They're putting a fun twist on Africa's decolonial stories, one cocktail, one conversation and one astonishing historical revelation at a time. At first glance, Bar Afrique feels like the kind of podcast you'd stumble across while looking for something light to accompany your evening commute. Then, almost without warning, you're listening to tales of failed CIA assassination plots involving poisoned toothpaste, banned books that refused to disappear, forgotten revolutions and the complicated personalities who shaped modern Africa.
It's history with wit, warmth and the unmistakable feeling that you're sharing a drink with two friends who happen to know an extraordinary amount about the continent's past.
That balance is no accident. Behind the microphones are Zimbabwean documentary producer Sarah Masiyiwa and Cameroonian journalist and writer Line Talla, two storytellers whose careers have been built on asking difficult questions and finding compelling ways to answer them. Masiyiwa has produced documentaries for Netflix, Sky, PBS and Peacock after beginning her career at CNN International, while Talla's reporting on African politics, culture and identity has appeared in publications including Atlas Obscura, New Lines Magazine and Africa Is a Country. Together, the New York University graduates have fused investigative journalism, documentary rigour and effortless chemistry into one of Africa's most original podcast formats.
The idea itself was born over cocktails in New York, where conversations between friends gradually became something much bigger. Instead of treating African history like a museum exhibit, they imagined it as a living conversation taking place around a bar table. That philosophy still defines the show today. "Take away the cameras and the microphones," they explain, "and you would still just have two African friends in a bar somewhere talking about the absolutely unbelievable things that happened on the continent a few decades ago." Their audience simply becomes the third person at the table.
That conversational style is what makes Bar Afrique so disarming. Every episode pairs an overlooked chapter of African decolonisation with an African wine, spirit or cocktail, celebrating not only the continent's political history but also its creativity, entrepreneurship and cultural identity. It's a subtle but deliberate reminder that Africa's stories deserve to be experienced through African perspectives, right down to what's in the glass. Coups, dictators, resistance movements, spies and political betrayals are woven together with humour, curiosity and genuine friendship, proving that history doesn't have to feel intimidating to be intellectually rigorous.
What sets the podcast apart is its refusal to flatten history into heroes and villains. Instead, Masiyiwa and Talla embrace complexity, arguing that Africa's past is full of contradictions, uncomfortable truths and flawed individuals whose decisions continue to shape the continent today. They spend months researching each season, often delaying recordings until they are satisfied every story has been treated with the care it deserves. Their ambition isn't simply to teach history, but to create a space where listeners can feel curiosity, sadness, anger, hope and even laughter without feeling overwhelmed by the weight of the past. As they put it, the goal is for listeners to "leave feeling good and not broken by the experience of talking about these things."
Now in its third season, Bar Afrique arrives at a moment when African storytelling is enjoying unprecedented global attention across film, literature, music and podcasting. Yet while many creators are reclaiming the continent's narratives, Masiyiwa and Talla are carving out a lane entirely of their own, one where historical scholarship meets sharp conversation, unexpected humour and cultural celebration. From Zimbabwe to Zanzibar, Liberia to Mali, they invite a new generation to see Africa's history not as a collection of dusty dates, but as vivid, surprising and deeply human stories that continue to echo through the present. We caught up with Sarah Masiyiwa and Line Talla from Bar Afrique to discuss why Africa's most fascinating stories are often the ones that have yet to be told.
Glamour: History can feel intimidating for a lot of people. What made you believe it could also be funny, entertaining and something people genuinely look forward to listening to?
Not only can African history be intimidating it can be very painful for a lot of people. Our podcast looks at the period of decolonisation – 1950s to 1970s – and so it’s the lived experience of our parents. And because it’s so painful, a lot of people just don’t talk about this history, or can’t access spaces where they feel comfortable enough to speak about it.
Bar Afrique at its core is about creating a space that feels welcoming enough to talk about really this really difficult piece of history, and to make people feel good enough about it to keep coming back.
And humour and entertainment is part of that. Not because any of this history is funny – massacres and dictatorships are objectively not funny. But we’ve created a space that feels so comfortable and safe for us as co-hosts and our guests to experience any emotion – anger, sadness, humour, hope, disappointment – and to leave feeling good and not broken by the experience of talking about these things. And our hope is that our listeners feel the same.
