Air Afrique × Nike: A Love Letter with a Boarding Pass

Air Afrique lived on our bookshelf before it lived on my feet. My father flew it often, and he returned with evidence that travel could be tender. Amenity kits with tiny combs, in-flight magazines with routes drawn like constellations, a boarding stub pressed inside a novel that smelled faintly of citrus and jet fuel. Those souvenirs did not say luxury the way a logo does. They said belonging. They said, here is a Pan-African project with lift, here is a future that leaves from our gate.

The airline’s story is not a mood board. Air Afrique was founded in 1961 by a group of West and Central African states with French partners, a rare and ambitious consortium that stitched cities into a network, then stitched that network to Paris. For decades it moved people, mail, ideas, and a vision of modern African life at cruising altitude. Operations ended in 2002, but the image never went quiet. Posters kept circulating. Uniforms kept inspiring. Aunties kept their ticket jackets in drawers beside passports and prayer beads.

Carte D’Accés Å Bord Nike x Air Afrique ; Image Source : Air Afrique x NIKE

The recent revival did the respectful thing first. The Air Afrique collective opened the archive, made a magazine, staged exhibitions, and asked the right question. Not how do we sell the past, but how do we carry it forward. Bottega Veneta put its shoulder behind that work. I remember seeing those pages and feeling something shift in my chest. This was not nostalgia. This was continuity.

Now the collaboration with Nike arrives and the shoe lands where the story began, on the continent. The Air Max RK61 looks like a dress shoe that decided to sprint. The liner nods to cabin fabrics, there is a quiet Morse detail for those who love codes, and the silhouette says boardroom at noon, airport gate at four, dance floor after midnight. The launch in Abidjan came first, the global drop follows, and that order matters. It says the center of gravity is not elsewhere. For the wider release, watch SNKRS.

Air Max RK61 x Air Afrique in Black & Coconut Milk, In-soles and Packaging ; Image Source : Air Afrique x NIKE

The campaign faces read like a chorus. Didier Drogba brings the kind of certainty that only years of goals can buy. Oumou Sangaré adds a voice that travels across borders without a passport. Marie-Josée Ta Lou-Smith is speed you can almost hear. There is also Mme Daba Traoré, a former Air Afrique employee, reminding us that brands are held together by workers who remember where the files live and which bolts need a second wrench. The images do not shout. They simply stand there with good posture and say, we were always here.

I think about what this means for the kids who will pull on the RK61 without a father’s stories in their pocket. The shoe will teach them. It will carry the idea that African excellence is not an exhibition that needs a Western curator. It is a daily practice that sometimes looks like leather and air bubbles and sometimes looks like a timetable printed in French and Bambara and Wolof. It is a pilot walking through a terminal in a jacket that fits and a smile that says I know where we are going.

There is also the simple pleasure of a product that works. Try to imagine the scene. A morning in Abidjan that begins with plantains frying, city buses exhaling, a tailor rolling his shutters up. A box opens, paper gives way, the shoe sits there with a small glint at the welt and that familiar air unit holding its ground. You lace it for the first time and think about the map that lives inside your own family. Lagos to Abidjan to Paris to Dubai to wherever the next call comes from. The RK61 is built for that rhythm.

Lamine Diaoune, Djiby Kebe, Jeremy Konko and Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam of Air Afrique ; Image Source : Air Afrique x NIKE

This collaboration could have gone another way. It could have turned a flag into a motif and left it at that. Instead, Air Afrique and Nike made a piece that behaves like a chapter, not a caption. The archive is present, the design is contemporary, and the first audience is the one that kept the flame. That is how you build desire without extracting dignity.

There is a line in my head that my father used when he kissed our foreheads before a flight. Be good, be curious, bring stories. Air Afrique taught him that curiosity has a gate number, that stories can be scheduled, that goodness sometimes looks like a flight attendant pressing a toy into a child’s hand and saying welcome. Watching this brand move again, and watching it do so with care, feels like a promise kept.

Acclaimed actor Issa, left, and football legend Didier Drogba feature in the Première Classe campaign for the Nike x Air Afrique Air Max RK61 ; Image Source : Air AAfrique x NIKE

Campaign Shots ; Image Source : Air Afrique x NIKE

For Gazetta, this is the kind of culture we cover with our full heart. Craft is present. Commerce is present. Community is present. The RK61 will sell, that is the job of a shoe, but it also returns a feeling to the people who carried it when there was nothing to buy. That is the job of a legacy.

Air Afrique x Nike Featuring Mme Daba Traoré

If you grew up with those amenity kits the way I did, you already understand. If you did not, slip the shoe on. Walk a few blocks. Listen to the air in the sole and the air in your lungs and consider that they are part of the same system.Then look up. You will see the route line, still bright, still ours.