About Us

Atlas by Wakonté is a collection of limited-edition posters and postcards building a visual record of the world — its places, people, cultures and moments — from an African and Caribbean perspective.

From photographs captured on location and transformed into bold graphic records of the places we encounter, to original illustrations celebrating the people, icons and cultural touchstones of our homes, each piece contributes to an Atlas designed to be as expansive as the world itself.

Atlas was initially conceived as a travel poster and postcard collection: real photographs, captured on location and transformed into bold graphic records of the places and moments we encountered. But as the collection grew, so did our understanding of what an atlas could be. If we were going to create our own record of the world, there was room for more than the places we lived in and travelled to. There was room for our people, our icons, our culture; the things that tell you where you are, who lives there and what a place means to the people who call it home.

So Atlas grew.

Today, our limited edition pieces document the world as we encounter it, while our original illustrated collections celebrate the people, icons and cultural touchstones of Africa and the Caribbean. Together, they allow us to build something much more expansive:

An atlas of our homes. An atlas of the world. An atlas from our perspective.

Our Roots

Atlas is part of Wakonté, a storytelling company committed to sharing distinctly African and Caribbean stories by African and Caribbean people; a company committed to ensuring that the lion’s share of the wealth emerging from African and Caribbean stories is distributed to African and Caribbean people. In fact, each of our major collections stems from one of Wakonté’s holdings.

The concept behind The Core Collection is rooted in the magazine’s We Travel Too features that showcase travel from the eyes of African and Caribbean people.

The Cub X Atlas Collection finds its roots in The Cub, an imprint of Wakonté Books. For almost two years, we have been assiduously working to document every country in Africa and the Caribbean through characters designed to resonate with children, with the goal of ultimately bringing them together in a beautiful coffee-table book for children and adults alike.

The Caribtecture X Atlas Collection, stems from our magazine’s collaboration with a young Saint Lucian architect who has taken on the mammoth task of documenting the region’s architectural history.

The Icons Collection was illustrated both for our magazine and Wakonté’s notes., an educational platform that provides syllabi-tailored exam prep for African and Caribbean school-leaving exams.

To capture the idea of our roots succinctly: we come from places that have too often been presented to the world, while the world has too often been presented to us, through someone else’s lens. Wakonté seeks to change that, and Atlas joins our digital magazine, small publishing house with multiple imprints and edtech platform as another avenue through which to do so.

In particular, Atlas gives us the opportunity to give our people an opportunity to impose its presence on the poster and postcard collection world; a space where we are almost absent. It also gives us the opportunity to share our homes for ourselves because we are more than an aesthetic —on our terms: the places, people and moments that are familiar to us — while also documenting the rest of the world as we encounter it.

Because we travel too.

Ultimately, our ambition is to build an Atlas that reaches every country in the world — Africa, the Caribbean and everywhere beyond. What makes it distinctly Wakonté is not where we go, but who is telling the stories and what we bring to it: Distinctly African. Distinctly Caribbean. Our homes. The world. Our perspective.