London’s revitalized and reimagined Africa Centre, which opened in June, boasts a starkly Afro-futurist character: a black exterior accented with confident vermilions and golds, and a plush interior warm with the taupes and saffrons of the African landscape.



BY ALASTAIR HAGGER



THE MOST ENJOYABLE PERIOD WAS WHEN seeds were germinating,” wrote Kenneth Kaunda in his autobiography, fondly remembering life as a young man on the family farm. “All this meant real hard work, but it was all my own and I simply loved it.”



In 1964, the year he became Zambia’s first president, Kaunda opened The Africa Centre in London’s Covent Garden, described by regular patron Desmond Tutu as a hub of cultural activity for “all who are Africans, and all those who have a care for the interests of the continent and its people”.



Opened as a charity in an 18th-century building with a lease gifted by the Catholic Church, the Centre became an incubator for the propagation and exchange of intellectual and creative dynamism; together politicians, writers, and artists enjoyed fierce political debate alongside theater productions, parties, dancers and the best African food the capital had to offer.



The Centre blossomed over the decades, adapting symbiotically with its mother continent’s evolution like a hardy perennial. In the 1970s, the Centre became, in its own words, “a vital instrument for the multiple voices of liberation during the struggles for independence on the continent”.



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<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="918" height="642" data-id="55887" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.36.04.png" alt="" class="wp-image-55887" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.36.04.png 918w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.36.04-300x210.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.36.04-768x537.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 918px) 100vw, 918px" /></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="796" height="432" data-id="55888" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.36.10.png" alt="" class="wp-image-55888" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.36.10.png 796w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.36.10-300x163.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.36.10-768x417.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 796px) 100vw, 796px" /><figcaption>Photos by Felix Speller and Randeric Bishop</figcaption></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="748" height="514" data-id="55889" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.35.57.png" alt="" class="wp-image-55889" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.35.57.png 748w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.35.57-300x206.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 748px) 100vw, 748px" /><figcaption>Photos by Felix Speller and Randeric Bishop</figcaption></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1838" height="668" data-id="55890" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.35.51.png" alt="" class="wp-image-55890" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.35.51.png 1838w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.35.51-300x109.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.35.51-1024x372.png 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.35.51-768x279.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-10-at-13.35.51-1536x558.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1838px) 100vw, 1838px" /><figcaption>Photos by Felix Speller and Randeric Bishop</figcaption></figure>
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A decade later it was hosting titans of African music such as Youssou N’Dour, Angélique Kidjo and Salif Keita, and by the 1990s, it was reconfiguring its function in the wider eco-political environment “to promote cultural, economic and socio-political initiatives in Britain and the rest of Europe that assist in the development of Africa”.



It continued to flourish into the new century, but then came the drought: the wilderness decade which began with the Centre’s closure in 2013. “The idea was always to maintain a space that would serve the needs of the intended audience,” says Belvin Tawuya, Head of Digital and Marketing Communications at the Centre.



“But it was becoming expensive to maintain, so there were these conversations around renovation – and the costs associated – or just considering getting a new place altogether.”



The Covent Garden building lease was sold, and with additional funding from Arts Council England, the multi-million pound redevelopment of a new site in Southwark, in the African diaspora-rich south of the city, began in 2015.



The result, a revitalized and reimagined Centre which opened in June, boasting a starkly Afro-futurist character: a black exterior accented with confident vermilions and golds, and a plush interior warm with the taupes and saffrons of the African landscape.



“Ninety percent of the interior elements within the space we actually imported from different parts of Africa,” says Tawuya.



“A phenomenal designer, Tola Ojuolape, has really helped us in identifying incredible artisans from across the continent, and then thinking about how all that could be brought together to create a cohesive but authentic contemporary African interior space.”



The Centre is now a multi-purpose hub featuring a restaurant, event facilitation, a gallery, and a research and education space, which will eventually host live digital learning opportunities for students in Africa. Further development plans include refurbishing one of the 



upper floors as an entrepreneurship nucleus “promoting innovation and ideas, specifically towards that business community looking to invest on the continent”.



Nearly six decades after this seed of hope, solidarity and community was first planted, has The Africa Centre’s self-identity, and its own understanding of its role in the community changed as manifestly as the continent itself?



“I think there’s now more awareness about the need to serve the local community, as much as we remain an organization with international reach,” Tawuya says. “How do we leverage our strength, one of the very few black-led organizations that has its own space, to support others? Particularly amongst the young audience, who might not know about the history of the Centre, but have their own passions now, their own dreams, who need the support and space to be able to express themselves and fulfil their goals and ambitions. We see ourselves taking that position going forward.”

London-Africa-Centre-renovation-domino-6

The Africa Centre in London Flowers Again

TOPLINE The U.K. is working towards dropping mandatory quarantine requirements for fully vaccinated travelers from other countries, transport minister Grant Shapps announced on Friday, a move that follows an earlier rule tweak that had extended the privilege only to fully vaccinated U.K. residents.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h3>



In an&nbsp;<a href="https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-plan-to-allow-vaccinated-expats-into-uk-without-quarantining-to-be-revealed-in-next-couple-of-weeks-12352084" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">interview</a>&nbsp;with Sky News on Friday morning, Shapps said the country’s ministers are “actively working” on proposals that would extend the quarantine exemption to travelers from the so-called “<a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/red-amber-and-green-list-rules-for-entering-england" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">amber list</a>” or medium risk countries if they are fully vaccinated.



While Shapps did not provide a timeline for the implementation of this move, he suggested that people from the European Union—which has a unified digital vaccine passport system—could be granted this exemption before those from the U.S.—where such a system does not exist.



Shapps indicated that the policy would accommodate all vaccines that have been certified by the World Health Organisation, including ones that have not been approved for use in the U.K.



The minister warned that in case of a worsening outbreak, an amber-list country could move to the red list of higher risk nations, meaning all incoming travelers regardless of their vaccination status would be required to quarantine in a government-approved hotel.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND</h3>



The U.K. government is set to lift most of its remaining Covid-19 restrictions on July 19, in what it has&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/uk-looks-set-ease-restrictions-july-19-sun-cites-pm-saying-2021-06-28/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">begun calling</a>&nbsp;“freedom day.” After being forced to delay reopening for a month due to a fresh outbreak fuelled by the more infectious delta variant of the coronavirus, the government led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been steadfast on fully reopening the country later this month. As part of the move, Shapps&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/08/shapps-confirms-no-quarantine-fully-vaccinated-amber-list-returnees-england-covid" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a>&nbsp;on Thursday that British travelers who plan to visit amber list countries will not be required to quarantine on arrival in England if they have been fully vaccinated by the U.K.’s National Health Service. The government considers a person to be fully vaccinated 14-days after they have received their second jab.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-further-reading">FURTHER READING</h3>



<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-plans-scrap-quarantine-non-uk-vaccinated-arrivals-weeks-2021-07-09/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Britain plans to scrap quarantine for non-UK vaccinated arrivals in weeks</a>&nbsp;(Reuters)



<a href="https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-plan-to-allow-vaccinated-expats-into-uk-without-quarantining-to-be-revealed-in-next-couple-of-weeks-12352084" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Plan to allow vaccinated people from abroad into UK without quarantine to be revealed in &#8216;next couple of weeks&#8217;</a> (Sky News)



By Siladitya Ray, Forbes Staff

Views Of Heathrow Airport As The Coronavirus Pandemic Continues

Britain Is Planning To Allow Fully Vaccinated Foreign Travelers To Enter Without Having To Quarantine

Topline England on Monday reported no new deaths from Covid-19 for the time since last March, a positive milestone that comes as the country continues to ease long-lasting lockdown restrictions.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h3>



<a href="https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nation&amp;areaName=England" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Data</a>&nbsp;released by Public Health England Monday afternoon added no new deaths to the country’s toll of 112,245.&nbsp;



Scotland and Northern Ireland also reported no new deaths for Sunday, a streak in the U.K. broken by Wales, which reported four more residents dead from Covid-19 in Monday’s update.&nbsp;



Both Scotland and Northern Ireland have reported zero coronavirus deaths prior to May 10, but this is the first time since March 7 England has hit such a milestone.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-big-number">BIG NUMBER&nbsp;</h3>



126,605. That’s how many people have died from Covid-19 in the U.K. since the start of the pandemic.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND&nbsp;</h3>



England’s 14-month record low for Covid-19 deaths comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to announce Monday the latest round of lockdown easing. The U.K.’s alert level has been lowered from a four to a three, meaning the transmission of coronavirus is no longer deemed to be high or rising exponentially, though it’s still in general circulation. Johnson is expected to announce friends and families can hug and mix indoors starting next week, including in pubs and restaurants, while cinemas, museums and theaters can reopen.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-surprising-fact">SURPRISING FACT&nbsp;</h3>



After hitting a peak of 70,000 cases per day in January, the U.K. is now recording an average of less than 2,000 new daily infections. The bloc of countries have also benefited from one of the world’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">most successful&nbsp;</a>vaccine rollouts, with over a quarter of residents fully vaccinated and more than half fully inoculated.



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/coronavirus/">Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus</a>



By Jemima McEvoy, Forbes Staff

Michael Nardone, who plays D.I Neil McKinven in the BBC

England Reports Zero New Coronavirus Deaths For First Time In 14 Months

Hungry in London with a stomach dreaming of home? From the smoky to the sensory, the city offers distinct African culinary encounters.

