Nigerian startups Trade Lenda and AirSmat have secured a combined USD 450 K investment from Village Capital’s Africa Ecosystem Catalysts Facility, marking the fund’s entry into Nigeria after backing two Ghanaian startups months earlier.

Trade Lenda, founded by Adeshina Adewumi, is a digital financial services platform that provides business loans, embedded finance, and Sharia-compliant financing to SMEs and farmers. The company says it has supported more than 260,000 customers across five Nigerian geopolitical zones, with women accounting for 66% of its users.

AirSmat, founded by Soji Sanyaolu, is a climate-tech startup that converts agricultural waste into biochar-based fertiliser, improving soil health while generating carbon-market opportunities for farmers. AirSmat will use the funding to complete and commission a commercial factory and expand production.

Africa Fintech Foundry sourced both investments for Village Capital.

The post Nigerian Startups Trade Lenda & AirSmat Secure USD 450 K From Village Capital appeared first on WeeTracker.

Les multiples visages de la création musicale sur le continent africain sont sous le feu des projecteurs. La saison 4 de la série Y’Africa est sortie il y a quelques jours sur les plateformes Trace Urban. Après les artistes et les sportifs, la série part cette fois à la rencontre des musiciens africains. Y’Africa dresse le portrait de 18 d’entre eux, venus du Rwanda, du Sénégal, du Maroc, du Cameroun ou encore du Ghana, et montre qu’il n’y a pas une mais bien des scènes émergentes africaines. Dan Assayag est le réalisateur de la série.  

Mamadi Doumbouya a reçu ce vendredi 12 juin 2026 l’homme d’affaires nigérian Aliko Dangote. La visite de l’homme le plus riche d’Afrique (fortune estimée à 36,7 milliards de dollars) s’inscrit dans une dynamique de coopération économique dans un contexte où il cherche à étendre les actions de sa raffinerie hors des frontières nigérianes. Avec le projet Simandou 2040, Conakry joue la carte de séduction vis-à-vis des hommes d’affaires.

Guinée : Aliko Dangote chez Mamadi Doumbouya

Cette nouvelle rencontre intervient après une première tenue à Conakry en janvier 2025. Le président guinéen a également eu des échanges avec l’homme d’affaires Dangote en marge du sommet économique Africa Forward au Kenya. Le retour de Dangote à Conakry témoigne de la bonne évolution dans les discussions entre les deux parties. Selon la présidence de la République guinéenne, cette rencontre « témoigne de la confiance grandissante entre la Guinée et l’un des plus puissants groupes industriels du continent ».

Lire aussi : Guinée : Mamadi Doumbouya élu Président au premier tour des élections

Au cœur des échanges, les deux hommes ont abordé des sujets par rapport à des domaines stratégiques. Les hydrocarbures, l’agriculture, l’énergie, les services financiers et l’industrialisation ont meublé les discussions. Ces secteurs d’activité occupent une place de choix dans la vision économique de Conakry, vision portée par le vaste projet Simandou 2040. « Aujourd’hui, la Guinée ne se contente plus d’exporter ses ressources. Elle ambitionne de les transformer en leviers de croissance durable, de souveraineté économique et de prospérité partagée », a indiqué la Présidence.

Après la période transitoire qui a suivi le coup d’État contre Alpha Condé, la Guinée a retrouvé progressivement sa stabilité. Un facteur qui pèse dans la mise en place d’un environnement sain et favorable pour les investissements privés. Le pays veut donc déployer tout son potentiel pour capter les meilleurs partenariats pour se positionner « comme l’une des destinations économiques les plus prometteuses du continent ».

Lire aussi : Nigéria : le choix d’Aliko Dangote qui change tout

Avec des partenaires privés de la trempe d’Aliko Dangote, magnat du ciment et du pétrole, la Guinée veut bâtir des partenariats durables capables de stimuler l’emploi et de créer la richesse. Toutefois, Mamadi Doumbouya met l’accent sur la nécessité d’avoir des partenariats équilibrés et « mutuellement bénéfiques ».

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.

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.

Ghana turns 69 today and the country has every reason to celebrate. On 6th March 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from colonial rule — a moment so significant it did not just belong to Ghana, it belonged to the entire African continent. The independence movement that started in Accra inspired nations from Lagos to Nairobi to demand their own freedom, and the ripple effects of that singular moment are still felt across Africa today.

Sixty-nine years on, Ghana is still giving the world so much to be proud of — and music is right at the top of that list. From highlife to hiplife, Afrobeats to Afro-fusion, Ghana has consistently produced sounds that travel far beyond its borders and land on playlists all over the world. So whether you are Ghanaian, Nigerian, or simply a lover of good music, here are five songs that deserve a spot on your playlist this weekend.

