Dear colleagues and friends,

Happy Africa Day! I admit that I was going to make some snide comment about Africa Day being some kind of marketing ploy akin to Valentine’s Day or all these other Days (don’t get me started). But it turns out that the point and history of the Africa Day celebration was lost on me, as it is apparently on many. 

Africa Day is actually the annual commemoration of the 1963 formation of the Organisation of African Unity (today the African Union), and is celebrated to acknowledge the progress made in liberation and social movements across the continent. So, I’m down with that. As with everything else these days, the celebrations are taking place online, and include a YouTube benefit concert, a Netflix African Collection showcase, and a Sport Business conference. 

But today is also the 3-months anniversary of HUSTLE & FLOW. Since launch, this newsletter’s audience has grown 350% to reach 450 investors (68%), entrepreneurs (25%) and government representatives (7%) predominantly based in the US, France, Nigeria, UK, Kenya and South Africa, in that order. Despite the global lockdown, it has led me to connect personally with more than 20 of you to discuss your various businesses, investments, or initiatives.

So there is a lot to celebrate today. In this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I will do so by sharing a whole bunch of delicious tidbits that truly highlight the excellence of Africa’s creative sector from food to fashion, music, literature and TV. More specifically, I’ll talk about the success of e-commerce platform Afrikrea, why Mr Eazi is the new Jay-Z, and Netflix’s new standard-setting South African original Blood & Water.

My goal with HUSTLE & FLOW is to galvanize the sector and spur investment, so please do share this newsletter with anyone in your network who may have an interest in African Entertainment. If you have received this newsletter from a friend or colleague, please subscribe here so that you don’t miss any future editions. And to catch up on past ones, head over there. 

Happy reading to all,


Marie

INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE

The COVID-19 crisis has intensified efforts by governments and the private sector to develop connectivity infrastructure. The African data center space in particular continues to register strong activity, and last week Raxio’s carrier-neutral data center has opened in Uganda with nine local data carriers on board, while Liquid Telecom Group's owned Africa Data Centres has announced the acquisition of a new facility in Johannesburg, South Africa. In this good overview, The Africa Report identifies competitive or diversified markets for both electricity and fiber connectivity as a main condition for a proper take off of the African data center space. 

African countries still have, on average, the least affordable mobile data, fixed-broadband and even mobile voice services by global standards, and price remain a major barrier to mass internet adoption and usage across the continent. However,  according to a recent report, Botswana, Nigeria And Seychelles are on track to meet the International Telecommunication Union's Broadband Commission affordability threshold target of 2% of the monthly gross national income. Mauritius and Gabon already provide the most affordable broadband services on the continent.


MOBILE

Lebanese telco group Africell has received Angola’s coveted third mobile provider license, which will see it compete against Movitel and Unitel for the country’s 15 million subscribers. Africell is already present in Uganda, DRC, the Gambia and Sierra Leone.

I’ve talked about Safaricom’s impressive results in previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW. This week, Business Daily gives us more points of analysis: with a market value of $9.96 billion, not only is the Kenyan operator the 10th most valuable African firm in a ranking dominated by South African companies, but it now also represents a shocking 53.3% total investors’ wealth on the Nairobi Stock Exchange. If Safaricom isn’t a Harvard case study already, it really should be.


FASHION 

For the African fashion sector, in which the lack of physical and digital distribution networks has long been a major challenge, the lockdown has had one positive impact in that it’s given a clear boost to e-commerce. In this great wrap up by Quartz, Afrikrea founder Moulaye Taboure says that the current crisis “is definitely a game changer in Africa”. Afrikrea mostly services clients in Europe and the US, but its orders from African customers have tripled over the past two months while an increasing number of African designers are also signing up to the platform. Founded in 2016, Afrikrea is a marketplace for African-made creative products from fashion, art and handicraft to beauty and fabrics. When the pandemic started in March, it was fresh off a successful funding round, having locked down $1 million to expand its footprint beyond its existing community of over 5,000 designers, which had already generated $5 million worth of sales across 101 countries. Moulaye contributed more insights in this webinar by Lagos Fashion Week. Of particular interest is his approach to competition from Instagram, which many African designers use to make direct-to-consumer sales. The key for Moulaye is to incentivize designers to sell through Afrikrea by solving real pain points (such as making shipping easier through their partnership with DHL), while “getting out of the way” of their need and desire to use Instagram as well as any other means at their disposal to advertise their business.

