WIFT South Africa becomes part of a sisterhood of more than 50 chapters worldwide, united in their mission to reshape industries and champion women’s creative contributions.

By Emmanuel ‘Waziri’ Okoro

Women in Film and TV South Africa (WIFT South Africa) has officially launched, marking a major step in empowering women across the country’s film, television, and creative sectors. 

The organisation joins the Women in Film and Television International (WIFTI) network, which spans more than 60 chapters across six continents, all working towards a common goal of achieving gender balance in the industry.

The South African chapter is led by writer and director, Athi Petela, who serves as its first president. She is supported by a founding leadership team that includes Actor Spaces Co-Founder, Felicia Naiwa Sithebe (Programmes Lead), Hayani Africa Managing Director, Tumelo Moema (Head of Communications), and business consultant and entrepreneur, Andile Mqwebu (Outreach Lead). 

Together, they are building a platform designed to foster opportunity, drive inclusivity, and create sustainable careers for women in the creative industries.

“Our mission is to build bridges across the continent and beyond,” Petela said. “It is about creating pathways for women to thrive, telling stories that reflect our diverse realities, and ensuring women are not just part of the conversation but at the forefront of shaping the future of film and television.”

The chapter’s launch comes as Petela prepares to represent South Africa at the Women in Film and TV Conference, a flagship event of the Africa Creative Market. The conference, themed “Creative Bridge: Empowering Talent, Accessing Ecosystems, Unlocking Markets”, takes place on 16 September 2025 at the Landmark Event Centre in Lagos, Nigeria.

She will appear alongside influential WIFT leaders from across the continent, including:

• Njoki Muhoho, President, WIFT Kenya
• Joke Silva, President, Forum for Women in Film and TV Africa (FWIFT Nigeria)
• Fatou Jupiter Toure, President, WIFT Senegal
• Juliet Ibrahim, President, WIFT Ghana
• Tatapong Bayela, Vice President, WIFT Cameroon

The session will be moderated by Inya Lawal, President of WIFT Africa. While WIFT South Africa will host its official launch event in November at the Africa Rising International Film Festival, its presence at the Africa Creative Market signals the start of a strategic programme aimed at empowering women through mentorship, training, and leadership development; advocating for equity and representation across the creative value chain; unlocking markets to help women creators access funding, platforms, and audiences, and more.

By joining WIFT International’s global network, WIFT South Africa becomes part of a sisterhood of more than 50 chapters worldwide, united in their mission to reshape industries and champion women’s creative contributions.

The post WIFT South Africa Launches, Joining Global Network to Champion Gender Equity first appeared on Afrocritik.

“I am the one who takes the little stories from friends in the neighborhood and adds my own twists to make them more captivating, more hilarious, or more dramatic”. – Achille Ronaimou

By Jerry Chiemeke

In his feature debut, Diya (Le Prix Du Sang), Achille Ronaimou crafts a morally complex drama that interrogates the collision between ancient customs and modern realities in contemporary Chad. 

The film follows Dane Francis (Ferdinand Mbaïssané), a working-class driver whose accidental knockdown of a schoolboy named Younous plunges him into a labyrinthine system of traditional justice that threatens to consume his family’s future. 

Dismissed from his job, stripped of his licence, and unable to secure employment due to his criminal record, Dane becomes a study in systemic failure. Ronaimou resists easy moralising, instead presenting a society where corruption, poverty, and rigid adherence to custom create seemingly impossible choices. 

Ferdinand Mbaïssané delivers a compelling performance as Dane, his weathered features mapping the psychological toll of a man caught between worlds. The actor’s restraint proves particularly effective in conveying the quiet desperation of someone whose moral compass is being systematically dismantled by circumstance. 

The film’s exploration of the Diya system proves particularly valuable in contemporary African cinema, where traditional justice mechanisms are often portrayed in simplistic terms. Achille Ronaimou avoids both romanticising and demonising the practice, instead presenting it as one element in an intricate web of social, economic, and political relationships that determine individual fate. 

While the film occasionally overreaches in its ambitions, its commitment to moral complexity and its refusal to provide comfortable resolutions mark it as a noteworthy first feature. 

In an exclusive interview with Afrocritik, Achille Ronaimou reflects on the events that inspired writing Diya, locations as characters in film, rigid traditional practices, and the use of cinema to alter perceptions of the African continent.

Diya, in the context of this story, translates to “the price of blood”. Can you walk us through your decision to render this concept both as your film’s title and its central moral dilemma? 

Interestingly, I never thought of any title other than Diya. I found this title even before I started writing the script. The first versions of my script tackled the subject from a rather violent angle, to the point of offending the sensitivities of some readers who believed that the film could provoke strong emotions in the Muslim community, which is very sensitive to religious issues, and label me as an anti-Islam filmmaker. 

That’s because, indeed, Diya in Chad is a poor translation of the surah ‘Al-Nissat’ from the Quran. Therefore, for me, Diya, the price of blood, is exactly the title that will resonate best for this film. Even though the script was revised several times to produce this current version, the depth of the content has remained the same.

How did you first encounter this story that would become your feature debut?

During a family ceremony, a cousin of mine, long consumed by guilt, decided to confide in me. He told me that he killed a 10-year-old child. Several years later, he was scammed and ruined by the latter’s family, in the name of the Diya. In Chad, 7 out of ten people are directly or indirectly victims of this practice called Diya or blood money. 

Hence, it’s a practice known to all, but the story of this cousin in particular touched me so much because it is the death of a child, an innocent person who pays a high price. One morning in January 2015, I set out to write the first draft of the script.

This is your first feature after directing shorts and documentaries. How did your documentary work on Minors in Prison (2013) and Kanoun (2012) inform your approach to bringing Diya to life?

My initiation to cinema through documentary was very decisive for the continuation of my career. Before that, I wrote short stories that, unfortunately, never got published; I love imaginative creation. I am the one who takes the little stories from friends in the neighborhood and adds my own twists to make them more captivating, more hilarious, or more dramatic. I have always loved writing, and documentary filmmaking has equipped me with another narrative channel because I can now combine both in my narratives, which are mostly scripted real events.

N’Djamena and Northern Chad almost become characters themselves in this story. How did you use geography and location to reflect the cultural and economic divides at play?

Diya is primarily a story of geography and religious confession. The setting and attire are characters in their own right. Following a civil war in 1979 in Chad, pitting southern Christians against northern Muslims, the population remained divided and dispersed according to their geographic and religious affiliations. 

Thus, in N’Djamena, there are northern neighborhoods inhabited by Muslims, characterised by religious austerity, where one can hear the calls of the muezzin for the 5am daily prayers. 

Women are all veiled and covered from head to toe, and men wear long boubous. However, in the southern neighborhoods inhabited by Christians, one will find bars, nightclubs, churches, and men and women proudly strolling the streets in Western attire. Therefore, one can never speak of Diya without referencing these very important details.

Ferdinand Mbaïssané’s portrayal of Dane moves from guilt through frustration to desperation. What did you look for in casting this role, and how did you guide him through this emotional arc?

I was looking for a broken man, a sober man, intelligent but crushed under the weight of society. Ferdinand was that young man among others who reflected this image a bit. He was recommended to me by my first assistant, Cyril Danina, for whom he acted in one of his films over 15 years ago. We still had to work on him a little bit, especially with his acting. For almost a year, we worked with him so that he would be more comfortable in the character of Dane. 

Working with (cinematographer) Cyrille (Hubert) and (editor) Guillaume (Talvas), how did you create the tension, dread, and chaos that mirror Dane’s psychological state?

Cyrille Hubert is a gem. I would say that the gods of cinema were with me (laughs). They sent me Cyrille from Heaven. I did not expect to have such a young, brilliant, and brave director of photography on set. It was his first time filming in Africa and in Chad where it’s over 40 degrees celsius in the shade. 

Just like me, it was also his first feature film as a director of photography, but he had more field experience than I did. He fell in love with the script from the first reading and committed to shooting it by my side. He followed the script to the letter, and it hurt him every time I had to modify or remove a scene. He continually proposed a thousand angles for each shot, giving us multiple options in the editing room. 

By having Ferdinand rehearse the scenes repeatedly, we ended up exhausting him, which sometimes isn’t a bad thing because that’s exactly when he can express the tension, fear, or chaos we’re looking for. I learned a lot from Cyril, and I would like to work with him again on my upcoming projects.

Guillaume Talvas is a very meticulous, rigorous, and creative editor; with him, we rewrote the script, focusing more on the psychology of the characters. He was the one who succeeded in bringing out Dane’s chaotic side on screen. I agreed with almost all his editing suggestions. Starting with a 150-minute rough cut, Guillaume did a remarkable job meticulously combing through every sequence to achieve a final film of 96 minutes, which is more fluid and dynamic.

The film poses questions about what really passes for good and evil. Without spoiling the ending, how do you want audiences to grapple with Dane’s ultimate choices?

I want the public to rise to the level of Dane’s spiritual maturity. After all he has endured in the name of Diya, it would have been legitimate for him to take revenge or to denounce his captors to the authorities. Instead, he chooses forgiveness. By handing little Younous back to his father, Dane breaks the chain of violence and vendetta. He rises above human baseness.

The ancient law of retaliation meets modern legal systems in your film. What does this collision reveal about justice in contemporary African societies?

Most Chadians and Africans wonder how such a practice can survive in the current era, where justice and human rights are known even to children. Diya is normalised, and Chadian authorities agree to concessions for its application. A practice that was originally intended to reconcile communities and avoid reprisals has today become a means of fraud and domination of the strong over the weak. 

Thus, a murderer can pay the Diya to the family of the deceased and be free from any legal pursuit. It is a true social tragedy that outrages new African societies.

Diya is distributed by Canal+ and produced by Sic Productions and Artisans Du Film. How important was this partnership in bringing authentic Chadian stories to wider audiences?

It is a beautiful collaboration that opens a global window on Chadian cinema, which is still unknown to the international public. I believe that I will be able to collaborate with Sic Productions for a long time; it’s one of the few Chadian production companies that has the vision of a revolutionary African cinema.

Looking beyond Diya, how has this feature debut shaped your vision for future projects? What stories are you burning to tell next?

This first feature film, recently praised by the public at TIFF, made me realise that there are things worth discussing. Where politicians have failed and tarnished the image of Africans, cinema can correct this by shedding light on it. 

Thus, I want to continue along the same lines by addressing a topic as burning as the Diya. It concerns the conflict between farmers and herders, which is a conflict skillfully perpetuated by African leaders to keep the populations divided. 

Livestock and agriculture have been the two nourishing pillars of Africans since time immemorial; they must be nurtured and energised, not hindered in their development through an endless conflict.

Diya screened in the Centrepiece section at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

Jerry Chiemeke is a Nigerian-born writer, film critic, journalist, and lawyer based in the United Kingdom. His writing has appeared in Die Welt, The I Paper, The Africa Report, The British Blacklist, Berlinale Press, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Culture Custodian, Olongo Africa, and elsewhere. Chiemeke’s work has won or been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ken Saro Wiwa Prize, Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Quramo Writers Prize. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection, Dreaming of Ways to Understand You.

The post In Conversation: Achille Ronaimou on “Diya”, Confronting Tradition, Justice, and Forgiveness in Chad first appeared on Afrocritik.

Hilda Baci, who first gained global recognition in 2023 with her marathon cook-a-thon, once again showcased Nigerian cuisine on the international stage.

By Abioye Damilare Samson

Nigerian celebrity chef, Hilda Baci, has set a new Guinness World Record for the largest serving of Nigerian-style jollof rice, weighing 8,780 kilogrammes.

The achievement, accomplished in partnership with food brand Gino, took place on Friday, September 12, at the Eko Hotel and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos, and drew a massive crowd of supporters, celebrities, and food enthusiasts. Among those in attendance were dancer Kaffy, filmmaker Funke Akindele, singer Spyro, and digital influencers Enioluwa and Folagade Banks, alongside other high-profile guests.

Guinness World Records confirmed the feat on Monday through a post on X (formerly Twitter): “New record: Largest serving of Nigerian-style jollof rice – 8,780 kg (19,356 lb 9 oz) achieved by Hilda Baci and Gino in Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria”.

Hilda Baci, who first gained global recognition in 2023 with her marathon cook-a-thon, once again showcased Nigerian cuisine on the international stage. Celebrating the achievement on social media, Hilda Baci wrote, “This moment isn’t just mine, it belongs to Gino and to all of us. We made history together for Nigeria, for Africa, and for everyone who believes in the power of food to bring us closer. This win is yours too”.

With this accomplishment, Hilda Baci further strengthens her reputation as one of Nigeria’s most prominent chefs and cultural ambassadors, spotlighting the global appeal of Nigerian food culture.

The post Hilda Baci Sets Guinness World Record for Largest Serving of Nigerian Jollof Rice first appeared on Afrocritik.

“The notion of resistance always having to be loud, glorious, and heroic comes from the fantasies of people who have never actually had to fight for anything. Effective resistance is often quiet, careful, and requires a delicate balance.” – Zamo Mkhwanazi

By Jerry Chiemeke

Drawing from personal history, South African filmmaker, Zamo Mkhwanazi, transforms intimate memories into powerful cinema with her feature debut, Laundry (Uhlanjululo), which premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). 

The film emerges from the painful story of Mkhwanazi’s grandfather, whose thriving laundry business in Durban was seized when the apartheid government consolidated its grip on power. This gaping wound becomes the foundation for a quietly devastating portrait of a Black family navigating the precariousness of operating within, but never truly belonging to, the violently stratified world of 1960s South Africa.

Set against the backdrop of apartheid’s tightening noose, Laundry centres on the Sithole family’s laundry business, granted rare permission to operate in a whites-only area of town. Patriarch Enoch (Siyabonga Shibe) walks a careful line between protecting his family’s fragile foothold and contending with his son Khuthala’s (Ntobeko Sishi) dreams of musical stardom. 

When Enoch faces imprisonment, the family’s survival depends on choices that pit pragmatic endurance against creative freedom.

“Prosperous black men like my grandfather were an unwelcome challenge to the myths of white superiority”, says Mkhwanazi. “This film is my way of not being silent. It is the story rarely told in the glorification of the struggle heroes. It is about the smaller moments that take place in the midst of the great injustices”.

Building on her extensive background in South African television and her internationally acclaimed short films, Mkhwanazi brings both intimate knowledge and artistic sophistication to this project. Her approach treats the laundry itself as a character: the steam-filled back rooms reflecting confusion and uncertainty, while the incandescent front space embodies the family’s determination to maintain control.

In an exclusive conversation, Afrocritik caught up with Mkhwanazi during the Festival to discuss stylistic choices, Black joy, the deployment of music in filmmaking, creating story worlds, and the exploration of resistance in African cinema.

Where does this film come from? Describe the combination of ideas and/or real-life experiences that culminated in the birth of Laundry as a screenplay.

My grandfather owned a laundry in Durban, South Africa, and when the apartheid government came into power, the laundry was taken from him. 

What conversations, if any, did you have with surviving family members about their experiences during Apartheid, and how did those inform the authenticity of this film?

Many. The choices of my mother’s family members were limited after these events, and I made sure to place some of these limitations on the characters in the film. Some of the phrases used by white characters are direct quotes that have been said to my family members. 

Music is very important to South Africans, and the stories around how music was made, the places it was played, and the characters that inhabited that world filled out a lot of people for me. The limitations placed on African women that essentially relegated them to the status of children were something my mother navigated directly. 

Laundry captures the perennial shadow of oppression that pervaded that era while maintaining moments of joy and hope. How do you navigate showing systemic brutality without letting the film fall into some sort of “joylessness”?

