For a film built on conversation and emotional intimacy, Mirrors never quite finds the depth of feeling needed to make those questions truly resonate.

By Joseph Jonathan

Marriage stories often begin where romance ends. 

Long after the wedding photographs have faded into family albums and social media memories, what remains are the quieter negotiations of everyday life: money, grief, expectation, resentment, compromise. It is in this difficult terrain that Mirrors, directed by Yemi “Filmboy” Morafa and written by and starring Diana Childs, situates itself. Released on Prime Video, the film strips away the distractions of spectacle and secondary plots to focus almost entirely on two people confronting the wreckage of a marriage that neither seems fully prepared to let go of.

In an industry where relationship dramas often rely on sprawling ensembles, melodramatic twists, or comedic diversions, Mirrors makes a more unusual choice. It is essentially a two-hander (a film centred primarily on two characters and their relationship), built around a single extended conversation between Eddy (Diana Childs) and Yemi (Kunle Remi), a couple standing at the edge of divorce. Eddy is in the process of moving out. Divorce papers have been served. Yet before the separation becomes final, the pair sit down for one last conversation, revisiting the story of their relationship and attempting to understand how a marriage built on love eventually collapsed under the weight of its contradictions.

The premise recalls films such as Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) and  Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013). Throughout the conversation, Eddy and Yemi recount shared memories that unfold in flashbacks, with each character offering their own interpretation of events. The technique highlights a simple but often overlooked truth about relationships: no marriage contains a single story. There is only perspective. Every disagreement produces competing narratives, every hurt carries its own justification, and every memory becomes a site of negotiation.

What emerges from these recollections is not a portrait of two people who never loved each other, but rather two people whose love proved insufficient against deeper incompatibilities. Eddy comes from a modest background; Yemi is the sole heir to considerable wealth. Their differing attitudes toward money become one of the fault lines running through the marriage. Yemi frequently approaches problems through provision and ownership. His instinct is to point toward what he has purchased, provided, or secured. Eddy, meanwhile, seeks emotional partnership rather than financial reassurance. To her, Yemi’s language of provision gradually begins to feel like a language of possession.

The film becomes particularly compelling when examining how grief exposes these differences. Following a miscarriage, the couple find themselves mourning in fundamentally different ways. Eddy retreats inward, yearning for comfort and emotional intimacy. Yemi, conditioned to respond to problems with provision rather than presence, gives her everything except what she needs. 

They grieve the same loss in completely different languages, and the distance between those languages is where the marriage quietly dies. The tragedy itself is devastating, but Mirrors is ultimately more interested in the emotional distance that tragedy creates. The question is not whether the couple suffered; it is whether they knew how to suffer together.

There is something refreshingly mature about the film’s willingness to interrogate the limits of love. Nigerian cinema often treats marriage as an institution whose preservation is inherently virtuous. Separation is frequently framed as failure, while endurance becomes its own moral achievement. Mirrors push against that assumption. 

The film repeatedly suggests that love alone cannot sustain a relationship. Communication, emotional intelligence, shared values, and mutual understanding matter just as much. Sometimes, the film argues, the healthiest thing two people can do is recognise that their differences have become irreconcilable.

It is an idea that feels particularly resonant within a Nigerian context, where cultural and religious expectations continue to place immense pressure on couples to remain together regardless of circumstance. Yemi embodies much of this worldview. His commitment to the sanctity of marriage is sincere, even admirable. Yet the film quietly asks whether preserving a marriage should always take precedence over preserving the people inside it.

Morafa deserves credit for embracing such a minimalist framework. In many ways, Mirrors represents the kind of formal experimentation Nollywood often needs more of. It resists the temptation to dilute its central premise with unnecessary subplots and instead commits itself to character, conversation, and emotional excavation. The decision is risky because it leaves the film with nowhere to hide. Every scene depends on the strength of the writing and the performances. Unfortunately, that is where the film begins to struggle.

For a story built almost entirely around dialogue, the conversations frequently lack the emotional texture needed to sustain them. Rather than feeling like two people excavating years of accumulated hurt, many exchanges feel overly constructed, as though the characters are explaining themselves to the audience rather than speaking to each other. Important emotional revelations arrive, but they rarely land with the force they should because the dialogue often feels too neat, too deliberate, and occasionally too flat.

The performances face a similar challenge. Childs and Remi both demonstrate an understanding of their characters’ emotional journeys, and there are moments where genuine vulnerability breaks through. Yet too often, the acting feels restrained in ways that undermine the film’s emotional ambitions. A project this intimate requires performances capable of transforming ordinary conversations into compelling drama. When those performances remain merely competent, the film’s emotional stakes become harder to fully invest in.

The film’s limitations are further exposed by the foundational logic of its central premise. The decision to frame the entire narrative around a final conversation between two people in the process of divorcing raises a question the film never satisfactorily answers: why are they having it? What is the purpose of this conversation for these characters? In legal and emotional terms, the divorce is already in motion; the papers have been served, Eddy is moving out, and the decision has been made. 

A final conversation of this intimacy and duration, in which old wounds are reopened and old love is briefly visible again, requires a dramatic justification that Mirrors does not provide. It is possible to accept the conversation as a structural device — a container for the film’s thematic content — but the best two-handers, from Before Sunrise (1995) to Marriage Story, earn their conversational architecture by making the conversation itself feel necessary to the characters rather than merely useful to the filmmaker. Here, the conversation occasionally feels like it exists because the screenplay needs it to rather than because Eddy and Yemi need it to. 

This issue is compounded by pacing. At just under eighty minutes, Mirrors is not especially long, yet its slow-burn structure occasionally stretches scenes beyond their natural endpoint. Certain exchanges linger longer than necessary, creating a sense of repetition that tighter editing might have alleviated. The film clearly wants audiences to sit with discomfort and reflection, but there is a fine line between contemplative and stagnant.

Yet even with these shortcomings, there is something admirable about what Mirrors attempts. In an era where much of Nollywood’s streaming output gravitates toward familiar formulas, Morafa and Childs choose a more difficult path. The film is interested in emotional ambiguity rather than easy answers. It trusts conversation over spectacle. It understands that relationships often end not because of a single catastrophic event but because of countless smaller fractures accumulating over time.

That ambition alone makes Mirrors noteworthy. It may not fully succeed in translating its ideas into compelling drama, but it points toward a kind of filmmaking that remains relatively uncommon in mainstream Nollywood. One hopes more filmmakers will take similar risks, while recognising that projects this stripped-down demand extraordinary precision in both writing and performance.

In the end, Mirrors is perhaps most interesting as an experiment. It asks worthwhile questions about love, grief, class, and the expectations we bring into marriage. It challenges romantic notions that love can overcome every obstacle. And it demonstrates a welcome willingness to break from convention. But for a film built on conversation and emotional intimacy, it never quite finds the depth of feeling needed to make those questions truly resonate. What remains is a thoughtful, ambitious work whose ideas are ultimately stronger than its execution.

Rating: 2.6/5

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 “Mirrors” Review: Yemi Morafa’s Two-Hander Is Undone by Its Own Screenplay first appeared on Afrocritik.

If June 12 means anything, it cannot simply be that Nigerians once demanded democracy. It must also mean that democracy remains answerable to those demands.

By Joseph Jonathan

Nations are, among other things, memory management projects. They cannot function on unresolved history. The friction of a painful, contested, genuinely unfinished past is incompatible with the civic cohesion that states require, so they do what institutions have always done with uncomfortable material: they process it, package it, and return it to the public in a form that is easier to live with.

The French celebrate Bastille Day on July 14; a revolution whose actual violence, whose terror, whose guillotines and factional massacres, is largely absent from the ceremonial version. What survives is Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité: the aspiration, stripped of the bloodshed that accompanied it. The United States of America marks Independence Day on July 4, 1776, a date whose declaration that all men are created equal coexisted without apparent contradiction with the institution of chattel slavery. The founding myth is preserved by carefully managing what it is allowed to mean. South Africa built the Rainbow Nation (one of the twentieth century’s most powerful post-conflict narratives) on a truth and reconciliation process that, for all its genuine moral courage, ultimately produced acknowledgement without restitution. The trauma was processed. The structural inheritance of apartheid was not.

The pattern is consistent enough to constitute a principle: states prefer commemorative certainty to historical ambiguity. A holiday is not a reckoning. It is a replacement for reckoning. It takes the volatile, unresolved energy of a historical wound and converts it into something annual, predictable, and safe; a ceremony that marks the wound’s existence without requiring that it be healed.

This is what Nigeria did with June 12 in 2018, when President Muhammadu Buhari announced the date change of Democracy Day from May 29 and conferred a posthumous GCFR on Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (MKO) Abiola. Many Nigerians received the announcement as an act of long-delayed justice. For the families of the dead, for the activists who had been detained and beaten across years of struggle, for ordinary citizens who had stood in queues only to have their choice erased, the official recognition carried genuine emotional weight. To dismiss that weight entirely would be dishonest.

Like all successful national narratives, this one contains a great deal of truth. It also leaves something out. The election of June 12, 1993, was not a democratic triumph. It was a democratic catastrophe. Votes were cast but never allowed to reach their conclusion. The winner was never sworn in. The mandate was never restored. The struggle that followed consumed lives, produced years of repression, and ended with Abiola himself dying in detention. If June 12 represents anything, it represents the violent interruption of democracy by the state.

Which raises an awkward question. Why does Nigeria commemorate a democratic failure as Democracy Day?

This is not an argument against remembering June 12. Quite the opposite. The date deserves remembrance. The activists who were detained, exiled, beaten, and killed deserve remembrance. The ordinary Nigerians whose votes were nullified deserve remembrance. The question is what kind of remembrance is taking place.

Because memory and commemoration are not the same thing. Memory preserves discomfort. It keeps old arguments alive. It refuses easy closure. Commemoration, by contrast, often organises the past into usable stories. It selects heroes, identifies villains, and transforms complicated histories into civic lessons. States do this constantly. Every national holiday is, in some sense, an argument about history disguised as ritual.

For twenty-five years, one of the most consequential events in modern Nigerian history (duly represented in popular culture) had existed in an uneasy space between public memory and official silence. State acknowledgement mattered. But acknowledgement is not the same thing as reckoning. And that distinction is what makes June 12 worth revisiting today.