The unfussy algorithm of a well-known review website has decided there are 105 ‘African’ restaurants in London. Search for ‘European’ restaurants, and you’ll discover 2,654 – now your gut might be telling you something is amiss in the capital’s gigantic foodscape.
‘European food’ seems rather a strange and empty phrase (bouillabaisse and chips, anyone?), but an equivalent suspicion of categorization seems not to apply to dishes from Africa, a continent boasting 54 countries to Europe’s 50. London may indeed be aggressively cosmopolitan, but it might be a while before this ravenous city can really consider itself fully ‘woke’.
Thankfully, word-of-mouth is still a solidly reliable guide to the thousands of eateries in the city, so let this small slice of recommended eats from the African continent – Ghanaian, Senegalese and South African – serve as a modest appetizer, should you find yourself hungry in London with a stomach dreaming of home.
“For me, it should be seamless – the tradition is in the flavor profile of the dish,” says Zoe Adjonyoh, author of Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen, of the challenge of reinventing Ghanaian flavors for a new audience.
“The reinterpreting is in the creativity of how to rebuild the dish through different cooking methods, or blending its inherent ingredients in new ways.” Try her ‘Suya Cauliflower Florets’, featuring the smoky notes of the Nigerian and Ghanaian suya spice blend, by way of tasty example.
<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/entrepreneurs/2018/10/22/the-foodies-with-a-drive-for-business/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Foodies With A Drive For Business</a>
Through her increasingly popular pop-ups and residencies, Adjonyoh tries to avoid “preaching or teaching” what Ghanaian food should or shouldn’t be.
“I’m highlighting what’s possible, and giving people the motivation to do more with these amazing flavors and ingredients to maximize their taste and longevity,” she says. The cookbook features “traditional Ghanaian recipes remixed for the modern kitchen”.

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“I’m very keen to champion and promote the next generation of female chefs cooking cuisines from across Africa,” she says. “I see it as part of my challenge and responsibility to keep encouraging them to fall in love with their heritage again through food, and tell their own cultural stories – to be the masters and makers of this food revolution.”
A short bus ride through East London brings us to Little Baobab, a monthly food and music pop-up above a vibrant corner grocery in Hackney. It’s a bright late afternoon, and Senegalese chef Khadim Mbamba is making his ‘Lamb Mafe’ – lamb in a tomato and peanut sauce (a traditional base sauce in Senegal), with rice and salad. It is creamy and tangy-sweet; hearty, but fresh on the palate. He makes me a gift of a home-made chilli paste that celebrates the spice’s medicinal punch but marries perfectly with the roasted umami of the nut gravy.
The events are themselves a marriage of music and food; guests share starters, and then choose from ‘Thiebou Dienne’ (fish casserole), ‘Chicken Yassa’ (chicken with onions and olives), ‘Lamb Mafe’, or ‘Vegetarian Thiou’ (tomato-based vegetable stew). Mbamba’s band – he plays bass – rounds out the sensory smorgasbord while the guests tuck in. It’s an experience close to Mbamba’s heart, full of the joy of community so integral to the Senegalese culinary encounter.
“There is a lot of soul in our food,” he says. “The love you have, making the dish – when people eat that dish, they will feel that love.” Little Baobab began life as a restaurant, with live music every night, but Mbamba and his team are now focussed on pop-ups and catering (especially for weddings).
Westward now towards the financial center, and Etienne Pansegrauw’s Hammer &amp; Tongs braai restaurant in Farringdon. Braai dishes seem perfectly suited to British culture: the locals crave an evolved barbecue civilization of their own, but wage constant war with a climate that seems hell-bent on wrecking any carefully-planned Sunday afternoon cook-out. What better, then, than letting a South African do it all for you?
Pansegrauw, from South Africa’s Eastern Cape, has invested in state-of-the-art extractors that allow chef Rodrigo Navarro to prepare a succulent array of locally-sourced fresh meats, vegetables and seafood on fires fed with sickle bush wood imported from Namibia.
This elevates the food to much more than barbecue (indeed, South Africans might argue that braai and barbecue are not the same thing at all; that the braai is closer to something like a cultural state of mind). ‘Mutton Chops in Cape Malay Curry’ are tender and sweetly charred; ‘Prawns with Lime Salt’ are juicy and moreish; and ‘Pork Belly with Apple Cider Compote’ gains most from the sickle bush smoke, the layers of pork fat richly infused with the fragrant nuttiness of the wood. The surprise star of the menu, though, is the ‘Honey Fried Carrots with Chilli’ – the plump, crunchy carrots are cooked in honey before being finished on the grill, giving them a caramelized meatiness equal in textural complexity to anything fish or flesh. These are the big, bold flavors of the camp fire, but prepared with panache and an attention to the subtle combinations of flavor and aroma that are the hallmark of great grill cooking.
“If you go back five years, even, if you had opened up a wood fire place, I don’t think that many people would have gone,” says Pansegrauw. “So the timing has been important. I wanted to see if British people would be receptive to this kind of food; that’s why I opened up in an area near the city, rather than South West London for example, which has a large South African community. For every group of 20 Brits that come, there’s usually one South African that drags them here! But then they all come back.”
Our final destination is two miles west, but a galaxy away. Ikoyi is the first ‘African’ restaurant in London to have earned a coveted Michelin star, but the continental label seems even more incongruous here – the irony is that the Ikoyi concept plays with the African association as readily as it flirts with the aesthetics of costume design, science fiction and pop art. This thrilling challenge to expectations is almost an affront – one isn’t completely sure if the menu, and the intensity of its creators, Jeremy Chan and Iré Hassan-Odukale, isn’t just some bizarre but delicious practical joke (chef Chan likens his food in the press pack to the paintings of Mark Rothko, a correlation that some will think pretentious &#8211; I found it endearingly ballsy and appropriate).
The ‘Plantain, Raspberry &amp; Smoked Scotch Bonnet’ starter is like something from an Eiko Ishioka fantasy costume sketch: there is a magenta slash of plantain, encrusted with a tart-sour raspberry salt, and a saffron-yellow quenelle of citrusy chilli mayonnaise. The plantain is dense and sugary, the raspberry salt reminiscent of a child’s fizzing candy powder, but with a bass note from the emulsion of Scotch Bonnet warmth. It’s odd, exhilarating and a little bit Star Trek – you might be served this if you were an alien ambassador at a private function on the USS Enterprise.
“The dishes have to lure you in,” says Chan. “You have to look at the dish and think – I want to destroy that! So, for example, a pork chop that looks more like a pig than the animal did – a cartoon version of itself. It’s about aesthetics and deliciousness, but unified. This dish is your kill, your prize!”
<div id="attachment_37673" style="width: 750px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37673" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-37673 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ikoyi-Jeremy-and-Iré-photo-by-P.A-Jorgensen.jpg" alt="" width="740" height="987" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ikoyi-Jeremy-and-Iré-photo-by-P.A-Jorgensen.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ikoyi-Jeremy-and-Iré-photo-by-P.A-Jorgensen-300x400.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ikoyi-Jeremy-and-Iré-photo-by-P.A-Jorgensen-600x800.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ikoyi-Jeremy-and-Iré-photo-by-P.A-Jorgensen-225x300.jpg 225w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ikoyi-Jeremy-and-Iré-photo-by-P.A-Jorgensen-768x1024.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" />Ikoyi Jeremy and Iré. Photo by P.A Jorgensen</div>
Childhood friends Chan and Hassan-Odukale were inspired to open the restaurant by a visit to Lagos (Chan is from the north-west of England, Hassan-Odukale is Nigerian-born), but Chan insists that these are “purposely not Nigerian dishes. They have to be completely innovative. That’s the rule”.
The ‘Smoked Jollof Rice’ is a sensuous love song to the crab – the perfect al dente rice has been cooked in a crab broth, and is finished with an unctuous crab cream; the entire crustacean is used in the preparation. It’s sophisticated comfort food, demonstrating Chan’s instinctive understanding that juxtapositions tradition and experimentation at the core of everything good emerging from 21st century multiculturalism.
“The dishes have to be driven by a creative interpretation of the ingredients,” says Chan, in a suitably enigmatic coda to a week of great eating from Africa. “It’s about a primal connection with the guest. Everything is stripped of any preconceptions.”
&#8211; By Alastair Haggar

Khadim-Mbamba-from-Little-Baobab

Taking A Bite Out Of Africa

Africa Writes, the Royal African Society’s annual literature festival, dwelt on Afrofuturism and where black British artists see themselves in the burgeoning new aesthetic.

June fries itself to an end; London is sticky with the combustible residue of unseasonable heat, lager, and irrational, tabloid-whipped World Cup optimism. It’s too absurd to be an African summer; temperatures above 30 degrees are tearfully embraced, red-raw and half-naked, by the English, with a stunned but gleeful alacrity at the entrance of a jolly, party-starting relative believed long-dead.
A hundred and fourteen years earlier, the Sierra Leonean writer A.B.C. Merriman-Labor, astonished to discover the religious void in the heart of the greatest metropolis on earth, sends a letter home from London in which he decides, with horror and affection, that “the Britons are barbarians and heathens”.
This motif of seeing – by Africans of the British and of British Africans of themselves – is one of the more urgent themes of 2018’s Africa Writes event, the Royal African Society’s annual literature festival. Merriman-Labor’s biographer for An African in Imperial London, Danell Jones, is discussing ‘African Literary Figures in Georgian &amp; Edwardian London’ at the British Library with Ade Solanke, author of the play Phillis in London (about the visit to London in 1773 of the “prodigy, poet, celebrity and slave” Phillis Wheatley), and the writer S.I. Martin, who “works with museums, archives and the education sector to bring diverse histories to wider audiences”.
It’s a crackling and challenging panel, with evocative and haunting subjects as its focus. “Forgotten voices have important things to teach us,” says Jones, echoing Solanke’s entreaty for writers to “exhume these stories” and Martin’s to “not enshrine, but internalize”.
Now no longer forgotten, these are ardent tales, tragic and cautionary. Merriman-Labor’s dazzling deconstruction of the contradictions of Edwardian London – its wretched penury cowering at the feet of its titanic opulence – was published in 1909, for which he achieved a degree of literary eminence, but he was to die in poverty at the age of 41, in a state-run hospital for the poor, his legal and artistic careers eviscerated by racism.
<blockquote>“Forgotten voices have important things to teach us,” &#8211; Danell Jones</blockquote>
Wheatley’s patron in Boston – her ‘owner’ (Wheatley had been abducted in Senegambia at the age of seven) – orchestrates the publication of her poetry in London, and she is “plunged into English high society”, but Wheatley dies shortly after her emancipation, at just 31, too poor to publish the second volume of poems that may have saved her. Both Merriman-Labor and Wheatley have vexing facets to their personalities. Is the former an arriviste, as starry-eyed as any narcissistic creative, with fame and adoration beckoning on the horizon of his mind’s eye? Is the latter a malleable apologist, in her poetry, for cultural and religious imperialism? These human beings are complicated; they are impressive. But they are not always likeable.
Which begs the question: how does a writer ‘exhume these stories’ with both compassion and honesty? How can these voices be reanimated, without committing further violations upon their memory, since we can never know how they ever really felt? Even if, as Solanke quotes from William Faulkner, “the past is never dead – it’s not even past”?
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2017/09/29/awesome-awkward-african-night/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Read more: An Awesome, Awkward, African Night</a>
“You know, I’m against that whole redemptive arc of black literature,” says Martin. “Yes, there has to be redemption, but that comes from the reader, through self-examination, rather than the character.”
Solanke agrees. “I don’t want simple people,” she says. “Phillis is problematic. I came close several times to abandoning her story. She wasn’t the Phillis I expected. But it’s actually been transformative for me as a writer. It’s the drama of facts – and then the drama of imagination.”
In An African in Imperial London, Jones places Merriman-Labor at a political march in London which he may or may not have attended – she has no supporting evidence either way, but argues that the artist is at liberty to fabricate experiences if they support a rational truth. “I can’t prove that he was there,” she says. “But to me, it made sense in the larger story.”