Glamour: Bar Afrique feels less like a history lesson and more like you're sitting with friends over a drink. How intentional was that format, and why do you think it works?
This was our intention for the beginning. If you want a pure, academic history lesson, go buy an African history textbook. That’s just not what our podcast is trying to be. Bar Afrique is how we as friends – Line and Sarah – talk about African history to each other. Take away the cameras and the microphones and social media clips, and you would still just have two African friends in a bar somewhere talking about the absolutely unbelievable things that happened on the continent a few decades ago. If you think about it, our listeners are just the third “person” sitting in the bar with us.
Glamour: Every episode pairs a historical story with an African drink. What does that small detail say about the way you think culture and history should be experienced?
The alcohol and liquor industry is overwhelmingly white and western in terms of ownership structures and in the spirit of our show, which is to showcase rare and untold stories of Africa, why not also do the same thing with the drinks we are consuming?
We’ve been really intentional in choosing African drinks that tell their own stories, that show how entrepreneurial, creative, and inventive Africans can be in industries that people don’t normally associate us being in.
Glamour: There are so many stories from Africa that never make it into classrooms or mainstream media. When you're choosing an episode, what makes you stop and think, "People have to hear this"?
We look for stories that feel surprising. We never want to go for an obvious, already known story.
For example, we knew we wanted to cover DRC this season, but a story on the rise and (deadly) fate of Patrice Lumumba felt like it was so extensively covered already. So how do you make the story of Lumumba feel surprising?
We settled on two lesser known stories: the first about a failed CIA plot to poison Lumumba (Lumumba was ultimately shot by the Belgians & Congolese, but before this, the CIA literally tried to sneak poison into his toothpaste); the second on a hostage crisis that took place after Lumumba’s death, where an entire town of Europeans was taken hostage by some of his supporters.
Both are our way of giving a different POV to a story many people may already know. And ultimately, if that surprise can lead to any revelations about the continent today, then we’ve done our jobs successfully.
Glamour: You both come from journalism and documentary storytelling, where accuracy is everything. How do you balance rigorous research with creating something that's genuinely fun to listen to?
People get very annoyed that we take months-long breaks between seasons. But we spend months researching our stories and getting them to a point that we’re comfortable recording. We’ve even had moments where we’re set to record and we cancel because the story just isn’t there yet.
From a journalistic perspective, that trust between us and our listeners is so important. In this day and age, there’s a lot of people just speaking loudly without actual facts, so it’s important to us that we do our best to get it right, every time. If we don’t know something, we say we don’t know.
Glamour: Your friendship is at the heart of the podcast. How has working together shaped the conversations you have, and do you think listeners can hear that chemistry?
We’re friends first, and that’s the chemistry a lot of people hear when listening to the pod. We met as undergrads at NYU in 2016 and bonded over so many similarities (we actually realized that we had attended the same international Catholic school as kids — Line at the Italian branch, Sarah at British!).
Working together has deepened our conversations and also provided a space for us to bounce ideas off of each other and think through them together without judgement.
Glamour: Many people first connect with Africa through headlines about politics or conflict. How important is it for you to tell stories that reveal the humour, complexity and humanity behind the continent's history?
We’ll give you an example of how we might do this. We wanted to tell a story this season about the Namibian genocide – probably the darkest topic in our pod to date. But we didn’t want the telling of that story to feel traumatic for our audiences (it’s a lot for a morning commute).
So we decided to focus of the saga of “The Blue Book”: a 1918 historical account of the Namibian genocide, including first person witnesses, which was banned (almost every copy destroyed) to ease relations with European settlers. But decades later, a copy of this book, held onto by survivors of the genocide, emerges and helps them bring attention to what was done to them.
We’re still telling the story of what happened in Namibia – but by focusing on the banned book, we’re now on the periphery of that story. Now, we can have a more complex conversation about banned books, how history gets erased, and we can create space for the story to not feel as traumatic for our listeners (and yes, even have one or two moments of humour!).
Glamour: Your new season explores coups, betrayals, spies, dictators and resistance movements. Were there any stories that surprised even you while researching them?
Oh yes — a couple come to mind.