The Election That Never Became Government

To fully understand the weight and significance of June 12, let’s take a trip back in time. On June 12, 1993, Nigerians participated in what is still widely regarded as the freest and fairest election in the country’s history. The contest pitted MKO Abiola of the Social Democratic Party against Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention. It unfolded under the supervision of General Ibrahim Babangida’s military government, which had spent years managing an elaborate and repeatedly delayed transition programme.

Abiola won, but more importantly, he won in a way that seemed to challenge many assumptions about Nigerian politics. He performed strongly across regional and ethnic lines, securing support in parts of the country that conventional wisdom suggested should have been inaccessible to him. For a brief moment, the election appeared to offer something rare in Nigerian political life: evidence that a genuinely national democratic mandate was possible.

That possibility lasted eleven days. On June 23, Babangida annulled the election. The decision was justified through legal technicalities and bureaucratic language, but its political meaning was unmistakable. Millions of Nigerians had participated in an election organised by the state, only to discover that the state reserved the right to reject the outcome.

What followed was not the neat morality tale that commemorative speeches often imply. Babangida eventually stepped aside, handing power to an Interim National Government headed by Ernest Shonekan. The arrangement collapsed within months. General Sani Abacha seized power in November 1993 and established a dictatorship that would become synonymous with repression, censorship, political assassinations, and the systematic destruction of dissent.

Abiola declared himself president in 1994 and was arrested. He remained in detention for four years. His wife, Kudirat Abiola, emerged as one of the most prominent voices of resistance. In 1996, she was assassinated in Lagos. Her murder became one of the defining symbols of the violence that accompanied the struggle. Abiola himself died in detention in July 1998. He was never sworn in. The election was never restored. The mandate was never recovered.

This matters because contemporary commemorations often compress the history into a story of democratic perseverance. Yet what happened in 1993 was, first and foremost, a democratic failure. The state organised an election, voters participated in good faith, and the outcome was nullified. The most remarkable thing about June 12 is not that democracy succeeded. It is that democracy was denied.

Which is precisely what makes its later transformation into Democracy Day so interesting. Nations do not merely remember the past. They interpret it. They decide which events become symbols, which symbols become rituals, and which rituals become part of national identity. The question, then, is not whether June 12 deserves remembrance. The question is why this particular memory was eventually elevated into a national holiday, and what happened to its meaning in the process.

The Strongest Case for June 12

Before interrogating the cost of the date change, it is worth seriously engaging with what it was trying to honour, because the case for June 12 as Democracy Day is not exactly a weak one.

Its most compelling form goes something like this: democracies are not born in transitions. They are born in struggle. May 29, 1999, was not a democratic achievement; it was a negotiated elite settlement. The constitution Nigerians currently operate under was drafted not by elected representatives but by a military government preparing its own exit. The man who won the 1999 election was a former military head of state whose democratic credentials were, at the point of his election, entirely theoretical. The handover was real. But it was a handover between elites, on terms set by the departing military, ratified by an electorate that had been given no meaningful alternative.

June 12, by contrast, represents something the Nigerian political process has rarely produced: a genuine expression of democratic will that crossed ethnic and regional lines, that was not managed or manufactured by any incumbent power, that emerged from the people rather than being administered to them. If democracy is, at its root, the idea that political legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed, then June 12 is Nigeria’s most democratic moment. May 29 is when the soldiers went home. June 12 is when the people spoke.

More than that, the people who fought to keep June 12 alive (who were arrested, exiled, killed for it) deserve to have their sacrifice located in the national calendar. NADECO’s members who went underground. Kudirat Abiola was shot in her car in broad daylight. Beko Ransome-Kuti, imprisoned. Gani Fawehinmi, harassed across decades. Their struggle was specifically for the mandate of June 12. To commemorate a different date would be to erase the specific content of what they fought for.

The date embodies an idea of citizenship that extends beyond elections and governments. It speaks to the willingness of ordinary people to defend political rights even when doing so carries significant risks. The years that followed the annulment produced some of the most sustained democratic resistance in Nigeria’s modern history. Journalists endured censorship and harassment. Activists were detained and exiled. Civil society organisations continued operating under increasingly hostile conditions. Some paid for their commitments with their lives.

To many Nigerians, it is this broader struggle, not merely the election itself, that June 12 commemorates. The argument is difficult to dismiss. Indeed, one could plausibly contend that May 29 always suffered from a symbolic weakness. It celebrated the arrival of democracy without adequately acknowledging the sacrifices that made that arrival possible. It focused attention on the settlement rather than the struggle. In doing so, it risked presenting democracy as something granted from above rather than demanded from below. June 12 corrected that imbalance. It shifted the emphasis from institutions to citizens, from transitions to movements, from government decisions to popular resistance.

This is a serious argument. It deserves a serious response.

The response is this: everything the argument says about June 12 is true, and none of it is what the 2018 date change was actually about. The date change honoured the struggle in name while performing a very different operation in substance. To see what that operation was, you have to look not at what the ceremony claims to remember, but at what it requires you to forget.

The Ideological Operation

When Buhari moved Democracy Day to June 12, his government accomplished something worth describing precisely. It took a date that represents democracy’s violent interruption — the beginning of an annulment, the opening of a wound — and reframed it as democracy’s foundation. June 12 in the official version is no longer the day Nigerian democracy was destroyed. It is the day Nigerian democracy began. This reframing is not neutral. It is load-bearing.

If June 12 is where Nigerian democracy begins, then 1999 is where it arrives. The May 29 handover, for all its compromises and limitations, became the vindication of the June 12 struggle; the moment the wound finally healed, the mandate finally honoured, the people’s will finally ratified. And the democracy that has existed since 1999 (with its rigged elections, its looted treasuries, its dynasty politics, its legislature of rentiers, its executive impunity) inherits the moral authority of a movement it did not complete and has, in structural terms, consistently betrayed.

The elegance of the operation is worth admiring, even as you resist it. By adopting June 12, the post-1999 Nigerian state claimed the legacy of a pro-democracy struggle while remaining institutionally continuous with the forces that the struggle was fighting against. Many of the politicians who have governed Nigeria since 1999 were participants in or beneficiaries of the military system that produced the annulment. The transition did not remove them. It reabsorbed them, gave them new titles, new electorates, and the same impunity. The date change allowed this class to drape itself in the symbolism of a resistance it had, in many cases, actively opposed.

Buhari himself is almost incidental to this argument, a vessel through which the operation was performed, but not its author. The operation belongs to the state. Any government seeking to manage the memory of June 12 would have faced the same temptation and the same choice: genuine reckoning, which is costly and destabilising, or commemorative theatre, which is cheap and consolidating. The theatre won. It usually does.

Consider what genuine reckoning would have required. It would have meant asking what happened to the specific democratic demands of the pro-democracy movement, not merely civilian rule, but accountable governance, press freedom, the protection of citizens from state violence. It would have meant accounting for the fact that many figures from the Abacha era transitioned seamlessly into the civilian order. It would have meant sitting with EndSARS (which happened in 2020, two years after the date change, twenty-one years into Nigerian democracy) and acknowledging that a government which massacres protesters at a toll plaza is not the inheritor of a democratic struggle. It is its repudiation.

A holiday cannot hold all of this. It is not designed to. The holiday is designed to make these questions unnecessary, to replace the restlessness of unresolved history with the comfort of annual remembrance. The danger of June 12 as Democracy Day is not that it makes Nigerians remember. It is that it convinces them that remembering alone is enough.

The Myth Needs a Hero

There is another cost to the commemorative version of June 12 that runs deeper than politics, and it has to do with what national myths require. Myths require heroes. Not men, heroes. The distinction matters because men are complicated: contradictory, morally mixed, shaped by the same structures they sometimes oppose. Heroes are simpler. Heroes are what myths need.

MKO Abiola, in life, was a man. He was one of the wealthiest businessmen in Nigeria, a fortune built substantially on proximity to military power. He had been a close ally of Babangida’s government before becoming Babangida’s most prominent victim, a relationship that is not incidental to understanding the political economy of the 1993 crisis. None of this cancels the wrong done to him or to the twelve million Nigerians whose votes were erased. But the commemorative version of June 12 cannot accommodate this complexity. It requires Abiola the hero, and so Abiola the man, with all his contradictions intact, has been quietly retired.

The more serious cost of this simplification is what it does to everyone else. The pro-democracy movement that formed around June 12 was larger, more radical, and more politically coherent than Abiola himself. NADECO contained voices whose democratic commitments were not personal to Abiola, who were fighting for a principle, not a patron. Fawehinmi had been a democratic agitator long before 1993 and would remain one long after. And Kudirat Abiola, whose assassination in 1996 is among the most brazen acts of political murder in Nigerian history, was not simply a loyal wife. She was an independent political actor who chose to continue a struggle she could have abandoned, under conditions of genuine physical danger.

These figures have received their posthumous honours. But in the commemorative architecture of June 12, they remain supporting cast. The myth has one protagonist, and everyone else orbits him. What is lost in that arrangement is the most important thing the pro-democracy struggle actually demonstrated: that democratic commitment does not require a candidate. That the principle is larger than any individual who embodies it.

A commemoration that genuinely honoured the June 12 struggle would put the movement at its centre, not the man. It would ask what the movement demanded (beyond Abiola’s inauguration) and hold the present accountable to those demands. Instead, the holiday gives Nigeria a martyr. Martyrs are easier. They do not make demands of the living.

May 29 and the Accountability It Kept

Something was lost when May 29 was retired as Democracy Day, and it is worth naming it.

May 29 was an imperfect date. The 1999 transition was rushed and military-designed, the constitution undemocratically produced, the leading candidate a former general. These criticisms are valid. But May 29 marked something specific and traceable: the moment from which the current democratic order is directly descended. It was the institutional origin of the republic Nigerians actually live in, with all its specific failures and all its identifiable architects.

Keeping May 29 would have maintained a form of accountability that June 12 dissolves. The problems of Nigerian democracy (the INEC manipulation, the godfatherism, the legislative capture, the executive impunity) are not betrayals of some pure democratic ideal. They are the direct, traceable consequences of specific choices made in 1999 and after, by specific people who are mostly still alive and, in some cases, still in office. May 29 kept those people in the frame. June 12 lets them exit it, replacing their accountable faces with the untouchable image of a martyred candidate.