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Merriman-Labor is mesmerized by London’s transport technology – “Overhead and Underfoot, Overground and Underground, Terrestrial and Celestial” – which shuttles me across the city for a second Africa Writes event at Rich Mix in East London. What would Merriman-Labor – or Wheatley – have made of the phone-scrolling throngs queuing for a salt-beef bagel on nearby Brick Lane, or the homeless man outside the restaurant gifting his incredulous dog a polystyrene tray overflowing with chips and ketchup? This is the gristle of the city, the marrow of poetry.
Rachel Long, Theresa Lola and Hibaq Osman, three members of Octavia, “a poetry collective for women of color founded in response to the lack of inclusivity and representation in literature and academia,” are sparing a few minutes to chat before rushing back to rehearsals for the evening’s show. It’s a credit to the Africa Writes programming that the events pull the festival’s central threads long and taught through centuries, across genres. And it’s striking that this collective of young female artists eschews the use of social media to promote its shows. Long, Octavia’s founder member, calls these platforms “unsafe spaces for women of color,” after a successful past event attracted a batch of abusive comments on its Facebook page.
“For me it was just like, how dare you?” she says. “How could you dampen something that was that beautiful?” The event later that evening is indeed exquisite and irresistible, both in execution and atmosphere – the boundaries of performance poetry are stretched and explored across several sets of poems which are by turns funny, tragic and uplifting.
“I feel like because so much of what we do is almost in secret,” says Osman, “that when we’re on stage, it becomes more intimate than other things I’ve been a part of. Everyone’s a bit more likely to take in the words in a way that maybe they weren’t expecting.”
It’s a night about woke female power, and the vibranium-hard Afrofuturism of the black creative economy – a widening path to artistic and financial success that was so cruelly curtailed for trailblazers like Wheatley and Merriman-Labor. Where do these black British artists see themselves in this burgeoning new aesthetic?
“What I think is so beautiful about Afrofuturism is this merging of different cultures,” says Lola. “I feel like before there used to be isolated identities. Afrofuturism will be this space where everything is embraced.”
‘An African in Imperial London’ is out now and published by Hurst Publishers. Ade Solanke’s new play ‘The Court Must Have a Queen’ runs through to September 2 at Hampton Court Palace in the UK.
&#8211; By Alastair Hagger

Rachel-Long-Africa-Writes-2018-image-by-Erefua-Boakye-picture-1

Talking African Writing in London

In May, 90,000 people were at Wembley Stadium, in London, for the FA Cup final between Arsenal and Aston Villa. A special guest was Yvonne Johanneson whose father played, against the tide, in the final half a century before.
“My [younger] sister Alicia and I were too young to see him playing, but we certainly remember him training at home and really enjoying the physical fitness that his career afforded him. He also loved to play football with the boys in the neighborhood whenever he had a chance,” Yvonne says.
On May 1, 1965, at Wembley, Albert Johanneson made history, but the African winger was sick as hell. The rain belted down. To the intimidating chants of 100,000 supporters, 22 footballers limbered up in the tunnel. This was the FA Cup final between Leeds United and Liverpool. This was also a small piece of history as Johanneson became the first African in an FA Cup final.
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Minutes before the game, Johanneson had been throwing up in the toilet and struggling with diarrhoea. Because of his condition, he asked Don Revie, his manager, to drop him. Revie refused; he thought Johanneson was being too soft and never forgave him.
In the tunnel, an opponent turned to Johanneson.
“You have got no chance looking like that. Our fans will murder you,” he said.
The final was goalless until three minutes into extra time. Roger Hunt broke the deadlock to give Liverpool the lead. Captain Billy Bremner equalized for Leeds. Liverpool scrambled the winning goal on 111 minutes, with a diving header from Ian St John. This ended Liverpool’s 75-year wait for a trophy. Johanneson had a poor game but it was remarkable that he was even there.
Before his English career, Johanneson grew up with racism and violence in South Africa. He remembered an incident when he was six years old playing football with friends in the street in Germiston. According to the history of Leeds United, a car stopped and a white boy of his age jumped out and spat in his face. Johanneson didn’t move while his tormentor laughed. The boy spat again. Then the driver, his father, also jumped out with a cane and whipped Johanneson across his neck. Johanneson’s friends ran away, leaving him bleeding on the ground.
These same mean streets also brought Johanneson luck. Barney Gaffney, a Germiston school teacher scouting for Leeds United, spotted the young Johanneson. The 20-year-old went to England for a three-month trial in late 1960. This changed his life. He was signed and made his debut in April the following year.
This was England in the 1960s – the days when boarding houses displayed signs in the window that read: ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’. There were virtually no black players in the English Premier League. Gerry Francis, also from Johannesburg and a Leeds player, was one of the few. It is believed Francis was one of the reasons Johanneson chose to go into the tough world for outsiders.
“My dad was even reluctant for my mother to attend the matches, which she initially found odd; but now we have a better understanding of why that could have been. It appears obvious that he wanted to protect her from hearing racial slurs being hurled at him. As you know, he left apartheid South Africa, only to be greeted with the same level of racism and discrimination when he arrived in England,” says Yvonne.
Yvonne says her father bottled everything up. She says one of the things she admired him for was not speaking badly about anyone; he made friends easily.
Johanneson also made a remarkable debut, on the wing, in a home 2-2 draw with Swansea on April 8, 1961. He created one of Jack Charlton’s two goals with a pinpoint cross. As his teammates ran towards him to celebrate, Johanneson froze. Back home, in South Africa, it meant trouble if a black man saw white men running towards him.
It was his deft and silky skills, plus devastating speed, that earned his nickname: The Black Flash. In the 1963/64 season, Johanneson was the top scorer for Leeds United with 15 goals, as the club won the second division title.
“He showed all the flair and loose-limbed speed for the game… High of action, he moved with supple grace, his feet scarcely touching the ground as if it were hot coal,” says Jack Charlton, a World Cup-winning center half and recipient of many of Johanneson’s crosses, in the club’s archive.
The shy and unconfident Johanneson was even daunted by the team bath. He was not sure whether he could bathe with his white teammates. The Leeds players saw this and stripped him naked and hurled him into the bath, good naturedly, to show him he was one of them. Johanneson was also puzzled when a white apprentice cleaned his boots. It would have never happened in South Africa.
The Times described him, rather patronizingly, as the colorful, popular, Johanneson from Johannesburg, whose gazelle-like speed down the wing draws the crowds to the terraces; an exciting player in the mould of the dusky Brazilians.
It helped make Johanneson a target for rough defenders. In an FA Cup semifinal, against Manchester United, he limped off before half time, thanks to a crunching tackle from midfield hard man Nobby Stiles. He lost his first team place and was never the same player again.
“Albert had no confidence. He could play, he was bloody quick… But it was as if Albert couldn’t believe it was happening to him, as if he thought a black man wasn’t entitled to be famous,” Bremner, the late Scottish international, says in the Leeds United archives.
“On his day he could skin any fullback, but he lacked the consistency and it was unfortunate that Albert was around at the same time as Eddie Gray. He was one of Don Revie’s most promising signings but when Eddie got a grip of his place on the wing, something had to give and Albert found himself in the reserves.”
“Albert was a jovial character around the dressing room, you know, and obviously he had a lot of talent. When I first came to the football club I played as a midfielder and Albert played as a winger. Eventually I took over from Albert because the manager at the time, Don Revie, felt we had a lot of good midfield players and he wanted me to try and play outside left. Albert had terrific pace and could dribble by people, could score a goal. I think Don was a little concerned that he couldn’t take it in the Premier League, the bigger league, because when Albert started playing we were in the second division,” says Gray.
“I never played with an African player and funnily enough it was very rare for a black South African player to come and play in England then… Albert was a pioneer. I feel he was the first black player from South Africa to make a name for himself and he did very well for Leeds United, he was a colorful lad and he was joyous and loved to play football.”
In his nine years at Leeds, Johanneson scored 76 goals in 200 appearances, with a couple of hat-tricks. In 1970, he was on the transfer list, as well as in the reserves, and was snapped up by a fourth division York City. At his new team, Johanneson managed 26 league games, with three goals, as York clinched promotion. He set up many of the 26 goals for leading goal-scorer Paul Aimson. In the 1971/72 season, Johanneson was offered a free transfer, but there were no takers. He retired as his injury problems grew.
Brendon Batson, the FA consultant and Arsenal’s first black player, says Johanneson helped pave the way for the scores of successful black players in the English game today.
“For a young black aspiring player seeing him playing in Wembley was fantastic. So his impact in terms of history became significant; more black players started coming to the fore. I think clubs started to see black players could make a contribution even though the stereotypical views would be expressed at that particular time,”
he says.
Sadly, Johanneson’s later life saw steep decline.
“It is not a secret that my dad suffered from alcoholism which affected his marriage. When the situation became too difficult for my mother, we returned with her to Jamaica in 1975. My mother and her sister subsequently moved to the United States in the 1980s and I joined her with my family in the late 1990s,” says Yvonne.
Johanneson remained in England with scant contact with his family. But Yvonne was to see her father again when she was a postgraduate student in France in 1984. Johanneson died alone on September 24, 1995, in Leeds. American poet Maya Angelou agreed to a family request to have her poem ‘Still I Rise’ inscribed on his headstone.
“Despite the humble beginnings from which he came, he engendered hope in others as a pioneer and brought pride to his race. Today, in spite of the fact that many have tried to disregard his contribution to the sport, his legacy can never die, as the poem says, ‘Still I Rise’,” says Yvonne.
It is arguable Johanneson has not received the recognition he deserves.
“My sister and I would very much like my father to be remembered for the joy he brought to the people watching him play. We firmly believe Albert should be recognized for the contribution he made in [British] football as a pioneer, who like Arthur Wharton, Andrew Watson and Walter Tull, paved the way for the black footballers. Although his influence was most prominent in [Britain], we would also like his legacy to be known in the land of his birth, South Africa. Lucas Radebe and Philemon Masinga are names synonymous with British Premier League football in South Africa, we feel that Albert should be equally recognized by his countrymen as a trailblazer who paved the way,” she says.
The last word on Johanneson goes to another battler, Angelou: I am the dream and hope of the slave, I rise, I rise, I rise.