But the fashion industry has barely began to scratch the surface of what it could do with digital tools. In a bold move that has been labeled as “bar raising” and “standard setting”, Anifa Mvuemba, the US-based Congolese designer of contemporary brand Hanifa, debuted her latest collection on Instagram Live via 3D models on Friday. The viral video (which you really need to watch) shows “invisible” 3D models walk down the screen wearing the brand’s designs. The 29-year-old designer said she had planned the digital-only show before the pandemic hit, but clearly she couldn’t have found a better time to grab the world’s attention. A truly innovative way to use available technology that is likely to change the way we shop for clothes online forever. 


MUSIC

Nigeria’s three Afrobeats Greats Davido, Tiwa Savage, and Mr Eazi are the subject of Billboard magazine's latest cover story “'This Isn't a Fad': Three of Africa's Biggest Stars on Making the Industry Come to Them”, in which they proclaim that the "next musical revolution is brewing in Africa." There are lots of gems in this article, which I encourage you to read in full, but I wanted to talk more specifically about Mr Eazi, whose business-savvy never fails to impress me every time I read or watch one of his interviews. Besides being a talented artist himself, at just 28-years-old he is an astute entrepreneur already building a Jay-Z-style musical empire. Contrary to Davido and Tiwa Savage, he turned down lucrative deals from global music labels to remain independent, and two years ago founded the talent incubator and label emPawa Africa, which helped cover video costs for 100 emerging artists from 11 countries with a first $300,000 round of investment. Mr Eazi is quick to point out that there are many kinds of music that get lumped into the “Afrobeats” genre, and emPawa doesn’t hesitate to support artists performing in a variety of sounds, such as Malawian folk singer George Kalukusha. In 2020 emPawa will award 30 artists grants of $10,000 each. Mr Eazi clearly is a mogul in the making.

In other music news this week, Global company Downtown Music announced that it has acquired South Africa-based Sheer Music Publishing. Building on a long-standing relationship between the two companies, the acquisition formally expands Downtown’s geographic footprint to the African continent, while Sheer will continue to function as a standalone business within Downtown’s portfolio of music publishing, distribution, monetization, artist and label services businesses. Sheer and Downtown also plan to develop new services specifically designed for the needs of African creators.


LITERATURE

The short list of nominees for the 2020 Nommo Awards for Speculative Fiction by Africans is out. The Nommo Awards are presented in four categories namely "Best Novel", "Best Novella", "Best Short Story" and "Best Graphic Novel" and will no doubt be of interest to HUSTLE & FLOW’s Hollywood-based readers. African fantasy or “Afrofuturism” fiction has been having a moment for quite a while now, with Hollywood studios actively snapping up IP in the genre across Africa and in the diaspora. This year, the Nommo Awards’ long list included Children of Virtue and Vengeance, the second book in 26-year-old Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orïsha Young Adult trilogy. In 2017, film studio Fox 2000 (now part of Disney) acquired Adeyemi’s first novel Children of Blood and Bones in one of the biggest YA debut novel publishing deals ever. Interestingly, the Afrofuturism genre is dominated by women, with high-profile screen adaptations of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death and Binti in the works with Amazon, HBO and Hulu respectively. Also nominated this year are graphic novels Iyanu - Child of Wonder (long list), which I’ve talked about in a previous edition of HUSTLE & FLOW (and which has smashed its Kickstarter goal of $5,000 by raising $26,000 so far), and Beserat Debebe’s Hawi (short list), which is branded as “the first female comic to ever come out of Ethiopia” (I’m always suspicious of “first ever” claims and highly doubt this is correct here).


FOOD

African gastronomy is getting noticed in France thanks to a new generation of young chefs bringing an aura of cool to a cuisine often considered as too “traditional” in the west. Twenty-seven-year-old Top Chef star Mory Sacko was about to launch his first Afro-Japanese restaurant MoSuke when the opening was postponed due to the lockdown. If this first experience is successful, his dream is to later expand to Rwanda, Senegal or Nigeria. Meanwhile, ELLE Magazine recently profiled Sylvain Avajon and Romuald Metellus of Table Metis, Gabonese chef and Canal+ Afrique presenter Anto Cocagne aka Le Chef Anto, Rudy and Joel Laine of Le Maquis-New Soul Food, Fousseyni and Abdoulaye Djikine of BMK Paris-Bamako, MasterChef’s Georgiana Viou, and Freddy Lindou Chokote and Gaudrey Chokote of Les Tontons Afro, who made an impression on France’s version of Shark Tank last year. The pioneer of the bunch is 29-year-old Dieuveil Malonga, who also got noticed on television in Top Chef all the way back in 2014, and has since opened a restaurant-lab in Kigali and launched the chefsinafrica.fr platform to showcase the continent’s best artisans, food growers and chefs.