It is surprisingly not difficult for me as a South African. Black rebellion in South Africa has always had an element of the joyful. In the words of Steve Biko, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”. 

There is an understanding that not allowing the enemy to hijack your joy is the first weapon we can wield against oppression. If we can find joy in the fight, we can endure it. 

From a character perspective, how does Khuthala’s musical ambition function as both personal expression and political act in the context of 1968?

I do not believe anyone wakes up in the morning wishing to fight a system or to fight oppression. What people wake up wanting to do is to fight for their dreams. I chose a commonplace dream. Not particularly admirable like being a doctor, or realistic like running a laundry or noble like being a teacher. Just an ordinary, somewhat selfish, possibly foolish dream. 

In the context of a world where black bodies were actively being turned into industrial fodder, a dream that does not create goods and services is the antithesis of a body that is meant to be an input of production. 

Music serves as both escape and resistance in this film. Can you discuss how you developed the musical elements and what specific South African musicians or musical traditions influenced the soundtrack?

The music was mostly created by Tracy September, Tshepang Ramoba, and Mpumi Mcata who are the musicians seen in the film. They have all been making music for decades and are some of my favourite musicians from my country. 

These are musicians who are not afraid to experiment with the traditional to create wholly unique sounds. I did not want the music to sound too ‘familiar’. It needed to have an edge, a feeling that they could have added something significant to the musical cannon of the time. 

The film draws parallels to real musicians like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, who had to flee South Africa. Was there a conscious decision to explore the stories of those who couldn’t escape?

Yes, there are many more who never had a chance to share their talents with the world, who never had a chance to escape the circumstances and the iron fist of a fascist regime. 

This feature focuses on the intimate textures of family life rather than grand historical events. What influenced your decision to tell this story through such a domestic lens?

There are more of those ordinary folk who quietly fought the system daily in their lives. Most films are not made by people who have had to survive any kind of oppression. The notion of resistance always having to be loud, glorious, and heroic comes from the fantasies of people who have never actually had to fight for anything. Effective resistance is often quiet, careful, requires a delicate balance, and can even seem illogical. 

For example, when you read South African history from the 1980s, you will hear much about the burning of schools – which were indoctrinating black children into willing slavery (called Bantu Education). But you will not hear about the resulting effect because to this day, that history is being told by people who think struggle is only valid when it’s highly visible. Mothers stayed home with their children, who had no classrooms to attend and were in danger of being on those burning streets where apartheid police were shooting us from Israeli-designed tankers. 

The government didn’t care about us burning our schools, but they could not continue without the labour of so many black mothers. Stayaways became even more effective as a tool than burning down those schools. 

We could be outgunned in the arena of violence; however, staying home and withholding labour was even more crippling for the regime. But I think when we look for drama, we look at the burning of schools and the faces of manufactured heroes shouting slogans. I wanted to look at the home front, where real resistance is held down. 

Laundry is a period piece. Tell us more about how the world for this story came to be, from the visual design to the fashion and verbiage.

Production design is what we started with; creating these environments to reflect both the times as well as class and lifestyle differences. This was also a family that owned a laundry and had access to the best seamstresses and fabrics. 

The family was not rich, but it was important that they be well turned out, especially compared to a character like Albert, who was a street urchin surviving on the margins. The wardrobe for Lillian was important, as she was the character who linked the world of the father and son. 

The actors had much work to do, and we had to place each character within context. Enoch, the father, was a missionary school product who had a strong command of the English language and would pepper his speech more with English, but his wife did not have the same education and was less confident in her speech in general, especially with regard to figures of authority. 

His children were already victims of the Bantu Education system and were far more stimulated by their home life, which included a musical, mechanical, and business education. The younger sister retained a certain innocent curiosity about the world, while Khuthala was more single-minded. Therefore, they all spoke a little differently from each other to reflect those historical and personal realities.

How did you work with your actors, particularly Ntobeko Sishi and Siyabonga Shibe, to capture the complex father-son dynamic at the heart of the story?

Both Ntobeko and Siyabonga are fairly experienced actors. I am a fan of stillness in performance as it forefronts emotion over action. With Ntobeko, it sometimes felt unnatural to the character, and so I was selective about using the moments of stillness as a punctuation mark in the story. 

Ntobeko was truly a collaborator in creating his character, and sometimes, instead of directing him, I would ask him questions as his character and let him answer with his performance. Siyabonga is an actor with a phenomenal physical presence, and sometimes his stillness could be right down intimidating, which was useful in certain moments with his son. 

But it was important to find the warmth of the character while maintaining the stoic dignity required for the storyline. For this, Siyabonga mastered the micro-expressions of the steady Enoch. 

The concept of “uneasy privileges” that your characters experience – being granted limited rights within an oppressive system – feels relevant beyond apartheid South Africa. Was this universality intentional?

Oh absolutely. In South Africa, we have the concept of the ‘the better black’, in the USA it is the house negro. Latin America is replete with examples of differential privilege. I am a middle-class person in the most unequal society in the world. These uneasy privileges are very much part of my life. And I am fully aware that as long as these systems of oppression thrive, those privileges are only borrowed. 

The laundry business becomes a gathering place for the Black community in the film. How important was it to show these spaces of connection and mutual support within the oppressive system?

The laundry is a place where they are served according to when they arrive, as opposed to most places where whites would always be served first. This is never explicitly mentioned, but is clear in the way customers line up when Enoch is present. It is also important to make it clear that while the area is declared white, most of the people given patronage or working in the area are black. 

Apartheid was incredibly nonsensical; a capitalist system that thought it could thrive by keeping the majority of consumers without any buying power. So places like this laundry show that these laws were nigh to impossible to maintain. 

After exploring your family’s past so intimately in Laundry, how has this experience changed your approach to storytelling and what stories you want to tell next?

What changed the most for me was when I had the screening here (in Toronto). Honestly, putting the work in front of an audience that connected so strongly with the work assured me that the issues that interest me remain relevant, even as I feel that political storytelling from Africa, particularly stories that challenge white supremacy, are being strongly discouraged both locally and in the international festival space. 

Having an audience that responded to the story with enthusiastic appreciation of the difficult themes was a blessing. My next project retains a strongly political point of view, with feminist themes. It’s set in the future and concerns bodily autonomy.

Laundry screened in the Discovery section of TIFF.

Jerry Chiemeke is a Nigerian-born writer, film critic, journalist, and lawyer based in the United Kingdom. His writing has appeared in Die Welt, The I Paper, The Africa Report, The British Blacklist, Berlinale Press, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Culture Custodian, Olongo Africa, and elsewhere. Chiemeke’s work has won or been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ken Saro Wiwa Prize, Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Quramo Writers Prize. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection, Dreaming of Ways to Understand You.

The post TIFF 2025: In Conversation With Zamo Mkhwanazi, Director Of “Laundry” first appeared on Afrocritik.

If The Serpent’s Gift had one lesson for Nollywood, it would be that cultural truth requires more than surface markers.

By Joseph Jonathan

Films do something blunt and unavoidable: they teach. Every shot, every costume, and cut either bolsters an image the world already carries about a people or complicates it. The Serpent’s Gift, directed by Kayode Kasum, signals an ambition to do the latter — to interrogate widowhood, wealth, and inheritance in a contemporary Igbo setting. Too often, though, it takes the cheaper route.

At its core, The Serpent’s Gift is straightforward: Nduka Sylvanus (Chico Aligwekwe), a wealthy businessman, dies suddenly; his young widow Ijeoma (Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman) finds herself under siege from relatives hungry for control of his empire. 

That premise, inheritance as battlefield, widowhood as vulnerability, has strong dramatic potential. But the film’s recurring error is a dramaturgical one: it treats certain customs as if they were the default script for contemporary Igbo culture, deploying them for maximum emotional jolt rather than interrogating their place in modern social practice.

Let’s be specific. The Serpent’s Gift repeatedly foregrounds widowhood rituals — the forced ceremonial walk, the insistence that Ijeoma drink the water used to bathe her late husband — and stages them as though they are normative in South-East Nigeria today. 

That choice reads like sensationalism disguised as ethnography. If you want the audience to understand why such practices persist (despite the fact that they hardly do nowadays), you show the debates, resistances, compromises, and legal or civic contexts that shape them. Instead, these rituals float in the frame as spectacle: dramatic curiosities to be watched, not social problems to be understood.

That tendency toward spectacle is compounded by sloppy world-building. Remove the language, and nothing about The Serpent’s Gift feels specifically Igbo. This isn’t a throwaway grievance — it’s the film’s central, damning weakness. The screenplay peppers dialogue with proverbs and local phrases, but the mise-en-scène often contradicts the claims of cultural specificity. 

There are moments so incongruous they yank viewers out of the drama: a wealthy businessman’s office decorated with the faces of national politicians who, in context, make no sense; an Ibadan branch of Nduka’s company where all the characters default to Igbo instead of English or a believable hybrid of Yoruba, Igbo and English; and, conversely, there are scenes set in Igbo contexts where the characters oddly switch to English. 

Even the funeral of a titled man is staged like an afterthought rather than the elaborate social event it should be. These are not minor slips. They signal a lack of scrutiny and research that makes the film feel like a pastiche — an image of Igbo-ness assembled from familiar icons rather than a living, internally consistent world.

Why does this matter? Because when a film claims cultural authenticity but fails to get the small things right, it invites two harms. 

First, it exoticises: audiences unfamiliar with Igbo culture will take these dramatised anomalies as normal practice. Second, it erodes trust among the community depicted. A scene that treats a titled man’s burial as underwhelming — when, by social and cultural expectation, such a burial would be elaborate, public and ritualised — doesn’t simply misread detail; it shrinks the stakes. 

If the director wants us to grieve the loss of a man whose wealth will evaporate into the hands of the wrong custodian, the funeral sequence should affirm why that loss matters socially and symbolically. Here it does not.

Small details earn large consequences. The decision to have Ijeoma relay the news of her husband’s death to the family via conference call — with none of them present at the hospital during Nduka’s final moments — strains credibility. In many Igbo communities, illness and death are communal events with kinship obligations that mobilise the extended family. 

Yes, the film suggests that Nduka hid his terminal illness, which could explain why relatives were absent. But even secrecy has limits: sudden hospitalisation or end-of-life care would typically trigger communal intervention, whether through family networks, business associates, or community elders. 

By presenting absolute isolation as an unquestioned fact, the film bypasses the very tension it needed to dramatise — the clash between a man’s desire for privacy and a culture’s insistence on communal presence. That clash could have enriched the story; instead, we are left with a thin shorthand that weakens emotional stakes.

Performances, to the film’s credit, keep it watchable even when the script and world-building falter. Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman is the film’s moral gravity: she finds the narrow seam between resolute anger and brittle grief and carries the film through its less credible stretches. Her Ijeoma is not simply victimhood in motion; she’s a woman negotiating a public claim to legacy with private sorrow. 

Tina Mba’s Margaret gives the film its sharp, antagonistic edge — a matriarch, who at times feels deliberately overdrawn, but whose presence grounds the familial friction. Stan Nze’s Nonso, by contrast, often flirts with broadness; his greed is readable, but it lacks the textured human desperation that would have made him more than an archetype.

The screenplay (credited to Stephen Okonkwo and Ufuoma Metitiri) is a mixed bag. It nails cadences and the rhythm of local speech in places, and some lines resonate with the weight of oral tradition. Yet, the script is reluctant to interrogate the practices it stages. 

Instead of dramatising the legal, economic, and moral mechanisms that sustain certain rituals — the role of title societies, the influence of patriarchal inheritance laws, the social sanctions that enforce conformity — the film lingers on performative acts of humiliation. That’s a storytelling choice with consequences: the viewer learns what happens but never why it still happens, or how it is contested.

Technically, The Serpent’s Gift does offer some pleasure. The cinematography captures the South-East’s green pulse; there are moments of visual lyricism that suggest a respect for place. 

The soundtrack, steeped in Igbo highlife motifs, works as an affective tether to a Nollywood lineage that can be both nostalgic and invigorating. Those formal strengths make the film’s missteps more disappointing: they show the crew had the tools to render a complex cultural portrait, but chose spectacle over nuance.

If The Serpent’s Gift had one lesson for Nollywood, it would be that cultural truth requires more than surface markers. Accuracy is not only about avoiding factual error; it is about showing social texture — the disputes, the negotiations, the everyday resistances that exist inside any living culture. To dramatise widowhood without showing its contested status in modern life is to flatten a subject that deserves interrogation. 

In the end, The Serpent’s Gift oscillates between two impulses: to honour and to capitalise. It wants to ask hard questions about legacy, gender, and wealth in contemporary Igbo society, and yet it keeps stepping onto a stage built of tropes that simplify its subjects for dramatic effect. Instead of deepening our understanding, the film rehearses stereotypes. And that is the most disappointing lesson it leaves behind.

Rating: 1.9/5 

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.

The post “The Serpent’s Gift” Review: Kayode Kasum’s Film Is Undone by Shallow Cultural Detail first appeared on Afrocritik.

With Healers Chapel, Wizard Chan invites listeners to experience a warmth of redemption and a sense of solace, even amid the turbulence and uncertainties of life.

By Abioye Damilare Samson

Afro-Pop’s global rise has not erased the truth that some of its most striking moments come from artistes who draw deeply from the roots of their immediate worlds. Whether it’s Rema and Shallipopi flipping Benin street slang into nationwide catchphrases, FirstKlaz experimenting with a Neo-Arewa sound in the north, or Adekunle Gold gesturing toward Fuji in his upcoming album, the pulse of home continues to shape what travels abroad. Wizard Chan, born Fuayefika Maxwell, stands within this current. His debut album, The Healer, is a purposeful extension of the journey to reimagine Ijaw language, elements, and spirituality within a modern fusion sound.

That sound, which he calls Afro-Teme, has always been the distinct marker that sets him apart. Since the meditative “Earth Song” put him on the map in 2022, his style—which recalled the depth of Reggae legend, Orits Wiliki, in the 80s and carried the communal energy of Gyration music—has since expanded far beyond what he displayed on that track.

The song became a career-defining moment, earning him two nominations at the 2023 Headies Awards—for Songwriter of the Year and Best Alternative Song—and ultimately winning the latter. It was proof that Wizard Chan’s music, stitched with gongs, bells, and other Ijaw music elements, alongside a fusion of Folk, Highlife, Hip-Hop, and Soul, could carve out a spiritual, almost ritualistic space in the mainstream, sustained by devoted listeners who now hail him as the “Big Masquerade” and “Native Doctor”.

Across projects like The Messenger and Time Traveller, both released in 2024, the Rastafarian-looking artiste has positioned himself as a conscious musician with a reflective approach. His new album, Healers Chapel, continues that trajectory by carrying his music into even more philosophical terrain, and offering a kind of songs to soothe, reflect, and restore. 

As a conscious artiste, it’s fitting that he chases transcendence for himself and his music on the soulful intro track, “I Want to Live Forever”.  “I want to live forever / My songs should live forever”, he quips passionately over soaring keyboard chords and a crowd vocal on the chorus.

The track “By The River” deepens this pursuit, drawing on the River Jordan as a biblical symbol of transition and purification, a motif of healing that aligns perfectly with the album’s title. The title track, “Healers Chapel”, features longtime collaborator, Boma Nime, a trio of women traditional healers, who infuse indigenous chants and prayers into the song’s chorus.

