Edition 01 — People in Motion
20 African creatives in 2026, working from the continent, who are building what comes next in fashion, film, food, design, literature, and care. We selected these African creatives on a single criterion: the work is its own argument.
There is a particular kind of profile the international press has long made of African subjects: the one that frames the work as exceptional given the conditions, that treats the continent as context rather than canon. The Momentum Report is built against that habit. The twenty African creatives in 2026 on this list are not exceptional given anything. They are simply doing the work, at scale, from where they live.
We chose these African creatives on three rules. The work has to be verifiable and ongoing. It has to be made primarily on the continent. And it has to belong to the kind of life Zanaposh is interested in fashion, design, health, food, image-making, the long sentences of a serious novel.
This is the first edition of an ongoing record of African creatives in 2026 and beyond. The Report will publish twice a year.
Lesley Lokko — Accra, Ghana
ARCHITECTURE & EDUCATION
Lokko is the founder of the African Futures Institute, the postgraduate school of architecture and public-events platform she established in Accra in 2021 after stepping down as dean at City College of New York. In 2024 she became the first African woman to receive the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in the prize’s 176-year history, overdue evidence that the centre of architectural thought is no longer fixed in the global north.
Sumayya Vally — Johannesburg, South Africa
ARCHITECTURE
Vally is the principal of Counterspace, and at thirty became the youngest architect ever commissioned to design London’s Serpentine Pavilion. Her practice treats migration, gathering, and ritual as architectural materials in their own right a working method that has shifted what is permitted to count as a building.
Thebe Magugu — Johannesburg, South Africa
FASHION
Magugu became the first African designer to win the LVMH Prize in 2019, less than three years after launching his Johannesburg-based label. His collections function like academic theses — African Studies, Genealogy, Counter Intelligence — and have made the quiet, persistent case that a designer can speak directly to global luxury without leaving the continent to do it.
Aïda Muluneh — Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
PHOTOGRAPHY
Muluneh founded Addis Foto Fest in 2010, the first international photography festival in East Africa, and her own saturated, painterly portraits sit in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Smithsonian. In 2019 she became the first Black woman to co-curate the Nobel Peace Prize exhibition — a curatorial seat that, until then, had simply not been offered.
Mariam Issoufou Kamara — Niamey, Niger
ARCHITECTURE
Kamara is the principal of Mariam Issoufou Architects, the practice she founded in 2014 to build with raw earth, recycled metal, and the climatic logic of the Sahel. Her Hikma complex in Dandaji — a former mosque turned library and community centre — is a careful refusal of the idea that modernity belongs to glass and steel.
Wanuri Kahiu — Nairobi, Kenya
FILM
Kahiu directed Rafiki, the first Kenyan film to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, and co-founded AFROBUBBLEGUM, the collective she set up to fund African work that is not built on suffering. In 2025 she was producing director and executive producer on Hulu’s Washington Black, which arrived to a 100-percent critics’ score, the kind of crossover that recalibrates what an African director is permitted to direct.
Lisa Folawiyo — Lagos, Nigeria
FASHION
Folawiyo started Jewel by Lisa in 2005 with twelve yards of Ankara and an investment of twenty thousand naira. The line now sold under her own name through Selfridges, MatchesFashion, and her New York showroom gave the West African print its first sustained presence on the international luxury floor, and made the embellished Ankara dress a global object rather than a regional one.
Amaka Osakwe — Lagos, Nigeria
FASHION
Osakwe is the designer behind Maki Oh, the womenswear label she founded in 2010 around adire — the indigo-dyed Yoruba textile patterned by hand with cassava paste. When Michelle Obama wore one of her dresses in Johannesburg in 2013, it was the first time most of the American press had registered an African designer working primarily in African cloth — which said less about Maki Oh than it did about what the press had been looking at.
Selassie Atadika — Accra, Ghana
FOOD & CULTURE
After more than a decade with the United Nations, Atadika opened Midunu in Accra in 2014 and built it around what she calls New African Cuisine — local, seasonal, and traceable to the smallholder farmer. In 2025 she received a TIME Earth Award for the way that work has tied gastronomy to food sovereignty across the continent.
