because the work is often extremely personal, the process is meant to be a therapeutic one for me. I can only really hope that it allows for the same thing for the audience; that it resonates with them too.”

In 2014 Kganye was commissioned by the British Council to make a short film to be shown in Scotland as part of a Mandela Day celebration, and so began her path to moving image and installation. She made an animated continuation of the Ke Lefa Laka series, entitled Pied Piper’s Voyage, and collaborated with musicians Auntie Flo and Esa Williams on the soundscape.

“It allowed for the cardboard series to continue to exist and to continue to come to life, even though the cardboards themselves don’t exist anymore,” explains Kganye.

The more she researched her history, the more it became apparent that the very nature of family history remains a space of contradictions, a mixture of truth and fiction, of memory and emotion.

Through the use of silhouette cut-outs of family members and other props, her films confront these conflicting stories, which are told in multiple ways, even by the same person. “For me they reveal that time can break apart and reconnect and not quite fit back into one another.”

In the same vein, Kganye has begun presenting her work as interactive installations, for example experimenting with playing clips of interviews she collected with family members for Heir-story.

This is another way of unpacking her

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fascination with oral 4 history — the transfer of knowledge and memory through spoken stories, and the loss of these traditions in modern life.

Kganye’s latest work is titled Tell Tale, and forms six theatrical scenes. For this, she went deep into South Africa’s Karoo desert, spending weeks walking in the hot sun along the gravel roads of the small town Nieu Bethesda. She was introduced to many of the town’s inhabitants by a woman named Shawn Graaff, who works on the conservation of Owl House, the former residence of artist Helen Martins, which is now a museum. Amongst the inhabitants Kganye met was a beekeeper who makes cosmetic products in her backyard from beeswax, a violin-string maker using horse tails to make the strings, and a woman who translates South African writer Athol Fugard’s plays from English to Afrikaans. These encounters informed the creation of 5 miniature theatre sets made from silhouette cutouts of these characters.

“Tell Tale does not attest to being a docmentation of a people, but presents their personal narratives, which they share over a cup of tea, homemade ginger ale or the locally brewed beer.

These prized possessions hearken back to a particular time but are also vehicles for a fantasy that allows for a momentary space to perform ideals of community,” the artist explains. “There is so FEATURE

much that is unwritten in history. It is literally passed down from one generation to the next, and so is quite fluid in that sense.

I am interested in the stories that are told, and that is where a lot of our history lies.”

Kganye is now represented by Afronova in South Africa and has been widely recognised internationally.

She has participated in major exhibitions and art fairs in Milan, Marrakesh, Tokyo and London and her work forms part of The Walther Collection in New York, The Pigozzi Collection in Geneva and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.

She has also received a slew of commendations including the Jury Prize at the Bamako Encounters Biennale of African Photography in 2015, the CAP Prize 2016 in Basel, and the 2017 Sasol New Signatures Competition award.

Despite all of her success, Kganye’s own story is only just beginning. “I’ve never really considered myself a photographer because it involves all these other processes.

So even though it starts with photography or ends with a photograph, I feel like the elements of collecting and research are really fulfilling processes. My practice is pretty experimental, I’m looking forward to what the next stage of my work will look like.”

LEBOHANG KGANYE

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Re palame tereneng e fosahetseng, 2016.

O emetse mohala, 2016.

Kwana borayeng Phadima II, 2013.

Tshimong ka hara toropo II, 2013.

Habo Patience ka bokhathe II, 2013.

Re shapa setepe sa lenyalo II, 2013.

Re tantshetsa phaposing ya sekolo II, 2013.

All images copyright Lebohang Kganye, courtesy AFRONOVA Gallery.

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Noncedo & Nonzuzo aim their twin talents at each other Words ALIX-ROSE COWIE

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Noncedo wakes up most mornings in the Mother City.

Dawn breaks for Nonzuzo in the City of Gold.

Noncedo studied photography after high school. Nonzuzo taught herself.

Noncedo is dazzled by the light that bounces between buildings in the city's core.

Nonzuzo snaps up what the streets below have to offer.

Noncedo is the refined to Nonzuzo’s raw; the considered to her candid approach.

But there’s more that binds the Gxekwa sisters than what differentiates them. Both are what they call “feel and shoot”. Both are keen observers of life and identity in South Africa and use their cameras to translate this into story.

Usually shooting friends and strangers, the twins — one based in Johannesburg, the other in Cape Town — have been known to turn the camera on themselves on occasion. Their 2015 series Carbon Copy saw the two dressed alike in a collection of creative self-portraits, inciting a serious double take. When they found themselves together in Joburg in early 2019, they turned their gaze towards each other once more for Nataal. Their inspiration: FEATURE

to play, like they did as girls, with their mother’s camera.

“As much as photography is very technical, that sometimes stifles the process,” Noncedo says. “This was about following our process of shooting with other people, which is about hanging together, very natural and free-flowing.

You allow for play to happen and follow your intuition.” They used what was available to them: a familiar space, natural light and for each, a subject she knows almost as intimately as she knows herself.

For a change from how they’re used to seeing themselves and each other, the sisters wore a shock of wigs for the images.

“There’s a very masculine element to us,” Nonzuzo says. “Maybe it’s just the way we dress. But I found that the play with wigs brought a bit of femininity and softness.

We’ve always kept our hair short and I’ve always felt uncomfortable in a wig. So it was interesting to see us just being different people.” Is it a game of Who’s Who? And the images beg the question: when you’re shooting your mirror image, how much of yourself do you project onto her?

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and subject blur, and a true collaboration like doing this or that, there’s a certain occurs. understanding that you have. And for you?

After their portrait session, the twins sat NZO I feel like I learn about you and myself in the shooting process. Because down in Nonzuzo’s Craighall apartment of your experience, you’re very generous to interview each other. and patient.

