Florence Kasumba. Photo by Diane Betties

The multilingual martial-arts expert and star of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Florence Kasumba, speaks to LUX about growing up Ugandan German and championing strong women

LUX: What inspired you to act?
Florence Kasumba: I grew up in Essen, Germany, in an all-white area. The only black people I knew were my mother and siblings. One day, my music teacher took our class to see Starlight Express. I was overwhelmed seeing people who looked like me on a stage and being celebrated by the audience. In the show, artists sing, act, dance and do acrobatics – on roller skates. I’d never seen anything like it. In that moment, I wanted to be a performer.

LUX: How do you navigate acting in three languages?
FK: I grew up in Germany, learnt English from age ten and studied in the Netherlands. I have done a lot of global productions and the common language tends to be English. But speaking three languages is one reason I have an international career.

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LUX: Is your Ugandan German identity important to you?
FK: I was socialised in Germany in a Ugandan household, but I am more familiar with the German way of living. When it comes to identity, I walk through life as a black woman. I am aware of my appearance and have learnt how to navigate in different situations. Some are safe, some not. That is just part of my life.

LUX: How does a director get the best out of you?
FK: I perform 100 per cent. That is my duty. It helps when the director does not scream at me.

LUX: How do you get the best out of you?
FK: For everything that does not come naturally, I ask for help. If I have to speak with an accent, I work with a language coach. If I have to work with weapons, I train with experts. I will always give my best effort, but give me time and training and you will get my absolute best.

Danai Gurira, Lupita Nyong’o and Florence Kasumba in a scene from Black Panther © Matt Kennedy/Disney/Marvel Studios via AP

LUX: What are the joys and pains of you job?
FK: I enjoy roles that need a certain physicality. Ayo in the Marvel films is one of my favourites as I get to train with the Marvel stunt team, which is fun – but sometimes painful. Like most people, I can feel insecure out of my comfort zone – when I need a skill that is not yet developed, or when dialogue has been changed just before I go on set. It used to bother me when people were rude, but now I know how to steer my focus to what is important for the scene. I am grateful I chose this path to become a performer.

LUX: Tell us about your character in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
FK: I play Ayo, one of the Dora Milaje, an elite troop of Wakandan female warriors. Ayo and her team are responsible for the safety of the King and Queen of Wakanda, and the royal family.

LUX: Are martial arts good for body and soul?
FK: I am not an expert on the effects of martial arts on the human body, but from my experience in Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi Chen, Tai Chi Yang and Qigong, my body has become stronger, I focus better and I am mentally stronger. Regular training has improved my coordination, flexibility, endurance and accuracy. I am more balanced and have less tension in my body.

Read more: Carolina Bucci on creating her own brand vision

LUX: What’s your favourite memory from the German TV series Deutschland 86/89?
FK: Working with the creative team was fun. We mainly filmed 86 in South Africa and working with actors who had experienced apartheid was educational. I enjoyed Cape Town. My favourite time was the scene in the safe house, when ANC members plan their next move. We were a lot of actors in one room and had time to chat between takes. This is how you get to know about people’s lives and culture.

LUX: How would you advise young people?
FK: I would say: work hard, stay focused, do not compare yourself to others, know you will make mistakes and learn from them. Surround yourself with people who have the same passion you do. Once you have found them, support each other.

Interview by Isabella Sheherazade Sanai

Black Panther: Wakande Forever is available to stream on Disney+

This article was first published in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of LUX

Abdullah Ibrahim by Lex van Rossen

Abdullah Ibrahim was discovered by Duke Ellington, fought against apartheid, and played at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration. The South African jazz legend speaks to LUX from his Cape Town home about his hopes and dreams

My favourite view…

The stars in the night sky over the green Kalahari.

The best place to listen to jazz…

Where your chosen jazz musicians are playing.

Where you’ll find the coolest new bands…

In the place you least expect.

The only thing I’ll queue up for is…

A masterclass with a master.

Most overrated tourist spot…

The beach.

Most undiscovered tourist spot…

The unlisted one you discover.

What I love about Cape Town…

The flowers and animals.

My favourite smell…

Musk.

I feel most at one with nature in…

The desert, hills and rivers.

The best local dish…

The traditional dish prepared at home.

My favourite memory is…

The next one.

What I think of the youngest generation…

I was once like them.

If I live to be 200 I would like to see…

If that bird at daybreak still sings the same song.

My proudest achievement is…

Realising and accepting that the process of learning is boundless.

My greatest fear is…

Becoming complacent and lapsing into a comfort zone.

My biggest regret is…

Not doing enough to seek for knowledge.

