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Achille T.

@bamichic_

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Pleasures, pure and lofty
📍Ba Sing Se 🇨🇲
Essays, poems, etc.
Building @baldwininstitute @festacdoc
Serving @jackartsny + @the_heritage_nation

POSTS STORIES REELS

The Poetry Project is pleased to share that judge Sawako Nakayasu has selected Achille Tenkiang as the winner of the 2026 Lisa Brannan Prize. Regarding Achille's winning poem, "After Bhanu Kapil’s 12 Questions", Nakayasu had the following to share:

The speaker arrives thusly: “Through the soft catastrophe of being loved by people who wanted safety for me more than they wanted truth.” The terse rhythms of this long and achingly stunning poem bring the complexity of this and other hard truths into the light—we consider the institutions of silence, the many textures and temporalities of grief. Dirt as archive. It responds to Bhanu Kapil’s classic work, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, with renewed intensity, across Africa and the US, urgently demanding more capaciousness on behalf of masculinity, of relationships, and of love itself.

"After Bhanu Kapil's 12 Questions" will be published in an upcoming issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter. Congratulations, Achille! by @bamichic_

At Baldwin Institute, we believe critical thinking and creative expression aren’t luxuries—they’re necessities.

In this moment of book bans, educational censorship, and shrinking space for free thought, our work is urgent. We’re building a Baldwin-informed future—one where young minds are empowered to question deeply, imagine freely, and create boldly.

We draw from Baldwin’s legacy because he taught us that clarity of thought and courage of expression are essential tools for liberation.

This is the work. And the time is now.

#EducationForLiberation
#FreedomToLearn
#EndBookBans
#TeachTheTruth
#BaldwinLegacy
#AmplifyBlackVoices
#YouthVoices
#CriticalThinking
#CreativeFreedom
#ArtAsActivism by @bamichic_

From Zora’s hats to @solangeknowles cowries. From Du Bois’s gloves to @ikeude lens.

My @voguemagazine debut (!!) is live—a piece on Black dandyism and the intellectual imagination, timed to the @metcostumeinstitute spring exhibition and the upcoming Met Gala. It’s about the thinkers and artists who didn’t just write or speak their ideas—they wore them. Who treated style as a language. As subtext. As strategy. They made arguments in satin and silhouette, and reshaped how we see intellect, resistance, and grace.

The photos here are from the Vogue piece and others sourced from the public domain. @ekoweshun is not photographed, the tagged photo is a piece from a 2016 exhibition he curated at The Photographer’s Gallery in London: “Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity” by @bamichic_

NEW YORK CITY, YOU’RE INVITED! 🇳🇬🎬

In 1977, FESTAC brought over 15,000 artists, intellectuals, and cultural leaders from all over the world to Lagos to celebrate, debate, and imagine a new Black world. Nearly 50 years later, come rediscover the landmark pan-African festival that the history books tried to erase.

Join 77 Productions for an exclusive trailer screening of our upcoming documentary “All Roads Lead to Lagos: The FESTAC ’77 Story” and an evening of conversation, community, and fundraising to help bring this story to the screen.

🗓 Tuesday, October 20, 2026
📍 13 Grattan Street, Unit 403, Brooklyn, NY 11206
🎥 Trailer screenings at 6 PM, 7 PM, and 8 PM

Each screening will be followed by a Q&A discussion between Producer Chisom Ilogu and Associate Producer Achille Tenkiang.

Light refreshments will be served, and all ticket sales will support the documentary’s production, promotion, and distribution.

Thank you to our sponsors, My Friend’s Show and The Krawl App, for helping make this evening possible! Please follow and show support :
@my.friends.show
@krawlapp

🎟 Tickets: posh.vip/f/ed2c0

#FESTAC77 #BlackHistory #AfricanCinema #blackcinema #nyff by @bamichic_

📺 Watch Now - Seeding Futures: Cultural Infrastructure Beyond the Institution!⁠
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🎨 Revisit this conversation, hosted at G.A.S. Lagos in collaboration with Achille Tenkiang (@bamichic_), founder and director of the Baldwin Institute, exploring the infrastructures that sustain Black art, cultural memory, and creative communities beyond formal institutions.⁠
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📜 Held as an associate event of the AAL Lab and Affiliates Network, the conversation brought together curator and cultural strategist Seun Alli (@shaysoul.a), creative entrepreneur Tushar Hathiramani (@tusharhathi), and The Republic founder and editor-in-chief Wale Lawal (@wallelawal), with Achille moderating.⁠
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💭 Through reflections on their respective practices, the panellists considered: Where does cultural infrastructure exist beyond institutions? What is gained or lost within institutional frameworks? How can relationships, systems, and acts of care become forms of infrastructure? And who gets to shape the structures that serve particular communities?⁠
⁠
🔗 If you missed the conversation, now is the time to catch up! Link in bio.

#gasfoundation #yinkashonibarefoundation #seedingfutures #achilletenkiang by @bamichic_

31. 🎂🎉

“Wake up and ache for your life.” — Natalie Diaz

The year took more than it gave.
The year gave more than it took.
Both can be true at once.
I am the infrastructure I was building.