NDO I think Nonzuzo what I We’re both love and what photograI’ve learnt from phers, but half the your photogratime we don’t phy is spontaeven talk about neity. I love our work. I always your sense of feel like there colour as well. are similarities.

If you send For instance we’re me an image, both drawn it could be to fashion, issues shadows and around identity highlights, and how people it could be a occupy space. silhouette, Noncedo but the colours Well, we’re are just comtwins after all — ing at you and somebody once it’s nicely said that we are balanced. one spirit in two NZO Let’s talk bodies. Perhaps about what that explains it. inspired the As much as our images that images are differwe’ve shot. ent, there’s someNDO We were thing about them inspired that feels like one by photograperson. But obviphy by the ously we have a likes of Vivian Maier, Santu Mofokeng, different experience, so what you capture is not the same as what I capture but I feel Malik Sidibé and Seydou Keïta. It’s simple images that kind of look mundane, like when I’m visiting Joburg…

NZO …you’re drawn to the same things but are well considered and speak about I’m drawn to. Do you feel different when current issues. You tend to start with we shoot each other compared to when an idea, but once you’re shooting, things you’re shooting other people? change, and I feel it is important to allow NDO Yeah, with strangers I’m more patient. those changes to happen.

NZO I was having a hard time shooting you I feel like I’m saying to you: you know as I was trying to think about all the process, you know what it takes, work the technical elements of making a good with me, give it to me! But if I don’t feel

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picture, but I guess I’m more of a ‘gut feel’ photographer. I have to feel it in my bones, otherwise it’s really hard to make images…

Where would you say you are currently in your photography career?

NDO I’m in a place where I want to go back to basics. I’m finding myself curious about old ways of taking pictures, so I recently got myself a Leica. It slows you down, you have to think about everything that goes into making your image. I also want to experiment a little bit. Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was a pioneer in colour photography. His process of shooting in black and white using colour filter RGB and then combining them to create a colour image is one of the things I’m interested in experimenting with. And you?

Where are you?

NZO Currently I’m trying to get into the exhibition space.

I’m staying open to collaborations.

I feel like that’s important because it gives you new eyes and fresh ideas in terms of how you work. And it’s an exercise in trusting other people’s visions.

I feel drawn to film photography and have recently been shooting on a Yashica Flex, a lot of nudes, a lot of street documentary. I’m interestFEATURE

ed in the people that occupy the city, their movement as well as the fashion, trying to understand that language has always fascinated me.

NDO Tell me about your zine?

NZO It’s a collection of my work, the different subjects that I have been drawn to from street documentary, to street style, to the female form. I’m inspired by Dayanita Singh, who is a bookmaker and a photographer. It’s a different way of archiving work. What is your latest project?

NDO I have a series called Beautiful Boys: they’re really stunning, gorgeous. The reason I started taking pictures of them was a curiosity about beauty as access. I think the project is to capture their beauty but also to have a conversation about what beauty means. I’m curious if it’s the same for boys and men as it is for girls and women.

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NENEH CHERRY Lessons in standing up and being counted from the legendary singer and musician 204

Words HELEN JENNINGS Photography LUCIE ROX NATAAL

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“Sorry I’m a bit vague today,” says Neneh Cherry, sipping a hot lemon and ginger drink and nursing a nasty cold.

We’re on set in west London for the Nataal photo-shoot and, even though she’s had a fever all night, this resolute professional has arrived on time and ready to work. And needless to say, she is anything but vague.

Vague is not a word that describes Neneh Cherry. Iconoclastic. Visionary. Radical.

Enduring. Contemplative. Loyal. Bloody lovely. These are all more apt adjectives for someone who has continued to push boundaries, bridge genres and quake dance floors for more than 30 years, and who continues to challenge her fans with her current album, Broken Politics.

Our conversation, like her fifth studio album, cuts to the real talk straight away.

I get the impression that she knows no other way. As its title suggests, the record finds Cherry in a defiant spirit as she laments the fractured political and social climate facing us all today. There are tracks tackling gun violence and global conflicts (‘Shot Gun Shack’), women’s rights (‘Soldier’) and disinformation (‘Faster Than The Truth’). Meanwhile the lead single ‘Kong’ ruminates on the refugee crisis as a legacy of colonialism.

This one started out as a song she wrote for Massive Attack, but it took on special meaning after her 2016 trip to the Calais Jungle where she volunteered at the Refugee Community Kitchen.

“It was a deep experience. I’m not going to say I felt like going there and helping out was important. I just wanted to put some energy into doing something that needed to be done — cooking 18,000 meals a day,” she recalls. “On the last day of the trip, I went to serve the food and visit the place. It was this small world where people were making their lives.

I looked into their eyes and saw their smiles, and also some of their heartbreak, feeling like their road had led to nowhere.

All of these people had sacrificed so much to get 20 minutes away from England, two hours away from Paris, down the road from Brussels, and no one wanted to know. Then they just flatten the whole thing and where is everybody? And so ‘Kong’ is definitely a response, a needing to talk about it, a needing to shed some beauty on it.”

The whole album is an expression of Cherry’s will to assert the right to be heard, to be present and to embrace personal activism. She’s not a prophet with all the answers, but she does appreciate the

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(Previous) NENEH wears Y3 top, NOIR KEI NINOMIYA jacket from MACHINE-A, PHILIP TREACY hat, JUDY BLAME earrings. (Opposite) NENEH wears AMBUSH dress from MACHINE-A, JUDY BLAME necklace and rings.

NENEH CHERRY

ability of music to empower. “Sometimes when I’m looking at what’s happening on a daily basis, I feel completely overwhelmed.