Find out more: abdullahibrahim.co.za

This article originally appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2020/2021 Issue. 

Ellerman House’s art collection features nearly 1,000 works

Hotels have long housed art collections, and now many are opening their own gallery spaces alongside art-focused programmes to offer guests unique cultural experiences. In his latest column for LUX, Abercrombie & Kent’s Founder Geoffrey Kent handpicks his favourite art hotels across the globe

Ellerman House, Cape Town, South Africa

Art lovers will delight in staying at this landmark hotel on Cape Town’s coast. Within the elegant Edwardian mansion of Ellerman House, close to 1,000 works of art reflect the changes in South Africa’s social and geographical landscape since the 1930s. Artists in the collection include John Meyer, Erik Laubscher, Jan Volschenk, Cathcart William Methven, and Pieter Wenning to name but a few. Guests can take a self-guided art tour with an electronic tablet providing insight into each piece. If you prefer, the in-house guide is on hand to take you around the extensive collection and beyond – guests can request guided excursions to the city’s local galleries, enjoying behind-the-scenes access and unmatched insight.

ellerman.co.za

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The bathroom of the Royal Suite at The Silo, Cape Town

The Silo, Cape Town, South Africa

A disused grain silo may seem an unlikely candidate for a museum and an art hotel. Yet, this imposing building on Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront has been transformed in recent years into a bastion for the African arts. The lower portion of the building is now my friend Jochen Zeitz’s eponymous Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. It’s home to the continent’s most extensive collection of contemporary African art. I’m proud to be one of its founding members and to support its primary aim of encouraging intercultural understanding. It’s a fantastic collection in an extraordinary building. Above, the museum is the beautiful Silo hotel in which I stayed for a few days before departing for the South Pole on one of my Inspiring Expeditions. The six storeys of luxury accommodation are brimming with curated artwork. The Silo’s owner, Liz Biden of The Royal Portfolio, has used the space to display her collection of African pieces. There are works by upcoming artists as well as more established names, such as Nandipha Mntambo, Cyrus Kabiru, and Mohau Modisakeng. The hotel even features its boutique gallery The Vault.

theroyalportfolio.com/the-silo

Hotel B is Lima’s first and only art hotel

Hotel B, Lima, Peru

For those of us who travel often, firsts are increasingly hard to come by, yet Hotel B is that rarest of things. Lima’s first – and only – art hotel is aptly situated in the city’s most bohemian district amid galleries and fashion boutiques. The building itself is brimming with character, converted as it is from a 1920s colonial mansion. Stay in this restored ‘grand dame’ to admire its private collection of more than 200 artworks, proudly displayed across the landings. Hotel B’s close relationship with nearby Lucia de la Puente Gallery allows guests to request private viewings easily; the gallery offers a fantastic insight into the world of contemporary Peruvian art.

hotelb.pe

Read more: In conversation with Iranian artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat

‘Crouching Spider’ sculpture by Louise Bourgeois at Villa La Coste in Provence

Villa la Coste, Provence, France

The pastoral landscape of Provence is impossible to upstage, so the owners of Villa La Coste have sought instead to adorn it with dazzling flourishes of creativity. Throughout the biodynamic vineyard of Château La Coste and art hotel, sculptures are tucked amid verdant woodland, hills, and lawns – including works by acclaimed artists Ai Weiwei and Tracey Emin. You can enjoy a two-hour private art and architecture walk with the curator, learning all about the eclectic collection while taking in the beautiful Provençal countryside. Also, the hotel is home to its very own arts centre and hosts temporary exhibitions throughout the year. Stay here, and you’ll never be short of art to admire (nor home-grown wine to sip as you do).

villalacoste.com

MONA Tasmania offers visitors the chance to stay on the museum grounds in a contemporary pavilion

MONA, Tasmania, Australia

Set on the banks of the River Derwent, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is Australia’s largest privately owned gallery and museum. It was masterminded by gambler and mathematician David Walsh and exhibits his diverse taste in art – from Ancient Egyptian relics to quirky dioramas. Whilst the museum isn’t strictly a hotel, visitors have the opportunity to stay in one of eight contemporary pavilions, each with its own unique character. As well as access to an enclosed lap pool, sauna, and gym, you’ll have a museum chock-full of eclectic and eccentric artwork right on your doorstep. Enjoy unfettered access to MONA’s permanent collection, and utilise its ‘O’ device during self-guided wanders to learn more about the art.

mona.net.au

Find out more: abercrombiekent.co.uk

Petra, Jordan. Instagram: @abercrombiekent

Increasingly businesses and professionals are using Instagram as a way of promoting their brand, but the app can also function as a modern-day diary. LUX contributor and Abercrombie & Kent Founder Geoffrey Kent explains why he’s a social media convert

Oscar Wilde wrote: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” Not many people have led as sensational a life as that of the Irish playwright, but keeping a diary or journal isn’t just for the outrageous, or the pursuit of Adrian Mole-esque teenagers.

