Senegalese artist transforms Conakry's walls with captivating street art

CONAKRY: It was the middle of the day when Omar Diaw, known by his artist name “Chimere”—French for chimera—approached a blank wall off the main thoroughfare in Guinea ‘s capital and started spray-painting, “They know who I am," he said confidently.

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Though it wasn't clear who “they” were, civilians and police didn’t bat an eye as Diaw’s fellow artists unloaded dozens of paint cans onto the roadside in Conakry. Graffiti has thrived for years in Diaw’s native Senegal, where the modern urban street art first took off in West Africa. But when he moved to Guinea in 2018 to explore a new place, he said such art was nearly nonexistent.

“It was thought that graffiti was vandalism,” he said. To win over the public, Diaw took a gentle approach, using graffiti for public awareness campaigns. One of his first was to raise awareness about COVID-19 preventive measures. “We had to seduce the population,” he said.

The port city of Conakry faces rapid urbanization. Diaw’s graffiti has become an undeniable part of its crowded, concrete-heavy landscape. His larger-than-life images of famous Guinean musicians and African independence leaders now dwarf the overloaded trucks that drive by. Drying laundry hung over the portrait of the West African resistance fighter Samory Toure. The tag of Diaw’s graffiti collective, Guinea Ghetto Graff, is on murals all over the city.

Graffiti as it’s known today began in the 1960s and 70s in the United States. It arrived in West Africa via Dakar, Senegal, in 1988, when the region's first graffiti artist, Amadou Lamine Ngom, started painting on the city’s walls.