By relocating democracy’s origin to a wound rather than a transition, the date change made the failures of Nigerian democracy feel like the continuation of an old theft rather than the result of new ones. The annulment is now always already the explanation. The soldiers are always to blame. The civilians who have governed for twenty-five years recede into the background as inheritors of a damaged system rather than agents of its continued deterioration.

The Question the Holiday Forecloses

June 12 deserves to be remembered. The people who suffered for it deserve to be honoured. The election of 1993 deserves its place in the national consciousness as evidence of what Nigerian democracy can be at its best: multiethnic, voluntary, legitimate in a way that subsequent elections have rarely matched. None of that requires a public holiday that does the work of settlement rather than reckoning.

That possibility is what makes June 12 worth revisiting, not because the date is unworthy of commemoration, but because commemoration should never exempt a society from asking whether the promises attached to that memory have actually been fulfilled. For if June 12 means anything, it cannot simply be that Nigerians once demanded democracy. It must also mean that democracy remains answerable to those demands.

The most honest thing you can say about June 12 is that the wound it marks has not healed. The democratic deficit the annulment created (the sense that elections in Nigeria are ultimately subject to the veto of power) has not been resolved by twenty-seven years of civilian governance. The political class that manages Nigerian democracy emerged from the same system that produced the annulment and has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it shares that system’s fundamental instinct: that power, once held, is not surrendered to the will of the electorate without a fight.

The holiday does not say this. It cannot. Its function is precisely to say something else, to provide a moment of national consensus around a shared wound, to transform political failure into cultural memory, to make Nigerians feel that they have reckoned with something when they have, in fact, only remembered it.

Nations do this. It is one of their oldest and most reliable operations. The question is whether citizens are obliged to participate in the performance, or whether they are permitted, required, even to ask what the ceremony costs.

What June 12, as Democracy Day, costs Nigeria is the restlessness the date should produce. The annulment of 1993 should make every subsequent election feel provisional, every abuse of democratic process feel like a continuation of the original crime, every moment of state impunity feel like evidence that the wound has not closed. That restlessness is not comfortable. But it is honest. And it is, arguably, the only political disposition adequate to the actual condition of Nigerian democracy.

The holiday offers something easier: pride, mourning, solidarity, the warm shared feeling of a people who have suffered and survived. These are not nothing. But they are not enough. And the day Nigeria decides that the feeling is enough is the day the state wins the argument it has been making since Babangida picked up his pen in June 1993.

The election was stolen. The mandate was never restored. The holiday arrived twenty-five years later, and called the debt paid. It is not. 

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 Should We Actually Celebrate June 12 As Nigeria’s Democracy Day? first appeared on Afrocritik.

Considered an associated programme of Berlinale Talents, Talents Durban is aimed at nurturing emerging African filmmakers, animators and film critics through training, professional development and international networking avenues.

By Adedamola Jones Adedayo 

The Durban FilmMart Institute (DFMI) has unveiled the list of participants for the 19th edition of Talents Durban, which will take place during the Durban FilmMart (DFM) in Durban, South Africa, from 9th to 12th October, 2026.

Considered an associated programme of Berlinale Talents, the annual summit and talent development programme of the Berlin International Film Festival, Talents Durban is aimed at nurturing emerging African filmmakers, animators and film critics through training, professional development and international networking avenues. 

The 2026 edition of Talents Durban brings together participants from 17 African countries. It received a record 551 applications, from which 25 participants and 6 film critics were selected across different formats, including feature and short fiction, documentary, animation, episodic content, and film criticism.

Participants will undergo intensive project-focused and hands-on professional development initiatives, encompassing pitch sessions, mentorship engagements, masterclasses and direct consultations with notable industry experts.

This year’s mentors include Akosua Adoma Owusu, Amine Hattou, Bongi Ndaba, Comfort Arthur, Jihane Bougrine, Mayye Zayed, Nicole Schafer, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, Ramadan Suleman and Razanajaona Ambinintsoa Luck.

Concerning the anticipated edition, DFMI Director, Magdalene Reddy, said: “The Durban FilmMart Institute remains committed to advancing African cinema through strategic collaborations that expand international access to professional networks, markets, and sustainable industry opportunities. Talents Durban is central to this vision. Now in its 19th year of partnership with Berlinale Talents, this partnership helps to contribute meaningfully to the long-term growth and sustainability of the African film ecosystem.”

Nikola Joetze and Tobias Pausinger, Heads of Berlinale Talents, affirmed the position of Talents Durban not only as a creative partner but also as a force for amplifying exceptional creativity in African filmmaking and storytelling for the greater cause of global cinematic pursuits. 

“Year after year, we are inspired by how Talents Durban nurtures bold artistic voices that embody the spirit of this year’s Berlinale Talents theme, Creating and Confusion, transforming uncertainty into innovation and new narrative possibilities,” they noted.

For Talents Durban 2026, a new Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Digital Newsroom model has been introduced, marking the evolution of the Talent Press stream. The programme will simulate a live festival newsroom environment, transcending the traditional workshop structure. 

The current edition also brings back alumni Wilfred Okiche and Domoina Ratsara in new roles as Section Editors. They will be mentoring and collaborating directly with an emerging crop of African critics designated as Festival Film Writers. The programme is further reinforced through collaborations with the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival (4th to 14th June 2026) and the Durban International Film Festival (23rd July to 2nd August 2026), offering participants hands-on festival reporting opportunities and a platform to publish critical commentary from the heart of contemporary African cinema.

Talent Press is an initiative of Talents Durban in collaboration with the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI). Courtesy of a new collaboration between the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF),  FIPRESCI and DFMI, an outstanding participant from the Talents Durban Press programme at Durban FilmMart 2026 will receive an award presented by CIFF. The selected critic gets to attend and cover CIFF, featuring in its English-language daily publication—an initiative geared towards empowering film criticism across the African continent and fostering long-term opportunities for emerging critical voices to engage with global film culture and discourse.

The following participants have been selected to take part in Talents Durban 2026:

Fiction Features

• Kelvin Kagambo – Dogi Dogi (Tanzania)
• Lawrencia Aphua Larbi-Amoah – Bare Feet (Ghana)
• Meekaaeel Adam – The Violent Type (South Africa)
• Mélanie K. ZAWADI – THE BASEMENT (DRC)
• Russell Oru – The Things We Leave Behind (Nigeria)
• Shandra Apondi – The Words I Do Not Have (Kenya)

Documentaries

• Ahmed Shams Nagm Eldin – SABARY (Sudan)
• Hussein Eddeb – The Birth of Derna (Libya)
• Junior Mozese – ABÉTI (DRC)
• Michelle Simon – Rivers: Under Threat  (South Africa)
• Ramaroson Razafimbelo Anatole – Fitampoha, the return of the king of Menabe (Madagascar)
• Sarra El Abed – Goodbye Party (Tunisia)

Fiction Shorts

• Daisy Masembe – Rukia (Uganda)
• Ghazzal Abdullah – Facing the Sun (Egypt)
• Moso Sematlane – Nightbirds (Lesotho)
• Sarah Abena Adjei – Awake (Ghana)
• Tendaiishe Chitima – The Last Tree on Kilimanjaro (Zimbabwe)
• Xola Limba – Only We Remain (South Africa)

Episodic

• Cheyi Okoaye – Cause, Effect & Maybe Consequences? (Nigeria)
• Des Dlamini – Slightly Awkward (South Africa)
• Rudo Furusa – Borrowed Skin (Botswana)
• SOGOBA Hawa – The Eleventh Year (Mali)

Animation

• Jack Machiridza – All You Sheep (Zimbabwe)
• Kirollos George – Alexandria forever (Egypt)
• Pule Mohotsi –  Amandla (South Africa)

Talent Press 

• Elijah Oluwanisola (Nigeria)
• Hlumela Luvuno (South Africa)
• NEYA Harouna (Burkina Faso)
• Michelle Abuti (Kenya)
• Domoina Ratsara (Madagascar) – Alumni
• Wilfred Okiche (Nigeria) – Alumni

The post The Durban FilmMart Institute (DFMI) Unveils Cohort For Talents Durban 2026 first appeared on Afrocritik.

Set against the backdrop of a retro-futurist African society, Memory of Princess Mumbi tells the story of a young filmmaker’s journey to a remote village called Umata in the wake of a war that revolutionised the world and reawakened ancient kingdoms.

By Adedamola Jones Adedayo 

Kenyan filmmaker Damien Hauser’s acclaimed Afrofuturist feature, Memory of Princess Mumbi (2025), has secured an English-language distribution deal with US-based independent film distributor Monument Releasing. The acquisition grants the company rights across key English-speaking territories: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

The agreement follows the film’s successful festival run last year, during which Memory of Princess Mumbi became the first Kenyan feature film to premiere in an independent parallel section of the Venice Film Festival. The film then made its North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Combining mockumentary, drama and AI-generated pictures, the film has been hailed as a landmark achievement in African sci-fi filmmaking. An Afrocritik review describes the film as “a micro-budget sci-fi odyssey that dazzles with invention while simultaneously casting a wary eye at the very tools that built it.”

Set against the backdrop of a retro-futurist African society, Memory of Princess Mumbi tells the story of a young filmmaker’s journey to a remote village called Umata in the wake of a war that revolutionised the world and reawakened ancient kingdoms. In Umata, the young man, Kuve, picks interest in Mumbi, a lady who challenges him to make his film without the use of AI. Struggling at first to find his own voice and identity, he eventually comes to terms with the delicate state of the world around him.

Reacting to the film’s stylistic experimentation and ambitious storytelling, Ryan Kampe, President of Monument Releasing, said: “There is so little truly original cinema in the world at the moment, and when you have the privilege of seeing such a smart and innovative film, it feels like an obligation to support and nurture it.  Damien has made a gem that audiences will fall in love with now in cinemas and for years to come as they discover it on various digital platforms.” 

Concerning the deal with Monument Releasing, Hauser expressed optimism at garnering reinvigorated audience interest.

“We live in a time that often feels defined by conflict and bad news. With Memory of Princess Mumbi, I wanted to tell a story that celebrates beauty, joy, and human connection,” he said. “I’m incredibly grateful to Monument Releasing for believing in the film, and I hope audiences leave it with a renewed appreciation for the small moments that make life meaningful.” 

