African artists cross borders to imagine a new Africa

Three South African artists have been selected to take part in the 5th annual edition of Invisible Borders trans-African road trip from Lagos, Nigeria, to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in June. Invisible Borders is an artist’s funded initiative aimed at telling African stories, by Africans through photography and inspiring artistic interventions while encouraging trans-African artistic relationships and contributing towards the socio-political discourse shaping Africa in the 21st Century.  


Johannesburg based graffiti artist Breeze Yoko, Writer Lindokuhle Nkosi and photographer  Angus McKinnon will join 6 other artists from Egypt, Eritrea, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria, on a road trip of a life-time:  transversing more than 20 African and European borders by road in 151 days. “I applied for this trip because I want to know what it feels like to actually be an African” says Nkosi “ I think south Africans are too caught up in being South African, because we’re rebuilding and trying to create a South African Identity which is rubbish. Our identity is the continent. That’s where we need to be”

The road to African unity is to explore our differences

This ambitious journey from Africa to Europe is the brainchild of Invisible Borders founder and  Artistic Director Emeka Okereke a Nigerian  photographer with a passion to paint a new image of Africa through his lens.  
The idea which started off as a dare amongst friends in 2009 has grown into one of Africa’s most sought after event s in the continents’ cultural and artistic calendar.

“One of the things we realised is that African Unity is the destination, but the road to African unity means exchanging and exploring our differences and flourishing from it”.

Okereke says Africans need to engage their differences before they can even think about unity. “There’s always something we’re learning bout all the places we visit because, Africa is so vast in culture language and everything – there’s no point to try and define Africa, part of this trip is  aimed at learning to transcend  Africa”

For the first time in four years Invisible borders Trans-African road trip go beyond the continents’ borders.
Artists will travel by road to several European countries and end up in Bosnia, Sarajevo.  “This is us being proactive, this is us saying that there is an Afro centric side to Europe and we want to address that”

Okereke says they felt that it was time to address the relationship between Africa and Europe and address issues around immigration, which is not often spoken about.

“We are saying that we are neighbours sharing borders, so it’s important to look at that relationship instead of focusing the colonial narrative of " Europe exploited Africans" we want to propose new ideas of how to tackle the problem and look at the relationship in a different way”


Okereke says they have been knocking on all doors to source funding.  “It’s not easy, we are not artist who are fortunate financiallySo we launched public funding campaigns such as crowd funding”

Johannesburg based visual artists Breeze Yoko has dreamt of embarking an epic road trip across Africa by road – and spreading love through his art.  Now, 37 years later, his childhood dream is about to come true.  

Yoko says he started facing borders while preparing for the trip from confronting   the costly, bureaucracy of acquiring 11 Visas, and the negative often xenophobic perceptions of Africa from South Africans. Some which he says almost killed his enthusiasm and exciting of taking the challenge of crossing borders.

“It has been disheartening and it kind of dimmed down my excitement a little bit” he said “I think it was easier to get a Schengen Visa (a visa that has made travelling between 22 European Union States 2 non-EU members) that to obtain visa’s to the different African countries. “ This has highlighted for me how we treat each other as Africans.”  Yoko says being selected on this trip has taught him a lot. “There are so many wonderful, amazing people on the continent, there are so many good things that are happening in Africa and I just wish that we’d be more proud of our continent”

We’re looking for different ways of experiencing people real time” said Okereke of the trip, which he says is built on African’s greatest trait “improvisation”.  “We’ll be tweeting, sharing our pictures and writing on all social media platforms. So the people can see the realities of the road trip.” He said.” Being lost and not knowing what is going to happen next is a great ways of learning.”
The artists will get on the road on the 2nd of June, spending two weeks in each country creating work and collaborating with local artists with objective of imagining a future continent, with out borders.