Dear colleagues and friends,
HUSTLE & FLOW is back! Thanks for sticking around while I was otherwise occupied.
This past Saturday, June 12, was Democracy Day in Nigeria. A “demonstration of craze,” would say Fela The Oracle. Indeed, in the past month, the situation in Nigeria has become increasingly volatile, leading those who could to start enacting their “Plan B”, aka to use their Get Out of Jail free card and take off for The Abroad.
First, it was the #EndSARS protests, the worsening economic situation, the free fall of the naira, and the Central Bank’s ban on cryptocurrency trading (although there is hope on that front). Then, the shocking rise in school kidnappings and overall insecurity, and the puzzling death by suicide vest of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, a harbinger of more instability to come in the north. Out of the blue, popular yet controversial evangelical preacher TB Joshua, mysteriously departed this earth at 57 in what is either a thrilling Nollywood plot twist, an ironic Act of God, or a boss-level Plan B. Finally, last week lame duck president Muhammadu Buhari found a way to make a terrible horrible no good very bad situation worse by throwing a Trump-level tantrum and banning the use of Twitter, in one fell swoop putting Nigeria’s future as the continent’s leading tech hub and investment magnet in jeopardy.
Nigerians promptly downloaded VPNs and went back online, and a number of them were out on the streets this weekend protesting this train wreck of a situation yet again. With tensions between the government and the country’s youth at an all-time high and the next presidential elections still 18 months away, those of us invested in Nigeria’s future are bracing ourselves for a very bumpy road ahead.
Meanwhile though, the African creative industries and sports business world has continued to spin around, so much so that Quartz Africa is dedicating an entire special this week to “The Ascent of African Entertainment”. I said it first.
This week in HUSTLE & FLOW, I’ve tried to catch up with everything I’ve missed. In particular, I attempt to explain what Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) might mean for Africa and how African countries could efficiently regulate global streamers’ investment in local content. I also talk about NBA Africa’s sports business proposition, IrokoTV’s equity crowdfunding campaign, portraits of Africans in England’s history, Mr Eazi’s DMs, and African comedy clubs.
We are all looking forward to spending more time out in the world and less time in front of our screens, so HUSTLE & FLOW will move to a monthly schedule for the summer. Watch out for next editions in July and August and don’t forget that you can subscribe and catch up on previous editions at www.restless.global/hustleflow.
Happy reading and happy summer to all,
Marie
INVESTMENT NEWS
French entertainment group Mediawan, founded by prominent entrepreneurs Xavier Niel, Matthieu Pigasse and Pierre-Antoine Capton, is increasing its focus on Francophone Africa. After becoming one of the key shareholders in Molotov, a French streaming platform operating in the region, and buying out Senegalese production house Keewu and Lagardere Studios’ Africa outpost, the French group is now reportedly finalizing the purchase of a major actor in Ivory Coast, which is rumored to be Bernard Azria’s distribution and production outfit Cote Ouest Audiovisuel. Ex-Thema TV CEO Francois Thiellet, who is responsible for one of the handful of success stories in African media, having sold Thema TV to Canal+ in 2014, has been appointed to head up Mediawan’s Africa-focused division.
MOBILE
Ethiopia has awarded the first of its newly available telco licenses to the Vodafone-Vodacom-Safaricom consortium. Interestingly, the government decided not to allot the second permit straight away (despite receiving another proposal from MTN and China’s Silk Road Fund), announcing instead that it would invite fresh bids after some policy adjustments. The winning bid will see the Vodafone consortium pay $850-million for the license and commit to investing $8.5-billion over the next 10 years, creating 1.1 million jobs.
EDUCATION
Music video Pay TV group Trace has launched its free online learning platform Trace Academia. The mobile app offers vocational training, entrepreneurial courses, soft skills and well-being courses, social learning features and job information, with educational content provided by partners such as Google, Schneider Electric, the University of Johannesburg, Leroy Merlin, and Durex. Trace also announced a protocol of cooperation with Senghor University in Egypt and Agence Française de Développement (AFD) to create a training program to support the professionalization of the creative and cultural sector in Africa, thanks to a $787,000 grant from AFD.