A growing body of research suggests that recording your experiences is a good practice, not only for posterity, but also as a good mental-health practice. Other benefits include aiding memory. Oscar Wilde also wrote that “memory is the diary we all carry about with us” – but memory is a funny thing. Impressions can last for years but the minutiae can become lost quite quickly if not written down.

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I discovered this for myself in 1958, as a teenager. When I was 16, I rode a motorbike from Nairobi to Cape Town on a 3,000-mile journey of self-discovery along some of Africa’s most dangerous roads. In my saddlebags, along with my Shell Oil road map, a poncho, tarpaulin sheet and elephant hair bracelets, were a pencil and journal. Every day, I made notes: the route I took, how many elephant hair bracelets I had managed to trade at market, leopard tracks on my tails, that the giraffes that I saw had smaller and smaller spots, that my next challenge would be climbing Kilimanjaro. I also posed more existential questions, such as: who is Geoffrey Kent? What do I think is worthwhile? I usually wrote at midday whilst catching shade from the broiling heat, resting at the base of baobab trees.

Geoffrey Kent at the Abercrombie & Kent camp in the South Pole. Instagram: @geoffrey_kent

Upon arriving in Cape Town, I felt a profound sense of achievement, duly recorded in my journal‚ and then my thoughts turned immediately to my next challenge – how to get home. I didn’t fancy another 3,000-mile bike ride back to Nairobi. I needed to earn some money so I could go back by boat or train – anything but by two wheels. A friend in Cape Town suggested I write a story about my journey and try to sell it. Thank goodness for my journal and all the notes I had taken along my route. I managed to pull together a good piece, full of accurate, evocative details, and the Cape Argus newspaper agreed to publish the article along with photos of me on my bike.

Due to my scribblings in my journal I was able to get home in style – in first class, aboard the Africa, the best ship in the Lloyd Triestino line, from Cape Town to Mombasa. From that day to this, I have always kept a diary. My diaries were invaluable in researching and writing my memoir Safari: A Memoir of a Worldwide Travel Pioneer. In the pages of Smythson notebooks unseen for years (sometimes decades), I uncovered details that had been lost to time – that I had been granted the first license to take travellers into the Ngorongoro Crater; how dinner with David Niven led me to own my first boat on the Nile; how I got into China before any other travel executive travelling as an Ethiopian citizen (thanks to my sister’s birth in Addis Ababa) in a tour group organised by an Ethiopian pro-Communist group that I had read about in the East African Standard.

Read more: Get to know these 4 new Instagram aesthetes

Over the years however, an evolution has occurred in step with technology and my method of memory-keeping has changed. I now keep a visual diary. Upon opening my Instagram account (@geoffrey_kent), I fell in love with the platform and now use it to – yes, promote my businesses and brands – but also as a photographic journal. It’s my new diary. Social media is the easy, accessible way to record your life and experiences in a public forum (shared with the wide world or just a private, select few – your choice). I post religiously – even from the South Pole.

An Abercrombie & Kent expedition to the South Pole (Day 5). Image courtesy of A&K

Antarctica is never one to be underestimated, but it is amazing too. I will long remember seeing the Emperor penguins, exploring the ice tunnels, climbing and naming a mountain in the Drygalski mountain range, and making it to the South Pole. Despite what can kindly be called patchy internet access, I posted daily to my grid and look forward to scrolling through my feed in years to come to bring to mind this sensational trip with some new close friends.

7 steps to Instagram success

1. Start by thinking about what it is you like about your favourite account.

2. Try the Preview app – it’s a cool tool for testing out your posts before you commit an image to your feed.

3. Quality rather than quantity – only feature amazing images which are in line with your chosen aesthetic.

4. Be sure to edit – Android and iPhone have excellent built-in photo editing tools for cropping and levelling, but there are lots of apps that can help make your photos picture perfect.

5. Be smart about hashtags – you can add up to thirty hashtags in one post, but you shouldn’t.

6. Include the geotag to boost your post’s visibility.

7. When and how much you post matters – those in the know suggest posting at similar times every day, when your followers are active.