With an acquisition agreement brokered by Ryan Kampe on behalf of Monument Releasing and Alexandre Moreau of international sales company Paradise City Sales, Memory of Princess Mumbi is expected to roll out across the selected English-speaking territories. 

The post Damien Hauser’s “Memory of Princess Mumbi” Secures Deal With US-Based Monument Releasing first appeared on Afrocritik.

Blood Sisters Season 2 is a repeat performance of the first season, except it is more Hollywood-ised, less technically capable, and happens to be both a courtroom drama and a prison drama in addition to its Thelma-and-Louise-on-the-run trope.

By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku

It has been four years since EbonyLife and Netflix collaborated to dish out the hit Nigerian original series, Blood Sisters (2022), a crime thriller billed as a miniseries. For all its flaws (some of which I noted in my review at the time), Blood Sisters felt like a breath of fresh air; though in retrospect, I now wonder if it only felt that way because it was the first Ebonylife-Netflix outing since the disastrous Chief Daddy 2 (2022) tarnished whatever goodwill the first Chief Daddy (2018) had managed to gain.

That inability to let sleeping dogs lie—or should I say EbonyLife’s tendency to revisit flawed but exciting releases hoping to milk them for commerce—has now led to Blood Sisters losing its limited series classification. The blood sisters, played by Nancy Isime and Ini Dima-Okojie, return in a second season where they spend four episodes dealing with the repercussions of the actions they took in the first episode of the first season.

To run through how we got here, Blood Sisters Season 2 follows best friends Sarah (Dima-Okojie) and Kemi (Isime), who become fugitives when Kemi kills Sarah’s abusive fiancé, Kola Ademola (Deyemi Okanlawon), on their wedding day, and both women hack the body to pieces and bury the parts in a shallow grave. Because Kola was the most beloved member of a wealthy and powerful family, Sarah and Kemi spent the four-part first season attempting to escape getting caught by the police or killed by the Ademolas, especially the ruthless matriarch, Uduak (Kate Henshaw).

By the end of that season, Sarah and Kemi resolve to stop running, but they also run into luck. Timeyin (Genoveva Umeh), the wildcard of the Ademola family, takes it upon herself to end her family’s reign. She shoots the family henchman Uncle B (Ramsey Nouah), her eldest brother Femi (Gabriel Afolayan), and Femi’s wife Olayinka (Kehinde Bankole). When the screen fades to black, Uduak is staring down the barrel of her gun.

At the start of Blood Sisters Season 2, we find out that only one of those gunshots served its purpose. Kola remains the only dead member of the Ademola family, but Femi is now paralysed. Uncle B is well and truly dead, though, and we meet his son “B Junior” (Ben Touitou), who is out for revenge. The problem is that B Junior has his sights set on the wrong people, to the benefit of the Ademolas.

You see, the Ademola family has closed ranks, despite their internal squabbles. In fact, Timeyin is now in charge of the family business. Kemi and Sarah now stand accused of more than Kola’s death and desecration; they are now standing trial for the murder of Uncle B and the attempt on the lives of the remaining Adebayos. And guess what? They once again find themselves running for their lives.

Really, the second season of Blood Sisters is a repeat of the first season, except it is more Hollywood-ised, less technically capable, and happens to be both a courtroom drama and a prison drama in addition to its Thelma-and-Louise-on-the-run trope. By the end of the second season, there’s too little to remember beyond the fact that the characters are in the same position that they were in for most of the first season, even regressing, considering that they had at least stopped running in the previous finale.

But even worse, there is a blatant lack of cohesiveness in both the plotting and the direction of the second season, and practically every element of production is either so mediocre or so incompetent that it makes the original series look like the best thing ever made.

The first season was directed by Kenneth Gyang (Sons of the Caliphate (2016); Oloture: The Journey (2024)) and the late Biyi Bandele (MTV Shuga Naija (2013)), and was definitely a Netflix original. The second is directed by Kayode Kasum (Unbroken (2019); Far From Home (2022)) and Daniel Oriahi (Oga! Pastor (2019); Etiti (2025)), and is streaming on Netflix without the traditional Netflix sound logo. Perhaps, with Netflix quietly cutting back on original programming in Nigeria, there might be budgetary explanations for the collapse in production value. But—and it hurts to say this about a project that has Oriahi attached, though he directs the better-shot half—it really does play as more of a craft issue.

Two minutes in, the visual worldbuilding falls apart as a prison van pulls into the vicinity of the “Lagos High Court” that has “Eko Judicial High Court” on the building and a “Faculty of Engineering” signpost within the shot. Before the first episode runs out, we would already have seen—quite visibly—the real-world building name plastered at the top of the university auditorium that has been staged as the courthouse. And by the second episode, you realise that the prison walls are practically the same as the walls of the court, and it suddenly makes sense why there is a jarring disconnect between the courtroom and the courthouse exterior.

It may sound like nitpicking, but these are just a few of many instances of the show’s manifestly confused production, and the cumulative effect is an on-screen world in which the suspension of disbelief is practically impossible. It is even more disconcerting and utterly unbelievable when combined with a tastelessly outlandish wardrobe, distracting hair and makeup, and way too many “creative choices” in the prison and court scenes that could not possibly be authentic in the Nigerian context.

Surely, the creatives behind Blood Sisters Season 2 do not expect their Nigerian audience to buy prison uniforms straight out of Orange Is the New Black, complete with the long-sleeved thermal undershirts, or lawyers randomly approaching the bench and practically testifying like they’re in an episode of How to Get Away with Murder. Other than the carefully constructed court sentencing that admittedly allows for an interesting, albeit undercooked, source of conflict between the two leading women, the court scenes are particularly exhausting due to their glaring lack of subject matter research.

Certainly, “dramatic licence” will be an easy justification for Blood Sisters Season 2 to fall back on. And even as a lawyer myself, I appreciate that accuracy does not always translate to good drama. But it is, quite frankly, a lazy cop-out for creative choices that are not in fact creative, especially when accuracy would likely be more dramatic than the choices made in pursuit of dramatic licence, which is the case with Blood Sisters Season 2 and its middling courtroom exchanges.

Nothing truly works in this season of the show. In-world timelines have been discarded. Characters have been re-wired while remaining underdeveloped. The protagonists themselves are now barely sympathetic. The dialogue has deteriorated. Suspense is virtually non-existent, and the stakes are much less convincing than they used to be. 

Even the acting performances have fallen below the show’s own standard, as caricaturish portrayals abound, save for Uche Jombo’s dedicated turn as Sarah’s mother and Blessing Obasi-Nze’s embodiment of the show’s most powerful prisoner. But how much can the cast really do with material this irredeemable?

Ultimately, this season of Blood Sisters is four episodes of fluff, death and sex, with the latter almost always short of valid consent despite the show having no real interest in responsibly reckoning with those choices. It is a pity. The first season, at least, cared about its social relevance, exploring delicate themes with considerable prudence. 

Blood Sisters Season 2 is not bothered with that, or with standards, really. And as it arrives at another inconclusive end, the possibility of a third season feels very much like a threat. Where do I sign out?

Rating: 1/5

*Blood Sisters Season 2 is streaming on Netflix.

Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku is a writer and film critic writing from Lagos. She has a master’s degree in law but spends most of her time consuming, studying and discussing film and TV. 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 “Blood Sisters Season 2” Review: EbonyLife’s Hit Thriller Returns to Netflix as Shoddy Merchandise first appeared on Afrocritik.

Each team preview breaks down squad strengths, tactical identity, and the players who could make the difference, before offering a prediction on how far they might go.

By Tuka Letura 

Ten African nations are making their final preparations for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, where the continent will enjoy its largest-ever representation on football’s biggest stage.

The expansion to 48 teams has opened the door for a record ten African qualifiers, giving the continent the second-highest number of representatives behind Europe.

Over the past few months, we have followed the qualification campaigns, tracking and analysing the strengths and weaknesses of each side to produce this guide to Africa’s representatives in North America.

Each team preview breaks down squad strengths, tactical identity, and the players who could make the difference, before offering a prediction on how far they might go. Whether you are interested in a particular nation or simply want to gauge Africa’s prospects as a whole, this guide provides a snapshot of the ten teams hoping to leave their mark on the 2026 World Cup.

Ghana

Carlos Queiroz will lead Ghana into the 2026 World Cup after taking charge in April. His most recent match ended in a draw against Wales, bringing an end to a run of six consecutive defeats. Ghana’s last victory came as far back as October 2025, highlighting the difficult run of form they have endured heading into the tournament.

The Black Stars have been drawn alongside England and Panama, with the new coach tasked with steadying the side and restoring confidence ahead of the competition.

Tactics

Beyond questions of style and approach, this Ghanaian side is dealing with a number of injuries and will head into the tournament without several key players.

Mohammed Kudus was left out after a quadriceps injury, and a subsequent setback in his recovery brought an early end to his season with Tottenham Hotspur. Also absent is Mohammed Salisu. The AS Monaco centre-back ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament in a league match against Olympique Lyon in January, and Ghana team doctor Dr Prince Pambo confirmed earlier this year that his nine-month recovery timeline would rule him out of the World Cup.

The biggest losses are undoubtedly Kudus and Salisu, both guaranteed starters. With Kudus’ directness missing, Salisu’s astute performances at the back unavailable, and veteran captain Andre Ayew no longer part of the squad, Ghana will have to find new ways to score goals.

That responsibility could fall on Kamaldeen Sulemana, who has looked promising in recent appearances, and especially Antoine Semenyo, who arrives as the star man in the Black Stars attack. The Manchester City forward will be expected to carry much of the goalscoring burden as Ghana looks to compensate for the absence of Kudus.

It is a big task putting together a side that can compete with the players available to Queiroz. Ghana are likely to be very defensive, operating in either a 4-5-1 or 4-4-2 shape and looking to hit opponents on the break. 

Prediction

Ghana are unlikely to make it out of the group stage. Drawn in Group L alongside Croatia, England and Panama, the Black Stars face an uphill task against three sides that are all ranked significantly above them. Panama, the lowest-ranked of the three, sits 33rd in the world, more than 40 places above Ghana, who enter the tournament ranked 74th.