On the PDSTRN-assisted “Quick Report” and “Amen (God My Dealer)”, he shows his range on Drill. The former tells a raw story of police brutality and the chaos such systemic violence breeds, amplified by Lagos-based rapper PDSTRN’s gripping raps and fluid flow, while the latter situates God as his ultimate inspiration, integrating the familiar hymnal chorus, “Amen Amen Amen Amen Amen.”

The pre-released “Oliver” pushes his fusion instincts further: gyration percussion, dancehall basslines, and Highlife guitar lines intertwine. Yet it is the lyrics, which draw on Oliver Twist’s story of eternal longing for more, that ground its symbolism.

With “Oh My Home”, he reimagines a primary school rhyme into a nostalgic Highlife ballad, carried by warm guitar riffs and trumpet solos. On the Pumba Mix-produced “Flee Oh Sickness”, the intro stands as an emblem of his self-coined sub-genre Afro-Teme, while he assumes the role of healer, declaring, “Sickness flee from my body, I am speaking as a person of an almighty Jah”, and reflecting on his 2020 Covid-19 ordeal.

The Reggae-tinged “Promised Land” drifts toward visions of Nirvana, while “In My Defence”, “Yours Truly”, and “Sober” lay bare his vulnerabilities in moments of self-rumination. On “Heal”, featuring Joeboy, he resists the familiar trope of weed as a muse, instead singing about abstinence from substances he once turned to for comfort but never found healing in. The hymnal requiem “Dein Na Mu” closes the album. It’s a poignant dirge that pays homage to lost souls and laments the many vices that hindered his healing, set against a sombre bassline.

Throughout the 38-minute runtime of Healers Chapel, Wizard Chan never loses sight of his primary aim of creating music as a form of healing for the troubled soul while also channeling his lived experiences and inner battles as a compass for redemption. Healers Chapel is richly layered as it taps into a sense of mystique and higher consciousness, particularly in songs like “By The River” and “Healers Chapel” with Boma Nime, and is culturally remarkable in the way he infuses his native Ijaw language to convey emotion with profound intimacy and nuance.

Although he had already proven his artistry with two prior projects, this debut full-length heralds a new chapter for Wizard Chan as a representation of independence and confidence that he has no intention of bending his sound to fit the currents of popular taste or waves in the zeitgeist.

With Healers Chapel, Wizard invites listeners to experience a warmth of redemption and a sense of solace, even amid the turbulence and uncertainties of life. Of course, it’s not the kind of project you play to soundtrack revelry or party anthems, but ultimately, it is the kind you return to for grounding, reflection, and assurance that the good times are still within reach.

Lyricism – 1.8

Tracklisting – 1.4

Sound Engineering – 1.4

Vocalisation – 1.5

Listening Experience – 1.5

Rating – 7.6/10

Abioye Damilare Samson is a music journalist and culture writer focused on the African entertainment Industry. Reading new publications and listening to music are two of his favourite pastimes when he is not writing. Connect with him on Twitter and IG: @Dreyschronicle

The post “Healers Chapel” Review: Wizard Chan’s Debut Is an Introspective and Soulful Sonic Balm first appeared on Afrocritik.

Èkó Groove is a fun listen. Its energy, its fluid mix of genres, and its vocal star power make it flow quickly despite its length. Spinall ties it all together with the presence and pacing of a live set, curating an experience that is both eclectic and cohesive in spirit if not in theme…

By Yinoluwa Olowofoyeku

Oluseye Desmond Sodamola, known simply as Spinall, is a Lagos-born DJ, producer, and label head whose career has evolved from mixtapes and club nights into a defining voice in Afrobeats. He founded TheCAP Music in 2014 and began releasing full-length projects shortly afterwards. His debut studio album My Story: The Album arrived in 2015, followed by Ten in 2016, Dreams in 2017, Iyanu in 2018, Grace in 2020, and Top Boy in 2023. Each covers a range of styles, from dancefloor anthems to soulful Afro-Pop, consistently showcasing his ability to curate major collaborations and diverse sounds.

Across these albums, Spinall has built a reputation for blending Afrobeats with House, electronic textures, and global club influences, while remaining rooted in Lagos’s energy. Tracks like “Palazzo” with Asake and “Loju” with Wizkid highlight both his commercial reach and his knack for creating songs that resonate locally and beyond.

Now, with Èkó Groove, Spinall returns with a project designed to both reflect and expand his legacy. Èkó Groove is rooted in the rhythms, chaos, and vibrancy of Lagos, while also reaching outward, with features from artistes such as Tyla and Dre, and production that leans into the city’s grooves while embracing international colour. 

It stands as both a tribute and a statement: that after nearly a decade of steady growth and numerous high points, Spinall is still defining what it means to be a groove curator in Afrobeats, while pushing his sound further.

The album opens with the titular “Èkó Groove”, a thematic and sonic overture where rattling shakers and clacking triplet Afrobeats percussion merge with brass and bright guitars. A sample from Ayinde Bakare weaves the city’s history into the music, transforming the track into an ode to Lagos that establishes both the rhythm and the atmosphere shaping the entire project.

That energy carries seamlessly into “Want You”, which builds instrumentally on the same shakers, percussion, guitars, and horns, now joined by filtered key chords. Jayo delivers a loose, patois-inspired flow—sensual and full of whispered accents—while Destiny Conrad layers his soft R&B tone over the Afrobeat pulse. 

Together, their performances embody desire, teasing out intimacy in lyrics such as “Come on and tease and turn/ Watch how you make me freeze and twist and turn/ A little bit of eye contact turn me on”, carrying the song’s simplicity with a sensual intensity.

“Early” continues this mood but infuses it with an electronic edge, opening with thumping synths, floating hi-hats, and a groovy Afrobeats rhythm. Pulsing electronics support Victony’s airy vocals, while a sharp guitar riff links the chorus to string pads. 

His playful lyricism disguises raunch with sly wit, singing, “I just dey give am for ealy morn’/ Her bobo dey call am for early morn’/ Girlie no know say my ting e go reach her belly button/ Easy to shout, I go ta-na-na Selena”. The cheeky tone dances across the synthetic textures, pushing the record’s sensual arc further.

With “Struggle”, however, the mood shifts, adopting Reggae instrumentation with steady drums and a rich bass guitar that grounds the track in something spiritual. Buju Banton’s gravelly voice anchors the chorus with heft, while Summer Walker’s soft, solemn tones smooth the edges, harmonising delicately over hard truths. “One time for the hardworking/ You smile but your eyes are hurting/ The life all up your desert/ ‘Cause we wake to the sunset, no no,” they sing together, their contrasting energies uniting in the shared language of perseverance.

The Ghanaian Highlife tradition animates “Aunt Mary,” its triplet clavs, shakers, and lively rhythm guitars paired with a bassline that refuses to sit still. Shine TTW offers soft, airy vocals that glide across the melody, while Darkovibes provides deeper contrast, weaving Twi lyrics and playful effects through the track. Their interplay is buoyed by spirited ad-libs and backing vocals, forming a bright celebration of beauty as Shine sings, “Aunty Mary wey I see for tele/ She say her body be na o gbona feli/ Mo ti moti but I see you clearly”.

From there, Spinall pares back the instrumentation on “Forward”, leaving rattling shakers, percussion-heavy drums, and a restrained palette of guitars and bass synths to create space for Tay Iwar’s agile vocals. His layered delivery carries an uplifting message, urging resilience with lines such as, “One thing that I know is that I love my life/ Through the highs and lows, I survived/ No regrets, no looking back, only forward/ I know yeah, keep moving forward, I know yeah”. The positivity is heightened by sprightly rhythm guitars that dance through the groove, keeping the track buoyant.

“Waiting” sets its pulse with four-to-the-floor drums, syncopated percussion, and a brass section that cuts through smooth, jazzy piano chords. A lively bass guitar riff runs like an undercurrent, elevating Taves’ energetic vocals as he sings of longing for a lover to meet him halfway. His chorus, “I’ve been waiting for you/ Say me, and my patience can’t deal/ Your heart that I wan come steal/ Me I want love, love like nobody else’s love”, captures the impatience at the song’s core. Jayo reappears, versatile and insistent, contrasting Taves’ breezy lightness with a sung flow full of drive, their voices together amplifying the tension between yearning and impatience.

“Kerosene”, one of Èkó Groove’s earlier singles, rides on bright pianos and smooth drones, with shakers and syncopated percussion leaning into Street-Hop but hinting at Amapiano once the log drums drop in. Young Jonn’s playful lyricism and buoyant delivery carry lines such as, “Baby mi, let’s faaji tongolo/ Body magic, okoro/ Last night was fun, ololo … You dey high me, ogogoro”, his signature style burning bright over Spinall’s layered groove.

On “Loju”, another pre-released single, Wizkid slips back into his effortless zone, gliding over energetic Afrobeats drums, plucked synths, and subtle electric piano chords. He rides the rhythm with nonchalance, flexing lyrically rather than narrating, singing, “Na we the girls wan follow go oo / Make the girl change area code / Till you follow me I no go go / Follow bounce if you get stamina”. His flow is instinctive, the vibe undeniable—proof of his mastery at bending Afrobeats cadences to his will.

That energy escalates on “Excited”, where triplet claps and pulsating synths signal Afro-House terrain. Ami Faku opens with soft, subdued vocals, painting visions of joy and responsibility over rhythm guitars, brass passages, and pads. Her chorus lifts brightly: “I just want this money/ I’ve been saving, praying about it/ Taking care of family/ With Spinall we rounding/ Come on be honest. We we wo let’s jolly yo”. 

Niniola stamps her signature on the second verse with powerful Yoruba lyrics, agile melodies, and a unique timbre, adding vibrance and vocal force alongside Heavy-K’s steady Afro-House imprint.

“Miami” brings cinematic strings into collision with Street-Hop percussion and hard-hitting Afrobeats drums. Olamide plays both roles, softly crooning the refrain, “When you wake in the morning / When you be yawning, I’d be in Miami”, before switching into rapid Yoruba rap with commanding confidence. T.I. enters with his Southern flow, marrying his cadences to the Afrocentric production seamlessly, never missing a beat as the transatlantic collaboration blurs genre borders. 

“One Call” follows with tender guitar chords and light percussion ushering in Omah Lay’s drawn-out, emotive voice. He pours himself into the promise of closeness, singing, “I’m on my way to you/ But time is on the loose/ I will always fight for truth/ If I have the chance to choose … ‘Cause no me without us”, drawing intimacy from restraint. Tyla’s entrance lifts the energy, her bright ad-libs and group vocals layering over Omah’s more subdued tones. The thumping log drums risk overwhelming the track’s gentleness, but her melodies bring a contrasting vibrance that reshapes its mood.

Returning to South Africa, “Living” builds on Afro-House foundations with thumping kicks, riding shakers, and smooth chords augmented by subtle flutes and mallet runs. Murumba Pitch and Tony Duardo weave their expertise into the evolving instrumental, with filtered kicks and swelling percussion amplifying the track’s meditative dance energy. 

Their lyrics crave simple freedom: “I wanna dance, let me see the speakers blow now/ Liquor running fast inside my veins yeah/ I ain’t tryna get drunk, I’m just tryna live my life/ The power is yours now/ You could do greater things, the power lies in your mind”. The song’s dance break leans inward rather than towards climax—an introspective release before the outro affirms a joy in living.

Finally, “Psalm 23” closes Èkó Groove with a return to Street-Hop’s high voltage. Thumping kicks, log drums, rifling snares, a rich bassline, bright chords, and saxophone riffs set the stage for Teni, whose infectious energy bursts through every word. She ends Èkó Groove on a triumphant note, proclaiming, “I’m so thankful ‘cause I’m so blessed/ Got me shouting seven halleluja/ Psalm 23 for you haters, fuck y’all”, her defiance sealing Spinall’s Lagos-inspired vision with gratitude, resilience, and fire.

Èkó Groove plays less like a tightly bound thematic album and more like a well-curated collection of songs. The theme of Lagos, introduced in the opening track, feels nominal and is scarcely revisited, as most of the songs turn instead to the well-worn but effective subjects of love, life, and gratitude.

What the record lacks in narrative cohesion, however, it makes up for in breadth. The tracklist spans a wide range of genres, pulling together strands of Afrobeats, Afro-House, Reggae, Amapiano, and Street-Hop into a lively mix that reflects the multiplicity of contemporary African pop.

The production is strong and versatile, showcasing the craft of a talented team. Beats are energetic and genre-appropriate, bringing the right sonic palette to each song and tailoring the mood to the featured artistes. At times, the light touch works best, allowing vocalists the space to shine against leaner backdrops. 

At other moments, the layers verge on overproduction, creating clashes of tone and energy that slightly blur Èkó Groove’s balance. Still, the engineering remains sharp and professional, maintaining clarity and polish throughout, ensuring that even the busiest arrangements feel clean.

The featured artistes are Èkó Groove’s real stars. Spinall has assembled a cast that is not only stacked with heavyweights but also cleverly balanced. Most are kept within their comfort zones, delivering exactly the kind of performances that earned them their reputations. Others are nudged into new spaces, and those experiments enrich the record, adding surprise and variation. 

Across the board, the vocals are strong—as expected—but what stands out most is the cross-pollination. The contrasts and harmonies, the way artistes bounce off one another’s styles, create sparks that keep the album engaging. It is less about discovering something entirely new in them, and more about the pleasure of hearing them in dialogue, riffing off one another in a shared space.

As a whole, Èkó Groove is a fun listen. Its energy, fluid mix of genres, and vocal star power make it flow quickly despite its length. Spinall ties it all together with the presence and pacing of a live set, curating an experience that is eclectic yet cohesive in spirit, if not in theme. 

By pulling together a little of everything his audience loves, he delivers a project that—while uneven in places—remains a milestone in his career. It is a work that should be celebrated, one that underscores his longstanding influence in the industry, showcases his instincts as an A&R, and creates collaborative moments unlikely to be found anywhere else.

Lyricism – 1.4

Tracklisting – 1.3

Sound Engineering – 1.5

Vocalisation – 1.6

Listening Experience – 1.5

Rating – 7.3/10

Yinoluwa “Yinoluu” Olowofoyeku is a multi-disciplinary artist and creative who finds expression in various media. His music can be found across all platforms and he welcomes interaction on his social media @Yinoluu.

The post “Èkó Groove” Review: Spinall Assembles Star-Studded Cast on New Album first appeared on Afrocritik.

Nomad Shadow excavates the personal costs of political displacement with an intimacy that cuts through the abstractions of geopolitical discourse.

By Jerry Chiemeke

In the contested territory of Western Sahara, where Moroccan occupation has displaced populations and shattered communities for nearly half a century, displacement becomes both literal and metaphorical. Eimi Imanishi’s feature debut, Nomad Shadow, takes this fraught geopolitical reality as its backdrop. It follows Mariam (Nadhira Mohamed), a young Sahrawi woman forcibly deported from Spain, who must navigate the treacherous waters between two worlds that no longer feel like home.

We witness the brutal velocity with which belonging can be stripped away in Nomad Shadow’s opening montage. One moment, Mariam is lost in the euphoric throngs of a Spanish nightclub; the next, she’s bundled to Western Sahara, her expired visa the scythe that severs her from the life she knew. It’s a jarring transition that establishes the film’s central preoccupation: what happens when home becomes the most foreign place of all?

Imanishi, whose previous short, Battalion to My Beat (2016), demonstrated a keen eye for social fractures, manifests an acute understanding of how political displacement manifests in intimate, domestic spaces. Mariam’s mother, convinced her daughter has been corrupted by European values, suggests she is “possessed”, a diagnosis that carries particular weight in a community already grappling with cultural erasure under occupation. The film’s most potent moments emerge from these micro-aggressions of rejection, where family becomes another site of exile rather than refuge.