African animation expert/distributor Mounia Aram and media teacher/consultant Patience Priso have joined forces to launch African Creative Talents (ACT), a non-profit organization that aims to open one dedicated animation and gaming school every year in a French-speaking African country to train young talent. The first school is expected to open next January in Casablanca, Morocco, offering 40 placements in a three-year course, and granting roughly 20 scholarships. ACT plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign later this month on French arts and culture platform Proarti, with the goal of raising $60,000 to go towards setting up this first location.
Meanwhile, new training opportunities for screenwriters continue to pop up across the continent, and that is a very good thing. In Cameroon, director Jean-Pierre Bekolo, book publisher Ifrikya, and the French Institute have recently completed the first edition of Scripto Sensa, a workshop program to support the adaptation of Cameroonian literary works for cinema. Among the titles chosen for adaptation is one of the first novels by the writer Amadou Djali Amal, Goncourt Prize for high school students in 2020. In Togo, La Maison Junior has kicked off its first training residency in scriptwriting of animated and fictional series, during which 10 writers from 6 countries (Burkina Faso, Senegal, Benin, Togo, Cameroon and Ivory Coast) will be working on scenarios for season 2 of Gulli’s Junior animated series and season 1 of the Junior fiction series. The Realness Institute's episodic lab with Netflix has started. And in Kenya, the Kenyan Film Commission has selected 20 scriptwriters from across the country to attend the inaugural edition of its Kalasha Writers Hub.
LITERATURE
French-Senegalese writer David Diop has won the annual International Booker prize for translated fiction for his novel At Night All Blood is Black, sharing the prize with his translator Anna Moschovakis. The book tells the story of a Senegalese soldier who descends into madness while fighting for France in the first world war.
Zimbabwean novelist, activist and prize-hoarder Tsitsi Dangarembga has been awarded the prestigious PEN Pinter Prize for her "ability to capture and communicate vital truths even amidst times of upheaval" following her protests against corruption and the arrests of prominent journalists such as Hopewell Chin'ono last year.
VISUAL ARTS
If you don’t know what Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are yet, you need to get on board, and quickly. This simple explanation can help you. NFTs give any digital item a unique digital identifier that enables ownership and transfers to be tracked on a blockchain - a system which records transactions made in cryptocurrency across a peer-to-peer network of computers (stay focused). A lot of the recent buzz has focused on applications of NFTs in digital art, which is seen as an evolution of fine art collecting. To make a very basic comparison, anyone can buy a Van Gogh print, but only one person can own the original. NFTs purport to do the same, although, yes, to the naked eye there would be no difference between an original digital piece and its copy -- the difference will be in your head, and in your wallet. So how does this apply to the African context? Well, first of all, there appears to be lots of people around with cash to spend on NFTs, so if you’re an innovative African digital artist, this may be your time. Earlier this year, Nigerian artist Jacon Osinachi sold $75,000 worth of crypto art over a ten-day period, for example. Naija no dey carry last, I’m telling you. But the most interesting aspect of NFTs is the feature that ensures that artists are paid a percentage every time the NFT is sold or changes hands - which is not the case in the traditional, physical art world today. Thanks to blockchain technology, artists can now get full transparency on secondary sales, and the ability to earn from their art in perpetuity. One can imagine that this model could eventually be applied to the real world as well. Thinking even further, this could mean that original creators or producers of not only visual art, but also of traditional products and crafts (such as African textiles) would be able to track and profit from their work, which would be a game changer for African creation. In this domain, Africa as a continent is starting off on an almost level playing field to the West, and that is exciting.
Moving from the future to the past, charity organization English Heritage has commissioned 6 prominent Black British artists to produce the portraits of 6 people from the African diaspora in England’s history. The subjects include Emperor Septimius Severus, who was born in Libya, Queen Victoria’s goddaughter Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the daughter of a west African ruler who was enslaved by King Gezo of Dahomey, and Abbot Hadrian, an African scholar in Anglo-Saxon England and the abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Kent. The paintings will be displayed at forts, abbeys, historic houses and barracks with which they have a connection.