It can leave me speechless. You can be left thinking, ‘what’s the fucking point?’” she says. “But I don’t like to feel like that because there is a point. Having some kind of hope is a point. There is a point in us listening to each other, trying to talk to each other, you know. And I guess the natural place where that starts to happen for me is in that area where I go creatively, where I digest, and process, and just try to express some of the things that are going on around us every day.”

Having written the songs with her husband and long-time collaborator Cameron McVey, they went to Woodstock to record at Creative Music Studio, which is owned by legendary vibraphonist Karl Berger. “He played a lot with my stepdad [jazz musician Don Cherry] over the years and his studio has had lots of people passing through it who are linked to my family. As my parents are both gone, going there gave me a feeling of coming home. It was really soothing and connected me to them on another level.”

On production duty was Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), who also produced Cherry’s 2014 album Blank Project, and helped to connect the dots both to that release and to much of her music to date. Its sparse sonic landscape creates a meditative and disconcerting bed for Cherry’s sometimes croaky, other times delicate vocals to land upon, where they tangle with resonant jazz and trip hop frequencies and all manner of world music instrumentation. “I was holding the whole journey with me, both in sound and expression, and little points to all of the different albums have just been allowed to simmer through. It’s quite nice having that roundedness in a way.”

Always surrounded by friends and family on her musical path, what she calls her “tribe”, Cherry is a rolling stone in every sense, and can’t help but attract new and exhilarating collaborators into her “nomadic threads”. While Wolfgang Tillmans shot the album cover, she’s worked with emerging London filmmakers for her two lead videos — Jenn Nkiru for ‘Kong’ and Akinola Davies Jr for the blistering ‘Natural Skin Deep’. Both of their work also speaks to Cherry’s own sense of building community through creativity, which galvanises and amplifies voices.

“I think, thank god for the younger generations for wanting to take charge and make a difference,” she says, reflecting on the dynamism of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. “Every person is political, and there are different levels of activism, but a huge part of transcending and giving power to each other is collective thought. We are not taking from each other, we’re not in competition, we’re making each other stronger as a united force.”

Cherry was brought up on this collectivist thinking. Her early years were

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spent in rural Sweden with her mother, the visual artist Moki Karlsson, and Don Cherry, and their home had something of a commune spirit. Her birth father was the Sierra Leonean percussionist Ahmadu Jah, who passed away last year and with whom she also had a meaningful bond. The Cherry family, including her half-brother Eagle-Eye, lived between Sweden and New York, and she dropped out of school as a teenager to move to London, where she squatted with Ari Up from The Slits and sang in Rip Rig & Panic, among other raucous bands.

This marinated her in the city’s reggae, post-punk and early rap scenes.

Cherry rose to rapid fame in 1988 with the instant pop anthem ‘Buffalo Stance’, followed by the BRIT award-winning album Raw Like Sushi, which also featured the worldwide smash ‘Manchild’. In the classic, Jean-Baptiste Mondino-directed video, the camera swings rhythmically from side to side to reveal a hyper-real beach scene within which she’s rapping while holding her new born baby Tyler (previously — and famously — spotted in her belly on Top Of The Pops), and her hair wrapped in a bath towel.

By this point the singer came to embody Buffalo, the style movement spearheaded by Ray Petri — alongside the likes of Jamie Morgan, Barry Kamen, Judy Blame and Mark Lebon — that defined an era, and has lived on to influence fashion and photography ever since. Think MA-1 flight jackets and cycling shorts with a smattering of Yohji Yamamoto or JeanPaul Gaultier; pork pie hats with kilts and Doctor Marten boots; ‘killer’ Jamaican tailoring meeting London rude-girl chains.

Think Buffalo. Think Cherry, who helped to take the look mainstream.

She continued to work closely with Blame until his untimely death from cancer last year. “It’s been very surreal in many ways. His absence is huge.

The hole is huge. At first there was the deep confusion of the person not being there. It’s only hitting me now — a year later — that he’s gone,” she says of the larger-than-life stylist and jeweller. As we talk, Cherry’s own stylist Karlie, who was once Blame’s assistant, is busy laying out many of his archive pieces, which express his unmistakable DIY aesthetic and mash up of high and low materials. His signature safety pins and buttons cluster next to plastic dinosaurs and faux pearls in statement neckpieces waiting to be worn.

“It’s been such a privilege to be able to work in the way that we’ve worked over the years, so I guess I carry that with me in my heart,” she says. “It takes a while to process before you can elevate the new relationship to a place where you can feel them around you and in you. Now I look at the pieces and can see their genius on another level. They’re beautiful works of art and it always feels like the icing on the cake when I put one on.”

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“I like the idea that maybe I have influenced people, but in my own dimension I try to just look forward to whatever I’m doing next” FEATURE

Blame and Cherry have continued to inspire successive generations, so impactful and inclusive was their work together. She is admittedly flattered that her creative output has influenced so many in the fashion and music worlds, but she’s not interested in resting on her laurels, even if those laurels include achievements such as the 1994 single, ‘7 Seconds’ with Youssou N’Dour, which went Top 3 in 13 countries, being nominated for a Grammy, and sharing songs with everyone from Michael Stipe and Gorillaz to Cher and Blood Orange.

“I like the idea that maybe I have influenced people, but in my own dimension I try to just look forward to whatever it is I’m doing next rather than thinking about how something I did 30 years ago has affected people. It’s part of who I am and I carry it with me,” she says. “There is a space for celebrating a certain part of the story. Judy and I were talking a lot before he passed about how it would be quite cool to draw some of that history into the visuals we were going to work with now. But both he and I were allergic to drowning ourselves in nostalgia. It’s pointless when you still have things to say.”