Adama Ndiaye — Dakar, Senegal
FASHION & INDUSTRY
Ndiaye, who designs under the name Adama Paris, is the founder of Dakar Fashion Week (2002) and Black Fashion Week (2010), both of which have outlasted most fashion-week ventures in any city. In 2022 Chanel chose Dakar — and chose Ndiaye’s hand on the wheel — for its first Métiers d’Art show on the continent.
Sindiso Khumalo — Cape Town, South Africa
FASHION
Khumalo trained as an architect, worked in David Adjaye’s London studio, and went on to launch the sustainable womenswear label that took her to the LVMH Prize finals in 2020. Her textiles draw on her Zulu and Ndebele heritage and on figures like Harriet Tubman and Sarah Forbes Bonetta — clothing as a long, patient correction to the historical record.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor — Nairobi, Kenya
LITERATURE
Owuor won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003 and went on to publish Dust and The Dragonfly Sea, two of the most ambitious novels written about Kenya in the last two decades. Her sentences carry a moral seriousness the contemporary African novel often gestures toward and rarely earns.
Sarah Diouf — Dakar, Senegal
FASHION
Diouf founded Tongoro in 2016 as a 100-percent Made-in-Africa label, cut, sewn, and finished by tailors in Dakar. Beyoncé’s Black Is King did the announcement work; everything Diouf has built since — the documentary, the couture studio, the homeware line — has done the harder work of proving that the entire supply chain can stay on the continent.
Bubu Ogisi — Lagos, Nigeria
FASHION & TEXTILE ART
Ogisi runs IAMISIGO, the conceptual fashion house she has based, since 2009, between Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra in order to work directly with weavers, dyers, and basket-makers across the continent. In 2025 she won the Zalando Visionary Award and made her Copenhagen Fashion Week debut — an unusually clean validation of a decade-long argument that ancestral textile technique is itself a contemporary art form.
Stephen Tayo — Lagos, Nigeria
PHOTOGRAPHY
Tayo is the photographer whose street portraits of Lagos and Accra — twins, dancers, market traders, drag artists — moved fashion’s gaze toward West African vernacular style and held it there. His work has appeared in Vogue, the New York Times, and in campaigns for Gucci and Nike, but his real subject is, and has always been, the people he photographs at home.
Laduma Ngxokolo — Johannesburg, South Africa
FASHION
Ngxokolo is the founder of MaXhosa Africa, the knitwear house he started in 2010 to dress the amakrwala — Xhosa initiates — in something that honoured the tradition. The label now employs more than 250 people, runs six stores including one in New York, and shows at Paris Fashion Week; its rise is what happens when local cultural specificity is treated as a luxury asset rather than a limit.
Joycee Awosika — Lagos, Nigeria
WELLNESS
Awosika founded ORÍKÌ in 2014, Nigeria’s first agro-beauty house a farm-to-skin operation that now runs ten wellness spas, seven subsidiaries, and a training institute for the regional industry. She left a senior advisory role in the country’s power sector to build it, which is the small detail that explains the discipline of the company.
Temie Giwa-Tubosun — Lagos, Nigeria
HEALTH
Giwa-Tubosun founded LifeBank in 2016 to move blood, oxygen, and vaccines between blood banks and hospitals using motorbikes, boats, and drones where the road runs out. The company now serves more than a thousand hospitals across Nigeria — a piece of public-health infrastructure the public sector simply did not build.
Ola Brown — Lagos, Nigeria
HEALTH
Brown founded Flying Doctors Nigeria in 2007, at twenty-one, after her younger sister died in transit because no air ambulance existed in West Africa. The service — the region’s first — now operates a fleet of aircraft out of Lagos and Port Harcourt; she has since added a healthcare investment company and a venture fund whose early bets included Paystack.
Vanessa Nakate — Kampala, Uganda
CLIMATE
Nakate began her solitary climate strike outside the Ugandan parliament in January 2019, at twenty-two, and stood there alone for months. The Rise Up Movement and the Vash Green Schools Project — which has installed solar power and clean cookstoves in dozens of Ugandan schools — both came out of that initial refusal to accept that the African voice in the climate conversation could be cropped, literally, out of the frame.
We chose twenty African creatives in 2026 because the number forces a discipline. It is small enough that no one made it on tokenism, and large enough to refuse the lie that there are only a handful of African creatives worth a feature in any given year. The next edition of African creatives in 2026 publishes in October.
