Away from Africa

Belatedly, a post about Vickie Fremont's exhibition at HIFA in Harare, Zimbabwe. This exhibition took place from May 1 to May 6, 2018, under the title “Birds of Freedom”, as part of the 18th edition of the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA), which will run under the theme “We Count”. Vickie Frémont , as we know from various articles and blog posts, "has been conducting workshops around the world, using a hands-on approach for the transformation of rejects or trash into useful everyday objects. Her workshops... take place in schools, community centers, universities, and even in commercial malls. They include lectures on the destructive effects that trash of every kind has on the environment and on climate change. She has conducted her workshops using recycled materials at The Fashion Institute of Technology, Vickie Fremont at HIFA The Bank Street School for Children, The Henry Street Settlement in New York City,...

Two tables, one design, by Lilikpó The Viaduc des Arts in the twelfth arrondissement in Paris now houses cafés and chic shops, including the Lilikpó workshop managed by Sika Viagbo. Walking by, the first thing you notice is the originality and the beauty of the creations through the store window. It's a workshop visible from the street: the designer, Sika Viagbo, works on her creations in front of passersby eyes. Before starting her own company, she worked with Pierre Mesguich (Paris), an internationally known mosaic designer, who has worked all over the world. Sika also interned separately in Tokyo and in China. The company's name means "cloud" in Ewé, one of the languages spoken in Togo, where her parents immigrated from. Her own design influences are multicultural, inspired by her travels and experience. How did Sika get started in this profession? She grew up in Vitry sur Seine, a Paris suburb. As a music major at the University of St. Denis P...

Zuri dresses in San Francisco Thanks to the internet, and the global economy, Made in Africa fashion is becoming more mainstream than ever before. Two partners had a hit on their hands when they designed and produced one simple dress, in a variety of African print fabrics:  Zuri. The company has been featured in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle , among other publications. Zuri has a brick and mortar shop in New York City, but San Francisco residents got a first taste at the pop up shop, in October 2017. The dresses' reputation caught the attention of Eden Stein, owner of Secession Art and Design . Usually only local designers are featured, but her customers were clamoring for the dresses. A Zuri dress in the Secession store window In her words:  " I was at a gala for Artspan , mingling with 800 emerging and established artists, when I saw artist Soad A. Kader in her Zuri dress. I beelined to give her a compliment. She told me about a ...

Photo courtesy of Suzanne Lehn Boukary Konaté , 1977 (?) - September 2017 He left us much too soon. Around early 2009, as I was still new on Twitter, I looked for Africa-centric communities and found  Global Voices , and then Claire Ulrich , Anna Gueye , and finally Boukary Konaté  from Bamako, Mali. We became quite friendly - albeit online - and I admired his desire to further his own education as well as promote and safeguard Malian culture, and bring the internet to rural areas. A group of his online friends, led by First World Music 's Akenataa Hammagaadji, in New York, sent him a solar backpack for that purpose. Boukary was a teacher in a Bamako high school. He wrote one of the rare blogs in Bambara, in fact one of the rare blogs in any African language in general: Fasokan . The blog won a Bobs (Best of the Blogs) award in 2012. In 2014, he created a blog and Facebook page called " Quand le Village se réveille " (When the village awakes), that showcased t...

Thanks to the professional social networking platform, LinkedIn, I connected with Joël Roux, General Director of CFAO Technology Cameroon. Later, during a stay in Douala, I had the pleasure of meeting him in person. Many of us wonder about the information technology and especially web access capacity of Sub-Saharan Africa. A while back, I wrote about IBM in Africa but was still searching for more in-depth information. Mr. Roux kindly accepted my request for an interview. Of course, he, also, is bound by his organization's confidentiality clauses, but he offered some additional insight. Joël Roux in his Douala office First of all, what is CFAO and its history? Formerly known as SCOA, the company was founded in 1881 in St. Louis, Senegal. It used to be a trading company  between Africa and France. It was renamed CFAO in 1887. In the meantime the company grew to be a multinational conglomerate represented in 34 African countries, 7 French overseas territories, Vietnam and ...

These past months, I read five novels, all written in the last ten years by African women from different English-speaking countries/regions. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf Doubleday, 2013) Ghana Must Go  by Taiye Selasi (New York Penguin Press, 2013) Behold the Dreamers  by Imbolo Mbue (Penguin Random House, 2016) Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Penguin Random House, 2016) The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) They were all interesting and engrossing, and cover a large swath of issues, especially the relationship between Africa and the United States of America (more directly in three of the novels).     Americanah and Ghana Must Go both feature protagonists who live and/or have lived in the United States and in their African home country, in the United States for a long enough time to have enjoyed American success stories. Americanah describes especially well the tensions in the relationships: betw...

Professor Mark DeLancey Mark Dike DeLancey is an Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the Islamic World Studies Program at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois (USA). He wrote an article within the Cameroon chapter of a soon-to-be-published book about African Architecture (DOM Editions), which is how I heard of him (I had written and compiled information for the chapter). As I got to know him via Facebook, I became curious about his background, as he appeared to have extensive ties to Africa in general and Cameroon in particular, beyond his academic specialty. Dr. DeLancey was born in South Carolina, USA. His family moved to Cameroon when he was two years old, in 1975. Both mother and father were Professors of African Studies; as Dr. DeLancey recounts it: “They became interested in Africa as a result of being stationed in Buguma for 2 years with the Peace Corps.”   Sir B.M Okororie with  Virgi...