Cherry is also no doubt kept on her toes by the youngest of her three daughters, Mabel, who is currently following in her footsteps with her infectious breed of insouciant pop and has recently slayed the UK charts with her song ‘Don’t Call Me Up’. “I’m always going to try to have her back when she needs support, but I don’t want to stifle her with my fear.

It’s an important balance and I can trust fully that she’s doing what she needs to do,” she says. “You can claim the business is different these days, but the routines are the same and it’s fucking draining. I can put my hand on my heart and say she deserves to be where she is. She’s really worked hard and I’m ridiculously proud.”

Would she say that it’s easier for women artists now than when she started out?

“I don’t think it’s easier. I really don’t.

It’s the same shit, different day. That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of people pushing for change, and there are amazing women who are able to project themselves, and to be and look and do the things that they want. But there is still a very stereotypical area where women are sexualised. We are presented with imagery that is not a celebration of the woman, that is bordering on pornography and isn’t real. That control of our image is something we have to claim back. Not even back — just claim!

It’s a journey, isn’t it?”

NENEH wears MM6 dress from MACHINE-A, KATHARINE HAMNETT jacket, JUDY BLAME necklace.

Styling KARLIE SHELLEY. Hair JOHN VIAL. Make-up CAROLYN GALLYER. Photography assistance ANDREW MOORES. Hair assistance SHIVS ARNOLD. Set design LUCY SANDERSON. Production CAT CRAWFORD. Post production STUDIO RM.

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CLUBE VERDE

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Photography CLARE SHILLAND Styling HANNA KELIFA

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KATTY wears M MISSONI top.

(Above) KATTY wears SUPRIYA LELE dress.

(Opposite) KATTY wears SPORTMAX bikini, stylist’s own skirt.

(Above) KATTY wears OTTOLINGER shorts and safety pin keychain, stylist’s own top and belt.

(Opposite) KATTY stylist’s own top and skirt.

KATTY wears OTTOLINGER dress.

(Above) KATTY wears VICTORIA BECKHAM dress and top.

(Above) KATTY wears ISA ARFEN dress.

(Opposite) KATTY wears OTTOLINGER dress.

KATTY at DA BANDA MODEL MANAGEMENT.

(Above) KATTY wears VICTORIA BECKHAM top, CENCI VINTAGE skirt.

(Opposite) KATTY wears OTTOLINGER top.

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Styling OLA EBITI Photography CHRISTINA EBENEZER

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Garment XXXX XXXXXXXXX credit Another Garment JORDAN wears PEBBLE XXXX XXXXXXXXX LONDON hat,credit EDWARD CUMING blazer.

(Opposite) TOMMY wears MOSCHINO blazer, GIVENCHY shirt and trousers, stylist’s own neck cuff.

(Above) JORDAN wears DELPHI WRIGHT blazer and trousers.

TOMMY wears PEBBLE LONDON hat, BALLY trousers, FALKE socks, stylist’s own vest, own jewellery.

TOMMY wears HALINA EDWARD BROWN shirt, CAROLINA FORSS top and trousers, stylist’s own hat.

(Above) SIMON wears LABRUM LONDON hat, OLUBIYI THOMAS blazer and t-shirt.

(Opposite) TOMMY wears ARNAR JONSSON shirt and trousers. JORDAN wears GIVENCHY boots (specially produced for the Soft Criminal Exhibition at Red Hook Labs).

JORDAN wears T/SEHNE waistcoat, COACH shirt. TOMMY wears BRIONI NAVY suit, REIGN VINTAGE shirt.

Grooming BILLIE MCKENZIE. Set design HAMED MAIYE and SANDRA FALASE. Models TOMMY at ANTI AGENCY, JORDAN at RAY & ROBIN, SIMON NNDJOCK. Location CITY OF LONDON ACADEMY.

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Photography PETROVSKY & RAMONE Styling DEBORAH BLOEMEN

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CASEY wears FREDERICK HORNOF jacket.

KIMBERLEY wears LEO dress, stylist’s own scarf.

CASEY wears THE PONY CLUB suit.

CASEY wears stylist’s own jacket, LEO belt, FREDERICK HORNOF trousers.

KIMBERLEY wears LEO suit.

CASEY wears FREDERICK HORNOF dress.

CASEY wears THE PONY CLUB suit.

KIMBERLEY wears LEO body, ALYX trousers.

KIMBERLEY wears MICOL RAGNI jacket.

CASEY wears ROMBAUT shoes.

CASEY wears LEO jacket, stylist’s own trousers. (Opposite) KIMBERLEY wears LEO dress, MICOL RAGNI shoes.

Make-up NIKI VOS. Models CASEY REDLINGHYS and KIMBERLY DAVIDSON. Production RATAX & DAMIEN.

SHARMAARKE wears LAMULA NASSUNA top, KINGS CROSS EYES goggles, KIONE GRANDISON collage hat.

WHEN DRY, STYLE AS REQUIRED

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Photography BENI MASIALA Styling BEVAN AGYEMANG Art Direction HARRIS ELLIOTT and KIONE GRANDISON

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(Above) ABBAS wears MICHELLE LOWE HOLDER white choker.

(Opposite) AYO wears KIONE GRANDISON collage.

(Opposite) DENNIS wears KINGSMAN jacket from MRPORTER.COM, ACNE STUDIOS trousers, HARRIS ELLIOTT STUDIO neck cuff, THE CONTEMPORARY WARDROBE necklace. (Above) SYDFALLS wears KIONE GRANDISON collage.

(Above) SYDFALLS wears THE CONTEMPORARY WARDROBE cape.

(Opposite) SHARMAARKE wears BIANCA SAUNDERS shirt, SUHAIYLA SHAKUWRA necklace.

(Above) DENNIS wears MICHELLE LOWE HOLDER necklace (over eyes), TSAU jumpsuit, KINGS CROSS EYES goggles.

