Dear colleagues and friends,

If you’re like me, you may by now be experiencing some serious COVID-fatigue. Perhaps you have stopped keeping track of the number of deaths in your country (unless you’re in Madagascar or Lesotho or Uganda or any other country where the recorded number of deaths is actually 0). Perhaps you’ve reached peak Zoom while at the same time being filled with dread at the thought of having to face traffic or public transportation to return to the office. Perhaps you are dreaming of eating food that you have not cooked yourself.

In any case, with the easing of strict confinement measures and the establishment of new post-lockdown health regulations globally, there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel for several sectors of the Entertainment industry. And we are ready to go towards the light.

This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about some of the continent’s visual artists who are making waves from New York to Mathare, why the UFC becoming the first major US sports league to emerge from the lockdown is relevant to Africa, and South Africa’s TV industry going back on set. 

If you have received this email from a friend or colleague, please subscribe here to make sure that you don’t miss any future edition of HUSTLE & FLOW. Also remember that you can visit the archives at any time for more insights. 

I always love to hear from you so do email me at marie@restless.global with your questions, comments, or suggestions. 

Happy reading to all,


Marie



GENERAL RESCUE MEASURES

After a first phase understandably focused on the immediate health emergency, regional and international development actors are now bringing their attention to specific sectors, including the tech and creative industries. Pan-African infrastructure investment platform Africa50 has announced a $800,000 COVID-19 Relief Support Initiative, which aims first to support the continent’s fight against the pandemic, while a second phase will focus on the deployment of technology-enabled solutions through Africa50’s Innovation Challenge initiative. French entrepreneur-focused development bank Bpifrance has launched a challenge for African startups seeking to raise between 1 and 3 million euros to finance their expansion to Europe, and especially France. Qualified African startups would either already have small ongoing operations in France or Europe, or have secured partnership agreements or letters of intent from customers. Applications close on September 30th.

On the Entertainment side, guidelines for a potential response are starting to emerge. East African investment fund HEVA has released its report on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the Kenyan creative ecosystem, with the goal of informing future initiatives by the fund and its institutional partners which include the British Council, Goethe Institute, AFD and UNDP. The document confirms the brutal loss of revenue experienced by many practitioners, and proposes resilience and recovery measures such as the establishment of artist representation, savings and credit unions; the improvement of royalty collection mechanisms; various tax, financial and administrative incentives; and an ambitious scheme for the government to employ artists to produce or perform public social works around the country. HEVA is currently conducting similar studies in the other East African markets where it operates. Across the continent in Senegal, the Direction of Cinematography also recently released a report on the impact of the crisis on the country’s cinema and audiovisual sector which highlights the strength of the blow, with the postponement or cancellation of 47 film, series and commercial shoots since March, the halted construction of a 7-screen multiplex cinema, the delayed delivery of a feasibility study for a major AFD-backed Cinema Village project, the closure of film schools, and the cancellation of numerous festivals and events. Finally, the European Commission and the Organization of the African, Caribbean and Pacific States (ACP) have launched CultureXchange, a “knowledge and skills sharing platform” which aims to be a hub for stakeholders from the cultural and creative industries, and a project incubator highlighting funding opportunities and collaborative schemes from the private and public sectors. 


INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE

Angola Cables has recorded 170% growth in traffic on its IP network during the first quarter of 2020 compared to the same period last year. Although a large portion of the growth can be attributed to the rapid surge in demand following the lockdown, additional traffic has also been caused by the opening of points of presence in the primary global traffic exchange locations in recent months. 


MOBILE

South Africa’s Vodacom has switched on Africa’s first-ever 5G mobile network in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria, with more rollouts scheduled for other parts of the country. Vodacom used the temporary additional spectrum allocated by the country’s telecoms regulator ICASA for the duration of the lockdown to fast track its 5G rollout. Vodacom expects the deployment of 5G to facilitate the management of the 40% increase in mobile network traffic and the 250% increase in fixed traffic that the telco has experienced in the past few weeks.

I’ve talked in previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW about the big prize that Ethiopia’s liberalization of its 100 million consumer market represents for telcos, as the government gets ready to offer two new licenses and sell part of the state-controlled monopoly, Ethio Telecom. The Ethiopian Communications Authority’s consultation period on the terms of these first competitive telecoms licences ends today May 11th. Kenyan operator Safaricom, one of several serious bidders, is determined to enter the Ethiopian market despite the country’s central bank announcing that it would only allow locally-owned financial institutions to offer mobile money services. This means that Safaricom will need an Ethiopian partner to locally operate its M-Pesa service, which accounted for 33.6% of the telco’s total revenue last year. The winning bids are expected to be announced after Ethiopia’s August 29th general elections.

While mobile operators across the continent are leveraging the current surge in demand caused by lowering data prices and acquiring new customers, Econet Wireless goes Hara-Kiri in Zimbabwe. The operator reportedly hiked its data prices by up to 225% overnight last week. Cash-squeezed Zimbabweans took their anger to social media with the hashtag #EconetMustFall. Econet didn’t offer an explanation for its tone-deaf move, however it seemed to follow an April 20th letter to its suppliers in which the company said it was experiencing tough trading conditions and ironically asked suppliers to cut their prices by 20%.


