Dear colleagues and friends,
HUSTLE & FLOW is back.
Depending on whether you believe that 2021 started on January 1st or January 20th, I may be a little late or right on time to wish you all a Happy New Year. We still can’t travel and we still can’t touch each other, but at least we can breathe a little easier under our masks since America has rejoined the adults’ table.
With a swift stroke of the presidential pen, Joe Biden has already reversed many of the most repulsive Trump-era policies, including the various travel bans that targeted visitors from Libya, Sudan, Tanzania, Eritrea, Nigeria, or Somalia. Deputy Treasury secretary Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo and health policy adviser Osaremen Okolo, both Nigerian-American, are also making their entry into the most diverse US administration in history.
The amount of gold-standard memes that the US inauguration gave us almost made us forget that Uganda was going through its own chaotic elections. However, there was no transfer of power there and, at the time of writing, pop star-turned-political opponent Bobi Wine was still under house arrest in Kampala. Meanwhile in Ethiopia, civil war continues to rage on.
The highlight of my locked-down weekend was to binge-watch Lupin on Netflix. The excellent and charismatic Omar Sy is clearly the main reason behind Lupin’s surprise worldwide success. Lupin, the first French series to crack Netflix’s US top 10, has been watched by 70 million households, surpassing other recent hits Bridgerton and The Queen’s Gambit to become the streamer’s top global program.
But is it really a surprise? The answer is in the signs. Sy is of Senegalese descent. The coolest film school in the world just opened its doors in Dakar. Senegalese-born Chef Mory Sacko just won a Michelin star. And Dakar Fashion Week won best overall by choosing a striking baobab forest as a setting. The truth is this: there is a Senegalese takeover underway, and it’s all been orchestrated by Bill Gates.
This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about the Secret Senegalese Supremacy (SSS), but also the crash-landing of Loon’s balloons; classical music in the Congo; Naomi Campbell sparking a Twitter feud in Kenya; a major deal in African football; Omo Ghetto breaking The Wedding Party’s box office records in Nigeria; and the vibrancy of Africa’s comic book sector.
Please do be in virtual touch and send your comments, feedback, corrections, and simple plain hellos to marie@restless.global or find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter @marieloramungai.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
Google’s Loon balloons have burst (pun © CNN). Less than a year after launching its first commercial service in Kenya in partnership with Telkom, the global company has announced that it would discontinue its pilot operation in March after realizing that its business model was unsustainable - aka the service was too expensive for the local market. Well, that seems hardly surprising, considering that even basic, last-century 3G technology is currently too expensive for the majority of African consumers. Still, it is disappointing. In a smart CSR move, Loon pledged $10 million to support nonprofits and businesses focused on connectivity, internet, entrepreneurship and education in Kenya as it exits.
Still in Kenya, Safaricom has announced that it was suspending the deployment of its Huawei-powered 5G network, despite successful testing and previously communicating about an impending launch. CEO Peter Ndegwa said the company would focus on converting millions of existing 2G and 3G customers to 4G service instead. There’s a bit of a mystery going on there, and if more information emerges I’ll be sure to bring it to you.
EDUCATION
As the Africa Season 2020 painfully hops along in France after being stuck for months in the Covid uncertainty vortex, several French-led initiatives to develop Africa’s creative sector are coming to fruition. In Senegal, French-Malian award-winning director Ladj Ly (of Les Miserables fame) has opened the Dakar outpost of his Kourtrajmé film school. The school, which is expected to bring a major boost to the cinema industry not only Senegal but in the entire francophone West African region, is partially financed by the French Development Agency (AFD). In Nigeria, 4 French companies (Teach on Mars, SUMMVIEW, WebForce3 and LAFAAC) have partnered with the Edo State government to launch a creative entrepreneurship and audiovisual e-learning platform. And in DRC, the soprano singer Isabelle Kabatu has launched her efforts to open an opera singing training center in Kinshasa with the support of Belgium’s Fondation Roi Baudoin. If the idea of classical music in the heart of the Congo seems innocuous to you, check out the excellent documentary Kinshasa Symphony which tells the story of Orchestre Symphoniste Kimbanguiste, and of the group of passionate amateurs who started it against all odds 20 years ago.
LITERATURE
For literature lovers (or Hollywood types in search of African IP to snatch up), here’s a yummy list of 50 notable African books of 2020. So much to read, so little time.
VISUAL ARTS
One of the continent’s most high-profile art events, Art X Lagos, took place in December, after HUSTLE & FLOW had wrapped for the year. Like any other gathering these days, this 5th edition of Art X Lagos took place online, and managed to attract a vast international audience from 101 countries to interact with 200 artworks from galleries across Africa and the diaspora, and engage in discussions on the theme ‘Present States; Shared Futures’. In response to the #EndSARS protests which rocked Nigeria in October last year, ART X Lagos also launched a support initiative for 100 photographers who worked at the frontlines and a selection of their works were shown as part of the fair’s special project, New Nigeria Studios.
Meanwhile, another flagship event of the African contemporary art space, the 1-54 art fair, just wrapped its first edition hosted for the first time and in-person at the Christie's Paris HQ. Twenty international exhibitors were also featured online at Christies.com. The fair was initially supposed to take place like it normally does in Marrakesh, but had to relocate due to Covid-19 travel restrictions.
In Accra, the Noldor Artist Residency has opened its doors as Ghana’s first independent residency program for emerging artists. Founded in 2020 by contemporary African art specialist and philanthropist Joseph Awuah-Darko, the Residency will invite one emerging African artist each autumn to work in a dedicated studio space. Ghana has produced some of today’s hottest contemporary African artists, so it will be worth keeping an eye on the new talents coming out of this initiative.
Finally, the New Yorker and the New York Times have great profiles of Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui and Kenyan satirical painter Michael Soi, respectively. Both are established artists in their own genres, but only one of them portrays scenes of African and Chinese characters engaged in various types of debauchery.
HERITAGE
To put on your travel list for one day in the distant future: Renowned Ghanaian-British Architect David Adjaye has been tapped to design the new Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) in Benin City, Nigeria. The Museum will house the returns of treasured bronze sculptures and other artifacts taken away from the Kingdom by the British government during its 1897 attack. According to Adjaye, a key part of the five-year-long project will be a $4 million-sponsored excavation of the site, from where fossils and discoveries would form the many artifacts to be housed by the Museum. EMOWAA will be situated beside the present palace of the Oba of Benin kingdom, primarily to help locals connect to their culture and history, even as it serves as a global historical monument.
HOSPITALITY
The tourism industry has been one of the hardest hit by the prolonged Covid crisis. In Kenya, which normally welcomes some 2 million foreign travelers annually, visitor numbers were down by 72% in 2020. Clearly, the government needed to take action, and it did so by appointing British supermodel and long-time friend of Kenya Naomi Campbell as the country’s tourism ambassador. The news did not go down too well locally, with many Kenyans complaining on Twitter about the choice of a foreigner to represent the country instead of local Hollywood star Lupita Nyong'o, for example. Tourism minister Najib Balala replied that Lupita has been “inaccessible for the past 5 years”, prompting Lupita to slap back with, basically, “LOL Nice Try but Nope”.
The newly-incorporated Kasada Hospitality Fund LP has gone bargain hunting and acquired a portfolio of eight fully operational Pullman, Novotel or Ibis hotels across three countries (Ivory Coast, Senegal and Cameroon) from AccorInvest, in what is billed as one of the largest cross-border hospitality M&A transactions in Africa. Kasada says the transaction is a reflection of its belief in the region’s “prospects for its post-Covid-19 recovery”.
GASTRONOMY
Congratulations to Senegal-born Mory Sacko who received his first Michelin star for his afro-japanese restaurant MoSuke. Sacko also won the best Young Chef prize for 2021. Sacko is part of a new generation of Paris-based African chefs, alongside Chef Anto and a few others, who are reinventing African gastronomy in the French capital.
FASHION
Dakar Fashion Week took place in December but it’s never too late to look at these pictures: in response to the pandemic, the organizers decided to move the event outdoors to a baobab forest. The result was majestic.
Launched in 2005 by the German foundation Aid by Trade with the support of German public partners (GIZ), NGOs and companies, the Cotton made in Africa (CmiA) project aims to integrate sustainable African cotton into the global textile industry. The initiative trains participating farmers to grow cotton in a more environmentally friendly and resource-efficient way. Last week, the Swiss subsidiary of the German distribution company Lidl announced the arrival in its shops of clothing made from CmiA cotton.
SPORTS BUSINESS
In what is probably the deal of the week, Egyptian conglomerate Mansour Group, valued at $7.5 billion in 2018, has invested $120 million to take control of Ghana’s Right To Dream academy. Founded in 1999 with a focus on both education and football by a former Manchester United scout, Right To Dream has since produced 20 Ghana internationals and bought Danish top-flight side FC Nordsjaelland in 2015. Mansour Group invested through a new entity called ManSports, and has plans to establish a Right To Dream academy in Egypt in addition to expanding existing activities in Ghana and Denmark. The move is one example of a new trend in global sports business: the influx of institutional capital. As leagues and franchises struggle to survive the pandemic, a flurry of new special purpose vehicles and private equity groups have been scrambling to take advantage of the situation to get their foot in the door of valuable properties. Indeed, despite the current challenging situation, the value of broadcast rights and the popular appeal of individual franchises remain on an upward trajectory.
Meanwhile in Nigeria, French club Olympique de Marseille has opened its first OM School at the Sports Institute of the University of Port Harcourt. Olympique de Marseille already runs two similar schools in Tunis and Algiers.
BROADCAST
In broadcast news this week, Multichoice’s Nigerian Idol is coming back for a 6th season in 2021 after a 5 year break. And still in Nigeria, two new TV stations have launched since the beginning of the year: TEEN Africa TV (TATV) founded by well-known filmmaker Charles Novia to focus on the underserved 13 to 19 year-old audience, and News Central TV, which will cover politics, nature, sports, eco-diversity, lifestyle, business, and sports.
Is it TV, is it VOD? Who knows anymore. Canal+ and Showmax have announced their second co-production after the South African Blood Psalms, and this time it takes place in Kenya: Crime & Justice, a gritty police procedural, will be the first original Kenyan show for both partners, who managed to make a move in the East African country before Netflix.
VOD
Our friends at Digital TV Research have released a new Africa OTT forecast report, predicting that revenue from OTT platforms in Africa will more than quadruple in the next 5 years to reach $1.7 billion by 2026. Market leader Netflix, which accounted for 57% of Africa’s SVoD subscriptions in 2020 with almost two million subscribers (and who, in case you missed it, appointed Zimbabwean Econet founder Strive Masiyiwa to its board last December), is expected to attract 6.3 million subs by 2026. Despite not launching in Africa until 2022, Disney+ is predicted to sign up 3.1 million subscribers by 2026, while 3rd-place contender and only local player Showmax, is forecast to reach two million by 2026. The race is about to start heating up, which is great news for African content creators.
Meanwhile, in this brave new digital world we are living in, Showmax has teamed up with MTN Nigeria to launch a special data deal for mobile subscribers; French TV streaming startup Molotov is expanding its service to 7 African countries; Kenya’s Media Pros Africa and Africa Digital Media Studios have partnered to bring African content to Vumicentral.com; and mobile company Mondia has introduced its entertainment platform Monsooq to the Nigerian market after launching in South Africa last November.
FILM
Putting an end to the 2020 curse on the Nigerian box office, Funke Akindele’s massive blockbuster Omo Ghetto (The Saga), has been on an incredible ride since its release in December and is on its way to break the records held by both Wedding Party movies to become the highest grossing Nigerian film of all time. After racking up more than a million dollars in a few weeks (not a small feat after the most recent Naira devaluation), the film is now getting an unprecedented release in Dubai, a first for a Nigerian movie. For cinema exhibitors, Omo Ghetto’s success illustrates the resilience of the Nigerian cinema sector, despite an increasingly gloomy global outlook for the theater business.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Nigerian diaspora talents continue to shine in Hollywood, with several high profile projects in the works: Disney+ is developing Yvonne Orji’s comedy First Gen, which is produced by David Oyelowo and Oprah Winfrey; Tessa Thompson has come on board to produce the TV adaptation of Nigerian-American sci fi writer Nnedi Okrafor's Who Fears Death for HBO Max; and Cynthia Erivo is set to star in and produce a film about an enslaved Yoruba girl who was presented to the Queen of England as a gift in 1850 for BBC Film.
PODCAST
In the last edition of HUSTLE & FLOW I talked about Africa’s arrival in the True Crime podcast game, and it is a given that other genres will follow. Earlier this month, the BBC World Service launched a competition to discover new podcast talents in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. The winners will be matched with a BBC Production team and will receive the full backing of the BBC World Service to turn their idea into a BBC World Service podcast.
Not exactly a podcast but still in the audio content format, a new audiobooks app called Afrikan Echoes is due to launch in March. The app will feature up to 50 original and unpublished African works that have been translated into multiple African languages, including Yoruba, Amharic and Swahili. African storytellers from across the continent will be able to pitch their stories to Afrikan Echoes by sending voice notes in their native language. These pitches will be evaluated by Afrikan Echoes’ creative team before being recorded in their studio.
SOCIAL MEDIA
YouTube has released the full list of Africa's 20 most creative YouTube content creators for the #YouTubeBlackVoices Creator Class of 2021, which includes 8 creators from both South Africa and Nigeria and 4 from Kenya. All of them will receive mentoring and funding as part of YouTube's campaign to spotlight Black voices. YouTube anticipates to fund over 500 Black content creators from across the world over the coming years. Social Media is becoming an increasingly valid avenue for African content creators to make money, with the pandemic only accelerating this trend. In Nigeria, the biggest YouTube earner is comedian Mark Angel who - allegedly - makes a whopping $326,800 a month from his 1.4 million daily views.
COMIC BOOKS
The small but vibrant African comics sector is the focus of two recent articles in The Economist and Forbes. While The Economist credits the pandemic for nudging African comic book artists and buyers towards digital platforms which provide easier access to fans and better margins to creators, Forbes points to the massive success of Black Panther as a catalyst for interest in Afrofuturism. In December, Kugali, a company co-founded in 2017 by two Nigerians and a Ugandan, made headlines when it announced a landmark deal with Disney to make Iwájú (The Future), a sci-fi series imbued with Yoruba culture. Similar enthusiasm can be found in Francophone Africa, as Le Monde reports, despite distribution, promotion and financing challenges. There, the most popular property is without a doubt the Aya de Yopougon series, created by the French-Ivorian Marguerite Abouet, which has sold 710,000 copies and was adapted into film in 2012.
GAMING
Esport may just be in its infancy stage in Africa, but it doesn’t mean that the continent’s best players don’t have the ambition to take their spot in this fast-growing, $1 billion a year global market. In 2020, the 18-year-old South African Thabo "Yvng Savage" Moloi made history by becoming the first-ever player from Africa to be sponsored by Red Bull. Can Kenya be next? CNN profiles two of the country’s most-promising gamers: Sylvia "Queen Arrow" Gathoni and Brian "Beast" Diang'a. Judging by their profile pictures, they definitely look the part.
HUSTLE & FLOW #30: Nigerian players’ NBA draft record, Netflix & Realness invest in TV writers, African true crime podcasts take off, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
As we all start (or attempt?) to slow down in preparation for a well-deserved holiday break, you will find here my last newsletter of the year. I will return somewhat rested in January.
I started HUSTLE & FLOW in February BC to share the vibrancy, depth and scope of the African entertainment space, dispel myths about the creative industries (you get it now - it’s a business, not a charity) and galvanize investors’ interest in the sector.
Then Covid happened and HUSTLE & FLOW became the place to track and analyze the enormous changes that the sector was suddenly forced to grapple with: the temporary collapse of the event and live performance industry; the explosion of the consumption of digital media and the new urgency to develop affordable high-speed mobile and internet infrastructure; the boom in fintech, logistics, and e-commerce to better serve new contingents of local consumers; the growing appeal of African content globally, for which we now finally have some data thanks to the likes of Netflix, Apple Music, or Spotify; the reinvention of African fashion as a global leader in sustainability; and the confirmation, despite the long absence of live games from our screens, that the undying passion of the continent for sports and especially football is very much under exploited. Adding to this powerful 2020 momentum, the Black Lives Matter movement also positively transformed the way the world sees Black talent and Black voices, leading to more opportunities for Black creatives worldwide.
Through all this, it’s been extremely motivating to receive your many notes of encouragement and witness the growth of this newsletter. But it’s also been, behind the scenes, an enormous amount of work. Although writing HUSTLE & FLOW could easily be a full time job, I’ve had to fit it in my spare time (aka weekends) while I continue to service my consulting clients. Indeed, most of my time is spent advising companies and organizations on the African creative industries and how to invest in them. I also develop, write and executive produce content and especially TV shows, either for myself or for clients.
If you follow me on social media, you may have seen that I have just started working on a groundbreaking study for UNESCO on the film and audiovisual sector in Africa’s 54 countries - the first such study to focus on the entire continent and, perhaps even more importantly, the first that will be made public when it is completed in June 2021. So yes, my short break from writing HUSTLE & FLOW will be filled with… more writing.
With that said, this week in HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about Nigerian players breaking all records at this year’s NBA Draft, the launch of Netflix and Realness Institute’s very welcome Episodic Content Development Lab, Africa’s finally getting on the true crime podcast trend, and my personal connection to one of these stories. But you’ll also read about 5G in Togo, a new training program for museum professionals, Davido’s political awakening, new TV stations in Zimbabwe, the cancellation of Queen Sono, Sudan’s first Oscar submission, Nigeria’s first animated feature film, and the longevity of my very own XYZ Show.
Subscribe and catch up on previous editions at www.restless.global/hustleflow. I remain available during the period so don’t hesitate to reach out as usual via email at marie@restless.global or on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter or Facebook @marieloramungai. My wish for 2021 is to soon be able to connect or reconnect with you all in person.
Happy Holidays to all,
Marie
MOBILE
Togo becomes the first West-African country and third African state to deploy 5G technology, with the launch of Togocom’s commercial 5G network in Lome in partnership with Nokia. As stated in its National Development Plan, the small country of 7.9 million has the ambition to become a regional hub for digitalization and technology, a smart strategy similar to the one currently pursued with great results by another small country, Rwanda.
Meanwhile across the continent, as the war in Tigray continues to rage on, reaching the beautiful cities of Axum and Asmara, it seems that the Ethiopian government’s plans to privatize its telecoms sector are still going forward. Difficult to imagine a more awkward, confusing, and even unethical context for wannabe investors. The Africa Report has a good explainer here.
LITERATURE
Ten Cities, a project by the Goethe Institut published by Spector Books, is out. The book tells the story of club music and club cultures in ten urban centers across Africa and Europe - namely Nairobi, Cairo, Kyiv, Johannesburg, Berlin, Naples, Luanda, Lagos, Bristol, and Lisbon - from 1960 to March 2020. “Bringing clubs to the fore as nocturnal laboratories for different ways of life, the book portrays the cities' music subcultures in twenty-one essays, playlists, and photo sequences - before COVID-19 impacted creative communities worldwide.” This is as cool and alternative as can be.
VISUAL ARTS
Leading contemporary art platform Artsy is running a virtual exhibition entitled African Art Galleries Now until December 13th. The event features galleries from 15 African countries and allows global audiences to discover and collect over 200 new artworks by 52 African artists. As part of the event, the platform is shedding a particular spotlight on 15 African artists on the rise, who, from Luanda to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Maputo or Lagos, have continued to create in these difficult times. If you are feeling generous, Angolan photographer Keyezua’s Never too Old to Cut the Banana when Erected 4 is on my personal Christmas list.
HERITAGE
The latest stolen artefact to make its way back to the continent is a 600-year-old Ife Terracotta, which was returned by the Netherlands to Nigeria last week. The artefact was reportedly stolen from Nigeria's South Western city of Ile-Ife and smuggled to the Netherlands via Ghana. The Ife Terracotta was seized at customs at Schipol airport where officials, suspecting that "the object might be illicitly imported", alerted the antiquity protection office.
One point of dispute in the lively debate over the return of stolen art to Africa has been whether African countries have the capacity to properly care for the precious items. France and Morocco are now addressing the issue by joining forces to launch a "Pan-African training program for museum and heritage professions", which will be led by Morocco’s National Museum Foundation with $360,000 in funding from the French Development Agency (AFD).
FASHION
Luxury e-commerce platform Farfetch has partnered with curated online store The Folklore to introduce 10 new designers from across Africa and the diaspora to its roster of brands. The aim of the partnership is to increase the number of Black-owned fashion labels available to buy on Farfetch. Launched in 2018 from New York City, The Folklore distributes exclusive pieces from African labels such as Orange Culture, Tokyo James, William Okpo, EDAS and Third Crown, all now also available to buy on Farfetch. The Folklore will be adding new brands to the luxury e-tailer’s platform each season, alongside commissioned photo content and fashion films from African designers.
MUSIC
Afrobeats prince Davido is known for his songs about love and lust, which have collectively amassed more than a billion streams. But in his just-released new LP A Better Time, he steps away from his usual escapism with Fem (“Shut Up”), a perky hit which became a protest song in September for young Nigerians demonstrating against police brutality and corruption. The New York Times interviews the 28-year-old star about his political awakening here.
SPORTS BUSINESS
The football world is mourning the death at age 42 of former Premier League player and Senegal World Cup star Papa Bouba Diop, reportedly of ALS. Diop, who was nicknamed “The Wardrobe” because of his imposing height (he was 1,95 meters / 6-foot-5) started his club career in Senegal before playing for teams in Switzerland, France, and England.
Still in football, Fifa has banned CAF president Ahmad Ahmad for five years for breaching various codes of ethics relating to duty of loyalty, offering and accepting gifts, abuse of position and misappropriation of funds. Ahmad’s sidelining leaves a clear path for South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe to win the CAF presidency next year.
Meanwhile, Nigerian talents shine at the NBA with a record eight players selected as part of the 2020 Draft class either directly or with at least one parent from the country. They include Precious Achiuwa (Miami Heat), Udoka Azubuike (Utah Jazz), Isaac Okoro (Cleveland Cavaliers), Onyeka Okongwu (Atlanta Hawks), Zeke Nnaji (Denver Nuggets), Desmond Bane (Boston Celtics), Daniel Oturu (Minnesota Timberwolves) and Jordan Nwora (Milwaukee Bucks). In total, there are more than 30 current and former NBA players with Nigerian roots. Possibly the most well-known Nigerian player is Hall of Famer Hakeem Olajuwon, who was drafted No. 1 overall in the 1984 NBA draft by the Houston Rockets, and whose influence greatly inspired subsequent generations of young Nigerian players to take up the sport. Nigeria’s potential in basketball (just as in everything else really) is certainly nothing new for the newly-minted Basketball Africa League, and it will be interesting to see how the organization sets out to exploit it in the years to come.
BROADCAST
I spoke about the rise of Senegalese TV series in previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW. For more on the topic, and to hear from some of the creators themselves (such as Jean-Luc Herbulot of Sakho and Mangane), listen to this RFI podcast (in French). One of the key drivers behind the growth of French-language African series has been the multiplication of funding sources in the Francophone West African region, with broadcasters such as Télé Futurs Médias in Senegal, RFI in Ivory Coast, and global operators like TV5 Monde or Canal+ Afrique now actively investing in this type of content.
Now Canal+ seems to be making similar moves in Rwanda through a new local initiative to develop and promote the country’s visual and audio industry. Canal+ already supports and promotes local events such as the Kigali Audio and Visual Forum and the Tour du Rwanda. With “Canal Plus Rwanda”, the Pay TV operator has announced that it would strive to enhance the quality of Rwandan arts including movies, sports, and music, and assist Rwandan content producers in reaching wider audiences across the African continent and the world.
A country that could really benefit from some emulation in its broadcast space is Zimbabwe, which has been saddled with the financially bankrupt ZBC TV as its only national TV station since the country’s independence in 1980. And the time may have finally come, as Zimbabwean authorities have announced the licensing of six new television channels, namely ZTN, NRTV, 3K TV, Kumba TV, Channel D and Ke Yona TV. The Broadcasting Authority has given the new stations 18 months to be operational and go on air or stand the risk of losing their licenses. However, as is often the case with the matter of broadcasting licenses, there are concerns that they may have been awarded to operators with strong political ties to the ruling party. Let’s see how they perform once they get on the air.
Across the world in Orlando, Florida, Afrotainment, the company behind the “polycultural” Black Comcast channel AFRO TV and 8 other Afro-centric TV stations, is opening up a 30,000 sf. Digital Television Studio to accommodate its daily productions. The multi-million dollar facility includes a 220 seat auditorium, 2 versatile TV studios with live audience, a 180-degree cyclorama (I don’t know what that is either), a music recording studio, 2 master control rooms, an event hall and other television production support rooms.
VOD
Netflix has partnered with film development organization Realness Institute to launch an Episodic Content Development Lab to train writers from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria in TV writing. Submissions are currently open and six writers will be selected to work on projects that will be developed and commissioned by Netflix. The selected writers will be paid a stipend of $2,000 per month (yes to paying writers to write!) and expected to be available full time from June to September 2021. A much needed initiative that has been widely celebrated by the industry.
Just a few days later however came the surprising cancellation of the second season of the streamer’s first African original series Queen Sono, after it had initially been given the go-ahead in April. Production company Diprente cited difficulties in filming due to the pandemic, however film shoots have been up and running across the continent for a while, so it doesn’t quite sound like the whole story. Other reasons may include shifting strategic priorities, budget concerns, or even rising expectations in terms of quality standards.
Meanwhile in South Africa, the government has confirmed that it would go ahead and enforce a 30% local content requirement for streaming platforms operating in the country. Although the spirit of the new regulation may be valid (protecting and supporting the local production industry) its mechanics seem completely unworkable due to the sheer volume of content available on global platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime or Apple+. The European model, which involves first taxing the platforms on the revenue generated locally, and then imposing a certain level of investment in local productions based on that taxable revenue, should be a template for other regions to follow. This is a meaty topic that I haven’t had time to cover this year but will definitely be on the menu for 2021, so stay tuned.
FILM
After similar announcements in recent weeks from Ivory Coast (La Nuit des Rois), Kenya (The Letter) and Lesotho (This is Not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection), Sudan is entering the Academy Awards’ Best International Feature Film race for the first time with the selection of Amjad Abu Alala’s You Will Die at Twenty. Only the eighth film in the history of Sudanese cinema, the film was conceived and produced just as the Sudanese revolution was unfolding. It premiered in Venice earlier this year and went on to win over 20 awards at film festivals worldwide.
The Guardian has a lovely profile of legendary South African actress Mary Twala, who passed away last July just a few weeks before Beyoncé’s Black Is King, in which the 80-year-old played a shaman, came out. Twala also holds the lead role in This Is Not a Burial, which is still traveling the festival circuit in advance of its theatrical release.
Four feature films and one documentary were selected by the Berlinale World Cinema Fund to receive “ACP bonus” funding for a total amount of $297,000. The co-production projects are Pepe, the Imagination of the Third Cinema by Nelson Carlos de los Santos, Dominican Republic; Rising up at Night by Nelson Makengo, DRC; O ancoradouro do tempo by Sol de Carvalho, Mozambique; The killer who gave me back my life by Mama Keita, Guinea; and Augure by Baloji Tshiani, DRC.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
African diasporans making waves: Artist and engineer Akin Adebowale, who was born in Nigeria, and director Ousman Sahko, who hails from Sierra Leone, have launched Blacktag, a “global interactive platform that will empower Black creators by connecting them directly with brands and audiences seeking out alternative Black”. Blacktag, which has raised a $3.75 million seed round led by Connect Ventures, a newly formed investment partnership between talent agency CAA and VC firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), has already announced deals with Issa Rae, Common and Janelle Monae.
Award-winning filmmaker Caroline Kamya, whose 2010 film Imani put Uganda on the global cinema map, has launched NATIV, a new project that aims to help talented media professionals in Uganda access global clients. NATIV’s website doesn’t seem quite ready yet, but you can register to be kept abreast of any new development.
PODCAST
One of my guilty pleasures is to listen to true crime podcasts, and I have been eagerly waiting for the trend to reach Africa. Last week saw the launch of not one but two projects of considerable ambition. In 23419, producer Chioma Onyenwe takes us on a journey into some of Nigeria's biggest online fraud cases, starting with a spectacular $242 million Banco Noroeste Brazil heist from 1995. The second project cuts close to home as I used to know the main protagonist well. In Case Number Zero, Vincho Ndovu looks into the unsolved disappearance of journalist and blogger Bogonko Bosire, who hasn’t been heard of since 2013. Bosire was my colleague at AFP’s Nairobi office from 2006 to his dismissal a few years later for gross misconduct after he stole money from a former Somali warlord. A brilliant and controversial writer (many people called him a genius), Bosire was also an open alcoholic with bipolar tendencies who would often wake up battered and bloodied on a Nairobi street corner after a night spent offending his drinking buddies with his provocative statements. At the time he was impossible to ignore, but also impossible to help, and the mystery of what happened to him haunts me to this day.
ANIMATION
Lady Buckit & The Motley Mopsters, which is billed as Nigeria’s “first animated feature film”, will be released in theaters on December 11th. The marketing of the film is very light on story and the synopsis seems to bear no connection to the title or the poster of the film (marketing fail alert), but Lady Buckit is apparently set against the backdrop of the historic oil producing town of Oloibiri in Delta State, and focuses on a precocious, self absorbed little girl who finds herself in wildly unfamiliar territory. The film was reportedly made on a $1 million budget.
