The African Imaginary Podcast

This remarkable conversation feels like it could only ever have taken place inside The African Imaginary. Such is the power of Malian artist Fatoumata Diawara, a visionary voice on the African music scene. The day after headlining the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, she talks with host Khangi Khoza about what it means to see your craziness as a gift, breaking taboos, transcending on stage, designing guitars and sewing costumes. Fatoumata Diawara is a multi-faceted artist from Mali, known for her ability to cross Malian rhythms with contemporary sounds. She has collaborated with music giants like Damon Albarn and Herbie Hancock, she has been nominated for a Grammy, and in 2026 she became the first black woman with a Gibson signature guitar in her name. Born in Ivory Coast, one of eleven children, Fatou grew up dancing in the streets before cinema found her. She took two films to Cannes playing characters her directors described as mad. "It wasn't acting," she says. "For me, it was normal." At 19 she fled a forced marriage, taught herself guitar, and began playing her own songs in Parisian bars. Her debut album Fatou dropped in 2011. In 2013, with her country at war, she gathered forty Malian artists to record Maliko, an anthem that still airs on Malian radio whenever tensions rise. The album ‘Fenfo’ (Something to Say) followed in 2018, establishing her as a genre-transcending musician, blending with ease afrobeat, jazz electro, pop and rock. Her new album MASSA drops on 5 June and explores the balance between her life as an artist and her role as a mother and activist. Always singing in Bambara, Fatoumata says, "I don't want people to understand what I'm saying, I want people to feel me.”

If you’re in need of good company and a far-reaching conversation, host Khangi Khoza and guest Blinky Bill have got you covered. In our fourth episode of The African Imaginary Podcast, they talk about what it means to build something original from African soil, what the continent's artists owe each other, and what soulfulness in music means in this new crazy world. Blinky Bill is a Kenyan musician, producer and DJ, and one of the founding members of Just A Band - the art and music collective widely regarded as the forefathers of Kenya's alternative music scene. His songs have found their audiences on Netflix, on Nike campaigns, on stages around the world, and here on The African Imaginary Podcast where we licensed ‘Jam Now, Simmer Down’ as our theme tune. Born in Eastleigh, Nairobi, to a mother who did missionary work and played the guitar, and a father who sang in the church choir, Blinky grew up absorbing gospel, lingala, jazz and hip-hop from home and the matatus that he rode in. His super-power is the massive music library in his mind that he effortlessly draws upon. It is why no two of his tracks sound the same, and it’s why his list of collaborators on and off the continent is so impressive, from Childish Gambino and Chance the Rapper to Idd Aziz, D’Afro and Sampa the Great. “I think that my biggest gift above and beyond the music is that I know how to bring people together and see their role in the vision,” he tells The African Imaginary Podcast. “I'm always connecting the dots.”

In our third episode of The African Imaginary Podcast, guest Justin Letschert and host Khangi Khoza talk about skin, the beauty industry, and why Africa is precisely the right place from which to launch a brand to the world. A rich and deep exploration into running a global business by leaning into humanness and instinct. Justin Letschert is the owner of Africa’s most global and well-known skincare brand. Since 2000 he has navigated Bio-Oil from selling a handful of products a year in South Africa, to a product a second in over 160 countries - the fastest global rollout of all time. So how does a 4-product brand from the tip of Africa generate a cult following? Justin credits Bio-Oil’s success in no small part to the fact that he and his brother (who is also his business partner) were born and raised in Durban, South Africa. ‘Being African gives you internal strength, tenacity and creativity. Exactly what is needed to navigate the international waters of taking a brand global,’ he says.

In this, our second episode of The African Imaginary Podcast, Msaki in deep conversation with host Khangi Khoza, reflects on her ancestral energies, salutes her icons, dissects the music industry, and lets us into her creative process. Msaki is an award-winning South African singer-songwriter. Her voice is one of the most distinctive in the business, delighting club kids in Kenya, folk festival-goers across the USA, and her huge fan-base in Mzansi. Msaki trained in fine art, graphic design, film photography and curation at Rhodes University, Leeds University, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and East London Technikon. She is a South African Music Award (SAMA) winning musician, who contributed to Black Coffee’s Grammy Award winning album as writer, composer and artist. She has also collaborated with Sun-EL Musician, Carlo Mombelli, Nduduzo Makhathini, Simmy and Ami Faku, Kabza De Small, Diplo, Ry X others. As a writer and facilitator, she is sought after for writing camps around the world. At the core of her practice is a commitment to catching and preserving ‘the soul of the song’ as it travels through the music value chain. In this way she shines a light for other independent artists across the continent, including those whose careers she supports through her collective ALTBLK. Msaki’s practice now merges installation and performance. Her visionary archetype extends to how she parents her 3 kids. She’s a ‘free range mom’ who co-creates their education and play . “Kids are incredible…I don’t know how to explain the things that I’ve seen,” she tells The African Imaginary. We are thrilled to have her take her rightful place in the African imaginary, which she sees as ‘a circular, communal intelligence’. The African Imaginary on Substack

In this, our first episode of The African Imaginary Podcast, host Khangi Khoza and writer Tsitsi Dangarembga dive into the importance of the African imagination, Tsitsi’s African icons, spirituality in her later writing, advice to writers, and more. Tsitsi Dangarembga is one of Africa’s key literary voices. She has been writing for four decades and is best known for her trilogy of novels set in her home country, Zimbabwe. Nervous Conditions was the first novel by a black Zimbabwean woman to be published in English, and was praised by the late Chinua Achebe for being ‘as natural as the grass grows’. In 2020, Dangarembga’s novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – something she has described as ‘absolutely immense’ and life-changing. Two years later she was named by The Financial Times as one of the 20 most influential women in the world after she was arrested in Harare for inciting public violence. Her crime was walking with a placard that read ‘We Want Better. Reform Our Institutions’. Among Dangarembga’s other awards are the English PEN Pinter Prize, the German Peace Prize, Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize and the PEN Catalan Free Voice Award. She is a former fellow of the Rockefeller Bellagio Centre, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and she was the International Chair in Creative Writing (Africa) at the University of East Anglia, and is an honorary fellow of her alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. She says that the subject of the African imaginary has ‘been on [her] mind, waking and sleeping, for the last 30 years’, because she believes that ‘no significant human advancement has ever taken place without tapping human creative potential’.