Mariam returns to find Western Sahara transformed by drought. “It hasn’t rained in three years”, her friend, Sidahmed (Omar Salem), informs her during a visit to a dry riverbed. This environmental devastation serves as both literal context and poetic metaphor for the spiritual aridity she encounters. Her brother, Alwali (Suleiman Filali), has descended into the drug trade, and her sister, Selka (Khadija Najem Allal), harbours silent resentment for Mariam’s abandonment during their father’s illness.

Nomad Shadow’s greatest strength lies in Mohamed’s ferocious central performance. She embodies Mariam’s displacement not through histrionics, but through a carefully calibrated sense of disconnection: the way she holds her body like borrowed clothing, the manner in which familiar spaces seem to reject her presence. 

When her mother criticises her “decadence” or her brother refuses to involve her in his illegal enterprise, Mohamed registers each rejection as a small death, accumulating layers of alienation that eventually threaten to suffocate her entirely.

The friendship between Mariam and Sidahmed, involving two outcasts finding solace in their shared estrangement from social norms, provides Nomad Shadow’s most tender moments. Salem brings a delicate vulnerability to Sidahmed, a man who faces homophobic persecution. Their scenes together achieve a naturalistic intimacy that contrasts sharply with Mariam’s stilted interactions with family members.

Cinematographer Frida Marzouk’s camera work demonstrates remarkable intimacy, employing close-ups to capture Mohamed’s emotional geography: the tension in her jaw, the vulnerability in her neck and wrists (particularly loaded given Mariam’s history of self-harm). The recurring sailboat dream sequences, shot with disorienting urgency, serve as an effective visual metaphor for Mariam’s psychological drift between two shores of belonging.

Noelia R. Deza’s editing deserves particular recognition for its restraint. In less capable hands, Mariam’s psychological fragmentation could have been rendered through flashy montages or obvious symbolism, but Deza allows the emotional weight to accumulate through sustained observation rather than editorial manipulation. 

Nomad Shadow breathes in the spaces between cuts, allowing Mohamed’s performance to carry the narrative burden without unnecessary embellishment.

Where Nomad Shadow falters is in its reluctance to fully engage with the political context that shapes its characters’ lives. While the Moroccan occupation looms over every frame, Imanishi treats it primarily as atmospheric pressure rather than examined reality. The film gestures toward larger questions of cultural survival and political resistance, but never commits to exploring how these macro-forces shape individual consciousness. 

The glimpses of female agency—a woman celebrating her divorce, Mariam’s mother expressing desires for remarriage—feel underdeveloped, promising explorations that the 81-minute runtime doesn’t allow space to pursue. These moments suggest a richer investigation of how women navigate patriarchal inhibitions in a society already constrained by colonial occupation, but Imanishi pulls back just as these themes begin to deepen.

The choice to centre the narrative around three forms of resistance (anti-colonial struggle, feminist rebellion, and queer visibility via Sidahmed) creates a compelling triptych of marginalisation. 

Yet, this ambitious thematic architecture sometimes threatens to overwhelm the plot. While the inclusion of Sidahmed’s character adds necessary complexity to Nomad Shadow’s exploration of otherness, his subplot feels underdeveloped, serving more as punctuation than fully-realised narrative thread.

Nomad Shadow succeeds most when it resists the temptation to romanticise exile or transform suffering into easy political allegory. Imanishi understands that displacement’s true violence lies not in dramatic confrontation but in the quiet erosion of belonging: the way familiar places become foreign, and the way identity fractures across geographical and cultural boundaries.

In its exploration of what happens when neither departure nor return offers genuine resolution, Nomad Shadow captures something essential about the contemporary experience of displacement. 

For Mariam, and for countless others caught between worlds, home exists not as a place to be recovered, but a concept to be continually negotiated. Imanishi’s debut suggests that sometimes the most radical act is simply learning to live in the space between shores.

Nomad Shadow screened at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

Jerry Chiemeke is a Nigerian-born writer, film critic, journalist, and lawyer based in the United Kingdom. His writing has appeared in Die Welt, The I Paper, The Africa Report, The British Blacklist, Berlinale Press, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Culture Custodian, Olongo Africa, and elsewhere. Chiemeke’s work has won or been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ken Saro Wiwa Prize, Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Quramo Writers Prize. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection, Dreaming of Ways to Understand You.

The post TIFF 2025: Eimi Imanishi’s “Nomad Shadow” Deftly Navigates the Intricacies of Exile first appeared on Afrocritik.

Diya is a morally complex drama that interrogates the collision between ancient customs and modern realities in contemporary Chad. 

By Jerry Chiemeke

In the opening frames of Achille Ronaimou’s feature debut, Diya (Le Prix Du Sang), we are confronted with an ancient equation: life for life, blood for blood. Yet what unfolds across this 96-minute moral labyrinth is far more complex than the stark mathematics of retribution might suggest. 

Ronaimou, whose previous work includes the documentaries: Minors in Prison (2013) and Kanoun (2012), brings an ethnographer’s eye to this fictional excavation of Chadian justice, tradition, and the crushing weight of circumstance.

Set against the dusty backdrop of N’djamena, the film transforms a traffic accident into something approaching Greek tragedy. When Dane Francis (Ferdinand Mbaïssané), a blue-collar driver from Moundo, strikes and kills schoolboy, Younous, the machinery of traditional justice begins its inexorable grind. The boy’s father, Béchir Salam (Youssouf Djaoro), invokes the diya, the blood price that must be paid to prevent further bloodshed. What begins as an accident becomes debt, debt becomes desperation, and desperation becomes something far darker.

Ronaimou’s direction displays the confident hand of someone who understands that the most powerful dramas emerge not from grand gestures but from the accumulation of small indignities. Dane’s dismissal from work, his wife’s humiliating attempts to bribe police for the return of his license, the community’s grudging collection of funds—each detail adds another stone to the mountain of pressure threatening to crush his protagonist. 

It’s precisely this attention to the bureaucratic machinery of oppression that elevates Diya beyond simple moral fable into something more uncomfortably recognisable. Ronaimou resists easy moralising, instead presenting a society where corruption, poverty, and rigid adherence to custom create seemingly impossible choices. 

Ferdinand Mbaïssané anchors the film with a performance of remarkable restraint. His Dane is no noble sufferer but a man whose decency is slowly eroded by circumstance. Mbaïssané’s face becomes a map of mounting desperation: the way his shoulders hunch as each door closes, the particular weariness that settles around his eyes as time runs short. It’s a performance that understands how ordinary men become capable of extraordinary things, for better and worse.

Equally impressive is Moussaka Zakaria Ibet as Oumarou, Dane’s cynical cellmate whose fluid ethics ultimately precipitate the film’s most dramatic revelations. Ibet brings a magnetic unpredictability to the role, embodying the kind of moral pragmatist who thrives in systems where traditional justice meets modern corruption. His performance suggests depths that Ronaimou, to the film’s credit, refuses to fully plumb, leaving us to grapple with the implications ourselves.

Solmem Marina Ndormadingar provides the film’s emotional anchor as Delphine, Dane’s pregnant wife, whose loyalty remains unwavering even as danger escalates. Ndormadingar brings a grounded humanity to scenes that might otherwise devolve into melodrama, particularly in moments where Delphine must achieve a balance between consternation and empathy.

The film’s visual elements serve its moral complexity. Cyrille Hubert’s cinematography captures both the suffocating heat of N’djamena’s streets and the cooler expanses of Chad’s north, while Guillaume Talvas’s editing maintains the mounting tension without sacrificing clarity. The score by Afrotronix adds layers of foreboding that never overwhelm the performances, understanding that the film’s greatest power lies in its human moments rather than its mythic resonances.

Yet, Diya is not without its limitations. While Djaoro brings appropriate gravity to Béchir, the character remains somewhat underexplored, functioning more as an embodiment of tradition than as a fully realised individual grappling with his own moral choices. 

Similarly, certain plot mechanics, particularly the film’s climactic heist involving what appears to be an entirely unsuitable vehicle, strain credibility in ways that threaten to undermine the careful moral ambiguity Ronaimou has constructed throughout the film. 

But these are minor quibbles with a film that succeeds admirably in its larger ambitions. Diya uses the specificity of Chadian culture to examine universal questions about justice, morality, and the ways in which good people can find themselves doing terrible things. Ronaimou understands that the most interesting existential questions are not those with clear answers but those that force us to confront the uncomfortable ambiguity of human behaviour under pressure.

The film’s final act delivers a twist that reframes everything that has come before, forcing both Dane and the audience to reckon with the true cost of the choices made. It’s a bold narrative gambit that works precisely because Ronaimou has earned our investment in these characters’ fates. We may not approve of Dane’s ultimate decisions, but we understand them, and that understanding is perhaps more troubling than simple condemnation would be.

Diya succeeds most completely as a character study of a man whose principles are tested by circumstances beyond his control. While the film occasionally overreaches and stumbles, its refusal to provide comfortable resolutions marks it as a noteworthy debut. Ronaimou has crafted a film that trusts audiences to grapple with difficult posers about tradition and survival in contemporary Africa, even if his technical execution doesn’t always match his thematic ambitions.

Diya screened at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

Jerry Chiemeke is a Nigerian-born writer, film critic, journalist, and lawyer based in the United Kingdom. His writing has appeared in Die Welt, The I Paper, The Africa Report, The British Blacklist, Berlinale Press, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Culture Custodian, Olongo Africa, and elsewhere. Chiemeke’s work has won or been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ken Saro Wiwa Prize, Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Quramo Writers Prize. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection, Dreaming of Ways to Understand You.

The post TIFF 2025: Achille Ronaimou’s “Diya” Confronts The Brutal Arithmetic Of Justice And Retribution first appeared on Afrocritik.

It is perhaps this deep grounding in Yoruba history and mythology that earned Sanya a spot on the shortlist for the Nigeria Prize for Literature 2025. And deservedly so.

By Evidence Egwuono 

Literature, among many other things, serves as a mirror to society. Perhaps no writer embodies this idea more profoundly than the venerated William Shakespeare. Through his tragedies, Shakespeare revealed the dangers of unchecked power, unbridled ambition, and the inevitable consequences of human choices—whether seemingly good or bad. 

At its core, his work reflects the nuances and complexities of human nature. For instance, Macbeth’s extraordinary battle skills eventually gave way to an insatiable thirst for power, fostering a dangerous sense of invincibility that ultimately led to his downfall.

As a research student, it is easy to observe that Oyin Olugbile must have drawn deeply from these invaluable lessons in literature. What is especially commendable, however, is the way she has domesticated and recreated such lessons in her debut novel, Sanya. In her novel,  Olugbile offers a fresh, creative perspective on the mythology of Sango, one of the most significant primordial beings in the Aborisa religious system.

Sanya begins with a prologue that establishes the historical premise of the entire story. It follows a chronological storytelling style, reminiscent of tales-by-moonlight narratives about the Yoruba pantheon, but with a particular focus on the Orisas. Although fictional, the prologue draws from historical accounts and serves as a creative retelling of the mythological foundations upon which Sanya is built.

The main story introduces us to a sickly child, Dada, born with locs into the family of Ajoke and Aganju, an otherwise ordinary couple in Banire village. The couple, plagued by fear of Dada’s fragile health, desperately seeks more children. After several inquiries and the heartbreak of stillbirths, the eponymous character, Sanya, is finally born. Her arrival disrupts the seemingly ordinary lives of the family. Consequently, the sudden deaths of Ajoke first after childbirth and Aganju months later propel both siblings into a new phase of life with their mother’s twin sister in Aromire village. They gradually move toward fulfilling a prophecy in which they both play crucial roles, though they remain unaware of its significance.

The next time Sanya appears is in Part II, now a fourteen-year-old lanky teenager described as having “sturdier shoulders than her brother. Her arms had small, firm muscle mounds, and her legs, sticking out from her buba and adire shorts, seemed to go on forever”. 

This physical portrayal stands in stark contrast to her brother, Dada, who is depicted as “as weak as an okro plant, and anyone could bend him to their will by just applying a little force.” As the stronger and younger of the two, Sanya naturally assumes the role of protector. This sense of duty not only defines her relationship with Dada but also serves as the catalyst for many of the actions and conflicts that unfold in the later parts of the novel.

As the children grow, their differences—particularly their strengths and weaknesses—become more pronounced. What Dada lacks in physical strength, he makes up for with his gift of clairvoyance, though this ability also serves as his greatest vulnerability. He is the more introspective of the two, and we encounter him primarily through his stream of consciousness rather than through direct action.

Sanya, on the other hand, is driven largely by impulse. Her extraordinary physical strength fuels her brazenness, but she remains largely oblivious to her surroundings. Unlike her brother’s reflective nature, Sanya is defined by her actions. This contrast is evident from her first act of “saving” Dada, where the omniscient narrator highlights her personality: “Sanya continued talking, unaware of her brother’s thoughts… Her loud voice disturbing the birds…”. These contrasting traits are gradually deepened as the narrative unfolds, ultimately manifesting in the defining choices and actions of each character.

In many African cosmologies, dreams are understood not simply as psychological by-products but as spiritual experiences. They act as conduits between the human and the supernatural, providing warnings, revelations, or glimpses of destiny. 

Oyin Olugbile’s Sanya situates itself firmly within this African paradigm. Both Sanya’s and Dada’s dreams are not abstract psychological states but direct precedents of future realities. Dada’s opaque vision of a rivalry with his sister over a throne foreshadows the eventual conflict that shapes their intertwined destinies. Sanya’s dream encounter with her mother similarly becomes a literal turning point in the novel. In the dream, she is compelled to swallow a stone, which materialises in reality as a consuming, almost invincible strength in battle.

This spiritual empowerment, however, becomes uncontrollable. Sanya’s inability to master her newfound power culminates in the murder of Ropo, her brother’s bully, exposing the double-edged nature of divine gifts. The act disrupts the careful efforts of her aunt, Abike, who attempts to shield Sanya from a prophesied destructive path. Yet, true to the logic of African cosmology, destiny proves inescapable. On the eve of her arranged marriage, Sanya abandons Abike’s plan and flees, stepping into a future which is seemingly unknown, yet already etched into her fate.

After Sanya’s disappearance, Dada struggles with conflicting emotions: “A part of him, some dark part, was relieved that he would no longer be smothered by his sister’s need to protect him… but those feelings were also conflicted by a childish anger that Sanya had broken her promise to always be there for him.” As the novel progresses, however, and he gradually comes into his own—eventually crowned the new Kabiyesi of Banire—he concludes that it is best for his egocentric sister to remain far away, lest she undermine his authority and efforts.

Meanwhile, Sanya’s disappearance marks the beginning of her transformation. She wanders through an unknown path and emerges profoundly changed: “…she was noticeably older and looked fierce, as though well-cooked in the flames of a life she could not remember”. 

Her growth, however, extends beyond her physical appearance; she evolves into a formidable warrior. Finding herself in Oluji village, whose king has just been murdered by marauders, she rallies the few remaining warriors and leads them to victory. After months of living among the people and proving her strength, she is crowned king—mistakenly, under the assumption that she is a man due to her masculine appearance.

Both siblings rise to prominence, yet Dada’s determination to avoid his sister Sanya, rooted in the fear of his prophetic dream, inevitably erodes under the weight of destiny. His futile resistance mirrors the Shakespearean insight that human beings are often powerless before larger cosmic forces: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport”. 

