Dear colleagues and friends,
This pandemic is like one of these multiple-parts Nollywood movies which, after serving us with a choice of several acceptable endings, decides to keep going for one more. This last one, dubbed The week Redditors armed with stimulus checks took on Wall Street, has been one of my favorites so far. And the storyline is not over yet. Not unexpectedly, the little guys are getting crushed as the euphoria wears out, while the sirens of Hollywood are turning WallStreetBets into Lord of the Flies. It may also be time for new regulations.
Talking about the control of obscure financial tools, the Central Bank of Nigeria recently announced that it had banned the trading of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the country. If you haven’t followed the saga of how Nigeria became the world’s second crypto market in the world after the US, that’s another good one.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s former Finance Minister Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is finally set to be confirmed at the head of the World Trade Organization. The appointment of Okonjo-Iweala as the first African to hold the position, in the same year that the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) is set to launch, is a great strategic opportunity for the continent. More specifically on the topic that interests us here, we can hope that Okonjo-Iweala will take a look at past WTO policies that have destroyed the once-thriving textile market in several African countries, including her own.
I’ll take this opportunity to look at who are the real winners of African fashion in this week’s edition of HUSTLE & FLOW. I will also talk about the sacred Ark of the Covenant which, tragically, may have been destroyed or stolen (and not by the Nazis this time), and about recent and future dealmaking in the African comic book space. Read on as well for tidbits on the continent’s great data race, Jumia’s phoenix rise, Mr Eazi’s plans to turn fans into investors, the search for elusive content development executives, and African Empire Warriors.
In housekeeping news, I have finally gotten around to making some technical improvements to HUSTLE & FLOW, so hopefully more of you will be receiving it in your inbox this week instead of it getting stuck in your spam. New also is the option to automatically translate this newsletter in French, Portuguese, or your language of choice by clicking on the link just below the header. This is an experiment as I strive to engage more non-English speakers, so please let me know if it’s helpful or not.
If you enjoy HUSTLE & FLOW, don’t hesitate to share it with your contacts. They can subscribe, and read all previous editions on my website. And as always, I remain reachable at marie@restless.global or on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter @marieloramungai.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
It’s been a minute since I talked about Africa’s biggest investment opportunity of this decade, one that gives me FOMO about not working in private equity: internet infrastructure in general, and data centers in particular. For those new to the party, the Financial Times has an in-depth article this week about what it calls Africa’s “great data race”. If Africa’s internet traffic was already growing fast before the pandemic, it is now exploding, and becoming more local. Major data center operators like Teraco, Rack Center and Africa Data Center have attracted hundreds of millions in investment. Driven by a pressing need to limit latency, lower costs, and protect data sovereignty, countries like South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya have also all established local internet exchange points which have seen their peak traffic surge - up to 400 times in Nigeria in the past 8 years. Considering that the number of Africans connected to the internet is expected to grow by 200 million by 2025, this is just the beginning.
MOBILE
As I often say, telcos are Africa’s overlords - they basically run the show. Competition is so intense, that typically two different mobile operators wouldn’t even think about working together. However, in Nigeria’s Ondo State MTN and 9mobile have piloted a free-roaming scheme, allowing each operator’s customers to switch to the other’s network depending on coverage. The experiment has run smoothly, and the two companies will now be requesting permission from the regulator for a full roaming agreement.
E-COMMERCE
As we are approaching the one-year anniversary of the pandemic (gasp), the impact of this extraordinary event on Africa’s e-commerce space is coming into focus. One big winner is Jumia, which clearly didn’t let this good crisis go to waste. By quickly implementing a series of smart decisions, the leading e-commerce player managed to recover from the negative publicity that followed its IPO and regain its unicorn status, with the company’s shares now reaching $60 from a low of less than $3. So what worked? Well in the past year Jumia closed its operations in some countries, moved to a third-party model, cut its advertising budget, and refocused on selling basic household items rather than luxury products like smartphones, and as a result the company finally put an end to its long history of losses.
The pandemic was also kind to Abidjan-based fashion and design platform Afrikrea, which had its best year ever in 2020 with over $7.2 million in transactions. Interestingly, the company reported that the majority of its sales originated in Africa but that these products were then sent to Europe. The online seller, which was co-founded in 2015 by CEO Moulaye Taboure and has since raised over $2 million in funding, is becoming a stable revenue channel for hundreds of small creative businesses, with 3 shops making over $120,000 and 52 over $12,000 last year.
LITERATURE
The multi-talented Blitz Bazawule, just off a hot 2020 where he co-directed Beyonce’s visual album Black Is King and was subsequently attached to direct The Color Purple feature musical, is now a published author. The filmmaker and musician’s debut novel, The Scent of Burnt Flowers, has been acquired by Ballantine Books and is slated for release in 2022. The story of the book is full of suspense and takes place in very colorful 1960s Ghana, so all signs point for a movie version, directed by Bazawule himself, to follow soon.
