Across the continent, a generation of muralists and graffiti artists is reclaiming public space. From Lagos to Dakar, these artists are using spray paint and brushes to tell stories that galleries often miss: stories about identity, gender, faith, waste, wildlife and what it means to grow up African right now. Here are 6 of the most exciting muralists and graffiti artists working across the continent today.
Osa Seven — Lagos, Nigeria
Born Osa Okunkpolor in Benin City and trained in Visual Communications at the University of Lagos, Osa Seven has spent the better part of two decades making the case that graffiti belongs in Nigeria's most visible public spaces, not its margins. He grew up in Festac, where some of his earliest tags still survive, and went on to found the 7th Element Initiative, a platform that gives Nigerian street artists access to tools, training and exposure they'd otherwise struggle to find.
In 2017, Osa created Eko Tag, a 13-by-108-foot mural commissioned by the Lagos State Government on Ozumba Mbadiwe Road, Victoria Island, celebrating Lagos at 50 with imagery of the National Theatre, the Aro Meta chiefs and tricycles.
CNN documented the project for Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown, and two years later, Osa became the first African artist commissioned to design a bottle for Hennessy Very Special Cognac. He has also painted for Guinness, Adidas, Google and Wizkid's award-winning Superstar album art, and through his Art For A Cause initiative, regularly paints educational murals on the walls of under-resourced Lagos schools.
Falko One — Cape Town, South Africa
Falko has been painting Cape Town's walls since 1988, three years before the end of apartheid, when he first picked up a can at Westridge High School in Mitchells Plain. Today he's widely regarded as one of the founding figures of South African graffiti, but it's his elephants that most people recognise: enormous, technicolour creatures that wrap around windows, air conditioning units and drainpipes, painted in a way that responds to the building rather than ignoring it.
The motif was born almost by accident during a trip to a village outside Dakar, Senegal, where chickens he'd painted caused an unexpected stir over their association with local beliefs around witchcraft. He switched to elephants as a neutral subject, and the idea took on a life of its own. Through his long-running project Once Upon A Town, Falko has travelled to small, under-resourced towns across South Africa, painting homes in poorer neighbourhoods and turning them into informal open-air galleries, an act he describes as changing how communities see the value of their own surroundings.
Graffiti Girls Kenya — Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya
Founded in Nairobi in 2015 by artist Douglas "Smoki" Kihiko, Graffiti Girls Kenya was created to give young women a way into a scene that, at the time, had almost no space for them. Early members Nancy "Chelwek" Chelagat, Dinah "QueenD" Simbauni and Victoria "Blaine 29" Joyce began painting murals across Nairobi and in informal settlements like Korogocho and Kariobangi, tackling subjects that rarely made it onto public walls: female genital mutilation, rape, education and the everyday work of caring for the girl child.
The collective's process is deliberate, beginning each project with research meetings where members discuss issues affecting their communities before a single line is sketched. Their most recent series tackled gender-based violence directly, culminating in a large mural in Nairobi's Baba Ndogo neighbourhood. As member Yvonne Nzilani has put it, the murals exist to make space for women who don't feel able to speak about violence elsewhere, "it encourages more women going through gender based violence to come out and speak out, as there are people who can listen to them."
eL Seed — Tunisia / Cairo, Egypt
Born in Paris to Tunisian parents, eL Seed grew up speaking only the Tunisian dialect and didn't learn to read or write standard Arabic until his teens, when an identity crisis sent him searching for his roots. What he found was calligraphy, and he began fusing it with the graffiti he'd grown up around in France to create what he calls "calligraffiti", monumental Arabic script that is meant to be felt before it's read.
His first major piece, painted on the minaret of the Jara Mosque in his hometown of Gabès in 2012, quoted a Quranic verse about unity across differences, a deliberately unifying message during a politically fraught moment after the Tunisian revolution. His best-known project remains Perception, an anamorphic mural spanning the facades of around 50 buildings in Cairo's Manshiyat Naser, home to the Zaraeeb community, who have collected and recycled the city's waste for generations despite being widely stigmatised. Visible in full only from a single point on the Muqattam Mountain, the piece quotes a 3rd-century Coptic bishop and was created with the community's full participation.
It won eL Seed the International Award for Public Art in 2019, on top of the UNESCO Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture and recognition as a TED Fellow and World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.
Karabo Poppy Moletsane — South Africa
Karabo Poppy grew up in Vereeniging, a mining town south of Johannesburg whose underfunded schools didn't offer art as a subject, and arrived at university to find herself one of only nine Black students in a class of roughly six hundred. The curriculum, she has said, only ever taught Western art history or traditional African art, never anything contemporary, despite the wealth of Black creatives working right now. So she built her own visual language instead, drawing on the hand-painted signage of township hair salons and barbershops, with their bold side-profile portraits and unconventional colour palettes of electric blues and reds.
That instinct has carried her from passion projects and school murals to commissions for Google, Nike, Coca-Cola and Netflix, including a pair of Air Force 1s worn by LeBron James and the graphics for Netflix's first African original series, Queen Sono.
For Karabo, street art remains essential precisely because it bypasses the barriers, financial and otherwise, that keep so many South Africans out of galleries and off the internet. "I try to make work that is as accessible as possible," she has said, and her large-scale murals, painted across Johannesburg's basketball courts and buildings, are where that philosophy plays out most directly.
Zeinixx (Dieynaba Sidibé) — Senegal
Dieynaba Sidibé first saw graffiti on television at seventeen and knew immediately it was what she wanted to do, despite her mother once throwing out all her art supplies in the hope she'd become a doctor instead. She found her way to the Africulturban Center in Dakar's Pikine suburb, where pioneering local artist Oumar "Grafixx" Diop became her mentor, an apprenticeship she later honoured by taking the name Zeinixx, a fusion of her own name and his.
Now widely described as Senegal's first female graffiti artist, Zeinixx has represented the country at international festivals from Casablanca's Meeting of Styles to Burkina Faso's Waga Hip Hop Festival, and her murals consistently return to the place of women in Senegalese and wider sub-Saharan society, addressing subjects like domestic violence and reproductive rights that rarely make it onto public walls elsewhere. Every March 8th, she takes part in Women Life, a graffiti session held for International Women's Rights Day. In 2021, she launched Zeinixx Entertainment to run visual arts workshops for young people, ensuring the path Grafixx opened for her stays open for the next generation too.
What unites these six artists isn't just a shared style; it's a shared instinct: that public walls are public conversations, and that the continent's most pressing stories deserve to live somewhere bigger than a gallery. Next time you're walking through Lagos, Cape Town, Nairobi, Cairo or Dakar, look up. There's probably a story painted right by you.
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