The Brilliance And Sadness Of  The Black Flash

The year was 1980, when Zimbabwe gained independence and thousands of educated black Zimbabweans found new opportunities in government and public institutions.
Around the time, Kubi Chaza, an international model, actress and nurse trained in the United Kingdom, had just returned home to Zimbabwe.
The opportunities in her country did not challenge Chaza (now Indi) enough, so she chose to defy the odds, deciding to plunge into the hitherto unknown cosmetic industry catering to black-skinned women.
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At the time, there were only beauty products for the white-skinned.
Before returning to Zimbabwe and becoming known in her country as a businesswoman, Chaza had trained as a nurse in Scotland, worked as a model in London and even appeared in a James Bond film.
“I was tall and decided to take up modeling at the London Academy,” she recalls. Soon after, she found herself traveling to Europe for assignments.
Her modeling work soon caught the attention of film producers and her career took a critical turn. She became an actress, working with Hollywood legend Roger Moore in the 1973 Bond film Live And Let Live (in which she plays a saleswoman).
Chaza later married John Indi, a film producer and actor, who has played a part in films Mandela (1987) and A Far Off Place (1993). In 1981, the couple decided to return to Zimbabwe.
It was not a bad decision as soon, Chaza established a hair salon at Machipisa, a teeming shopping center in the bustling suburb of Highfield in Harare.
“That is when I discovered there were no cosmetics that catered for black people, especially women. There was a huge demand for cosmetics for black women, [but] none were available,” says Chaza.
Noticing a gap in the market, she grabbed the opportunity and established an eponymous beauty business.
“At first it was not easy as some people felt that the name Kubi was not marketable for cosmetic products,” recalls Chaza.
Despite the discouraging remarks, she was determined and soon was able to build the House of Kubi into a renowned brand.
With a factory in the industrial area of Msasa, Harare, the House of Kubi produces popular products to redefine the beauty of the African woman.
However, like most companies in Zimbabwe, Kubi was not spared by the economic downturn. The operating environment for most companies has made profit margins smaller and recapitalization has become a major challenge.
The House of Kubi has been affected by the influx of cheaper products in the market. Most of these cosmetics are skin lighteners, harmful to the user and sold illegally on the black market.
To cushion her brand from this harsh environment, Chaza has now expanded her business to South Africa, where the cosmetics are manufactured and distributed.
Despite her busy schedule, she is also the patron of the Our Children Our Future Trust (OCOFT), an organization that assists children whose parents are serving time in prison. Through Chaza, OCOFT is planning to establish a center where these children are trained various life skills whilst their parents also benefit from the program once released from prison.
Chaza and her husband now spend most of their time traveling between Zimbabwe and South Africa.
The enterprising businesswoman continues to have a lot of passion for the film industry; she is a member of the Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe.
It’s not time yet for Chaza to say
‘The End’.

Kubi-Edited-3

Beauty & the Bond

&nbsp;
There was a time when what happened in Westminster mattered, when British ballot boxes set the scene for the world.
In 1900, when the Labour Party competed in its first general election as the Labour Representation Committee, the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe and the lives of 383 million people were effectively governed from London.
Labour only won two seats in that first outing but it grew rapidly and went on to form 14 governments between then and 2010, completely overshadowing the Liberals, which had challenged the Conservatives for ascendancy in the 19th century. The Liberals eventually became the Liberal Democrats after merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988.
The British Empire is long gone and aggressive new political parties have put Britain’s two-party political system to rest. In 1950, the Conservatives and Labour won 90% of the vote, but in 2010 they garnered just 65%, according to Professor Paul Whitely of the University of Essex’s Department of Government in an article in news and analysis website, The Conversation.
The recent recession and the re-emergence of nationalism as a potent political force has left Britain with an increasingly restive population which is looking inwards and demanding that politicians do the same.
The reality being hammered home is that all politics is local, a phrase made famous by American politician Tip O’Neill in the 1930s.
Economic recovery, living standards and rising inequality, public health, employment and, importantly, immigration were being grappled with in the build up to the May 7 polls.
Helping other countries to grow and making the world a fairer place is generally far down the list, if it makes it onto the list at all.
Going into the elections, the Greens were the only party tackling international affairs with enthusiasm. Given their view that trade and economic growth must be curbed, it is a good thing for Africa that their influence is likely to be minor.
At the time of writing, it was highly likely that neither the Conservatives nor Labour would win the 326 seats needed for an outright majority and almost certain that both would fall far short of the 340 seats necessary for a ‘working majority’. This makes a minority government propped up by a deal with one or more of the smaller parties very likely. The travails faced by the coalition formed by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in May 2010 makes such an arrangement less attractive. The deal left the Liberal Democrats a shadow of what it was and has weakened the Conservative Party’s claim that it was the sole driver of the economic recovery.
Growing political insularity and the likely outcome of the polls returning no clear winner means that while existing trade and foreign aid commitments will be honored, major new concessions or bigger contributions are highly unlikely.
This means that the outcome the British election will not be felt – either positively or negatively – in Africa.
But before we judge Britain too harshly for this and criticize it for not doing more, it should be borne in mind that last year Britain spent £11.4 billion – or 0.72% of GNP – on overseas aid, becoming the first major economy to meet the United Nation’s 45-year-old aid spending target, according to The Guardian.
Expecting its politicians to do more, especially when times are tough, is simply unrealistic.

Africa Far Down The List

Kerryne Krause-Neufeldt was on a roll. She founded her first beauty product business at 23 and was turning over $45,000 in the dying months of her company. But she lost it all on her worst day.
“I never thought in my wildest dream that anybody would steal my company from me. Seriously, how would they get that right?” she says.
Born in Pretoria, she was raised by a single mother who ran a hairdressing salon.
Krause-Neufeldt worked odd jobs while paying her way towards an Honours degree in marketing at the University of Pretoria. From working as a sales lady at a small outdoor store, she packed her bags and left for London on a two-year working visa, to toil for a sandwich making store, Pret A Manger. She was training to be a manager for one of the stores the company was going to launch. It was here that she learned how a well-oiled, structured company functioned. But after three months, she returned to South Africa on the promise of a job.
“The difference in having worked for Pret A Manger in London and coming back to work for this company was a culture shock of note and it was a defining moment for me. I realized there was no vision. I was never going to see this marketing position,”
she says.
She resigned after five weeks and decided to start her own business – a distribution company, supplying cheap eye masks that rejuvenated the skin and removed puffiness. She called up the principle office for the eye masks in Switzerland which did not have a market in Africa.
They offered 10,000 eye masks to sell in South Africa but Krause-Neufeldt needed funding to start this business. One of her mother’s customers was a lawyer who dabbled in business from time to time. He wanted to start his own business but Krause-Neufeldt convinced him that her business idea was more viable. But he wanted 51% of the business.
“He knew I was caught between a rock and a hard place. He said, ‘I’ll give you the money but its 50/50 for the business,’ and in that moment I was relieved I could get started on the business but somehow I knew it was the beginning of the end,” remembers Krause-Neufeldt.
The lawyer funded the first 2,000 units. She hired around 12 sales reps and did all the training and focused on the administration. She also hired Peggy, her best friend, who would distribute the units to the sales reps from a factory. The sales reps earned commission on all the stock they sold, while she earned a mere salary of $275, which she felt was too little.
Business picked up and more stock was brought into the country and South Africa became one of the biggest markets for eye masks.
After running the business for close to two years, Krause-Neufeldt told her business partners that they had to inject more money into it to meet their side of the deal. They were reluctant and felt she was becoming a problem.
Then, at peak season during November, three of her sales reps picked up units worth $91,000. Peggy counted the stock and gave it to the sales reps. They should have delivered the products and returned with the cash, but they never came back.
When Krause-Neufeldt approached her business partners about it, they said that the sales reps gave them the money and that they were investigating her for fraud.
“I asked them how much the reps were giving them and they said R30,000 ($2,740). I said they have R1 million ($91,000) worth of stock. I told them they were getting nailed, but I was the enemy,” she says.
Her boyfriend was a director in the company.
“I was fighting with my boyfriend at the time and I told him he can’t be playing golf all day and take a salary. I told him to do something and he said he’d be a sales rep.”
While in a meeting a few days later, the partners asked Krause-Neufeldt’s boyfriend whether he was earning commission. According to the contracts, it was illegal for directors to earn commission as part of their pay package unless the board of directors approved it.
“We went into a meeting and that’s the only dirt they could find on us,” says Krause Neufeldt.
The partners said they were going to open a criminal case against her and the boyfriend unless she signed over her shares and released the company to them. She tried to get lawyers in but had to fork out around $3,600 upfront. Krause Neufeldt couldn’t afford this with her small salary.
“I signed my shares for nothing and handed my company to these people. I didn’t have a choice in the matter,” she says.
Krause-Neufeldt lost everything. She also signed a restraint of trade agreement. She lost her distribution agency and a local market she had personally grown.
“It was the biggest trauma of my life. To be betrayed by everyone and you know I’d get calls from salons that would complain about my reps and I wouldn’t believe them. I lived for my staff. It was devastating.”
Krause-Neufeldt, however, refused to lie down.
“I just believed failure was the inability to get up again. So I resolved to get up the next day and start another company to show them,” she says.
She immediately started working on her next business, I-Slices Manufacturing. She had come across an Italian eye mask but it wasn’t in line with the quality she wanted. So she decided to develope her own product.
She needed the technology that would make the base of her product, Eyeslices. A friend introduced her to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), a research and development organization. Here she found the department that worked on a hydrogel treatment pad for burn wounds but the idea was shelved in 1993 because it couldn’t be developed further.
One day, Krause-Neufeldt met Avie Kruger, a scientist who had worked in the CSIR polymer department, and helped her to develop her products.
She started her own laboratory in a cottage on a plot in Midrand, outside of Johannesburg, but there were no standard manufacturing methods or equipment available to produce the product she wanted.
Her mentor suggested she look into the food industry and she came across a machine which had oval cut outs, similar to those of Eyeslices. She contacted Ulma Packaging Solutions, a company that packages products such as yoghurts and meat. The next morning, they arrived at the cottage and started to help Krause-Neufeldt customize her machine.
It took about one and a half years to create the perfect Eyeslices products following the seven years of research. Today, Eyeslices is a reusable stable water-based hydrogel eye mask manufactured through a physical process of freezing and thawing.
Instead of placing cucumbers on your eyes, Eyeslices does that job better and it’s a product many beauty salons have stocked on their shelves.
The United States was I-Slices Manufacturing’s first distribution country. Today, the company boasts 19 other export markets including and hopefully followed by Morocco, Kenya and Nigeria.
Krause-Neufeldt says the challenge with exporting products on the continent is that Africans want brands to be successful in the overseas market before they buy. Regulations can also be a problem.
“Every single country in Africa, the regulations are different and they’re very onerous. They’re incredibly expensive,” says Krause-Neufeldt.
But she is not giving up just yet, she plans to grow the product and take it to many countries on the continent. She hopes it will be one in the eye for cucumbers.

