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About us
A magazine, a radio station and a directory
African Pride Magazine publishes on the culture, style, business and ideas of people of African descent — in Canada, on the continent, and everywhere the diaspora has settled. This page says what we stand for, and what we will not do.
Our mission
We focus on promoting African interests and traditions, and highlighting the achievements of people of African descent in all spheres of human endeavor, all over the world.
African Pride Magazine
It is a sentence with a verb in it — promoting — and that is the part that decides everything else. A magazine that only described would not need a mission. Ours commits us to a point of view, and it commits us to the people we write about.
In practice that means we go looking for work that has not been written about, we name the people doing it, and we give away the things that cost us nothing to give: a listing in the directory, a slot on the radio, a correction when we are wrong.
At a glance
What this site is
Four numbers, all of them counting things you can check on this site rather than figures we would like you to believe.
The desks
What we publish, and where
Each desk is named for an Adinkra symbol from the Akan tradition of Ghana. The symbol is the standard the desk is held to, not a decoration.
Culture
Language, food, faith, music, textiles and the rituals that travel with families. Adinkrahene — leadership and greatness.
Style
Print, tailoring, hair, jewellery and the designers working with heritage cloth. Dwennimmen — strength with humility.
Opinion
Argument rather than outrage: identity, migration, parenting and the things diaspora families genuinely disagree about. Nkyinkyim — adaptability.
Business
Founders, traders and tradespeople — how African-owned businesses start, are financed and are handed on. Nkonsonkonson — unity.
Diaspora
Settlement, permits, remittances, credential recognition and community associations. Aya — endurance.
Radio
Africanpride Radio, seven days a week, with a free evening noticeboard for anyone in the community. Gye Nyame — the supremacy of God.
Standards
Six things we hold to
Independent publishing is mostly a series of small refusals. These are ours, written down so you can hold us to them.
Names, not labels
We name the weavers, designers, founders and organisers we write about, and we credit the people who taught them. Nobody is a “local artisan”.
Context before comment
Sankofa: go back and fetch it. We explain where a tradition came from — and who says so — before we argue about where it should go next.
Corrections in the open
When we get something wrong we fix it and say so at the foot of the piece, with the date. We do not quietly edit a mistake out of existence.
Uplift, not flattery
Eban is a fence — a boundary. Pride means being willing to report honestly on the community, including when the story is a hard one. A magazine that cannot criticise is a newsletter.
A wall around the editorial
Advertisers buy space, never coverage. Sponsored material is marked as sponsored wherever it appears, and no advertiser sees a story before it is published. Fihankra — the compound with one gate.
A listing is not an endorsement
Marketplace entries are published as the business describes itself. We do not inspect, accredit or vouch for anyone — and we say so on the page where people find them. Pempamsie — sewn in readiness.
How the writing is credited
Bylines, sources and the things we will not invent
Pieces on this site are bylined by the desk that produced them. Where a contributor writes under their own name, the name appears on the piece. We do not maintain an invented masthead — a list of impressive-sounding editors who do not exist is a lie told for free, and it is the first thing a reader should check in any publication.
- Nobody in our pages is invented. We do not create composite characters, anonymous “community members”, or businesses that do not exist to make a page look busier.
- Quotes are from people who were spoken to — or attributed to a document we can point you at. Where an account is contested, we say that it is contested instead of picking the tidier version.
- Photographs are illustrative unless captioned otherwise. We credit the source of an image where we know it, and we do not present a stock photograph as though it were our own premises, staff or customers.
- No testimonials we cannot source. We would rather have no praise on a page than praise we wrote ourselves.
Seven days, on air
Music in the morning, talk in the afternoon, and a free evening noticeboard for births, funerals, fundraisers, events and jobs. Announcements are read out, not sold.
See the schedule MarketplaceFree listings, worldwide
Twelve categories, open to African-owned businesses anywhere. No fee, no commission, no paid ranking — because a directory that sells position is an advertisement page.
Browse the categoriesThe publisher
Who is behind it
African Pride Magazine is an independent publication. It is not owned by a media group, a political party or an advertiser, and it is edited from Calgary, Alberta, where the magazine, the radio programming and the marketplace directory are all run by the same small team.
The magazine reports about the continent and the diaspora rather than from a single country, and it has been published continuously online. It keeps three things going under one name: the magazine itself, Africanpride Radio, and the marketplace directory.
Why the company details are blank here
We would rather leave a field empty than print something we cannot prove. The registered name of the business, its business number, its street address and its telephone number are all being supplied to us for publication, and until they are, the fields below stay marked as pending rather than filled with a plausible guess. A magazine that asks you to trust its reporting should not start by inventing its own address.
- Registered nameCONTACT_TBD
- Business numberCONTACT_TBD
- AddressDowntown Calgary, Alberta, Canada — street address CONTACT_TBD
- EmailCONTACT_TBD
- TelephoneCONTACT_TBD
- Office hoursCONTACT_TBD