Indeed, Sanya offers a creative retelling of the story of Sango, but with a dynamic focus not only on power but also on the nuances of human emotions and relationships. One such instance is the sibling rivalry between Sanya and Dada. 

Because of his physique and frail health, Dada continues to nurse a wounded ego. His sister looks down on him, believing he is incapable of much, but Dada is determined to prove everyone wrong. When he gets the chance to become king, he accepts it as an opportunity to finally demonstrate his worth. 

However, Sanya reappears and, despite her earlier promise, reclaims the spotlight amidst the praises of the people of Banire. She, too, is crowned king, and from this point Dada begins to plot her downfall. Sanya, however, blinded by fame and adulation, remains unaware of her surroundings and does not see Dada’s schemes until it is too late. Her fall results largely from her hubris or pride rather than from any preternatural force.

Beyond pride, Sanya’s downfall also stems from her unchecked powers and overreaching ambition. Like Macbeth, she believes she can act without consequence. Her decision to subsume her brother’s kingdom under her control, as well as her refusal to heed Oya’s warnings about the dangers of her relationship with Osoosi, ultimately led to her tragic end

Although this book is undeniably a work of creative brilliance, it is not without its limitations. My first critique concerns the implicit message it conveys about femininity. In an interview with Literature Voices, Oyin Olugbile subtly distanced herself from the claim that she was reimagining Sango through female instincts but rather from a creative lens. 

Yet, when gender is at stake, neutrality is hardly possible. While Sanya is nominally identified as a woman, the text offers little to substantiate her femininity. As the narrator observes, “The only hint of femininity about her, [were] mere nubs where breasts should be”. Her physicality and attributes are consistently coded in masculine terms—strength, bravery, and fearlessness.

In contrast, her brother Dada is characterised through weakness, vulnerability, and, at times, effeminacy. This juxtaposition produces a troubling implication: that strength and authority are inherently masculine qualities, while weakness and fragility are aligned with femininity. 

Rather than disrupting patriarchal binaries, the novel inadvertently reinforces them, suggesting that power cannot be embodied in a recognizably feminine form. Thus, while Sanya succeeds as a mythological and literary reinvention, and attempts to blur the importance of gender in matters of power (see this excerpt: “If they did not feel that her deeds were more important than her gender, then it was their own failing rather than her problem”), it reinscribes stereotypes it might otherwise have subverted.

Another criticism is the way the Orisa, Esu, is portrayed. In the Aborisa religious tradition, Esu is a trickster god and a divine messenger. As Wole Soyinka points out, people often blame Esu for everything evil, even though he is not evil at all. 

In Sanya, however, Esu is shown as exactly that—an evil figure, a disruptor of order, described as one who was rejected in heaven and cast down to earth. All through the novel, Esu appears in dark, menacing terms as the ultimate source of destructive dark power. The issue here is that this repeats a long-standing distortion. By painting Esu as purely evil, the book leans into the Euro-Christian view of Esu, rather than reflecting his true role in Yoruba belief.

Among other things, what makes Sanya such a remarkable work is the way it reimagines an important story in Yoruba mythology, one that deserves to be passed down from generation to generation. But beyond that, its real brilliance lies in its layered portrayal of human personalities and their complexities. 

The novel’s ending is not about punishment for wrongdoing or reward for making the right choices. Instead, it holds up a mirror to readers, showing us that binaries—right and wrong, fair and unfair—are often illusions. Sanya is the kind of novel that pushes us to question ideas of partiality, impartiality, fairness, and justice, all through the lens of history, culture, and myth.

It is perhaps this deep grounding in Yoruba history and mythology that earned Sanya a spot on the shortlist for the Nigeria Prize for Literature 2025. And deservedly so. Sanya is not just a book to admire for its beauty; it is a work that should be shared and taught.

Evidence Egwuono Adjarho is a dynamic and evolving creative with a flair for literature and the arts. She finds joy in reading and writing, and often spends her free time observing the world around her. Her interests span a wide range of artistic expressions, with a particular focus on storytelling in its many forms including photography.

The post “Sanya” Review: Oyin Olugbile’s Debut Novel Is a Creative Retelling of Sango as a Woman Warrior first appeared on Afrocritik.

Nigeria has a serious class problem. As with all such societies, the controlling oligarchy is only actively involved in pursuing self-centred policies.

By Chimezie Chika 

I

Let us begin with a familiar story. Nnamdi grew up in a big house in Ikoyi, Lagos, owned by his dad, who is the CEO/MD of a 55-year-old family-owned company. His mum is a member of the House of Representatives, in her second tenure. Between June and August every year, and sometimes in December, the family goes on vacation to Europe or America, or any other place around the world that welcomes bankable tourists. 

Nnamdi’s parents established an investment account for him as soon as he was born, which is expected to grow to millions of dollars by the time he clocks eighteen. Nnamdi started driving at puberty. He takes whatever car he likes from the luxury fleet in his parents’ garage. In his earlier years, he attended a British school. 

Within Nigeria, his visits outside Lagos are either to Abuja or to his village in Anambra, where his father has another big 30-room mansion. Nnamdi has never seen a bad road in his life except on the internet or in the news (at least not in the sense in which most of his fellow Nigerians do). Nnamdi has never known power cuts in his life, except on the internet or the news. Nnamdi’s circle is close. 

His friends are the sons and daughters of an industrialist, a real estate mogul, high-ranking politicians, and businessmen with hefty investment portfolios; his uncles and aunts are either wealthy gentrified immigrants in Western countries or the selfsame fathers and mothers of his friends. 

After secondary school, Nnamdi insists he wants to further his education at an Ivy League university, and his parents agree too, since that has been their plan all along. He finds the Ivy League school he chose fascinating because of what his cousin Aderonke, who is studying there on scholarship, tells him. 

But Nnamdi is an average student and therefore cannot get a scholarship like his brilliant cousin, Aderonke, who herself has a Dad that owns a private university in Nigeria. Nnamdi’s dad subsequently makes a handsome donation to the Ivy League school in millions of dollars, to be used for research purposes and, soon, Nnamdi gains admission into the school to study Business Administration and Management, a course his dad considers fitting for his future role. 

Nnamdi takes all these for granted. Nnamdi thinks most people either live like he does or are not that far off. “It can’t be all that bad for Nigerians, is it? Not sure why they always complain”. Nnamdi consequently attends the school, goes through his undergraduate studies as softly as he considers appropriate to his classy tastes. 

Upon his return to Lagos, Nnamdi marries Stella, the daughter of his father’s industrialist friend, who had had a gentleman’s agreement with his father that their children would marry each other. Later on, he takes over the family company, struggles sometimes with government policies that affect business; these prove to be scalable hurdles with the right connections and pecuniary support for incumbent politicians in the ruling party, especially during elections. 

In his later years, flush with achievement and about to hand over management to his own children, Nnamdi writes a book titled, My Struggle for Success (actually ghostwritten for him). And so and so forth; you get the drift.

II

The hypothetical story above illustrates the reality of a different world, which many Nigerians will only ever be acquainted with through the internet, some society weddings, or through the conduit of glamorous plots in Nollywood movies. 

Rarely does an average Nigerian come into direct contact with members of these exotic individuals, who make up one percent of the population or less. This is because their lives have been conditioned in such a way as to insulate them entirely from the rest of the country. 

And when such contact happens, the one percent individual is sometimes incredibly confused, unable to understand the motivations and aspirations of his less-privileged countryman. 

The fawning and attention which aspirational Nigerians unwittingly accord to the wealthy is worthy of painstaking psychological study. Such attention is not given to any significant virtue other than the reality of their being extremely privileged in a society where most of the rest are severely handicapped economically. But this condition allows for two things to fester: admiration, on the one hand, and hatred, on the other. 

The former elicits ambition, which can sometimes throw the moral groundings behind the inordinate pursuit of wealth into stark relief; the latter creates revolutionary anger or exposes the wealth inequalities that have been perpetuated for long in this country, from the inception of the colonial divide-and-rule system to sycophant reward systems that subsequently emerged out of it. But also, in circumspect, both can also be the impulse for crime.

It is all too familiar, as far as this country goes…

III

A week ago on X, the seeds of this reflection were sown when a user, who goes by the name of Uncle Ayo, made a series of posts highlighting the problem of a man like Femi Otedola announcing the forthcoming publication of his memoir titled, Making it Big: Lessons from a Life in Business. 

In those posts, Uncle Ayo makes a compelling argument that Otedola and the likes of him achieved success, not through hard work alone, but through privilege, access, and leveraging family wealth and connections. 

The telling examples he gives trace the deep-seated connections and generational wealth that run through the families of people who occupy strategic positions of influence in all spheres of this country. In light of this, Uncle Ayo accuses the upper class of romanticizing struggle for the benefit of their self-image and their desire to be seen as a generational inspiration to all and sundry. 

“No let anybody write book for you oo”, Uncle Ayo writes in pidgin, noting the foolhardiness of a less-privileged Nigerian trying to draw inspiration from people who had never had to struggle for anything most of their lives, people who, by virtue of their birth alone, was always going to be “3000 steps” ahead in the race toward success.

It is easy to understand the motivations behind the added glamour of laundering one’s success story as that of scaling over high walls, defeating insurmountable obstacles, and achieving goals via a road filled with struggles. 

For one, it makes for a more riveting tale (there is certainly nothing more boring than a story that is devoid of struggle or any form of pain); and it enhances the image of an individual to that of a heroic persona. This is nothing more than the classic noblesse oblige. In Nigeria or elsewhere, class problems have always resulted from coded class attitudes—that of the rich always paying calculated lip-service to the poor.

The fallout from Uncle Ayo’s indictments seems to have established a remarkable cultural moment in which already existing metaphors are further entrenched into the fabric of social relations to describe the different economic and social states, worlds, and conditions in which Nigerians exist. 

The group, labelled “Nepo babies” (after the word Nepotism), are the extremely privileged, trust-fund backed individuals who constitute less than 1% of the Nigerian population and occupy a soft bubble of plenty and ease where the daily struggles of the majority of their countrymen are a far distant tinkling bell; the other group, labelled “Lapo babies” (after the notorious loan sharks, LAPO) conjures up images of unending debt, want, extreme deprivation, illiteracy, and perpetual struggle to make ends meet.

IV

What I would refer to as the Nigerian Social Other is one of the worst states to exist in. In its barest offerings, there is nothing to gain; there is no sign of respite, no comfort, no peace, no way to meet even the most basic needs to sustain life (one wonders whether our governments and their anchors under the acronym HDI). 

It is often easy, when one lives a kind of life in which feeding is taken for granted, to forget that there are dozens of millions in this country for whom to do that just once a day is a mammoth struggle. It might sound outlandish even, but this reality stares at us every day in this country outside the insular environments of gated communities. 

Wealth disparity in Nigeria is not a matter of frivolity. It is fomented by a negligent government that insidiously apportions rewards through an established nepotistic system. This is why a historical analysis of some of the most important positions in the land in the last 60 to 70 years would show that they mostly rotate among the same closed circle of people, their children, their grandchildren, and their lineages. 

The reality of this is that Nigeria has a serious class problem. As with all such societies, the controlling oligarchy is only actively involved in pursuing self-centred policies. The good news is that oligarchies are not completely sustainable in developing societies with geometrically expanding populations unless they find insidious ways to acquire mutative abilities (which many have done successfully, by the way). 

Class blindness in Nigeria immensely affects government policies. Instead of investing in education, health, and other indices of human development, what we often see are unattainable white elephants posed strategically to enhance reputations just so far enough as to influence the tribal and religious prejudices that seem to win elections in Nigeria.

The solution to class-motivated wealth disparities is usually social welfare policies. The socialist democracies of Europe diagnosed and understood this problem in the post-WWII years and now enjoy the dividends of the policies that were formulated at that time. 

Several tools such as taxation, universal health and educational reliefs, and social security, often help to alleviate these social extremes, for no society will get anywhere with such stark disparity in the comparative comfort of the majority of its citizens and therefore of the country itself, since a country’s being and image is nothing without its people.

V

A few Nepo babies did come at Uncle Ayo for his posts, arguing that some of the wealthy work harder than many of the poor who accuse them of privilege. This is true, in a sense, but it is also true that the hard work of the connected is crowned with access and wealth, so that it becomes easy to achieve goals. 

For individuals within the Nigerian Social Other, hard work is not at all a guarantee of success. As many have argued, millions have broken their back with the most grueling hard work and still died without experiencing even the simplest comforts. There is nothing more insensitive, more affirming of privilege than calling the Other lazy. 

It highlights the nuances that exist in any straightforward argument regarding the injustice of a system that encourages the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. The system conditions the former to achieve with maximum or minimal effort; for the latter, there are no guarantees that any kind of effort—maximal or otherwise—would lead to any kind of success.

The psychological effects of a long-entrenched situation in the province of lack and deprivation are damaging. Studies have shown that the long stay of poverty in the life of an individual leads to anxiety, all kinds of depression, mental illness, emotional instability, violence, and even brain regression. 

This is part of the reason why some of the sanest, mentally stable, and sensible people out there are still people from wealthy, or at least comfortable, backgrounds (Why? For the simple fact of the opportunity scale. They are so far high up on the opportunity ladder that their interests are not the mentally draining squabbles of necessity but the bliss of health, well-being, and innovation). 

In other words, these kinds of over-wide income disparity we see in Nigeria are too costly in human terms to be allowed. And as I have noted previously, many countries in the West and East have understood this and have moved regulations and policies in the right direction to varying degrees of success. 

It is in this sense that the inordinate craze for wealth in Nigeria—especially among the Other in a more overt way, but also for the upper echelon, in a more covert, state-sanctioned way—is detrimental to the country’s moral and social well-being. People want to achieve wealth—not even comfort—by all means. 

We have seen its fallout in spikes in ritual killings, greed, and corruption in high and low places, in the Yahoo culture, in the inability of successive governments in this country to achieve meaningful development over long periods. 

A society where criminals with questionable sources of income are eulogised and admired for their wealth is headed towards a bleak horizon. A society in which wealth, regardless of moral standing, has more purchase than notions of right and wrong, will have its systems of accountability—if any exist at all—completely eroded. 

It is what we have seen with the Nigerian judiciary and other institutions that were mandated with upholding this country’s ethical foundations. Where there are no funerals, vultures become revered citizens.

Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1

The post Nigeria’s Class Problem and the Nepotism Debate first appeared on Afrocritik.

Trailing 2–0 at halftime, the Super Falcons mounted an incredible second-half comeback to claim the WAFCON title.

By Tuka Letura 

Nigeria are champions of the 2024 African Women’s Cup of Nations (WAFCON), clinching their 10th title in what will go down as one of the most dramatic finals in the tournament’s history.

Trailing 2–0 at half-time, the Super Falcons mounted an incredible second-half comeback. Morocco had taken the lead just 12 minutes in through a penalty converted by Ghizlane Chebbak, before Sanaâ Mssoudy added a second 12 minutes later to put the hosts in control.

But Nigeria responded with resilience and brilliance after the break. Goals from Ijeoma Esther Okoronkwo and Folashade Ijamilusi brought the Super Falcons level, with the team converting a penalty and surviving a penalty scare of their own. Then, just minutes before stoppage time, Jennifer Onyinyechi Echegini struck the decisive winner, sealing a remarkable 3–2 victory.

Chiamaka Nnadozie, the Super Falcons’ brilliant shot-stopper and Brighton & Hove Albion’s newest signing from Paris FC, was named Goalkeeper of the Tournament. Meanwhile, team captain, Rasheedat Ajibade, whose influence was felt throughout the tournament, deservedly claimed the Player of the Tournament award. Morocco captain, Ghizlane Chebbak, picked up the Golden Boot, while South Africa were honoured with the Fair Play Award; fitting recognition of their discipline and sportsmanship throughout the tournament.