‘I Never Thought Anybody Would  Steal My Company From Me’

Rich Africans may make their money in Africa, but enjoy spending it in London. After all, London has it all. Nobody is going to be imprisoned because their face no longer fits. The legal system is fair and what’s yours remains yours. Best of all, London has a world-class financial system, which is quite happy to take an African’s wealth and grow it for them. Even with a first-world tax system, London boasts 45 billionaires, making it the world’s fourth richest city.
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<h4>Education</h4>
For successful Africans, nothing is more important than educating their children for future success. Britain is rather good at this, and school is where you make friends and contacts for life. It defines your social status. A recent Tatler article on wealthy Nigerians highlighted Florence Otedola, the 20-year-old King’s School-educated daughter of Femi Otedola, one of Nigeria’s richest men. Boarding fees for King’s in 2014-15 are $55,700, and according to Tatler, Nigerians spend $500 million every year at British universities and schools such as Benenden, Wycombe Abbey, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Eton, Harrow and Bradfield.
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<h4>Concierge service</h4>
Rich people employ a concierge business to open doors in London, and rich Africans are no exception. Veronica Voronina is CEO and Founder of her own concierge business, The Anonymous, which has a number of wealthy African clients. The idea is to allow the superrich to plug into a network of excellence.
“Our database is our best asset. We source the best of everything – doctors, lawyers, property agents, party planners, nannies, restaurants, hotels, even the best diamonds,”
says Vorinina.
It’s all about price and quality.
“Rich people didn’t get rich by wasting money.”
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<h4>Houses</h4>
Many wealthy Africans have business interests in London. So, even if they are only there for a few weeks a year, Africans like to buy. The preferred areas are Knightsbridge, Belgravia, St John’s Wood, and Kensington and Chelsea. The most controversial development is One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge, described as the most expensive residential development on earth. One apartment reputedly sold for $230 million. Several billionaire Africans have bought there, but few live there; it is an investment not a home. Upper-class Londoners, priced out of their natural habitat by international interlopers, are said to be increasingly unhappy.
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<h4>Hotels</h4>
Africans fly around the world in pursuit of business deals and the hotel they choose to stay in often defines their social status. The most prestigious hotels to namedrop are the grand old London hotels, The Lanesborough, The Dorchester and Claridges. The Royal Suite at Claridges will set you back around $82,000 per week. And of course the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge is the quintessential business hotel chain. Younger entrepreneurs may prefer boutique hotels like Andre Balazs’ Chiltern Firehouse hotel. All reek of exclusivity.
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Shopping
Wealthy Africans love to shop. Their favorite stores in London are Harvey Nichols, Harrods and Selfridges. It’s a well-oiled world of shopping by appointment, private openings, personal shoppers and trips to private shopping departments, as well as limousines and drivers to carry the shopping home. The shopping company Premier Tax Free reports that Nigerians account for 46.3% of total African sales in London and the fastest-growing region for international sales in Britain this year has been Africa, whose spend has grown by 45% year on year.
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<h4>Experiences</h4>
The Beatles sang money can’t buy you love. But according to concierge company, The Anonymous, money can buy pretty much everything else. One client, convinced the world was coming to an end, decided to splash out. Alongside gas masks and copious quantities of food, they wanted the best, no expense spared, holiday ever. A private jet was hired for a three-week trip around the United States. Helicopters flew the family over the Grand Canyon and New York. The client splashed $25,000 on the illusionist Criss Angel and then went to Universal Studios in Florida on a VIP pass. Hopefully the holiday offset any disappointment that the world still exists.
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<h4>Private jets</h4>
For mere mortals, travel is conducted by commercial plane and train. For the uber-wealthy transport is done by private jet. And if you don’t own one, you charter one. Charter companies like Little Blue will fly you to Paris for the weekend for around $20,000. Nigerians don’t just use private jets to carry themselves; they take their lifestyle with them.
“If someone wants basic food &#8211; milk, bread, cheese, yogurt – I’ll go somewhere, like Whole Foods, and pick up the employer on the way to Farnborough (a small airport on the outskirts of London), load it on the plane and send it off,” says Ansema Fagapona, who works with rich families.
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<h4>Superyachts</h4>
Yachting is as much about the exclusive lifestyle as it is about owning a boat. With it comes access to a world beyond the reach of mere mortals. For those who can afford it, glittering European destinations like Monaco, Cannes and the azure seas of Sardinia beckon, and few luxury experiences are better than being on a yacht.
To order a new superyacht at one shipyard, tycoons need to put their names on a five-year waiting list. A weekly charter of the stunning 65-metre superyacht, Imagine, at $710,000 per week may be the preferred option.
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<h4>Celebrations</h4>
What is better than going to an Akon concert with friends to celebrate your 16th birthday? How about a private Akon gig? Did I mention that the 15 friends were all flown to a private island near Dubai, transported in limousines and given Michelin-star catering? Wealthy Africans certainly know how to party. And if you would like to treat your wife on your wedding anniversary, why not hire the renowned Cipriani’s Italian restaurant in Mayfair for a night. You and your beloved can be the only diners on the night, with Beverly Knight on vocals  to add a special touch of romance. Ahhh.
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<h4>Polo</h4>
Polo is famously the sport of kings and was introduced to Lagos in the 1930s through the Lagos Polo Club. Today, in Britain, you will find oil and gas supremo Kola Karim playing polo with Prince William and Prince Harry at Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s private estate, and at Cowdray Park, the best polo ground in the country. The Veuve Clicquot Gold Cup is the most prestigious competition and Nigeria’s Prince Albert Esiri has competed several times. A team of four players, each with a dozen or more top polo horses, would need millions of dollars to play a sing

How Africans Splash Their Cash

It is a hot day in Lagos when we talk and yet you can feel the chill when Eryca Freemantle tells you of her worst day that left her body crushed and mind shattered. It was very cold on that day; December 14, 1990, in Brixton, London. A raw wind gnawed into Freemantle’s cheek as she tried to keep warm at the pay window of a busy petrol station. She knew how cold the streets of the capital could be as she was born in London of parents who emigrated from Jamaica in the 1950s.
“I was putting petrol in my car. I walked over to the kiosk to pay for the petrol and a lady came in with a Volvo Estate car and instead of putting her foot on the brake, she put her foot on the accelerator and made me into a human sandwich between the kiosk and her car,” says Freemantle.
“The glass from the kiosk shattered across my face. My body went into shock, my hair fell out there and then and my left leg was broken in five places.”
By cruel, or as it turned out, fortuitous coincidence, Freemantle’s father was near where his daughter lay in agony.
“My dad happened to be across the road in the pub, the Angel in Brixton, having a pint and he came out because there was a crowd around me. Someone had said to him: ‘A woman has just got run over at the petrol station. He had turned around to say: ‘Stupid. How can anyone get run over at a petrol station?’ At the same time, his left leg started twitching, he told me later.”
When the cold realization set in, Freemantle senior was beside himself with grief.
“He went over to have a look and saw me lying on the ground. He went into shock and started screaming. Everyone kept on saying ‘She’s dead, she’s dead!’ And he said: ‘God, why have you taken my only daughter?’ and in my semiconscious state, I could hear him. My father and I were very close and I remember thinking I don’t want to upset daddy, I have to get through this.”
Within minutes the ambulance came to take Freemantle away.
“My hair was on the ground and my dad had picked it up and put it in his pocket. He followed the ambulance to the hospital in my car. I was taken to the King’s College Hospital in South London, where they informed my mother. She was told they’d have to amputate my left leg. My dad said: ‘No way, before you amputate her leg, you will have to cut mine off.”
Freemantle spent months in hospital, luckily the surgeons did not amputate and she was left to heal. On release, she underwent physiotherapy every day for two years as she learned to walk again.
“I was also told I would also have a crooked walk,” she says.
Doctors told Freemantle her hair would never grow back again. For a while, the scars meant she had to cover her face. It was then that the demons of her traumatic childhood, at a tough London school, crawled from her subconscious and bared their teeth.
“I had been called ugly while I was at school and had always been teased about my looks. So, when this accident happened to me later, I took that as confirmation of all the things I had been called by the bullies at school,” she says.
Freemantle’s parents could not get her out of the house for nearly two years. Her scars held her prisoner.
“Now, this was the early 1990s, when there was no make-up for women of color and what was available was Derma-blend. I however went out and got some mud which I mixed with some water and put all over my face to cover my scars—that was my first ever encounter with make-up. Of course, that only lasts for so long but that gave me a bit of confidence, even if it was only for five minutes,” she says.
“My parents noticed  my new interest and thought it might be a good idea to send me to a make-up school, which was an idea that was frowned upon back then, in the West Indian culture, as you’d rather become a doctor or an accountant.”
Freemantle went to college to learn the trade and passed with distinction. She completed teachers’ training and the next thing she knew she was writing make-up classes for London College of Fashion. Her courses were endorsed by the British Association of Beauty Therapy and Cosmetology.
One day, the newly qualified Freemantle was invited by a friend, who was a model, on one of her photo shoots.
“When I got there, I immediately knew I could do a better job than the person who was working on her. I ended up doing her make-up and there was someone there from Island Records, who engaged me on the strength of my work at the shoot. Before I knew it, in a week’s time, I was doing celebrity make-up for names like Seal and Soul to Soul, Loose Ends. Whitney Houston would come into London a lot and I assisted her make-up artist,” says Freemantle.
“Seal was lovely, he used to wear his hair on his face because he used to have locks. He’s a very intelligent man, who was ahead of his time. I understood why they asked me to do his make-up, as he also had some scarring on his face.”
A pharmaceutical company, which had heard Freemantle’s story, approached her to create a make-up range. She said she would get involved only if it was a range for women of color. That is how Keromask was born.
Nearly a quarter of a century after the crushing accident that changed her life, Freemantle is in Lagos setting her sights on the world’s great emerging markets in Africa.
“There are many brands that are afraid to enter the market as they don’t know anyone on the ground… Africa is huge and many brands are looking to come in here presently. I see the biggest markets for make-up in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa,” she says.
“Training is the way forward. In Lagos there are 500,000 make-up artists. A high proportion of them are not trained or are self- trained. So, there is scope for certification and international recognition.”
Anyone with the courage to claw their way back from being a shattered heap on the cold stone floor of a London petrol station is surely worth listening to.