(Opposite) SYDFALLS wears NBA top, model’s own earrings.

Fine art KIONE GRANDISON. Hair AFI EMILY ATTIPOE using KERA CARE. Make-up LIZ DAXAUER at CAREN using EMBRYOLISSE. Photography assistance YASMINE SABRI. Make-up assistance CHANTAL AMATI. Models ABBAS MWAMBAKALE, AYO FAGBOYEGUN, NYAKOR RIAM and DENNIS OKWERA at STORM, SHARMAARKE ALI ADAN and SYDFALLS at ANTI AGENCY.

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Photography MARIANNA SANVITO Styling NAOMI MILLER

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NISAA wears BOTTEGA VENETA coat, L’ENCHANTEUR sunglasses and earring.

NISAA wears VINTAGE GIORGIO ARMANI jacket, RELLIK trousers, stylist’s own tights, Y PROJECT shoes, L’ENCHANTEUR earring.

NISAA wears GIVENCHY coat, L’ENCHANTEUR hair piece and ear piece.

NISAA wears CHARLOTTE KNOWLES top, NANUSHKA jacket, PORTS 1961 trousers, L’ENCHANTEUR earring and necklace.

NISAA wears L’ENCHANTEUR rings.

NISAA wears PORTS 1961 top, SIES MARJAN jacket, L’ENCHANTEUR earring and necklace.

NISAA wears MAX MARA top, JOSEPH skirt, L’ENCHANTEUR finger caps and box.

L’ENCHANTEUR rings and box.

(Opposite) NISAA wears DIOR body stocking and body top, L’ENCHANTEUR sunglasses and rings.

Hair EDWARD LAMPLEY at BRYANT ARTISTS. Make-up COURTNEY PERKINS at FRANK REPS. Nails HONEY at EXPOSURE NY. Model NISAA POUNCEY at NEXT MODEL MANAGEMENT NY. Casting JULIA ASARO at CREARTVT. Assistance STEFANO ORTEGA.

SHELDON wears CHRISTOPHE LEMAIRE jacket and trousers.

JOANI wears CHRISTOPHE LEMAIRE jacket, ANNIE COSTELLO BROWN earrings.

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Photography IBRAHEM HASAN Styling JESSICA WILLIS

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JOANI wears JACQUIE SERIES coat.

SHELDON wears JACQUIE SERIES top. JOANI wears AND RE WALKER poncho, ANNIE COSTELLO BROWN earrings, MARYAM NASSIR ZADEH shoes.

SHELDON wears stylist’s own trousers.

JOANI wears AND RE WALKER coat.

JOANI wears AND RE WALKER top, skirt and shoes, ANNIE CASTELLO BROWN broach.

SHELDON wears JACQUIE SERIES top, stylist’s own trousers.

JOANI wears JACQUIE SERIES jacket and trousers, MARYAM NASSIR ZADEH shoes.

SHELDON wears JACQUIE SERIES top, ACNE STUDIOS trousers and shoes.

Hair LIZZIE ARNESON. Hair and Make-up LIZZIE ARNESON using Oribe and Dior.

Models JOANI JOHNSON and SHELDON SHEPHERD. Assistance BECKY AKINYODE.

SHROUDED GODDESS

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Photography LUCA KHOURI Styling MARIKA-ELLA AMES

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(Opposite) NADINE wears stylist’s own headpiece. (Above) BREANA wears CAROLINA FORSS dress and skirt, SALVATORE FERRAGAMO bodysuit, stylist’s own headpiece, SLIM BARRETT earrings, E8 BY MIISTA shoes.

BREANA wears SALVATORE FERRAGAMO bodysuit, stylist’s own fabric.

(Top) NADINE wears SALVATORE FERRAGAMO dress and bodysuit.

(Bottom) NADINE wears IOANNES dress, SALVATORE FERRAGAMO bodysuit, T LABEL gloves, stylist’s own headpiece.

(Above) NADINE wears T LABEL dress, stylist’s own fabric.

(Right) NADINE wears SALVATORE FERRAGAMO dress and bodysuit, stylist’s own headpiece.

BREANA wears KATHRYN BOWEN dress, SLIM BARRETT earrings, MANOS AMOROSAS bag.

(Top) BREANA wears T LABEL top, MARQUES’ALMEIDA skirt, SLIM BARRETT earrings.

(Bottom) BREANA wears SALVATORE FERRAGAMO dress, stylist’s own fabric.

BREANA wears SALVATORE FERRAGAMO bodysuit and shoes, T LABEL skirt, stylist’s own fabric, SLIM BARRETT earrings.

(Top) BREANA wears SALVATORE FERRAGAMO dress, bodysuit and shoes, SLIM BARRETT earrings.

(Bottom) NADINE wears stylist’s own fabric, JESSICA OGDEN APC pillow.

(Above) NADINE wears CAROLINA FORSS dress and skirt, SALVATORE FERRAGAMO bodysuit, stylist’s own headpiece.

(Opposite) BREANA wears SALVATORE FERRAGAMO bodysuit and shoes, stylist’s own fabric.

Make-up KIMBERLY PATTERSON. Photography Assistance AMBER PINKERTON, REBECCA WILLIAMS. Styling Assistance KADEEM RODGERS. Models NADINE WILLIS and BREANA CARSON at SAINT MODELS.

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Photography SHARIF HAMZA Make-up GRACE AHN

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South African photographer and Taylor Wessing Prize winner Alice Mann has been taking portraits of ballroom dancers Tehillah and Corban Anthony ever since they started competing two years ago. “When they dance, it’s undeniable,” says London-based Mann of the dazzling brother-sister duo from Charlesville, Cape Town, who have won countless competitions. “Their chemistry, aspiration, and natural gift are unique. Together, they’re a force to be reckoned with.” The outfits they wear for this story were designed by Tehillah, Corban, and their perennially supportive father, Desmond, and produced by stylist Mikhailia Petersen. Each piece adheres to the ballroom world’s exacting standards and will now form part of their performance wardrobe.

