🔅 Nando’s Walls Are Having an Art Attack
“But Aren’t Billionaires Always Right?”
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
Nando’s Walls Are Having an Art Attack, and Artists Are Loving It
Who knew your extra-hot half-chicken came with a side of contemporary South African culture? Since 2004, Nando’s has quietly morphed from peri-peri pusher to art patron extraordinaire, stocking its 1,200-plus restaurants with roughly 32,000 works by 700 local artists. That makes the chicken chain one of the world’s biggest private collectors and, thanks to those cheeky open-plan dining rooms, perhaps the planet’s MOST WIDELY VIEWED GALLERY.
About 2,000 pieces a year fly out of studios and into restaurants from Soweto to Chicago, all family-friendly, glass-free, and big enough to compete with a platter of chips. Artists rave: murals by Kilmany-Jo Liversage stretch from Dubai to Dallas; painter Diana Hyslop has sold 250 magical-realist canvases; mixed-media elder Kagiso Patrick Mautloa says the steady commissions let him “put more of myself into the work.”
Nando’s doesn’t dish on what it spends, but its side-hustle programmes hint at scale: “Creative Block” critiques miniature works, while a furniture-and-lighting mentorship has already moved 65,000 bespoke pieces worth more than $10 million into restaurants. The result? Diners tuck into flame-grilled chicken under vibrant portraits, abstract finger paintings, and the occasional street-sign collage, proving great art doesn’t need hush-hush galleries. Just pass the peri-peri sauce and keep the masterpieces coming.
“But Aren’t Billionaires Always Right?”: The Not-So-Green Green Revolution
In this eye-opening short documentary, The Guardian dives headfirst into a colossal question: what if well-intentioned Western billionaires are actually making Africa’s food crisis worse?
It looks at the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and their big idea: a “Green Revolution” for African farming, orchestrated by AGRA (the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), and how small-scale farmers who grow 70% of Africa’s food are left with crippling debts, fewer crop varieties, and, ironically, even less to eat.
The doc explores how “seed laws” criminalize age-old local practices (like sharing seeds with your neighbors), while partnerships with corporate titans (hello, Monsanto and Syngenta) essentially push these agribusiness agendas.
Check it out if you want to see how philanthropic billions can have major side effects when they collide with centuries of African farming tradition.
‘Global South’: A Term Invented Because We Can’t Say “Nonwhite World” Anymore
If you’ve been watching the geopolitical circus, you’ve probably heard the phrase “Global South” thrown around quite a bit. But dig deeper, and you’ll find it’s basically the 2025 version of calling somewhere “the Third World”. Except it’s way more polite.
Where did it come from? Well, according to this article, you have to zoom all the way back to European colonial fantasies of “us vs. them,” starring guys like Henry Maine who insisted that non-European societies were “frozen” in time.
Fast-forward to the mid-1900s: We had a neat little label called “Third World,” thanks to French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who stuck “underdeveloped” nations in one big basket. Then the Cold War ended, the “Second World” disappeared, and the old “colonizer vs. colonized” script morphed into “North vs. South.” Fast-forward again, to 1969, and activist Carl Oglesby introduced “Global South” as shorthand for poor, largely nonwhite, ex-colonial countries that Westerners would rather not call “nonwhite” to their faces.
But if it sounds fuzzy, that’s because it is: Good luck defining “Global South” on an actual map without excluding half of Africa or accidentally including Australia. But will “global South” vanish anytime soon? Not likely. It’s a tidy term with deep historical baggage hidden behind a breezy label—exactly how the polite global order likes to do business.
It’s got a fascinating history, and you can read more on it here.
Food for Thought
“A man who knows nothing is not aware of his ignorance.”
— Uganda Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is taken from Rwanda! You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.