Bloodied, Scarred And Unbowed

One name was in the head of Cameron van der Burgh amid the lights, screaming and chaos at the poolside—that of his friend, Norwegian world champion swimmer, Alexander Dale Oen. Just a few months before, Dale Oen was altitude training in Arizona, in the States, looking forward to winning gold medals in London. On April 30, the 26-year-old collapsed and died from a rare heart complaint.
“We were friends and I was training to beat him when he died and it almost felt like he left something with me that helped me with my journey. As you can see, at the end of the race there is a picture [of me] pointing to the sky in his honor. It was relief that I was able to achieve what I wanted to do with the help of someone to look after me. I felt I was swimming with him,” says van der Burgh during a visit to FORBES AFRICA in Sandton.
“I would always go fast, so in the second 50 meters, I would fatigue. Alex was always very fast in the second 50 and so was I in this race. I could almost feel maybe this guy was smiling down on me afterwards… When I got home that night I looked at the medal and reflected. It is like you have to study for four years for one final exam, lasting 58 seconds, if you fail you go back to day one. I was very lucky to be on the other end of the scale.”
<div id="attachment_1199" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1199" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1199" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149537322_10.jpg.-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Swimming: 2012 Summer Olympics: South Africa Cameron van der Burgh victorious after winning gold with world record time of 58.46 seconds during Men&#8217;s 100M Breaststroke Final at Aquatics Centre. London, United Kingdom 7/29/2012 CREDIT: Peter Read Miller (Photo by Peter Read Miller /Sports Illustrated/Getty Images) (Set Number: X155279 TK5 R1 F131 )</div>
Van der Burgh, born-and-bred in Pretoria, South Africa, is the grandson of a Karoo farmer and probably one of the most polite and unassuming world champions you will ever meet. You wouldn’t bat an eyelid if you saw him cleaning his dad’s pool in the Pretoria suburbs. He is also a man who believes in home; he turned down offers from Australia to become the first-ever world swimming champion to be trained in Africa. Along with his fellow South African gold medalist, Durban-based swimmer, Chad le Clos, he believes their win could boost swimming in South Africa.
“We have shown the country that swimming is worth investing in. There is a lot of money out there and I am sure the guys in rugby and cricket will be complaining because we will be taking money away from their sports,” he says.
On the face of it, van der Burgh is the consummate narrow-eyed sport professional. Since the age of 11, days when he beat all-comers easily, without training, his cellphone PIN has been 2-0-1-2, his year for the Olympics. By the age of 16, he was losing heart and could have tossed it all away if it hadn’t been for a painful freak accident.
It was the South African national championships in Durban and van der Burgh hadn’t made the finals and was beginning to wonder if he ever would. Instead of tearing through the pool he was out of it and messing around with a mate on the high diving board.
“I jumped once and it was OK, the second time I was wet. There were big banners saying don’t jump off the diving board. I got to the top of the stairs, my foot slipped; I fell three meters onto the tiles and broke my ankle. Boys will be boys,” he says.
“Three months and two operations later I was recovering when I saw all my mates were training away and I wasn’t even able to jump into the water. It was then I decided to push myself further.”
It wasn’t easy. For four years, training began at 8am, with grueling hours in the pool and gym, followed by a massage until 6pm.
“It is a hard life. It is a lonely sport with lots of sacrifices. I do get lonely,” he says.
The fruit of this labor has been crazy days, far from lonely, with people drawn to him like flowers to the sun. On the eve of the semi-final he had to switch off Twitter because 10,000 messages a night were keeping him awake. People have asked him to sign their arms and legs; one man asked him to attend his child’s birthday party. You can be sure more than a few South Africans will name their children Cameron. He was also amused by entering the gold medal club.
“Gold medalists like Phelps are in their own world and they don’t talk to you. I noticed, the day after I won, that they nod to me now,” he says.
The man himself can’t wait to go surfing in Jeffreys Bay, off the east coast of South Africa. He learned how to surf three years ago and says he is very good at paddling.
The future lies in financial management, which van der Burgh is studying through the University of South Africa (UNISA). He has already invested in a company offering accounting services to the mining industry.
In January, he will begin training for the 2016 Olympics, which he is sure will be his last.
“I want to go back and win the medal. So then I have done my job and can haul my togs up. I see it like a gladiator—after you have finished your job you can live and you can be proud,” he says.
Africa will be proud too.