We have a Liberia story coming that feels really different. For most of our episodes, we’re dealing with a European colonizer. But the country Liberia was founded by formerly enslaved people who returned from America. They were descendents of Africans taken during the transatlantic slave trade, and when they arrived on the continent, they created their own hierarchacal society that put them above the native Africans. Researching that one felt really conflicting.
We also have an episode that’s totally unlike anything we’ve done before covering Timbuktu, Mali. When the city of Timbuktu, where books were more valuable than gold, fell in the 1500s, families all over the city secretly saved the hundreds and thousands of priceless books — hiding them in attics, basements, even holes dug on the ground. Centuries later, as Mali became independent, these books were uncovered in the most extraordinary way, and played a huge role in the country’s politics.
Glamour: History often shapes how people see themselves. Have there been moments while making Bar Afrique that changed the way you think about your own identities or backgrounds?
We have an episode coming up about Zanzibar that had a bizarre set up but was really challenging. John Okello, a Ugandan revolutionary, had a dream where he states God told him to travel to Tanzania and liberate the native people from Arab rule. The topic led to a lot of discussion, both in the episode and afterwards, about identity, religion, prophecy and more. We also didn’t 100% agree by the end, which is rare! But it was such a good reminder that historical figures are just flawed people, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with bad ones, doing what they believe is justifiable according to their own moral compasses.
Glamour: Both of you have built impressive careers in journalism, media and storytelling. What has creating Bar Afrique allowed you to do that your previous work couldn't?
There’s a freedom that comes with working on Bar Afrique that is incredibly refreshing and exciting. We get to do things on our own terms and be as creative as we want to be. Whether it’s revamping our episode format or experimenting with our release schedule, we get to choose. This gives us the chance to be more imaginative and there’s no one to tell us no. It’s a lot of work but it’s also been really fun and rewarding!
Glamour: The podcast speaks to a younger generation that wants to understand Africa on its own terms. What conversations do you hope people are having after an episode ends?
We have a friend in Canada whose weekly routine involves a Bar Afrique episode, then a discussion afterwards with a fellow diasporan about what they took away from the episode.
A teenaged boy in Zimbabwe reached out to us to say that he learnt about the Malagasy Uprising from a season 1 episode and did a presentation about it at school.
That is what Bar Afrique is creating; a space for young Africans who are committed to understanding why African countries function the way they do today, and how the past can better help them to understand themselves.
For centuries, oral storytelling was a way for people to pass on their history and identity from one generation to the next, and that is how they created communities with shared pasts, goals and values. Bar Afrique is a tiny, tiny participant in this age-old tradition, but it only works if the stories keep moving: from us to you, to the next person, to the next.
Glamour: African storytelling is having a remarkable moment across film, podcasts, literature and music. Where do you think Bar Afrique fits into that wider cultural movement?
If you’re an African who was never taught your history, you’re often engaging with African creatives as a way to learn. And so there’s always been a lot of pressure on African creatives to be educators, historians, documentarians.
But recently, there’s been an amazing amount of play in the African creative scene, and that’s what we’re so excited to be a part of. We want the same amount of leeway as anyone else in the world to be experimental, bizarre, and funny. The way we see it: yes, we have a responsibility to be historians of a sort, but the current moment is all about doing it in a way that feels loud and expressive and unique to us.
Glamour: You've said that history deserves depth, wit and personality. Is there a common misconception about African history that you're most determined to challenge through the podcast?
When it comes to African history, we’ve noticed a tendency for people to create “heroes and villains” narratives. But African history is much more nuanced and complex than a lot of us are comfortable with. Great liberators become autocrats; independence icons have fatal flaws; sometimes a colonizing force looks like us and not white and European.
We have to get away from the really surface-level, ragebaity, heroes vs. villain narratives that occupy so much of the conversation around colonialism. We have to treat every story with curiosity, and nuance, and leave space for healthy disagreements.
Glamour: If someone has never listened to Bar Afrique before and only has time for one episode, which one would you recommend first and what do you hope they'll walk away thinking about Africa?
It’s so hard to choose! We’d say start with Togo – an episode we just did about the very first successful coup post-Independence. The African continent has had coup attempts in 45 out of 54 for countries, so we’ve got a bit of a reputation now, so it was interesting to rewind to the very first time an African leader was taken out like that, and to reflect on how that set the stage for what we see in the continent today.
Watch an episode of Bar Afrique here