VISUAL ARTS
With the opening of its new space on Melrose Avenue, Nigeria’s Rele Gallery becomes the first contemporary African gallery to take root in Los Angeles. The gallery’s first LA exhibition will showcase three Nigerian female artists: Marcellina Akpojotor, Tonia Nneji, and Chidinma Nnoli. Founder Adenrele Sonariwo established Rele’s first outpost in Lagos in 2015. In 2017, she was the lead curator of the Nigerian Pavilion for the 57th Venice Biennial.
PERFORMING ARTS
Lagos-based cultural centre Terra Kulture, is a key player of the vibrant theater space in Nigeria, has partnered with the French ENSATT (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Techniques du Theatre) to launch the Terra Academy for the Arts (TAFTA).
HERITAGE
As the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region continues in a climate of international indifference, one of the world’s most sacred religious artefacts may be in danger of destruction. The biblical Ark of the Covenant, said to contain the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments and made famous in global pop culture by Indiana Jones in the Raiders of the Lost Ark (one of the Greatest Films of All Time), has been hidden from view for thousands of years. But many believe that it is housed in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum, which was recently the site of a massacre followed by looting. International heritage experts have raised the alarm over the impact of the on-going conflict on Ethiopia’s sacred sites and their invaluable cultural heritage.
GASTRONOMY
In South Africa, the latest in a series of alcohol sales bans since the start of the pandemic has left winemakers with a surplus of 300 million liters (around 400 million bottles) - nearly half of last year’s harvest. But around the world, South African wines are gaining in popularity. Last year, the US joined the UK and the Netherlands among top export destinations. South Africa is the world’s ninth largest producer of wine, which contributed almost $2 billion to the country’s $351 billion GDP in 2019.
FASHION
French-Somali entrepreneur and Afrobytes co-founder Haweya Mohamed has launched The Colors, a new fashion platform to promote cosmetics and fashion creations for people of African descent. More specifically, two training tracks, La Fabrique for cosmetics and L’Atelier for fashion, will help entrepreneurs develop their brands and leverage digital tools to grow their business.
A new twist in the long-running debate about the cultural appropriation of African culture by Western fashion brands: what happens when the Western designer in question is of African descent? Sparking this new controversy is Virgil Abloh’s latest Louis Vuitton collection - themed Ebonics/Snake Oil/The Black Box/Mirror, Mirror - which features a tracksuit adorned with Kente, a traditional Ghanain textile. The show’s notes explain the intention behind the collection: “If Kente cloth—the fabric of Virgil Abloh’s cultural heritage—is rendered in tartan, does that make Kente any less Ghanaian and tartan any less Scottish? Provenance is reality, while ownership is myth: man made inventions now ripe for reinvention.” In many ways, Abloh, who was born to immigrant Ghanain parents, is in an impossible situation: as one of very few Black designers on the world stage, he is expected to speak for the global Black community. But at the same time, he also represents an iconic European fashion house. To find our way out of this mess, African fashion insiders suggest using one question as our compass: in the end, who benefits?
That’s a question that may have crossed the mind of Winston Udeagha, founder of Winston Leather, when his company celebrated its biggest sales in its 30 years in business last June. Winston Leather’s tannery in Kano, northern Nigeria, supplies leather to luxury fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton (again) and Ralph Lauren. But because EU laws stipulate that the country of origin of finished goods is where the final production process occurs, Winston’s clients never had to use the Made in Africa tag, instead branding their products as Made in Italy, for example, keeping the Nigerian company in obscurity. Realizing the growing potential of the local African market, Udeagha launched its own brand of leather accessories in 2018. And then everything changed last June, when a tweet about the tannery from fashion historian Shelby Christie resurfaced in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement encouraging more people to support Black businesses. That tweet is how I got to know about Winston Leather myself. By correcting misconceptions about the quality of African leather goods, it prompted a flood of orders. So let’s ask ourselves again, who benefits from the current structures of the global fashion trade?
MUSIC
Sony Music West Africa and pan-African digital entertainment channel WatsUp TV have partnered to promote artists in the subregion. The move comes a month after a delegation from Sony traveled to Ghana as part of a scouting and partnership exercise.
In July last year, Mr Eazi, the Nigerian Afropop superstar and African Jay-Z in the making (I’ve called it months ago, we’ll circle back on this in 5 years), launched a $20 million African Music Fund dedicated to financing African creatives. For Mr Eazi, artists are like startups and labels like VCs. By his estimates, while major music labels control about 60% of musical Intellectual Property in the rest of the world, they only own about 2% of the music IP in Africa - suggesting that many African artists are largely independent, a huge opportunity for investors. Now, Mr Eazi says that he wants to explore the possibility of allowing fans to own equity in his songs for his next album, essentially turning them into retail investors (waiting for the MrEaziBets subreddit) and unlocking funding for artists to invest in things like branding and marketing.
