A Mecca of
African culture

Issues 12 and 13 arrive as twins: two volumes speaking in harmony, each completing the other. Together, they stand as a declaration of who we are, how we create, and why Africa remains one of the world’s most enduring wells of becoming. This is a single story told in two movements: identity as legacy, and Africa as limitless art.

We open with Identity. Here, we journey into the lives of the Siddi community in India, descendants of Africans who crossed oceans centuries ago yet still echo the continent in their features, their gestures, their spirit. Their presence reveals something the world too easily forgets: identity is alive. It travels. It adapts. It remembers. Through the Siddi, we explore how belonging is carried in the body and the heart; how belonging finds its own language and how people continue to recognise themselves even when borders, time, and distance attempt to rewrite them.

Then we move into Africa Is Art. If identity is our root, then art is our eternal bloom. This chapter takes us to Ghana, where creativity is not an act but a way of breathing. Art pulses through cloth, through experiences, through generosity, through heritage. It’s found in the spontaneous and the ceremonial, the everyday and the extraordinary. To honour this spirit, the issue unveils a commissioned painting, an ode to Africa’s youthfulness, inventiveness, wisdom, and restless promise. A portrait not of what Africa looks like, but how Africa feels.

Together, these two issues whisper a profound truth: Africa is not a place you can contain. It travels in its people. It lives in culture and imagination. It survives, evolves, and creates with an unbreakable grace. And through its children scattered across the globe, Africa continues to shape the future; boldly, beautifully, and undeniably.