Guzangs

The Sovereign Stack · Part Five AI has made permission something machines can execute. Whether African makers see the money now turns on who writes the terms in a form a machine will honour. Léppi, resist-dyed indigo cloth from Tokora in Guinea’s Fouta Djallon. In 2025, léppi became the country’s first artisanal textile registered as a protected geographical indication. Photograph courtesy of Tensira.

For Salwa and Selma Mikoü, architecture begins before the building. Portrait: Salwa and Selma Mikoü, architects and co-founders of Mikoü Architecture. It begins in memory: the filtered light of a courtyard, the coolness of a shaded passage, the threshold between public and private. It begins, too, in the physical intelligence of making: the hand drawing a line, shaping a model, testing a material, and turning an intuition into something tangible.

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Filmed over four years along the Ivorian coastline, Nadi Saddy and Nuits Balnéaires’ documentary follows surf pioneer Souleymane Sidibé and the movement rising behind him. Still from The Rising Dawn. Courtesy of Surf Côte d’Ivoire. Along the Ivorian coastline, the ocean has never been a playground. It feeds families, holds spirits and commands a caution passed down through generations. For most of the country’s history, almost nobody looked at those waves and imagined riding them.

Akin Faminu can spend one evening watching a 1999 Dolce & Gabbana show and another reading an anatomy textbook from cover to cover. The medical doctor and fashion creator has built a public life around style, but his tastes extend well beyond clothes.

Of Roots and Routes, curated by Frédérique Cifuentes at London's Almas Art Foundation, brought together five contemporary women artists whose experiences of migration, displacement and distance from home shape how they preserve, reinterpret and express Sudan's visual and cultural heritage. Fayrouz Omer, textile artist These Sudanese artists are making art from the memories of home.

A year before "God Gotta Afro & Gold Hoops," Rapsody walked Ghana with the filmmaker Joseph Amino. The questions she carried home became the album. Rapsody. Photo courtesy of Joseph Amino Rapsody did not come to Ghana for a show. There was no tour routing to explain the visit, no announced album cycle. She came to walk the country, and she came with questions about where she was from.

At Porto-Novo’s Festival des Masques, photographer Kelvin Selasie Quist turns his camera toward the masks, movement and crowds of a tradition being encountered by another generation. A raffia masquerade turns in the square before the temple. The fibers move a half second behind the body inside them, so the mask appears to spin on its own. This is the frame the photographer described: the moment the atmosphere changed.

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Across Buea, Lagos, Nairobi and Cairo, a running boom is exposing the hidden economics of belonging. Who pays to keep a community free, who profits when it grows, and why not one of six global brands would say what any of it is worth. Vintage Run Club warms up in Buea, Mount Cameroon and the town behind them. Above: Vintage Run Club in Buea, Mount Cameroon behind.