📸 : @shotbycaitlyn by @bamichic_

The strongman state didn’t just kill democracy. It killed fathers.⁣⁣
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My new essay for @africasacountry examines what @akinoladaviesjr My Father’s Shadow reveals about the cost of military rule on African families — not at the level of policy papers and GDP, but at the kitchen table, the bedtime story, the unanswered question.⁣⁣
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The film is set on June 12, 1993 — the day Nigeria’s freest election was annulled and a particular kind of African fatherhood became impossible. But this isn’t just a Nigerian story. Across the continent, a generation of strongmen styled themselves as Fathers of the Nation while systematically destroying the conditions under which actual fathers could exist.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
Davies and his brother @kingxdavies lost their own father at 20 months and four years old. The film imagines a day they never had with him. Their production company is called Fatherland. Few have asked why.⁣⁣
Full essay at the link in bio.⁣⁣
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My Father’s Shadow is showing at the New York African Film Festival on May 25 at @BAM_Brooklyn.⁣⁣
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Stills from My Father’s Shadow courtesy of @maborocinema⁣⁣
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MKO Abiola casting his vote, June 12, 1993 — Getty Images⁣⁣
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Obiora Udechukwu, Portrait, The Politician Is Up, 1993 — courtesy the artist and @ko_artspace⁣⁣
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Wale Davies and Akinola Davies Jr. — Ayesha Kazim for The New York Times⁣⁣
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@faboroatherlandprods @africaisacountry @maborocinema @ko_artspace by @bamichic_

For this week’s Long Wave newsletter, I spoke to @bamichic_ and Liz Gomis, executive director of Maison des Mondes Africains (MansA), a cultural institution based in Paris. They told me how Black French culture has gained visibility in the capital and beyond.

As the saying goes: “The banlieues influence Paris, and Paris influences the world.”
@guardian
Link in story highlight. by @bamichic_

Lots of love, lots of Cameroun — Oyé! 🇨🇲
Congratulations to the Nguatems@mighty_koba @amberbrion

#nguatemeverafter

@alwaysadelle went crazy w/ the digicam 📸 by @bamichic_

the troubles.

As always, thank you @shotbycaitlyn 🫶🏿 by @bamichic_

LAGOS, YOU’RE INVITED 🇳🇬🎬

We’re thrilled to share the first exclusive screening of the trailer for All Roads Lead to Lagos: The FESTAC ’77 Story, our upcoming documentary exploring the extraordinary gathering that brought thousands of artists, thinkers, performers, and cultural leaders from across Africa and the Black diaspora to Lagos in 1977.

Join us this Friday, October 2 at 5 PM at MUSON Centre for an exclusive first look, hosted by Lights, Camera, Africa Film Festival @lcafilmfest .

This film has been years in the making, and we’re so excited to finally begin sharing it with an audience. ❤️

📍 MUSON Centre, 8/9 Marina Road, Onikan, Lagos
🗓 Friday, October 2, 2026
⏰ 5 PM

Registration link in bio.
Come see where the story begins.

#FESTAC77 #FESTAC #nigerianfilm #lagos by @bamichic_

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder almost eight years ago. The word arrived like a verdict. But my body recognized it as memory.

In my family - as in many Black/African families - there were no frameworks to hold the mad. No language for trembling. There was an aunt who “needed rest.” A cousin who “went quiet.” Stories spoken at the edge of the room and then folded away. So many of our ancestors survived things their bodies had no space to hold. So many of them held a grief so large it changed the room around them

I learned early that silence is not absence. It is storage.

Last November, in Lagos, at the 𝐑𝐞:𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐒𝐲𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐮𝐦, I presented 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘢(𝘴) - the public face of a project I have been researching for years. An inquiry into mania and madness as ancestral diasporic inheritances.

The phrase comes from La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s (@the.afromantic ) 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘰 𝘎𝘰 𝘔𝘢𝘥 𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘓𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘔𝘪𝘯𝘥, a book that changed my life. The room held writers, artists, curators, and cultural workers from across the diaspora - among them Yinka Shonibare, who afterward described the work as an expansion of Frantz Fanon’s.

This work is about what the archive will not hold. The dispossessed. The silenced. The ones marked excessive because they remembered too much. The body, when it has seen the world clearly, cannot return to silence without consequence.

It treats mania not as defect, but as capacity — a nervous system tuned to a pitch the world pretends not to hear. What clinicians call symptoms, I started to understand as signals.

This project is me unswallowing.

I don’t know where this goes from here - an archive, a book, an exhibition, a performance, I don’t know yet. What I know is that I want to keep building it alongside the people who want to be in it with me. No deadline. Taking my time.

We are not broken. We are overfull. We do not end here. We continue.

Thank you @yinkashonibarestudio , @yinkashonibarefoundation, @gasfoundation , @naimasfieldnotes , @belholden , @solamoni
and the whole team. by @bamichic_