I’ll finish off this edition and this year with a personal note as I congratulate my team at Buni Media for reaching season 14 of The XYZ Show! The satirical puppet show which I co-created with cartoonist Godfrey “Gado” Mwampemwa back in 2009 is now one of the longest-running programs on Kenyan television. Three other Buni Media productions have also been nominated for the 2020 Kalasha Awards (Kenya’s Emmys): Ask Dr. Pamoja (Best TV Advert), From Here to Timbuktu (Best Animation), and Hiddo and Hirsi (Best Animation). Hongera sana Buni Media, tuko pamoja!
HUSTLE & FLOW #29: Google and Orange bring the promise of superfast internet; Ghana’s Wakanda City of Return; MultiChoice’s smart sports-betting investment, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
Our bruised and battered world breathed a collective sigh of relief when Joe Biden’s victory was announced a week ago. Yes of course, he is as old as the last generation of African leaders, but he might still have a good fight in him. After all, he is still the same man who made this powerful, impassioned speech against US support to the apartheid regime back in 1986.
In the same week came the news of a potential COVID vaccine with 90% efficiency, and just as I am writing these lines we’re hearing of another, potentially even more effective one. So there might, finally, maybe, be some light at the end of this very long, dark tunnel of gloom.
On the continent however, the ghosts of undemocratic elections, state repression, and ethnic conflict seem to be catching a second wind. Opposition voices are being arrested in Tanzania, locked in a vice-like grip in Côte d’Ivoire, actively fought on the ground and in the courts in Nigeria, or dragged into a full-on war as tensions in Ethiopia’s Tigray region escalate and engulf neighbor Eritrea.
None of this is new of course, as the complicated legacy of former Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings, who passed away a few days ago, reminds us. But it’s 2020 and every bad news carries with it a specific “Oh My God What Next” kind of flavor.
This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about Google and Orange bringing the promise of superfast internet to East and West Africa; Ghana’s Wakanda City of Return; and MultiChoice’s smart investment in sports-betting. But you’ll also read about Jumia’s path towards profitability; Kenya’s literary dwarfism (not my term, I wouldn’t dare); the intriguing concept of music development banks; Lesotho’s first entry in the Best Foreign Film Oscar race; and the annus horribilis of the Nigerian cinema sector.
The next edition of HUSTLE & FLOW will be its 30th, a nice, round number to wrap this up for the year. I will take a break from newsletter writing in December, and will find you all again, hopefully refreshed, in January.
In the meantime, head over to www.restless.global/hustleflow to subscribe or check out the archives, and please stay in touch via email, DM, whatsapp, or else, as it is always a pleasure to hear from you.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
There’s some Star Trek-worthy news this week in internet infrastructure. After launching its Loon balloons in July, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is now banking on invisible light beams to provide high-speed internet to Africa’s rural and remote areas. The initiative, dubbed “Project Taara”, will allow for the high-speed transmission of up to 20 gigabits per second between Taara terminals mounted high up on existing towers or rooftops over distances of up to 20 kilometers. The planned pan-African roll-out will start, just like Loon, in Kenya, in partnership with Econet.
In the same week, French telco Orange launched Djoliba, a new terrestrial and undersea fibre-optic network in West Africa that will deliver high speed broadband at up to 100 Gbps and seamless connection to Orange’s services across Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal. This is a big deal as previously telecommunications networks in the area were built independently within each country and stopped at national borders. Orange, which says it is investing $1.18 billion annually into the continent’s digital transformation, currently serves 120 million customers in 18 African countries. It has identified the Middle East and Africa as a key growth driver for the company as part of its five-year plan.
MOBILE
The war in Tigray has certainly tarnished Ethiopian Prime Minister’s Abiy Ahmed’s image as a reformer, however whether it will impact foreign companies’ appetite for the country’s 110 million-strong market is another story. Last week, the Ethiopian Communications Authority confirmed that two new service providers had been selected to receive the country’s first private operating licences, and that their names would be revealed by the end of this month. Suspense. As you may recall, 12 entities including MTN, Etisalat, Saudi Telecom, Liquid Telecom, but also a consortium called Global Partnership for Ethiopia made up of Safaricom, Vodacom and Vodafone, had thrown their hats in the ring of this highly competitive process.
E-COMMERCE
Nothing like a good pandemic and global lockdown to boost a struggling e-commerce business. Over the last few weeks, investors had parked on Jumia, expecting some major growth this quarter. That did not happen. Jumia lost 20% of its value last week when the company reported a lower than expected revenue for Q3 2020 - an 18% fall year over year. However, things might be better than they seem as in fact Jumia has been on a journey to reduce its historically staggering losses. By evolving beyond selling only first-party products (products which Jumia sells directly to end customers) to become a “marketplace” for third-parties, Jumia has temporarily sacrificed higher revenue for better margins over the longer term. Also, after getting into fintech with Jumia Pay, Jumia is now betting on spinning off its logistics arm and opening it up to 3rd-party e-commerce companies across 11 countries in Africa. As Jumia already is one of the biggest players in the e-commerce logistics space across the continent, this seems like a no-brainer move to unlock revenue. The question really is not whether e-commerce will work in African in the future, but rather how long investors will be willing to fund losses before it does.
FASHION
When Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Accra became one of the countless victims of this pandemic, the automaker decided it still wanted to spotlight the work of local West African talent. It is doing it in this special Vogue photo series showcasing the new collections of five Accra-based designers (Larry Jafaru Mohammed, Steve French, Hassan Alfaziz Iddrisu, Atto Tetteh, and Chloe Asaam), all focused on innovating traditional Ghanaian textiles and implementing eco-friendly production methods. Yes, sustainability is the new black.
In Ethiopia, a $6.5 million fund has been set up as a partnership between the government, the UK, and Germany to save thousands of jobs in the country’s textile and garments industry threatened by the COVID-19 slowdown. Through the fund, Ethiopia’s textile factories can apply for wage subsidies and incentives to reward businesses that can adapt to respond to the pandemic.
LITERATURE
HUSTLE & FLOW favorite Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been voted "Winner of Winners", a once-off award in celebration of the Women's Prize’s 25th anniversary, for her iconic novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Adichie beat out previous winners Zadie Smith, Lionel Shriver, and Rose Tremain. The Women's Prize, formerly known as the Orange Prize, brought Half of a Yellow Sun into prominence back in 2007.
As Nigerian writers continue to assert their uber-dominance over English-language African fiction, Kenyan writer and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola digs into the reasons behind her own country’s lack of literary clout in a masterfully written article. Nyabola links “Kenya’s literary dwarfism” to the “virulent anti-intellectualism” of Daniel arap Moi’s long-running regime, which was characterized until its end in 2002 by arbitrary arrests, detention, and the exile of scholars including Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Today Kenyan publishers still self-censor, foreign books are taxed like luxury items, self-help is the most popular genre, and fiction writers tend to “hide their observations behind heavy-handed moralizing in books that can be sold as assigned reading for high school students.” But recent releases such as Makena Maganjo’s debut novel South B’s Finest, Billy Kahora’s short story collection The Cape Cod Bicycle War, and Nairobi Noir, a collection of crime stories edited by Peter Kimani, might be finally threading a different path. I’ll leave the last word to Nyabola as I can’t do better than that: “Nairobi readers of contemporary fiction may be left still longing for a story about a Nairobian who has sex, smokes a blunt, or has a beer without their life unraveling into a cautionary tale. Regardless, these books are a declaration of intent.”
HOSPITALITY
In 2019, Ghana organized ‘the Year of Return’, drawing many members of the diaspora, including celebrities, to the country to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in America. The success of the event was such that it should be made a Harvard case study. Since then, Ghana has been making efforts to consolidate the gains made “Beyond the Year of Return”. Last week, the city of Cape Coast announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Africa Diaspora Development Institute (ADDI) and two local companies to create an ultramodern city called the “Wakanda City of Return” (hope somebody checked they could use or license the name). The partners seek to create a place of pilgrimage for the people of African descent to learn about their history, culture, the civilization of Africa, and its role in the creation of the new world economy. As long as it doesn’t turn into a white elephant or a basket case, I’m here for it.
MUSIC
Warner Music has signed a new licensing deal with music streaming platform Audiomack for key African territories including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania. Audiomack, which claims to have more than 16 million monthly active users, will also provide support for Warner Music’s A&R research activities across these territories. For Warner Music, this is just the latest in a series of African moves that includes recent investments in Nigerian label Chocolate City and music rights management company Africori. At the beginning of last year, Warner Music also became the second major music company to sign a direct licensing deal with Africa’s biggest music streaming service, Boomplay.
Meanwhile, as new lockdowns are being instituted in Europe and the US and performance venues continue to operate (if at all) at limited capacity worldwide, Shain Shapiro of the Center for Music Ecosystems is making the case for the creation of “music development banks”. The live performance industry may be in shambles, he writes, but people are also paradoxically consuming more music than ever before - on streaming platforms of course, but also through TV, films, or video games. In fact, in the United States, the value of recorded music increased by 5.6% in the first half of 2020, prompting a number of investment funds to bet on recurring heritage music rights. However, the ecosystem requires musicians to continue to create music and right now, many of them are struggling. Shapiro argues that the creation of a Music Development Bank could support and protect the sector during this difficult time by recognizing the future value of music and spreading the risk over time. The idea is intriguing and sounds very similar to the African Music Fund launched by Nigerian superstar Mr Eazi in July this year -- a model that the various DFIs that have pledged to support the African creative industries should investigate.
And finally, a win for the culture: the Grammys are finally changing the name of their “best world music” album category to “best global music” album, to avoid “connotations of colonialism”. Initially coined in the UK in 1987 to help market music from non-western artists, the term “world music” had since become highly criticized, including by three-time Best World Music Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo, for its patronizing undertones. The Grammys’ change follows the announcement last July that the Recording Academy’s “best urban contemporary” album would be renamed “best progressive R&B” album, as the term “urban” is increasingly seen as an inappropriate descriptor of Black music.
SPORTS BUSINESS
Way back in February BC (Before COVID), I wrote that Vivendi Sports was up to something in Africa. Since then, the pandemic has put a freeze over most of the group’s planned activities, but it’s always good to hear from Vivendi Sports’ dynamic CEO and former rugby pro Robins Tchale-Watchou, who was interviewed by Jeune Afrique last week. In just 2 years of operation, Vivendi Sports notably created the Tour de l'Espoir, a cycling competition reserved for under 23s, organized boxing tournaments, and launched ARES, the first African-European MMA league, with a first major competition that drew a crowd of 5,000 in Dakar last December. All these events take advantage of synergies within the group: the competitions are organized whenever possible around the CanalOlympia sites, so that they can be combined with concerts showcasing Universal Music artists, and benefit from special media coverage by Canal+ television channels. Great strategy, bad timing.
In football news, South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe has been nominated as a candidate for the leadership of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) as the race for the top post in African soccer gathers momentum. Motsepe’s candidacy has already won support from Botswana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. The two other candidates are embattled incumbent Ahmad Ahmad of Madagascar and the Ivorian Jacques Anouma, a former FIFA executive committee member.
After much debate and some likely vigorous haggling over price, Multichoice SuperSport has renewed its broadcasting agreement with the English Premier League until 2025. The broadcasting rights have been confirmed to extend across Sub-Saharan Africa (including South Africa) and cut across all languages and via all the available distribution platforms. This is coming just as South African regulator ICASA is about to publish a regulatory mandate requiring DStv to make the broadcast so-called "public interest sports" available free-to-air. Did SuperSport just pay big money for content it will be forced to broadcast for free? Apparently not, as the new regulation does not seem to concern international league matches but rather major competitions such as the Summer Olympic Games, the Paralympics, the (FIFA) World Cup, the (FIFA) Women's World Cup, the Africa Cup of Nations, the Rugby World Cup, the Cricket (ICC) World Cup, the T20 Cricket World Championships, the Netball World Cup, the Commonwealth Games, the IAAF World Athletics Championships, the Super Rugby, the All Africa Games, the COSAFA Cup, the CAF Champions League, and the CAF Confederations Cup. If the draft regulation comes into law, SuperSport will be facing existential problems pretty soon.
BROADCAST
Mais jusqu’ici, tout va bien. Actually, things are better than good for Multichoice, whose just-released first-half earnings statement revealed that the South African Pay TV group had breached the 20 million subscriber mark across Africa for the first time, amounting to a 6% increase in active subscribers over the six months through September. These are strong results for the group which was spun out of Naspers in February last year amid concerns over its profitability. The group also announced that it planned to develop more local productions and share more content costs with new shareholder Canal+. The duo have already teamed up on Blood Psalms, a drama based on pre-colonial South African mythology, which is due to be broadcast on MultiChoice’s Showmax streaming service next year. Another highlight from the earnings statement is the news that MultiChoice had acquired a 20% stake in Nigerian sports-betting platform BetKing for $81 million, valuing the startup company at over $400 million, and giving Multichoice access to a booming sector which presents many synergies with its activities, and not only when it comes to sports content. Just imagine what online sports-betting technology could do when applied to a non-sports competition blessed with a rabid following such as Big Brother Naija. (Print money, that’s what it would do.)
VOD
Not a big surprise, but now we have some numbers to back it up: Netflix is the leading streaming platform in South Africa with a 35% market share, while Showmax is second with a 25% share, according to rating service JustWatch.
There continues to be lots of activity in the (crowded) South African VOD space. Staying with Showmax, the local streamer recently announced the launch of a free, ad-supported version of its service for the South African market. Has the time for a-VOD finally come in Africa? This remains to be seen but it’s definitely a worthwhile experiment on Showmax’s part which we will be observing closely.
A bit late to the party but not a contender to be dismissed nonetheless, new platform TelkomONE has inked an agreement with SABC which will give the streamer non-exclusive access to content from SABC1 and SABC2 TV channels, as well as sports and educational content, and audio content from 19 SABC radio stations. The novelty here is that SABC will be paid a carriage licence fee, plus a yet-to-be-determined share of revenues generated by TelkomONE from its content. The deal, inspired by the American US cable carriage model, is similar to what SABC has been pushing to get from Dtsv.
FILM
The glocal appeal of Nollywood films was confirmed in a big way this year thanks to the impressive success on Netflix of films such as Oloture or Citation (number 6 worldwide last week). Meanwhile, on the ground, Nigeria’s once-booming cinema sector was going through the Year from Hell. A few weeks ago, just as cinemas were finally reopening after an inexplicably long and somewhat absurd lockdown (considering the mild impact of the pandemic in Nigeria), the #EndSARS protests and the ensuing mayhem forced theaters to close again. Some locations, such as three state-of-the-art FilmHouse cinemas, were destroyed by looters. Variety estimates that after a string of record-setting years at the box office, the Nigerian industry will take a hit of up to $21 million in 2020, a 60%-70% drop from 2019. A long list of highly anticipated films, all backed up during the long months of closure, are now set to be released over the next few weeks and during the holiday period. Netflix will no doubt also have its pick of the many unreleased films which will struggle to find a spot in cinemas among the backlog. However, with the delayed or cancelled release of many big Hollywood titles, there is an unprecedented opportunity for the local film industry to step up and grab a wider market share - if nothing else comes in the way.
Kenya has selected multiple award-winning documentary The Letter as the country’s official entry for the Oscars’ best international film category, while Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection is Lesotho’s first ever entry in the competition. The nominees for the 93rd Academy Awards will be announced on February 9th, 2021, while the ceremony itself will take place on April 25th.
And finally, the African film community has been celebrating the nomination a couple weeks ago of one of its own, creative industries veteran Alex Moussa Sawadogo, as FESPACO’s new director. The dynamic and very qualified Sawadogo will be in charge of modernizing the iconic festival, which takes place every other year in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and has in recent years been marred with financial and organizational issues. Educated in Germany, Sawadogo also has the potential to expand the attractiveness of the festival beyond the French-speaking world. We certainly wish him well.
GAMING
The 2020 Fak’ugesi Arcade event, which is running virtually this month, is a good opportunity to get to know the people and studios at the forefront of African gaming. If this is your space, check out the ‘People of Play’ exhibition, which is showcasing 13 of the most well-known developers on the continent including Hugo Obi of Maliyo Games (Nigeria), Eyram Tawia of Leti Games (Ghana), Dawit Abrahim of Qene Games (Ethiopia). Also watch out for Africa Games Week and the Business of Gaming event which will take place virtually on December 3rd and 4th, 2020.
HUSTLE & FLOW #28: New books by literary legends, the death of an art patron, taboo-breaking Senegalese soap operas, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
Perhaps it is because there are only 2 months left until the end of this exhausting year, but the pace at which our world is tumbling forward seems to have reached fever pitch in the past two weeks.
Just a few hours after I sent the 27th edition of HUSTLE & FLOW paying tribute to the beauty of Nigeria’s peaceful #endSARS movement, the army laid down a nighttime trap on harmless protesters and shockingly executed several of them under the cover of darkness, in what is now referred to as the Lekki Toll Gate massacre. Initially stunned and traumatized, Nigeria’s youths have since picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and are now focusing their energies on organizing themselves for the country’s 2023 elections.
Talking about elections, some very messy ones have just happened in Tanzania, and will soon happen in Ivory Coast, in Guinea, and of course tomorrow in America -- all countries in which incumbent leaders might cheat, steal, or plainly just refuse to leave office because, it turns out, they can.
Meanwhile, just before Europe went back into lockdown courtesy of that dreaded second wave, people in France were getting beheaded in the street and in broad daylight by terrorists.
In the midst of all this mess, businesses, creators, and ideas continue somehow to survive and thrive across the continent. This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, I talk about new books by literary legends Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o; the shocking death of art patron Sindika Dokolo (another tragedy); and the success of taboo-breaking Senegalese series. But you’ll also read about why data is where the money’s at; Christmas gifts ideas; a must-see-but-can’t-see exhibition of African textiles; Africa’s hottest architecture projects; Kenyan Heroes on Google; new music talent search competitions; the future of sports post-COVID; and the new South African Ugly Betty.
Don’t hesitate to share this newsletter with friends and colleagues who might be interested in the African Entertainment industry. If you are new to HUSTLE & FLOW, you can subscribe and catch up on previous editions at www.restless.global/hustleflow. And please continue as always to send me your comments, links, tips and corrections at marie@restless.global.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
If you are a regular HUSTLE & FLOW reader, you know I’ve been very bullish about Africa’s data center opportunity. If you have a couple hundred millions lying around, it truly is a no brainer - and Liquid Telecom is on it. With a fresh $307 million in the bank, the group, which already operates five data centers in South Africa, Kenya and Rwanda, is now expanding to five other countries, including Egypt and Nigeria. Strive Masiyiwa, the Zimbabwean founder of Liquid Telecom’s owner Econet, has announced that construction is already under way for the company’s new data center in Lagos, which is set to be the largest on the continent outside of South Africa.
MOBILE
Masiyiwa has been maneuvering his way into the Nigerian market for years, even setting up the country’s first GSM mobile network, Econet Wireless Nigeria (now Airtel Nigeria) back in 2001 - an adventure that didn’t exactly end well. It is clear that he is still determined to crack Nigeria, one way or another.
Indeed, despite the sharp economic slowdown, the continued devaluation of the Naira, and the social and political chaos of the past few weeks, some companies continue to win big there. And MTN might be the biggest winner of them all, as it just announced a 13.9% revenue growth over the 3rd quarter which guarantees it to cross the N1 trillion ($2.6 billion) mark by year’s end -- all thanks to data. A strong validation, if one was ever needed, of Masiyiwa’s data center approach (if you can’t beat them, join them, and if you can't join them, make yourself indispensable to them).
E-COMMERCE
In other MTN news, the operator has announced the sale of its 18.9% stake in Jumia, for net proceeds of $142.31 million. This move is part of MTN’s ongoing efforts to streamline its portfolio and minimise debt by disposing of its non-core businesses. The e-commerce platform, which faced difficult times last year that brought its share price crashing to a low of $3 after a groundbreaking but controversial listing on the New York stock exchange, has since rallied and regained its unicorn status. In the last 10 days, Jumia’s shares have steadied between $16 – $19 and its market cap has reached as high as $1.5 billion. As I was writing a few months ago, the pandemic might have very well been Jumia’s saving grace.
FASHION
Today in Fashion news, here’s one exhibition I would have loved to see, hadn’t it been for Lockdown Season 2: Black Thread, a showcase of the textile traditions of West Africa curated by Marché Noir creator Amah Ayivi, has opened at Världskulturmuseet in Sweden. The exhibition presents century-old fabrics (with a focus on Kente from Ghana) side by side with contemporary outfits by Ayivi and Cameroonian star designer Imane Ayissi. I see a lot of exciting opportunities in the future for the revival of traditional, hand-crafted African textiles as the fashion industry continues its march towards sustainability.
LITERATURE
At 86-years-old, father-of-African-literature Wole Soyinka is more productive than you. The Nigerian playwright, poet, and Nobel prize winner has used his time in lockdown to write his third novel, the first in almost 50 years. The optimistically titled Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth, which his publisher calls “a narrative tour de force”, will be published in Nigeria before the end of the year and internationally in early 2021. As you may recall, a film adaptation of Soyinka’s iconic play Death and the King’s Horseman, is also currently under development at Netflix. You can put Soyinka on the (short) list of people who won 2020.
It looks like writing is good for life expectancy. I somehow (how could I??) forgot to mention the new book by another hyper-prolific African literary giant, 82-year-old Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Although he has been based in California for decades as a distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, Thiong’o’s work remains engaged with his homeland. His new book, The Perfect Nine, is a recounting of the creation myth of the Gikuyu people through a decidedly feminist and pan-African lens. Originally written in Gikuyu and published in Kenya in 2018, the novel was translated into English by Thiong’o and embodies his famous theory on “Decolonizing the Mind.” The beautiful cover was designed by the talented Monica Obaga, a friend and former team member at Buni.tv.
In other literature news, Booker Prize shortlisted author Maaza Mengiste has assembled a diverse array of Ethiopian writers for Addis Ababa Noir, an intriguing anthology of short stories, while in Paris Cameroonian novelist Djaïli Amadou Amal has made it to the second round of selections for the prestigious Goncourt prize with Les Impatientes (The Restless Ones).
VISUAL ARTS
The African art world is in mourning this week after the tragic, untimely death last Thursday of Congolese businessman Sindika Dokolo in a diving accident in Dubai. Forty-eight-year-old Dokolo was perhaps best known to some as the husband of the controversial Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos. But in art circles, he had earned a serious reputation as a committed supporter of African art, growing a vast collection of more than 3,000 pieces and dedicating time and money to the restitution of the continent’s works from Europe. Through his foundation, Dokolo set up a team of researchers, dealers, and lawyers in 2013 to scour archives and investigate the international art market, looking for any potential stolen artworks. So far the team is reported to have located 17 pieces and has returned a dozen to their home countries, which is, by any stretch, a very commendable legacy for which Dokolo deserves to be honored and remembered.
This would make a great Christmas present (and I just ordered mine): Editions Textuel, in partnership with London-based publisher Thames & Hudson, have released Africa 21st century, a coffee table book celebrating 20 years of contemporary photography on the continent through more than 300 reproductions of works by 51 African artists.
And for those with slightly more disposable income, the Foundation for the Development of Africain Contemporary Culture (FDCCA) and the African Culture Fund (ACF) are currently running “Africa Unite Against Covid-19” an online charity auction to support artists from the continent. Seventy-three works donated by more than 30 leading African artists are available, with starting prices ranging from $698 to $35,000.
CULTURE
The National Museum of Kenya has partnered with Google Arts & Culture and Shujaa Stories to create Mashujaa Wetu, an impressive and even groundbreaking digital project that explores the history of 61 Kenyan heroes, representing each of the country’s 44 communities. The site was unveiled on Mashujaa Day, or Heroes’ Day in Kenya, and is part of the wider Kenyan Cultures project, a bottomless rabbit hole showcasing historical and modern aspects of the country’s rich cultures. Google Arts & Culture (formerly Google Art Project) is an online platform through which the public can view high-resolution images and videos of artworks and cultural artifacts from partner cultural organizations throughout the world. Earlier in its development, the project faced criticism about its western-centric approach. Clearly the internet giant is working to correct this and has now made Kenyan culture available to the entire world.
ARCHITECTURE
CNN has a pretty cool slideshow of Africa’s most anticipated architecture projects, that include the Niamey Cultural Center and Adjaye Associates’ Memorial des Martyrs in Niger; the monumental National Cathedral of Ghana, also by Adjaye Associates; Zaha Hadid’s Grand Theatre and the Mohammed VI Tower in Rabat; the New Redemption Hospital in Liberia and the Ellen DeGeneres Campus (sigh, yes) of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda, both designed by US nonprofit MASS Design Group; Cairo’s Grand Egyptian Museum and the Gouna Conference and Culture Centre in Egypt; and the Floating Music Hub in Cape Verde by Kunlé Adeyemi of Makoko floating school fame.
MUSIC
Two new Music talent search competitions were announced last week. First, MTN Nigeria has partnered with Berklee College of Music and Nigerian creative hub Afrinolly to produce its Y’ello Star reality show. Members of the Berklee community will serve as coaches and judges for the 16 semifinalists, with the winners offered the opportunity to record their debut single at Berklee’s campus in New York. The Mic: Africa is a music competition and docu-series independently produced by creative tech startup AMP Global Technologies and broadcast through various media and telco partner platforms across the continent. Fans have used the app to select 18 semi-finalists among young artists from Rwanda, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, and Mauritius. The show will air in early December with a finale on January 3rd.
By tapping into young people’s hunger for fame and Africa’s seemingly bottomless reservoir of raw talent, such music-based competitions have been extremely popular across the continent in recent years. Local adaptations of global formats such as Idols, Project Fame, X-Factor, The Voice, or America’s Got Talent, but also mobile-based competitions such as Trace Music Star, have drawn massive viewership and generated substantive revenue through sponsorship or premium SMS voting.
SPORTS BUSINESS
New Frame is looking at the future of Sports in Africa in a post-COVID world. With competitive sports being largely dependent on revenues from match-day attendance fees, sponsorships, and declining broadcast license fees, sports federations and sports business entrepreneurs need to urgently start exploring other revenue streams as they wait for some kind of normalcy to return. As I have written in HUSTLE & FLOW in the past, opportunities exist to create more innovative content around local sports and exploit it over the variety of digital platforms available today (social media, global streaming platforms, mobile, exclusive club-owned platforms, etc).
One federation that has been very active in pushing new digital content out during the lockdown is the Basketball Africa League. ESPN has a very interesting article about how America’s relationship with its African NBA players has evolved over the years - from prejudice to curiosity to finally, respect, as BAL is forcing Americans to look at Africa through a different lens. Meanwhile, although basketball’s practice and audiences are growing on the continent, it remains a “luxury” and “forward-looking” sport most appreciated by the educated elites.
One advantage the NBA has by starting basically from scratch in Africa is that it can fully control the way the sport is structured and run. This is not the case for local football which is, let’s be honest, a hot mess. Last week, Confederation of African Football president Ahmad Ahmad was found to have breached various codes of ethics, which may destroy his chances for re-election come next March. And in Kenya, StarTimes’ recently signed 7-year deal to broadcast the national football league games may be compromised by bitter infighting between the defunct Kenya Premier League (KPL) and the Football Kenya Federation (FKF) over who, exactly, owns what rights. A rookie mistake on the part of StarTimes.
BROADCAST
Canal+ slow-but-steady takeover of MultiChoice continues, with the French group now owning 12% of its South African partner-rival. We’ll keep an eye on that. Meanwhile, Canal+ continues to experiment with new types of content, and is releasing tonight its first paranormal African series, Hantés (Haunted), written and directed by South African Gareth Crocker (Shadow).
Staying on the topic of TV series, Le Monde has a good article this week on the new wave of “made in Senegal” soap operas sweeping the country.The trend started with the broadcast of Maitresse d’un Homme Marié (Mistress of a Married Man), which broke all records on TV and on YouTube in January 2019 with its taboo-breaking themes of domestic violence, polygamy and depression. Another hit is Infideles, which talks about infidelity in relationships, in the family or towards religion, and competes in prime time against Maitresse. Despite the shows’ massive success, the economics of the local fiction market are still tight. According to the series producers, 2 seasons of 52 episodes cost between $133,000 and $177,000 to make, or approximately between $1,280 and $1,700 per episode. The revenue model involves first a TV broadcast where producers keep 60-70% of the advertising revenue with the rest going to the channel, then an exclusive VOD window (on Sonatel’s platform WIDO for example), and finally a free release on YouTube, where millions of viewers can bring some $27,000 over 6 months. But of course, this is only the beginning, and producers are already starting to dub their productions in French and English in order to target multiple channels across the region.
In Nigeria, the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, which hasn’t been making friends in the industry lately, has fined Channels, AIT and Arise TV $9,000 each for "unprofessional conduct" and "using unverifiable footage" in their coverage of the #EndSARS Protests. The move promptly triggered outrage from the country's civil rights organizations who described it as a “blatant curb on freedom of expression and media independence”. A few days later, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, and 261 concerned Nigerians, civil society and media groups filed a lawsuit against the NBC and the Minister of Information and Culture, asking the court to “declare arbitrary, illegal, and unconstitutional, the fines imposed on the aforementioned media houses".
VOD
So what has Netflix been up to in the past couple of weeks? Making deals with telcos to make it easier for African consumers to pay by adding their subscriptions to their phone bills. So far Netflix has inked such partnerships with Vodacom and Telkom in South Africa, where a substantial number of users have post-paid accounts, while the streamer is no doubt looking at other types of mechanisms in Nigeria and beyond, where most mobile users are on a pre-paid model instead.
In South Africa, the SABC continues to fight for its survival, proposing a new regulation that would expand the definition of a TV licence to include streaming services such as Netflix, and hence bring the public broadcaster more revenue, while also finalizing plans to launch its own VOD platform in early 2021.
FILM
The Guardian sheds some light today on the emergence of a new kind of Nigerian cinema - the type that is finally finding its place in top film festivals around the world (although not necessarily at the top of the local box office). Films like The Ghost and the House of Truth, Eyimofe and For Maria, tackle serious topics such as gender equality, postnatal depression and transatlantic migration, and are currently available on the BFI Player as part of the Beyond Nollywood strand at Film Africa, which is running virtually until November 8.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Yo soy Betty, la fea, the hit Colombian telenovela which inspired the American Ugly Betty, is now getting a South African remake featuring the show’s first Black lead. UBettina Wethu is set to be released in April 2021 on SABC. African remakes of international fiction formats are still exceedingly rare (the only other one I have in mind is EbonyLife’s Desperate Housewives Nigeria), for two reasons: first, the format rights are prohibitive for the local markets and second, African viewers are not exactly waiting for this type of shows, as they’re quite happy with original creations that are more directly relevant to their own experiences. It will however be interesting to see the response to uBettina Wethu, as tastes constantly change and evolve.
If the busiest producer in Africa is Mo Abudu, the busiest African director award goes to Wanuri Kahiu, who has just boarded ANOTHER Hollywood project. The Kenyan filmmaker is now set to direct Paramount Player’s feature adaptation of bestselling author Angie Thomas’ second novel On The Come Up.
Another African director is making strides this week in Hollywood as South Africa-based Nigerian director Akin Omotoso has been tapped to direct Greek Freak, a Disney+ feature about NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was born in Greece to Nigerian parents and currently plays for the Milwaukee Bucks.
ANIMATION
Two more African-flavored Hollywood announcements this week, this time in Animation, with Matthew A. Cherry (Hair Love) set to direct Tut, an animated “afro-futuristic, coming-of-age story of the boy king Tutankhamun” for Sony Pictures Animation, while Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out) will lead the voice cast of Netflix’s Yasuke, a new anime in which Stanfield portrays the first African samurai of the same name.
GAMING
Finally, NETINFO, AfricanGameDev and Epic Games MegaGrants are launching Let's Build the African GameDev Community, a free 5-month support program for budding African game developers aged 18 to 30 to learn how to use Unreal Engine. Inscriptions take place here.
HUSTLE & FLOW #27: #EndSARS, Sports is Africa’s new oil, Canal+ buys into Multichoice, opportunities for African film and animation, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
I love a good revolution (as most French people do), and for the past 10 days the youths of Nigeria have served us with a particularly beautiful and inspiring one.
What started as spontaneous protests against the brutality of a particular section of the Nigerian police force called SARS, whose rogue officers have been guilty for many years of harassing, racketeering, raping and killing young people across the country, has turned into an unprecedented peaceful movement for reform which is likely to have long-lasting repercussions.
Across the country, young professionals who would normally have been too busy hustling to get involved with any kind of political wahala have had a lot of time to reflect in the past few months, courtesy of a particularly long lockdown. It seems that in the process they realized that they just had enough.
When foreigners say that Nigeria is disorganized, I tell them that they must be talking about the government, because Nigerians in the private sector and civil society are, in fact, extremely organized. What better illustration than these past few days, during which strangers and groups like the Feminist coalition have come together to raise funds for victims of police violence, deliver food and water to protesters, set up power outlets so that witnesses could continue to counter attempts at misinformation and manipulation, build crowdsourced tech platforms, all the while maintaining the pressure on Twitter where they got their very own dedicated emoji. Even celebrities are out there on the ground, Burna Boy mounting #ENDSARSNOW billboards all over Nigeria, Davido protesting in Abuja and Wizkid in London, Banky W leading street clean ups in Lekki, and countless Nollywood stars joining in as regular, masked citizens.
And in a shocking plot twist, 5-year-old Nigerian digital payment startup Paystack, founded by exactly the kind of young people that are the primary targets of SARS, was acquired by Stripe for a whopping $200 million. All in one week’s work.
It’s always pointless to attempt to compete against Nigeria’s flamboyance. But I will nevertheless still try to keep you interested. In this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about why Sports is Africa’s new oil; Canal+’s possible long-term plot to take over Multichoice; and why education companies should invest in Africa’s animation sector. But you’ll also read about Africanfuturism (and not Afrofuturism), West African portraiture, an Ethiopian gold crown, a fashion collection inspired by real female spies, Ivorian sports agoras, Kenyan content on Netflix, major new funding opportunities for film, and more.
If you haven’t subscribed yet, please make sure to do so at www.restless.global/hustleflow, where you’ll also find all previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW. And please continue to engage by email or on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter @marieloramungai.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
LITERATURE
This week we’ll start with literature for a change. Seven years after Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is finally releasing a new piece of fiction entitled Zikora, a short story about a Nigerian lawyer living in Washington, D.C. who has been abandoned by her successful partner after he learned that she was pregnant. Zikora will be available on October 27 as part of an Amazon Original series.
Talking about Americanah, it looks like the book’s long-awaited TV adaptation is no longer happening at HBO Max after a scheduling conflict led star Lupita Nyong’o to drop out of the project. It was a long-time passion project for Nyong'o, who optioned it years ago and tapped Danai Gurira to write, with Brad Pitt's Plan B co-producing and Chinonye Chukwu directing. It would seem surprising for such a star-studded, topical project to die such as prosaic death, so let’s hope it gets resurrected somewhere else.
Another exciting release this month is Brittle Paper’s 10-year anniversary free Africanfuturism anthology edited by Wole Talabi. Talabi is an author, a member of the African Speculative Fiction Society and the curator of a database of over 600 works of African speculative fiction. The word Africanfuturism was coined by Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, who rejects the most well-known term of Afrofuturism, to refer to science fiction rooted in the African world. Okorafor’s writing is featured in the anthology alongside works by TL Dilman Dila, Rafeeat Aliyu, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Mame Bougouma Diene, Mazi Nwonwu, and Derek Lubangakene.
VISUAL ARTS
Sotheby's 2020 online auction of African modern and contemporary art closed on October 9, with a piece by El Anatsui notably reaching $1.35 million. The sale also listed several paintings and sculptures by Nigeria’s Ben Enwonwu, including a previously unknown work entitled The Court of the Oba of Benin. Although that particular piece didn’t end up selling, many others did. Interest in Enwonwu's work has increased dramatically in the last two years after two of his portraits, Tutu and Christine, sold for more than $1 million each.
West African portraiture is emerging as a popular sub-genre of African contemporary art, and I must admit that I would love to have some of those on my walls. ARTSY has a lovely story about the ascent of young Ghanaian artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, whose striking paintings feature large-scale portraits of stylist Black figures. Quaicoe’s story involves an early childhood fascination for Ghana’s hand-painted movie posters, studies at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design, an online romance and subsequent marriage with an American lawyer, and a move to Portland. There, Quaicoe struggled for a while before his friend and fellow artist Amoako Boafo (if you follow HUSTLE & FLOW, you might recognize Boafo as the artist Dior Men collaborated with on the brand’s new collection) introduced him to Los Angeles gallery owner Bennett Roberts, and the rest is history.
HERITAGE
In the latest episode of the Looted African Artworks Saga, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has started talks with the Ethiopian embassy over returning looted treasures in its collections, including a gold crown and royal wedding dress, taken from the country more than 150 years ago. Ethiopians have campaigned for the return of the items since they were plundered after the 1868 capture of Maqdala in what was then Abyssinia.
And in France, the National Assembly voted to pass a bill returning 27 colonial-era artifacts from French museums to Benin and Senegal. The bill now needs to be confirmed in the Senate. If enacted, it would compel France to return 26 works looted from Benin’s royal palace of Abomey that are in the collection of the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, and a sword that belonged to the west African military leader Omar Saidou Tall would return permanently to Senegal from France’s Musée de l’Armée. The sword is currently on loan to the Musée des Civilisations Noires in Dakar.
PERFORMING ARTS
The performing arts have been one of the sectors hardest hit by the lockdown worldwide, and Africa was no exception. But confinement or not, dancers gotta dance, and two initiatives offer a window into what the experience has been like for them: Arts Fundi showcases two short films made in collaboration with the Cape Town City Ballet, while the Institut Francais is presenting Lettres du Continent, a long video performance led by choreographer Faustin Linyekula and producer Virginie Dupray which stitches together contributions from 21 dancers and collectives from all over Africa.
FASHION
Paris Fashion Week has officially drawn to a close and South Africa’s Thebe Magugu and Nigeria’s Kenneth Ize, the only two African designers on the schedule, did not disappoint. Kenneth Ize invited artist Maty Biayenda to live paint a mural as models milled around in his unisex clothes, while Magugu, the first African to win the prestigious LVMH prize in 2019, illustrated his intelligence agent-inspired collection with a 7-minute film inspired by a series of interviews he conducted with female ex-spies who worked for and against South Africa's Old Regime.
It’s not everyday that we have news from eSwatini (the country formerly known as Swaziland) in HUSTLE & FLOW, so it is worth mentioning Khokho Collection, an accessories line putting a luxe spin on the classic woven basket bag. The brand is a collaboration between New York-based designer Sapna Shah, Central Saint Martins alumna Philippa Thorne, and master weaver Zinhle Vilakati. The bags are fully produced in eSwatini using traditional swazi weaving techniques.
MUSIC
MTV has announced its Europe Music Awards nominees for Best African Act, and South African artists are dominating the list including, of course, Jerusalema hit maker, Master KG. However the category has been won by Nigerian artists 4 years in a row, and 2019 winner Burna Boy is nominated again this year, so the competition will be tough. The competition will be broadcast live on November 8 on MTV and MTV Base.
SPORTS BUSINESS
The sports industry is, without a doubt, one of Africa’s most exciting untapped business opportunities. Aubrey Hruby and Jake Bright explain why in The Africa Report. As more and more international leagues and clubs, such as the NBA, Arsenal or Paris Saint-Germain (both of whom have a deal with Rwanda), as well as global companies like Nike, Redbull or StarTimes, start getting the drift, is it likely that we will see an explosion of Africa’s markets for both competitive sports (with talent scouting and development playing a big part) and sports-related health and leisure activities. Already, strong communities exist across the continent that are passionate about cycling, biking, running and even crossfit or petanque. As just one example, the number of registered participants to the Lagos City Marathon grew from 50,000 in 2016 to 150,000 this year.
Sports news and streaming company Sports Network Africa is hoping to tap into sports fans’ hunger for anything related to their passion by bringing them content that is currently not broadly accessible. On its first weekend of operations, the site streamed the Sanlam Cape Town Marathon, the South African StrongMan contest, and the South African Squash Nationals.
Opportunities are also plentiful in infrastructure. Just a few days ago, the French Treasury granted a loan to the Ivorian government to finance the construction by WinWin Afrique and ALAMO of 10 new social and sports facilities in Cote d’Ivoire, after the successful inauguration in December 2019 of a first AGORA center in Abidjan.
And of course the scramble over football rights continues, with the new frontiers being the free-to-air broadcast of international premier properties, and the development of new audiences for and through the broadcast of African leagues games. Multichoice’s Supersport has acquired the rights to the Ethiopian Premier League, just as in South Africa the regulator is reviewing the definition of ‘public interest’ to force the Pay TV operator to make more free-to-air sports available via its satellite platform. Meanwhile the German Bundesliga has announced that it would be distributing selected free-to-air TV rights in Africa for the next three seasons. Yes, it’s a challenge to keep up.
BROADCAST
The big news in Broadcast this past week has been the revelation that Canal+ Group had bought its way to a 6.5% ownership stake in Multichoice for $165 million. Canal+ had been quietly buying shares in the publicly-traded Pay TV operator since April, but when Canal+’s stake got above 5%, Multichoice became required by law to inform their shareholders as well as the Takeover Regulation Panel. The French company is now the fourth-largest shareholder at Multichoice. Currently, Canal+ has 4.3 million African subscribers across 25 countries, compared to Multichoice’s 19 million. Over the last decade, Canal+’s parent company Vivendi has built a reputation for engaging in hostile takeovers. Under South African law, no foreign entity can own more than 20% of voting rights at a broadcasting company... But for how long? In what seems like more than a simple coincidence, the South African government is now reportedly considering allowing foreign ownership to 49% or even 100% if the investors are from other African countries. Vivendi/Canal+ buying Multichoice would make sense strategically, even if it would come with substantial challenges.
One of these challenges is the current attempts by South African and Nigerian legislators to dismantle Multichoice’s over-dominant position in both markets. One issue I’ve talked about at length is the one of sports rights exclusivity. But now a new proposal put forward by the South African government also wants to force Multichoice to pay retransmission fees for "must-carry" content and channels from public broadcaster SABC. Indeed, the financially bankrupt SABC has been complaining that Pay TV broadcasters benefit from its content for free due to the must-carry rules that were designed to fulfil the universal access regulations. This type of carriage fee is the norm in the US market and could be a lifesaver for the SABC.
VOD
The VOD sector is not being spared by the intense industry regulations overhaul ongoing in the South African broadcast industry. The government is proposing a new regulatory framework that would establish two types of licenses - Individual and Class - depending on each online video operator’s annual turnover. According to the government’s white paper, content streamers such as Netflix would require a license, while video sharing platforms like YouTube might not, although they would still face stringent regulations. Besides Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple+ and co, the new rules are also expected to apply to upcoming local services such as e.tv’s Openview Plus launching this month, and TelkomONE, set to debut on November 30. No word so far on potential local content quotas for streamers. The issue is currently a hot topic in other markets such as France, for example, where SVOD platforms will soon be required to spend 25% of their in-country turnover on European productions, with a large (and as yet undetermined) proportion of that going toward French productions in particular.
In any case, these new regulations, if they are confirmed, will not slow Netflix’s progress on the continent (or elsewhere). The latest African production to get everyone talking is Òlòturé, a hard-hitting film on human trafficking in Nigeria directed by Kenneth Gyang and executive produced by the ubiquitous Mo Abudu. Soon after its release earlier this month, the film became the 8th most watched movie on Netflix in the world, reaching the top 10 in many countries such as Switzerland, Brazil, Morocco, Ukraine, Qatar, South Africa and of course Nigeria.
But it cannot always only be about Nigeria, and other countries, such as Kenya, are also yearning for this kind of exposure and recognition. Writing in The Guardian, Nairobi-based filmmaker Fred Onyango calles Netflix “a lifeline for African filmmakers”, just as three Kenyan films - Sincerely Daisy, Disconnect, and Poacher - make their debut on the platform.
FILM
Staying in Kenya: as I have mentioned in previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW, 2020 has been a good year (I admit I didn’t think I would have the opportunity to string these words together) for Kenyan documentaries. Multiple award-winning Softie, about activist and photojournalist Boniface Mwangi, has now been qualified for consideration for the Oscars shortlist in 2021. The film premiered in Kenyan theaters last week. Meanwhile, Le Monde has a profile of Peter Murimi, the director of I am Samuel, the other big Kenyan documentary of the year which tells the story of a gay couple struggling to gain acceptance. I am Samuel screened at the recently concluded London Film Festival. I would be remiss not to mention that the two films were both produced by Toni Kamau, who is probably the hottest African documentary producer right now and is the youngest female African documentary producer member of the Academy for Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
Across the border, UNESCO and the European Union have partnered with the Government of Uganda to launch a joint year-long project to support the development of the film sector in the country. The initiative aims to boost local content development and professionalization by creating tax incentive measures and strengthening the capacity of professional film associations.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Two new funding opportunities are now available to African content creators. YouTube has reached out to content creators and artists in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa to ask them to tap into the available grants from its $100 million dollars Black Voices Fund before applications close this Wednesday. The company is reportedly looking at expanding the list of applicable countries further in the future. The fund, which was launched last June to support Black creators and help them promote their work on the YouTube platform, has also just unveiled its first slate of shows from the US.
Meanwhile, applications are also open for The Write Project Film Fund, a new initiative by PSP Media Capital and its Managing Director Brian Wu. Wu, who has reportedly been successful with a similar model in China, has tapped angel investors from California, Asia, and South Africa to raise the fund. The Write Project aims to crowd source story ideas, scripts, or fully packaged projects from across the continent, eventually financing and producing up to 6 features, 4 TV series pilots, and 15 short films in 2021 (there is no current target on the number of documentaries). The Write Project is targeting an international sales business model to platforms such as Netflix and Amazon, and plans to invest between $2.5 and $6 million per feature film, an amount multiple times larger than typical film production budgets on the continent. The initiative is interesting in that it goes against conventional thinking about film development and production, such as the necessity to have a correlation between film budgets and local revenue potential, or for filmmakers to painstakingly build credibility and trust over many years before being considered for any kind of private investment. It will certainly be fascinating to see the results of this experiment. Applications are currently open and close on October 31 for South Africa and December 15 for the rest of Africa. Keep in mind that the platform charges application fees (which in my view they should get rid of asap).
CONTENT DISTRIBUTION
French film production and distribution company Pathé has announced the launch of Pathé BC Afrique, a new subsidiary in charge of distributing French and American films in 17 countries in North and French-speaking Africa, starting with Tunisia and Morocco. In 2016, Pathé and its exhibition partner Gaumont had announced their plans to open a joint network of 47 cinema screens across Africa, and they soon after inaugurated a multiplex in Tunis. However in 2018, Pathé acquired Gaumont’s existing Africa cinema network and it seems that it is now going to continue on this journey alone. With no mention of any plans to invest in local content, Pathé’s approach (or at least its communication) appears anachronistic at a time where other players such as Vivendi/CanalOlympia or Netflix have fully realized that localized content strategies were a must-have and not a nice-to-have.
ANIMATION
After Forbes declared in June that Africa is “animation’s next global hotspot”, it’s BBC’s turn to affirm that “Africa’s animation scene is booming”. Besides the usual mentions of bright star Ridwan Moshood of Garbage Boy and Trash Can fame, the good work of Nick Wilson and the African Animation Network, and Ng’endo Mukii’s iconic Yellow Fever, the article does a good job at laying down the challenge of growing new talents in an environment with a dearth of formal training institutions. Currently, most African animators are self-taught. However, for Africa’s budding animation sector to turn into a real industry capable of generating revenue by servicing global studios (as per the India model) or through original content creation at a large scale, proper training infrastructure needs to be developed -- a major opportunity for private operators in the education field. International animation studios Toonz Media Group and Baboon Animation have announced plans to establish animation academies in Africa, while the African Animation Network hopes to inspire broadcasters to invest by launching its own TV network. In Tunisia, digital arts school Net-Info has trained 12,000 young people from North and Francophone Africa in the fields of animation, 3D imaging and gaming since its inception in 1999. Last week it announced it has become Epic Games’ new and only academic partner in Africa.
HUSTLE & FLOW #26: African creators win bigly, Orange launches $30 smartphone, Netflix and Canal+ experiment with mobile-only VOD, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
Good news is hard to come by these days so this one should be celebrated.
No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump’s COVID diagnosis (sorry, not sorry). Sudanese filmmaker hajooj kuka was released from jail, alongside the other 4 artists who were arrested with him. Another group of artists who were arrested later on are still being held however, so the African filmmaking community remains engaged.
On October 1st, we also celebrated Nigeria’s 60th birthday, with some of the world’s biggest brands joining in for the party: Nike gifted its 2020 Super Eagles Football kit to several diaspora influencers like the writer Luvvie or the musician Jidenna (the simple fact that a company like Nike has a Naija collection should leave no doubt on the importance of the Nigerian market); Apple Music launched its month-long Oshe Naija ("Thanks Nigeria" in Yoruba) campaign; and Netflix came through with the surprise release of the documentary Journey of an African Colony, The Making of Nigeria.
For a more poetic, less commercial take, British-Nigerian visual artist Asiko wowed the interwebs with his Nigerian Renaissance photographic project inspired By Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People. The conceptual series brings forth a vision of Nigeria stepping out of the shadows of the past into a new dawn. Cheers to that.
This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, we’ll also celebrate African creators doing so much #winning in Fashion, Architecture, Visual Arts and Literature; Orange releasing a $30 smartphone; Nigerian cinemas’ reopening strong, and Netflix and Canal+iRoko experimenting with mobile-only sVOD, among other tidbits like a 5G revolution in slow-motion, Ethiopian mobile money, local football’s new sexiness, a Christmas music channel and South Africa’s first female-led animation studio.
If you missed a previous edition or haven’t subscribed yet, head over to www.restless.global/hustleflow. To get in touch and share your comments, questions, or corrections, email me at marie@restless.global, or connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter @marieloramungai.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
To the delight of South African telecoms operators, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) has agreed that they could keep using the temporary 4G and 5G emergency spectrum allocated to them during the lockdown until March of 2021. The South African regulator has also started receiving applications for licenses for its high-demand 3G/4G spectrum.
Thanks to the temporary spectrum, MTN and Vodacom were able to launch their 5G networks in South Africa ahead of schedule. However, the 5G revolution is still a long way off across the continent, where 5G connections will account for only 3% of the total mobile connections by 2025. When the technology does become mainstream, it will take 32 seconds to download a high-definition movie, as opposed to 22 minutes on a 4G network.
MOBILE
Orange has released the Sanzo touch, a $30 4G Android Go smartphone supported by Google, which the operator describes as “the most affordable device globally”. Orange will start commercializing the device this month with a bundled mobile data plan in Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast and Madagascar, before rolling it out to its other markets in the Middle East and Africa region. Orange hopes that this price point will be a game changer that will accelerate the pace of digital adoption in the region - which it might very well be. However, and in case you were wondering, the Sanzo is far from being the cheapest smartphone in the world. In 2016, the Freedom 251 was released in India by a company called Ringing Bells for the shockingly low price of… $3.70. Although many customers received their phones, which seemed legit, Ringing Bells ran into trouble when some of its distributors accused it of not fulfilling all its orders and the company’s CEO ended up behind bars for fraud. Although it does seem doubtful that such a low price could be achieved without some sort of forced labor involved, it does make us wonder about how cheap technology will become during our lifetimes and what this will mean for a continent like Africa.
The National Bank of Ethiopia has finally given the greenlight to the national telecom company, Ethio telecom, to start mobile money services. Foreign firms will initially not be allowed to engage in mobile money service in Ethiopia, except for the one that will eventually acquire the 40% stake in Ethio telecom made available through the company’s on-going partial privatization process. Ethiopia is expected to generate $13 billion in mobile money revenue by 2025.
E-COMMERCE
Embattled e-commerce leader Jumia continues its strategic overhaul with a new partnership with Airtel Kenya that will allow consumers to make prepayments using Airtel Money. The prepayment option, which is already operational in Ghana and Uganda, is aimed both at enhancing contactless safety measures and at limiting the damage to Jumia caused by “last mile” issues such as delivery personnel being unable to find the address, or the customer changing their mind when they see the goods. However, customers will still be allowed to pay on the spot if they choose to, leaving that last issue unresolved. Jumia is also considering opening its logistics operations to third parties in a bid to increase revenue and is looking at expanding into rural areas to reduce reliance on customers in capital cities.
FASHION
September and October mean Fashion Week in the world’s fashion capitals of New York, London, Milan and Paris, and despite the move to digital this year, African talents are out there making their mark. South African knitwear line MaXhosa by designer Laduma Ngxokolo made its second appearance on the official calendar at New York Fashion Week with a vibrant and well-reviewed virtual runway show on Youtube, while LVMH Prize finalist Sindiso Khumalo, who focuses each of her collections on the life of a historical Black woman, debuted her Harriet Tubman-inspired collection with a fashion film presented at Milan Fashion Week. Khumalo’s previous collection was an homage to the Egbado princess Sarah Forbes Bonetta, who was taken as a prisoner of war as a child and spent many years in the British Royal household under Queen Victoria, and the next one will be inspired by South African activist Charlotte Maxeke.
Also showing at Milan Fashion Week were Vogue Italia’s Scouting for Africa Initiative 2020 winners Emmy Kasbit and Rich Mnisi, who are featured in the September issue of Vogue Talents, an initiative supported by the African Fashion Foundation and the Impact Fund for African creatives to recognize emerging African creative talents. Vogue has been a key supporter of African designers globally, and the company’s efforts might even intensify now that Nigerian-Swiss Chioma Nnadi has been named the new editor of Vogue.com. With this promotion, Nnadi joins British Vogue’s Edward Enninful and Teen Vogue’s Lindsay Peoples Wagner among the Black editors-in-chief within the Vogue global franchise.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Fashion Week, which will be taking place later this month, has been rebranded as the “business of ethical fashion” to echo African fashion business’ on-going transformation into a leader in sustainability. According to CEO Lucilla Booyzen, SAFW has been reimagined as an environmentally-friendly digital experience staged at the Mall of Africa in Johannesburg, which will use a fraction of the lighting typically used, smaller sound systems, smaller teams, and a minimum number of models to reduce the event’s carbon footprint.
Another approach to sustainability is the one of Egyptian online fashion rental service La Reina, which has raised an undisclosed six-figure funding round to expand its team and launch a new fashion subscription service called The Box. La Reina, which has over 100,000 users, allows women to rent their evening and bridal gowns to each other. In 2018, the startup had already secured a $1 million Series A round from Algebra Ventures and 500 Startups. New service The Box will partner with global fashion brands such as Zara, Massimo Dutti, or Mango to provide the members with the newest collection to be used and returned within a week.
And finally a correction: in the last edition of HUSTLE & FLOW I incorrectly linked to a CNN profile of IAMISIGO’s designer Bubu Ogisi while talking about celebrated stylist Daniel Obasi. Both are extremely talented Nigerian creatives with very distinctive styles, so if you didn’t click on the link last time you now have a second chance to discover them both.
VISUAL ARTS
The Ivorian art world is definitely buzzing these days. In the last edition of HUSTLE & FLOW I talked about Abidjan’s dynamic contemporary art gallery scene. This week, OkayAfrica profiles four young and exciting Ivorian female photographers - Akobs, Aicha Fall, Noella Elloh and Saphir Niakadie - whose work is worth checking out.
In more West African art news, Ghana-born Nigerian sculptor and art world rockstar El Anatsui has been awarded the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture’s 2020 Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. El Anatsui is well-known for his large scale tapestry-like sculptures composed of thousands of folded pieces of metal sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire.
ARCHITECTURE
On a similar topic, Africa’s most famous architect, the Tanzanian-born British architect of Ghanaian descent Sir David Adjaye, has been announced as recipient of the 2021 Royal Institute of British Architects’ royal gold medal, one of the world’s highest accolades for architecture. Adjaye is the first black architect to receive the prestigious distinction in its 173-year history. The very busy Adjaye, who is behind the striking National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC and the Alara concept store in Lagos, is currently building a high-rise tower in Manhattan, the new National Cathedral for Ghana in Accra, a library in Florida, a financial center in Dakar, and the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library in Johannesburg.
LITERATURE
And we finish this week’s round up of African creatives just #winning with Zambian author’s Namwali Serpell receiving the UK’s top prize for science fiction, the Arthur C Clarke award, for her first novel The Old Drift. The book, a mix of historical fiction, magical realism and sci-fi, tells the stories of three families over three generations, moving from a colonial settlement by Victoria Falls at the turn of the 20th century, to the 1960s as Zambia attempts to send a woman to the moon, and into the near future. It was described as “the great African novel of the 21st century” by last year’s winner of the prize, Tade Thompson.
MUSIC
In a testament to the global label’s commitment to the growing African market, Zimbabwean Taponeswa Mavunga has been appointed Director of Africa at Sony Music UK. In this newly created position, Mavunga will be responsible for amplifying UK signed artists across Africa, as well as supporting artists within Africa to develop relationships, identify opportunities and increase visibility within the UK. Mavunga is a veteran of the African music scene, having distinguished herself through previous stints as Head of Talent and Music for Viacom Africa, working on MTV Base, BET Africa and Nickelodeon channels, and Head of Publicity for Sony Music’s Columbia UK label.
SPORTS BUSINESS
The scramble for European premier league rights that we have witnessed over the past few weeks doesn’t seem to have satisfied the appetites of broadcasters, who are now busy looking for more, with their attention shifting to local leagues. Multichoice has announced a 5-year title sponsorship by DStv of the South African Premier Soccer League (PSL), while StarTimes has signed a $1.1 million, 7-year contract with the Football Kenya Federation (FKF) for the live broadcast of the local premier league matches, both men and women national teams matches, plus some thirty other matches from the lower-tier of the Kenyan league.
Meanwhile, French club Paris Saint-Germain is launching a football academy in Rwanda, after months of delays caused by the pandemic. The academy is part of a 3-year sponsorship deal that was signed last December between Rwanda and the French football giant which will also see PSG promote Rwanda as a tourism destination. In an opposite move, Dutch club Ajax is exiting its South African franchise Ajax Cape Town after its second successive failure to win promotion back to the Premiership. The 21-year association was meant to produce a steady flow of talented young players for the European market while at the same time sustaining a top club in South Africa's PSL. But the results have proved disappointing, and Ajax management bluntly declared that “the South African football market has not produced enough talent at the level that Ajax strives for” and that “Ajax does not see sufficient potential for the future.” Ouch. Efforts by European clubs to invest in talent sourcing and training in Africa have so far been haphazard. My feeling is that they have suffered from the common symptoms plaguing many Western approaches to Africa: under-investment and lack of adaptation of Western practices to the local environment.
Hopefully this will not be the case of the projects supported by the Agence Francaise de Development’s new African sports initiative, the online platform Sport En Commun. Based in Dakar, the pan-African platform aims to promote the financing and support of projects combining sport and development in Africa by referencing various funding opportunities and connecting interested parties.
BROADCAST
Music TV group Trace has announced that it would institute a permanent 50/50 video airplay for women artists and other women-produced content on its channels, after testing out the concept during Women’s Month in August. It is unclear if this measure will apply to Trace’s channels globally or in South Africa only, but in any case such a self-imposed constraint is a bold move. In fact, Trace seems to be full of good marketing ideas recently as it also just released Trace Xmas, a brand new pop up music channel dedicated entirely to Christmas hits on Sky Channel 364 in the UK, in a bid to “lift the country's spirits”. The hilarious concept will be coming soon to Francophone Africa, the Caribbean and the Reunion. Full disclosure, in 2016 Trace Group acquired my company Buni.tv, which was then merged with their own VOD service Trace Play.
CINEMA EXHIBITION
As major global cinema chains, such as Cineworld Group, announce new shutdowns in the US and UK in the face of a second wave of the pandemic and the repeatedly postponed release of tentpoles like the new James Bond film No Time To Die, the Nigerian cinema exhibition sector is hoping for a strong rebirth carried by local blockbusters. The industry breathed a collective sigh of relief when the comedy Fate of Alakada, the first local release since the reopening of theaters, made over 10 million nairas ($25,800) on its Independence Day opening despite seating restrictions, placing it among the top 5 highest grossing opening days for Nollywood since 2018, according to distributor FilmOne Entertainment.
Vivendi’s CanalOlympia will also count on local releases to drive audiences to its first Nigerian location opening in Abuja later this month after a 6-months delay in the company’s roll out plan.
VOD
However, with the past few months’ persistent incertitude over the state of the local cinema business, it is no surprise that the producers of some of Nigeria’s most highly anticipated films - such as Oloture, Citation, or King of Boys II - made the decision to skip cinemas for the first time and release their movies directly on Netflix. The unprecedented move privately shocked many theater owners, who were counting on the high-profile films to restart their business. Threatening the delicate economic balance of Nigeria’s film sector, whose business model is highly dependent on box office revenue to survive, is a risky move for Netflix.
But after all, the global giant might not be interested in playing nice as it is looking for ways to speed up its growth 5 years after it arrived in Africa. Digital TV Research estimates that Netflix currently has 1.4 million subscribers on the continent, still a far cry from Multichoice’s 20 million. Last week, the platform announced it was now experimenting in Nigeria with much cheaper, mobile-only subscriptions priced at $2.95 a month, after trialing similar offers in South Africa and Egypt. Such a strategy has been highly successful in India, and we can expect that it will be as well in Africa, even in countries, like Nigeria, where the internet infrastructure is still lacking. It is, truly, only a matter of time.
Interestingly, Vivendi-owned Canal+ announced last week that it was also developing its own mobile-first VOD service for Francophone Africa, in partnership with iRoko (Canal+ acquired iRoko’s ROK Studios last year). It is not the first time that Canal+ attempts to jump start the VOD market in French-speaking Africa, and it is also not its first try at creating synergies with iRoko. So far, none of it has worked, but I also believe that the market was not ready. Another challenge, which might seem trivial but is not, is creating successful products wile working across the Franco/Anglo cultural and language divide. Good luck to them - we will be watching.
In any case, if we believe Digital TV Research’s new finger-licking guesstimates on Africa’s sVOD industry, at least some of these initiatives are bound to bear fruit as the market is set to grow almost 5 times to reach 12.96 million subscriptions by 2025. Digital TV Research predicts that Netflix will count 5.7 subscribers and Disney+ 2.71 million, even though it is not expected to enter the African market until 2022. Showmax will be the 3rd-largest platform with 1.65 million subscribers.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Double FESPACO winner (Gold Stallion in 2013 and 2017), French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis will dedicate his next feature film to Thelonious Monk, the famous American jazz pianist and composer behind such jazz standards as Well, You Needn’t, Blue Monk and Round Midnight.
ANIMATION
South Africa’s first female-led animation outfit, Studio Yezi, has announced its first project in SOLA, an action-adventure, fantasy coming-of-age series “about the adventures of a girl named Sola who experiences her magic awakening in a world where magic is dangerous and deadly”. Founder Thandiwe Mlauli will act as producer, director and showrunner. Studio Yezi is currently running a crowdfunding campaign (#MakeSOLAHappen) to finance the project’s development and production.
HUSTLE & FLOW #25: Facebook opens an office in Lagos, FilmOne inks with Disney, Trace buys Okuhle, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
For the past few days, the African film community has been mobilizing to demand the immediate release of Sudanese filmmaker hajooj kuka (he does not capitalize his name) who was arrested in Khartoum last week and sentenced to two months in prison on charges of “public annoyance.”
Kuka and five other artists-activists (Duaa Tarig Mohamed Ahmed, Abdel Rahman Mohamed Hamdan, Ayman Khalaf Allah Mohamed Ahmed, and Ahmed Elsadig Ahmed Hammad) were arrested following an attack by religious militants on the Civic Lab, where they were creating art for community engagement.
Kuka’s films Beats of the Antonov and aKasha have premiered at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, and the filmmaker was admitted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences earlier this year. A couple days ago, kuka was beaten in prison and his dreadlocks were partially shaved. Is this how you know that you are having an impact?
More information, as well as instructions on how to contact Sudanese Embassies to demand the artists’ release, can be found on Twitter at #ReleaseTheArtistsSudan.
This week, The Economist is the latest major global publication to wake up to the fact that “African entertainers are wowing global audiences”. I’ll continue to show you how in this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, as I talk about Facebook opening its second African office in Lagos; leading Nigerian distributor FilmOne inking a deal with Disney; and Trace Group acquiring South African prodco Okuhle Media. But you’ll also read about African fashion influencers, Congolese antics including a museum heist, Patrice Lumumba’s tooth, opposing views of African literature, women kicking ass in sports, and the latest Netflix moves.
If you are new to HUSTLE & FLOW, you can catch up on previous editions and subscribe at www.restless.global/hustleflow. For the loyal readers among you, please continue to send your comments, questions or corrections at marie@restless.global.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
MOBILE
Despite the current global economic slowdown, Africa - and especially Nigeria - continues to see massive growth in mobile services subscriptions, according to the newly released Ericsson Mobility Report. The second quarter of 2020 saw an increase of 12 million new subscribers across the continent, with 6 million coming from Nigeria, bringing the total number of mobile subscribers in the country to 184 million. Meanwhile, subscriber numbers have flattened-out or even dipped in North America, South America and Europe over the same period.
New plot twist in the saga of Ethiopia’s telecommunications sector privatization: the country has now announced that it would only be pursuing a "partial privatization of Ethio Telecom and the allocation of two new telecom licenses", with a completion date now reset to February 2021. The new sharing model for Ethio Telecom would maintain the Ethiopian government as a majority shareholder with a 55% stake, while 5% would be made available to Ethiopian citizens and 40% only to international investors.
DIGITAL MEDIA
Growth markets investor Platform Capital has announced its investment in Nigeria’s digital media group Big Cabal Media (BCM), publisher of tech news website TechCabal and youth-oriented Zikoko, and owner of the Cabal Creative Studio. According to BCM, its content reaches over 3 million people every month. Digital media is a very tough space in Africa as you need large volumes of in-country traffic (not traffic diluted across the continent) to monetize (mainly) through advertising, and are also competing directly with global social media behemoths-turned content publishers such as Facebook, Google/Youtube and others. Due to its size, strong local culture, and digital-savvy audience, Nigeria - where other notable players include Ringier’s Pulse, BellaNaija and Linda Ikeji - may be the only sub-saharan market where that model even makes sense today from an investment perspective.
SOCIAL MEDIA
That certainly is not news to Facebook, which has announced that it would open a full office in Lagos in the second half of 2021 to house teams from sales, policy, communications and engineering. Facebook is thus confirming its commitment to Africa’s largest internet market, after opening a hub space in partnership with Co-Creation Hub in 2018. A “shrewd move”, according to Quartz, as Africa’s population is expected to triple by 2100 and Nigeria is set to become the second most populous country in the world, ahead of China (and after India), which in itself is mind-boggling.
FASHION
One of my favorite destinations for African fashion, Industrie Africa, has an interesting article this week on the challenges that Africa’s influencer industry faces as it navigates its growth. From being underpaid by global brands, the difficulty of promoting local designers focused on couture when customers want affordable ready-to-wear, to the opportunity of becoming the spokespersons for Africa’s sustainable approach to fashion, the influencer model currently being invented by African creatives may end up looking very different from its western counterpart.
Not an influencer per se but definitely influential is creative director and stylist Daniel Obasi, who at only 25-year-old has already shot portraits for the New York Times and Billboard, styled fashion editorials for Vogue Portugal and Dazed, and worked on Beyonce’s Black is King. Obasi, who uses fashion, photography and film, “combines the traditional, the contemporary and the imaginary to create a Nigeria freed from the political and social limitations of reality”. His name is now popping up everywhere, and it is pretty safe to say that he is destined for great things.
DESIGN
This may be the first time that I highlight an African home ware line in HUSTLE & FLOW, but with the strong pandemic-induced trend towards nesting and home improvement, it would make sense for more African designers to explore that space. Siafu Home is an ethical Kenyan-made home ware line that was born out of a collaboration between Kenyan jewelry designer Gladys Macharia and Niccola Milnes, a Canadian who sells the collection from her Vermont home. Working with artisans using local techniques and upcycled materials, Siafu’s ambition is to “break away from the mold of trying to be too ethnic or too European, to create a well-balanced symmetry that is true to traditional forms and borrows inspiration from art and tribes, but the translation and execution is done in a way that allows people from all cultures, all backgrounds to appreciate it.”
VISUAL ARTS
French daily Le Monde continues its active coverage of the (francophone) African creative space with a look at Ivory Coast’s growing contemporary art scene. Although quantitative studies are lacking, professionals report encouraging signs pointing at a developing market, such as the growth of contemporary art venues in Abidjan (there are now around ten), the occasional or permanent return of leading Ivorian artists from the diaspora (such as Ouattara Watts, Jems Robert Koko Bi, or Ernest Dükü), and the widening of the circle of local buyers and collectors to a new generation of 30 and 40-somethings with significant purchasing power.
Le Monde also has a nice portrait of Cheri Samba, the iconic Congolese painter whose work’s humorous and naive style belies a biting social commentary. "Don't admire me just to please me. It can lead to my downfall. Admire me or my work only if I deserve it," says an inscription on the floor of his Kinshasa house. His new painting entitled Merci, merci je suis dans la zone verte (Thank you, thank you, I’m in the green zone), referring to the Paris area post-confinement, is currently on show at the Parisian gallery Magnin-A in the Kings of Kin exhibition. Unfortunately, and ironically, Paris has now been reclassified as a red zone once again.
HERITAGE
In another bout of central African political humor, anti-colonial Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza and other protesters briefly stole an African funeral statue from the Afrika Museum in Nijmegen, Netherlands. They streamed their effort on Facebook, announcing that they were "reclaiming" colonial-era artwork, and were promptly arrested and the statue returned to the museum. This was not the first time that Diyabanza (also known for his vocal opposition to the CFA franc) was making his point. Last June, he and four other militants from the Unity Dignity Courage (UDC) movement were apprehended at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris as they tried to make off with a 19th-century African funeral pole. Later in the same month, Diyabanza was arrested again for a similar offense in Marseilles. I’m always a sucker for a good creative political protest, but Diyabanza’s aggressive techniques may have appeared slightly overkill to the Director of the Africa Museum, who said that the museum indeed owned looted art, and that "we have already said that we are in favor of returning stolen artifacts."
Believe it or not, this is nothing compared to the story of the tooth of Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba, which Belgian prosecutors have just ruled would be handed back to his relatives, after a court dispute that lasted several years. Lumumba became the newly independent Congo's first prime minister in 1960 when he was just 34 years old. But after a military coup and the rise of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Lumumba was arrested, jailed, and assassinated by separatists (with the probable involvement of Belgium and the CIA). Lumumba's body is said to have been dismembered and dissolved with acid, in an apparent attempt to keep any grave from becoming a pilgrimage site. The tooth was allegedly pulled from his corpse during the effort and taken to Belgium by a man whose family then kept it for more than half a century. Yes, this sounds like a movie, and hopefully it will eventually become one, as several Lumumba biopics are currently in the works.
LITERATURE
Twenty-one-years-old Nigerian English Lit student Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé is the literary world new wunderkind after landing a million-dollar book deal in the US for her first novel, high-school thriller Ace of Spades. Already scheduled for publication in 2021 by the UK publishing house Usborne, the book was snapped up this week, along with a second novel, by American imprint Macmillan for the seven-figure sum. Meanwhile, it’s the “rentrée littéraire” in France and Le Monde is highlighting a selection of new books from African authors. No sign of juicy Young Adult fiction here - it’s all about very serious, and quite dry, political statements about colonization, migration, and apartheid. A very clear illustration indeed of two very different markets, visions of Africa, and approaches to literature.
MUSIC
Afrobeats queen Tiwa Savage released her new and fifth album Celia 3 weeks ago to… deafening silence. Sure, there are the collabs with international artists Sam Smith, Davido, Stefflon Don and Naira Marley, the Black is King appearance, the glowing review in OkayAfrica, and even the in-depth New York Times profile. But, there is no buzz, no chatter on social media, where it’s all about Savage’s male colleagues Burna Boy, Davido, or Mr Eazi, and about South Africa’s viral hit Jerusalema which became the most Shazamed song in the world this month. Some industry insiders worry that Savage may have lost her edge since she signed with Universal Music in 2019. But it might also be too soon to tell - the appeal of Celia might reveal itself in a slow burn. Whatever the case, we’re rooting for Tiwa.
SPORTS BUSINESS
Women are making waves in the sports industry this week. Thirty-year-old Tanzanian-Colombian Barbara Gonzalez became the first female CEO of a Tanzanian football club when she was appointed at the head of national champions Simba last week, two years after taking her place on the board. The brilliant, US-educated young woman was poached in 2016 by Tanzanian billionaire Mohamed Dewji, to work as both the head of his foundation and chief of staff. Dewji bought a 49% stake in Simba in 2017. Gonzalez will now be in charge of increasing revenue and building a global brand around the club, which boasts 20 million supporters. One of her first goals will be to develop an academy to foster young local talents.
In Sierra Leone, the government has implemented equal pay for the country’s female footballers, covering appearance fees and winning bonuses. The new measures have even been backdated for the women's team who have been paid $2,000 each for participating in this year's maiden West African Football union (Wafu) Zone A tournament on home soil. The government hopes that the move will serve as an incentive to develop women's football and lead to a growth in the number of players.
Meanwhile, the scramble for football broadcast rights continues across the continent. In Nigeria, Silverbird Television has signed on with Integral, the current free-to-air rights holder for the English Premier League, to broadcast one live match a week over the course of the 2020-2021 season. If similar deals with other FTA broadcasters follow, this could become a tough challenge for Multichoice. Still in Nigeria, TStv, a local direct-to-home Pay-TV company, has announced the acquisition of the rights to broadcast live matches from the English Football League (the league below the Premier League). And in South Africa, while the regulator ICASA is reviewing rules around broadcast exclusivity for “public interest sports” which again, would directly go against Multichoice, the SABC has signed on with the Bundesliga to broadcast one live game per week for the 2020-2022 season.
BROADCAST
The big news in broadcast this week is the acquisition by global music TV group Trace of a majority stake in Okuhle Media, a leading producer of audiovisual content based in Cape Town. Okuhle Media, which was founded in 2003 and employs 78 staff, constitutes a 'high-potential asset' for Trace, which it will use to enhance its in-house production expertise, especially when it comes to building the courses of Trace Academia, an online edutainment platform set to be launched in November. Okuhle Media will also provide content to Trace TV channels and to TracePlay, the streaming platform of Trace Group.
I’ve talked a few times in HUSTLE & FLOW about the enormous success that is Big Brother Naija for its producer and broadcaster Multichoice. Well, that’s how enormous it is: Multichoice executives have now revealed that the production and promotion of Season 5 of the reality show, which is currently breaking all viewership records on the air, on VOD service Showmax and on social media, has cost upwards of $10 million. Which means that, if Multichoice has done its maths right, it is bringing in even more in revenue and/or subscriber acquisition, retention and engagement.
FILM
The Kenya Film Commission (KFC) is kicking off reforms that it says will bring insurance, medical cover, union protection, and funding to filmmakers. It is encouraging Kenyan creatives to officially sign up on the KFC website so they can be recognized and counted, as many of them are not registered with the Kenyan Revenue Authority (for good reason: dodging taxes is a basic condition for survival in the creative space in Kenya and beyond). The KFC also said it would set standard prices for content and prevent buyers from purchasing all exclusive rights to the content (as it is still often the case), leaving room for producers to manage and exploit their content over the long term across several platforms and territories. This won’t please buyers but it may well be a gamec hanger for the Kenyan film industry. Of course, the KFC approach may also backfire if the policy is not thoughtfully designed - see the wahala around Nigeria’s new broadcasting code.
Talking about Nigerian wahala, Producer Pamela Adie and director Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim are risking up to 14 years in prison if they ignore the warnings of the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) and go ahead with the release of their movie Ife ("love" in Yoruba) about a lesbian relationship, which the NFVCB says violates the country’s stuck laws on homosexuality. This is not the first time an LGBTQ-themed movie has fallen foul of regulators on the continent. Stories of Our Lives (2014) and Rafiki (2018) were banned in Kenya, and Inxeba/The Wound (2018) in some theaters in South Africa. Certainly Adie and Ikpe-Etim knew what they were up against. Nevertheless the fearless filmmakers plan to release Ife in Nigeria through private screenings and hold international premieres online.
Meanwhile, if you want to keep abreast of the African talents and projects that are most likely to break out internationally in the next few years, head over to the awards section of the Durban Film Festival and the Durban Film Market, both of which took place recently online and just wrapped.
CINEMA EXHIBITION
Finally some good news for Nigeria’s film industry, which had ground to a complete stop due to the pandemic. Just as cinemas are finally reopening in Nigeria (albeit at just 33% of their capacity), leading production and distribution company FilmOne Entertainment has announced that it had signed with Disney to become the studio’s exclusive distributor in English-speaking West Africa. The agreement, which commenced this month, covers titles from all Disney studio divisions including Pixar, Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Pictures, and Blue Sky pictures. FilmOne Entertainment is a division of FilmHouse Group, which is also the largest cinema exhibitor in Nigeria and West Africa. In 2019, FilmOne Entertainment signed a deal with Chinese media giant Huahua to co-produce the first major China-Nigeria film, and raised Nigeria’s first million-dollar film fund, also from Huahua and South Africa’s Empire Entertainment.
VOD
More Nigerian good news with the announcement today that Netflix is coming on board a new series project in the country. The 6-part untitled young adult drama series is created and produced by Inkblot Productions and will be directed by prominent filmmakers Chinaza Onuzo, Tope Oshin and Niyi Akinmolayan. The streamer will also be releasing 3 new Nigerian films branded as Netflix originals: Kenneth Gyang’s Òlòtūré (produced by Mo Abudu), Kunle Afolayan’s Citation and Kemi Adetiba’s King of Boys II.
At the same time, Netflix has also been testing a $2.50 mobile-only pricing plan in South Africa, which seems priced to undercut Showmax’s mobile-only $3.00 plan. Until the introduction of this new option, Netflix was only accessible in South Africa for a $6.00 monthly subscription fee. Although the mobile-only plan limits the video stream to 480p and one viewing stream on a mobile device or tablet, this type of value proposition is likely to be a big hit across Africa.
And I’ll wrap up this week with the nomination of Nigerian-born exec and former MAC Cosmetics Chief Marketing Officer Ukonwa Ojo at the same position at Amazon’s Prime Video and Amazon Studios. Although she will not be in a position to directly influence content decisions, it’s always good news when a potential ally for African creation reaches the top of the global food chain.
HUSTLE & FLOW #24: Tecno malware steals users airtime, Mdundo goes public in Denmark, IROKO refocuses on international subs, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
On August 28th I woke up, quite uncharacteristically, a little bit before 4 am. I reached out for my phone, which of course you should never do when waking up in the middle of the night. Chadwick Boseman had just died.
The news hit me and millions of people around the world like a sucker punch, not just because a talented artist had passed away shockingly, tragically, and way too young, but also because it is hard not to see the loss of the King of Wakanda, at a time when America is struggling with brutal racial strife, like a pretty bad omen. Who is going to give us hope now that the wise Black Panther is dead?
Well, Disney has reportedly found a solution, and it is Shuri, T’Challa’s little sister, who will assume the mantle going forward.
For those of us writing or producing content in Africa, there was a before and after Black Panther. This film changed the world’s perception about Africa and African creativity more than any politician’s speech, academic paper or news report could ever do. Black Panther may have been a Hollywood movie, but since its release and tremendous success, African creators have been resolutely throwing themselves through this open door.
This week on HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about the revelation that thousands of Tecno phones sold in Africa had been preinstalled with malware eating up users’ airtime without their knowledge (and why I think it won’t threaten Transsion’s leading position on the market); Kenya-based music startup Mdondo going public in Denmark; and IrokoTV refocusing on its international markets after catching some serious headwind in Nigeria. But I’ll also talk about towercos, new education initiatives, children’s literature, Nigerian traditional textiles, and even Kenyan VR.
If you have missed a previous edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, especially over the summer, head to www.restless.global/hustleflow to catch up on the archives (and subscribe!). Please do share your thoughts, comments or even corrections by emailing me at marie@restless.global or reaching out on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
CREATIVE INDUSTRIES FUNDING
Nairobi-based HEVA Fund has launched its new East Africa Creative Business Fund, which will invest between $20,000-50,000 in creative businesses in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Developed in partnership with the European Commission and Agence Française de Développement (AFD), the facility is designed to help businesses restructure interrupted supply chains, increase production capacity, diversify offerings, increase market share increase integration in local and regional value-chains, support the transition to low-touch and digital capabilities, and take advantage of new opportunities.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Leading “towerco” Helios Towers is set to acquire Free Senegal’s passive infrastructure assets for almost $190 million. The deal, which will be subject to regulatory approval by the Senegalese authorities, should come to fruition by the end of the Q1 2021 and is expected to be fully financed by Helios' cash and existing debt facilities. Helios Towers was founded in 2009 with a $350 million backing by private equity firm Helios Investments and high-profile investors such as billionaire George Soros and former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. In October 2019, the company raised an additional $364 million after listing on the London Stock Exchange. When completed, the Senegal transaction will give Helios Towers the status of the largest independent tower provider in the country with more than 1,200 sites, reinforcing the company’s existing network of 7,000 stations operating across the continent in South Africa, DRC, Ghana, Republic of Congo and Tanzania. The telecoms towers industry is set for strong and sustained growth as African mobile operators continue to expand their networks in the years to come.
MOBILE
Staying in Senegal, virtual operator Promobile, whose launch had been blocked for more than a year by its "partner" Free Senegal (see last edition of HUSTLE & FLOW), has finally decided to team up with Free’s competitor Sonatel. Promobile holds one of the three virtual mobile operator licenses (MVNO) in Senegal and was supposed to launch on Free’s network earlier this year. Noting the stalling of negotiations between the two companies, the Senegalese telecoms regulator had imposed a daily fine on Free Senegal’s owner Saga Africa Holding, an entity controlled by Xavier Niel, Yérim Sow and Hassanein Hiridjee. But Promobile founder Mbackiou Faye, who spent about $5.4 million to create the new operator, just got tired of waiting.
Dramatically raising the bar in terms of mobile shenanigans is the revelation last week that tens of thousands of Transsion phones were sold in Africa preinstalled with harmful malware which downloads subscription apps and signs users up for paid services that eat up their airtime without their knowledge. The shocking news came from a report by security service Secure-D, which says it blocked a total of 19.2 million suspicious subscription sign-ups between March 2019 and August 2020, coming from over 200,000 unique Transsion Tecno W2 devices across 19 countries including Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa, Cameroon, and Ghana. China-based Transsion Holdings has put the blame on a “vendor in the supply chain” and said it has released a security patch that users can download to fix the problem. The question is whether the malware controversy will have an impact on future Transsion sales in Africa, where the company currently dominates both the low and middle sectors through several brands including Tecno. My personal view is that people desire cheap smartphones and user-friendly technology so much that they are willing to put up with the occasional security breach and data or even cash theft (just look at all of us using Zoom and TikTok with abandon).
EDUCATION
Several educational initiatives are launching this month across Francophone West Africa. In Togo, Page 49, Yobo Studio and ACTA (Togolese Animation Cinema Association) have teamed up to launch La Maison Junior, a "learning by doing" residency training that will be held in Lomé over a period of 10 months, and will offer 15 participants from different French-speaking African countries the opportunities to acquire skills in the fields of animation, fiction and TV magazine production. The project, which was initiated by Christophe Guignage, creator of the animated Gulli series Junior, des Idees en Or, benefits from the support of the Annecy Animated Film Festival, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the French Institute of Togo. The call for applications opens today September 7.
In Gabon, the new Hema Online Music Academy, the brainchild of MTV Base Africa’s Magali Palmira Wora, will provide professional training in music business and give Gabonese artists the opportunity to interact with other recognized artists and music professionals.
Finally, mobile e-learning startup LAFAAC has partnered with the OIF (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie) to produce a free program of training courses primarily intended for producers from African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. Lasting around 6 hours, the courses will tackle the main principles and tools for setting up a co-production project (film, fiction or TV series, documentary or web series).
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
The dearth of culturally relevant content for African kids is a well-known issue for parents on the continent and in the diaspora. Not a parent himself but inspired by his 6-year-old niece, 23-year-old Dominic Onyekachi has launched Akiddie, a web-based subscription platform providing access to African storybooks for children in different languages. Akiddie currently has 21 books available to readers, including 5 that are accessible for free, and more than 1,200 users including six Lagos schools. Onyekachi, who wrote some of the stories on Akiddie, said a lot of the themes revolve around gender equality, innovation and financial literacy.
FASHION
Vogue Business has a great article this week about how traditional Nigerian hand-woven textiles are being rediscovered by a new generation of designers who appreciate both their complex beauty and their natural, sustainable processes of production that are very much in line with the times. Adire, for example, was (re)introduced on the global fashion stage a few years ago by Amaka Osakwe, designer of high-profile label Maki Oh, worn by Michelle Obama and Lupita Nyong'o. Other textiles include aso oke from the Yoruba, akwete cloth from the Igbo and akwa ocha from the Aniocha people of Delta state. All have featured in the collections of leading Nigerian designers such as Tiffany Amber, Kenneth Ize and Emmy Kasbit. This new focus on traditional textiles is not only a way for designers to promote their cultural heritage, but also offers a path towards sustainably rebuilding the Nigerian textile industry, which was once the largest in Africa. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the country counted more than 180 mills employing 450,000 people, before it joined the WTO and opened its borders to cheap textiles from Asia. Today Nigeria imports $4 billion of ready-made clothing and textiles each year.
This series of shots from photographer Tariq Zaidi’s upcoming first book Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo is a feast for the eyes. Since the 1920s, the Sapeurs have been making sartorial statements on the streets of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, and their flamboyant style is by now pretty well-known around the world. But Zaidi is bringing a fresh take by including rare photos of female and children Sapeurs, which are very much worth a look.
MUSIC
One of this week’s most notable news is the listing on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market in Denmark of Kenya-based music service Mdundo, following an oversubscribed pre-sale period that raised $6.4 million. Launched in 2013 in Nairobi by Danish entrepreneur Martin Nielsen, Mdundo provides access to a large catalog of popular African music to over five million monthly active users in 15 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and reports over 20 million monthly downloads and streams via its website and app. The company plans to use the newly secured funds to continue its expansion across new African markets. Of course, this does nothing to alleviate the controversy over the fact that 70% of startups founders (2018 figure) who have raised $1 million or more in Kenya are white expatriates.
FILM
After his first feature Run premiered in Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2014, Ivorian director Philippe Lacôte continues to impress with his new film Night of the Kings (La Nuit des Rois), which screened at the Venice Film Festival last week.
Meanwhile, the film adaptation of Franco-Rwandan rapper and writer Gaël Faye’s 2016 novel Petit Pays, directed by Eric Barbier, is currently showing in French cinemas. Set in Burundi, the film was shot in neighboring Rwanda, the second international film to be shot in the country since it actively started promoting itself as a regional film hub. Our Lady of the Nile, an adaptation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel directed by Afghan filmmaker Atiq Rahimi, premiered at TIFF in 2019. For good measure, here’s a quick list of established Rwandan film directors who could direct this kind of films: Kivu Ruhorahoza, Joël Karekezi, Eric Kabera, Clémentine Dusabejambo, Thierry Dushimirimana, Kantarama Gahigiri, Jacqueline Kalimunda.
SPORTS BUSINESS
Pan-African company Rainbow Sports talks to New African Magazine about its ambition to build a pipeline of African sports superstars, starting with football, by fundamentally transforming the underlying structure of the African sports ecosystem. The company’s most notorious feat so far is the discovery of 2017 Africa Cup of Nations winner Christian Bassogog, today one of the best-paid players in the Chinese Super League. Rainbow Sports developed the Cameroonian player through domestic soccer, a stint in Denmark, to national representation and being a professional in China, and it now wants to apply the same strategy to cohorts of young players from across the continent. Rainbow aims to control the entire value chain to enable their players to progress to the top seamlessly, all the while also investing in their personal development as only a small fraction is destined to stardom. The group has recently bought a second division club in the Czech Republic, where they can expose their young talents to European football. It is now listing a $26 million (GPB 20 million) bond on Euronext Dublin to buy 4 European clubs and set up a developmental system within 10 African clubs.
Still in football, retired Ivorian star striker Didier Drogba's hopes of becoming the next president of Ivory Coast's football federation (FIF) were controversially dashed by the electoral commission 10 days ago, but could be restored after FIFA stepped in to review the entire process. The Africa Report has a play by play of the entire soap opera.
And finally, Canal+ has acquired the sub-Saharan Africa French-language broadcast rights to Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 matches for three years. The French Pay TV operator also secured a four-season extension with the Spanish LaLiga, which it will share with rival broadcaster Startimes across sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar and Mauritius.
BROADCAST
Talking about Startimes, the Chinese Pay TV company has admitted that it still has to see any profit from its business in Nigeria, ten years after launching on the market. In 2018, the company said it had invested over $220 million in Nigeria since 2010. Startimes is currently the leading Pay TV broadcaster in Nigeria in terms of number of subscribers thanks to its affordable entry-level plans, but Multichoice rakes in more revenue. Will it all be worth it in the end? Possibly. According to PwC, Pay TV revenues in Nigeria crossed $500 million in 2018 and are expected to remain a significant part of all TV and Video earnings in the country, which should surpass $900 million by 2023.
But that is if the already-harsh business environment doesn’t get even worse. After releasing its new broadcasting code that seeks to put an end to content exclusivity (a move that primarily targets Multichoice’s monopoly over sports rights), Nigeria’s National Broadcasting Commission is trying to prevent Multichoice from increasing its subscription prices while also stating that it would not tolerate any move from the company to fire its workers under any circumstance. Seems like the NBC wants to have its cake and eat it too.
With that, it is no surprise if Multichoice is turning to other African markets in search of growth. Following its success with local channels like Mzansi Magic in South Africa, Pearl Magic in Uganda and Zambezi Magic in Zambia, the company is now looking to create similarly localized entertainment channels in Ghana, Ethiopia and Mozambique. This could provide a welcome boost for these countries’ film industries as Multichoice typically doesn’t hesitate to invest in local original content.
VOD
Leading Nigerian VOD platform IrokoTV has announced that it would be forced to cut 150 jobs and refocus on its international subscribers which contribute over 80% of its revenue. CEO Jason Njoku disclosed that the company has lost at least $30 million over its lifetime with its focus on the African market. For a brief moment, the pandemic spurred a growth for Iroko in Nigeria, but a combination of value-destroying devaluation, COVID-19 recession, and unfair government regulations are now forcing the company to shift its attention away from Africa. Jason can at least celebrate one small victory: the absurd 5% levy that the Film and Video Censors Board had attempted to impose on all local content produced and sold in Lagos, and against which Jason had been particularly vocal, was cancelled by the State government over the weekend.
One may think that IrokoTV’s struggles, well documented and analyzed by Jason himself, would provide a cautionary tale to the new batch of local VOD platforms seeking to launch on the continent. But no. In the past few days we’ve heard about Wi-flix, which has partnered with Trace TV and a few others to launch an entertainment package mixing on-demand content and live TV, and CineMagic, South Africa’s newest streaming service that is currently looking for short films to help shore-up its local content catalogue. I could also mention the recently launched Afroland TV, Vuma TV and MyMovies.Africa. If you have been a HUSTLE & FLOW reader for some time, you know that I believe that the Africa streaming war has been won before it even began by Netflix (and possibly Showmax) and that attempting to carve out a space as a niche local player is now a waste of time and money.
One space I’m more optimistic about is mobile video, but it’s been so far dominated by the telcos themselves. Mobile content startup StarNews Mobile is a notable exception, having just announced that it had passed the 5 million subscriber mark after less than 3 years in operation. Full disclaimer: I am an early investor and advisor in StarNews. The company targets the mass market with a network of over 50 mobile channels offering celebrity-based content priced at low daily subscription rates, and is active in Ivory Coast, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo and South Africa, through partnerships with MTN, Moov and Orange.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
In African diaspora Hollywood news this week, Ghanaian multi-talented artist and Black is King co-director Blitz Bazawule has been tapped by Warner Bros to helm the feature adaptation of The Color Purple Broadway musical, while Nigerian-American writer/director Chinonye Chukwu is set to direct a feature film about Emmett Louis Till’s tragic torture and death in 1955 and the relentless pursuit of justice by his mother, Mamie Till Mobley.
CONTENT DISTRIBUTION
Canal+’s stylish Senegalese crime series Sakho and Mangane, created and directed by the French-Congolese Jean-Luc Herbulot, was acquired by All 4, the VOD service of the UK’s Channel 4. The Financial Times gives the show an enthusiastic review here. As far as I know, Sakho and Mangane is the only African TV show produced by Canal+ that has sold outside of the continent (please correct me if I’m wrong).
VIRTUAL REALITY
African Space Makers, Africa’s first interactive mockumentary series using virtual reality, is also the first Kenyan VR film to be showcased at the 77th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2020. A co-production between The Nrb Bus / Cultural Video Productions, Black Rhino VR and INVR.SPACE, the film takes viewers on an interactive journey through five urban collectives that work in Nairobi’s creative industry.
ANIMATION
And to wrap up this week’s edition, Lwanda Magere, the short film produced by Kenyan animation studio Apes in Space based on the famous Kenyan folk hero of the same name, has been selected for the LA Shorts International Film Festival. To date, Apes in Space’s work has received international acclaim at the Abidjan Film and Animation Festival, the Accra Animation Film Festival, the Lagos International Festival of Animation, and the Lift-Off Global Network Film Festival.
HUSTLE & FLOW #23: Ethiopia’s telco bids stall, Grand Egyptian Museum nears completion, Burna Boy releases Twice as Tall, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
First off, my apologies for skipping one week out of my planned publishing schedule (this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW was supposed to go out last week). It appears that many months of intense work with no play, combined with a dragged-out house renovation and a move to a different country, have led me to one of those dreaded COVID burnouts. Something had to give. But I am back now and excited to share fresh business insights on African entertainment with you.
As we near the end of August, it is still unclear what the post-COVID world has in store for us. While the United-States are suspended in a state of limbo until the November presidential elections, and Europe is delaying its economic reckoning until the end of its sacred summer vacations, worrying signs of where Africa may be headed have started to appear.
Nigeria has always been a tough market for outsiders, the latest victim being South African grocery retailer Shoprite, which threw in the towel a couple weeks ago and is exiting the country. But in recent months, a series of decidedly non-business friendly new taxes and regulations are making even battle-hardened local entrepreneurs seriously question their ability to survive in that environment. Tech startups are moving out of Lagos to escape harassment by the state government, which also just imposed a new 5% tax on film production; the controversial new broadcasting code may succeed in driving Multichoice away; and cinemas still haven’t been allowed to reopen (but airports have).
Meanwhile Ghana, despite being the seat of the African Continental Free Trade Area secretariat, is now asking foreign traders and investors for a minimum of $1 million in cash or equity for the privilege of doing business in the country. Another approach to alternative revenue generation is that of Kenya, where some $400 million in COVID relief funds seem to have found their way into the pockets of #COVID19millionaires. All that extra taxing and looting is probably not what experts had in mind when they recommended that African governments take advantage of the crisis to diversify their economies.
This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about Ethiopia’s about-face on the highly anticipated opening of its telco space to foreign investors (the inward-looking trend is definitely in motion); Cairo’s upcoming Grand Egyptian Museum and its big bet on Tutankhamun to lure tourists back; and Burna Boy’s star shining bright as he releases his P. Diddy-produced album Twice as Tall.
Going forward, I will continue to release HUSTLE & FLOW twice a month, instead of every week, as this new format seems satisfying for you and more sustainable for me. As always, previous editions can be accessed here. Please do continue to engage by emailing me at marie@restless.global or by reaching out on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter @marieloramungai.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
MOBILE
MTN Group has appointed CFO Ralph Mupita as its new president and CEO. A couple of weeks ago, outgoing President Rob Shuter had revealed the organization's plans to exit its Middle Eastern markets and focus on the pursuit of a panafrican strategy. In June, the company reported a 9.4% half-year revenue growth and an extra 11 million subscribers, bringing its total panafrican subscriber base to over 260 million.
Local reports suggest that the Ethiopian authorities are considering applying the brakes on foreign investments in its telco space, just after the government asked for bids for a 40% stake in national operator Ethio Telecom. As we discussed in previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW, the opportunity to enter this previously locked down market had generated a massive amount of interest from a variety of industry players, including MTN, Orange, Safaricom and Helios Towers. However the process has apparently encountered strong opposition from Ethio Telecom itself, which had recently announced strong annual revenues of over $1.3 billion and the growth of its subscriber base to 46 million people, or just under half the country’s population. As of now, the entire bidding process seems to be on hold, to the dismay of foreign investors.
In Senegal, Free (formerly Tigo Senegal) was imposed a heavy penalty by the regulator for blocking the launch of virtual operator (MVNO) Promobile for more than a year, despite Promobile being authorized to operate on Free’s network. According to Promobile, Saga Africa Holding, the company which owns Free in Senegal, wanted to sell voice communications for three times the price that it charges itself and refused to allow future Promobile users to receive calls and SMS from outside operators.
Finally, Safaricom seems to be the latest telco player to jump on the super app bandwagon as M-Pesa announced an upcoming consumer “lifestyle” offering, which will embed a selection of goods and services into its mobile-money app. The offer is expected to be launched first in Kenya within the next 12 months and then extended to other African markets.
E-COMMERCE
Continuing on the topic of e-commerce, Ethiopia’s Bank of Abyssinia (BoA) and Visa have announced a strategic partnership to acquire payment gateway CyberSource, through which BoA will become a member of Visa’s global payments ecosystem. The partnership makes BoA the first bank in Ethiopia to support e-commerce by enabling businesses to accept online payments using credit cards.
Less than a year after Jumia exited the country, Tanzania is ironically experiencing an e-commerce boom, courtesy of COVID. Multiple e-commerce platforms have sprung up, from food and grocery delivery apps like Piki to ‘online malls’ such as Duka.direct or Inalipa. The new services recognize that Jumia has opened the door for them by educating the market. However, contrary to the e-commerce giant, they are taking the approach to grow slowly and sustainably.
VISUAL ARTS
Over the summer, Le Monde has been running a multiple article series dedicated to African museums from Burkina Faso to Madagascar, including Ivory Coast’s first institution dedicated to contemporary cultures which opened recently in Abidjan’s popular neighborhood of Abobo. The museum is named after Adama Toungara, former minister of oil and energy, mayor of Abobo for almost twenty years, and one of the country’s biggest private collectors. Conceived by Ivorian superstar architect Issa Diabaté, the building offers a plurality of spaces designed to attract a diverse audience, with two exhibition rooms, painting workshops, media and book libraries and a space reserved for dance.
ARCHITECTURE
Al Jazeera has an in-depth profile of 84-year-old artist and architect Demas Nwoko, who was recently commissioned by the Nigerian government to design the new National Gallery in Abuja. For the past 60 years, Nwoko has developed and formalized a creative approach grounded in the knowledge of African art traditions, with the conscious addition of Western innovations where useful. Nwoko uses on-site materials such as laterite soil, trees and stones, which are resilient to the local environment and even become more beautiful with time and wear, and builds natural cooling systems through strategically placed ventilation portals. The result: his Ibadan home has never needed renovation or significant repair since completion in 1964.
HERITAGE
Cairo’s upcoming Grand Egyptian Museum is nearing completion and should open next year, after 8 years of work and multiple delays. The $1 billion, 500,000 square meters project is the size of a major airport terminal and was financed through loans from Japan. It will re-house and restore the country's most precious artifacts including the iconic treasures of Tutankhamun, which Egypt hopes will be enough of a draw to drive tourists back to a region which has suffered greatly from the double impact of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and this year’s pandemic.
FASHION
Loved Black is King? Looking to expand on the experience by acquiring some Beyoncé-approved African fashion? The singer is sharing her "Black Parade Route," a personal directory of Black- and African-owned small businesses curated by Queen Bey’s own stylist Zerina Akers, the founder of Black Owned Everything.
Not on the Beyoncé list however are Africain streetwear brands like Nigeria’s Waffles N Cream and Vivendii (which collaborated on a project with Virgil Alboh's Off-White and Nike) or Ghana’s Free the Youth, which are working hard to prove that there is more to African fashion than hand-made custom gowns and jewelry. Whereas the style has become mainstream in the West and in parts of Asia, in West Africa, where popular culture is largely shaped by the flamboyant Afrobeats party scene, streetwear (and its associated alté subculture - more on that below) conveys an aura of youth rebellion that may be closer to hip hop’s original roots.
MUSIC
On August 13, Nigerian megastar Burna Boy released his new album Twice as Tall, executive produced by none other than Sean Combs aka P. Diddy, and he “has the whole world listening” according to the New York Times. The album got over five million streams in just an hour after it dropped, and quickly reached number one in 31 countries. From the moment he sold out the Wembley SSE Arena in London in 2019, to his 2020 Grammy nomination, being featured solo in Beyonce’s Black is King, and now capturing the global charts, the 29-year-old artist has had one hell of a year, as I’ve written repeatedly in this newsletter.
And he’s even got his name on the song of the summer - the remix of 2019 rhythmic South African gospel track Jerusalema by South African producer and DJ Master KG featuring vocalist Nomcebo Zikode, on which Burna Boy was called in to sprinkle in some Naija flavor. The result is so infectious that the song has reached every corner of the globe in the form of the #jerusalemadancechallenge. Master KG attributed the moves in the dance to a group of Angolan fans who put together a candid video, which quickly reached Portugal and then spread from there.
The fact that Burna Boy calls his music Afro-fusion rather than the catch-all Afrobeats is a possible hint that the future Nigerian sounds to find success globally will be more diverse. On that topic, the French daily Liberation digs into the rising influence of Nigeria's “alté” subculture (The Guardian has a similar article here in English), which is carried by artists with different inspirations mixing jazz, r&b and hip hop, but who have in common to have broken out online and being committed to freely expressing their individuality in a culture that can be quite conventional.
DANCE
A couple of months ago, the video of a young boy ballet dancing, barefoot on raw concrete and in the rain, went viral with 20 million views worldwide. Since, then the internet has done its thing and changed the life not only of that boy (11-year-old Anthony Mmesoma Madu) but also of his teacher Daniel Owoseni Ajala and fellow students at Lagos’ Leap of Dance Academy, who have been offered resources and training opportunities by supporters from around the world. You can bet that it’s only a matter of time before this inspiring story finds its way onto the screens.
SPORTS BUSINESS
Global Pay-TV spending for sports media rights reached its apex with $48.2 billion spent in 2019 before the pandemic hit, according to sports marketing agency Two Circles. The company advises sports rights holders to end their current reliance on Pay-TV income, which is bound to decline, and transition to a ‘hybrid media model’ by developing new packages of content comprising live, near-live and non-live rights that can be commercialized through various media partnerships with free or paid linear or VOD services. Although this trend is likely to take some time to reach Africa, where StarTimes just announced the acquisition of the French-language broadcasting rights to the Spanish LaLiga and the UEFA Nations League, the signs of overheating are already there as Multichoice hesitates to renew its English Premier League rights in Nigeria, leaving the door open for more innovative deals.
BROADCAST
Still on the topic of African Pay-TV, Ndubuisi Ekekwe breaks down one of the major reasons (if not the major reason) why challengers have found it near impossible to build alternatives to Multichoice, and it has to do with how these businesses are financed. Indeed, Multichoice is backed by South African media and tech giant Naspers, “which has so much money that it could buy all the publicly traded stocks in Nigeria with just 30% of the Group’s market cap”, writes Ekekwe. This means that MultiChoice was not built with debt, while other players in Nigeria such as HiTv or TStv were saddled with 25% interest rate loans. “It is nearly impossible to grow faster than your bank interest rate. Yes, if the interest is 25%, it technically means that to have the capacity to pay that loan, you need to be hitting excess of 40%, on value creation. That is nearly impossible in a media business where leverageables are linear, not exponential. At 25-27% interest on debt, most businesses cannot survive and you will be a slave to the banks for life.” What Ekekwe says here is valid not only in the media space but for most businesses in Africa, and especially in the seed and growth phases.
Meanwhile, consulting firm Accenture is optimistic when it comes to the future of South Africa’s film and television industry, which it says has the potential to grow by close to $6 billion over the next five years by embracing digital technologies. That additional benefit could come from advertising revenue as well as investment in local film productions - particularly from global streaming platforms with deep pockets.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Eighteen film or TV projects supported by the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF) will be presented during the DISCOP AFRICA virtual market which will take place on October 28-29, 2020. The projects, which include 7 series, 7 feature films and 4 documentaries, are in various stages of development or production and have for the most part been structured as international co-productions between several African, Caribbean and European countries. The presentation of these 18 projects is organized within the framework of CLAP ACP, a program to strengthen South-South co-productions led by the OIF in partnership with FONSIC (Côte d'Ivoire), with financial assistance from the Union European Union and the support of the Organization of ACP States (Africa-Caribbean-Pacific).
VOD
Still in South Africa, Multichoice has finally introduced the much-awaited DStv dishless streaming service, which will enable subscribers to access its Pay-TV services directly through the Dstv app. The company confirmed that the DStv dishless platform would offer the same content and channels as the existing service. In case you weren’t sufficiently confused already, Multichoice also runs its standalone VOD platform Showmax, and recently rolled out two new offerings, DStv Explora Ultra, a new decoder with added features, and DStv Streama which lets viewers swap from DStv to Showmax or YouTube, making it a “one stop shop” for all things entertainment.
Talking about Showmax, executives at the company have announced that Multichoice’s hit show Big Brother Naija had "broken the record for the most-watched live-streamed entertainment show" on the platform. According to Showmax, "Nigeria accounts for almost 50% of the viewing hours, South Africa 30% and 15% from Kenya. Ghana, Botswana, Namibia and Uganda also see unusual viewing traffic for Big Brother Naija." The power of this show is currently without comparison on the continent. As I’ve said before, I believe this makes a strong business case for Netflix to get on the Naija-flavored reality show bandwagon now now.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Going viral today is truly like winning the jackpot. At least it’s how it must have felt to the Ikorodu Bois, the group of young Nigerian mimikers famous for humorously recreating the trailers of big productions such as Extraction or Casa de Papel, when they received a full film equipment package gifted by Netflix. They will also receive mentoring from star director Kunle Afolayan. The Ikorodu Bois’ Extraction video racked up 11.4 million views and more than 160,000 shares on Twitter, and received praise from star Chris Hemsworth and producers the Russo brothers, who also invited the group to the premiere of Extraction 2. No doubt that these ones are on their way.
ANIMATION
Leading Ivorian studio Afrikatoon has released King Keita, its new 26-episodes animated series recounting the adventures of Soundiata Keita, the Emperor of Mali who, after his accession to the throne, will have the onerous responsibility of implementing the “Mandé Charter”, the new rules decreed by him.
COMIC BOOK
And finally, Kenya’s The Nest Collective has released two digital comic books, based on the stories of traditional female leaders Mekatilili wa Menza and Wangu wa Makeri. Over the years, the Nest has built a certain expertise in narratives that focus on women, sexuality or gender, and their diverse portfolio of works (spanning film, fashion, photography and more) is worth checking out if you are interested in these topics.
HUSTLE & FLOW #22: Ethiopian art is poised for global debut, the Queen releases Black is King, ESPN comes back to Africa, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
Here on HUSTLE & FLOW we’ve been tracking the winds of change that are currently sweeping the global Black creative world, and this week the tempest has settled on Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is a beautiful, schizophrenic country where both the literacy and the formal unemployment rate are at 90%. Former president Robert Mugabe, who passed away less than a year ago, is widely credited for both. What is clear is that his death has so far not magically fixed Zimbabwe, which is currently suffering its worst economic crisis in more than 10 years.
Last week, seven babies were stillborn at Harare Central Hospital after urgent treatment was delayed. Nurses are on strike because of a lack of COVID-19 PPE, and the maternity wards were overwhelmed. The health minister has been sacked over allegations of corruption, as the country struggles with (another) bout of hyperinflation. Three days ago, award-winning author Tsitsi Dangarembga was arrested while protesting this whole mess, ironically just as her latest novel entered the longlist for the prestigious Booker Prize. And because this is 2020, you know there must be more: this is also the week that current President Emmerson Mnangagwa chose to sign an agreement worth $3.5 billion to compensate white farmers evicted from their land in the early 2000s. This is next-level bad timing.
We root for Zimbabwe to find its way out of this quagmire so that the country’s numerous artists and intellectuals can share their talents with the world. But despite all of this, there is no shortage of good news this week. In this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I talk about the vibrancy of contemporary Ethiopian art, as the country liberalizes in fits and starts; the (unjustified) controversy over Beyonce’s Black is King visual album; and the return of ESPN to the African airwaves. But you’ll also read about Ivorian chocolate, Nigerian curling, and Multichoice’s and Canal+’s first co-production.
If you are new to HUSTLE & FLOW, visit the archives here to catch up on current trends and opportunities in African Entertainment, and don’t forget to subscribe. To drop me a note, comment, suggestion, or correction, email me at marie@restless.global or reach out on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram @marieloramungai.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
Facebook’s investments in infrastructure and connectivity in Africa will increase internet traffic by 9%, contributing an extra $57 billion to Africa's economy by 2024, according to a recent report by Analysys Mason. Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa will benefit the most due to the presence of Facebook's Points of Presence connecting ISPs directly to Facebook's internal network. Most notably and as we’ve discussed here before, Facebook is one of the investors behind the $1 billion 2Africa subsea internet cable project, which will link 16 African countries to Europe and the Middle East and triple the current capacity.
Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa is seeking buyers for 20% to 34% of Liquid Telecom for as much as $600 million. He needs the money to repay a $375 million loan backed by Public Investment Corp that was used to fund Masiyiwa’s failed pay-TV venture Kwese TV (more on this further down in this edition).
Ethiopia resumed full internet connection on July 23 after a 23-day hiatus, and ordinary Ethiopians can now access the internet again. Ironically, that latest internet shutdown came just weeks after Ethiopia’s Council of Ministers approved its digital strategy to boost tech services exports and digitize the country’s economy, which has been growing by more than 9% annually for the past decade. Besides costing the country hundreds of million of dollars, the regular shutdowns are hampering the efforts of Ethiopian tech entrepreneurs to establish Addis Ababa as one of Africa’s major tech hubs. As foreign investors are waiting in the starting blocks to get a piece of this new market of 109 million people, Ethiopia is demonstrating once again that economic and political liberalization is anything but a smooth process.
MOBILE
Airtel Africa has reported a 6.9% jump in revenues to $851 million in the second quarter of 2020, with mobile money and data recording the most uptick. Over the period, Airtel’s subscribers grew by 11.5% to 111,5 million users throughout the continent.
Zimbabwean authorities are asking EcoCash, the country’s biggest mobile money platform, to share 2020 transaction data with law enforcement, in a move that the operator says violates its user data privacy rights. The government is alleging that EcoCash is allowing money-laundering activities on its network that are fueling street market foreign currency rates. The Zimbabwean government has been locked in a battle with EcoCash for several months as its currency and economic crisis has spiraled out of control.
E-COMMERCE
The fast convergence of fintech and e-commerce, clearly a major trend of 2020, continues. Dubai’s Network International has acquired DPO Group, a digital payments company and e-commerce platform, for $288 million. DPO facilitates online payments for some 47,000 merchants in 19 African countries, with South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania being its largest markets. The 15-year-old company, which has largely been flying below the radar, quietly racked up $16 million in revenues in 2019. Just three months ago it launched its e-commerce solution DOP Store, in partnership with Mastercard, initially targeting essential services such as supermarkets, food stores, pharmacies and chemists.
Meanwhile, Vodacom South Africa is entering the super app game, in partnership with the Chinese Alipay which will act as the technology provider. The operator is planning to create and launch a financial services app that will allow users to stream music, access news, shop online, pay bills and transfer money. The service, which is set to be launched next year, will also assist small and medium scale enterprises to access lending, insurance and other financial services.
Finally and still on the hot topic of super apps, TechCabal has a very interesting article about OPay’s billionaire Chairman Yahui Zhou, who stepped in as CEO in April and is reportedly behind the recent decision to shut down several of the company’s transport verticals in Nigeria to double down on e-commerce. Four months ago, the company claimed it had 5 million monthly active customers and was responsible for over 60% of mobile money transactions in Nigeria.
FASHION
Seven African fashion designers talk about the impact of the pandemic on their work in Vogue Italia (Google Translate is your friend here). Interestingly, the designers report little impact from the cancellation of fashion weeks on their business, as most were able to effectively leverage social media to promote their collections. A few even reported an increase in sales over the period. As Vogue Business writes, African designers have turned to establishing their own direct businesses online to make up for retail store closures. Before the pandemic, only the biggest designer brands had websites, and those were targeted at the global customer, while African fashion customers had previously been wary of shopping solely online for fashion due to a cultural preference for physical interactions, a lack of trust in online solutions, and restrictions in delivery. But the lockdowns have led to a fast, deep and long-lasting shift in customer behavior which, I believe, will eventually prove wildly beneficial for the sector.
VISUAL ARTS
British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare shares the vision behind his Guest Artists Space (G.A.S) Foundation in Quartz Africa this week. I’ve talked a couple times about Shonibare’s upcoming artists residency spaces, scheduled to open in Lagos and Ijebu, Nigeria in 2021. G.A.S Foundation will host three artists at a time from various disciplines for three months, offering opportunities for emerging local talents to grow their skills and visibility as well as network with their peers. Shonibare’s project also aims to facilitate social and cultural change by supporting the needs of the local community through job creation and food security. “Social interventions are a part of my practice. They’re not separate from my art,” he says. In recent years, Nigeria’s contemporary art scene has gained global recognition. However, few state-funded educational facilities exist to support creatives. Like it is usual in Nigeria, private individuals - and in this case the more established artists themselves - are stepping up to fill the gap.
One rare example of a government-led cultural initiative is the refurbishment of Togo’s Palais de Lomé, which was inaugurated with great fanfare in November 2019. The former Palace of Governors, a symbol of French colonial power, was transformed by director Sonia Lawson into an ambitious and innovative art center open to all, celebrating culture and nature. The Togolese government distinguished itself by financing the entire project to the tune of $4 million (3,5 million euros). Lawson counts on sponsorships and donations to make the project sustainable.
Moving from West to East Africa, CNN has an in-depth feature this week about Ethiopian contemporary art, which may finally be having its moment on the global stage. Although Ethiopia’s art lineage dates back to 4th century church paintings, the local art community had largely been cut off from the rest of the world until current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed started opening the country. One fascinating consequence of this isolation is that local art practices have had time to develop unaffected by global trends, allowing Ethiopian artists to create their own distinct language. The same could be said of Ethiopian cinema and music, about which I plan to talk more in future editions of HUSTLE & FLOW. Now, the local art scene is booming, with the launch of new art spaces and artists branching out beyond painting to experiment with other disciplines. Of course, international collectors are also starting to notice, so now is the time to go shopping while it is still affordable.
LITERATURE
British-Nigerian writer, Irenosen Okojie, is this year's prestigious AKO Caine Prize winner for her short story Grace Jones. It tells the story of Sidra, an impersonator of the legendary 70s and 80s musician, who is keeping some dark secrets.
As I mentioned in introduction, Zimbabwean literary giant Tsitsi Dangarembga’s third novel This Mournable Body has been selected in the latest Booker Prize longlist, alongside Ethiopian-born Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King. This Mournable Body reflects on the volatile political landscape in Zimbabwe through the life of female protagonist Tambu, picking up 30 years later from Dangarembga's seminal work, Nervous Conditions. Mengiste’s The Shadow King revisits the Italian-Ethiopian war under Mussolini's reign.
FOOD
Former banker turned chocolatier Axel Emmanuel has been selected as one of 50 finalists to the African Business Heroes prize 2020. The entrepreneurship competition, an initiative of the Jack Ma Foundation, received 22,000 applications from across Africa. Emmanuel describes his 2012 epiphany, which led him to change careers: “I saw the big transactions of cocoa and thought it’s fine to export cocoa, but not all of it. Two million tonnes of cocoa are exported from the Ivory Coast every year to big companies like Nestlé. It’s absurd. More than 75% of the world’s cocoa comes from Africa, and there were almost no local brands of chocolate.” Emmanuel’s company Le Chocolatier Ivoirien now distributes more than 100 chocolate flavors in local supermarkets, airlines, and other outlets, employing a team of 10. He’s now looking for investors to open a factory (and, I’m guessing, wouldn’t say no to partners who could get him into Wholefoods or Monoprix).
MUSIC
Beyonce’s highly anticipated Black is King, the visual companion to the singer’s 2019 album The Lion King: The Gift, was released last Friday on Disney+, DSTV and Canal+. The 90-min film sees Beyonce narrate and guide a young African king on a journey of love, betrayal, and understanding the importance of his history. A perfectly-timed reclamation of Black power and heritage, Queen B’s latest production still managed to stir up controversy as some African critics complained about perceived cultural appropriation from the American star. Personally I find myself resolutely on the pro-Bey camp here. Beyonce and her team clearly put in the time and care to curate the dozen African artists who collaborated with her on the project, offering them a massive platform to showcase their work in the process. Besides featuring Afrobeats stars such as Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, Mr Eazi or Yemi Alade, alongside appearances by Lupita Nyong’o or dancers from the DWP Academy in Ghana, Black is King also makes references to Dogon and Yoruba cultures, and includes the work of African designers such as Ivory Coast-based Loza Maléombho. The very secret production was shot all over the globe including in South and West Africa. It was codirected by Kwasi Fordjour, creative director at Beyoncé's Parkwood Entertainment, alongside African directors Emmanuel Adjei, Blitz Bazawule (The Burial of Kojo), Pierre Debusschere, Jenn Nkiru, Ibra Ake (Atlanta), Dikayl Rimmasch, Jake Nava and Dafe Oboro.
In a new milestone of the genre’s journey to global domination, Afrobeats is getting its first-ever official singles chart in the UK. The move by the UK's Official Charts Company recognizes Afrobeats’ rising popularity in the UK and growing influence on popular culture across the globe. The new Top 20 weekly rundown will pull data from downloads, physical sales and audio and video streaming, and the playlist will be published every Sunday on Spotify.
Meanwhile, a new player is entering the now crowded Nigeria streaming market (which already counts Boomplay, Apple Music, Deezer, UduX, Spotify, SoundCloud and MTN MusicTime), as music streaming and discovery service Audiomack opens a new office in Lagos. According to the 8-year-old company, “when you look at majority English-speaking countries, [Nigeria is] second after the United States. Since most of the artists we have are English speaking, it makes practical sense to see Nigeria as a growth opportunity both for Audiomack and all of the artists who upload their music to the platform.”
Moving over to the Francophone side, Universal Music Africa has launched Def Jam Music fr, which will focus on artists from Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Senegal. To bring this news into context, the label’s parent company Vivendi stated in its 2019 annual report that local artists (meaning artists from a certain territory selling in that same territory) accounted for 61% of UMG’s revenues last year - a strong incentive for the music giant to continue investing in its African operations. However African diaspora artists are also extremely popular in France. In fact, Franco-Malian singer Aya Nakamura is the most listened to artist in France on Spotify, where she accumulates more than 12 million listeners per month and dethrones male superstars Booba, PNL and JuL by far.
SPORTS
This week we’re doing a little tour of lesser-known sports in Africa. The first one is freestyle football, which is described by the World Freestyle Football Association (WFFA) as “the art and sport of juggling a football using all parts of the body to entertain audiences and outperform opponents; a fusion of tricks with a ball, dance and music.” Sports tricks + dance + music = a perfect African product (just add TikTok). Freestyle football was launched in Africa and Nigeria in 2017 by business leader and philanthropist Valentine Ozigbo, the Chairman of Feet ‘N’ Tricks International. In 2019, some 30 countries converged in Nigeria for the African Freestyle championships, sponsored by StarTimes. Ivorian Abdoul Titi Kone won for a second time. This year, the competition took place virtually, sponsored by MTN, and saw reigning Nigeria champions Benjamin Ebong and Augustina Unamba retain their titles.
A lot more unexpected is the slow but steady development of... curling in Africa. OkayAFrica has an offbeat article about a small group of die-hard diasporan fans trying to bring the winter sport to Nigeria, despite the unlikely climate. In 2018, Damola and Henrietta Daniel set up the Nigeria Curling Federation (NCF), which became the first African member association of the World Curling Federation. They recruited team members from the diaspora to participate in events in Norway, Scotland, China and Austria. NCF has a five-year plan to create 100 teams to breed competition in the country and has purchased land for the first ice rink in Nigeria in Calabar, partnering with ISS, a German firm renowned for making ice rinks across the world. Estimated at $6.9 million, the facility could become the home of ice sports in the country. In true Nigerian fashion, nothing is too big for the Daniels who dream of representing Africa at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, in the company of the Nigerian bobsled and skeleton athletes who've pioneered winter sports in Africa.
BROADCAST
ESPN is back on on Dstv across Africa. Two 24-hour channels, ESPN and ESPN2, will feature every major US sport, including the NBA, NFL, National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball, plus live football from the English Football League, Scottish Premier Football League, Dutch Eredivisie and Major League Soccer, as well as local sports including the Cup of Nations and boxing tournaments. ESPN’s courtship with the African market has been through several twists and turns over the past few years. In 2013, the channel had pulled its content away from Dstv as part of a decision to end operations in non-American markets that were considered to be no longer financially viable. A couple years later in 2016, the sports channel struck a licensing partnership with pay TV and VOD upstart Kwese TV (mentioned earlier in this newsletter), an ambitious initiative by Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa’s Econet Media to compete with Dstv. However, barely 18 months after its launch, Kwese TV shut down (a classic case of overspending in small markets with tiny margins) and Econet Media went into administration. ESPN had been looking for a new Africa home since then.
Multichoice’s SuperSport and the Spanish La Liga have renewed their broadcast deal for another two years, up until the 2023/24 season, in all languages except Arabic and French. Multichoice has also announced that the number of its movie channels will be reduced from the existing six (M-Net Movies Premiere, Action Plus, Action, Smile, Zone and All-Stars) to four, which will simply be called M-Net Movies 1, 2, 3, and 4 moving forward. A little note here as I know this is extremely confusing: Dstv, Multichoice, SuperSport, Mnet and Showmax are all part of the same group. There are some subtleties (cable operator vs commercial channel bouquet vs individual channels vs VOD platform) but for the sake of simplification you can just consider them one and the same.
Canal+ will launch Ethiopia’s first premium DTH platform at the beginning of 2021, in partnership with satellite operator Eutelsat. The pay TV offer will launch with 50 premium channels and a selection of Ethiopia’s Free-to-Air channels. This is the second partnership announced by Canal+ this month for the continent, following news of a deal with African utilities firm Bboxx. Still in Ethiopia, Indian Zee TV has rolled out a new channel in Amharic called Zee Alem. This brings Zee TV’s total number of channels in Africa to eight, airing mainly Bollywood entertainment and series in different languages across the African continent.
FILM
Film festival roundup: For the first time in twenty years, an Ivorian feature film will compete at the Venice International Film Festival taking place in September, as Philippe Lacôte’s La Nuit des Rois is one of the 19 titles selected in the Orizzonti section. Lacôte’s first feature Run was selected at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2014. Thirty-one film projects from 13 African countries were selected by the Durban FilmMart Institute to take part in its Finance Forum from 4 to 13 September, and 5 African film projects have been awarded grants in the Berlinale’s World Cinema Fund’s latest funding round. Finally, seventeen producers will take part in the inaugural Creative Producer Indaba scheme, which has been developed by Realness Institute in partnership with Sundance Institute, International Film Festival Rotterdam and European training outfit EAVE.
South Africa’s National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) is examining a number of propositions to help and support the film industry in South Africa as it battles the impact of the pandemic. One of the initiatives is the call for fundable proposals that will see the revival of drive-in cinema. And still in South Africa, Netflix has partnered with the South African Screen Federation and the Independent Producers Organisation, to establish a Covid-19 film and television relief fund that will provide emergency relief to the hardest-hit workers in South Africa's creative community. The streaming service will donate about $400,000 from the global $150 million hardship fund it had announced in March.
VOD
Talking about Netflix, a couple recent interviews provide more information on the platform’s inner workings in Africa for those of you out there trying to crack the code: Ife Idowu, the Licensing and Contracts Manager at FilmOne Entertainment, the largest distributor of Nigerian content to Netflix, shares his experience selling to the platform, while Netflix Africa Originals Manager Dorothy Ghettuba speaks to CNN about developing content in Africa during the pandemic.
Only the second global VOD platform to launch across the continent, the British BritBox has announced that it will expand its service to be accessible from Africa. BritBox is a joint venture between the BBC (via the BBC Studios) and ITV. According to Britbox, the Africa move is part of a global extension drive to expand its service to other parts of the world from its current markets of Britain, Canada and the United States.
CONTENT DISTRIBUTION
Despite the major progress brought about by the arrival of Netflix on the continent, the distribution and monetization of African content remains a challenge, especially for non-English language productions. Alain Modot, founder of distribution company Diffa (who recently brought the company back from previous owner Lagardère Studio), brings a Franco-centric perspective to the matter in this interview. According to Modot, Diffa now represents about 140 producers from 35 African countries, including around 15 Ivorians. He praises Ivory Coast as the only country in Francophone West Africa with a clear audiovisual policy, mostly executed through Fonsic, a European fund managed by the Ivorian Ministry of Culture and intended to support not only Ivorian films but also pan-African and Afro-European co-productions.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Pan-African pay TV leaders Multichoice and Canal+ have joined forces for the first time to co-produce an ambitious epic series called Blood Psalms. Inspired by a Xhosa legend, it tells the story of Zazi, a fierce African queen who battles a world-ending prophecy to lead her people through complexities, politics and endless wars. The 10-episode series will be available to stream on Multichoice’s VOD platform Showmax in 2021. This groundbreaking collaboration is a major development for the African TV space as it will pave the way for much larger production budgets for TV series.
And to wrap up this week, we take a look across the Atlantic, where African and diaspora creatives continue to collect accolades and high-profile projects. While Issa Rae, Yvonne Orji, Trevor Noah and Uzo Aduba all received Emmy nominations, Kenya’s Wanuri Kahiu has come on board to direct Once On This Island, a feature adaptation of the 1990 Broadway musical based on the Rosa Guy novel My Love, My Love; or, The Peasant Girl, for Disney+. One must wonder where she will find the time as Kahiu is also developing an adaptation of the YA novel The Thing About Jellyfish for Universal, and an adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed for Amazon. Another exciting announcement comes from former Netflix exec Erik Barmack, who has teamed up with renowned “Afro-French” (her term) artist Nicholle Kobi on Queens, a high-concept, stylish animated series about six extraordinary real-life African queens. Barmack and Kobi are also in development on La Femme Noire, an animated Sex and the City-type animated series for ViacomCBS-owned BET.
HUSTLE & FLOW #21: Loon’s balloons take flight in Kenya, Mr Eazi launches $20M Music Fund, Showmax Pro allows sports streaming, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
This is 2020 and every week we are reminded that reality truly is stranger than fiction. For the past few days, Nigeria’s startup world has been in shock over the gruesome murder of Bangladeshi-American entrepreneur Fahim Saleh, the well-known and well-liked CEO of Nigerian motorbike-hailing startup Gokada. Saleh was found dismembered in his Manhattan apartment, the apparent victim of an incomprehensible act by his 21-year-old personal assistant Tyrese Haspil. Saleh had recently discovered that Haspil had stolen money from him but had chosen not to report him to the police, putting him on a repayment plan instead.
Meanwhile, the normally subdued world of French-language African cinema was also being rocked by its own scandal, as it was revealed that actress Annabelle Lengronne had been edited out of the latest edition of Canal+ Afrique’s Ciné Le Mag show for mentioning Assa Traoré as an example of an inspiring Black woman. Assa Traoré is an activist and the sister of Adama Traoré, a young French-Malian who died in police custody in 2016. In response to what they considered blatant censorship from program director Frédéric Dezert, host Claire Diao and her team resigned. This is actually far from the first incident of censorship at Canal+, which is owned by Vivendi, a conglomerate with business and political interests across Africa and whose management certainly tried - in an incredibly clumsy way - to avoid stirring up anti-French sentiment on the ground.
As we collectively shake our heads at people making terribly bad choices (Kanye that includes you), we can take comfort in the fact that exciting things do continue to happen in the African entertainment space. In this edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about internet balloons bringing connectivity to remote areas of Kenya, Mr Eazi’s mogul move creating new financing models for African music artists, and Showmax Pro introducing live sports streaming to Africa’s VOD space.
For those of you currently on their summer vacations, enjoy and feel free to ignore this email. For those of us in Nigeria or the US whose work life knows no respite, don’t hesitate to send me your comments, questions, or corrections at marie@restless.global. Previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW are available here. Watch out for the next one in two weeks.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE
The Nigerian government has officially handed over Lagos’ iconic National Arts Theater to the country’s Bankers Committee, which will shepherd its renovation. The landmark location used to be Nigeria’s primary performance center and had its heyday in 1977 when it hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Festac '77), but has since gone into disrepair. The Bankers Committee, which brings together commercial banks CEOs and officials from the Central Bank of Nigeria, has announced that it would invest no less than $51 million (N20 billion) in the project. Besides the rehabilitation of the facility, which is supposed to be completed in 18 months, the project aims to create economic activities in music, film, fashion and ICT around the National Theater, targeting 1 million jobs in the next 5 years. Lagos has been crying for proper infrastructure to support its booming creative industries, and the idea of a Media and Tech city built on the model of Dubai’s Media City has been going around for a while. Depending on the final plans, the National Theater project has the potential to fulfill that role. However, some question whether the timeline and expected results announced by the Bankers Committee are realistic, especially in the current context. Let’s hope that this initiative doesn’t turn out like the 12,000 federal projects reportedly abandoned across Nigeria.
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
Alphabet’s Loon has officially begun operating its commercial internet service in Kenya, in partnership with Telkom Kenya. The fleet of 35 high-altitude balloons will essentially work as floating cell towers, drifting 20 km above ground on currents in the Earth’s upper atmosphere to provide 4G LTE service across 50,000 square kilometres in central and western Kenya. The balloons, which are about the size of tennis courts, were launched from the US and navigated to Kenya using wind currents (which, yes, seems totally crazy). According to Loon, this is the first balloon-powered internet project to launch in Africa, and the first non-emergency commercial deployment in the world.
In rather less uplifting news, the Ethiopian government has only partially restored the Internet across the country, after two weeks of a total internet outage. The government had justified the shut down as a measure to prevent the spread of hate speech after the shooting of prominent Oromo singer and activist Haacaaluu Hundeessaa led to violent unrest. According to internet monitoring group NetBlocks, most fixed-lines and some wifi users have regained access, while mobile internet and data services - which are used by a majority of Ethiopians - remain inaccessible.
MOBILE
Sonatel, Senegal’s leading telco, is seeking to raise up to $170 million (including $50 million through a bond issue) through the Private Infrastructure Development Group and the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund, to upgrade its service platforms and extend its 4G plus network across the country.
In South Africa, MTN has switched on its 5G network in the cities of Bloemfontein and Port Elizabeth. Through its agreement with Ericsson for the provision of 5G radio access networks equipment, the telco now plans to roll out its 5G service across 20 of its markets in Africa, starting with Nigeria.
Despite a substantial fall in voice and data prices in Africa in recent years, a recent International Telecommunication Union report shows that Africans still spend a lot more on mobile costs as a share of gross national income than the rest of the world. As Quartz writes, African users pay nearly 200% more than the global average for voice and three times more for data, relative to average income.
E-COMMERCE
The merging of finance and e-commerce solutions continues in Africa’s biggest market. TradeDepot, a four-year-old startup solving supply chain issues in Nigeria’s informal retail market, has raised $10 million from Partech, IFC, Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-FI) and MSA Capital and will now be expanding its operations to include financial services and credit facilities to its customers. In a country where informal stores account for 98% of all retail sales, TradeDepot uses technology to connect consumer goods distributors including Nestle, Nasco, Unilever and Kelloggs, to some 40,000 micro retailers in the informal sector. The TradeDepot platform already processes order payments and offers inventory management, which puts it in the position to aggregate data on its merchants’ businesses and use it to build credit ratings. Including this latest round, TradeDepot has raised a total of $36 million since its launch in 2016.
Professor Ndubuisi Ekekwe, writing on the Tekedia Institute website and referring to OPay’s recent shutting down of several of its verticals, has some words of advice for companies that have big ambitions in the consumer sector in Nigeria: you cannot grow faster than the environment. Ekekwe’s take is very insightful and worth quoting at length: “Nigeria cannot be growth-hacked in the way Beijing, London, New York and other areas can. Our gestation period to profitability is legendary and one of the longest in the world (...) If you do those flashy things (yes, one million Facebook likes, top ten local ranking in Alexa, etc), you will burn. More so, as OPay goes into ecommerce, it needs to slow down and not try to grow faster than Nigeria: Nigeria is a slow-po country and no marketing gimmicks will change that. The hardest job in life is finding jobs for people where there are no jobs. The second is making sales to people who have no money! My Response: My principle is to model that Nigeria has only about 30 million “people”. That is a very pessimistic model. It gives me room to navigate. Another strategy is to become a parallel entrepreneur: be in many things and forget Harvard preaching of core competency and domain focus. If you visit one of the owners of a bank in Nigeria, his office has 27 companies with the bank as one. While we know these rich guys for their banks, they are super-diversified that one policy change will affect one business while benefiting another. There is no govt policy in Nigeria that will not help one of the firms and at the end, everything is neutralized and wealth is preserved.” Words to keep in mind as Nigeria enters what is likely to be a long-term recession.
FASHION
Dior Men Creative director, Kim Jones, has partnered with Ghanaian painter and portraitist Amoako Boafo for the brand’s Spring-Summer 2021 menswear collection. Jones, who grew up between Ethiopia, Kenya, Botswana and Ghana with his hydro-geologist father, had wanted to work with an African artist for a while when he encountered Boafo’s work at Art Basel in Miami last year. The collection was modeled by an all-Black cast and released as a short film on YouTube. Dior will also ensure this particular collection leaves a lasting legacy by supporting Boafo’s newly created foundation for young artists in Accra.
Kenya’s ban on the importation of used garments in late March, as a precautionary measure against the spread of COVID-19, could help the country revive its own textile industry, writes the New York Times. The textile sector in Kenya, like in several other African countries, was wiped out in the late 1980s as the continent started opening its markets to foreign competition. A couple of years ago, East African countries had already attempted to ban second-hand clothing imports to boost local manufacturing, but all except Rwanda had to back down after the US threatened to suspend them from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides reduced or duty-free access to the American market. While for Rwandan president Paul Kagame, wearing hand-me-downs not only compromises the development of the local economy but also the very dignity of its people, in Kenya, searching for hidden gems in second-hand markets and upcycling or styling them has become a creative industry in itself. Nevertheless, coronavirus restrictions might have finally provided Kenya with a window of opportunity to start shaping the future of its textile manufacturing sector.
FOOD
Nigerian company Pedro's, founded by Lola Pedro and Chibu Akukwe, is redefining ogogoro, a local West African alcoholic drink extracted from palm trees, for the global market. Ogogoro is a type of gin that is often served to guests, including at traditional wedding ceremonies, or consumed at local bars. Pedro’s team works with communities in southern Nigeria to collect locally filtered palm saps, before distilling them a second time to match global tastes. The drink targets high-income earners across Africa and the world, and is currently distributed in high-end restaurants and bars in Accra, London, and Lagos.
VISUAL ARTS
Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop’s series “Liberty”, although produced in 2016, remains extremely topical today and is worth revisiting, especially if you are not yet familiar with Diop’s striking work. “Liberty” chronicles events linked to Black protests across eras and countries through the lens of allegory. It includes a photograph of Diop playing the role of young Trayvon Martin, who was shot and killed in Florida in 2012, and another, played by Diop's friend Dija, of Aline Sitoe Diatta, a Senegalese hero of colonial resistance who led a boycott against the French government's seizure of rice harvests during World War II and died in prison for her efforts. "The art I produce is an attempt to build another bridge between these [groups of] people that are actually one people -- that were separated by history and slavery and the colonial era," Diop said.
On the topic of French misdeeds in Senegal, France has officially confirmed the handover to its former colony of a historic saber which belonged to the entourage of El-Hadj Oumar Tall, a 19th century warlord and Muslim scholar who conquered an immense territory straddling Senegal, Guinea and Mali, and fought against the French colonial army. France will follow this up with the upcoming restitution of 26 works of art belonging to the kings of Abomey in Benin and currently housed at the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum in Paris. Looks like the restitution is finally being concretized.
MUSIC
Remember when I prophesied (yes, prophesied) that Mr Eazi would become the Jay-Z of Africa? Well the award-winning artist has just announced the launch, in partnership with lead investor 88mph, of a $20 million Africa Music Fund (AMF) through which he wants to create a new funding model for music artists on the continent. Selected artists will be given funds upfront based on their existing and projected streaming revenue, so that they can expand their catalog of music content. The investment will then be paid back in installments as the artist's earnings start to rise. Does this sound familiar? Yes, this is exactly the same model as TradeDepot’s new credit facility for informal merchants that we just talked about. Digital tools now allow knowledgeable investors like Mr Eazi to extrapolate the future growth of an artist from precise metrics such as streaming revenue, YouTube views, or social media data, so that he can provide that artist with the money he or she needs to scale their production. And because money is only one aspect, AMF also plans to support its artists grow their audience by helping them book shows and distributing their music on its upcoming platform Cinch Distro, developed in partnership with music technology company Vydia.
And the audience is showing up. OkayAfrica has a great article on the rise of stan culture in Afrobeats. The term “stan” was coined by Eminem in 2000 to refer to an excessive form of fandom. Since then, social media democratized "stanning," which now simply refers to a group of loyal fans who may not necessarily be that obsessive (you may have heard of K Pop Stans’ recent foray into political activism). Read the article for more on D’Banj’s Koko movement (rape allegation still pending, let’s not forget), 2Face's "African Queens", P-Square's "Omoges", Korede Bello's Belovers, Olamide’s "YBNL Gang", Davido's "HKN Gang," Yemi Alade's "Warriors," Burna Boy's "Outsiders", Naira Marley's "Marlians," and, most powerful of all, Wizkid’s “Wizkid FC”.
SPORTS BUSINESS
Nigerian-born mixed martial artist Kamaru Usman beat Jorge Masvidal in Abu Dhabi last weekend to retain his welterweight championship belt, delighting fans and even prompting the Nigerian President to send him a congratulatory message. Usman is the UFC’s first ever champion from Africa, and he remains unbeaten after 16 bouts. The dominance of Usman and of his compatriot, New Zealand-based middleweight champion Israel Adesanya, is now leading more Nigerians to look into MMA, despite the current lack of structure for the sport in the country.
French Development Agency (AFD) continues to roll out its Sport and Development initiative, which finances micro-projects across Africa. These initiatives must be supported by small French associations in partnership with local actors. The second call for proposals is open until September 30, 2020. AFD also just released a new magazine dedicated to women in sports titled Women Sports Africa.
BROADCAST
As Bundesliga, La Liga, Premier League and Serie A returned last month, sports streaming surged to pre-COVID level across Europe, according to Conviva, returning to about 30% of total viewing time, up from 2% at the height of the pandemic. However in Nigeria, MultiChoice is still considering not renewing its license for Premier League and other sports rights, which have become overpriced in the tough economic environment. MultiChoice used to be able to buy sports rights in bulk for the whole continent, until the now-defunct HiTV came into the market and argued that the Nigerian rights should be sold separately. However, this proved unsustainable. Should MultiChoice decide not to renew its EPL rights, it would open the door for competing bids from Pay-TV operator StarTimes or from public free-to-air channel NTA, although it seems improbable that either of them could come up with anything close to the $250 million last paid by MultiChoice for the Premier League.
One piece of content that MultiChoice Nigeria is unlikely to let go of any time soon is Big Brother Naija, which premiered yesterday and swiftly took over social media. The online auditions, conducted in May, received more than 30,000 applications. If you are curious about the 20 housemates who made the cut, head over here. They will be fighting it out over the next 10 weeks for $220,000 worth of gifts. According to their enlightening profiles, I would say that about 97% of them promise to bring either “fun” or “drama” to the house, while some 74% are interested in “the money”. Get ready.
Finally, Mo Abudu has announced that her EbonyLife TV channel will no longer be broadcast on Multichoice’s DStv satellite platform. This means that Abudu is essentially shutting down her linear broadcast business (which had reportedly been struggling for years) and focusing fully on her production activity. All her current and future content will now move to her VOD platform EbonyLife ON, and of course to Netflix, with which she recently signed a major deal.
VOD
Comcast-NBCU’s VOD service Peacock launched in the US last week, and with that, the global streaming wars’ fight card is complete. Coming last to the market after competitors HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and of course Netflix, Peacock is differentiating itself by its ad-supported model (AVOD), backed up by live sports.
I have talked in previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW about the huge potential appeal of both the AVOD model and of live sport streaming in Africa. Well, the second one is about to get tested as Showmax has launched Showmax Pro, which bundles the existing Showmax service with music and news channels, as well as live sport from SuperSport. Showmax Pro, which has begun rolling out in Kenya and Nigeria and will go live across sub-Saharan Africa within the next few weeks, features all Premier League, Serie A, La Liga and PSL games, IAAF Athletics, professional boxing, the world’s biggest marathons, and more. Now this is starting to look like proper competition for Netflix. Showmax didn’t stop there and also announced new investments in local content, although these seem limited to South Africa at the moment.
Meanwhile, Netflix has released its global Q2 results, which showed the addition of 10 million new subscribers in the past 3 months, bringing its total footprint to 193 million. Netflix has repeatedly cautioned that it might not be able to maintain this momentum throughout the year, forecasting “only” 7.5 million additional subscribers for the second quarter. This would nevertheless bring the streamer’s global audience above the 200 million subscriber mark, which is a staggering number. Besides its considerable head start in terms of reach, Netflix also finds itself in the enviable position of not having to play catch up on Black content, contrary to its competitors who are now scrambling to “diversify” their library. The New York Times has the fascinating story of how that came to be. It may have helped a little that Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, who was just named Co-CEO, happens to be married to a Black woman. And when it comes to Africa, YNaija has an interview with Netflix execs Ben Adamasun and Dorothy Ghettuba in which they share some insights about the way the streamer approaches partnering with local producers, which it often does as early as the pitch phase, to develop authentic local content that can travel.
FILM
The Cinema Exhibitors Association of Nigeria has appealed to the federal government and President Muhammadu Buhari to include the cinema sector in its financial intervention plans to prevent an “imminent collapse,” and to speedily allow cinemas to reopen in line with the approved reopening of air travel, arguing that both activities present similar health and safety challenges. Like in many other countries, the Nigerian film sector came to a complete stop in March. Among the numerous negative impacts of the lockdown is the build up of a substantial backlog of unreleased films, in a country that normally produces up to 50 movies a week. Pre-COVID, some of the most anticipated films of the year were, interestingly, remakes of 1990s Nollywood classics such as Domitilla, Glamour Girls, Rattlesnake, and Nneka the Pretty Serpent. Quartz has a good article about this new trend, which follows the huge success last year of Living In Bondage: Breaking Free, a sequel to its 1992 original.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Meanwhile in Hollywood, African projects and talents continue to gain ground. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood is now attached to direct Viola Davis in The Woman King, inspired by the 18th century Dahomey Kingdom’s all-female military unit known as the Amazons, which fought against the French and neighboring tribes. Apple has signed a first-look deal with Idris Elba and his production company Green Door Pictures to produce series and films for its platform Apple TV+. And finally, Ghana-born multi-disciplinary artist Blitz Bazawule has signed with leading talent agency CAA. Bazawule’s feature directorial debut, The Burial of Kojo, was acquired by Netflix through Ava DuVernay’s Array Films. His work is also featured prominently in the upcoming Beyonce visual album Black Is King, which will debut internationally on July 31 on Disney+, and in Africa on Mnet and Canal+ Afrique.
CONTENT DISTRIBUTION
Acomart TV, a new platform that brands itself as “the first-ever virtual screening room exclusively for Afrocentric films and TV shows” kicked off a few days ago. Producers can now upload their content to the platform to promote it to potential buyers. Acomart says it currently has over 15,000 hours of film and TV series content from Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Cameroon and South Africa available for licensing.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Is TikTok’s reign already over? Facebook is scheduled to launch Instagram Reels, its answer to TikTok, in a matter of weeks in the US and more than 50 other countries, after piloting it in Brazil, France, Germany, and India. The global launch, which has been in the works for over a year, comes as TikTok is facing scrutiny from Washington over its handling of user data. Like TikTok, Instagram Reels lets users make and share 15-second video clips set to a vast catalog of music, as well as borrow and remix audio from other people's videos. May the best social media giant win.
VIDEO GAME
And to wrap up this bi-weekly summer edition of HUSTLE & FLOW, I recommend any reader interested in the African video game space to watch Africa in Colors’ excellent webinar (in English and French) on the topic. At the speakers explained, this is a sector with tremendous potential in Africa but where everything still remains to be done, from growing and measuring audiences (the lack of market data is a challenge), to building schools and infrastructure with the support of governments, and creating flexible business models based on diversified revenue streams, including outsourcing from global studios.
HUSTLE & FLOW #20: Geographical Indication could protect Africa’s traditional IP, Afcon postponed to 2022, the Oscars welcome new African members, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
2020 is certainly the gift that keeps on giving. Over the 4th of July weekend, a providential Black personality with global influence has emerged to save Americans from an uninspiring choice at the ballot next November. Unfortunately, it’s not Michelle Obama but Kanye West, who announced his candidacy for the presidential elections on Saturday. It doesn't come as a complete surprise as Kanye had already threatened to run last year (but was aiming for 2024). Democrats are now concerned that Kanye will pull a Nader and cost them the Presidency, to the benefit of the rapper’s erratic soul brother and current occupant of the White House. Seems like we haven’t reached the depths of the absurd yet.
Meanwhile in Ethiopia, popular Oromo singer and activist Hachalu Hundesa was shot dead last week, sparking protests from outraged fans and prompting the government to shut down the internet. This is not the first time that Ethiopia’s leadership resorts to this tactic to quell dissent, which is not a good look at a time where the country is purportedly opening up. It is also very expensive. In 2019, a similar two-week blackout is estimated to have cost Ethiopia $66.87 million.
This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about how a type of legal certification called “Geographical indication” could be the way to protect Africa’s IP over its traditional crafts such as Ghana’s kente cloth, how the postponement of the African Cup of Nations to 2022 may disadvantage African teams at the World Cup, who are the African artists who have been invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures this year, and more.
Also, as my readers in the western hemisphere are preparing to take some time off over the summer, I’ll temporarily reduce the frequency of HUSTLE & FLOW to one edition every other week until the end of August. This will also give me a little bit more time to absorb your great feedback and reflect on new ways to continue serving this community.
Please continue to reach out at marie@restless.global, to consult past editions at www.restless.global/hustleflow, and to subscribe here!
Happy reading to all,
Marie
COVID IMPACT
Speaking to the BBC’s Business Daily podcast, Moses Babatope, co-founder of Nigeria’s largest cinema chain FilmHouse, estimates the loss of revenue over the past 5 months at $13 million for the Nigerian film sector and $50 million for the Nigerian creative industries as a whole, with 50 to 150,000 jobs at stake, while PwC’s Chijioke Uwaegbute believes the total loss could eventually reach up to $200 million. HEVA Fund’s George Gachara has also spoken out about the shock that the pandemic has caused to the fragile East African creative ecosystem.
As the scale of the impact on the African creative sector becomes clearer, the rescue and support measures that have been announced so far seem clearly insufficient. More recently, the Goethe Institut has launched a $3.4 million support fund for African creative and cultural organizations impacted by the pandemic. These approved organizations will be able to access up to $28,000 in funding for the September-December 2020 period. Meanwhile, the Africa Technology and Creative Group has launched the 'ATCG COVID-19 Response for African Creative Industries Fund', which seeks to raise donations to support creatives across Africa who have lost their income source due to the pandemic or are looking for innovation support to test out new ideas or create new COVID-related projects. Applicants can receive a maximum grant of $500 or innovation support up to $2,000.
However, as Aubrey Hruby and Roberta Annan write in The Africa Report, the long term trends (rising popularity of African music, film and fashion, fast digitalization, decreasing data costs, interest from companies like Netflix and Universal Music, to which I would add the new global Black empowerment movement that is changing the perception around Black content) continue to support the investment thesis in Africa’s creative economy. I shared more of my thoughts on this topic (and in French for once) on the panel organized by Africa in Colors last week.
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
Africa Data Centres, part of the Liquid Telecom Group, has consolidated its position as Africa’s largest carrier-neutral data center provider by acquiring a major site in Johannesburg from Standard Bank. The facility is “widely recognized as the most prestigious and highly specified data center anywhere in Africa, offering world-leading levels of security, resilience and capacity”.
Paris-based content and technology provider Summview has chosen Rack Center to host its services in Nigeria. Summview specializes in the development of applications and multimedia services for smartphones, tablets, connected TVs, IPTV and OTT, such as EbonyLife TV’s VOD platform. Rack Center will provide the company with a direct connection to the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, over 35 of the major carriers and ISPs and all five undersea cables serving the South Atlantic coast of Africa.
MOBILE
The Ethiopian Communications Commission has announced that it has received twelve bids for the country’s two available telecommunication licenses, including nine from telcos (The Global Partnership for Ethiopia (a consortium made of Vodafone, Vodacom, and Safaricom), Etisalat, Axian, MTN, Orange, Saudi Telecom Company, Telkom SA, Liquid Telecom, Snail Mobile), two from non-telcos and one incomplete submission. The Global Partnership for Ethiopia is the clear favorite, although others likely made very compelling cases as well. For more on this, this Jeune Afrique article digs into the value proposition of several of the bidders (in French and behind the paywall).
In South Africa, MTN has called for the release of additional spectrum in order to enable its implementation of its 5G network expansion plans, which aim to cover 10 million people within 12 months. Authorities in South Africa have made temporary spectrum available during the lockdown, but have not yet allocated permanent spectrum.
E-COMMERCE
Chinese-owned startup OPay, which had been aggressively pursuing a super app strategy in Nigeria, is putting several of its verticals “on pause”, including its ride-hailing services (ORide and OCar) and its logistics delivery service (OExpress). Just last year, OPay had raised a massive $170 million round of funding, but it proved to be no match for the current “harsh business conditions” which include a global pandemic, a lockdown, as well as a government ban on motorcycle taxis. OPay plans to focus on its payment solutions, which it claims are profitable, and on growing its e-commerce operations.
With Whatsapp payments now operational in Brazil, an Africa launch cannot be far away. Although Facebook’s payment platform is likely to be a hit with sellers and consumers alike, the risk is that it might make some homegrown African fintech solutions redundant. Nigerian fintech startup Carbon, however, has already anticipated this moment and is now positioning itself as a potential future partner for the social media giant. The startup’s keyboard-based Carbon Express solution allows users to perform financial transactions within any conversation on their mobile devices, and already works on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Twitter. Facebook typically collaborates with local partners to facilitate its services in different countries, so working with Carbon could be a convenient way for the platform to connect with the Nigerian financial ecosystem. That is not the first smart move from Carbon, who is also one of few private companies in Africa that voluntarily releases and discusses its financial reports. All the way back in 2013, when co-founders Chijioke and Ngozi Dozie launched the first incarnation of their lending product, they made the bold choice of commissioning a satirical ad featuring the crooked Nigerian pastor character from my show (spoiler alert: that didn’t quite work). Those ads have now disappeared from the internet, but click here for a taste of Pastor Chinedu and his Desperately Single and Bitterly Married Seminar.
FASHION
Vogue highlights Industrie Africa this week, a two-year-old platform dubbed the “wikipedia of young African designers” which showcases a directory of over 80 brands from 24 different African countries. Already a solid fashion content destination, in May 2020 Industrie Africa went one step further by launching an online store, with a catalog available for worldwide delivery thanks to a partnership with the ubiquitous DHL. Industrie Africa is the brainchild of Tanzanian Parsons School of Design graduate Nisha Kanabar who worked in fashion publishing for a decade across various markets before founding her own venture.
Last week I talked about Vlisco’s wax prints and Nigeria’s aso oke. As an example of IA’s great content, one of its recent in-depth features digs into the history and symbolism of kente, Ghana’s traditional fabric, and why its use by some members of the US Democratic Party to demonstrate solidarity with Black America a few weeks ago irked many. Writer Sefa Gohoho Boatin also exposes the apparition of fake printed “kente” cloth from China (the real kente is woven by master craftsmen) and recent efforts to patent or protect Ghana’s intellectual property over the cloth, with one option being “Geographical Indication”, a label that ties the production of a particular item to its region of origin, just like it is done for champagne, cognac, or even South African rooibos tea. Geographical Indication could be used to protect many of Africa’s traditional products and crafts, and efforts to implement it across the continent should be backed by development institutions that have a mandate to support the African Creative Industries.
VISUAL ARTS
The couple of (possibly looted) Igbo sculptures presented at Christie’s Paris’ June 29 auction have sold slightly below their estimated price for $239,232 to an online bidder. If it’s any consolation, the Nigerian Urhobo sculpture which was on sale for around $1 million did not find any takers. For the French speakers among you, Le Monde has the story here.
LITERATURE
Nigerian writer Innocent Chizaram Ilo has won the Commonwealth Prize Short Story prize (Africa) for When a Woman Renounces Motherhood, which can be read in full on Granta’s website. At 23, Ilo is the youngest-ever writer to be awarded the Africa region prize.
MUSIC
Three African artists are among the winners of this year’s BET awards, which took place last Monday. Nigeria’s Burna Boy confirms that 2020 is his year by winning Best International Act, while Zimbabwe’s Sha Sha won the Viewer’s Choice award for Best International Act, and Brown Skin Girl, WizKid’s collabo with Beyoncé, her daughter Blue Ivy, and rapper Saint Jhn, won the BET Her Award.
Nigerian record label Mavin Records has partnered with Seattle-based music licensing startup SyncFloor to bring the label’s catalog to more potential sync buyers. Mavin was launched in 2012 by star producer Don Jazzy, notorious for working briefly with Kanye West, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and for over a decade with D’Banj, with whom he used to own Mo’ Hits Records. Mavin Records, which secured major investment from Kupanda Holdings (backed by TPG Growth) last year to back an ambitious growth strategy, represents local artists such as Johnny Drille, Di’ja, D’Prince and Korede Bello, whose breakout hit Do Like That has racked up over 200 million YouTube views. I did a quick test on SyncFloor, whose tagline is “Finding Music Naturally”, by searching for the key word “Nigerian”. The response I got: “We noticed the core genre in your search is underground.” Hmm.
SPORTS BUSINESS
The Africa Cup of Nations, which was set to take place in January 2021 in Cameroon, has been postponed to January 2022 by the Confederation of African Football as a result of the pandemic, while the women's version of the tournament has been cancelled. This means that the Afcon will now take place in the same year as the World Cup, which risks disadvantaging African teams at the World Cup by giving them an extended season of competition.
Multichoice’s SuperSport is reportedly considering not renewing the broadcasting rights for the English Premier League and the UEFA Champions League, for which it pays around $250 million and $100 million respectively, citing rising prices and an unfavorable economic environment. Both properties are currently barely breaking even on the platform, according to SuperSport executives.
BROADCAST
The Independent Broadcasters Association of Nigeria has called for the Nigerian National Broadcasting Commission to put on hold the implementation of its controversial new Broadcasting Code, which seeks to ban content exclusivity in the country, to make way for a fresh process of wide-ranging stakeholder consultations. Meanwhile, the NBC has indicated that it would move forward with the implementation. The arm-wrestling continues.
Still in Nigeria, Information Minister Lai Mohammed said that the still-ongoing digital switchover is expected to eventually generate more than $1 billion, mostly from spectrum sales, and more than 1 million jobs in the areas of set-top-box manufacturing, content production and advertising services. After repeated delays, the digital switchover is currently completed in only 5 of Nigeria’s 36 states. No word about the impact of COVID on these plans, despite the fact that the broadcast industry has been hard hit globally by the loss of advertising revenue. In Kenya, for example, Nation Media Group has had to let go of 175 employees.
However in Ivory Coast, which has experienced a less severe lockdown than most and whose broadcast market has recently been energized by the launch of new DTT channels, advertising revenues have grown 37.7% in May 2020 compared to May 2019. TV advertising revenues are still twice lower in Ivory Coast than in Senegal though, despite Ivory Coast’s GDP being double the one of Senegal.
FILM
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (whose members vote for the Oscars) has invited 819 new artists and executives to join its class of 2020, including several Africans such as Kenyan documentary producer Toni Kamau, Nigerian actress and director Genevieve Nnaji, Zimbabwean post-production coordinator Sue-Ellen Chitunya, Kenyan short film director Wanjiru Njendu, British-Nigerian actress and singer Cynthia Erivo, Nigerian director Akin Omotoso, British-Ghanaian actor David Gyasi, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, Mozambican director Inadelso Cossa, Egyptian-American short film director Miranda Yousef, French-Malian director Ladj Ly, and Sudanese documentary filmmaker Hajooj Kuka. Congratulations to all new Oscar voters, many of whom have already been showcased in this newsletter for their groundbreaking work.
Disney-owned Searchlight pictures has signed on to produce a movie based on the improbable life of “Black Mozart” Chevalier de Saint-George, who was born the illegitimate son of an African slave and a white planter in the French Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe and rose to become a champion fencer, classical composer, virtuoso violinist, and conductor of the leading symphony orchestra in Paris. The project was pitched by Atlanta writer Stefani Robinson and will be helmed by Jamaican-born Watchmen director Stephen Williams. Do I wish that French producers and financiers would invest that boldly in projects that reflect on their own colonial history? Yes I do. But there is also no question that Disney will be more effective in bringing the story of Saint-George to a mass audience. A note to African writers: now is the time to polish all these African historical hero projects that have been sitting in your drawers for years.
VOD
Netflix has tapped Ghanaian-American Marketing Maven Bozoma Saint John as its new Chief Marketing Officer. Saint John is leaving entertainment company Endeavor, where she had been CMO since 2018. Previously she held senior brand and marketing positions at Uber, Apple Music and Pepsi. Saint John has been involved behind-the-scenes in shaping Ghana’s roots tourism strategy and in bringing Black American stars to the country for its Year of the Return celebrations last year. Just before the global lockdown, she took her Endeavor team to Accra to explore business opportunities and collaborations with local creatives. Her appointment at Netflix is great news as it can only strengthen the streamer’s current push into African content.
CONTENT PRODUCTION
I’ve already talked about Yvonne Orji’s HBO special Momma, I Made It, which is getting great reviews in the US. I must admit that I have not yet watched it myself, but this thought piece from writer Damilola Oyedele seems to echo the ambivalent feelings of Nigerians on the ground for Orji’s comedy show. Oyedele talks about a certain type of “performative Nigerianness” plaguing some Nigerians who have been away from their home country for so long that they have partially embraced the American view of it, and might even unknowingly contribute to perpetuating certain stereotypes. “It is crucial to make clear that Nigerian-Americans are one type of Nigerian, one small slice of the experience of being Nigerian,” writes Oyedele. “There are so many other ways to be Nigerian. Some Nigerians continue to remain in Nigeria, with the means to immigrate but with no interest to do so. Some were born in Togo. Others have lived in countries like Tanzania, South Africa, Germany, Nigeria, the UK, and the US. Some, like me, migrated in their 20s for education and remain here as reluctant economic migrants. All these experiences are different. Their stories matter. And these stories must not be silenced by a caricatured story of a Nigeria that doesn’t even exist anymore.” This is valid for Africa as a whole.
HUSTLE & FLOW #19: African Art Sells, Beyoncé announces Black is King, #AfricaOnNetflix is #AdCampaignGoals, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
As the Black Lives Matter movement continues to send ripples through the world in general and the Entertainment industry in particular (more in this edition), Nigeria is fighting its own fight against rape culture, which is a different but not unrelated topic.
As Quartz reports, a concerning 717 cases of rape have been registered with the police in Nigeria since January, leading to outrage and protests, and pushing state governors to declare a state of emergency on the issue. More recently, accusations of sexual misconduct have even rocked the more progressive worlds of tech, after a woman called out the CEO of Lagos-based ISP Tizeti for sexual harrassment, and music, with rape allegations made by Seyitan Babatayo against Afrobeats superstar Dbanj. The story of how Babatayo was arrested and intimidated by the police after she spoke out is deeply disturbing.
And that’s where the two issues intersect. Where Black men are at high risk of police or gun violence in the US and in other countries worldwide, the type of violence exercised on Black women often takes other shapes such as sexual violence or gaslighting. In another shocking reveal last week, a group of former employees of OkayAfrica, a prominent platform for African culture, came out to denounce CEO Abiola Oke’s abusive treatment of women in the workplace. Oke resigned from his post two days later. This wokeness wave might very well turn into a tsunami.
This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ll talk about two African art auctions including a very controversial one, Queen Bey’s surprise announcement of her upcoming new visual album Black is King, Netflix’s gorgeous #AfricaOnNetflix campaign, and more.
If you have received this newsletter from a colleague, please make sure to subscribe here. Previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW are available on my website at www.restless.global/hustleflow. And as always, don’t hesitate to reach out with your comments, questions, tips, or Zoom call invites at marie@restless.global.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
The Internet Society has released an update to its 2012 original report on Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in Kenya and Nigeria. Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), by enabling local traffic exchange and access to content, are a key element to the development of fast and affordable local internet ecosystems. In 2012, which coincidentally was the year Jason Njoku launched IrokoTV and I launched Buni.tv, approximately 30% of internet traffic in both Nigeria and Kenya was localized. Now it is 70%. “The growth of the IXPs in each country was exponential, as were the cost savings”, says the report, with the cost of 500BM of prepaid data dropping from $5.92 to $2.92 in Kenya and from $12.75 (!) to $3.37 in Nigeria. In 2012, Google Global Cache was the only Content Delivery Network available locally, whereas the local CDN ecosystem now includes Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Facebook, Google Global Cache, Google Edge, Limelight, Microsoft and Netflix. As you know this is a space I am very bullish about.
MOBILE
MTN Group has announced that it has topped 100 million active data customers for the first time. This corresponds to 39% of the telco’s total subscriber base of 257 million across its 21 markets in Africa and the Middle East. However, about 60% of rural populations in Africa remain unconnected. To support smartphone adoption, in 2019 MTN distributed 675,000 cheap, data-enabled handsets across 12 markets, launched a digital literacy programme, and reduced entry-level data rates across its footprint by 60%.
In South Africa, MTN and competitors Telkom and Vodacom are gearing up for a “Battle Royale” over 5G spectrum, which is largely unassigned in the country but that the regulator, ICASA, has promised to auction by the end of the year. Vodacom currently has the lead since it switched on Africa’s first live 5G mobile network in May in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town, thanks to temporary additional spectrum made available by ICASA during the lockdown. But Telkom is reportedly so focused on implementing its 5G plans that it decided not to pay its shareholders any dividends and reinvest instead in acquiring 5G spectrum and building related infrastructure.
E-COMMERCE
Nigerian digital payment startup Paystack has launched Paystack Commerce, “a collection of free tools to help African brands sell more physical and digital products online”. The new features and the demo video are beautifully done. In 2016, Paystack was the first startup from Nigeria to enter Y Combinator and it has since raised $10 million in funding from Stripe, Tencent and Visa.
I’ve talked about the recent forays of Nigerian payment companies into e-commerce in several previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW. Techcabal has a very good in-depth piece on the topic this week, which explains how the context has dramatically evolved since the first generation of (failed) Nigerian e-commerce startups, namely Jumia and Konga. Since then, while Nigeria’s economic macros have weakened, underlying challenges such as payments and logistics are being solved, with a little help from COVID. Merchants have also changed attitudes and expectations and now prioritize a direct relationship with their customers, which benefits solutions proposed by fintech startups versus global e-commerce platforms. How these new, fintech-driven local solutions will fare once Facebook Pay arrives on the market is another question.
FASHION
Are virtual fashion models here to stay? This week serial innovator Sarah Diouf, in partnership with Ghanaian studio Balm.labs, launched Tongoro’s digital magazine MADE, which includes an editorial on the future of fashion and a photo spread featuring digital models. I have a lot of respect for Sarah’s work at every level, and props to her for continuously pushing the envelope. However I have to say that I find these giant and vacant-eyed virtual models quite creepy. One great thing about Anifa Mvuemba’s 3D fashion show for Hanifa was that she used realistic female bodies to model the clothes (with no face, probably a smart choice).
Lagos-born LVMH Prize winner Kenneth Ize has been tapped by Karl Lagerfeld, the late designer’s namesake brand, to design a capsule collection that will be released in April 2021. Ize, who is the first Black designer to ever collaborate with the brand, will likely bring his trademark Nigerian weaving technique aso oke to the collection. ”Our vision is to combine Karl’s Parisian-chic aesthetic with elements of traditional African artistry,” he said. This already sounds like a winner.
Talking about African fabrics, it is now a reasonably well-known fact that African wax prints are not, indeed, African. If this information has passed you by, the BBC has a nicely illustrated history of the wax print, from its origins in Indonesia to its current design and production in the Netherlands, most famously by Dutch company Vlisco, and in Asia. The BBC article, however, misses the last chapter of this story. In January this year, Afreximbank signed a term sheet with Kojo Annan’s Made In Africa Inc. to provide the company with a $190 million facility to finance the acquisition of Vlisco. If the deal is confirmed in this post-COVID world, it would bring the wax print under African ownership - a pretty major symbol.
VISUAL ARTS
The pressure is mounting on the controversial auction of African artifacts taking place today at Christie’s in Paris, which includes a pair of sculptures representing Igbo Alusi deities. The artifacts were initially bought by French collector Jacques Kerchache in 1968, during Nigeria’s Biafra war, and are estimated for sale between $280,769 - $393,077. Nigerian scholars and government officials, as well as more than 2,000 people who signed a petition titled "Stop Christie's from selling STOLEN Igbo Sculptures. #BlackArtsMatter”, question how these sculptures could have been legally acquired when the region they originate from was literally a war zone at the time. Which, you must admit, is a very good question. At the time of writing, the sale was going on as planned, with the most expensive item - another Nigerian sculpture - expected to fetch up to $1 million.
More auction news, with last Wednesday’s sale by Piasa of 172 contemporary artworks by 106 artists from 19 African countries. Le Monde highlights some of the works here (in French), which include paintings by DRC’s Cheri Samba and Eddy Kamuanga, Nigeria’s Wole Lagunju, or Uganda’s Joseph Ntensibe, whose Tropical Garden 4 (my favorite) more than doubled its estimate to sell for 67,600 euros. But many other works from well-known artists were far more affordable: you could have walked away with a Malik Sidibe print for 3,640 euros or a Yinka Shonibare lithograph for 1,560 euros.
Talking about Yinka Shonibare, the British-Nigerian superstar of the African contemporary art scene has had to adapt his Guest Projects residency program, which he normally runs from his London studio, to today’s socially-distanced world. The call for proposals for his newly-minted Guest Projects Digital residency is open until July 12th.
MUSIC
Stop the presses -- yesterday Beyoncé unveiled the trailer for Black is King, the new visual album that she will be releasing on Disney+ on July 31st. Black is King is based on music from The Lion King: The Gift, the Lion King remake soundtrack album produced by Beyoncé and featuring top African artists like Wizkid, Burna Boy, Mr Eazy, Tiwa Savage and Yemi Alade. I loved The Gift so much that I had to stop listening to it because I couldn’t get it out of my head. The visual album, which is set to feature appearances by some of the soundtrack artists, is described by Disney as "a celebratory memoir for the world on the Black experience. The film is a story for the ages that informs and rebuilds the present. A reunion of cultures and shared generational beliefs. A story of how the people left most broken have an extraordinary gift and a purposeful future." Well played Beyoncé, and well played Disney. That’s hitting the zeitgeist’s bullseye.
In the past few years, interactions between the global and African music industries have been growing at a fast rate (film and TV are next, sit tight and keep reading). Pulse has an in-depth explainer this week on the evolution of the global music market and how Africa fits into it, which is a good read especially if you are an investor interested in the space and looking for where to start. As a rule, what I tell my clients is: platform-building is for global players that have scale and unlimited resources. Anything that requires deep on-the-ground knowledge (talent spotting and development, content creation, tech features plugging a gap between local markets and global solutions - for example in payments or data collection and analytics, ability to leverage telcos relationships) are opportunities for investment.
BROADCAST
Successful Ivorian advertising and media entrepreneur Fabrice Sawegnon has launched his first TV station, Life TV, positioned as a general entertainment channel focusing on local content. Life TV is one of five free-to-air stations to win a broadcast license to exploit Ivory Coast’s new Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT - TNT in French) market, after Canal Plus’ A+ and RTI3. It is owned by Sawegnon’s Voodoo Group and French channel M6 which holds a 12,5% share, down from the 33% that were initially announced for M6 in 2017. Check out HUSTLE & FLOW #2 for an explainer on the misdirected enthusiasm of French broadcasters towards Francophone Africa’s DTT space.
ViacomCBS has promoted Monde Twala, senior vp of ViacomCBS Networks Africa, editorial and general manager, to the additional role of peer lead for BET International, tasked with growing the BET brand outside the U.S. Despite its positioning, cultural relevance, and worldwide reach, BET (Black Entertainment Television for the non-initiated) has so far been pretty tame when it comes to leveraging the global Black experience to expand its business worldwide. With the emergence of a global Black consciousness now dominating the headlines, it seems obvious that BET has missed a big opportunity. Perhaps it is not too late to course-correct, even though other Hollywood players, including HBO and Netflix, have been much bolder in terms of creating Black content that can drive global conversations.
Finally, a recently released report by Accenture shows that MultiChoice invested just over $2.1 billion in Nigeria between 2015 and 2019, including $400 million in the development of local talents within the creative industry. I would love to see the detail of what they include in that last number.
FILM
Realness has announced the selection for its 5th screenwriter’s residency, which will take place online from July 1st to September 1st, 2020. In the five years since its inception, Realness has supported 30 feature film projects from across Africa, the first two to be produced going on to screen at Venice, TIFF, Sundance, IFFR and Berlinale.
Moonlight director and Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins will be writing the film adaptation of the BAFTA and Oscar nominated documentary Virunga for Netflix, which Leonardo DiCaprio will executive produce. According to Netflix, "the film tells the story of those who worked to save one of the world’s most bio-diverse parks & the endangered gorillas inside." I’ll be interested to see where this project ends up filming (Rwanda, Kenya?).
VOD
There is no stopping Netflix’s methodical and enthusiastic advances in Africa. Last week the streamer gave other media brands a lesson in aspirational African marketing when it released its new #AfricaOnNetflix campaign, a beautiful video featuring some of the biggest African stars with content on the platform. The promotional content quickly went viral of course, with the stars themselves actively sharing the material on their pages. In a nice - but also strategic - move, the campaign also includes directors, such as Nosipho Dumisa or Kunle Afolayan, writers like Malenga Mulendema (Mama K’s Team 4), and Netflix’s own executives Dorothy Ghettuba and Ben Amadasun, both veterans of the African TV space whom everybody in the industry knows and respects. This signals to all African creatives that Netflix is the place where they can strive. I’ve said this before, but the goodwill that is being built here will be very hard for other players to compete against when they eventually come to the continent.
Talking about Netflix competitors, I’ve been hearing that Amazon Prime Video is looking for its first African projects. Meanwhile, it is gearing up to launch a linear TV offering in its home market of the US, which is not a bad idea considering that AVOD seems to be taking off, that live sports are one of streaming’s next frontiers, and that Amazon Prime has already established itself as an aggregator of third-parties on-demand channels (HBO, Showtime, etc).
CONTENT PRODUCTION
One of the exciting side effects of the global Black Lives Matter movement is that media companies and financiers are rushing to shift resources toward the production of Black and diverse content. LeBron James' SpringHill Entertainment (behind projects like Netflix's Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker and Top Boy) raised $100 million from investors including Elisabeth Murdoch, production company Sister (Chernobyl, Gangs of London), Guggenheim Investments, The University of California's UC Investments and private equity firm SC Holdings, and signed an overall deal for scripted TV with Disney’s ABC Studios. Meanwhile across the pond, the BBC has launched its Creative Diversity Commitment, which will prioritize £100 million of the broadcaster’s existing commissioning budget over three years (from 2021-2024) towards diverse and inclusive content. The BBC will also implement a new mandatory 20% diverse-talent target in all new network commissions from April 2021, and is looking for ways to make concrete changes sooner. This of course is great for all African diaspora talent working in the US or the UK, but I believe that it will also change how studio heads and TV commissioners view Black content in general, including African content.
Remember the Ikorodu Bois, the young Nigerian “mimickers” famous for their bare-bones and hilarious remakes of music videos and movie trailers? Well they are heading to Hollywood. The kids behind the videos, brothers Muiz (15), Malik (10) and Babatunde (23) Sanni and their cousin Fawas Aina (13), received an invitation from Extraction producers the Russo brothers after their homemade remake of the movie’s trailer went viral. Securing US visas and flights for Hollywood-obsessed Nigerian kids in this climate will be another issue though.
ANIMATION
African animation continues to make inroads and lands a prime profile in Forbes this week, which is worth reading in full. The article highlights the key structuring role played these past few years by the African Animation Network (AAN) led by the South African Nick Wilson, who has been tirelessly advocating for African animation for over a decade. Behind-the-scenes support from AAN has helped the emergence of several African talents on the global scene, such as Ridwan Moshood from Nigeria, winner of Cartoon Network Africa's Creative Lab competition with his genius original property Garbage Boy & Trashcan. Also worth noting is the role played by US story consulting company Baboon Animation, which has been working with African creators for years to develop their storytelling skills with great results, and is now partnering with Moshood to launch his new studio Pure Garbage. This is a model to explore for investors interested in the African content space. In recognition for this recent flurry of activity, Africa was supposed to be Annecy Animation Festival’s territory of honor this year, but the showcase has now been postponed to 2021.
Another leading initiative in support of the African digital creative space is Digital Lab Africa, run by Institut Francais. DLA unveiled the nine winners of its fourth edition last week in five categories: immersive realities, video games, music, animation and digital art.
CALL FOR PROPOSAL
And I’ll finish with a global call for proposals, also supported by Institut Francais and by AFD, the French Development Agency. Accès Culture seeks to offer finance and support for cultural projects presented by African and French cultural organizations working in partnership. The projects should encourage cultural cooperation and be oriented around community arts outreach, and the deadline for applications is July 30th, 2020.
