Global Africans, Building And Redefining The Continent

Sithembile Xola Pearl Thusi (born 13 May 1988) is a South African actress, model, television host, and radio personality. Pearl has made great strides both on the African continent and abroad breaking glass ceilings and paving the way for future talent in the creative industries.

Her entry into the entertainment space began when she was just a teenager. She was crowned first runner-up at Miss SA Teen in 2003 and won Miss KwaZulu Natal in 2005. After high school she moved from Durban to Johannesburg with the aim of pursuing her tertiary studies in the Dramatic Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. This move laid the foundation for an incredible and illustrious career which led to Pearl Thusi becoming one of the most striking faces on African Television.

As a host, she entertained audiences on The Real Goboza before she moved on to South Africa’s biggest music show, LiveAmp, while simultaneously doing Tropika Island of Treasure 5 – which was shot in Jamaica. She was a contestant and was later asked to host the 6th season of the show in Mauritius. Pearl moved on from LiveAmp to host Moment: South Africa, a talk show broadcasting on Ebonylife TV and the very popular Lip Sync Battle Africa on MTV and eTV; continental offerings of which she is very proud.

The multi-talented actress has starred in many local and international feature films including Scorpion King: Book of Souls, Kalushi, Tremors 5: Bloodlines as well as highly rated local production Rhythm City, Zone 14, SoulCity and Isidingo. One of her most notable achievements was being cast as Zimbabwean Harvard Law School graduate, Dayana Mampasi in American Series Quantico alongside Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra. Critics loved her in Catching Feelings with renowned South African filmmaker, Kagiso Lediga; the romantic comedy was streamed on Netflix.

2020 saw Pearl making her mark in the beauty world as she made history by being the first person on the continent to collaborate with international cosmetics giant MAC, following on the heels of collaborations with Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and trail-blazing drag queen RuPaul over the years.
They released two limited-edition make-up kits featuring products hand-picked by Pearl. Each is intended to capture a different side to the star’s personality.

Playing the lead in Queen Sono, Netflix’s first original African series, was a dream come true.

“I was part of the genesis of the series, I brought a seed to an incredible creator, an incredible writer and director, Kagiso Lediga. I went to him and explained what I was hoping to do going forward because I realized that I was skilled in doing stunt work as an actress and I wanted to do something that empowers young black women; like imagine having an action hero on the continent who is female and young,” states Pearl. “Telling stories like Queen Sono are very important because it shows African women in a different light but it also shows African people in a renewed and more authentic light for the rest of the world to see: how we act, what we actually look like, what we actually sound like and most importantly for Africans to take control of their own narrative.”

Queen Sono has been picked up for a second season. Pearl will start taping the new season of her MTV show “Behind The Story” this coming June.

AWARDS

▪ Nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting role at the SAFTAs for her role as Samkelisiwe on ZONE 14
▪ YOU Spectacular Most Stylish Female Celebrity and Best Female Host/Presenter
▪ Voted one of the Coolest Female Celebrities at the Sunday Times Generation Next Awards in 2015
▪ Selected as one of Glamour Magazine’s Most GLAMOURous Women
▪ Feather Awards once hailed her the Fag Hag of the Year
▪ Awarded Coolest Female Personality by the Sunday Times Generation Next Awards
▪ The Inaugural Rapid Lion Film Festival nominated her Best Actress for her captivating performance in Kalushi: The story of Solomon Mahlangu

“God himself breathed life into you. Don’t give anyone else the power to diminish the strength within you.” – Pearl Thusi

The 1st overall pick in the 2014 WNBA Draft from Stanford University, Chiney Ogwumike was the 2014 WNBA Rookie of the year and is a 2-Time WNBA All-Star (2014, 2018). As the top pick in the 2014 WNBA Draft, Chiney and her sister Nneka made history, joining Peyton and Eli Manning as the only siblings ever selected number one overall in a professional sports league. Chiney is the starting forward for the Los Angeles Sparks, and is the vice president of the WNBA Players Association (WNBPA).

In 2018, Chiney became a full-time multi-platform ESPN NBA Analyst, becoming one of the youngest national sports studio analysts and one of the only full-time professional athletes to currently hold a regular national sports media position. In her role, she makes regular appearances as an NBA studio analyst on SportsCenter, First Take, Get Up! and The Jump. Chiney originally joined ESPN in 2017 to co-anchor SportsCenter across Africa and work as a WNBA and NBA analyst in studio. As on-air talent, Chiney has worked as an analyst for ESPN and Pac-12 Network; analyst for NBATV; and co-host for studio shows such as ESPN’s First Take, Sports Nation, The Jump, and Pac-12 Network’s Sports Report.