With this triumph, the Super Falcons have fulfilled the expectations they carried into the tournament, completing what was dubbed “Mission X” by claiming their 10th WAFCON title. In doing so, they have now won all 10 finals they’ve appeared in.

The post Nigeria’s Super Falcons Crowned WAFCON 2024 Champions After Historic Comeback first appeared on Afrocritik.

Catalog is an invitation to reconsider the division of emotional labour within families, especially in societies where fathers are excused from caregiving simply because they pay the bills.

By Joseph Jonathan

When we speak about parenting on screen, especially in African or Middle Eastern contexts, it is almost always through the mother’s gaze. She is the emotional core, the invisible labourer, the keeper of routines and rituals that hold a family together. 

In Catalog, a quietly stirring eight-episode Egyptian series released on Netflix on July 17, writer Ayman Wattar, and director Waleed El-Halfawy, challenge that longstanding norm, not through sweeping melodrama or activist declarations, but through one man’s fumbling attempt to step into shoes he never thought he’d have to wear.

Mohamed Farrag plays Youssef, a recently widowed father whose wife, Amina (Riham Abdel Ghafour), dies suddenly, leaving him the sole caregiver of their two children, Mansour (Ali El Beialy) and Karima (Retal Abdelaziz). Youssef is not a deadbeat dad in the conventional sense. He loves his family. He provides. 

But like many men in similar roles, he has long been a stranger in his own home: emotionally distant, practically absent, and out of sync with the rhythms of everyday parenting. When Amina dies, Youssef is forced to reckon not only with her absence but with the vast, emotional terrain he never learned to navigate.

It is here that Catalog finds its narrative engine. In a moving twist, Youssef discovers a series of parenting videos Amina had recorded before her death, a kind of posthumous guidebook, filled with instructions and encouragement. These video clips become his lifeline: a blueprint through grief, a mirror to his inadequacies, and a gentle invitation to become the parent he was never socialised to be.

At its heart, Catalog is a slow-burn cultural critique disguised as a family dramedy. It’s an invitation to reconsider the division of emotional labour within families, particularly in societies where the father is excused from caregiving simply because he pays the bills. This critique is subtle, never didactic. 

In one poignant scene, Youssef takes his son to football practice for the first time and is visibly uncomfortable being surrounded by mothers. When he finally spots another man, he assumes the man is a fellow widower, to which the bewildered man retorts, “I come to practice because I’m his father”, cutting through Youssef’s internalised belief that men only show up when forced to.

These moments, quiet, human, but politically loaded, make Catalog more than just a story of grief. It’s a cultural intervention and statement. One that challenges gender roles, critiques male emotional illiteracy, and reimagines fatherhood as a practice of presence, not just provision.

Farrag is masterful in his portrayal of Youssef. Not in the grand emotional crescendos, but in the quiet confusions and failed attempts that mark his growth. His grief is not always pretty; it’s clumsy, frustrated, and deeply human. Abdel Ghafour as Amina, though physically absent for much of the show, haunts every frame. Her presence through the parenting videos gives the show its emotional spine.

The child actors (Ali El Beialy and Retal Abdelaziz) are standout surprises. Their performances are sensitive, intelligent, and heartbreakingly believable. They embody the children of a fractured home: confused, angry, sometimes manipulative, but ultimately yearning for connection.

Khaled Kamal as Hanafi, Youssef’s brother, also shines in a supporting role. A hardened man with a soft streak, Hanafi becomes both comedic relief and moral compass, often delivering wisdom in a way that feels earned, not imposed.

Walid El-Halfawy’s direction is understated but effective. The camera rarely leaves the home, reinforcing the domestic claustrophobia Youssef feels. The sound design adapts with the emotional weather of the scenes, swelling during chaotic moments, and softening during moments of introspection. 

The score, especially the opening music, is beautiful and distinctly regional. There’s something about the instrumentation that signals, immediately, that this is Arab television at its finest — unhurried, emotive, culturally grounded.

The writing is another triumph. The dialogue feels real, often to the point where viewers might find themselves finishing characters’ sentences. It doesn’t pander or overexplain, which is especially important in a show deeply rooted in local nuance. Amina’s monologues are full of small truths, which are not just poetic for the sake of being poetic, but full of the kind of reflections that reveal themselves only through lived experience.

Though rooted in Egyptian life and culture, Catalog speaks across cultures. Its themes of emotional reconnection, posthumous love, and the invisible weight of caregiving, are as relevant in Lagos as they are in Cairo, as resonant in Beirut as they would be in Nairobi. In many parts of Africa and the Middle East, the idea of “fatherhood” still carries the distant, stoic weight of the patriarch. This show gently, but firmly, asks us to let that go.

Even more interestingly, Catalog reframes motherhood not as saintly martyrdom, but as structured intention. Amina’s videos are both acts of care and acts of control, one last way to shape the future of her family in her absence. They are feminist in their very existence: proof that domestic labour is not instinctual but learned, practiced, taught, and therefore, shared.

As a first-time viewer of Egyptian television, I was struck by the narrative precision of Catalog. Unlike many Nollywood series that begin with promise only to meander through unnecessary subplots, Catalog stays true to its emotional arc. Every subplot feeds the main story. Every emotional beat is earned. The pacing is patient but never plodding. This is a masterclass in restraint, a lesson in how to trust your characters enough to carry the story without needing contrived twists or dramatic noise.

Catalog is not flashy. It doesn’t shout its importance. Instead, it invites you into a home, sits you down, and slowly unravels the knot that binds grief, masculinity, and love. It is one of the most culturally grounded and emotionally intelligent shows from Netflix in recent times.

For anyone who’s ever had to relearn how to love—after death, distance, or emotional detachment—Catalog offers a quiet, powerful reminder: it’s never too late to show up.

Rating: 3.5/5 

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @JosieJp3.

The post “Catalog” Review: The Egyptian Netflix Series Is Quiet But Speaks Volumes first appeared on Afrocritik.

For all the fuss about cybercrime and money in this show, the crime world of To Kill a Monkey is bland, feeble, and visually non-existent.

By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku

There is more than one way to kill a monkey. But one way that certainly doesn’t work is by talking about how to do it. If there are areas in life where that rule does not apply, screen culture is not one of them. Because in film and TV, the rule is almost sacrosanct: you don’t tell a story by telling it, you tell it by showing.

And this is the primary failure of Kemi Adetiba Visuals’ hotly anticipated Netflix-commissioned crime thriller limited series: To Kill a Monkey (2025) talks so much that if you only listened without watching, you would not miss a lot. 

There’s an opening sequence with an occult ambience, but To Kill a Monkey begins properly with a voiceover narration. The show’s lead, Efemini “Efe” Edewor (a remarkable William Benson, with a steady grip on his character’s range), husband, father and poverty-stricken first class graduate who once hated his own poor father and now feels empathy for him after having himself experienced raising a child in poverty, is stealing Wi-Fi from a facility to improve on his programming skills. We know these because he tells us, in so many words.

His wife, Nosa (Stella Damasus), is pregnant with triplets, news that makes his supervisor (Emeka Okoye) at the restaurant where he works tell him that God doesn’t like him. When only two of the triplets survive because they were severely underweight, Efe weeps, and though we can perceive that his tears are triggered partly by the pain of losing a child to poverty and partly by relief that he has one less child to provide for, Efe helps explain to us (by explaining to the doctor in the first episode, and to a law enforcement officer later on) that he in fact feels relief and guilt.

But his luck changes when he re-encounters an old acquaintance. Played by a larger-than-life Bucci Franklin who owns the screen every time, the brash Obozuhiomwem, simply called “Oboz”, offers Efe a life-changing job. But Oboz runs a cyber fraud organisation, so Efe is initially hesitant to take up the offer. He doesn’t have the liver for it, he says.

However, when his poverty becomes unbearable, including incidents of workplace sexual harassment by a superior (a superb Constance Owoyomi), domestic sexual harassment experienced by his older daughter (Teniola Aladese) at the hands of a relative, and newborn babies who are hungry because their mother is too malnourished to produce milk, Efe returns to Oboz with a counter-offer. With his tech knowledge, and this amazing new tech called artificial intelligence—it’s certainly amazing to Oboz—they can exploit cybersecurity weaknesses and game the system, he explains.

Of course, the idea that you can steal a person’s physical appearance to defraud their loved ones blows the mind of the streetwise Oboz. It blows our minds, too. It’s an early highlight in the series and a timely plug-in for the real-life questions about digital safety and wellbeing in the AI era, especially in light of the internet fraud (aka “yahoo”) menace in Nigeria. Who wouldn’t want to watch it play out? 

Except, we don’t get to. To Kill a Monkey jumps four years into a future where Efemini’s family is now comfortable in wealth, and Oboz is now so much wealthier that he can easily afford a yacht. After two episodes of romanticising Efe’s poverty and hyping him up as a tech wiz, we don’t get to see him start to touch money. Neither do we get even one scene out of eight episodes where we see Oboz’s fraudulent empire actually take advantage of the almighty AI.

As a matter of fact, we don’t see how Oboz’s criminal empire operates beyond the one dramatised sequence in the first episode where Oboz makes his initial offer to Efe. For all the fuss about cybercrime and money in this show, the crime world of To Kill a Monkey is bland, feeble, and visually non-existent.

In the one plot point where To Kill a Monkey cares about showing, we are introduced to Inspector Mo Ogunlesi (Bimbo Akintola), an agent of the Nigeria Cyber Crime Commission who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder after losing her entire family in an accident. We don’t see the accident happen, but at least we know when it does, and we see how it affects her.

Returning to work after the time jump, Inspector Mo spends the rest of the show trying to manage her mental health and to prove that she can still do the work. She forms an alliance with Inspector Onome (Michael O. Ejoor), and together, they offer some of the more refreshing interactions in the series, and even more insight into the workings of the cybercrime world than the show’s cybercriminals themselves.

But her investigation is delivered inadequately and incoherently, with the screenplay hyperfocused on painting her as unreliable, at least to her direct superior (Ireti Doyle). In her scenes, the series attempts to take on a psychological thriller atmosphere, and it’s laid on so thick and so repetitively that it’s easier to be exhausted by her than to empathise with her.

At least, a good deal of Inspector Mo’s story is shown, which is more than we can say for others. The characters of To Kill a Monkey recite away actions, motivations, backstories, and even their behaviours. We’re supposed to believe that one character habitually neglects her children not because the series establishes a pattern—it does not—but because another character accuses her of it. And we have to accept that important events have taken place, like the raiding of clandestine cells that we did not even know still existed, just because characters report that they happened.

Even To Kill a Monkey’s most explicit villain, an old taker called Teacher (Chidi Mokeme, doing his best to render a villain that’s nothing more than fodder), who spends most of the series brooding over his losses and repeating the same threats, is introduced via dialogue, interspersed with sprinkles of his family life that only serve as a quick setup for the next grand event of gangsterism that Kemi Adetiba, the series’ creator, is eager to pull off.

And oh, Adetiba loves her grand events. Her references, too. Little details that do get shown, like envies and rivalries, are abandoned halfway in favour of bombastic moments that are often middling versions of foreign cult classics—some are KAV originals, though—and are barely established.

Adetiba cannot let us forget that this show comes from the same source as the King of Boys franchise, Nollywood’s answer to The Godfather. So, she lines up big gangster moments from the earliest point that she can to the last moment of the show, most of which, like many of the plot twists in this show, are manufactured and then explained away with some grandiose speech.

Don’t even get me started on the stressful Tarantino-esque monologues and dialogues that the characters in this show love to deliver, except that, unlike Quentin Tarantino, Adetiba’s monologues and dialogues are only mildly interesting, low stakes, and often end with no immediate consequences.

In one annoying instance, a character called Sparkles, played by Sunshine Rosman, delivers a lengthy monologue about her life’s story in a bid to make a point that she spends the rest of the show deviating from. And in another, Mokeme’s Teacher spends minutes outlining his supposedly intense plans for vengeance, only for us to watch so many of those plans fail.

In fact, there is so much yapping in To Kill a Monkey that in the finale, after a little speech that dampens what should have been a more interesting start to the final showdown, Efemini tells Inspector Mo, “This talking thing has truly now gone too far”. He could not be more right. And yet, his words are soon followed by a closing sequence that uses another voiceover narration to abruptly tie up major plot points.

For a film, that would be haphazard writing, but for an eight-episode TV series with all the space in the world for a story this simple to unfold properly, it’s even more egregious. Adetiba, who serves as the sole writer and director on all eight episodes of To Kill a Monkey, while also producing and editing, exhibits an overreliance on herself so much so that she doesn’t appear to have consultants of the type who can tell her that divorce agreements are not a thing in Nigeria, or that writing for TV is quite different from writing for film.

And that is indeed a part of the writing problem of To Kill a Monkey, that it isn’t structured like a TV series in the first place. Granted, TV in the streaming era is now skewed towards the binge model, but even with that evolution, good television still values the essence of the episodic format for a project with such lengthy duration.

Television typically distills the overall narrative into smaller, purposeful beats and breaks its story into tighter arcs with episodic climaxes. When rightly done, the result is storytelling that is effective and also maintains suspense. Not To Kill a Monkey, though. This one is a series that plays like one unending film with an inconsistent rhythm and barely any suspense.

Because To Kill a Monkey is focused not on unfolding the story but on exciting audiences with big thrills—and it is, in fact, exciting—characters are whoever the plot needs them to be at any point in time. And so, they feel more like plot devices than characters. Efemini is expectedly the most complex, and Oboz the most interesting, albeit underdeveloped, but the appeal of both and practically all the characters is less in their characterisation and more in the performances of the actors who portray them.

It’s a delight to watch Bucci Franklin and William Benson onscreen together, and scenes that have Oboz and Efe sparring are just spellbinding. Lilian Afegbai is fascinating as Idia, Oboz’s wife, and the contrast between her character and that of Nosa, played by the more experienced and appropriately moderate Stella Damasus, is entertaining to watch.

The unsung heroes here are the costume and set design departments, how they give finishing to the characters, especially the nouveaux riches, or the money-miss-road as we call them in these parts. But the element more likely to get praise is the original score by Oscar Heman-Ackah, the acclaimed music producer whose upcoming political musical drama, Finding Messiah, is also highly anticipated.

Unfortunately, having watched the viral Finding Messiah teaser, it’s not difficult to see how the atmosphere of that film may have seeped into the music of To Kill a Monkey. It really is a brilliant composition. But instead of propping up the film, it’s distracting, and its volume is in competition with the diegetic sound.

It’s saddening that To Kill a Monkey is nowhere near the excellence we hoped for. Sure, it’s exciting TV, but it’s also a lesson in bad storytelling. For a reference-heavy, Netflix-commissioned series, clearly, aspiration is not in scarce supply. And for a project from the stables of Kemi Adetiba Visuals, I don’t believe that it is talent or capacity that is missing. Perhaps, we are just content with excitement and spectacle. Hoorah, I guess?

Rating: 2.8/5

*To Kill a Monkey is streaming on Netflix.

Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku is a writer, film critic, TV lover, and occasional storyteller writing from Lagos. She has a master’s degree in law but spends most of her time watching, reading about and discussing films and TV shows. She’s particularly concerned about what art has to say about society’s relationship with women. Connect with her on X @Nneka_Viv

The post “To Kill a Monkey” Review: Kemi Adetiba’s Exciting Crime Thriller Series Is a Lesson in How Not to Tell a Story first appeared on Afrocritik.