FASHION

The COVID crisis has spurred unprecedented collaborations around the world, whether it’s been between governments and the private sector, citizens of different generations, or competitors in the same industries. In Africa, fashion is one of the areas in which this change of mindset is the most apparent. Designers are now collaborating to source material together in bulk and share factory space, while industry leaders from across the continent are joining forces to map out the future of fashion. The topic was central to the recent discussion hosted by Lagos Fashion Week’s Omoyemi Akerele, who brought together her counterparts from South Africa, Senegal, Uganda, and Ghana. The speakers shared various ideas, including developing a joint fashion education curriculum, standardizing the criteria for the selection of designers who show at the regional Fashion Weeks, share fundraising efforts, and coordinating Fashion Week calendars across the continent to allow more people (designers, buyers, journalists) to travel from one to the other, while at the same time also considering the option of limiting travel by having designers only show physically in their home countries and in the rest of the world through a joint online platform. 

The underlying impetus for fashion industry leaders is to foster the development of a strong pan-African regional market and become less reliant on the West as the main export destination and on Asia as the main supplier of fabric and other raw materials. In this effort, the fashion sector is set to benefit enormously from the launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area which was initially scheduled for July 1st but postponed due to the crisis, as intra-African export tariffs are currently prohibitive. The mammoth AfCFTA project would unite 55 nations into a $3.4 trillion free-trade economic zone, the largest trading bloc since the World Trade Organization formed in 1994.


VISUAL ARTS

Quartz has a lovely piece this week on the remarkable resurgence of acclaimed Nigerian modernist painter and sculptor Ben Enwonwu, after the recent discoveries of some of his long-lost works in private homes in London and Texas. Enwonwu is widely considered to be one of Africa’s greatest contemporary artists and known for fusing Western techniques with indigenous aesthetics. The entire Quartz article is worth reading for its analysis of concepts such as artistic influence, the white gaze, and authentic Africanness, which at some point were used to question Enwonwu’s work. He passed away in 1994. In 2018, his Tutu (Africa’s Mona Lisa) sold at a record $1.6 million, and in 2019, his portrait of Christine sold at $1.4 million, or seven times its valuation.

Ben Enwonwu’s distinguished legacy can only inspire young Nigerian contemporary artists. For Oyinkansola Dada, founder of online art gallery POLARTICS, building art ecosystems in Africa implies not only supporting young artists but also inspiring younger Africans to collect: “A lot of the works being created by the artists we work with engage with themes that are relevant to African millennials, and I think it’s important that a great proportion of these works end up in their hands.”

Another leading contemporary African artist in the news this week is Billie Zangewa, who was just picked up for representation in New York by the prestigious Lehmann Maupin gallery. Zangewa hails from Malawi and South Africa and works with silk fabrics to create scenes that explore her own personal narrative and celebrate womanhood. Lehman Maupin is showcasing one of her pieces in its online booth as part of the Frieze New York art fair, which opened last week.

From the chi-chi New York gallery world we move to the overcrowded Mathare slum in Nairobi where a street artist called Msale is creating giant murals to bring public health messages about COVID-19 to half a million people. Msale is far from the only one in his line of work. In fact, Nairobi has a long tradition of using street art to incite positive change, and a vibrant community of street artists who are recognized on the world stage, showcased at global festivals and regularly commissioned by local or international organizations, businesses and NGOs for original murals. My personal favorite is the graffiti artist WiseTwo.


MUSIC

Following the recent news of its expansion to 17 new African countries, Apple Music has launched a month-long celebration of African artists with exclusive playlists curated by music heavyweights Angélique Kidjo, Davido, Sauti Sol, or Jimmy Dludlu. Meanwhile Spotify has rolled out its Premium Family plan in South Africa, granting six people access to Spotify Premium through one shared subscription for $5.39 per month. If you remember our music focus in HUSTLE & FLOW #10 and keep your ear to the ground, you will notice the rumblings of Africa’s long-awaited music streaming boom getting louder.


SPORTS

Football fans can breathe a sigh of relief as Germany’s Bundesliga, which had been on pause since March 13 because of the pandemic, has been given the green light to resume its standard calendar from May 16. However, games will be held behind closed doors and without physical audiences. No such luck for the French Ligue 1, which was not given the go-ahead to restart its season. One of the consequences of the COVID crisis in the sports sector has been the growth of esport, as we’ve discussed previously in HUSTLE & FLOW. Sébastien Audoux, the head of digital sports at Canal+, believes that esport will stick around post-COVID because it represents strong competition for second or third-tier sports, especially if these esports games are grudge matches between popular Ligue 1 stars and are properly advertised.