The 6’4” forward and Cypress, Texas native of Nigerian descent graduated from Stanford University with an International Relations degree under the mentorship of Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Chiney led Stanford to three Final Fours while distinguishing herself in academics, earning multiple honors for her academic success, including being named the 2014 Capital One Academic All-American of the Year and the Pac-12 Women’s Basketball Scholar-Athlete of the Year. Chiney and her sister Nneka have redefined the word “Nerd” through several music videos which they conceptualized and produced while at Stanford, celebrating the culture of the school in a movement entitled “Nerd Nation.”

At Stanford, Chiney was a three-time First Team All-American, two-time Pac-12 Player of the Year, three- time Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year, four-time All-Pac 12 First Team, and finalist for multiple national Player of the Year awards each of the last three seasons. The John R. Wooden Award winner and Pac-12’s all- time leading scorer and rebounder’s 26.1 points per game, 12.1 rebounds, 60.1% field-goal percentage, and 27 double-doubles made Chiney the only player in the country to rank in the NCAA’s top 10 in each of those categories. Chiney captured a gold medal with USA Basketball at the FIBA 3×3 World Championships in August 2012 and earned a gold medal with the USA Basketball World University Games team in 2011.

Chiney is passionate about giving back and empowering the next generation. Chiney spent the spring of 2013 studying abroad in Nigeria where she successfully raised $30,000 to build a basketball court for underprivileged youth in an effort to break down barriers for girls in sports and instill confidence in the next generation. Chiney and Nneka partnered with UNICEF in 2014 to raise almost $10,000 for girls’ education and empowerment in Nigeria. Chiney has made numerous trips to Africa with NBA Africa and other nonprofits to help launch youth engagement initiatives using basketball as a tool for development, including a 2017 trip to Rwanda with nonprofit Shooting Touch to celebrate International Women’s Day.

Jidenna’s music proudly encompasses a wide range of vibes, ranging from afrobeat, funk, and R&B to dancehall and hip-hop. This kaleidoscope of cultures, eras, and sounds cemented the GRAMMY® Award-nominated multi platinum rapper, singer, songwriter, producer, and actor as an international sonic pioneer who paved the way for the 21st century Afropolitan music revival. Regarding rap as a gentleman’s sport, he applies etiquette, eloquence, and global consciousness to the culture with verbal excellence and global style. Since 2015, he has distinguished himself as a rare talent equally at home on a playlist by President Barack Obama, on the court at the 2020 NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, or on-screen in Marvel’s Luke Cage and HBO’s Insecure. After clocking just shy of one billion total streams and views and receiving worldwide acclaim, he continues to elevate the playing field with a series of singles and his forthcoming third full-length album due this year.

In 2015, Jidenna formally introduced himself with the double-platinum “Classic Man” [feat. Roman GianArthur]. It garnered a GRAMMY® Award nomination in the category of “Best Rap/Sung Collaboration,” while Kendrick Lamar appeared on the official remix. Not to mention, a chopped-and-screwed version played in the Academy® Award-winning Moonlight. The song also paved the way for his full-length debut, The Chief, which arrived to praise from The New York Times, XXL, and more. In 2018, he traded Atlanta for Africa and lived throughout the continent as he consciously crafted his sophomore full-length, 85 To Africa. It yielded a string of international anthems, including “Babouche” [feat. GoldLink], “Tribe,” and “Sou Sou.” Plus, it notably touted international collaborations a la “Zodi” [feat. Mr Eazi] and “Worth the Weight” [feat. Seun Kuti]. In addition to praise from Pitchfork and The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly described the album as “coding the narratives of global black experiences, both lived and imagined, into heartfelt lyrics and a riot of new sounds discovered along a cross-continental journey.”

Bringing 85 To Africa to life, Jidenna became the first American artist to promote in Africa first, giving the continent the new music before anyone. He ultimately shined a light on the bridge across the Diaspora with a swanky, funky, and AfroChic vision of his own.

Closing out a banner 2019, Jidenna brought the album to life on the road with the 33-city 85 To Africa Tour, selling out cities coast-to-coast across North America. Following the tour, he continued to create. Kicking off 2020, Jidenna contributed “Feng Shui” to Insecure: Music From The HBO Original Series, Season 4 and “Black Magic Hour” to the compilation African On All Sides. Right out of the gate, Time hailed the latter among “The Best New Songs of July 2020” and called it “entrancing.” Amplifying his voice further, he launched The Lit Review: A Black Men’s Book Club Hosted by Intoxicated Uncles. This innovative book club dissects topics relevant to the black diaspora and progressive masculinity by welcoming authors, dynamic influencers, and prominent voices across the spectrum of culture on his YouTube channel.

Ibrahim Mahama (b.1987) in Tamale Ghana is an artist who lives and works in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale, Ghana. He started his practice through his interest in the history of materials and architecture. Failure and delay through specific forms always inform his choice of sites which he believes the works do not only occupy but are also occupied within the works/objects. Residues and points of chaos registered as marks within the forms he selects, they present us alternative perspectives of looking into the materials/Labour conditions of society. Form is important. His work has included objects from jute sacks used to transport commodities to the point of decay and later sewn together with a network of collaborators under specific Labour conditions which is then superimposed on architecture. The politics of the hand and it’s parallel relation with architectural forms become a lot more evident.

