For nearly two decades, Nouvelle Afrique has chronicled the cultural heartbeat of the continent — through its kitchens, its ceremonies, its crafts, and the quiet wisdom passed from one generation to the next. This is the story of how a small editorial circle grew into a living archive.
Nouvelle Afrique began in 2007 as a slim print journal — sixteen stapled pages, mailed by hand to three hundred subscribers — when its founder, Ama Diallo, noticed how quickly the recipes, lullabies, and migration stories of her grandmother's generation were slipping from family conversation. She gathered a circle of writers, photographers, and oral historians, and gave the project a single, stubborn mission: to record what was vanishing.
What started around a kitchen table has since grown into a living archive of more than four thousand entries — essays, archival photographs, recorded interviews, and field dispatches from across the continent and its diaspora. Today we work with cultural institutions, museums, and family-run archives to ensure that the people, places, and practices that built modern Africa are not lost to time, but honored, studied, and served back to the generations who will inherit them.
Three principles guide every interview, every restoration, every plate we set at a gathering. They are not aspirational — they are operational, and we are accountable to them.
We treat every story entrusted to us the way a family treats a passed-down textile — with care, with naming, and with the understanding that it will be handed forward. Nothing we publish is disposable.
Read our editorial charterFrom Sahel markets to coastal bookshops, from refugee corridors to royal libraries — we commission voices from every region, every language family, and every generation. A continent is not a single chord.
See our regional coverageEvery recording, transcript, and photograph we commission is released to a non-profit trust for open access. Knowledge that costs the public to view is knowledge that has failed its first duty.
Read the ChroniclesMilestones from a project that has always been slightly ahead of its funding, and never behind its mission.
The first sixteen-page issue is hand-stapled in a borrowed flat in Douala and mailed to 312 subscribers. Cover story: a portrait of Madame Adjoua, a fifth-generation indigo dyer from the Comoé valley.
We begin recording first-person testimonies from elders across the Sahel — cooks, griots, fisherwomen, midwives — eventually producing the foundational 800-hour audio archive that powers much of our work today.
A formal agreement places digitized copies of our archive inside twelve public university libraries, free of licensing fees, ensuring the work outlives the organization that produced it.
Launched during a year of separation, this series connected forty-six families across continents through mailed letters and recorded recipes — a reminder that culture travels, even when we cannot.
Our interactive map of cultural sites, endangered practices, and living archives is released to the public — built with and for the communities it represents, never without their consent.
Our editorial circle is small on purpose. Every voice you read here is named, accountable, and rooted in a specific place.
Twenty-two years in cultural journalism, founded the journal from her grandmother's kitchen in Douala. Believes the most important archives are still being written down.
Trained in Accra and Leiden. Has recorded more than 600 hours of testimony across West and Central Africa, with a particular focus on apprenticeship lineages in craft trades.
A former cataloger at the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, Fatima oversees the metadata, preservation, and ethical-use agreements for every entry in the archive.