Azonto — Fuse ODG ft. Tiffany

We could not make this list without starting here. Azonto is the song that turned a dance move into a global phenomenon and reminded the world that Ghana knew exactly how to have a good time. It is over a decade old and it still works at every single party. A classic for a reason and a forever staple on any Ghana playlist.

Makoma — King Paluta 

King Paluta’s breakthrough song did enormous numbers on streaming platforms and dominated TikTok and Instagram all through 2024. If you have not heard it yet, today is a very good day to fix that. It is the kind of song that makes you want to find out everything else he has ever made.

Sankofa — Gyakie 

Gyakie’s latest track, Sankofa, debuted on the Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart, securing a spot within the Top 50 — which tells you everything you need to know about where she is headed. Jackline Acheampong, who grew up around music through her father, veteran highlife musician Nana Acheampong, has been building steadily and Sankofa is her most compelling work yet. Beautiful, intentional and very much worth your time.

Jejereje — Stonebwoy 

Stonebwoy’s Jejereje was one of the most talked-about songs in Ghana in 2024, smooth guitar work sitting alongside heavy cultural drums that make the whole thing completely irresistible. It is the song you put on when you want the weekend to feel like it means something.

WOTOWOTO SEASONING — Black Sherif ft. ODUMODUBLVCK 

This standout collaboration between Black Sherif and Nigerian rapper ODUMODUBLVCK became a West African anthem that crossed every border it met. Ghana and Nigeria on one track, doing what West Africa does best. The perfect note to end the list on.

The post From Azonto to Wotowoto Seasoning — Five Ghanaian Songs to Celebrate Ghana at 69 appeared first on BellaNaija - Showcasing Africa to the world. Read today!.

Ghana turns 69 today and the country has every reason to celebrate. On 6th March 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from colonial rule — a moment so significant it did not just belong to Ghana, it belonged to the entire African continent. The independence movement that started in Accra inspired nations from Lagos to Nairobi to demand their own freedom, and the ripple effects of that singular moment are still felt across Africa today.

Sixty-nine years on, Ghana is still giving the world so much to be proud of — and music is right at the top of that list. From highlife to hiplife, Afrobeats to Afro-fusion, Ghana has consistently produced sounds that travel far beyond its borders and land on playlists all over the world. So whether you are Ghanaian, Nigerian, or simply a lover of good music, here are five songs that deserve a spot on your playlist this weekend.

Azonto — Fuse ODG ft. Tiffany

We could not make this list without starting here. Azonto is the song that turned a dance move into a global phenomenon and reminded the world that Ghana knew exactly how to have a good time. It is over a decade old and it still works at every single party. A classic for a reason and a forever staple on any Ghana playlist.

Makoma — King Paluta 

King Paluta’s breakthrough song did enormous numbers on streaming platforms and dominated TikTok and Instagram all through 2024. If you have not heard it yet, today is a very good day to fix that. It is the kind of song that makes you want to find out everything else he has ever made.

Sankofa — Gyakie 

Gyakie’s latest track, Sankofa, debuted on the Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart, securing a spot within the Top 50 — which tells you everything you need to know about where she is headed. Jackline Acheampong, who grew up around music through her father, veteran highlife musician Nana Acheampong, has been building steadily and Sankofa is her most compelling work yet. Beautiful, intentional and very much worth your time.

Jejereje — Stonebwoy 

Stonebwoy’s Jejereje was one of the most talked-about songs in Ghana in 2024, smooth guitar work sitting alongside heavy cultural drums that make the whole thing completely irresistible. It is the song you put on when you want the weekend to feel like it means something.

WOTOWOTO SEASONING — Black Sherif ft. ODUMODUBLVCK 

This standout collaboration between Black Sherif and Nigerian rapper ODUMODUBLVCK became a West African anthem that crossed every border it met. Ghana and Nigeria on one track, doing what West Africa does best. The perfect note to end the list on.

The post From Azonto to Wotowoto Seasoning — Five Ghanaian Songs to Celebrate Ghana at 69 appeared first on BellaNaija - Showcasing Africa to the world. Read today!.

Lors du conseil des ministres de mercredi 25 février 2025, le gouvernement togolais a adopté un projet de loi au sujet du patrimoine national. L’idée est de réviser l’actuelle loi qui date de 1990 afin de l’adapter aux réalités de la société actuelle. Le nouveau texte qui sera soumis au gouvernement, comporte des innovations comme …

L’article Togo : Une loi sur le patrimoine immatériel et les droits des créateurs en étude est apparu en premier sur Africa Top Success.