BROADCAST

The lack of precise audience data in most African countries generally prevents any in-depth analysis of the popularity or commercial value of specific programs. I also don’t believe that there exists a pan-African ranking of most-watched shows (if it does, please let me know). One player that does have its own audience data and makes proper use of it however is Pay-TV leader Multichoice. And Multichoice just renewed Big Brother Nigeria for its 5th season. Big Brother Nigeria is an offshoot of Multichoice’s Big Brother Africa reality TV franchise, which was launched in 2003 and produced by global format owner Endemol. Big Brother Africa brought together a pan-African cast and ran for 9 seasons before being cancelled. This type of reality show is way past its heyday worldwide, and yet, Big Brother Nigeria still survives. Now, I don’t have access to Big Brother Nigeria’s audience numbers. But based on my own, wholly un-scientific, empirical observations, I believe that it might be the most popular TV show in Nigeria. Here’s what I know: when Big Brother is on the air, conversations about the show take over Instagram for weeks. At Lagos Fashion Week last fall, I noticed that some of the models walking the runway were getting the audience buzzing with excitement. When I asked my 20-something neighbor what the fuss was all about, she explained that they were Big Brother contestants. Big Brother Nigeria is having a Tiger King-esque impact on the country’s culture, and if we set aside any moral considerations about this type of shows, they are money-making machines. Which leads me to two thoughts: one, I am not sure Multichoice realizes this fully and is exploiting this property to the maximum and two, in its quest to win over Nigerian subscribers, Netflix might want to get into the reality TV game (like it’s done in other countries already) sooner rather than later.

WarnerMedia is boosting its presence in Francophone Africa thanks to a new carriage deal with Pay-TV operator StarTimes for its CNN and Warner TV channels. The two new channels come to enrich WarnerMedia’s portfolio already available on StarTimes which includes TCM Cinema, Boing, Boomerang and Cartoon Network. This is the first time that Warner TV, which will propose American series from the Warner catalogue dubbed in French, becomes available in Africa. Warner TV is not a well-known brand of the WarnerMedia television portfolio, and is only available in Latin America, France, Southeast Asia, and now Africa. However, Warner TV started investing in French original series last year, a sign that it may eventually do the same in Africa.


VOD

The global streaming world was rocked last week by the news that Disney’s direct-to-consumer chief Kevin Mayer was leaving to become the CEO of TikTok and COO of TikTok’s owner ByteDance. Mayer is largely credited for the very successful launch of Disney+, but was nevertheless passed over as new CEO of Disney when Bob Iger chose Bob Chapek as his successor in February, which might have given Mayer some incentive to move on. He will bring the Disney aura to TikTok as well as the ability to manage at scale, and of course a strong connection to the Hollywood ecosystem. But he is also likely to be used as a buffer by the Chinese ByteDance in its delicate well… dance with US lawmakers in the context of the US-China trade war.

Meanwhile, a new player has entered the VOD arena in Nigeria, with the launch of Super TV, which describes itself as “Nigeria’s first zero data technology for on-demand live TV and VOD.” It will be open to both linear TV broadcasters and individual content distributors seeking to upload and monetize their content on the platform. In order to offer a zero data solution to customers, Super TV has negotiated deals with mobile operators 9mobile and MTN. If this actually works, it could be a big step forward for VOD adoption in Africa and I will, of course, keep you updated. 

Now, I have kept the best for last. Blood & Water, Netflix’s second South African original was released on May 20th, and it is Fire! The series follows 16-year-old Puleng Khumalo as she investigates whether the girl she recently met at a party could be her kidnapped-at-birth older sister. Set in a gorgeous and exclusive high school in Cape Town (while also taking care to show less-privileged corners of the city), Blood & Water gives off some serious Gossip Girl vibes and promptly reached the number 1 spot on Netflix in numerous countries including South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, but also the US, UK and France - an amazing feat by any standards. One needs to acknowledge Netflix’s strong commitment to its African originals, which have so far been supported with serious and efficient marketing campaigns. But the praise really should go to the Gambit Films team, who are the creators and producers of the show. Nosipho Dumisa, Travis Taute, Bradley and Daryne Joshua, and Benjamin Overmeyer may have official titles but also work within their own innovative structure that sees various team members share writing, directing and producing duties depending on the project. When I met them several years ago, it was already clear that they had what it takes to go far. For a while they kept their heads down as they continued to hone their craft, and the success of Blood & Water is the result of their talent and dedication.