This year’s spotlight is on prose fiction, and the competition attracted a record-breaking 252 entries, surpassing both the 2024 tally of 163 and the previous prose fiction record of 202 entries set in 2021.

By Evidence Egwuono Adjarho 

Often regarded as the most prestigious literary prize in Africa, and among the most lucrative in the world with its $100,000 cash award, the Nigeria Prize for Literature announced its 11-title longlist for the 2025 edition on July 23rd. Sponsored by Nigeria LNG Limited, the prize is notable not only for its monetary value but for its rotating focus among four genres: prose fiction, drama, poetry, and children’s literature. This year’s spotlight is on prose fiction, and the competition attracted a record-breaking 252 entries, surpassing both the 2024 tally of 163 and the previous prose fiction record of 202 entries set in 2021.

In remarks earlier in the year, Chairperson of the Advisory Board, Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, expressed optimism about the submissions: “We are optimistic that the calibre and volume of entries submitted this year will significantly elevate the quality of the competition.”

The 2025 Longlist for Prose Fiction:

• An Unusual Grief by Yewande Omotoso
• Fine Dreams by Linda Masi
• Leave My Bones in Saskatoon by Michael Afenfia
• New York, My Village by Uwem Akpan
• Petrichor: The Scent of a New Beginning by Ayo Oyeku
• Sanya by Oyin Olugbile
• The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe
• The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma
• This Motherless Land by Nikki May
• Water Baby by Chioma Okereke
• When We Were Fireflies by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

Following the announcement, acclaimed novelist, Chigozie Obioma, who made the list with The Road to the Country, took to his X page to share his excitement: “Grateful. Writing is hard, so this recognition means a lot!”

Also noteworthy is the inclusion of two previous winners: Chika Unigwe, who won the prose fiction category in 2012 with On Black Sisters’ Street, and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, who took home the prize in 2016 for Season of Crimson Blossoms. 

Their appearance has stirred debate online, with some readers and critics raising concerns about the fairness of the selection process, arguing that including former winners might limit opportunities for new and emerging voices.

In another X post, prominent literary critic, Ikhide Ikheloa, remarked: “As in previous years, the longlist showcases the drift and lack of strategic vision of the prize. What is its purpose? How does it help to promote literature in Nigeria?” His comments reflect the sentiments of others who question the prize’s structural framework and broader impact on the literary ecosystem.

Yet, amid the critiques, there is no denying the strength of the 2025 longlist. With its rich variety of themes, styles, and voices, this year’s selection is shaping up to be one of the most competitive in the prize’s history. While each of the listed writers has shown remarkable literary prowess, only one will eventually emerge as the winner.

The next stage of the prize will see the Advisory Board announce a shortlist of three finalists later this year and the winner will be unveiled at a public ceremony scheduled for October.

As anticipation builds, readers, critics, and publishers alike will be watching closely to see who claims the top honour in what is shaping up to be a historic year for the Nigerian prize for Literature. Who will take home Africa’s most coveted literary prize? The wait begins.

The post The Nigeria Prize for Literature Announces its 2025 Longlist For Prose Fiction first appeared on Afrocritik.

The list is based on streams outside Nigeria and spotlights the country’s continued influence as a global music powerhouse.

By Abioye Damilare Samson

Spotify has released its Nigerian Global Impact List for the first half of 2025, highlighting the top 30 Nigerian songs, and songs featuring Nigerian artistes, that have made the biggest splash beyond the country’s borders. The list is based on streams outside Nigeria and spotlights the country’s continued influence as a global music powerhouse.

Afro-Pop star, Rema, leads the chart with “Baby (Is it a Crime)”, his lush soulful hit that cleverly samples Sade Adu. The track, which sparked buzz even before its release, now holds over 60 million streams, making it the most globally streamed Nigerian song of 2025 so far. He also appears at No. 14 with his follow-up single “Bout U”.

Davido earns the most entries on the list with nine entries including his smash hit, “With You” featuring Omah Lay, off his album Five, at No. 3, and “Be There Still” at No. 10. Burna Boy follows with five entries, with his highest-charting track, “TaTaTa” featuring Travis Scott, from his latest album Sign of Weakness, debuting at No. 5.

Street-Pop star Shallipopi, lands a major global breakout with “Laho” at No. 2, while the remix featuring Burna Boy comes in at No. 9. The list also highlights Nigeria’s genre diversity, with Gospel artiste Lawrence Oyor charting at No. 28 with “Favour”,  the only Gospel song to make the cut. 

Rising acts Chella, Hima, and Minz also made first-time appearances. “This year’s Global Impact List is a testament to the vast range and international appeal of Nigerian music”, said Phiona Okumu, Spotify’s Head of Music, Sub-Saharan Africa.

As the year progresses, and with major projects still anticipated in the second half, this mid-year snapshot from Spotify offers a compelling look at what Nigerian audiences are listening to, and where the culture is headed nexta.

The post Spotify Unveils Top 30 Nigerian Songs With Global Impact in 2025 first appeared on Afrocritik.

Slowly but steadily, more African men are beginning to take skincare seriously, not just as an aesthetic pursuit, but as a reflection of wellness, self-respect, and changing ideas about masculinity. 

By Joseph Jonathan

I attended an all-boys secondary school, the kind where masculinity was constantly being performed, tested, and policed. There was always some unwritten contest about who was the toughest, the most rugged, the least bothered about anything remotely “soft”. I remember one harmattan season when a few boys brought lip gloss to school, not for fashion, but simply to keep their lips from cracking under the dry weather. Still, they were ridiculed endlessly. Some were called names. Others tossed the lip gloss away and never brought it back.

Looking back, it’s both funny and sad, how even basic grooming, like moisturising chapped lips, was treated as a betrayal of boyhood. In that environment, the message was clear: to be a “real man”, you had to be tough, indifferent, and unconcerned about your appearance. Self-care, especially of the visible kind, was suspect. To care about your skin—your lips, your face, your body—was to risk being called feminine or worse. 

Before now, the average African man’s approach to skincare was remarkably minimal. Grooming, for many, was a ritual of utility, not care. A bath with black soap or any soap really. A quick rub of petroleum jelly (vaseline) or body cream, if you managed to get your hands on one. The idea of using separate towels for the face and body sounded excessive; a single towel, often sun-dried and scratchy, did the job for everything. Skincare was treated as something indulgent or ornamental, and by cultural expectation, that meant it belonged to women.

This attitude was not just personal but social. In many African households, grooming beyond the basics was policed by gender expectations. A boy who stared at the mirror too long risked being called vain or unserious. Face creams were dismissed as “womanly”. 

Pimples were simply part of life. Few men thought to ask why they had oily skin or dark spots, let alone whether there was anything they could do about it. And even when they did, they were more likely to reach for a harsh antiseptic soap than an actual skincare product. Skincare, where it existed for men at all, was seen as reactive, not intentional.

For the longest time, society insisted that to be a man was to be tough, unbothered, and oddly indifferent to one’s appearance, as if masculinity meant neglect by default. But something is shifting. Slowly but steadily, more African men are beginning to take skincare seriously, not just as an aesthetic pursuit, but as a reflection of wellness, self-respect, and changing ideas about masculinity. 

What was once neglected or laughed off has become a site of self-awareness. A new generation, exposed to global media, health-conscious discourse, and peer influence on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, is challenging the old binary that tied skincare to femininity and neglect to masculinity. In doing so, they are not only reclaiming their skin, they are reshaping the culture.

As with any cultural shift, the natural question is: why now? What’s driving African men to embrace skincare? There are quite a number of factors really. 

Considering the fact that skincare has always been seen as feminine, it is no surprise that for most African men, their entry point into skincare came through the women in their life. It could be through “stealing” the girlfriend’s bodywash from the bathroom cabinets. Or sisters who, tired of gatekeeping beauty secrets, hand over their cleansers and serums with a warning: “Don’t waste it”. What started as casual borrowing has turned into full-blown ownership. 

Take Tobi, a 26-year-old Lagos-based designer, who now swears by his five-step routine but used to wash his face with only water. “It was my girlfriend who put me on”, he laughs. “She got tired of me using her products without asking, so she bought me my own moisturiser and cleanser. At first, I didn’t take it seriously, but then I noticed my face was clearing up, and I actually started feeling more confident”. What started as a girlfriend’s nudge has become a ritual of self-respect. “Now I even remind her to wear sunscreen”, Tobi says, half-joking, half-proud.

While the strength of a woman (shoutout to Shaggy) is quite persuasive, another factor is the growing awareness of skin health. Acne, razor bumps, hyperpigmentation, and others aren’t just cosmetic concerns; they affect confidence, mental health, and self-image. For a long time, men simply endured them in silence. But now, with more information and access to products, they’re treating their skin with intention. Skincare isn’t vanity. It’s strategy. It’s control.

For Ebuka, a historian and researcher based in Enugu, skincare wasn’t something he thought much about until his face reacted badly to a body cream. “I was told it had vitamin C or whatever, and that I shouldn’t use it on my face or step into the sun with it,” he recalls. That caution came from a female friend and it stuck. “To be honest, the average woman knows way more about skincare than most guys,” he admits.

Then there’s the social media effect. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have normalised self-care for men. Influencers—from barbers to lifestyle creators—are openly sharing their routines, breaking down ingredients, and reviewing products. The comment sections are filled with questions from men who are newly curious: “Is this good for oily skin?”, “How do I deal with dark spots?” 

In these spaces, skincare has become communal; a dialogue, not a secret. While some men still scoff at skincare online, those who are curious now find support from a growing community of enthusiasts: a community that barely existed a few years ago.

Economic growth and urban exposure also play a role. As more African men work in corporate settings, entertainment, tech, and media, appearance becomes part of the professional package. Showing up well-groomed—clean-shaven, well-moisturised, intentional—signals self-respect. It screams: I’m paying attention to detail. 

Media influencer, Phil Badung, shares that he only started paying attention to skincare in April of last year. “Honestly, it was peer pressure that triggered the shift”, he says. “I’ve always had good skin, never dealt with acne or breakouts”. But as a content creator, he began to notice how other creators’ skin looked brighter and more refined. “That got me thinking”, he adds. “Then I started getting tanned from sun exposure. Around that time, a skincare store reached out for an influencer deal, that was the sign I needed”.

Like Badung, other African men are also beginning to pay closer attention to their skin, not necessarily because of underlying skin issues, but because they’re becoming more aware of how they present themselves to the world. 

In cities like Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, it’s no longer unusual to find men strolling into skincare clinics, booking facials, asking for sunscreen — sometimes shyly, sometimes boldly. Whether it’s driven by career demands, digital visibility, romantic appeal, or simple self-care, the shift is happening: men are slowly shedding the myth that skincare is a feminine pursuit.

Unsurprisingly, the market has caught on. More skincare brands across the continent are now tailoring products and messaging to men. From premium brands like Arami Essentials and R&R Skincare to drugstore-friendly options in open markets and online shops, there’s an expanding range of products made with African skin and climate in mind. Some brands run gender-neutral campaigns with male models front and centre, challenging the idea that skincare is still “women’s territory”. 

According to a forecast by Mordor Intelligence, the men’s grooming and skincare market in Africa is expected to register a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.45% between 2025 and 2030, a reflection of changing perceptions, growing disposable incomes, and increased access to products tailored specifically for men. 

There’s something quietly revolutionary about African men reclaiming skincare as a form of joy. In societies where men are expected to be hardened, silent providers, the simple act of gently massaging moisturiser into your skin can feel like a protest. It is resistance to toxic masculinity, but it’s also restoration. Skincare becomes a moment of solitude, a habit of healing, a ritual of care in a world that rarely encourages men to pause, let alone pamper.

It won’t fix everything. But it’s a start. It represents something larger: a cultural shift toward self-awareness, softness, and emotional health. So if you see a man exfoliating with intent or patting sunscreen onto his forehead, don’t laugh. He might just be loving himself, for the first time in a long time.

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @JosieJp3.

The post Why African Men Are Finally Embracing Skincare first appeared on Afrocritik.

There’s a lot of communication via body language in this film, and for the most part, it’s the actors, under Wingonia Ikpi’s direction, who give The Lost Days its heart and emotional heft.

By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku

The first half of Wingonia Ikpi’s slow burn debut feature, The Lost Days (2025), is solid. That it features an older couple in what looks like a second chance romance trope already sells it to anyone who likes a good romance. That it takes place predominantly in a small town that looks alive sets it apart from most of mainstream Nollywood. And with familial frictions and tensions of the past as its conflict, it sounds like a perfect recipe for an interesting drama.

The Lost Days is about a wealthy woman on a journey of recovery and reconnection. Chisom Agu, a business magnate and widow, has just been informed that she’s in remission after an arduous battle with Hodgkin lymphoma. As people are wont to do when they face death and make it out alive, Chisom takes her second chance seriously, eager to confront her past regrets.

Confronting her past means going home, so she embarks on a trip. Her daughter assumes she means their hometown in Nsukka. And though Chisom allows her daughter to hold that impression, she leaves Lagos for a different kind of home, one that’s situated in Siun village, Ogun State, where she hopes to reconnect with the man she loved in her youth and the son she left behind.

In an immaculate debut screen performance, seasoned theatre professional, Ifeoma Fafunnwa stars in the lead as Chisom. Bimbo Manuel plays her past lover, Kolawole, aka Baba Kola, a widowed father of two men. Baba Kola comes onscreen without fanfare, a curious introduction for a character who is a physical manifestation of Chisom’s past and regrets. But it’s easy to forgive once interaction, laden with awkwardness and tension, between Chisom and Kola kicks off.

Fafunnwa carries a natural warm presence, but she’s also a skilled performer, deeply emotive but very controlled. And Manuel remains that veteran actor you can rely on to be modest in his deliveries but always effective. When they interact, the appeal is not so much what they say but how they say it. There’s a lot of communication via body language in this film, and it works so well in saying what’s left unsaid, in hinting at secrets harboured, regrets suppressed, and grief masked.

Ikpi has a good eye for directing, aided by her background in production, and it’s evident in how she uses everything onscreen to tell the film’s story and establish its characters, from the choice of locations to the production design, to the casting choices, and even down to the colour of clothing on the characters’ backs. But for the most part, it’s the actors, under Ikpi’s direction, who give The Lost Days its heart and emotional heft.

Fafunwa’s Chisom is at the centre of this film, and Manuel’s Baba Kola is at the very least the male lead, but the cast of The Lost Days feels like an ensemble. Chisom’s daughter, Nkem (played by Cynthia Clarke, gorgeous and well-suited to the role, but considerably lacking in acting range), is certainly a supporting character through and through, but Baba Kola’s sons, Moses (Baaj Adebule) and Kola (Durotimi Okutagidi), take up plenty of space in the story, with strong enough performances to match.

Baba Kola’s sons know some parts of their father’s secret past, at least as much as their late mother shared with them. So, of course, they have notes on the re-emergence of this woman he calls his old friend. But where one son is receptive, the other is not. Kola, the younger son and apparent black sheep who doesn’t mind that his father has his sights set on a woman for the first time in the decade since their mum’s passing, very much minds that the new woman is the woman his father would have preferred to marry over their mother.

As a result, the dynamics between each son and Chisom, and by extension Baba Kola, are far apart, with one end offering reprieve to balance out the agitation on the other end. But both parallels have an allure to them that could have provided valuable support for the film’s main plot, especially in light of the very early revelation that she birthed one of those sons, if Abdul Tijani-Ahmed’s screenplay had just let the story tell itself.