The Golden  Gladiator

With just hours to go, the prevailing mood in Britain was hardly celebratory. On streets washed by rain, the number of tourists in London’s capital seemed below the average for the time of year. The last minute preparations were far from frenzied and all that anyone was certain of was that the opening ceremony involved live sheep.
But then the brutal cynicism that greets every major event in Britain was washed away by an event that left many around the world scratching their heads. The spectacular, which included dancing nurses, engineers, Shakespeare, James Bond and a cameo from the Queen, was a satisfying antidote to the blanket corporate sponsorship that had alienated many Londoners ahead of the games.
<div id="attachment_1187" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1187" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1187" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149916643_10-300x203.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="203" />WINDSOR, ENGLAND &#8211; AUGUST 02: Sizwe Ndlovu, John Smith, Matthew Brittain and James Thompson of South Africa celebrate winning the gold medal for the Lightweight Men&#8217;s Four final on on Day 6 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Eton Dorney on August 2, 2012 in Windsor, England. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)</div>
The ceremony—which saw a celebration of the National Health Service, the industrial revolution and modern day British multiculturalism—combined wit, elegance and a theatricality. It confounded a widespread belief in the country that the event would be an expensive and embarrassing disaster.
A security fiasco, which saw G4S, the lead contractor, admit with weeks to go, that it had not hired enough staff to man the games, saw the army drafted in to run X-ray scanners and patrol the venues. Last minute problems on some of the major routes into London raised fears of transport chaos, but, though the infrastructure creaked under the weight of the additional hundreds of thousands of users, it held—just.
Even the weather, which had appeared apocalyptic, from March through to July, turned. The ceaseless rain gave way to fierce sunshine as summer smiled—although the hailstorms did return to add spice to the cycling road race.
The early stages were not encouraging for African teams. Nigerian slalom kayak hopeful, Johny Akinyemi, fell at the first hurdle, accumulating too many penalties in his two runs in the K1 event and failing to reach the semi-finals.
The Nigerian basketball team, which qualified at the eleventh hour for their first appearance at an Olympic Games, showed some promise, but came up against a rampant USA ‘Dream Team’, who notched up an Olympic record winning spread of 156-73. One of the country’s two individual medalists from the Beijing Olympics in 2008—Chika Chukwumerije—had to wait until close to the end of the event to try to better his bronze in the +80kg Taekwondo.
<div id="attachment_1185" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1185" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1185" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/150115672_10-300x214.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="214" />LONDON, ENGLAND &#8211; AUGUST 10: Meseret Defar of Ethiopia celebrates as she crosses the finish line ahead of Jepkemoi Jepkemoi Cheruiyot of Kenya and Tirunesh Dibaba of Ethiopia celebrates winning gold in the Women&#8217;s 5000m Final on Day 14 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Olympic Stadium on August 10, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)</div>
Not that it mattered—London’s large Nigerian community has been vocal in its support of its team. A three day conference saw ministers and some of the country’s leading businesspeople gather in the Dorchester Hotel, while around town other delegations turned up to show off their country’s investment opportunities.
Juliano Máquina, Mozambique’s light-flyweight boxing hopeful, was soundly beaten by a clinical Aleksandar Aleksandrov, the Bulgarian took apart the Olympic debutant over the three rounds to win on points 22-7. Thomas Essomba, from Cameroon, the other African fancied in the weight category, put in a solid first round win, but failed to make the quarter finals, beaten by the Northern Irishman Paddy Barnes.
South Africa picked up some early successes in and on the water. The South African men’s lightweight four picked up a gold in the rowing, while Cameron van der Burgh and Chad le Clos were the surprise winners in the 100m breaststroke and the 200m butterfly, respectively. The latter, saw le Clos beat the world’s best—the American, Michael Phelps—by a fingernail, and made a hero of his father, Burt le Clos, whose hoarse and emotional post-swim interview with BBC quickly went viral.
As the first week drew to a close, it was only South Africans who had made it to the podium.
Hopes were boosted when the Kenyans arrived. With three Olympic champions—Pamela Jelimo, Brimin Kipruto and Asbel Kiprop—and four world champions—Vivian Cheruiyot, Ezekiel Kemboi, Edna Kiplagat and captain David Rudisha—named in their squad for the London games, there was no doubt the East Africans had come to win. Rudisha, an 800m runner, was set to follow in the footsteps of his father by participating in the 4x400m relay—the team’s pedigree crossed generations. In Beijing, Kenya was the highest ranking African country in the medal tables, taking six golds and 14 medals overall.
This time, they rejected the offer of a training base in Bristol, to the west of London, preferring to remain in Kenya to train at altitude right up to the last minute.
<div id="attachment_1189" style="width: 215px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1189" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1189" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149585173_10-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" />LONDON, ENGLAND &#8211; JULY 31: Chad le Clos of South Africa celebrates after winning the gold in the Men&#8217;s 200m Butterfly final on Day 4 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Aquatics Centre on July 31, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)</div>
Cheruiyot was the first in action, taking on a strong field, including the Ethiopian Olympic champion, Tirunesh Dibaba, in the 10,000m final. In the end, it was the Ethiopian’s day, kicking ahead to win gold, with Cheruiyot trailing in third behind her compatriot Sally Kipyego.
It was the Ethiopians again who denied Kenya in the women’s marathon; Tiki Gelana beat Priscah Jeptoo by five seconds to claim gold in the thrashing rain.
The highly fancied men’s team fared even worse in the 10,000m. On home turf, the British runner, Mo Farah, took gold ahead of the American Galen Rupp and Ethiopia’s Tariku Bekele, with the Kenyans trailing outside of the medal positions. It was the first time since 1984 that an African runner had not won the event—although some were quick to claim Mogadishu-born Farah for the continent. In a rather ugly series of attacks in the run-up to the games, the right-wing press had railed against Britain’s foreign-born competitors using the epithet “plastic Brits”. Farah’s response was definitive. Having taken gold, a journalist asked him whether he would have preferred to have won the medal for Somalia.
“Look, mate,” Farah replied, “This is my country.”
The Kenyans had to wait until Sunday afternoon to finally break their duck, Ezekiel Kemboi, a policeman facing an assault charge back in his home country, stormed ahead in the last lap of the 3,000m steeplechase, after his compatriot, Brimin Kipruto, had fallen. At the end of the race, Kemboi announced that he would retire from the discipline to focus on the marathon.
Amongst the running contingent was Guor Marial, whose story captured the imagination of many in the international media in the run up to the games. Marial was one of four competitors who joined the parade of athletes underneath the Olympic flag. Three—Churandy Martina, Philip Elhage and Rodion Davelaar—are previous competitors from the Netherlands Antilles, which recently became a municipality of the Netherlands.
<div id="attachment_1188" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1188" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1188" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149771045_10-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />LONDON, ENGLAND &#8211; AUGUST 03: Tirunesh Dibaba of Ethiopia celebrates winning gold in the Women&#8217;s 10,000m Final on Day 7 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Olympic Stadium on August 3, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)</div>
Marial, in his first Olympics, was born in South Sudan, and turned down an offer from Khartoum to run for the north. Granted refugee status by the US when he was 16, the marathon runner lost many of his relatives in the vicious civil war that saw millions displaced. With South Sudan newly independent and lacking an organizing committee, the decision by officials to allow Marial a spot marks the first time an athlete from Africa’s 54th nation has been able to compete.
While stories like that of Marial have provided great examples of the redemptive power of sport, the event continues to raise questions about the ability of athletes from the continent to be able to make their mark. While the raw talent and commitment of African competitors has seen them dominate a few important sports in recent decades, the London games more than any other may have shown that top-level sport is becoming so clearly bifurcated between the haves and the have-nots. The dominance of the US and China in the medal tables showed that financial clout can be the difference between a victor and an also-ran.
The press fell in love with the stories of hardship and graft of willing amateurs like Hamadou Djibo Issaka, the rower from Niger who took up the sport only months before the games. He worked as a gardener and swimming pool attendant in Niamey and trained in an old fishing boat. The 35-year-old finished a distant last in the single sculls. While narratives like his provide great examples of the vaunted “Olympic Spirit”, they also highlight the vast discrepancies in resources. British rowers, who had one of their best years at home, are the product of a well-established network of training facilities, coaches, equipment and finance.
In the end, African hopes fell in the most part to domestic competitors, as British athletes, fired up by the support in London, won through in events that would normally be dominated by the continent’s finest.
Although much noise was made around the ‘Africa Village’ hospitality area about a potential bid by Durban for 2024, with no African countries on the shortlist for 2020, it will be more than a decade before anyone on the continent will be able to claim that home advantage.
<div id="attachment_1186" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1186" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1186" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149948438_10.jpg.-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Track &amp; Field: 2012 Summer Olympics: Kenya Ezekiel Kemboi victorious after winning Men&#8217;s 3000M Steeplechase Final gold at Olympic Stadium. London, United Kingdom 8/5/2012 CREDIT: John W. McDonough (Photo by John W. McDonough /Sports Illustrated/Getty Images) (Set Number: X155268 TK11 R1 F174 )</div>
Kenya’s prime minister, Raila Odinga, threw his country’s hat into the ring for a bid, reminding press that the country is not only home to some of the world’s greatest runners, elite athletes already flock to the high altitude training centres in Iten, in the Rift Valley. However, major international investment—and a change in international perceptions of the country, and the continent more broadly—would be needed for that bid to take off. It is unlikely to have been enhanced by the closure of the ‘Africa Village’ early due to unpaid debts, caused by the failure of many African Olympic committees to turn up and take out space.

