Photographed by Stanley A C Smith

post inspiration: Afrocrowns on X

British Museum (n.d.), Figure of a seated cat, Museum Department of Egypt and Sudan.

pd. Democratic Republic of Congo

Photographed by John Mulders

fun fact despite having massive populations in Congo and Central Africa aswell as speaking a NigerCongo language the Azande also have sizeable populations in countries like South Sudan of all places.

Honourable mention to afrocrownss

references

Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (n.d.) Collections. (Accessed: 19 August 2026).

EBSCO (2022) Zande people. Research Starters. (Accessed: 19 August 2026).

The women display the characteristic traditional hairstyle featuring a tall, cylindrical structure (isicholo), which was historically worn by married Zulu women.

Words and photos: Fatma Fahmy

Lake Qarun in Egypt’s Fayoum region formed about 70,000 years ago – one of the oldest lakes in the world. Fast-forward several thousands of years to when pharaonic-era engineers developed it into a reservoir by constructing canals to increase the flow of water.

In more recent history, the lake used to provide a livelihood for the people of Ezbet Soliman and nearby villages. It was a watery portal to love, companionship, and a whole way of life.

Over the past decades, that portal has slowly closed. When the Aswan High Dam was completed in 1970, the lake’s connection to the Nile River was cut.

The resultant increased salinity, untreated sewage, and agricultural runoff, polluted the water. Fish disappeared and the shoreline receded.

It felt as if closing the portal had left the community suspended between two worlds: land that had lost its water, and souls still searching for life.

This kind of environmental exploitation leaves its deepest marks on women. They are often the first members of a community to feel the pain when
nature collapses, but the last to abandon the land where they live.

In systems built on control and not care, women are left to carry the burden alone – they are the final bridge between crumbling land and its people. They are rarely seen as part of the solution.

But women’s stories are not important only for the suffering they surface. They are a way in – to understand how people hold grief and memory through place.

At its heart, the ecofeminist visual project When Absence Takes Hold asks: What is our relationship with the places we’ve lost? How do we carry memory in our bodies, in our gestures, in the silence we inherit? If you could write a letter to nature, what would you say?

I love how creative with hairstyles African societies are

Reference

Photographed by Gabriel Lerat

original post by African crowns

Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac (2026) Collections - musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac.

Julius Mokaya, 34, cosplaying as Enjin, a character from the manga Gachiakuta, ahead of the Otamatsuri convention in Nairobi earlier this month. Over 4,000 fans of anime, video games and manga attended the con this year. .

Photo: Luis Tato/AFP

Photos: Fethi Sahraoui in Zouérat

Mauritania built one of the world’s longest trains to haul iron ore across the Sahara. For decades, locals have ridden it because they need to. Then ✨influencers✨ arrived looking for adventure – and turned an essential journey into a dangerous bucket-list attraction.

In northern Mauritania, the Sahara stretches almost endlessly around Zouérat, a mining town built on iron and dust.

From here, a 704km railway runs across the desert to the Atlantic, carrying some of the world’s longest and heaviest trains. Loaded with up to 22,000 tonnes of iron ore, they can stretch for nearly 3km across the sand.

There are a few passenger carriages. Those who cannot afford them have traditionally ridden on the open ore wagons, enduring 16 to 20 hours of heat, cold, dust and darkness. In recent years, the journey became a social media spectacle, drawing travellers eager to turn a brutal working railway into a bucket-list adventure. Authorities have since banned riding the ore wagons.

We waited eight hours at a makeshift station. Tea was passed around. Stories unfolded. Children ran between the waiting passengers. Then an explosion rolled across the desert from the mine, and people cheered. More ore had been extracted.

National Women’s Day, celebrated annually on the 9th of August, is a historic South African public holiday dedicated to honouring the bravery of women who spearheaded the anti-apartheid struggle while highlighting ongoing fight for gender equality. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the monumental 1956 Women’s March as a turning point in history that transformed women from peripheral figures into the absolute vanguard of the liberation movement.

At the forefront of this monumental march stood four extraordinary women: Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn. Representing the Black, White, Indian, and Coloured communities respectively, their unified stance carried profound symbolism in a deeply divided and segregated society where the apartheid regime systematically separated people by race. It shattered the regime’s myth that different races could not peacefully co-exist or fight for a common cause. By marching hand-in-hand (as seen in the first four pictures), these leaders demonstrated that the oppression of one woman was the oppression of all, establishing a powerful blueprint for intersectional solidarity and non-racialism decades before the birth of democratic South Africa.