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Photography ALICE MANN Styling MIKHAILIA PETERSEN

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Art direction ALICE MANN, MIKHAILIA PETERSEN. Styling assistance DANIEL BORAINE. Outfits designed by the ANTHONY FAMILY. Words SAMANTHA SMALL.

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Photography & Styling DANIEL OBASI

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(Opposite) AYELOJA wears POST IMPERIAL scarf, KENNETH IZE sleeveless top, shirt and trousers.

OLABISI wears POST IMPERIAL scarf and shirt, GREY PROJECTS jacket and trousers, stylist's own jewellery.

OKE wears GREY PROJECTS head wrap, ORANGE CULTURE shirt and shorts, POST IMPERIAL jacket.

(Below) OLABISI wears GREY PROJECTS jacket, top and skirt.

(Opposite) OLASUNKANMI wears GREY PROJECTS hat and trousers, LISA FOLAWIYO jacket.

(Below) AYELOJA wears POST IMPERIAL shirt and tie, KENNETH IZE jacket and shorts.

(Opposite) OLABISI wears POST IMPERIAL shirt, KENNETH IZE scarf. ENIOLA wears GREY PROJECTS shirt and dress.

OLASUNKANMI wears POST IMPERIAL shirt and trousers, KENNETH IZE sleeveless jacket.

ENIOLA wears GREY PROJECTS dress.

(Below) TEMIDAYO wears LISA FOLAWIYO dress, POST IMPERIAL trousers, KENNETH IZE scarf.

(Opposite) TEMIDAYO wears LISA FOLAWIYO dress, KENNETH IZE scarf.

Hair HAPPINESS OKON. Make-up LAURETTA ORJI. Models ENIOLA ABIORA, TEMIDAYO SANUSI, OLABISI OLANIYAN at FEW MODELS, OLASUNKANMI ABAYOMI at FUSE MANAGEMENT, SAMUEL AYELOJA at FOWLER MODELS, OKE TOBIOLA at MYBOOKER MODELS.

Rudi Geyser’s series features four queer, mixed-race professional dancers and performance artists from communities on the outskirts of Cape Town. Initially the South African photographer’s aim was to reflect how these artists navigate personal expression in a conventional, and frequently hostile, environment. But as the collaboration progressed, they all felt compelled to explore performance as a metaphor for total freedom outside of their present reality and denied history.

Chester Martinez, who appears here with Lee Kotze, Berlin Williams and Ashley Smith, states: “Standing at the intersections of race, gender and culture, we find solace in the reflections of our chosen tribe — one another. We’re creating homes away from home, the spaces where we were taught to deny our personal truth, edit ourselves, to play small, to be less visible. Without the names of ancestors to call on, we must recreate and embody identities rooted in our intangible heritage.”

INTERSECTIONS

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Photography RUDI GEYSER Styling GAVIN MIKEY COLLINS

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(Opposite) CHESTER wears W35T polo neck and tights, own mask. (Above) BERLIN and CHESTER wear THEBE MAGUGU skirts, MISSIBABA earrings (worn as belts), CRYSTAL BIRCH headpiece, stylist’s own gloves.

(Top) CHESTER wears W35T polo neck and tights, own rings. (Bottom From left to right) CHESTER wears COKE X RICH MNISI jacket, NICHOLAS COUTTS scarf and trousers. LEE wears MAXHOSA AFRICA coat, COKE X RICH MNISI skirt, MISSIBABA necklaces, CRYSTAL BIRCH headpiece, KLUK CGDT coat (as veil). BERLIN wears NAO SERATI jacket, NICHOLAS COUTTS sweater and trousers.

(Above) LEE wears NAO SERATI jumpsuit.

(Right) BERLIN wears stylist’s own gloves.

LEE wears NAO SERATI jumpsuit, MARIANNE FASSLER skirt and blouse, NICHOLAS COUTTS scarf as headpiece, MISSIBABA bag worn as mask.

(Above) BERLIN wears SKEET coat, LOUISE STEYTLER tights as gloves, SELFI trousers.

(Top) CHESTER wears W35T polo neck and top. (Bottom) LEE wears own shorts and accessories.

(Above) CHESTER wears CRYSTAL BIRCH headpiece, SELFI jacket and trousers, KLUK CGDT dress, TROTSE TERT gloves, KIRSTEN GOSS necklaces. (Right) LEE wears NAO SERATI jumpsuit, stylist’s own necklace.

BERLIN wears NICHOLAS COUTTS sweater, LOUISE STEYTLER tights.

LEE wears CRYSTAL BIRCH headpiece, SELFI jacket and trousers, KLUK CGDT dress, TROTSE TERT gloves, KIRSTEN GOSS necklaces.

LEE wears SKEET coat, SELFI trousers, own necklace.

CHESTER wears W35T shorts, WOOLWORTHS bodysuit.

(Above) CHESTER wears own swim trunks. (Opposite left to right) CHESTER wears COKE X RICH MNISI jacket, NICHOLAS COUTTS trousers and scarf. LEE wears MAXHOSA AFRICA coat, COKE X RICH MNISI skirt, MISSIBABA necklaces, CRYSTAL BIRCH headpiece, KLUK CGDT coat as veil. BERLIN wears NAO SERATI jacket, NICHOLAS COUTTS trousers and sweater.

Models CHESTER MARTINEZ, LEE KOTZE, BERLIN WILLIAMS and ASHLEY SMITH.