SPORTS BUSINESS
Now, here is a show concept that has the potential of being widely entertaining: Africa Sports Venture Group is launching Africa Empire Warrior, a new program which will pit against each other candidates from Africa’s 54 countries representing 12 ancient kingdoms such as the Benin, Songhai, Malian, and Ghana empires. The show aims at showcasing the strength, agility, endurance, power, and ultimate fitness of the contestants, while tapping into the history of ancient African warriors. The first season is expected to shoot in Liberia in 2022.
VOD
Kenya has introduced a new Digital Services Tax, which impose a 1.5% levy on gross income derived from downloadable digital content such as mobile apps, movies, music, e-books and podcasts. Tanzania and Uganda have already implemented similar measures. The move will of course irk companies operating in the digital content space, but these conversations will become unavoidable in Africa like elsewhere as huge sectors of the economy continue to dematerialize.
Meanwhile, MultiChoice's Showmax announced that it was offering new subscribers a “buy one month, get two months free” deal, just as it teased its lineup of Showmax Originals, which include Laycon (Nigeria’s first Showmax original), Crime and Justice (Kenya’s first original), DAM (a new South African psychological thriller), as well as the second season of the South African comedy show Tali's Wedding Diary.
CINEMA
South Africa's biggest movie theater chain, Ster-Kinekor, is going into business rescue. With 55 cinema halls and a combined capacity of 64,000 seats across the country, the company had previously been healthy and profitable, but like many other cinema chains worldwide it was hardly hit by the Covid lockdowns.
FILM
Softie, the little Kenyan documentary that could, has been nominated for the prestigious Producers Guild Awards. Back in January last year, it became the first Kenyan film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Sam Soko and produced by Toni Kamau, the documentary tells the story of Boniface "Softie" Mwangi, an idealistic photojournalist and part-time musician who squares off against a corrupt political system. It is now available online in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa, the US, UK and Canada.
As the 6th edition of short film festival Quartier Lointains, whose theme this year was “Afrofuturistik”, closes its doors in Abidjan, Jeune Afrique publishes a profile of its founder Claire Diao. I talked about Diao, a journalist, editor of the film magazine Awotele, and founder of distributor company Sudo Connexion, when she and her team resigned from the Canal+ show Cine Le Mag after being censored by the channel.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
In the first deal of this kind between a Hollywood studio and a Nigerian company, EbonyLife Media has signed an exclusive first-look agreement with Sony Pictures Television to develop scripted TV series. The two-year agreement is a continuation of the existing relationship between the two companies, who have been collaborating for the past three years on the development of several projects including an action drama inspired by the female Dahomey Warriors. Recently, EbonyLife also announced the launch of its Ebonylife Creative Academy (ELCA), a free program of short creative and practical filmmaking courses developed in partnership with the Lagos State Creative Industries Initiative (LSCII).
A few months ago, Netflix and the Realness Institute launched their Episodic Lab program to give writers from Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa the opportunity to develop their story concepts, with the possibility of having these stories adapted for production by Netflix. Now, Netflix and Realness have announced that the initiative was being expanded to include development executives from across Africa and the diaspora. What is a development executive, you may ask? It is the person sitting on the production company, studio, or buyer’s side who works with the creators and writers of a project to help turn it into the best version of itself. Development executives have a strong grasp of character, story, and structure, and are instrumental to the content production ecosystem. Unfortunately, aside from a few creative producers and a handful of people at Multichoice, Canal+ and Netflix, they basically don’t exist in Africa yet. Actually, I am looking for one myself, so if you know anyone, send them my way.
COMIC BOOKS
I have talked about YouNeek in a couple previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW, and this was just a matter of time: the comic book company, founded by Nigerian-born Doye Okupe, has secured a groundbreaking deal with Dark Horse Comics (home to Hellboy, Sin City and Umbrella Academy) to publish all its graphic novels, which are based on African history and mythology. Some of the titles to be rolled out as a result of this deal include Malika: Warrior Queen and Iyanu, Child of Wonder, which is centered around an orphan with superpowers. In addition, VC firm Impact X Capital will also be supporting YouNeek’s development of an Afrocentric animated series. As I wrote two weeks ago, the African comic book space is very hot right now, and I am hearing that similar deals will be announced in the next few weeks and months.
ANIMATION
Comic book properties are of course ideal IP to turn into animated series, and the only thing standing in the way of Africa becoming a major center for animation creation, production and outsourcing is the lack of training opportunities on the continent. Now, Netflix and the world-famous French animation school Les Gobelins are offering scholarships for 6 African students for the September 2021 intake. The scholarships will cover the full tuition fees for 3 students to attend the Gobelins’ 3-year BA program, and for 3 others to complete a 2-year Masters of Arts.