HUSTLE & FLOW #18: Orange eyes Nigeria expansion, Decathlon's aggressive Africa strategy, Animation studio Triggerfish opens up in Ireland, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
Last Friday the world celebrated Juneteenth, an annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United-States. Previously, Juneteenth had been relegated to American-American communities where it was celebrated almost confidentially, while the rest of the country and the world remained blissfully ignorant about it. But thanks to the global Black Lives Matter movement, its meaning now resonates widely, with companies like Twitter and Spotify offering employees a paid day off and efforts currently underway at the US Senate to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
In Africa, the flag of pan-Africanism has been captured by Ghana, which held a memorial for George Floyd and invited African-Americans to “Come home”. Ghana has long courted the descendants of enslaved Africans to “return home”. In 2019, its “Year of the Return” celebrations attracted a number of Black American personalities and even culminated in a naturalization ceremony where over 100 African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans became Ghanaian citizens. This strategy by Ghana to leverage shared culture and history to attract talents (and money) is nothing short of visionary, and makes Ghana a prime investment destination - I plan to unpack why and how in a future edition of HUSTLE & FLOW.
Meanwhile the new global awareness over systemic racism has also reached South Africa, a country that has so far not distinguished itself favorably on that topic, to say the least. Streaming service Showmax has pulled several films from popular white South African comedian Leon Schuster for review. Schuster’s films have raked in millions at the box office, making him probably the most successful filmmaker in South Africa. Schuster’s oeuvre includes a film in which he uses blackface, and another where he plays a white sangoma.
This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, we have a bit of an Ethiopian theme going on, which is fitting as Ethiopia is one of only two African countries (with Liberia) never to have been colonized. But I’ll also talk about Orange eyeing expansion into Nigeria, sports goods retailer Decathlon’s aggressive Africa strategy, and South African animation studio Triggerfish opening up in Ireland.
Please continue to share HUSTLE & FLOW with your friends and colleagues and to send in comments and contributions at marie@restless.global. Subscribe here to receive this newsletter directly into your inbox every Monday, and head over there to catch up on previous editions.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
Amazon has added 3,000 new virtual customer service jobs in Johannesburg and Cape Town, bringing its total permanent workforce in South Africa to 7,000 people. The new roles range from customer service associates to technical staff and the employees will be working virtually from home to provide round-the-clock support for Amazon customers in North America and Europe.
This is just the latest in a series of major moves from the world’s tech giants as they continue to make strategic advances on the continent. As Kofi Yeboah writes on Global Voices this week, Facebook and Google (and to a smaller extent Amazon) are on a race to build Africa’s internet infrastructure and capture the world’s last virgin market. Although these companies have achieved faster, greater results than governments, their dominance in the provision of what has become a public good should be of concern as “Africa is vulnerable to mass mis- and disinformation, market monopolization, exploitation and misuse of personal data”. Besides issues around privacy and data use, there is the question of course of the takeover by the tech giants of huge chunks of countries’ digital economies with the concerned nations not reaping any benefits. In Europe, France has led the charge for a GAFAM tax that would be imposed on revenue accrued inside the country, even if the tech companies are headquartered elsewhere. If handled correctly and in a way that doesn’t dissuade investment, such a tax could be a new and welcome source of revenue for African governments.
MOBILE
According to reports by Reuters, French telco Orange is reportedly exploring ways to enter two of Africa’s biggest markets, Nigeria and South Africa, in the next few months. Orange is France’s largest mobile operator, and its portfolio across 18 countries in the Middle East and Africa is its fastest-growing market. Orange acquired four of Airtel’s units in Africa in 2016 and reportedly considered snapping up Etisalat Nigeria (now 9mobile) in 2017. This comes at a time when MTN Group is pressing on with its plans to dispose of 15% of its 79% stake in MTN Nigeria to local investors. No one knows if MTN Group would be ready to unload more, but it sounds like there is an opportunity there for Orange to slide in. In any case, the news of a potential arrival of Orange on the Nigerian market has sent waves of excitement among industry observers as the French telco certainly would have the weight to cause some serious (positive) disruption.
Meanwhile across the continent in Ethiopia, MTN and Vodacom are reportedly in the process of forming a partnership to bid for one of the country’s new telco licenses. To be continued.
E-COMMERCE
You read it in HUSTLE & FLOW first: Whatsapp is indeed rolling out its payment solution, starting with Brazil. And as I mentioned last week, Whatsapp Business catalog with Facebook Pay is stealthily being tested in Uganda, so we can expect things to move fast from now on. Enabling payments on Whatsapp, but also Facebook and Instagram, will be a game changer for small businesses, artists and creatives across Africa who are already heavy users of these platforms. It also hints at the future development of a “super app” ecosystem on the continent. S&P Global Market Intelligence has an in-depth article about the various models and strategies for super app development which is a must-read if you are interested in this topic.
FASHION
Ethiopia’s burgeoning garment industry has been hard hit by the slowdown in production caused by the COVID crisis, a recent report by the International Labor Organization shows. Managers are concerned about employee retention as mass layoffs loom. However, as many western economies lift their lockdowns and stores reopen, with only 60 COVID-related deaths from a total of 3,630 cases, Ethiopia is well positioned to hit the ground running to fulfill new orders. The Industrial Federation of Textile, Leather, Garment Workers Trade Union has launched a campaign to raise awareness of best health and safety practices in Ethiopian garment factories to limit the risk of a spike as business picks back up.
VISUAL ARTS
London-based gallery TAFETA, which is specialized in modern and contemporary African art, has launched the “SixforSix” initiative which offers the opportunity for collectors to live with up to three pieces from their “SixforSix” collection for six weeks before deciding whether they want to make a purchase. The collection features pieces by Arinze Stanley, Babajide Olatunji, George Osodi and more, priced between $970 and $9700.
The Dutch government returned a stolen ceremonial 18th-century crown to the Ethiopian government last Thursday. The crown went missing from a church in Ethiopia 21 years ago, and landed in “a suitcase left behind by a guest” in the apartment of Sirak Asfaw, a former Ethiopian refugee who is now a Dutch national. Asfaw waited 21 years to approach the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to let them know he was in possession of the object. Plot hole you say? We will not learn more about that mysterious guest from that CNN article unfortunately. The issue of the restitution of Africa’s artifacts seems to be gathering momentum though. Quartz continues to proactively cover the topic, publishing a new article this week, while Princeton art history professor Chika Okeke-Agulu called for the cancellation of a forthcoming auction in Paris of two sacred Igbo sculptures taken out of Nigeria during the Biafra war.
LITERATURE
This week OkayAfrica explores what happens when Nigeria’s vibrant literary scene moves online, as prominent events like Lola Shoneyin’s Ake Festival and Efe Paul Azino’s Lagos International Poetry Festival (LIPFEST) re-imagine themselves as virtual gatherings - and it’s not all bad as the loss of human physical connection is balanced by wider reach. According to the same article, the lockdown has also had a positive effect on local book sales, with bookstores reporting a surge in orders.
Meanwhile for the writers out there, applications for the 2020 Morland African Writing Scholarships will open on July 1st. Besides running this yearly scholarship, the Miles Morland Foundation also supports African writing and African literature through grants to literary festivals in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and Somaliland, cultural initiatives in east, west, central and southern Africa, London’s Film Africa festival, the Caine Prize for African Writing, several African educational initiatives and the new Rhodes scholarships for Africans.
MUSIC
Universal Music Group (UMG) opened an office in Casablanca, Morocco, last week, as it seeks to expand its footprint in the MENA region to discover and promote new local talents. In sub-Saharan Africa, UMG already has offices in Abidjan, Lagos and Johannesburg. Two years ago it acquired Kenyan label AI Records, and it announced the launch of Def Jam Africa last month.
I talked last week about Tanzanian Bongo Flava superstar Diamond Platnumz and his mastery of YouTube, which he joined earlier than most other African artists in 2011. Well, a few days ago Platnumz became the first sub-Saharan African singer to reach one billion views on the platform, where he racks up 3.7 million subscribers. And he’s doing even better on Instagram where he has a staggering 9.7 million followers. Platinumz’s new song Quarantine also became viral on Tik Tok. The Tanzanian artist still ranks behind African performers from the diaspora such as Malian-born and Paris-based singer Aya Nakamura who has more than 1.7 billion YouTube views, or Senegalese-American rapper Akon who smashes them both with 3.5 billion views. Akon was also in the news this week but for a completely different reason: the global star and philanthropist announced that it had awarded a $6 billion contract to KE International to build and execute Akon City, his futuristic-cryptocurrency themed metropolis project in Senegal.
If charismatic African artists are the ones attracting the limelight, few know the name of the instrumental producers or “beatmakers” working closely with them to create their viral hits. African Shapers has a great run-down this week (in French) of some of the most talented beatmakers on the continent, from Platnumz’ collaborator Ayo Liser to Ghana’s Killbeatz or Nigeria’s Kel-P, who produced 10 of the 19 songs of Burna Boy’s Grammy nominated album African Giant.
SPORTS BUSINESS
Recession, what recession? French sporting goods retailer Decathlon is staying on track with its aggressive African expansion strategy and opened its second store in Abidjan last week. With over 1,600 stores in 57 countries, Decathlon is the largest sporting goods retailer in the world. In Africa, besides Ivory Coast the company also has stores in Kenya, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal, and its products are available online through a partnership with Jumia. Contrary to France where Decathlon also distributes leading brands such as Nike or Adidas, in Africa it chose to focus only on its own products.
Decathlon’s steady inroads on the continent are another strong sign that France is particularly well positioned to dominate vast areas of the sports market across Africa. I’ve talked previously about Vivendi Sports’ plans to create, develop and monetize (largely through broadcast rights) new sports leagues - including Afro-European MMA league ARES - across the continent. Earlier this month, ARES announced the signing of former WBO and WBA boxing champion Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam, who joins other high-profile fighters such as Senegalese wrestler Reug Reug, UFC veterans Eric Shelton and Danilo Bellaurdo, former Bellator champion Will Brooks, UFC standouts Nordine Taleb and Juan Adams, and ex-UFC title challenger Wilson Reis. Now, for a bit of inside baseball, or rather inside MMA, website The Body Lock zoomed into screen captures from N’Dam signing video to expose confidential details about his contract. We learn that N’Dam’s base pay is to be $20,000 per fight with a $20,000 bonus in case of a knockout or submission, among other juicy details.
BROADCAST
To continue with our Ethiopia theme this week, Balancing Act’s Russell Southwood looks at the country’s freshly liberalized broadcast market to find out what’s going on. As Russell reports, Ethiopia now counts nearly 20 local channels. Although almost all of them saw their audience grow thanks to the thirst for news about COVID-19, they were also hit hard by the drop in advertising revenue. To add to this contextual challenge, in April the Ethiopian government banned the advertising of alcoholic beverages for health reasons. Local breweries had been an important source of advertising for broadcasters. The tense economic environment has already led to the closure of JTV, one of the country’s new stations, with rumors that at least two others will follow.
Despite the industry uproar which followed the publication of Nigeria’s new broadcast code last week, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) confirmed its intention to break the decades-old monopolistic sports broadcast rights structure in Nigeria, re-affirming in a press conference that its licensees would be banned from acquiring exclusive sports broadcast rights. The first victim of this new regulation would of course be Multichoice, which owns most premium sports broadcast rights in English-speaking Africa. Coincidentally, Multichoice issued a report last week showing that its products and services were 55% cheaper in Nigeria than in most of its other markets on the continent including Ghana, Kenya or South Africa. Despite the country’s size and potential, Multichoice’s Nigeria operations only bring 10.89% to the Group's revenue and $300 million in profit, compared to the $600 million generated in South Africa. Multichoice Nigeria blames challenging market conditions for its underwhelming results.
In South Africa, the SABC is reportedly planning mass layoffs to reduce its staff bill by up to $40 million, in-line with its new operating model which I mentioned last week. Pre-COVID, the embattled national broadcaster had received a $185 million financial bailout from the South African government, but will be prioritizing those funds to pay off creditors, invest in content and maintain its critical broadcast equipment and infrastructure.
FILM
The Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) and Market (DFM), arguably Africa’s leading film rendez-vous which normally takes place every year in July in the South African coastal city, will be taking place virtually in September. Another opportunity to discover African films online is the relaunch of Cinewax’s Online African Film Festival (OAFF) with a Kickstarter launch party on June 24 and the free screening of Kenya’s Likarion Wainana Supa Modo. I mentioned the controversy around the production of this film in last week’s HUSTLE & FLOW - now is your opportunity to watch it.
Kenyan filmmakers have built a true expertise in navigating the complex (and political) world of international film festivals and film funds. The latest one to snag funding is the very talented animator Ng'endo Mukii, who received a script and development grant from the Hubert Bals Fund for her feature debut The Goat Sunday. Also in this year’s HBF Spring Selection are Sudanese director Ali Cherri, Mohamed Rashad from Egypt and Tariq Teguia from Algeria.
VOD
Not a big surprise considering the runaway success of its first season, but South African teen mystery drama Blood & Water was renewed for a second season at Netflix. The streamer’s strategy for its African originals is an interesting one. Indeed, Netflix could have chosen to produce and release both Queen Sono and Blood & Water as 12-episode series, which is the traditional TV format across Africa (except for soaps and telenovelas which have dozens of episodes per season). But by basically cutting the traditional series length in half to release short 6-part seasons, Netflix avoids putting too much pressure on producers for whom these projects are the firsts with truly global ambitions, while giving them more resources to focus on quality. At the same time, this approach also allows Netflix to limit their financial exposure on a new market, and the tactic of ending these short seasons on cliffhangers ensures that demand for a second season will be as strong as possible.
CONTENT PRODUCTION
Linear broadcasters on the other end need long-running series to fill their many hours of programming. Multichoice’s South African channel M-Net has announced the upcoming release of its new telenovela called Legacy, scheduled for September 2020. The show is described as a cross between HBO's Succession and The Bold and The Beautiful with some Brazilian telenovela undertones. Over the years, M-Net and its various African channels have built a strong expertise in that specific genre, producing successful long-running soaps such as Jacob’s Cross, Tinsel, or Hotel Majestic.
ANIMATION
Award-winning South African animation studio Triggerfish has announced that it will establish its first international production arm in Galway, Ireland. I have been a fan and a friend of Triggerfish since the launch of The XYZ Show in 2009 (there were few of us trying to do African animation at the time), and I was lucky to visit their beautiful Cape Town studio several years ago. The current success of Triggerfish, which launched all the way back in 1996 and is now widely recognized as the best and largest animation studio in Africa, is a study in dogged perseverance. More than ten years ago CEO Stuart Forrest and his team embarked on the seemingly impossible task of producing ambitious animated feature films in South Africa for a fraction of the cost that similar projects would have taken to get made in Europe or the US. The studio’s feature films Adventures in Zambezia (2012) and Khumba (2013), voiced by Hollywood stars like Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne or Liam Neeson, were released in cinemas worldwide and both reached the top 5 highest grossing films of all time in South Africa. Triggerfish then expanded to TV, working with UK company Magic Light Pictures to produce Annecy Festival Cristal award winner Stick Man, Oscar-nominated Roald Dahl adaptation Revolting Rhymes, International Emmy-winning Zog, British Animation Awards winner The Snail and the Whale, and Rose d’Or-winning The Highway Rat. Triggerfish management has always been concerned about growing animation capacity in Africa, and in 2015 the studio launched the Triggerfish Story Lab with the support of Disney to develop writers and directors from across the continent. One of the projects that emerged from the program is Mama K’s Team 4, which Triggerfish is currently producing for Netflix as the platform’s first original African animated TV series. Also on Triggerfish’s busy slate is their third feature film, the action-comedy Seal Team. In this context, the studio “needed more capacity to keep up with (their) ambitions,” and clearly they were not able, despite their best efforts, to expand fast enough in Africa. The opening of Triggerfish's Galway location received the support of the Irish government and is expected to create 60 new jobs over the next three years.
HUSTLE & FLOW #17: #KECreativesDeserveBetter, SA’s first virtual model, MultiChoice posts strong results, Netflix’s groundbreaking Nigeria deal, and more
Dear colleagues and friends,
The global Black Lives Matter movement, coupled with the restlessness created by months-long lockdowns that have aggravated existing inequalities, seem to have created a real powder keg of reclamation against injustice worldwide.
The wind of change reached the Kenyan film industry this week as prominent Kenyan creatives, led by Cape-Town based artist and filmmaker Silas Miami under the hashtag #KECreativesDeserveBetter, came out against the entrenched racism of some white or foreign gatekeepers by sharing shocking tales of mistreatment. In a heartbreaking Facebook post, director Likarion Wainaina talked about his experience earning so little from his work on Supa Modo, one of Kenya’s most successful films and the country’s entry to the 2019 Oscars, that he was unable to pay his rent, among other traumas and indignities. The exploitation of black Kenyan cast and crew in the local film industry has been an open secret for decades. Speaking up against well-established and globally recognized white producers who are often the main purveyors of jobs or opportunities in the Kenyan film industry demanded a lot of courage. These conversations are hard but they eventually need to take place, and people have run out of patience. Who’s next?
This edition of HUSTLE & FLOW is packed with big media news. MultiChoice posted strong financial results despite a challenging global environment, while Nigeria’s content industry lived through a schizophrenic week, tugged between the celebration of Netflix’s multi-title deal with Nigerian producer Mo Abudu and shock at the National Broadcasting Commission’s attempt to ban content exclusivity, a move that threatens to (but probably won’t) stop the growth of the continent’s most dynamic film and TV industry in its tracks. I'll unpack all of this and more below.
Please continue to share this newsletter with your colleagues and friends who have an interest in the African entertainment space. They can subscribe here to receive HUSTLE & FLOW directly in their inbox every Monday. Previous editions can be consulted there. I always enjoy hearing from you so do reach out at marie@restless.global or on your favorite social media platform @marieloramungai.
Happy reading to all,
Marie
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
Last week I mentioned the issue of Right of Way charges relating to cable infrastructure in Nigeria and linked to a Quartz article that incorrectly implied that Ekiti was the first and/or only state to lower such charges. However a HUSTLE & FLOW reader kindly informed me that several other states including Katsina, Plateau, Imo, Kaduna and Anambra had also lowered or even waived RoW charges in support of the national broadband plan. Please do not hesitate to drop me a line if you spot any mistake in this newsletter or if you have more information to share on a specific topic.
MOBILE
I received another valuable contribution from a loyal HUSTLE & FLOW reader this week who pointed me to this great resource: hyper-precise mobile coverage maps for 14 African countries made freely available by mobile network operators association GSMA and Masae Analytics. The lack of consumer data in Africa is a major challenge to decision-making for businesses, governments and development agencies, but satellite imagery and machine learning advances are starting to provide effective solutions. Tools such as Masae Analytics’ mobile coverage maps are not only useful for mobile operators themselves, but also for any business looking to leverage the mobile infrastructure to offer digital finance, marketing, e-commerce, or media services. Another leading player in the satellite data space is US-based startup Fraym, which has worked with organizations such as MasterCard and the African Development Bank to provide neighborhoods and rural districts level data.
No need to reinforce here how central and strategic the mobile telecommunications sector is to the development of African economies in general. In Ghana, the National Communications Authority has become concerned about the “significant market power” of MTN Ghana, which counts more than double the number of voice and data subscribers than competitors Vodafone and AirtelTigo. Ghana’s regulator is now looking at leveraging the playing field and curtailing MTN’s market dominance by implementing measures such as setting minimum and maximum prices for calls, texts, and mobile internet but also for mobile money services. Ghana has been Africa’s fastest-growing mobile money market in recent years.
One operator that has managed to avoid all attempts to regulate its dominant position so far is Safaricom. This week, the Kenyan telco launched new affordable data bundles (as low as $0.094 for up to 30 minutes) to use on YouTube content. According to Safaricom and to YouTube’s owner Google, both companies plan to exploit their digital capabilities and reach to deliver wide-ranging content in entertainment, education, news and sports to Kenyans.
FASHION
Back in May, HUSTLE & FLOW readers and pretty much everyone else out there loved Congolese designer Anifa Mvuemba’s groundbreaking 3D fashion show for her brand Hanifa, which quickly sold out as the Instagram video of the collection went viral. Last week in more Ex-Machina fashion news, South African “virtual model” Kim Zulu participated in the Russian Fashion Council’s Global Talents Digital event, which presented itself as the world's “first hybrid international online fashion project” combining real designer collections and digital ones. The brainchild of graphic designer Jason Campbell, Kim Zulu recently scored a modelling contract with international brand Kangol and is set to launch her first album and TV show. She was also listed as one of the top 12 virtual influencers to follow globally by Forbes, which made the point that “in the post-coronavirus reality of limited or inaccessible travel, the digital modeling domain is set to expand. In part, it is a practical question of easier logistics and simpler labor agreements.” Kim Zulu is far from the first or only black virtual model however, with the most famous ones being CGI-superstars Shudu and Koffi, who were controversially created by British photographer and 30-year-old white man Cameron-James Wilson. Wilson has since launched a digital-only talent agency. Confused by all this? Don’t know what to make of it? You are not alone.
Besides Kim’s coming out on the global fashion scene, Twitter and Instagram were flooded last week with beautiful images of black models thanks to the viral #VogueChallenge, where thousands of black creatives who have been largely neglected by the fashion industry imagined their own versions of Vogue covers. The challenge originated on TikTok in mid-May but took on a new meaning after the Black Lives Matter movement spread worldwide and Vogue editor Anna Wintour admitted that “Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators.” According to Teen Vogue, there has been only one black photographer to shoot a cover in the 127-year history of the publication, and only 21 black women have appeared on the cover on their own. Some of the artists even gave their covers the title Vogue Africa, a magazine that does not currently exist but whose concept Business of Fashion made a case for over two years ago.
London concept store Koibird is dedicating the summer to designers scouted at Lagos Fashion Week and committed to a sustainable approach to African fashion, using traditional materials and craftsmanship and supporting skilled local artisans. Koibird’s selection includes Studio One Eighty Nine, which produces its hand-dyed, woven and upcycled womenswear in Ghana, Nigerian androgynous brand Orange Culture, and South African shoe maker Galago. Nataal magazine profiles other sustainable African or produced-in-Africa brands such as Thebe Magugu, Ami Doshi Shah, Anyango Mpinga, Shekudo and Brother Vellies.
And finally, Anita de Werd, Head of Marketing and Business Development at world’s leading shipping line Maersk, talks to the AfDB’s Fashionomics platform about what her company is doing to facilitate the growth of Africa’s fashion industry and “push the #MakeInAfricaForAfrica ideal”. Maersk recently launched Twill, a new freight logistics service for small and medium-sized businesses that ships cargo door-to-door over land and sea. An important service for designers seeking to develop their pan-African market as, according to expert logistics company Solistica, close to 90% of Africa’s trade is carried out by sea.
MUSIC
I have talked at length in previous editions of HUSTLE & FLOW about the opportunities presented to the African music industry by the accelerated adoption of music streaming. Justin Norman has a good expose on the topic in The Flip where he tackles “the battle for African consumers”. Some notable insights are the challenges (adjusting prices on already slim margins, cost of data, piracy, and the importance of on-the-ground distribution strategy) that African markets represent for global players such as industry leader Spotify, which still operates at a loss globally. These challenges leave some room for competition from local players with distribution strategies involving telco deals. Norman also makes a good point by referencing Disney’s famous business model in which each product and business line (Disney+ platform, movies, comic books, theme parks, merchandising, etc) works to reinforce the company’s deep relationship with its customers in a highly profitable virtuous cycle. Telcos are the obvious top dogs when it comes to adopting such an integrated model to Africa, although Norman also mentions device manufacturers like BoomPlay owner Transsion (I’m a lot less convinced by that). I’d like to offer a third contender: super apps built on top of robust mobile payment systems such as OPay, Jumia Pay or even potentially Flutterwave.
Talking about monetizing music, Pulse Ghana has a list of Africa's richest musicians which includes the estimated net worths of artists like Akon, Don Jazzy, Wizkid and Davido (no word about Tiwa Savage and Yemi Alade). I have absolutely no faith in these numbers but who doesn’t like lists? Meanwhile Burna Boy, who only gets a “notable mention” from Pulse for his net worth guesstimated at $4 million, cements his popularity on the French market as his single “Be honest” with Jorja Smith goes Platinum there. Burna Boy even tops Billboard’s list of 15 Sub-Saharan African artists based on global views, followed by Tanzanian bongo flava artist Diamond Platnumz and Davido. The Billboard article is worth reading for its analysis of the YouTube strategies of the African artists who have broken internationally as they could teach a thing or two to Western artists, according to YouTube music trends manager Kevin Meenan. Diamond Platnumz, for example, posted 600 videos in the span of a year, often following up on an official music video with a lyrics video, a dance version, a karaoke version without vocals and an animated rendering. That’s some real work right there.
SPORTS
The NGO La Guilde has announced the 13 winning microprojects of its Sports & Development program supported by Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD). The projects, which span 10 African countries and various disciplines from football to basketball, rugby, handball, triathlon and Basque pelota, will receive between 10 and 20,000 euros each to further educational, gender equality, health or environmental sustainability goals through sports. The Summer 2020 call for proposals is currently open until September 30, 2020. AFD has big ambitions to support the development of sports in Africa so we can hope to hear more from them soon.
Multichoice's SuperSport is adapting to the return of English Premier League and Spanish LaLiga matches and is warning fans that the broadcast of these matches will look and sound different from what they are used to because of the lack of live audiences. Broadcasters are expected to use virtual stands to simulate images of fans in the stadiums. On the plus side, new camera angles might now be possible from areas that would have previously obscured the action for live spectators.
And to wrap up this sports section, another aspirational list with what appears to be more solid numbers from our friends at Pulse: the richest African footballers of 2020.
BROADCAST
In South Africa, the embattled SABC has announced a switch to a new operating model called the "Target Operating Model,” which should allow it to be more financially sustainable and less reliant on government assistance. The state-owned enterprise, once a key player of the country’s television industry, embarked on a restructuring program in 2018 after admitting it was technically insolvent due to years of mismanagement.
On the other end of the spectrum, while the global broadcast industry is facing a major crisis due to the combined effect of the COVID-induced fall in advertising revenue and increased competition from VOD platforms, pan-African Pay-TV provider MultiChoice has released strong financial results for the year ending in March 2020. Its report shows a 38% growth in "core headline earnings" to $150 million and a 59% increase in consolidated free cash flow to $310 million, driven primarily by improvements from its businesses in the "Rest of Africa" (meaning outside of Multichoice’s home market of South Africa), which have in the past been a drag on the company’s revenues, and tight cost control. In total, MultiChoice reported 19,5 million subscribers across the continent, with 8,4 million in South Africa and 11,1 million in RoA. Four new local content channels were launched over the reporting period in RoA, bringing the group’s total number to 10 across the continent. The Pay-TV player aims to increase its production of local content from the 3,850 hours it achieved last year. In total, MultiChoice reported some $279 million spent on “Programme and film rights” last year, which combines money spent on local and international content including sports license rights. Although the company warned shareholders about future challenges linked to the COVID-19 and oil price crisis in several of its major markets, CEO Calvo Mawela said that the group’s healthy balance sheet “positions MultiChoice well to weather market uncertainties going forward." Also noted by industry observers was the announcement that MultiChoice had inked distribution deals with two major international SVOD providers, presumably Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, while its own SVOD service Showmax had started trialing sports content.
Meanwhile in Nigeria, the content industry was shocked by the announcement of new regulation by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) which seeks to ban content exclusivity, forcing broadcasters and platforms to sub-license their programs while also regulating license prices. IrokoTV CEO Jason Njoku immediately voiced his strong opposition to the proposed measures as they would “100% destroy PayTV in Nigeria.” For both Pay-TV services and VOD platforms, exclusive content is a major if not the main unique selling proposition to gain and retain subscribers and the motivation behind the players’ sustained investment in local films or series. NBC’s new broadcast code would directly threaten the value of such investments by compelling broadcasters and streamers to sub-license content to competitors whether or not they have recouped their initial investment. The convoluted text also stipulates that a broadcaster cannot transmit premium international sports content unless it also acquires a minimum of 30% equivalent local licencing of the same category, such as football for example. While these revisions to the broadcast code are motivated by the valid goal of providing more opportunities for smaller local channels to compete, the NBC was clearly ill-advised on how to achieve this objective - or not-at-all advised, according to industry professionals who complained about the lack of consultation. Let’s hope that the widespread outrage will lead the NBC to seek qualified counsel to review the text.
VOD
YouTube has set up a $100 million fund to help amplify black voices through new content on the platform, lining up Bear Witness, Take Action, a global conversation on racial justice hosted by Common and Keke Palmer, as the first project. No word on whether African creators will be included in this initiative, but it does not seem impossible.
Back to Nigeria, Pay-TV operator StarTimes and MTN have announced a strategic partnership which will see StarTimes offer its VOD content catalog, including live European sports streaming channels such as UEFA Europa League, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Coppa Italia, as well as blockbuster movies, cartoons, news and documentaries to MTN subscribers at reduced data rates.
And I have kept the best for last, as without a doubt the most exciting news this week has been Netflix’s groundbreaking announcement of a multi-title deal with prolific Nigerian producer Mo Abudu’s EbonyLife to create two original series including one based on Lola Shoneyin’s best-selling debut novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, as well as a film adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman and multiple branded films. One of the unnamed projects is due to premiere on the platform in 2020. The deal is the first of its kind for Netflix in Africa and speaks volumes, both about the value the platform sees in Nigerian content, and about the foresight and dedication of Mo Abudu who started investing heavily to develop original content in Nigeria before anybody else even considered it. Abudu took to Instagram to talk about the 5 year journey to acquire and adapt Death and the King’s Horseman, while Secret Lives has reportedly been in development for 3 years. I for sure will be looking forward to watching those.