From African Grit  To Plastic Brits

With just hours to go, the prevailing mood in Britain was hardly celebratory. On streets washed by rain, the number of tourists in London’s capital seemed below the average for the time of year. The last minute preparations were far from frenzied and all that anyone was certain of was that the opening ceremony involved live sheep.
But then the brutal cynicism that greets every major event in Britain was washed away by an event that left many around the world scratching their heads. The spectacular, which included dancing nurses, engineers, Shakespeare, James Bond and a cameo from the Queen, was a satisfying antidote to the blanket corporate sponsorship that had alienated many Londoners ahead of the games.
<div id="attachment_1187" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1187" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1187" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149916643_10-300x203.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="203" />WINDSOR, ENGLAND &#8211; AUGUST 02: Sizwe Ndlovu, John Smith, Matthew Brittain and James Thompson of South Africa celebrate winning the gold medal for the Lightweight Men&#8217;s Four final on on Day 6 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Eton Dorney on August 2, 2012 in Windsor, England. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)</div>
The ceremony—which saw a celebration of the National Health Service, the industrial revolution and modern day British multiculturalism—combined wit, elegance and a theatricality. It confounded a widespread belief in the country that the event would be an expensive and embarrassing disaster.
A security fiasco, which saw G4S, the lead contractor, admit with weeks to go, that it had not hired enough staff to man the games, saw the army drafted in to run X-ray scanners and patrol the venues. Last minute problems on some of the major routes into London raised fears of transport chaos, but, though the infrastructure creaked under the weight of the additional hundreds of thousands of users, it held—just.
Even the weather, which had appeared apocalyptic, from March through to July, turned. The ceaseless rain gave way to fierce sunshine as summer smiled—although the hailstorms did return to add spice to the cycling road race.
<div id="attachment_1186" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1186" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1186" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149948438_10.jpg.-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Track &amp; Field: 2012 Summer Olympics: Kenya Ezekiel Kemboi victorious after winning Men&#8217;s 3000M Steeplechase Final gold at Olympic Stadium. London, United Kingdom 8/5/2012 CREDIT: John W. McDonough (Photo by John W. McDonough /Sports Illustrated/Getty Images) (Set Number: X155268 TK11 R1 F174 )</div>
The early stages were not encouraging for African teams. Nigerian slalom kayak hopeful, Johny Akinyemi, fell at the first hurdle, accumulating too many penalties in his two runs in the K1 event and failing to reach the semi-finals.
The Nigerian basketball team, which qualified at the eleventh hour for their first appearance at an Olympic Games, showed some promise, but came up against a rampant USA ‘Dream Team’, who notched up an Olympic record winning spread of 156-73. One of the country’s two individual medalists from the Beijing Olympics in 2008—Chika Chukwumerije—had to wait until close to the end of the event to try to better his bronze in the +80kg Taekwondo.
Not that it mattered—London’s large Nigerian community has been vocal in its support of its team. A three day conference saw ministers and some of the country’s leading businesspeople gather in the Dorchester Hotel, while around town other delegations turned up to show off their country’s investment opportunities.
Juliano Máquina, Mozambique’s light-flyweight boxing hopeful, was soundly beaten by a clinical Aleksandar Aleksandrov, the Bulgarian took apart the Olympic debutant over the three rounds to win on points 22-7. Thomas Essomba, from Cameroon, the other African fancied in the weight category, put in a solid first round win, but failed to make the quarter finals, beaten by the Northern Irishman Paddy Barnes.
South Africa picked up some early successes in and on the water. The South African men’s lightweight four picked up a gold in the rowing, while Cameron van der Burgh and Chad le Clos were the surprise winners in the 100m breaststroke and the 200m butterfly, respectively. The latter, saw le Clos beat the world’s best—the American, Michael Phelps—by a fingernail, and made a hero of his father, Burt le Clos, whose hoarse and emotional post-swim interview with BBC quickly went viral.
<div id="attachment_1189" style="width: 215px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1189" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1189" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149585173_10-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" />LONDON, ENGLAND &#8211; JULY 31: Chad le Clos of South Africa celebrates after winning the gold in the Men&#8217;s 200m Butterfly final on Day 4 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Aquatics Centre on July 31, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)</div>
As the first week drew to a close, it was only South Africans who had made it to the podium.
Hopes were boosted when the Kenyans arrived. With three Olympic champions—Pamela Jelimo, Brimin Kipruto and Asbel Kiprop—and four world champions—Vivian Cheruiyot, Ezekiel Kemboi, Edna Kiplagat and captain David Rudisha—named in their squad for the London games, there was no doubt the East Africans had come to win. Rudisha, an 800m runner, was set to follow in the footsteps of his father by participating in the 4x400m relay—the team’s pedigree crossed generations. In Beijing, Kenya was the highest ranking African country in the medal tables, taking six golds and 14 medals overall.
This time, they rejected the offer of a training base in Bristol, to the west of London, preferring to remain in Kenya to train at altitude right up to the last minute.
Cheruiyot was the first in action, taking on a strong field, including the Ethiopian Olympic champion, Tirunesh Dibaba, in the 10,000m final. In the end, it was the Ethiopian’s day, kicking ahead to win gold, with Cheruiyot trailing in third behind her compatriot Sally Kipyego.
It was the Ethiopians again who denied Kenya in the women’s marathon; Tiki Gelana beat Priscah Jeptoo by five seconds to claim gold in the thrashing rain.
The highly fancied men’s team fared even worse in the 10,000m. On home turf, the British runner, Mo Farah, took gold ahead of the American Galen Rupp and Ethiopia’s Tariku Bekele, with the Kenyans trailing outside of the medal positions. It was the first time since 1984 that an African runner had not won the event—although some were quick to claim Mogadishu-born Farah for the continent. In a rather ugly series of attacks in the run-up to the games, the right-wing press had railed against Britain’s foreign-born competitors using the epithet “plastic Brits”. Farah’s response was definitive. Having taken gold, a journalist asked him whether he would have preferred to have won the medal for Somalia.
“Look, mate,” Farah replied, “This is my country.”
The Kenyans had to wait until Sunday afternoon to finally break their duck, Ezekiel Kemboi, a policeman facing an assault charge back in his home country, stormed ahead in the last lap of the 3,000m steeplechase, after his compatriot, Brimin Kipruto, had fallen. At the end of the race, Kemboi announced that he would retire from the discipline to focus on the marathon.
<div id="attachment_1185" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1185" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1185" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/150115672_10-300x214.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="214" />LONDON, ENGLAND &#8211; AUGUST 10: Meseret Defar of Ethiopia celebrates as she crosses the finish line ahead of Jepkemoi Jepkemoi Cheruiyot of Kenya and Tirunesh Dibaba of Ethiopia celebrates winning gold in the Women&#8217;s 5000m Final on Day 14 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Olympic Stadium on August 10, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)</div>
Amongst the running contingent was Guor Marial, whose story captured the imagination of many in the international media in the run up to the games. Marial was one of four competitors who joined the parade of athletes underneath the Olympic flag. Three—Churandy Martina, Philip Elhage and Rodion Davelaar—are previous competitors from the Netherlands Antilles, which recently became a municipality of the Netherlands.
Marial, in his first Olympics, was born in South Sudan, and turned down an offer from Khartoum to run for the north. Granted refugee status by the US when he was 16, the marathon runner lost many of his relatives in the vicious civil war that saw millions displaced. With South Sudan newly independent and lacking an organizing committee, the decision by officials to allow Marial a spot marks the first time an athlete from Africa’s 54th nation has been able to compete.
While stories like that of Marial have provided great examples of the redemptive power of sport, the event continues to raise questions about the ability of athletes from the continent to be able to make their mark. While the raw talent and commitment of African competitors has seen them dominate a few important sports in recent decades, the London games more than any other may have shown that top-level sport is becoming so clearly bifurcated between the haves and the have-nots. The dominance of the US and China in the medal tables showed that financial clout can be the difference between a victor and an also-ran.
The press fell in love with the stories of hardship and graft of willing amateurs like Hamadou Djibo Issaka, the rower from Niger who took up the sport only months before the games. He worked as a gardener and swimming pool attendant in Niamey and trained in an old fishing boat. The 35-year-old finished a distant last in the single sculls. While narratives like his provide great examples of the vaunted “Olympic Spirit”, they also highlight the vast discrepancies in resources. British rowers, who had one of their best years at home, are the product of a well-established network of training facilities, coaches, equipment and finance.
<div id="attachment_1188" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1188" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-1188" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/149771045_10-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />LONDON, ENGLAND &#8211; AUGUST 03: Tirunesh Dibaba of Ethiopia celebrates winning gold in the Women&#8217;s 10,000m Final on Day 7 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Olympic Stadium on August 3, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)</div>
In the end, African hopes fell in the most part to domestic competitors, as British athletes, fired up by the support in London, won through in events that would normally be dominated by the continent’s finest.
Although much noise was made around the ‘Africa Village’ hospitality area about a potential bid by Durban for 2024, with no African countries on the shortlist for 2020, it will be more than a decade before anyone on the continent will be able to claim that home advantage.
Kenya’s prime minister, Raila Odinga, threw his country’s hat into the ring for a bid, reminding press that the country is not only home to some of the world’s greatest runners, elite athletes already flock to the high altitude training centres in Iten, in the Rift Valley. However, major international investment—and a change in international perceptions of the country, and the continent more broadly—would be needed for that bid to take off. It is unlikely to have been enhanced by the closure of the ‘Africa Village’ early due to unpaid debts, caused by the failure of many African Olympic committees to turn up and take out space.

Stacked plastic boxes of Dutch Wax, the colorful patterned fabric ubiquitous in West African communities, obstruct the cramped staircase of Yinka Shonibare’s studio, a converted warehouse in east London.
Now a signature of his work, the tangled history of the material encapsulates some of the themes central to the artist’s canon. Originally based on Indonesian batik printing techniques, the fabric was commercialized by Dutch and Belgian traders in the 19th century and sold on to West Africa in huge quantities. Since then, Chinese manufacturers have begun to capture large swathes of the market.
Dutch Wax is, like Shonibare himself, a cultural chimera, a combination of global influences. Born in the United Kingdom in 1962 to Nigerian parents, Shonibare moved to Lagos at the age of three and returned at 17 to complete his education. Today, his joyfully subversive work mixes quintessentially British iconography with African accents, taking aim at a broad range of domestic and international issues.
“My point is that identities are often made up of different influences from around the globe&#8230; no culture is actually static,” he says of his chosen material. “A lot of cultures actually take and reuse things. But there is a romantic wish to freeze culture in a sort of time warp. Even within the continent of Africa, no such thing [as stasis] actually existed within traditional cultures. People always incorporated and took on new things as part of a growing, dynamic, living culture.”
<div id="attachment_1151" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1151" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-1151 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/143776123_10-681x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="713" />Artwork Homeless Man by Yinka Shonibare</div>
He is comfortable with the Nigerian-British or British-Nigerian labels he is routinely given. The world accepts “hyphenated identities” as does he.
“I have no wish to run away from my identity. I’m informed by history. I’ve been defined by a colonial encounter with Nigeria… So, I enthusiastically explore that historical fact in my work because to stand outside of it would be to delude myself. If I don’t define myself by it, then others will. So I might as well do it first.”
Shonibare resisted definition from an early stage. At art school in London during the last days of the Soviet Union, he began working on art that explored perestroika. His tutors, however, saw an African artist and with that, came preconceptions. He was asked, he says, why he was not producing “authentic” African art.
That was difficult, he says for “somebody who grew up in a cosmopolitan city like Lagos, watching Sesame Street on television. I don’t think people understand that here. They think Africa is still the jungle. It’s coming from that mentality and that’s why I thought I’ll give you ‘Africa’, but I’ll give you Africa with a twist.”
“At the time, I guess I was facing the world and trying to understand how I was perceived by it. I learned through that process that actually, as a black man in Europe, anonymity was rather difficult. Now things are different, but I think then, whatever I did, people would have said ‘that’s a black man who doesn’t make work about being black.’”
Shonibare’s reaction to this early pigeonholing created the signatures he uses to this day—British imagery remade. One set of photographs cast Shonibare himself as a Victorian dandy. Another of his most popular pieces—which had a long residency on the empty fourth plinth beneath Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square—was a scale model of Admiral Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory: its sails made of Dutch Wax. The work is frequently playful, an ironic comment on aspects of European society and globalization through the eyes of someone with a “hyphenated” identity.
“I think for me, it’s just generally amusing. No-one ever questioned Picasso’s obsession with African clichés—why can’t I do the same to European culture? There was a fetishization of African culture by a lot of modernist European artists. So as an African artist now, I can do the same to European culture with a lot of amusement,” says Shonibare.
Post-colonialism and the colonial ties that link global Africans like Shonibare to Europe remain a major theme in his work. Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, he has avoided sliding into bleak assessments of the crushed optimism of early post-colonialism. The reason, once again, is his refusal to fall into line with preconceptions and labels.
“It’s extremely important not to be anybody’s victim. Power does not lie in victimhood, so you are more assertive if you are in control of your own image and your own culture. One group does not have a monopoly on aesthetic pleasure. Anyone has the power to express themselves in the way they want to. I dictate the terms of my own work,” he says.
In the same vein, he refuses to appear to be suffering for his art. Shonibare is wheelchair-bound after contracting Transverse Myelitis in his youth.
“I think what’s normally expected is some sort of sob story of the victim. That’s not the narrative I’m particularly interested in; especially where historically my people have been oppressed and disempowered. Why should I fall for another victim narrative, when I could actually take control of the means of production?”
“That sounds very Marxist,” he laughs. “The artist is meant to be some kind of van Gogh who will die with no money and suffer generally, but I actually think in 2012 that’s just old hat. It’s not interesting. You have to take control.”
Art, he says, has been a spiritually and commercially fulfilling career—although his father would still have preferred him to become a lawyer. It’s one that continues to provide new outlets for his musing on identity and culture. For the next five years, his latest work—a ballerina dressed in bright purple and green Dutch Wax fabric, will rotate in a glass bubble on the corner of the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. In August, he curated a major exhibition of African art and culture at the opera house, overseeing, among other performances, an African ensemble performing Handel’s Messiah in the heart of Britain’s cultural establishment.

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