LOVE BUZZ

FASHION

Photography NADINE IJEWERE Hair CYNDIA HARVEY Styling NATHAN KLEIN

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(Previous) LEAH wears ASAI top, ANGUS CHAING jumper, KLOTO earring. (Above) MAGUEYE wears MOWALOLA jacket, LEO AND LIN skirt, DOC MARTENS shoes, own earring. YACINE wears ASAI shirt, MOWALOLA skirt, vintage top and shorts, JAKHU earrings.

ANNE SOPHIE wears ACNE dress, OTTOLINGER jumper, DINOSAUR DESIGNS earring.

YACINE wears ASAI top and dress, RUPERT SANDERSON shoes. HELENA wears ASAI top and dress, WALES BONNER trousers.

LEAH wears ASAI top, ANGUS CHAING jumper, KLOTO earring.

DARIUS wears PREEN LINE jumper, GUCCI gloves, ASAI trousers, FIGURE OF A necklace, DINOSAUR DESIGN earring, vintage top and belts.

SOPHIA wears JOHN LAWRENCE SULLIVAN blazer, ANGUS CHAING jumper, SIMONE ROCHA X MONCLER coat.

DARIUS wears WOLFORD bodysuit, RIONA TREACY vest, MOWALOLA trousers, DOC MARTENS shoes.

YACINE wears GUCCI dress, PRONOUNCE top, EMILIO CAVALLINI tights, MOWALOLA belt, RUPERT SANDERSON shoes.

YACINE and HELENA wear ASAI top and dress.

SOPHIA wears CHLOÉ dress, WOLFORD tights, DORATEYMUR shoes, GABERON earrings.

MAGUEYE wears ASAI top, ANGUS CHIANG jumper, AMAZON FASHION trousers, DOC MARTENS shoes, vintage belts.

DARIUS wears PREEN LINE jumper, GUCCI gloves, ASAI trousers, DOC MARTENS shoes, FIGURE OF A necklace, DINOSAUR DESIGNS earrings, vintage top and belts. (Opposite) YACINE wears ACNE shirt and skirt.

Hair CYNDIA HARVEY at STREETERS. Make-up LUCY BURT at LGA. Nails AMA QUASHIE at STREETERS. Set design ALICE ANDREWS. Assistance JAMES GILBERT and MEGAN JORDAN. Casting JOIE at AKRAV AGENCY. Production GABI BESEVIC-SIMPSON. Post production TOUCH DIGITAL. Models DARIUS NEWELL at THE SQUAD MANAGEMENT. MAGUEYE DIOUCK and ANNE SOPHIE at AKRAV AGENCY. YACINE DIOP at THE HIVE MANAGEMENT. LEAH ABRAHAM at FIRST MODEL MANAGEMENT. SOPHIA SOLANO at MILK MODEL MANAGEMENT. HELENA MAHAMA at PREMIER MODEL MANAGEMENT.

CORSAIR KINGDOM

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Photography MOUS LAMRABAT Styling LISA LAPAUW

NATAAL

(Opposite) JEAN AND PATRICE wear SOUK MEDINA MARRAKECH djellabas, NIKE sneakers.

(Above) JEAN wears photographer’s own kandora.

(Below) JEAN AND PATRICE wear GIVENCHY tracksuits, PRADA sunglasses, VINTAGE hats, SOUK MEDINA MARRAKECH babouche slippers. (Opposite) PATRICE wears photographer’s own kandora, stylist’s own belts.

PATRICE wears photographer’s own kandora, stylist’s own hat.

JEAN wears photographer’s own kandora, stylist’s own hat.

(Opposite) PATRICE wears OFF-WHITE poncho, SOUK MEDINA MARRAKECH babouche slippers, WEEKDAY socks.

(Above) JEAN and PATRICE wear photographer’s own kandoras.

PATRICE wears photographer’s own kandora, SOUK MEDINA MARRAKECH babouche slippers.

JEAN wears MISBHV tracksuit, SOUK MEDINA MARRAKECH babouche slippers.

(Opposite) JEAN and PATRICE wear CASABLANCA tracksuits, SOUK MEDINA MARRAKECH babouche slippers.

(Above) JEAN wears photographer’s own kandora, OFF-WHITE mask.

(Below) JEAN wears photographer’s own kandora, LOUIS VUITTON stockings.

(Opposite) JEAN and PATRICE wear photographer’s own kandoras, BALENCIAGA scarves.

(Below) JEAN and PATRICE wear photographer’s own kandoras, SOUK MEDINA MARRAKECH babouche slippers.

(Opposite) JEAN and PATRICE wear stylist’s own scarves, photographer’s own kandoras.

Models JEAN and PATRICE.

