For centuries, the connection between Black people on and off the continent of Africa has been complex, bound up in a painful history of slavery, separation and, at times, suspicion. Yet the relationship has also thrived.
In 1964, Malcolm X visited Ghana. In a speech at a university there, he said: “I don’t feel that I am a visitor in Ghana or in any part of Africa. I feel that I am at home. I’ve been away for 400 years, but not of my own volition, not of my own will.”
Today, for the booming young population of Africa and its diaspora, the relationship is more direct. There’s a reciprocity of inspiration, fueled by a multitude of creative efforts and propelled by social media platforms like TikTok.
Examples are plenty. Resonant movies like “Black Panther” and majestic portraits by artists like Kehinde Wiley and Omar Victor Diop. Nigeria’s hilarious pulp movies, which are binged in homes across Europe and the Caribbean. And the Afro-Pop songs of Kenya’s Sauti Sol and the Afrobeats sounds of Tems, Burna Boy and Mr Eazi. In 2022 alone, Afrobeats artists were streamed more than 13 billion times on Spotify.
For this project, we spoke to 12 leading creators from Africa and the diaspora, as far afield as Asia, Europe and the United States. They include a two-time Oscar winner and first-time filmmakers, a Michelin star chef and a best-selling author, a fashion designer and an architect, a visual artist and a pop star. For them, Africa is the motherland, the source from which they draw. They are part of the global web of creatives who are making the world more African.
“I don’t separate the Black diaspora from the Blacks on the continent,” the writer Nnedi Okorafor told us. “I speak about Blacks, globally, collectively. For many years, that was my personal definition of the Black diaspora: every Black person on the planet.”
Carter, 63, was the first Black person to win an Oscar in the costuming category, for the 2018 film “Black Panther.” When she took home her second Academy Award in March, for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” she also became the first person to win for both an original movie and its sequel.
Wakanda, the world of the “Black Panther” films, is a fictional African kingdom, reimagined without the footprint of colonization. Carter borrowed from Indigenous cultures across the continent for her designs: Buyers during pre-production sourced tribal artifacts including Dogon masks from Mali, Himba crowns from Namibia, Maasai beading from Kenya and stacked neck rings worn by Ndebele women from South Africa. Carter also drew inspiration from contemporary African fashion designers such as Laduma Ngxokolo, the founder of the South African knitwear brand MaXhosa Africa, and the Ghanaian British tailor Ozwald Boateng, and scouted streetwear at the Afropunk music festival in Johannesburg to see new trends firsthand.