Of course, FIFA rankings do not decide matches, but in terms of overall quality, experience and squad depth, all three teams appear stronger than Ghana. With several key players unavailable through injury, Ghana’s prospects have become even more difficult.

As things stand, their chances of reaching the knockout rounds are very slim. In fact, Ghana are very likely to finish bottom of Group L and is unlikely to progress, even as one of the best third-placed teams.

Democratic Republic of Congo

The Democratic Republic of Congo are back at the World Cup for only the second time in their history and for the first time under their current name. Their only previous appearance came in 1974, when the country was known as Zaire and competed at the World Cup in West Germany. Drawn alongside Yugoslavia, Scotland and Brazil, they lost all three matches, failed to score, and conceded 14 goals, including a historic 9-0 defeat to Yugoslavia.

Things are very different this time around, although the road to the 2026 World Cup was far from straightforward. The Leopards had to navigate a difficult route, defeating both Cameroon and Nigeria in the second round before edging past Jamaica 1-0 in the intercontinental play-offs to become one of the final two nations to secure qualification, completing Africa’s contingent of ten teams.

The Leopards are led by Sébastien Desabre, who took charge in 2022 after replacing Héctor Cúper. Under the Frenchman, DR Congo has steadily improved and arrived at the World Cup in excellent form. They are currently on an unbeaten run and have not tasted defeat since their Africa Cup of Nations elimination at the hands of Algeria.

The challenge ahead is substantial. Drawn in Group K alongside Portugal, Colombia and Uzbekistan, the Congolese will face some stern opposition. Unlike Ghana, however, DR Congo is not the lowest-ranked side in their group, and their recent form suggests they are capable of causing problems.

After their scheduled friendly against Chile was cancelled, their World Cup campaign will begin with arguably their toughest assignment: a clash against Portugal.

Tactics

DR Congo’s recent resurgence has been driven by the integration of players who had previously not been regular members of the squad, as well as several dual-nationality talents who chose to represent the Leopards. Among the most notable additions are former Manchester United defender Axel Tuanzebe and full-back Aaron Wan-Bissaka.

Sébastien Desabre has several options when it comes to setting up his side. Cédric Bakambu is expected to lead the line, with Arthur Masuaku, Edu Kayembe and Noah Sadiki offering width and creativity. Sadiki, in particular, has enjoyed an impressive season with Sunderland and gives the side another attacking dimension.

In midfield, Ngal’ayel Mukau and Samuel Moutoussamy provide balance and energy, while the central defensive partnership of Chancel Mbemba and Axel Tuanzebe could prove to be one of the more underrated centre-back pairings at the tournament.

Prediction

While finishing top of Group K is almost impossible, DR Congo has enough quality and momentum to compete for a place in the knockout rounds. Unlike some of Africa’s other representatives, they are not the lowest-ranked side in their group and arrive in excellent form.

A third-place finish would not be surprising and could well be enough to secure qualification for the Round of 32.

Egypt

Egypt missed out on Qatar 2022 and arrived in North America unbeaten in qualifying. Led by Mohamed Salah, the Pharaohs conceded just two goals and kept seven clean sheets on their way to qualification, but they remain something of a paradox. They are organised, resilient, and difficult to break down, yet they often struggle to impose themselves against stronger opposition. Drawn alongside Belgium, Iran, and New Zealand, Egypt’s minimum objective will be to finally record their first-ever World Cup victory, while a place in the knockout rounds is a realistic ambition.

Tactics

Hossam Hassan has built a pragmatic side that prioritises defensive solidity over attacking flair. Egypt generally line up in a 4-3-3, although they can shift into a 4-2-3-1 when chasing games and occasionally employ a 3-5-2 against opponents who sit deep. The double pivot of Marwan Attia and Hamdi Fathi protects the defence, while Emam Ashour is tasked with linking midfield and attack.

Most of Egypt’s attacking threat comes through Mohamed Salah and Omar Marmoush. The pair are expected to exploit transitions, with Ibrahim Adel offering another outlet capable of carrying the ball forward and reducing the overreliance on Salah. Egypt are comfortable defending without possession, but their inability to consistently play through an aggressive press means they can become predictable when opponents successfully neutralise Salah.

Prediction

Belgium should have enough quality to top the group, but Egypt have every chance of finishing second ahead of Iran and New Zealand. Their defensive organisation and tournament experience make them difficult opponents, though their conservative approach may limit how far they can go.

Algeria

Led by Vladimir Petković, Algeria is back at the World Cup for the first time since their memorable run in Brazil in 2014, and they arrive with one of the strongest squads on the African continent. Drawn alongside Austria, Jordan, and reigning champions Argentina, the Desert Foxes find themselves in a group where progression looks realistic, although Argentina remain clear favourites.

Interestingly, three of the four teams in the group begin with the letter “A”, but Algeria will be hoping that is not the only thing they share with the holders. Vladimir Petković’s side has been remarkably consistent, losing just three of its last 34 matches since March 2024. Only two of those defeats came in competitive fixtures, both in normal time: a 2-0 loss to Nigeria at the Africa Cup of Nations and a friendly defeat to Denmark.

With experience, attacking quality, and a settled core, Algeria heads into the tournament with genuine belief. The question now is whether that consistency can carry over to the biggest stage and deliver a first knockout appearance since that dramatic campaign in Brazil twelve years ago. The squad contains players performing across Europe’s top leagues, though their tournament ceiling remains uncertain due to tactical predictability and occasional struggles against well-organised opposition.

Tactics

Algeria are expected to operate primarily in a possession-based 4-2-3-1 structure. The game model is built around territorial control, structured build-up, and sustained ball retention. The aim is to dominate possession and create chances through positional rotations rather than direct transitions.

Riyad Mahrez remains the creative focal point, supported by mobile attackers such as Mohamed Amoura and Amine Gouiri. Ibrahim Maza adds a layer of creativity and unpredictability in advanced zones.

However, the system’s main limitations lie in its tempo. Algeria can become slow in circulation, allowing compact defensive blocks to settle. Defensively, their rest structure is vulnerable in wide transition moments, particularly when full-backs advance simultaneously.

Prediction

Algeria are in a competitive group where margins will be fine. Their technical quality makes them competitive, but not necessarily dominant against higher-ranked opposition.

A third-place finish is the most realistic outcome, with progression to the knockout stage dependent on ranking among the best third-placed teams.

Tunisia

No African nation has been at the World Cup more often without ever reaching the knockout rounds. Seven appearances spread across nearly five decades, but never progression. Tunisia return to the global stage, drawn alongside Sweden, Japan and the Netherlands in Group F. The Eagles of Carthage have been given little margin for error. It is arguably one of the most balanced groups, yet Tunisia must be very intentional. If there is to be a first, it will have to be earned the hard way.

Tactics

Sabri Lamouchi has been in charge for the second shortest time among all the coaches of the African teams at this World Cup. He took over the side in January 2026, and in the four friendly games they have played so far, they have only recorded one win — a 1-0 victory over Haiti in March. They lost 5-0 in their latest game against Belgium and have yet to score a goal under him. It is very difficult to get an idea of what his side will look like, but so far, they have maintained a fairly consistent shape.

Based on how they have played in recent games, there has been very little time for him to really imprint his ideology on the team, and that in itself is a major weakness. Beyond that, they have simply struggled to win games, and when a team cannot win, it usually points to deeper problems.

At the moment, they are a side that looks vulnerable and open to being torn apart by stronger opponents. It is difficult to identify many positives, especially given their lack of goals and poor recent performances.

Prediction

Progression is not impossible, but Tunisia look like one of the African teams most likely to make a group-stage exit. The chances of that are quite significant, even though they are in a group where they could still pick up a result somewhere and perhaps finish third.

The verdict, however, is that they will once again be knocked out in the group stage. There will be no progression to the knockout rounds, meaning Tunisia will still be waiting for their first-ever appearance in the knockout stages of the men’s World Cup.

Côte d’Ivoire

Having appeared at just three previous World Cups and exiting at the group stage on each occasion, Côte d’Ivoire return to the tournament in 2026 after missing out on the editions in Russia and Qatar. Drawn in a group featuring Curaçao, Germany and Ecuador, the Elephants have been handed a favourable opportunity and look well placed to reach the knockout stages for the first time in their history. They are led by Emerse Faé, himself a veteran of the 2006 tournament.

Tactics

Faé has built a side comfortable in multiple shapes, alternating between a 4-3-3 and a 4-4-2 depending on the opponent. Unlike previous Ivorian teams that often relied on moments of individual brilliance, this side is more measured and tactically disciplined. They are happy to control possession, but equally dangerous in attacking transitions.

Franck Kessié is the central point in midfield. His ability to carry the ball, dictate tempo and arrive late into the box gives Côte d’Ivoire balance, while Ibrahim Sangaré or Seko Fofana provide the defensive security that allows others to play with freedom. Further forward, Faé is spoilt for choice with his wide options. On the right, he can choose either or both Yan Diomande and Solomon Adingra. On the left, Amad Diallo has developed into the team’s most creative outlet, while Nicolas Pépé is just ahead of him in the pecking order. Elye Wahi and Evan Guessand are the striking options, and both can play together or individually to give the team a spearhead.

There are also occasional questions over defensive concentration, particularly when the full-backs push high, and transitions are not managed properly.

Prediction

Germany are favourites and will likely determine whether Côte d’Ivoire finish first or second. The meeting with Ecuador feels like the game that gives them a real chance of qualification. Both sides possess similar levels of quality, and the outcome could decide progression. Curaçao is a fixture the Elephants simply cannot afford to mishandle; they are inexperienced at this level but also very compact, making it a must-win.

Côte d’Ivoire advances from the group. A quarter-final appearance is not beyond reach.

South Africa

Sixteen years is a long time in football. Long enough for generations to grow up without seeing Bafana Bafana at a World Cup. Long enough for South Africa to drift from being hosts to spectators. Hugo Broos has changed that. What began as a rebuilding project has evolved into a side that finished third at AFCON 2023 and waltzed past Nigeria in World Cup qualification, and now returns to the global stage two years later with genuine belief. Group A pairs them with Mexico, Czechia and South Korea, and fate has given them a familiar beginning. The opening game of the tournament comes against Mexico, the same opponent that welcomed them to the 2010 World Cup.