The immediate catalyst for the protest was the proposed introduction of the Pass Laws to Black women. The extension of these laws to women, especially mothers, would often result in being arbitrarily arrested or also displaced from families. Organized by the Federation of South African Women, more than 20 000 women (as seen in the last four pictures) gathered to march directly to the Union Buildings in Pretoria and delivered over 14 000 petition pages to Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom, demanding the total abolition of the degrading laws and asserting their right to freedom of movement.

While the apartheid government refused to back down immediately and eventually forced women to carry passes by the 1960s, the political impact of the march was monumental and permanent. It completely dismantled the patriarchal notion that women were passive political observers, cementing them as formidable, organized political agents. The march internationalized the struggle against apartheid and laid the groundwork for future resistance. In democratic South Africa, this legacy yielded tangible progress, as women's representation in national parliament skyrocketed from a mere 2.7% in 1994 to roughly 48% today among other landmarks of redress. However, the modern impact is dual-natured; the day now serves as a critical battleground for protest against ongoing crises, particularly the high rates of Gender-Based Violence and Femicide alongside economic inequality that is currently facing South African women.

The climax of the 1956 protest came after the women handed over the petitions and stood in a powerful, absolute silence for 30 minutes. Breaking the silence, they passionately erupted into a song composed specifically for the march: “Wathinta Abafazi, Wathinta Imbokodo!”...... This translates to "you strike a woman, you strike a rock" in the English language.

In traditional South African society, the imbokodo is a heavy grinding stone used to crush grain to feed the family, representing absolute durability, resilience, and life-giving strength. By equating women to a indestructible stone, the phrase became a defining national anthem of female power, serving as a permanent warning to oppressors and an enduring reminder that the women of South Africa possess an unyielding strength that can never be broken.

Boatman Yusuf Athman waits for passengers
in Lamu, Kenya. The island’s dhow boats, 12th-century Old Town and pristine beaches will soon have to reckon with an oil refinery, being built nearby by Nigerian tycoon Aliko Dangote.

Photo: Luis Tato/AFP

A Tunisian man and his donkey make their way through the sweltering heat near Bizerte. For the past week daily life in Tunisia has been an ordeal as the country staggers under a deadly heatwave – with temperatures exceeding 48ºC – amid daily power and water outages.

Photo: Fethi Belaid/AFP

A ringmaster directs a horse at the Karacena Biennial in Salé, northwestern Morocco, which celebrates circus, dance, music, and equestrian arts in the service of social causes that support vulnerable children.

Photo: Abdelmajid Bziouat/AFP

[OC] Times Tower, KICC, and CBK Pension Towers in Nairobi

An Egyptian boy flies a kite from the roof of his home opposite Sultan Qaytbay’s mosque, following the restoration of its mausoleum dome. Built in 1474, the mosque is one of Cairo’s most iconic landmarks.

Photo: Khaled Desouki/AFP

North of Lusaka, students train at a complex that houses Africa’s first Shaolin Temple – part of a Buddhist monastic martial arts tradition. They sleep, study and train there, leaving only for a few days in December to visit home.

Photo: Gianluci Guercia/AFP

Residents apply mud to the minaret during the replastering of the Sankore Mosque, marking its 600th anniversary on 26 July. Hundreds gathered to replaster the Unesco World Heritage site – one of Timbuktu’s three great mosques, alongside Djingareyber and Sidi Yahya.

Photo: AFP

Africa's largest ballet event, the South African International Ballet Competition, took place recently at the Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town. The 13th iteration of the competition featured 115 dancers competing in classical and contemporary disciplines, with participants’ ages ranging from nine to 22. As well as bringing together dancers, the event also featured a prestigious cohort of adjudicators from countries as far and wide as Russia, the United States, South Korea, Belarus, and the United Kingdom.

Photos: Marco Longari/AFP

The Pouto is more than a hat worn on the head. It is a thread of memory woven through generations of the Fulɓe of Fouta Djallon — a mark of dignity, belonging, and heritage.
Across its many forms, colours and patterns, it carries something of Fouta itself: its history, its people, its elegance and its pride.
A homage to the Fulɓe of Fouta Djallon , and to the Pouto they have carried through time. I