Okutagidi is an undeniable talent, embodying the entirety of Kola, arguably the most complex of the characters: his anger, his hurt, his grief, his love, and even his little joys. And Adebule holds his own, doing his very best to sell an underdeveloped and perplexing character, despite the excesses in his performance in the film’s second half.

Which brings me to the film’s second half, and I mean half both literally and conceptually. Midway into The Lost Days, the plot takes a detour into an unwarranted crime subplot and becomes a thriller of sorts, anchored by a kidnapping incident that plunges both the film and its characters into utter confusion. 

While the subplot manages to maintain the pace of the first half, at least as much as it can as a thriller, it derails the main plot, distracts from the heart of the film, and fundamentally undermines the emotional base that the first half laboured to establish. Not only is it a subplot that stunts the development of the primary plot, it’s not even mildly developed or logical. Characters’ actions are beyond far-fetched, motivations are thoroughly unconvincing, and the dialogue is just flimsy, all to serve a plot twist that isn’t shocking enough to have shock value.

And so, what could have been an easy ninety-minute watch that makes a soft statement about family, love and life ends up being a two-hour watch that says too little, despite its preachiness. The Lost Days does signal a promising future for Wingonia Ikpi in the director’s chair. Hopefully, that future comes with better material to work with.

Rating: 3/5

*The Lost Days is streaming on Prime Video.

Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku is a writer, film critic, TV lover, and occasional storyteller writing from Lagos. She has a master’s degree in law but spends most of her time watching, reading about and discussing films and TV shows. She’s particularly concerned about what art has to say about society’s relationship with women. Connect with her on X @Nneka_Viv

The post “The Lost Days” Review: Wingonia Ikpi’s First Feature Starts Strong but Crashes Halfway into the Journey first appeared on Afrocritik.

Afrocritik Weekly Music Spotlight: Detour Week

By Yinoluwa Olowofoyeku

Greetings, my acoustic adventurers!

We hope the past week has treated you kindly and that you’re staying grounded as we make our way through July. Can you believe how quickly the month has flown by? We’re already well into the second half of the year, and as the pace picks up, so does the music.

This week, we’ve taken a slight detour, veering off the usual bridges and diving straight into some off-the-path highlights that carry their own spark and surprises. We’re swerving away from the obvious and embracing fresh delights.

As always, we’re here to keep your playlists vibrant and full of colour. If you haven’t already, be sure to follow us on social media so you never miss a drop. And while you’re at it, have you checked out our Monthly Spotlight for June?

It’s live now and absolutely worth your time. Got a song or project you think we should spotlight? Don’t hesitate to send it in to yinoluu@afrocritik.com; we’re itching to shine a light on your own work as well.

Now that the housekeeping is out of the way, here’s this week’s brilliant selection, which arrives in the form of:

SOFT AND HEARTFELT: We begin this week’s journey on a tender note, with songs that wear their hearts on their sleeves. Nigerian newcomer, Czin, sets the tone with “One For The Road”, a strikingly intimate acoustic moment and the opening track of his CNG project, which also includes the reflective title track “CNG”. 

South African talent, Mlindo The Vocalist, returns with Uhambo, The Journey, a record rich with heartfelt expression and vocal sensitivity. Highlights include “Dance Around You”, “Holy Father”, and “Noma Yini Bhoza Yam”, all of which showcase the breadth of his emotional storytelling. 

Kenyan songstress, Maya Amolo, floats gently into the mix with “Look The Other Way”, a soft, shimmering piece that lingers long after its final notes. Nigerian singer, Kunmie, brings new light to his earlier ballad with the remix of “Arike”, enlisting the expressive touches of Mabel and Simi. Rising Zimbabwean singer, M.I.L.E, crafts a heartfelt blend of R&B and Afrobeats on “Sunday”, while Ghanaian pair, MisterKay and Darkua, offer “Pick Up”, a gently woven duet about love, miscommunication, and all the things left unsaid.

PARTY STARTERS: We kick things up a notch with songs that were built for the dancefloor. Nigerian artiste, Minz, keeps things tight and punchy with his 444Play EP, filled with danceable bangers like “Ta Na”, “Agenda”, and “4×4”. Mavin’s own Mbryo and Magixx join forces on the fun and catchy “My Shayla”, a buoyant single that radiates collaborative energy. The always-brilliant Guchi teases her upcoming project with “Your Type”, a witty and sassy number full of playful charm. 

Jaywillz gives us both ends of the spectrum with the vibrant “Magic” and the gentler “Bumaye”, both off his new Ocean Echo project. Thutmose lets his range shine on Bad Boy Good Lover, delivering both the swaggering title track “Bad Boy Good Lover” and the slick, introspective “Sixth Sense”. 

Ghanaian legend, Sarkodie, teams up with Lasmid on “Lavida Loca”, an energetic and confident jam that refuses to slow down. Meanwhile, Lojay serves up “Tenner”, a high-octane banger that keeps the tempo racing forward.

DETOUR INTO RAP CITY: This week’s detour takes us deep into rap territory, where bold flows and vibrant cadences rule. South African DJ and curator DJ Speedsta drops 120 Ocean View Dr., a full-bodied rap album that gives us “All I Have”, “Come Right Back”, “Violate”, and “Unidentified”, each one layered with precise flows and rhythmic punch. 

Veteran rapper, Casper Nyovest, makes a bold return with “Guess Who’s Back”, a braggadocious statement piece that reminds us of his presence. 

Young South African emcee, Tony Dayimane, unleashes Big Boy II, a gritty and vibrant project with standout tracks like “Marco Polo”, “Balaclava”, and “Gemelli”, all rich with character and bounce. Olamide brings his unique energy to “Girl on Fya”, a playful collaboration with Ashidapo that draws creatively from Donae’o’s classic “Party Hard”.

SOUTH AFRICAN SIGN-OFF: As is tradition, we close out with a trip to South Africa, where the Amapiano keeps flowing strong in many shapes and moods. J&S Projects deliver a sleek and meditative cut in “Deeper 7”, while Bless offers soulful and melodic textures on Nkateko, with “Nkateko”, “Inganekwane”, and “Amaphupho” standing out as vocal-driven gems. Bean RSA leans fully into instrumental flair on Tshimologo, particularly on the hard-hitting “Glory” and “JD27”. 

Kammu Dee’s Vitamin Dee 2.0 brings high-energy fun with its Gqom-flavoured Amapiano blend, especially on “Heh He!”, “Bhanashilolo”, and “Siyay’dala”. Finally, Kabza De Small tugs at the heartstrings on Bab’Motha, a full-bodied and emotional project with deeply felt offerings like “Ngyozama”, “Siyabonga”, “Ukuthula”, and “Isthombe”.

These are just a few highlights from this week’s playlist. There are even more sonic gems waiting to be discovered on the full spotlight, so dive in and let your ears roam free. As always, send us your recent favourites, especially from the releases coming in this new week, and be sure to check out the June Monthly Spotlight if you haven’t already. We’ll be back again next week with more carefully curated picks just for you.

Until then, we wish you joy, clarity, and inspiration for the week ahead. Stay kind, stay open, and keep your music close.

Warm regards,

Yinoluwa “Yinoluu” Olowofoyeku is a multi-disciplinary artist and creative who finds expression in various media. His music can be found across all platforms, and he welcomes interaction on his social media @Yinoluu.

The post Afrocritik Weekly Music Spotlight: Detour Week first appeared on Afrocritik.

Among the big winners of the 2025 DFM Awards was the Michael James-directed South African film, The Second Coming, which took home the National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa (NFVF) Best Fiction Award.

By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku

The 16th edition of the Durban FilmMart (DFM) has come to a fruitful end with the 2025 DFM Awards presented to winning participants for their outstanding films and projects. This year’s programme ran from 18th to 21st July, 2025 in Durban, South Africa and featured fiction, documentary, episodic, and animation projects in development.

Magdalene Reddy, Director of the Durban FilmMart Institute (DFMI), described the talent showcased in this year’s programme and film projects as exemplifying the strength of African cinema.

“We are delighted to have hosted such a dynamic array of filmmakers from across the African continent. They entrusted us with their projects and ideas, and generously shared their time, expertise, and passion through enriching conversations, creating a truly African event,” said Reddy, who added that “The memories made, networks expanded, and partnerships forged have significantly contributed to DFM’s enduring legacy and impact.”

Among the big winners of the 2025 DFM Awards was the Michael James-directed South African film, The Second Coming, which took home the National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa (NFVF) Best Fiction Award, as well as the Red Sea Film Fund Award, and the Inkaba Award reserved for bold new work seeking financing and co-production support.

Also recognised for top awards were Tunisia’s The Salt of the South, directed by Rami Jarboui, which received the NFVF Best Non-Fiction Award and the EURODOC Award; and Crocodile Dance, a South African and Nigerian production co-directed by Shofela Coker and Nadia Darries, winning the NFVF Best Animation Award.

Cape Verde’s Plastic Atlantis, a documentary directed by Samira Vera-Cruz, received six accolades, including the Climate Story Labs Award, the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund’s New Voices Award, and the prestigious Women Make Movies Award for the Best Pitch by a Woman Filmmaker.

Other notable winners include Zimbabwe’s Golden, directed by Rumbi Katedza, which received the Red Sea Film Fund, the CANAL+ Development Grant, and a place at DOK.fest München Award; and Algeria’s Climbing the Mountains, directed by Sabrina Chebbi, a recipient of the Red Sea Film Fund and Al Jazeera Co-Production Award, in addition to a participation grant for the Hot Docs-Blue Ice Docs.

The Durban FilmMart is Africa’s premier co-production and film finance market and a platform for African filmmakers looking to access international markets, build networks, and secure funding. Held under the theme “Bridges Not Borders: Stories That Unite,” this year’s edition drew a large crowd of 1,364 filmmakers and film professionals from 63 countries to Durban for four days of panel discussions, pitching sessions, networking, and project showcases.

See the full list of the 2025 DFM Award winners below.

Best Fiction (NFVF)

The Second Coming (South Africa)

Producer: Siyabonga Xaba

Director: Michael James

Best Non-fiction (NFVF)

The Salt of the South (Tunisia)

Producer: Ramzi Laâmouri

Director: Rami Jarboui

Best Animation (NFVF)

Crocodile Dance (South Africa, Nigeria)

Producer: Ingrid de Beer

Directors:  Shofela Coker, Nadia Darries

Red Sea Film Fund Award

Golden (Zimbabwe)

Producers: Rumbi Katedza, Ingrid Martens

Director: Rumbi Katedza

Red Sea Film Fund Award

The Second Coming (South Africa)

Producer: Siyabonga Xaba

Director: Michael James

Red Sea Film Fund Award

Climbing the Mountains (Algeria)

Producers: Kenji Accard, Sabrina Chebbi

Co-producer: Oualid Baha

Director: Sabrina Chebbi

Al Jazeera Co-production Award

Climbing the Mountains (Algeria)

Producers: Kenji Accard, Sabrina Chebbi

Co-producer: Oualid Baha

Director: Sabrina Chebbi

Climate Story Labs Award

Plastic Atlantis (Cape Verde)

Producer: Pedro Soulé

Director: Samira Vera-Cruz

Inkaba Award (Stained Glass TV) Award

The Second Coming (South Africa)

Producer: Siyabonga Xaba

Director: Michael James

CANAL+ Development Grant

Golden (Zimbabwe)

Producers: Rumbi Katedza, Ingrid Martens

Director: Rumbi Katedza

TRT Award

The Guardian (Libya, Algeria, Canada)

Producer: Lynda Belkhiria

Director: Muhannad Lamin

MTN Group Digital Award

Nomvula (She Who Brings the Rain) (South Africa)

Producer: Kethiwe Ngcobo

Director: Sibusiso Khuzwayo

Sundance Institute Documentary Fund New Voices Award

Plastic Atlantis (Cape Verde)

Producer: Pedro Soulé

Director: Samira Vera-Cruz

The Whickers Bursary Award for a First-Time Feature Documentary Director

Vuka (South Africa)

Producer: Rehad Desai 

Director: Matthew Robinson

OIF-ACP-EU Award

Plastic Atlantis (Cape Verde)

Producer: Pedro Soulé

Director: Samira Vera-Cruz

Hot Docs-Blue Ice Docs Award

Climbing the Mountains (Algeria)

Producers: Kenji Accard, Sabrina Chebbi 

Co-producer: Oualid Baha

Director: Sabrina Chebbi

Wrapped Talents Durban Prize

Trucker Man (South Africa)

Director: Shiefaa Hendricks

DFM Talents Durban Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

Designing Divide (South Africa)

Director: Jessie Ayles

Sørfond Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

Baptism of Silence (South Africa)

Producer: Casey Diepeveen

Directors: Kanya Viljoen, Emilie Badenhorst

El Gouna Film Festival Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

Samaa Gafa (Dry Sky) (Sudan)

Producer: Aya Tallah Yusuf

Director: Ibrahim Omar

The FIDADOC Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

KUMFOGA (Togo)

Dissirama Bessoga

Rotterdam Lab Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

Space Maasai (Tanzania)

Producer: Wilson Nkya 

Director: Priscilla Marealle

Animation Production Days (APD) Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

Tribe (South Africa)

Producer: Debbie Crosscup

Director: Tendayi Nyeke

Visions du Reel Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

Akal (Morocco)

Producer: Karim Debbagh

Director: Basma Rkioui

Sheffield Doc Fest Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

Plastic Atlantis (Cape Verde)

Producer: Pedro Soulé

Director: Samira Vera-Cruz

The DOK Leipzig Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

Akal (Morocco)

Producer: Karim Debbagh

Director: Basma Rkioui

DOK.fest München Award (Market/Event Participation Award)

Golden (Zimbabwe)

Producers: Rumbi Katedza, Ingrid Martens

Director: Rumbi Katedza

MAD Solutions Award (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership)

Ping Pong (Palestine)

Producer: May Jabareen

Director: Saleh Saadi

Doc A Award (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership)

Plastic Atlantis (Cape Verde)

Producer: Pedro Soulé

Director: Samira Vera-Cruz

EURODOC Award (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership)

The Salt of the South (Tunisia)

Producer: Ramzi Laâmouri

Director: Rami Jarboui

Fak’ugesi Residency Award (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership)

Kamaroza (Egypt)

Producer: Nouran Abdallah

Directors: Ahmad Abdelhameed, Islam Mazhar

Studio: Samaka

TFL Next IEFTA Award (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership)

Nomvula (She Who Brings the Rain) (South Africa)

Producer: Kethiwe Ngcobo

Director: Sibusiso Khuzwayo

Women Make Movies Award (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership) 

Plastic Atlantis (Cape Verde)

Producer: Pedro Soulé

Director: Samira Vera-Cruz

Impronta Films Consultancy Award (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership)

Planet Carnival (South Africa)

Producers: Thandi Davids

Co-producer: Luana Rocha

Director: Kurt Orderson 

Vuka (South Africa)

Producer: Rehad Desai 

Director: Matthew Robinson

Triggerfish Mentorship Award (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership)

Aisha Qandicha (Morocco)

Producer: Alyssa Harden

Director: Fatima Mahdar

Isiziba Award (Stained Glass TV) (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership)

Watching over You (South Africa)

Director Stephen Nagel

Talent Press Award Supported by FIPRESCI (Mentorship, Distribution and Membership)

Alice Johnson (Ghana)

Wrapped Talent Press Prize

Tshi Malatji (South Africa)

The post 16th Durban FilmMart Concludes with 2025 DFM Awards first appeared on Afrocritik.