Tactics

Broos has built South Africa around a disciplined 4-2-3-1 that prioritises organisation over possession. Out of possession, Bafana Bafana defend in compact lines and look to win the ball in midfield before attacking quickly into space. It is not a system designed to overwhelm opponents, but to frustrate them.

Teboho Mokoena and Sphephelo Sithole provide the platform. Mokoena dictates the tempo and carries much of the responsibility in possession, while Sithole offers the energy and aggression that protect the back four. Behind them, Ronwen Williams organises a defence that prefers to stay narrow and force teams wide.

Further forward, Oswin Appollis provides the creativity. His ability to drift across the attacking line makes him difficult to track, while Relebohile Mofokeng adds unpredictability and direct running. Lyle Foster leads the line, occupying defenders and creating space rather than serving as a prolific goalscorer. The objective is straightforward: defend compactly and attack before opponents can recover their shape.

The weakness is obvious. South Africa lacks the firepower of elite teams. There is no striker guaranteed to score consistently, and periods of dominance do not always translate into goals. Against stronger opposition, chances will be limited, and efficiency in front of goal could determine whether they progress or go home.

Prediction

South Africa is capable of frustrating the hosts and has enough pace on the counter to make the opening game uncomfortable. It could swing either way. Czechia and South Korea represent real opportunities. Neither side is beyond them, and Broos has repeatedly shown an ability to organise his teams for tournament football.

They will reach the Round of 32 in this edition. Beyond that, anything else would represent another remarkable chapter in Broos’s rebuilding of Bafana Bafana.

Senegal

This is Senegal’s third consecutive appearance at the World Cup, and they arrive in North America with expectations. The generation that restored Senegal to the summit of African football is growing older, but it is also being supplemented by an influx of fresh talent. Pape Thiaw has inherited a side that knows exactly what tournament football demands. Drawn alongside France, Norway and Iraq in Group E, their opener is against France, a throwback to 2002 when Senegal famously beat the defending champions. Senegal beat France, the defending champions, then. Twenty-four years later, they have another opportunity to do it again, although France are not defending champions this time.

Tactics

Thiaw has shown he can be flexible and win games, which is no surprise given the quality of his squad. Senegal has not lost a competitive senior game since 2023, excluding the overturned result in the final of the last Africa Cup of Nations.

Heading into the World Cup, the expectation is for that run to continue. Primarily set up in a 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 depending on game state, Senegal has also shown the ability to shift away from a four-man backline. In a recent friendly defeat to the USA, they used a three-man defence. Out of possession, Senegal defends aggressively and compactly, looking to recover the ball early and attack before opponents can settle.

In possession, they are more dangerous. Idrissa Gueye remains the heartbeat of midfield and will likely be partnered by Lamine Camara ahead of the backline. Sadio Mané remains the side’s emotional leader and most decisive attacker, operating alongside Iliman Ndiaye, Nicolas Jackson and Ismaïla Sarr. These four will likely form Thiaw’s front line, with Ndiaye operating centrally. The idea is straightforward: regain possession quickly and attack vertically.

The weakness is in goal. The goalkeeping depth is not necessarily poor, but it no longer matches the overall squad quality. Édouard Mendy has lost form, and while he did well at the last AFCON, his recent performances leave room for improvement.

Prediction

France in the opener is the defining match. Senegal has enough quality and organisation to trouble any side, but they will need to be clinical when chances arrive. Norway possess enough attacking quality to make second place a genuine contest, while Iraq is a game Senegal should expect to control.

Senegal will advance from the group. Their experience, defensive organisation and attacking talent make them difficult opponents in knockout football. A place in the quarter-finals is well within reach with the right draw.

Cape Verde

Cape Verde is one of four debutants at the 2026 World Cup. A nation of barely half a million people and the smallest country by land area to qualify for a men’s World Cup, the Blue Sharks qualified top of a group containing Egypt and Cameroon. Group H offers little room for sentiment. Spain, Uruguay and Saudi Arabia stand between them and the knockout rounds.

Tactics

Bubista has built this side around a disciplined 4-3-3 that can become a 4-2-3-1 when extra protection is needed. Out of possession, Cape Verde sit compact and force teams into wide areas before springing forward quickly. They are comfortable without the ball and do not pretend otherwise. They are also one side that can rotate the starting lineup without too much of a downturn or uptick in performance.

The plan is to trap teams in central areas and target the flanks in transition. That direct threat will be relied upon whenever Cape Verde finds opportunities to break.

The weakness is straightforward. They lack the individual quality and depth possessed by the stronger nations in the group. Their defensive shape can keep matches competitive, but maintaining concentration for long spells against elite opposition is a different challenge entirely. This is also a squad with little experience at this level. One mistake can undo ninety minutes of organisation.

Prediction

Spain in the opener is likely to be damage limitation unless something extraordinary happens. Uruguay will demand a similar level of discipline, although Cape Verde will believe they can make life uncomfortable for them. The decisive fixture is Saudi Arabia — that is the game they must target.

Cape Verde could progress from Group H. One win and a third-place finish may be enough to see them through as one of the best third-placed teams, but that will likely be as far as they can go.

Morocco

Morocco arrives at the 2026 World Cup as a well-run, organised side. Ranked eighth in the world and only topped by Brazil in this group, they are no longer underdogs, even here. Group C draws them against Brazil, Scotland and Haiti. Their opener against Brazil is the tournament’s most compelling first-round fixture involving an African side. Everything else flows from that result.

Tactics

Ouahbi inherits Regragui’s 4-2-3-1 but wants more positional fluidity in attack. Without the ball, Morocco compresses into a disciplined 4-4-2 mid-block, with Sofyan Amrabat screening in front of the back four, intercepting, recycling and protecting the channels. The defensive structure is elite when functioning correctly.

In possession, Achraf Hakimi pushes high on the right as an overlapping outlet, while Noussair Mazraoui tucks inside as a third centre-back, covering the space left behind. It is a system that demands positional intelligence from everyone; one lapse and the counter-exposure is significant. One of El Aynaoui’s or Bouaddi’s press resistance and recovery runs is central to maintaining balance in midfield.

Further forward, Youssef En-Nesyri leads the line physically, holding up play and running in behind, while Díaz and Ben Seghir operate in the half-spaces to connect midfield to attack. In En-Nesyri’s absence, we could see more minutes for Ismaïl Saibari as a striker option. The goal is simple: get Hakimi into crossing positions.

The weakness is the coaching transition. Ouahbi has had limited time to install his ideas into a squad accustomed to a different voice. Tactical cohesion under pressure remains untested at this level. This is not the same team we saw at the last Africa Cup of Nations, and he still has to fully translate his ideas.

Prediction

Brazil in the opener is the defining fixture, unless something extraordinary happens. Ouahbi will set up to absorb and counter, but Morocco also has the personnel to go toe-to-toe when required.

Morocco will advance from the group. Their Round of 32 opponent would come from Group F, one of the tougher groups in the draw. A win there would put them on course for at least the quarter-finals.

Tuka Letura is an experienced sports writer with over five years of experience in the craft. He uses data and statistics to provide analysis and commentary. From regional to worldwide competitions, he has covered a wide range of sports-related events and topics. He is devoted to sharing his enthusiasm for sports with his audience and engaging them with interesting anecdotes and viewpoints.

The post 2026 FIFA World Cup: How Africa’s Representatives Shape Up first appeared on Afrocritik.

Death does not end the earning life of a music catalogue. What determines whether that value continues, grows, or disappears is not sentiment but structure, and in most cases, structure is what is missing.

By Deborah Oyedijo

A music catalogue can continue generating income long after an artiste has died. Streams do not stop, broadcasts continue, films still license old records, and advertising agencies still look for familiar sounds. The real question is not whether the money exists, but whether anyone is properly positioned to collect and manage it when the artiste is no longer here to do so.

Consider the catalogue of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who died in 1997. Almost three decades later, his music remains one of the most commercially active archives in African music history. His works continue to generate income through streaming platforms, reissues, live performances of his compositions, and, importantly, synchronisation licensing. His music has appeared in global productions such as Netflix’s The Harder They Fall (2021), where his sound was used to heighten a key action sequence, introducing his work to a new generation of international viewers. More recently, his 1971 track “Let’s Start” was featured in Apple’s global marketing campaign for the MacBook Air with the M5 chip, placing his catalogue in front of millions of consumers worldwide in a commercial context that goes far beyond traditional music consumption.

The commercial strength of Fela’s catalogue is not accidental. It is the result of deliberate rights retention and structured management. His estate retained ownership of both publishing and master rights, allowing licensing decisions to remain under the family’s control rather than being permanently assigned to third parties. 

Over time, this approach has supported a steady stream of income from streaming, film placements, theatrical productions such as Fela!, and commercial synchronisation deals. That outcome, however, also depended on legal navigation, probate processes, and sustained administrative coordination across multiple jurisdictions and rights systems. Even a catalogue as globally recognised as Fela’s requires continuous management to ensure that value is not lost in the gaps between platforms, territories, and collecting societies.

The contrast becomes clearer when set against the reality of many African artistes whose estates are not structured the same way. Across the continent, music continues to earn after death, but the earnings do not always reach the intended beneficiaries. In many cases, royalties accumulate in collecting society systems or remain unclaimed due to missing documentation, unresolved succession issues, or lack of registration with the relevant rights organisations.

The legal foundation for posthumous copyright ownership exists across most African jurisdictions. In Nigeria, the Copyright Act 2022 classifies copyright as movable property capable of being transferred by will or through intestate succession under Section 30, with protection for musical works lasting for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. Sound recordings are protected for 50 years from the date of publication. In South Africa, the Copyright Act 98 of 1978 (as amended) protects sound recordings for 50 years from the end of the year of publication, while musical compositions are protected for the life of the author plus 50 years. Kenya’s Copyright Act 2001 (as amended in 2019) also provides protection for the life of the author plus 50 years for literary and musical works, and 50 years for sound recordings. In Ghana, the Copyright Act 2005 (Act 690) similarly protects the life of the author plus 70 years for musical works. On paper, these frameworks are clear. In practice, they depend entirely on whether there is an identifiable rights holder who can activate them.

