Gazelle Mba

The​ cities most closely associated with modernism – Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich – are all European. A number of recent exhibitions have sought to broaden this geography. Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence, which opened at the V&A in March 2024, considered the incorporation of modernist ideals into the architecture of postcolonial South Asia and West Africa....

In​ 2009 the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered a TED talk called ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, which addressed the unflattering stereotype of Africans in Western media and literature – what she called a ‘single story’ of half-truths and ‘incomplete’ tales. Adichie’s account recalled Binyavanga Wainaina’s seminal essay...

In the early hours​ of 10 September last year, Hauwa woke to discover water pooling beneath her bed. She attempted to stem the flow by stuffing bits of cloth in the gap under the door, but it continued to pour in. People outside were shouting, waking up her five young children. Hauwa couldn’t get all of them out of the house together, but some neighbours came to their aid. Two young...

The sculptor​ Richard Hunt was nineteen years old when he looked into Emmett Till’s casket. It was September 1955. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had called on mourners to witness and grieve for her son and, over three days, thousands of people filed past Till’s body at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side, a short walk...