Journal
Dispatches from African creative culture.
The Informal Bank That Built Afrobeats
International capital arrived in Nigeria in 2019 and bought a proof of concept that had been running for twenty years. There was no pitch deck behind Afrobeats — only savings pots, family money, marketer advances and a Lagos market that never wrote anything down.
Africa Did Not Start Making Games in the Smartphone Era
Africa's game industry did not begin with the smartphone. A South African studio shipped a number-one game in 1996 and an Xbox title in 2002 — then the archive that should have kept them was never built. The smartphone era took the credit.
How Nigerian Music Escaped Lagos
Before streaming, a Lagos record had to leave Lagos twice — once to reach the rest of Nigeria, then to reach Africa. Both escapes were built by traders, DJs and market operators who never called it an industry. The route went global, not the talent.
Nollywood Was Already Internet Culture
Nollywood was already speaking the internet's language: short, serialised, built for a thumbnail, argued about in a forum thread. The memes were not invented online. They were compressed in a market stall first.
What Happened to Early African Web Forums?
Africa's first online communities did not die when social media arrived. They migrated, and left almost nothing behind — a thirty-year chain from Usenet to WhatsApp, and the archives that did or did not survive it.