DIRECTORY A A.P.C. apc.fr ACNE STUDIOS acnestudios.com ALYX alyxstudio.com ANDRE RE WALKER @and_re_walker ANGUS CHIANG anguschiangshop.com ANNIE COSTELLO BROWN anniecostellobrown.com ARNAR JONSSON @arnarmarjonsson ART COMES FIRST artcomesfirst.com ASAI asaita.co.uk B BALENCIAGA balenciaga.com BALLY bally.co.uk BERTHOLD berthold-uk.com BETHANY WILLIAMS bethany-williams.com BIANCA SAUNDERS biancasaunders.co.uk BLOKE @bloke_ng BOTTEGA VENETA bottegaveneta.com BRIONI brioni.com C CAROLINA FORSS carolinaforss.com CASABLANCA casablancaparis.com CELINE celine.com CENCI VINTAGE cenci.co.uk CHARLOTTE KNOWLES @charlotteknowleslondon CHLOÉ chloe.com CHOPOVA LOWENA chopovalowena.com CHRISTOPHE LEMAIRE lemaire.fr COACH coach.com CRYSTAL BIRCH therealcrystalbirch.com D DINOSAUR DESIGNS dinosaurdesigns.com DIOR dior.com DOC MARTENS drmartens.com DORATEYMUR dorateymur.com E E8 BY MIISTA miista.com EDWARD CUMING edwardcuming.com ELEVATION XII @elevationxii EMILIO CAVALLINI emiliocavallini.com EMMY KASBIT emmykasbit.com F FAITH CONNEXION faithconnexion.com FALKE falke.com FIGURE OF A figureofa.com FREDERIK HORNOF hornof.tv G GABERON gaberon.online GIORGIO ARMANI armani.com GIVINCHY givenchy.com GREY PROJECTS greyprojects.ng GUCCI gucci.com H HELEN LAWRENCE helen-lawrence.co.uk I I.AM.ISIGO @iamisigo IÉFO @iefo_ _ _ _ IOANNES ioannes.eu ISA ARFEN isaarfen.com ISSEY MIYAKE isseymiyake.com J JACQUIE SERIES jacquie-series.com

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JAKHU jakhustudio.com JESSICA BAGNALL @jessica_bagnall JESSICA OGDEN jessicaogden.com JIL SANDER jilsander.com JOHN LAWRENCE SULLIVAN john-lawrence-sullivan.com JOSEPH joseph-fashion.com K KAIMIN kaiminofficial.com KALEOS kaleoscollection.com KATHARINE HAMNETT katharinehamnett.com KATHRYN BOWEN kathrynbowen.com KATUNGULU MWENDWA katungulumwendwa.com KENNETH IZE kennethize.net KIALA KANZI kialakanzi.com KINGS CROSS EYES kingscrosseyes.com KINGSMAN mrporter.com KIRSTEN GOSS kirstengoss.com KLOTO klotodesign.com KLUK CGDT klukcgdt.com L L’ENCHANTEUR lenchanteur.co LABRUM LONDON labrumlondon.com LAMULA NASSUNA lamulanassuna.com LEMAIRE lemaire.fr LEO AND LIN leoandlin.com LEO leobyleo.com LISA FOLAWIYO lisafolawiyo.com LOUIS VUITTON louisvuitton.com LOUISE STEYTLER @steytlerlouise LUKHANYO MDINGI lukhanyomdingi.co.za M M MISSONI missoni.com MACHINE A machine-a.com MAKE UP FOR EVER makeupforever.com MAKI OH makioh.com MANOS AMOROSAS manosamorosas.org MARCHE NOI mrcnoir.com MARIANNE FASSLER leopardfrock.co.za MARIEYAT marieyat.com MARQUES ALMEIDA marquesalmeida.com MARTA JAKUBOWSKI martajakubowski.com MARVIN DESROC @marvindesroc MARVIN OTIENO @marvinotieno_studio MARYAM NASSIR ZADEH mnzstore.com MAX MARA maxmara.com MAXHOSA AFRICA maxhosa.africa METAMORPHISIZED @metamorphisized MICHELLE LOWE-HOLDER lowe-holder.com MICOL RAGNI micolragni.com MISBHV misbhv.com MISSIBABA missibaba.com MM6 maisonmargiela.com MONAD monadlondon.com MONCLER moncler.com MOSCHINO moschino.com MOWALOLA mowalola.com N NACK nackonline.com NACKISSA nackissa.com

NANUSHKA nanushka.com NAO SERATI naoserati.com NATHALIE COSTE nathaliecoste.uk NICHOLAS COUTTS nicholascoutts.com NICHOLAS DAILEY nicholasdaley.net NIKE nike.com NOIR KEI NINOMIYA @noirkeininomiya O OLIVER GOLDSMITH olivergoldsmith.com OLOOH @oloohconcept OLUBIYI THOMAS @olubiyithomas ORANGE CULTURE orangeculture.com OTTOLINGER ottolinger.com P PARIA/ FARZANEH pariafarzaneh.com PEBBLE LONDON pebblelondon.com PHILIP TREACY philiptreacy.co.uk PORTS 1961 ports1961.com POST IMPERIAL post-imperial.com PRADA prada.com PRECIOUS TRUST @precious.trust PREEN LINE preenbythorntonbregazzi.com PRONOUNCE pronouncestudio.com R RELLIK relliklondon.co.uk RICH MNISI richmnisi.com RIONA TREACY rionatreacy.com ROMBAUT rombaut.com ROMEO GIGLI VINTAGE romeogigliofficial.com RUPERT SANDERSON rupertsanderson.com S SALVATORE FERRAGAMO ferragamo.com SELFI selfi.co.za SIES MARJAN siesmarjan.com SIMONE ROCHA simonerocha.com SINDISO KHUMALO sindisokhumalo.com SLIM BARRETT slimbarrett.com SPORTMAX sportmax.com SUHAIYLA SHAKUWRA suhaiylashakuwra.com SUPRIYA LELE supriyalele.com T T LABEL tlabel.co.uk T/SEHNE tsehne.com THEBE MAGUGU thebemagugu.com TOPSHOP topshop.com TSAU @tsaustudio V VICTORIA BECKHAM victoriabeckham.com VIVIENNE WESTWOOD viviennewestwood.com W W35T w35t.com WARDROBE BANTER @wardrobe.banter WEEKDAY weekday.com WOLFORD wolfordshop.co.uk WOOLWORTHS woolworths.co.za Y Y PROJECT yproject.fr Y3 y-3.com Z ZARA zara.com

NATAAL

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Cyrus Kabiru, Macho Nne: Vatican Soldier, 2017, C-Type Print on Diasec Mount, 70 x 60 cm. Image courtesy of SMAC, © copyright he t artist.

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