What Roland-Garros Inherited from Central Africa

Whenever I tell people I was born and raised in Cameroon, the first thing they bring up is the football. The Indomitable Lions. Roger Milla dancing at the corner flag in 1990. Samuel Eto’o at Barcelona, scoring goals against teams whose names we learned to pronounce just for him. The 1990 World Cup quarter-final against […]
Architecture Learns to Play

A tennis court is already a diagram, with its rectangle and net and service boxes laid out in white before anyone arrives, and Backyard Community Club, the new tennis facility that DeRoche Projects has just completed in the dense Accra neighbourhood of Osu, takes that familiar diagram and complicates it in ways that turn out […]
Who Trains the Machines That See Africa?

The Sovereign Stack
As AI becomes the infrastructure beneath culture, African creators can no longer
A Memory of Walls

A Memory of Walls Uche Ibemere photographs the brutalist soul of the University of Lagos The University of Lagos was not built to be beautiful. It was built to be permanent, a concrete declaration that independence would have institutions to match its ambitions. Constructed between the 1960s and 1980s, the campus is one of […]