DRUM Cover Stories

Event
Lagos

This November in Lagos, MOWAA presents Cover Stories, a series of public showcases, talks and workshops exploring themes of pre- and postcolonial West African identity, the power of archives, and the role of media in shaping cultural memory across fashion, music and visual arts.

At the heart of MOWAA’s programme this Lagos Art Season is DRUM Magazine, the seminal publication whose West African editions documented the region’s social and cultural transformations, offering a lens through which to interrogate and reclaim our histories.

Cover Stories unfolds across four strands: a public poster campaign on the streets of Lagos, from Yaba to Victoria Island and elsewhere in-between, a showcase of 10 issues of DRUM’s Nigerian edition (1959 to 1969) at the newly opened arts club, Mbari Kola, which serves as the projects central hub for exchange and collective reflection, A Place for Dreams, a new garment by designer Abiola Olusola responding to a 1958 DRUM feature, and a programme of talks.

Join us as we activate the DRUM archive through a series of events and showcases, opening up new readings of the region’s histories. In partnership with the DRUM Archive and with the support of Ford Foundation. 

Showcases & Talks

Cover Stories: DRUM Archive at Mbari Kola

Wole Soyinka Gallery, Mbari Kola
30.10.26
2PM
Engage with the DRUM West African editions at Mbari Kola in Lagos. Founded in Johannesburg in 1951, DRUM Magazine was passed between households, offices and schools, and argued over in its letters pages and on the street. Its Nigerian edition followed the country from the last years of colonial rule into independence, and its covers and fashion pages recorded how women dressed, posed and presented themselves through that decade. On display at Wole Soyinka Gallery at Mbari Kola, 10 issues of the DRUM’S Nigerian edition, published between 1959 and 1969, are reproduced at actual size. Read in sequence, the issues move from tailored Western outerwear to local prints and embroidered gowns. Dress was a space of self-articulation, registering economic fortune, political sovereignty and the negotiations women made within and against patriarchal structures. Cover Stories puts people back into the DRUM archive: the women on these covers, the readers who wrote in, the Lagosians answering them today, and everyone who encounters it here, in real time.




Cover Stories: DRUM Posters across Lagos

across Lagos
2.11.26
This November, MOWAA’s new curatorial project, DRUM Cover Stories, takes the magazine’s pages and covers to the streets of Lagos. For two weeks, DRUM Magazine covers will appear across four of the city’s corridors: Victoria Island, Lagos Island (including Freedom Park and Onikan), YabaTech–UNILAG, and Kofo Abayomi.  In this public art activation, DRUM’s covers are plastered onto the city’s walls alongside political campaign posters, commercial adverts and public notices, placing them back into public circulation, competing for attention as DRUM once did at the newsstand. In Nigeria, posters have always been political: a tool of campaign and protest, regulated, contested and pasted over by the next one. DRUM Cover Stories enters that field with a different proposition, inviting everyday Lagosians to consider what has changed, and what has not, and reassess the histories and ideas these images carry. Beneath each poster, responses to the DRUM covers from West African artists, designers, students, drivers and traders bring the magazine’s histories into dialogue with the present. Locations
  • Federal Palace / Victoria Island Axis
  • Lagos Island Axis: Freedom Park, Onikan and environs 
  • Yabatech to Unilag Axis 
  • Kofo Abayomi Axis: Nordic Hotel Strip




A Place for Dreams

Wole Soyinka Gallery, Mbari Kola
30.10.26
In collaboration with ROUNDABOUT, MOWAA invited designer Abiola Olusola to treat a single feature in DRUM as the brief for a new garment. Displayed in the Wole Soyinka Gallery at Mbari Kola, alongside the showcase of DRUM publications, this garment takes "Miss Nigeria to Paris" as its starting point, a 1958 DRUM feature linking dress to aspiration, travel and international recognition.  Olusola reads it through contemporary Lagos to consider the histories that cloth carries. In this new context, the materials connect histories of Nigerian dress with present-day practices of making, inheritance and reinterpretation. A Place for Dreams is part of MOWAA's work to activate the DRUM archive, opening it to contemporary practitioners so that it remains alive for those making work today. About the designer: Abiola Olusola Abiola Olusola is a Lagos-based contemporary luxury womenswear label, founded in 2017 by Nigerian designer Abiola A. Olusola. Raised in Ibadan, she studied fashion design at Istituto Marangoni Paris, graduating with a BFA in 2015, with experience at Givenchy menswear and Lanvin. The brand pairs clean, architectural tailoring with West African textile techniques such as adire, batik and hand-stamping. Each piece is handmade in Nigeria with local artisans, with a focus on slow, sustainable production, and the label has been featured in Vogue, ELLE UK, CNN and Dazed.




Cut from Our Own Cloth: Fashion, Modernity and Nationhood

Wole Soyinka Gallery, Mbari Kola
3.11.26
2-3PM
Speakers: Dr Christine Checinska, Senior Curator of African and African Diaspora Textiles and Fashion, V&A; Zara Odu, founder, ROUNDABOUT Moderator: Aindrea Emelife Format: 45-minute conversation followed by 15 minutes of audience Q&A Using the archive as a starting point, the panel will explore how fashion became a way of negotiating modernity, identity and nationhood as political and social realities shifted. Through decolonisation and independence, dress became an expression of newfound freedom, moving between locally made fabrics, traditional dress and tailored Western silhouettes like the three-piece suit. At the same time, woven and locally produced textiles grew in importance, as designers and wearers began looking inward rather than only to Europe and the West, transforming textile traditions and positioning them as modern. Running alongside this was the constant circulation of imported cloth, garments and styles. Did they replace local dress, spark adaptation, or become part of a hybrid fashion culture? Together, we'll trace how these forces shaped what modern African dress could be, and what they mean for designers and makers now. About the speakers Dr Christine Checinska is the inaugural Senior Curator of African and African Diaspora Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where she has worked since 2020. She originated and led Africa Fashion, the V&A’s internationally touring exhibition. Before joining the museum, she spent over three decades as a womenswear designer, including as Senior Designer at Margaret Howell. Her practice as an artist, writer and curator explores the relationship between cloth, culture and race. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths. Zara Odu is the founder of Designers Consociate, a consultancy dedicated to building sustainable brands through strategic innovation, cultural insight, partnerships, and circular thinking. She is also the founder of Roundabout, an ecosystem-building platform advancing circular and regenerative practices across Africa’s fashion, textile, and creative industries. With over 18 years of experience across Africa’s fashion and creative sectors, Zara’s work sits at the intersection of fashion, innovation, sustainability, and economic development. She has worked with brands, institutions, and industry stakeholders to design strategies, programmes, and partnerships that strengthen value chains, support creative enterprises, and foster ecosystem growth across the continent. Her work has been featured by Vogue Business and CNN Inside Africa. In 2024, she was honoured as a Young Leader at the Green Carpet Fashion Awards in Los Angeles.