Depuis février 2026, Lil Wayne et Birdman semblent avoir définitivement tourné la page de leur long conflit public et judiciaire. Bien que leur relation ait été marquée par des années de tensions extrêmes, les deux figures emblématiques de « Cash Money Records » ont officiellement décidé d’enterrer définitivement la hache de guerre. Himra: le rappeur envisage d’arrêter …

L’article Showbiz : Lil Wayne et Birdman veulent faire définitivement la paix est apparu en premier sur Africa Top Success.

Wisdom Dotsé qui a animé des émissions, révélé des artistes et formé des journalistes-animateurs sur Radio Métropolys pendant plusieurs années, n’est plus de ce monde. Le décès de l’animateur-radio et acteur très engagé de la culture togolaise a été annoncé ce lundi 22 décembre. LIRE AUSSI : Kiko parle de ses blessures à travers son …

L’article Carnet noir : La presse togolaise pleure le confrère Wisdom Dotse est apparu en premier sur Africa Top Success.

Kiko a récemment produit un album de 14 titres intitulé  » Bleus  » qui est actuellement le chénopode blanc des médias togolais et les plateformes de téléchargement. Avant même la sortie de ce document sonore de l’ancien membre du groupe Get Ready Gang, Santrinos Raphaël est entré en clash avec lui sur les réseaux sociaux. …

L’article Togo showbiz : Peewii répond à un tacle de Santrinos sur Kiko est apparu en premier sur Africa Top Success.

Chanteur algérien à la voix éraillée, Nedjim Bouizzoul, leader du groupe Labess, propose un gypsy-chaâbi au son influencé par tous les voyages de sa vie. Lui qui a parcouru le Maghreb, l'Europe de l'Est, le Canada et la Colombie s'est laissé toucher par les sonorités flamenco, rumba, mais aussi les musiques manouches. Ses mélodies de guitare, tantôt mélancoliques, tantôt euphoriques, ont résonné cet été au Festival Nuits d'Afrique de Montréal.

Ce dimanche 31 août 2025, l’esplanade du Palais de la Culture de Treichville accueillera Sindika pour un concert exceptionnel. Le rappeur ivoirien, figure montante du rap ivoire mêlé à la drill, promet une performance intense et mémorable à ses fans. Un spectacle à haute tension Dans une récente interview, Sindika a annoncé la couleur : …

L’article Sindika en concert le 31 août 2025 à Abidjan : un show explosif en perspective est apparu en premier sur Africa Top Success.

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

By Chimezie Chika 

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Joseph Jonathan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fondé en 2006 au Mali par Damon Albarn, pop star britannique des groupes Blur et Gorillaz, le collectif Africa Express revient avec un nouvel album ambitieux, intitulé Bahidorá.

La 39e édition du Festival international Nuits d'Afrique se termine ce dimanche 20 juillet à Montréal. Treize jours de concerts ont rassemblé près de 700 artistes africains, d'Amérique latine et des Antilles. Des sonorités traditionnelles aux fêtes technos en passant par des cours de danse ouverts à tous, la richesse culturelle de cet événement a transporté le public en voyage tout autour du monde.

In November 2021, thousands of artifacts were destroyed in a fire at the National Museum of Gungu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Four years later, the Sudan National Museum met a similar fate, as tens of thousands of artifacts were either destroyed or shipped off to be sold when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized the country's capital. In other parts of the continent, like Ghana and Nigeria, archival documents and records are being improperly stored or are already deteriorating.

While the knee-jerk answer to these setbacks has mostly been a surge of creators digitally preserving African history and culture — from Fu'ad Lawal's Archivi.ng to Juliana Oduro's Vintage African Women to Rwanda Archives to Decolonising the Archive — creators like Kofi Iddrisu are now playing vital roles in archiving both digitally and physically.

Founded in 2020 solely as an Instagram page, Iddrisu's project ArchiveAfrica has attained a global audience of over 200,000 followers, a growing digital store of over 1,800 photos, videos, and documents, as well as partnerships with institutions like the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Oxford Afro Caribbean Society, 154 Art Fair, amongst others. What started as a personal project for Kofi to post images, whether submitted by followers or sourced across the continent, gradually evolved into an audio-visual archive curated to enable university students, historians, art enthusiasts, and cultural workers to utilize it without worrying about payment or subscription.

"Before now, it was very difficult to find a giant archive of African history and art that isn't behind a paywall or hidden in some Western university's library," Kofi tells OkayAfrica. Now, students and academics can access this freely.

Kofi, born Kofi Nana Oduro Iddrisu in North West London, has always been fascinated by his African roots. His parents ensured that he spent his formative years in Accra, prioritizing African history and culture at home while he was schooling in the UK. "It was easy to lose connection when you are in the diaspora," he explains.

It was when he moved back to Ghana in 2020 to further his medical studies that the brainwave for ArchiveAfrica started. His siblings, Kanchelli Iman and Charney Iddrisu supported the project and played a crucial role in curating the page. They later went on to establish respective projects focusing on Black-owned businesses and the cinema industry.

