The Section
Culture.
Art, music, fashion, film and literature — the creators, traditions and movements giving shape to Africa’s most exciting cultural moment.
Issue 07 · May–June 2025
Culture · Heritage
Threads of Memory: The Quiet Revival of Indigenous Textile
From the Sahel to the southern coastlines, a quiet revolution is underway. Farmers, engineers and policymakers are rewriting the continent’s response to a warming planet — and the rest of the world is finally taking notes.
By Amara Diop · 9 min read
Latest Dispatches
Cities
Urban Futures: Designing Smarter African Cities
As populations swell from Accra to Addis Ababa, a new generation of architects and planners is reimagining what an African metropolis can be — denser, greener, and rooted in the rhythms of its people.
May 10, 2025
·
6 min read
Policy
Inside the African Union's Climate Finance Push
May 12, 2025
·
5 min
Cities
Lagos at Twilight: Mapping a Megacity's Next Decade
May 10, 2025
·
6 min
Education
Reimagining the Classroom from Dakar to Dar es Salaam
May 8, 2025
·
4 min
Health
Community Clinics Quietly Rewriting Public Health
May 5, 2025
·
5 min
In Conversation
"Culture is the only export that grows richer the more we share it. We don't borrow from the past — we are in continuous dialogue with it."
Chimene Nwosu
Policy Scholar, Ikodi Fellow
Most Read in Ikodi
- How Rwanda Became a Quiet Climate Laboratory
- The Quiet Power of Africa's Women Mayors
- Why the Sahel's Future is a Story of Water
- Inside the Pan-African Movement for Open Data
The Ikodi Brief
A weekly read on the ideas shaping Africa.
Curated dispatches every Sunday. Free. No noise.
"Happiness is a choice. So is the culture we choose to keep alive — and the new culture we choose to make."
— From the Editor’s Letter
Inside Culture
Ikodi · By the Numbers
54
Countries Covered
120+
Contributors
07
Print Issues
1.2M
Monthly Readers
Voices of Ikodi
"The continent's future will be written in policy as much as in protest."
Dr. Naima Okafor
"Africa's youth aren't waiting for a seat at the table — they're building new ones."
Kwame Adjei
"Climate justice is not abstract here. It is harvest, water, home."
Amara Diop
The Print Edition
Hold the conversation in your hands.
Each quarter, the Ikodi section is reimagined for print — 148 pages of long-form reporting, original photography and essays from across the continent. Collectible, archival, and crafted to last.
- 148 pages
- Original photo essays
- Quarterly delivery
- Archival paper stock
- The Ikodi Podcast
Conversations with the continent's quiet builders.
Weekly long-form interviews with the policymakers, founders and artists shaping Africa’s next chapter — hosted by Amara Diop.
42 episodes · Weekly
- The Long Read
A History of the Sahel, Told Through its Rivers.
A 12,000-word essay tracing four centuries of trade, faith and resilience along the waterways that still bind the region together — and the climate threats redrawing its maps.
38 min read