Cost-saving plan to transfer Antwerp museum’s entire collection to another city described as ‘simply insane’

Prominent artists have spoken out against an “arbitrary reshaping” of Belgium’s museum landscape, as the Flanders region seeks to cut public spending by dismantling the country’s oldest contemporary art museum and transplanting its entire collection to another city.

At a press conference in Antwerp on Tuesday, the directors of the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA), which was founded in 1985, decried what they called the “flagrant illegalities” of the museum sector shake-up, which is due to be debated in Belgium’s parliament on Friday.

When the Afrobeat sensation first saw Lemi Ghariokwu’s work, he said, ‘Wow!’ Then he plied him with marijuana and asked him to design his album sleeves. The artist recalls their extraordinary partnership – and the day Kuti’s Lagos HQ burned

‘There were flames everywhere. Soldiers with bayoneted rifles were dragging people out into the streets, staggering, naked and bleeding. Nobody knew if Fela was still inside the burning building.”

Lemi Ghariokwu pauses. For much of our video-call, the 70-year-old artist has joyfully revisited his years as friend and confidant of Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer whose legacy has been celebrated recently by both a high-profile podcast produced by the Obamas and a career-spanning box-set, The Best of the Black President, designed by Ghariokwu.

From a thriving miniature city inside a Cairo cemetery to a goat sacrifice in Nigeria, the photojournalist’s eye-opening images are celebrated in a new book

•Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing