Africa Week at UNESCO is an annual event that celebrates the cultural, scientific and artistic richness of Africa and its diaspora. This year, a series of conference panels focused on African heritage and its contributions to global knowledge – from Nok metallurgy and Dogon astronomy to the intellectual centres of Timbuktu.
Speaking from UNESCO Headquarters, Liberia’s Special Envoy for Cultural and Heritage Diplomacy, Ambassador Lorenzo Llewellyn Witherspoon, urged the international community to restore and celebrate African heritage through UNESCO’s work.
It is essential to highlight that Africa's significant contributions, previously overlooked, have been notably illuminated by the pioneering UNESCO’s General History of Africa.
An educational panel, led by H.E. Dr Auxillia Mnangagwa, First Lady of Zimbabwe, underscored that schools ‘must teach restitution as a right, not a favour’.
In addition to conferences, exhibitions offered a glimpse of Africa’s rich artistic and cultural heritage, from hand-carved masks and miniature bronze curios to centuries-old textiles and regal garments.
Among women entrepreneurs from across the African continent, Semeni Mohamed Salum, representing the Zanzibar Wakulima Hai Cooperative Society, shared how UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere programme has played a vital role in advancing her enterprise. It has enabled her cooperative to sustainably harvest and transform local seaweed into a variety of high-quality, value-added products.
We have come to the UNESCO Exhibition to showcase—and sell—a wide range of value-added products made from locally farmed seaweed. Among them are soaps, shampoos, face and body creams, massage and hair oils, as well as seaweed tea. Each item reflects the many varieties of seaweed we cultivate and the cooperative’s commitment to turning this sustainable resource into high-quality goods.
Senegalese artist William Sagna’s vivid compositions evoked memory and tradition through dreamlike imagery—baobabs, masks, minarets, and sailboats emerging from sun-soaked fields of colour.
Hand-carved masks, beaded trinkets, and miniature bronze curios cluster together in a vibrant tableau—each piece whispering a fragment of Africa’s hand-crafted heritage.
Alongside these works, traditional Moroccan court attire stood in elegant contrast to modern Zimbabwean fashion, highlighting the continent’s enduring creativity and stylistic evolution.
UNESCO also gave the stage to pan-African creativity, with a line-up spanning 11 countries. Together, artists and performers wove tradition and innovation into one continent-wide celebration.
Performances included RemiTone’s Tanzanian Afro-grooves and Mauritania’s nomadic desert sounds, followed by Côte d’Ivoire’s kinetic Sellou’Art dancers and Rwanda’s heroic Intore troupe. Zimbabwean mbira jazz, Morocco’s mystical ´¡Ã¯²õ²õ²¹·É²¹&²Ô²ú²õ±è;chants and Cape Verdean morna gave way to Congolese salsa, Comorian toirab, Malian fusion, plus Senegalese Bogolan couture.