Where no will exists, the situation becomes significantly more complex. A large number of artistes across African markets die intestate, leaving their intellectual property to be distributed under general succession laws that were not designed with creative assets in mind. 

Depending on the jurisdiction, estates may be governed by statutory inheritance rules, customary law systems, or a combination of both. In Nigeria, for example, estates may fall under statutory regimes or customary inheritance structures depending on the nature of the marriage and family system involved. The result is often fragmentation, where rights are divided among multiple heirs who may not have the technical or industry knowledge required to manage a catalogue effectively.

The estate of Sikiru Ayinde Barrister illustrates this complexity differently. As one of the most influential figures in Fuji music, his catalogue carries both cultural and commercial value. Yet managing such a body of work after death involves more than inheritance in the traditional sense. It requires coordination across rights ownership, royalty collection systems, licensing negotiations, and catalogue preservation. In situations like this, professional administration often becomes necessary not because families are unwilling, but because the structure of the music industry itself demands specialised knowledge to operate effectively within it. 

Organisations such as Digital Music Commerce and Exchange (DMCE) have been involved in supporting estates like Barrister’s and Dagrin’s in navigating these systems. Their role typically involves coordination across metadata management, distribution platforms, collecting societies, and licensing processes, ensuring that works remain commercially active and legally protected. This is less about control and more about bridging the gap between legal ownership and functional access to revenue systems that are often highly technical and fragmented.

The administrative challenge is not unique to Nigeria. Across Africa, the same structural issues appear in different forms. In South Africa, the estate of Solomon Linda, the original composer of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, became one of the most widely cited examples of posthumous royalty disputes. Although the song generated significant international revenue through adaptations and licensing, his family spent decades in legal battles to secure recognition and compensation. In many cases like this, the issue is not that the law does not recognise ownership, but that enforcement and access to revenue streams require sustained legal and institutional engagement that estates are often not equipped to maintain.

Even where rights are clearly established, the practical ability to collect royalties depends heavily on infrastructure. Collecting societies play a central role in this process. In Nigeria, organisations such as COSON manage performance rights collections, while in South Africa, SAMRO performs a similar function for composers and authors. Kenya’s Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) and Ghana’s GHAMRO perform equivalent roles in their respective jurisdictions. 

These organisations are responsible for collecting and distributing royalties from public performance, broadcasting, and other uses. However, their effectiveness depends on accurate registration, complete metadata, and active engagement from rights holders or their representatives. Without these, royalties may remain in distribution systems without being properly allocated.

This is where the gap between legal entitlement and practical recovery becomes most visible. A catalogue may be legally protected for decades, but without active administration, the income it generates can become difficult to trace or collect. In some cases, royalties accumulate in what are often referred to as “black box” pools within collecting societies, awaiting claim by verified rights holders. The longer these claims remain unresolved, the more complex recovery becomes.

The Fela Kuti estate demonstrates what becomes possible when these systems are actively managed. His catalogue continues to operate across multiple revenue streams because there is clear ownership, an active licensing strategy, and institutional coordination behind it. Even then, maintaining that position requires ongoing negotiation, legal oversight, and industry engagement. The catalogue does not manage itself; it requires continuous intervention to remain commercially relevant.

For most African artistes,  however, such systems are not in place at the time of death. The result is often fragmentation. Songs continue to circulate, but ownership becomes unclear. Revenue continues to be generated, but not always collected. Families may inherit rights in theory, but lack the infrastructure to exercise them in practice.

The broader issue is not simply legal awareness but operational readiness. Copyright law across African jurisdictions provides for posthumous protection, but it assumes that rights holders will have the documentation, registration, and institutional access needed to activate those rights. Without that, the law exists in principle but not in practice.

Ultimately, the survival of a music catalogue after an artiste’s death depends on whether it was ever treated as a structured asset during their lifetime. Fela Kuti’s catalogue continues to earn money because it was positioned within a system capable of sustaining it. Sikiru Ayinde Barrister’s estate reflects the ongoing effort required to manage culturally significant works in a complex rights environment. Solomon Linda’s legacy shows what happens when that system fails to function across borders.

Death does not end a music catalogue. It simply transfers the responsibility of managing it. Whether that responsibility produces value or loss depends entirely on what was put in place while the artiste was still alive.

Deborah Oyedijo is a music business writer and entertainment lawyer-in-training with a focus on the African music industry. When she is not writing about music rights and culture, she is watching K-dramas or absorbing yet another documentary. Connect with her on IG and X: ayooyedijo

The post The Catalogue Lives On: What Happens to an Artiste’s Music After Death? first appeared on Afrocritik.

At a time when digital culture often prioritises speed over substance, Afrocritik has remained committed to the belief that criticism, reflection, and context are essential parts of cultural development. 

By Afrocritik’s Editorial Board 

Five years ago, Afrocritik was founded on a simple but ambitious premise: that African stories deserved to be documented, celebrated, interrogated, and understood through perspectives rooted in the continent and its diaspora. At a time when conversations around African arts and culture were becoming increasingly global, there remained a need for a platform that could engage these conversations with rigour, context, and critical depth.

Since then, the media landscape has shifted repeatedly. New platforms have emerged. Audiences have changed their habits. The pace of cultural production has accelerated. Yet, through these changes, Afrocritik has remained committed to its founding vision: projecting Africa while contributing meaningfully to the conversations that shape how African culture is understood, both within the continent and beyond it.

When co-founders Samson Jikeme and Owanate Max-Harry conceived Afrocritik in 2021, the vision was to conscientiously explore the length of African and Black culture and to stir up conversations about people of colour globally. What has emerged, five years later, is something that exceeds even that ambition. Afrocritik has become, in the most deliberate sense, an archive; a living, growing repository of African cultural thought that generations of critics, artists, scholars, and curious minds will return to long after the specific cultural moments it documents have passed.

As Afrocritik marks its fifth anniversary, this milestone offers an opportunity not only to celebrate longevity but also to reflect on growth. More importantly, it invites a consideration of what the platform has become. What began as a publication dedicated to African cultural criticism has gradually evolved into something larger: an institution committed to documenting, preserving, and contributing to African cultural discourse. In many ways, this distinction matters.

A publication publishes stories. An institution helps shape the ecosystem within which those stories are produced, discussed, archived, and remembered. Over the past five years, Afrocritik has sought to do both. From its coverage of music, film, literature, sports, and fashion, to its explainers, interviews, essays, and cultural analyses, the platform has consistently engaged African creativity with seriousness and nuance. At a time when digital culture often prioritises speed over substance, Afrocritik has remained committed to the belief that criticism, reflection, and context are essential parts of cultural development. This commitment has increasingly found expression beyond individual articles.

In recent years, Afrocritik has expanded its role within the broader cultural landscape through initiatives designed not only to document culture but also to support the conversations surrounding it. The Afrocritik Prize for Criticism, launched to encourage critical engagement with African literature, reflects the platform’s investment in nurturing thoughtful criticism and supporting emerging voices. Similarly, initiatives such as the annual Notable Essay list, expanded end-of-year rankings across music, film, sports and literature, and the continued growth of “Afrocritik Spaces” and the Newsletter have helped create avenues for discovery, engagement, and cultural exchange.

Taken together, these initiatives are more than editorial projects. They represent an evolving commitment to institution-building: creating structures that encourage critical engagement with African creativity while contributing to the preservation of cultural memory. This past year, in particular, offered perhaps the clearest indication yet of that evolution.

One of Afrocritik’s most significant undertakings was the publication of the inaugural edition of  The Afrocritik Report, a project designed to document, analyse, and contextualise developments across Africa’s creative industries. More than a retrospective account of cultural happenings, the Report is an annual cultural and intellectual record, reflecting a broader commitment to knowledge production and documentation. In an era where cultural moments often disappear as quickly as they emerge, the importance of creating records that capture trends, achievements, challenges, and transformations cannot be overstated.

The Report embodies a fundamental belief that documentation is itself a form of cultural stewardship. For African creative industries to grow, there must exist not only the artists and practitioners producing remarkable work but also the critics, journalists, researchers, and institutions willing to record, analyse, and preserve those developments for future generations.

This same commitment to participating in broader cultural conversations was reflected in Afrocritik’s coverage of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. For the first time, Afrocritik had a physical presence at the world’s most prestigious film festival, providing on-the-ground coverage of a global event that continues to shape conversations around cinema and storytelling. Beyond the significance of attending Cannes itself, this milestone represented something larger: the increasing visibility of African critical voices within international cultural spaces.

African films, artists, and stories continue to command greater attention globally. Equally important is the presence of African journalists, critics, and publications participating in the conversations that surround those works. Afrocritik’s presence at Cannes reflects the growing recognition that African perspectives belong not at the margins of global cultural discourse but at its centre.

Taken together, these developments point toward an important reality: the work of cultural criticism extends beyond reviewing books, films, albums, or exhibitions. It involves creating archives, fostering conversations, nurturing communities, preserving histories, and helping societies better understand themselves through the art they produce.

This responsibility feels particularly urgent in the African context. Across the continent, artists continue to push boundaries, challenge conventions, and create work that speaks to both local realities and global audiences. Yet, the task of documenting these developments remains ongoing. Cultural memory does not preserve itself. It requires institutions willing to undertake the often-unseen labour of recording, analysing, and contextualising the moments that shape a generation.

For five years, Afrocritik has contributed to that work. None of this would have been possible without the writers, editors, contributors, readers, critics, artists, collaborators, and supporters who have helped shape the platform’s journey. Every review published, every essay commissioned, every interview conducted, every conversation hosted, and every story documented has been part of a larger collective effort to build a space where African creativity can be engaged with seriousness, curiosity, and care.

Members of the Afrocritik editorial team reflect on five years of our work:

“It is incredible what you can accomplish in 5 years, having the very best of minds committed to excellence in journalism, criticism and upholding standards across the continent in general. 

 

As Afrocritik takes a deliberate glance at its journey so far, we are poised to leap forward with even more certainty that the future of our continent largely depends on building cultural institutions which mirror the very core of African exceptionalism. 

 

Cheers to an amazing future.”

 

Owanate Max-Harry

Co-Founder, Afrocritik.