Now in its fifth year, ArchiveAfrica is expanding to create a physical archival space in Accra, enhancing preservation and accessibility. Kofi says that one of the reasons for this is the unreliability of social media pages. Instagram, a common platform used by photographers, archivists, cultural workers, and models to share ideas, has been deactivating accounts without warning or explanation.

"If the goal of our work is preservation, we need a medium that is permanent," Kofi states. "How can we transfer this massive social media following and condense it into actual physical space?"

The plan for the museum's construction is underway. The museum will be dedicated to the royal history of Ghana's Upper West region and will also house a library and writer's retreat in Accra. This will create a space for archival research, literature, and creative work that fosters deeper engagement with African history and storytelling.

While there are existing physical archives in Ghana, such as the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) created in 1997, Kofi laments that these archives are at risk of deterioration. For the museum project, he has made a GoFundMe page for donors to support construction and maintenance. But there are challenges.

"Nowadays, funding is so precarious, so while we don't have long-standing paid staff on our list yet, we have received numerous offers to volunteer from different countries," Kofi says. He envisions the museum to house a mix of audio-visual, textual, and tactile materials.

The fundraiser has raised only £865 ($1,177) of its £60,000 ($81,693) target, but this initial success has prompted the architects to begin planning the site. While the crowdfunding goal may appear ambitious, Kofi stresses that this is an early-stage project where raising awareness is essential for attracting both institutional and individual support. He is actively pursuing partnerships and exploring alternative funding approaches with diverse organizations, including Mubi UK, 154 Art Fair, and the British High Commission.

Once the museum is established in Accra, Kofi plans to expand to other countries on the continent and beyond: "We are hoping for a permanent space in different African countries and multiple spaces in the diaspora to support the next batch of cultural workers in terms of giving access to spaces and encouraging networking."

"The overarching goal is to have a physical location where the average African person can walk through the doors, borrow a book or photography collection, go home, do research, and return it," he says.

AfroFuture, the dynamic celebration of African culture, music, and innovation, is making its long-awaited U.S. debut in Detroit this August. In partnership with Bedrock, the festival has announced a two-week series of immersive, community-driven events leading up to the main event on August 16 - 17, 2025, at the Douglass Site.

Titled The Road to Detroit, the pre-festival programming aims to energize the city while connecting the African diaspora. Running from August 11 through August 28, these events will spotlight Detroit’s rich Black cultural landscape, combining culinary experiences, nightlife, tech innovation, cinema, and live performance.

Kicking things off is the AfroFuture Countdown Bar Crawl taking place from August 11 - 15. Here, festival-goers can sip custom cocktails at some of Detroit’s most iconic venues, such as the Hush Harbor, The Vinyl Society, and Paramita Sound, all while unlocking exclusive rewards like VIP passes and limited-edition merch.

Food lovers can indulge in Taste of Detroit Restaurant Week (August 11 - 18), which offers curated prix-fixe menus and chef demos at standout Black-owned restaurants such as Ivy Kitchen, Kola Lounge, and Salt + Ko.

Innovation takes center stage on August 13 with Diaspora Connect: Innovation For Global Black Futures, a pitch competition hosted by Black Tech Saturdays and Venture 313. Finalists will compete for up to $10,000 in equity-free funding in categories like digital culture, creative industries, and community development. The event will take place at TechThree in Midtown and is free to attend with an RSVP.

On August 14, poetry lovers can immerse themselves in poetry me, please – A Diasporic Spoken Word Experience at the historic Willis Show Bar. Featuring musicians and spoken word artists from across the diaspora, the night promises to be intimate and deeply moving.

Every Thursday throughout August, Afrocentric Movie Nights will take place at Lowkey Cinema, featuring screenings of films like Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, the Ethiopian post-apocalyptic sci-fi romance film, Crumb, and radical intersectional feminist Lizzie Borden’s dystopian docu-fiction drama, Born in Flames.

On August 15, the festival taps into Black music history with Samples n’ Friends X AfroFuture Experience, a communal celebration of samples, trivia, and karaoke spotlighting AfroFuture artists, Afrobeats, and Motown classics.

To round things off, a lineup of official pre- and after-parties will keep Detroit buzzing all weekend, with events like the Jerk x Jollof Pre-Party, Obi’s House, Toasted Life, and PVO.

“Bringing AfroFuture to Detroit isn’t just about launching a festival — it’s about building a cultural movement long before the first stage is set,” said Abdul Karim Abdullah, AfroFuture CEO & Co-Founder. “AfroFuture Detroit and its leadup events will honor the deep ties between the city and the African diaspora, amplify diverse voices, and foster and strengthen meaningful connections.”

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