Hi, Quartz Africa readers!
Let the music play
If you only watch one video this week make sure it’s the Quartz News episode on the rise of Afrobeats. Our reporter, Yomi Kazeem, explains how the sound from the streets of Lagos, Accra and beyond has spread to the US Billboard charts and London clubs and festivals to become a cultural phenomenon around the world.
Too often when we discuss pop culture moments there’s a tendency to focus on what makes it cool, the eye-catching fashion, the new dance steps, the different sound or unusual visuals. But many times a moment can have a far more prosaic driver, aside from the usual requirements of great timing and exceptional talent.
The global reach of Afrobeats has had a lot to do with the power of social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter and the innovative ways the small independent labels and artists in the early days of developing the sound jumped on these distribution platforms to share their music. This built an audience not just at home but with a growing diaspora market of first and second generation young Africans in cities like London and Atlanta.
Early on, it meant Nigerian and Ghanaian artists, with next to no promotion or marketing, had built international audiences from kids watching their videos endlessly on Vevo in the suburbs of Maryland, US or Manchester, England. Since then digital music has rapidly monetized, especially over the last five years, so those once-small labels have also been benefiting from Spotify’s rise and Apple Music—even if these services aren’t formally launched for consumers in the artists’ home markets yet.
It’s also been fascinating to see the arrival of the establishment music business keen to tap into the energy of a fast-growing pop scene. Major music companies might not be everyone’s favorites but even in a business that’s been turned on its head over the last two decades, they still wield a huge amount of power and can help develop a formal industry where more local stakeholders from songwriters to promoters to collection societies getting paid and building a lasting ecosystem.
You could argue the global rise of Afrobeats backs up the thesis behind the quote: “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.”
— Yinka Adegoke, Quartz Africa editor
Stories from this week
An Ethiopian shoe brand is going global and shows sustainable manufacturing works in Africa. Entrepreneur and 2015 Quartz Africa innovator Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu has been building a manufacturer at home in Ethiopia that aims to benefit the local economy, without exploiting local workers or the environment but selling globally. To that end it’s opened its 22nd store in Hamburg’s trendy St Pauli district. But her ambitions are much bigger she tells Lynsey Chutel.
Cameroon armed forces and separatists have the Anglophone regions on lockdown. Both Cameroon’s armed forces and militant “Ambazonia” separatists have the Anglophone regions of the central African country on lockdown as the country’s election fast approaches (see below). Reporting from Buea, in the southwest, Amindeh Blase Atabong found streets deserted as people have been fleeing to neighboring French-speaking towns.
How to stop Africa’s young scientists from leaving the continent. Research shows nearly one in three African scientists leave the continent every year. Most young African scientists leave for higher pay, better opportunities, and a conducive research environment and a new project is trying to better identify the challenges and how to address them.
If Facebook wants to beat “fake news” in Africa it needs to focus on WhatsApp. Facebook says it’s partnering with French news agency AFP and fact-checking group Africa Check to combat false stories on its news feeds in Kenya, with plans to go wider in Africa. But as Abdi Latif Dahir notes, tackling fake news on Facebook is the easy option when the real challenge is misinformation shared through Africa’s most popular app: WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook.
Twice as many African presidents attended China’s Africa forum than the UN General Assembly. A Quartz analysis shows that many more African presidents and premiers traveled to Beijing for the FOCAC China-Africa summit than to New York in September to attend for UN General Assembly. The reasons for this discrepancy are plenty but mainly point to the shifting dynamics and priorities of African governments.
Zimbabwe is broke, but mobile money is booming so the government is hiking taxes on mobile payments. Zimbabwe’s recently appointed finance minister Mthuli Ncube has been trying to figure out how to plug the troubled economy’s many fiscal holes after years of stagnation. His plan, reports Tawanda Karombo in Harare, is to significantly hike the tax on mobile money transactions, one of the few parts of the economy that has been working through a difficult few years.
Chart of the Week
The world’s biggest hotel chains are in a billion-dollar race to win Africa’s hospitality market. Africa’s growing economies and rapidly developing urban centers are proving a big draw for global hotel chains. With the continent’s hospitality space regarded as “under capacity,” several hotel corporations are devoting huge resources to driving expansion across Africa.
Other Things We Liked
Infanticide is a significant problem in Senegal. The second most common reason women are imprisoned in Senegal is for infanticide. One reason is very strict abortion laws, say local lawyers and activists. Abortion is illegal in Senegal except when the health of the mother is in danger and requires the consent of two doctors and a prosecutor. For NPR, Allyn Gaestel and Ricci Shryock met women in the West African country who have been jailed for infanticide.
Angola’s $500 million central bank heist. It all kicked off after a man walked into a London bank and asked the teller to transfer $2 million to a bank in Japan. Wall Street Journal‘s Margot Patrick, Gabriele Steinhauser and Patricia Kowsmann, investigated how $500 million went missing ($) from Angola’s central bank in the final weeks of former president José Eduardo dos Santos’s 38-year rule.
Nigeria’s golden age of creativity at home home and abroad. Up against a long-standing preference for Western products, Nigerian designers are staking a claim for attention and local market share with culture-inspired, minimalist designs Ayodeji Rotinwa highlights in Vogue. And even far beyond Nigeria’s shores, through entertainment, literature, fashion and arts, Nigerians are showcasing a golden age of creativity, writes Siddhartha Mitter in W Magazine.
China is buying African media’s silence. “I wrote about Chinese oppression in a South African paper. Hours later, they cancelled my column,” writes Azad Essa, for Foreign Policy. Essa argues China’s expansion in Africa needs clear-eyed coverage, not the distortions of the Western media’s portrayal of Chinese neo-colonizers or Chinese media’s safe description of benevolent benefactors or partners.
ICYMI
International residency for animated films. The Digital Lab Africa and NEF Animation call on African authors and animators to apply for a month-long residency in France to fully immerse themselves and develop their projects in April 2019. (Oct. 14)
The Mo Ibrahim Leadership Fellowship. The annual fellowship is designed to mentor future African leaders and place them in key institutions including the African Development Bank, International Trade Center and the UN Economic Commission for Africa. (Oct. 15)
Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship. African-born scholars living in the US or Canada and faculty of accredited tertiary institutions in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda can apply to carry out research or undertake curriculum co-development. (Dec. 9)
Keep an eye on
Cameroon goes to the polls (Oct. 7). Citizens of Cameroon will go to the polls today to elect a new president. Brookings’ Landry Signé gives an overview of what to expect on Sunday and the weeks afterwards. President Paul Biya, who has been in the role for 36 years, is running for the seventh time for another seven years in the office against eight other challengers even as the country reels from one crisis to the next.
AfriLabs Annual Gathering (Oct. 11-13). The umbrella organization for 123 hubs across 34 African nations will convene entrepreneurs, investors, corporates and academics in Dar es Salaam to discuss innovation in the data age.
*This brief was produced while listening to A beginners’ guide to Afrobeats by Quartz
Our best wishes for a productive and thought-filled week ahead. Please send any news, comments, suggestions, sustainable Ethiopian shoes and Zimbabwe mobile cash tokens to africa@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter at @qzafrica for updates throughout the day.
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