Meanwhile in America, the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s UFC 249 was the first major US sporting event to emerge from the shutdown when it took place last Saturday in Florida (where, in one of these inexplicable Florida quirks, employees of professional sports organizations are deemed essential workers). Founded in 1993, the UFC was valued at $2 million in 2001 and sold to Endeavor in 2016 for around $4 billion, so that's serious business. Pre-COVID, the UFC was in discussions with French media giant Vivendi and its newly launched Afro-European MMA League (ARES) to expand on a partnership that started with a first MMA event in Dakar in December 2019. While the UFC plans for at least three more events in the US in May, Vivendi’s ARES cancelled all its competitions previously scheduled to take place in Africa and Europe in 2020. But considering the commercial potential, “ce n’est que partie remise,” as we say in French.


BROADCAST

Nigeria’s Federal Government has granted a two-month licence fee waiver to terrestrial broadcast stations to support the sector during the pandemic, while South Africa’s ICASA has exempted national broadcaster SABC from the 65% local TV content quota which was becoming impossible to fulfill since many local production houses were forced to shut in March.


FILM 

French sales group Wide Management has picked up worldwide rights (outside of Ethiopia) for Running Against the Wind, Ethiopia's official entry for the best international film Oscar directed by Jan Philipp Weyl. The film will be presented to buyers next month at Cannes' virtual film market, the Marché du Film Online.

The trailer for upcoming Nigerian-American fraternity drama Tazmanian Devil is here. The film, about a newly immigrated Nigerian student who "struggles to balance his conflicting desires of joining a college fraternity and bonding with his strictly religious father" is director Solomon Onita’s first feature. It boasts a pretty serious pedigree with Beasts of No Nation’s Abraham Attah and When They See Us’ Adepero Oduye starring and American music moguls Birdman and Benny Boom producing.  


VOD

Netflix has announced that its second African original series Blood & Water, a youth-led drama series directed by the award-winning Nosipho Dumisa, would be released on May 20. Blood & Water will follow the story of a teenager who discovers shocking secrets about her family's past whilst trying to navigate life at a South African high school. Also coming to the service this week are Nigerian films Anchor Baby, Living in Bondage: Breaking Free, Delivery Boy and She is, as well as romantic comedy Cook Off, Netflix’s first acquisition from Zimbabwe. In parallel, the streamer has introduced its ‘Made in Africa’ collection, a curated list of African series, documentaries and films, to celebrate Africa Month and demonstrate Netflix’s commitment to the continent. 

On a global scale, VOD has been a great winner of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the industry is starting to wonder about what awaits when the world emerges from the health crisis only to jump into an economic one where consumers will be rethinking their household expenses. Although Africa is still far behind and consumers there are not yet overwhelmed by a proliferation of streaming services like they are in the west, they might also experience a sharp drop in their disposable income. Bloomberg has an interesting opinion piece highlighting three ideas the industry should explore: incorporate ads but in new, inventive ways; reintroduce content and internet bundles (already the case in Africa); and make VOD apps more of a social community akin to Instagram and TikTok. All of these suggestions are very relevant to the perennially cash-sensitive African market.


CONTENT PRODUCTION

South Africa’s film production and film servicing industry (which normally caters to big budget Hollywood or European projects) has been hard hit by the coronavirus shutdown. Last week the first steps were taken towards the reopening of film sets and shooting resumed for several shows including SABC2's 7de Laan, kykNET's Binnelanders, and SABC1's Skeem Saam. Although South Africa has the most developed TV industry on the continent, many challenges still pave the way of TV series creators (even in a non-COVID context), as Tjovitjo director Vincent Moloi expressed in an enlightening Facebook post. The Tjovitjo pilot was shot 7 years ago and rejected by all South African broadcasters. The self-funded series sat around for 4 years before the SABC took a gamble and licensed it. Tjovitjo went on to break the South African viewership record for a drama series and won 7 South African Film & Television Awards. It is now on Netflix. Many African TV producers can relate to Vincent Moloi’s experience with Tjovitjo. When my team and I launched The XYZ Show in Kenya in 2009, we also had to fund the project independently, as broadcasters were not financing local content at the time. We offered the program to Citizen TV for free. It instantaneously became one of Kenya’s most popular shows, won some awards, made headlines around the world, and remains on the air more than 10 years later. Although the industry has seen progress during the past decade, many stubborn hurdles remain (such as broadcasters’ risk-averse stance) and the disruption caused by the arrival of Netflix and other global players is more than welcome.


ANIMATION

The coronavirus crisis has created a big opportunity for the global animation industry, writes producer and writer Aaron Simpson. Contrary to live-action, the animation sector has faced fewer layoffs thanks to a quick transition to a fully remote workflow, which has also allowed studios to respond to the surging demand for new content. What is preventing a similar phenomenon from taking place in Africa is largely access to funding (for equipment, team, development) - the quintessential African dilemma. Still, we know that African animators never stop working, even if their work is not always seen. Triggerfish, Africa’s leading studio based in Cape Town, is shedding the spotlight on young animators from across the continent through its “10 second animation competition.” The Triggerfish Academy’s next tutorial and competition will kick off mid May.

And I’ll finish this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW with the best video I’ve seen all week: Dance Glitch. They’re young guys, they're from Nigeria and they’re on TikTok, so you know it’s going to be good.