His work, a straight line through the carcass of history has also dealt with forms related to the second world war and bacteria life. His work has been included in the 56, 57 and 58 Venice Biennale, documenta 14 Athens and Kassel, Orderly Disorderly, Accra, Images An Age of Our Own Making, Denmark, the island is what the sea surrounds, Valletta 18, Malta and Spectacles Spectations, Kumasi Ghana and Labour of Many at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town, Parliament of Ghosts at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and currently at the 22nd Sydney Biennale. He finished a year residency with the DAAD in Berlin in 2018. In march 2019 he opened SCCA Tamale, which is an artist run space, built and dedicated to retrospectives of practices which emerged from the 20thcentury. His current interests are using specific architectural forms within history in the formation of spaces inspired by the potentialities and failures of modernity.

The Empress of Global Entertainment & Culture

Michael Armitage’s paintings weave multiple narratives that are drawn from historical and current news media, internet gossip, and his own ongoing recollections of Kenya, his country of birth.

Living and working between London and Nairobi, Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo, a traditional bark cloth from Uganda, which is beaten over a period of days creating a natural material which when stretched taut has occasional holes and coarse indents. As noted by the artist, the use of Lubugo is at once an attempt to locate and destabilise the subject of his paintings.

Applying the paint in layers, Armitage scrapes, revises and repaints his compositions. The visual iconography of East Africa lies at the heart of his practice: its urban and rural landscape, colonial and modern vernacular architecture, advertising hoardings, lush vegetation and varied animal life. Undermining this rich colour palette and dream-like imagery, however, is a quiet exposition of Kenya’s sometimes harsh reality: its politics, social inequalities, violence and extreme disparities in wealth. In turn, Armitage reflects on the more absurd aspects of the everyday, commenting on both society and the surrounding natural environment – evoked with a lyrical and phantasmagorical vision.

Armitage claims that ‘Painting is a way of thinking through something, trying to understand an experience or an event a little better and trying to communicate something of the problem to others’. In the painting ‘Hornbill’ (21st – 24th September 2013) (2014), Armitage depicts one of the four terrorists who carried out the Westgate Shopping Mall attack, in which 67 people were killed including a group of children who were filming a cookery programme in the mall at the time. Armitage makes reference to this loss, by implanting the symbol of the Hornbill bird repeatedly across a tiled wall to the foreground of this armed figure; as according to West African myth Hornbills bury their dead in the beak of their bill.

In the painting Necklacing (2016), a naked man with a tyre around his neck is framed by two sutures or lines in the Lubugo surface, that run vertically either side of his body. A penetrating, haunting image, the idea for the painting surfaced from an event the artist witnessed as a child, in which a naked man with a tyre around his neck was being chased through the streets of Nairobi by a large mob. Necklacing is the name given to this type of unlawful mob justice enacted by gangs across Africa.

Inspired by the 2017 Kenyan General Elections, Armitage centred a series of eight paintings and ink drawings around his own experience at an opposition rally situated in Uhuru Park with a local press team. Amongst the crowds, the artist bears witness to politics at play as he recalls a number of carnivalesque revellers dressed up in outfits with wigs, masks and slings at the ready to rouse further attention. Those same characters were reported in the news running through teargas throwing stones at the police force that replied with live rounds, as further political rallies turned to protest and eventual violence.

As Catherine Lampert describes: ‘His approach is synthetic but various in terms of composition; sometimes shapes flow, occasionally images are cut and pasted, he experiments with florid colour and sinuous line, and eventually the elements click into place….This instability exists in part because the stories that inform Armitage’s paintings have been filtered by inherently unreliable voices.’ Using a flattened perspective Armitage’s figuration evolves into passages of pure abstraction, and then back again seamlessly within one painting creating works that are both romantic and synchronous, offering up various narrative threads, only to then unravel them like a resonant myth or legend.

Michael Armitage was born in 1984 in Nairobi, Kenya and lives and works in London. He received his BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2007) and has a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London (2010). Solo exhibitions include: Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020), The Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2020), Projects 110, Studio Museum in collaboration and at MoMA, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2019), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo , Turin (2019) South London Gallery (2017); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2017); White Cube, Hong Kong (2017); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco (2016); White Cube, London (2015); and Royal Academy Schools Studios, London (2010). Selected group exhibitions include 58th Venice Biennale (2019) Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina (2018); Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2017); HOME, Manchester, UK (2016); Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK (2016); Yuan Art Museum, Beijing (2015); 13th Biennale de Lyon, France (2015); Palazzo Capris, Turin, Italy (2015); South London Gallery (2014); and Drawing Room, London (2013).