Discover Abercombie & Kent’s portfolio of luxury travel tours: abercrombiekent.co.uk

The Rovos vintage train at Matjiesfontein. Image by James Houston

Journeying through desert, diamond fields and wine lands, South Africa’s luxurious vintage train line takes Digital Editor, Millie Walton from the country’s capital of Pretoria to Cape Town

“Has anyone travelled with us before?” A few hands shoot up. “More than twice?” A few down. “More than three times?” One hand remaining. “How many times have you travelled with us, sir?” “Eight,” replies a balding man who looks like he spends his time smoking cigars in a white tuxe (this was affirmed later on). We all gasp. Eight times on the most luxurious train in the world. Rohan Vos, the founder of Rovos Rail, smiles, “It should be you up here doing the welcome talk.”

Vos, a tall, distinguished looking gentleman with a strong South African accent, purchased his first coach in 1985: a 1938 Class 19D locomotive from Lowenthal’s Scrap Metal in Johannesburg renamed BIANCA after his daughter. His intention was to restore the carriages and hitch them to a South African Railways train as a family caravan, but the tariff for hauling the train was extortionate unless he sold tickets and so, quite naturally, the Pride of Africa was born.

Read next: Fawaz Gruosi on luxury’s need for experimentation

It’s time to board. Our wonderful, young hostess Lizzy gives us the grand tour of our lavish suite and asks us how we’d like our mini-fridge to be stocked. All complimentary, of course. Then its to the observation car for high tea: champagne, cake, sandwiches and biltong as the train rolls through the goldfields of the Witwatersrand. At 7.30pm the gong rings for a five course dinner in the old-fashioned dining cart. Most of this journey is spent heavily sated with food and alcohol. I’m not quite sure how one would survive the 15 day ramble through South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania. The excess is all part of the nostalgia, harkening back to a time without weight watchers and juices cleanse, when wealth was illustrated by the plumpness of your breasts. When you’re travelling past townships and bare-footed children running along the train tracks though, it does all seem a bit (forgive the pun) tasteless especially when you’re sitting back unbuckling your trousers too stuffed to finish the last few bites of lobster tail. However, tourism like this is crucial to supporting the South African economy; Rovos alone provides many job opportunities and tries where possible to use locally sourced produce. You’re by no means changing the world, but at least when your champagne is being topped up, you can rest in the knowledge that you are making some kind of contribution.

The day bed in the Royal Suite. Image by Rovos Rail

Read next: Cointreau and Liberty London’s reforestation project

During the night the train rattles through eerily barren landscapes crossing the border between the maize lands of western Transvaal and the Orange Free State, arriving into Kimberley shortly after breakfast. Once the wealthiest city in the world and still home to the De Beers headquarters, Kimberley is surprisingly unvisited by tourists and as such, has remained delightfully trapped in the distant past. We stand for a while in awe on the suspended viewing platform that juts out over the Big Hole, 580ft deep and a mile wide, filled with turquoise water before wandering round the diamond museum to marvel at some of the gems found embedded in the kimberlite.

Golden fields through the train’s window. Image by James Houston

There’s something wonderfully cinematic and romantic about lying on your day bed watching the landscape change from the green marshlands of the diamond fields into the harsh, semi-desert of the Karoo. Through the night we bound across Beaufort West, the “Capital of the Karoo”, famous as the home of Christiaan Barnard, who performed the world’s first successful heart transplant. The night sky is startlingly clear scattered with thousands of burning white stars. On the hills, the tops of what look like wind mills dance with coloured LEDs.

Read next: Investment secrets from international entrepreneur, Javad Maranda

The train pulls up somewhere in the middle of nowhere shortly after day break for those who wish to walk the next 5 kilometres to Matjiesfontein,a tiny settlement founded by a Scottish railwayman, James Douglas Logan. The short stretch of tarmac with a colonial style hotel, an old fashioned post office and sun worn, pastel coloured petrol pumps leads into dust and desert. It’s a lonely kind of place, preserved just as it would have been when Logan planted his first handful of seeds. The museum is a labyrinth of underground caves piled high with ancient furniture, type writers, medical equipment, dolls and trinkets. It’s hard to imagine that this quiet place was where 10,000 soldiers were based during the Boer War.

Table Mountrain looms majestic at dusk. Image by Millie Walton

After miles more of desolation, the train enters the Hex River tunnels, emerging blinking into the lush fertility of the Hex River Valley. This is South Africa’s wine lands where white dutch country style houses stand orderly amongst the vines. The train heaves to a stop alongside golden fields of corn and cows grazing. We sip cocktails and wait. There’s a rumour that the train lines have been stolen, we’re going to be delayed here for some hours. How delightful! In fact, when we do get rolling again the sun is just setting. Through the pink and orange hue, and streaming smoke of a wild fire Table Mountain appears.

Discover more itineraries by Rovos Rail: rovos.com