 

“Afrocritik has always believed that criticism is an act of love; love for the work and the creators, and love for our readers that deserves to understand both. That belief has guided every pitch we have accepted and every conversation we have had with writers who have trusted us with their ideas. We have given serious attention to music, film, literature, sports, and visual art at a time when the world was finally catching up to what we already knew: that African creative expression is a movement, not a moment.

 

To the writers and critics who have shaped this publication, thank you.  To our readers, who have shared and pushed us to be better, this is yours too.

 

Five years is a milestone. But honestly, it feels like the beginning. The conversations we want to have are bigger than ever. The stories waiting to be told are still waiting. The writers who need a home are still looking for one.

 

We are not done.”

 

Emmanuel “Waziri” Okoro

Managing Editor, Afrocritik.

 

“It has been both humbling and rewarding to grow into a leading voice in such a short period of documenting, celebrating, and contextualising African cinema for the benefit of the continent, the diaspora, and the global audience. We have established our presence on the international festival circuit, covering African films both home and abroad, from the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival, to the Africa International Film Festival, the S16 Film Festival, and the African Diaspora International Film Festival. 

 

We also take great pride in the work we do in platforming less visible but equally important formats and categories of film, through projects such as the Afrocritik Documentary Spotlight and our special interest in independent film. African cinema is evolving and travelling while still speaking to the audience at home, and it is truly an honour to be at the forefront of documenting that journey and stirring conversations in that regard.”

 

Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku

Editor and Head of Film Department, Afrocritik.

 

“When Afrocritik started, it was clear about its desire to capture the African cultural landscape in its entirety. One of the most successful nodes of its coverage has been literature. The work of covering and critically engaging a field like literature is not an easy task, but Afrocritik has shown that it understands what beginning and extending quality discourses entails. 

 

Presently, in a world where critical engagements with books and intellectual products have become susceptible to the philistinism of capitalism’s great, ruthless axe, Afrocritik has chosen the integrity of organically building its own cultural capital and maintaining intellectual engagement with literature and the arts—which carry the weight of a generation’s cultural rhetoric. At the literature department here, we’re pledging to continue the work of rigorous documentation, archiving, and positioning of our literary culture.”

 

Chika Chimezie

Head of Literature Department, Afrocritik.

Five years is a significant milestone, but it is also a reminder that the work remains unfinished. The conversations continue. The stories continue. The culture continues to evolve. And as Afrocritik enters its next chapter, the core of its commitment remains unchanged: to document, critique, celebrate, and elevate African and Black creativity while contributing meaningfully to the cultural conversations that shape our present and future.

If the first five years were about establishing a voice, the years ahead may well be about strengthening the structures that ensure that voice continues to resonate across Africa and the world.

The journey continues.

The post Afrocritik Turns Five: From Platform to Institution first appeared on Afrocritik.

A total of 24 short films are lined up to compete for the Best Short Film (Oscar-qualifying award) and the Best South African Short Film Award at DIFF 2026.

By Adedamola Jones Adedayo 

The 47th Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) has unveiled its official selection of short films for the latest edition, set to take place from 23rd July to 2nd August, 2026. The presentation was done by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. 

A total of 24 short films are lined up to compete for the Best Short Film (Oscar-qualifying award) and the Best South African Short Film Award at DIFF 2026. All short films are expected to present themes bordering on authentic cultural perspectives, systemic struggles and human advancement.

10 of the total selection are South African productions, while the remaining 14 are either Pan-African or Diaspora titles. Dian Weys’s Vultures (2025) is the only South African co-production (in partnership with France) selected, having previously premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d’Or Best Short Film and also won the Unifrance Short Film Grand Prix. 

The other African countries that make it to the spotlight are Uganda and Senegal through Jonathan Curtiss’ Boy No Fear (2025) and Aida Captijn’s Dëmm (2025), respectively. 

Commenting on the development, Sakhile Gumede, DIFF Festival Manager, described short films as the vanguard of cinema.

“They are a materialised embodiment of risk-taking, technical success and the true telling of its reality, respectfully; this is beautifully captured or translated in every frame,” Gumede said. “This year’s curated shorts offer an extraordinary global dialogue, bridging deeply moving local South African realities with visionary narratives from across the world.”

See below the full lineup of short films (with their directors) that will be screening at the 47th Durban International Film Festival:

South African Films:

• A Nation’s Fight for Identity and Justice – Pretty Mothata (South Africa)
• Colour of Dreams – Peter Smuts (South Africa)
• Fracture – Alex Fynn (South Africa)
• One Day at a Time – Mehita Iqani (South Africa)
• Perception – Miselwa “Missy” Ngamlana (South Africa)
• Runner – Mmathabo Johanna Bopape (South Africa)
• The Break-In – Sizwe Kubeka (South Africa)
• Verses My Brother Taught Me – Thomo Tshipinyane (South Africa)
• Vimba 2 – Monde Gumede (South Africa)
• Vultures – Dian Weys (South Africa / France)

Pan-African & International Films:

• Boy No Fear – Jonathan Curtiss (Uganda)
• Braza – Diane Maia (Brazil)
• Buah (Fruit) – Jen Nee Lim (Singapore)
• Butty – Liz Cartwright (United Kingdom)
• Café? – Bamar Kane (France)
• Close Your Eyes Hind – Amir Zaza (Netherlands)
• Dëmm – Aida Captijn (Senegal)
• Flock – Mac Nixon (United Kingdom)
• Hope Is Lost – Eno Enefiok (North Macedonia / United Kingdom)
• Mari Lewyd – Charlie Grayson (United Kingdom)
• My Brother Lyosha and I – Lena Tronina (Kazakhstan)
• Nelson Mandela: The Man Behind the Legend – Alex Strizhevskii (Russia)
• Please Hold – Solal Bouloudnine (France)
• This Is Your Captain Speaking – Nienke Deutz, Digna Van Der Put (Belgium / Netherlands)

The post Durban International Film Festival Releases List For 2026 Short Film Competition first appeared on Afrocritik.

Netflix, in collaboration with the Gauteng Film Commission and the KwaZulu-Natal Tourism and Film Authority, has revealed 14 young  South Africans for its first edition of the ScreenCraft Pathways training programme.

By Adedamola Jones Adedayo 

Netflix, in collaboration with the Gauteng Film Commission and the KwaZulu-Natal Tourism and Film Authority, has revealed 14 young  South Africans for its first edition of the ScreenCraft Pathways training programme. The participants will spend the next year working in South Africa’s film and television production and post-production companies. The steaming giant has also announced that the programme will begin its second cohort in 2027.

The announcement came at a Youth Month event spearheaded by Netflix and its South African partners that assembled filmmakers, industry stakeholders, policymakers and government officials, geared towards negotiating audiovisual investment and national socioeconomic goals in tandem with the 2026 Youth Month theme “Year of Putting Young South Africans to Work.”

The 14 beneficiaries of the inaugural ScreenCraft Pathways Programme are Thobeka Nkosi, Lebohang Tsotetsi, Paballo Segalagala, Noluthando Tshazibane, Reotshepile Mohutsiwa, Tiny Mapodile, Ikageng Madia, Nontobeko Mbhele, Keletso Lesetla, Tyler-Vorne Arendse, Sipho Nuse, Bryoni Baxter, Didintle Ledwaba and Chloe Beukes.

Each trainee will be well remunerated during a 12-month placement in a below-the-line role of their choosing (covering pre-production, production and post-production) available within Netflix’s network of local production partners that includes Burnt Onion, Quizzical Pictures, The Refinery, Midnight VFX, Rechord Post, Mushroom Media and Gambit Films. Participants will receive high-level professional mentorship, granting them on-set, in-suite experience along with entry to specialised workshops led by Netflix, with emphasis on skills development, technical production, career advancement and networking access.

Pelin Mavili, Netflix Director of Global Affairs for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, described South Africa’s creative economy as a fertile ground for talent, initiative and opportunities. 

“ScreenCraft Pathways is our commitment to ensuring that talent has a structured, professional pathway into the industry, not just for the benefit of these 14 individuals, but for the long-term competitiveness of South Africa’s production sector”, Mavili said. “When young South Africans are working on world-class productions, everyone wins—from the industry to the economy and the audiences who get to see their stories told”.

Keitumetse Lebaka, CEO of the Gauteng Film Commission,  emphasised the Commission’s commitment to ScreenCraft Pathways as part of a long-term strategy to shape the future of South Africa’s film and television industry: “By giving young creatives access to real productions, experienced mentors and practical workplace experience, we are helping to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity. The Gauteng Film Commission is proud to partner on an initiative that not only equips young people with critical industry skills, but also strengthens the talent pipeline needed to grow a competitive and sustainable screen sector.”

Sibusiso Gumbi, Acting CEO of the KZN Tourism and Film Authority, reiterated the importance of human and creative development:  “South Africa’s film industry cannot grow sustainably unless we deliberately invest in the people who will power its future. ScreenCraft Pathways is a practical response to one of the sector’s greatest challenges—creating credible pathways from learning into employment. By placing young creatives inside leading production and post-production companies, this programme provides the experience, mentorship and professional networks that are often the difference between talent being discovered and talent being lost.”

“Our partnership with Netflix and the Gauteng Film Commission demonstrates what can be achieved when industry and public institutions work together to develop the next generation of film professionals”, Gumbi added. “Beyond supporting individual careers, initiatives such as this strengthen the broader screen sector, enhance South Africa’s competitiveness as a production destination, and contribute to job creation in one of the country’s most promising creative industries.”

Conversations at the Youth Month event, where the cohorts were unveiled, bordered on the deployment of regulatory frameworks and specialised initiatives in triggering skill development, career mobility and the country’s global competitiveness as a production haven. 

According to Lebogang Maile, Gauteng MEC for Education, Sports, Arts, Culture and Recreation, who also graced the event: “The creative industries have enormous potential to create jobs, stimulate economic growth and unlock opportunities for young people. Programmes such as ScreenCraft Pathways demonstrate what is possible when government and industry work together with a shared purpose. By opening doors to meaningful workplace experience and skills development, we are empowering the next generation of storytellers and contributing to a more inclusive and dynamic creative economy”.

More information on the next round of ScreenCraft Pathways will be announced in due course.

The post Netflix Announces 14 Young South African Creatives For Inaugural ScreenCraft Pathway Cohort first appeared on Afrocritik.

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.

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