FASHION
Ten days ago, I was in Abidjan to attend BPI France’s Inspire & Connect Africa, my first in-person business conference of the season. Besides speaking about entertainment trends alongside Françoise Remark of Canal+ Côte d’Ivoire, Alex Ogou of Plan A, and Gregoire Furrer of the Montreux Comedy Club (read on to learn about his ambitious Africa plans) and teasing the first results of my UNESCO study on Africa’s film and audiovisual sector (watch the video in French), I also had the pleasure of moderating the session on fashion. This was an opportunity to discover 3 new luxury brands led by 3 dynamic creative entrepreneurs: Sekbi Bogolan by Sekou Coulibaly, Maraz by Moustapha Sy Ndiaye, and Kente Gentlemen by Artistide Loua. Watch what they had to say (also in French) about their approach to luxury and how Africa can find its place and even lead in this competitive segment.
MUSIC
As global music labels are scrambling to get on the Afrobeats bandwagon, African artists are proving that they need no help to get things done by sliding in each other’s DMs to negotiate deals and collabs. Self-made mogul Mr Eazi discovered aspiring artist Joeboy on Instagram in 2017 and reached out directly to sign him to his emPawa Africa initiative. Another DM from Mr Eazi led to a joint track with Grammy winner Angelique Kidjo, while Kidjo in turn messaged Zambian-Botswanan rapper Sampa the Great, leading them to create several songs together. The rules of the game are changing, and the labels and other gatekeepers will have to work hard to continue to prove their value in a world where everybody is now directly connected.
SPORTS BUSINESS
The inaugural season of the highly anticipated Basketball Africa League (BAL) wrapped on May 30th with a win by 100-year-old Egyptian club Zamalek, some celebrity sightings, and no issues to report. While this was going on, the NBA announced the launch of NBA Africa, an entity that owns BAL and values the NBA’s future operations on the continent at a whopping $1 billion. Private equity firm Helios Fairfax Partners as well as Nigerian millionaire Tunde Folawiyo and former NBA players Dikembe Mutombo, Junior Bridgeman, Luol Deng, Grant Hill and Joakim Noah invested in the new entity for a combined 8% stake. The NBA will spend the cash building infrastructure such as offices, courts and stadiums and work to boost local interaction with fans and talented players. As Rwanda’s New Times writes, BAL is a strategic business proposition which endorses the potential for sports investment in Africa and, if successful, could demonstrate how other sports in the continent could thrive.
One can hope for example that the NBA’s confidence in Africa and the success of the BAL championship would inspire leaders in the world of African football, which I have in the past called a hot mess. After its inspection team released a report stating categorically that 22 of the 54 countries in Africa have no football pitch that meets international standards, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) has announced a push for a $1 billion lifeline for a wholesale revamp of football infrastructure on the continent. The money, which still needs to be raised, would go towards building at least one stadium in every country associated with the federation. These stadiums would have to meet criteria such as a minimum seating capacity of 10,000, a lawn, quality changing rooms, as well as lighting and safety devices. The few countries with stadiums up to standard are South Africa (13), Egypt and Nigeria (7), Morocco (6), Cameroon (5), Equatorial Guinea (4), and DRC, Ivory Coast, and Tunisia (one stadium each). In the meantime, the African qualifiers for the 2022 world cup were postponed until September.
Cleaning up and structuring the African football ecosystem is a tall order, but perhaps Motsepe can hack it. The South African billionaire and newly-elected President of CAF has already committed to donating $10 million through his Foundation to support the FIFA-CAF Pan-African School Football Championship launched in DRC a couple months ago. The money will be used to fund the development of schools’ football activities in the 6 CAF Zones. Qualification tournaments will be played between May and December 2021, with the finals scheduled for February 2022. The first full edition of the FIFA-CAF Pan-African School Football Championship will include all countries from the African Continent and take place between 2022 and 2023.
BROADCAST
Multichoice, which owns DStv, SuperSport, Showmax and other assets, expects to report great financial results for the year that ended on March 31st, 2021, anticipating trading profit to be between $14,8 billion (+25%) and $17,8 billion (+30%) higher than the previous year. The group mentioned strong cost controls and the embrace of new ways of working brought about by the pandemic as reasons for the growth.
VOD
Not as lucky is South African media group eMedia, which suffered a loss in 2020. The group however is going ahead with plans to launch its VOD service under the name eVOD, even closing down some non-core businesses to provide capacity for the new project.
Another struggling player is leading Nigerian platform Iroko TV, which was hit hard by the brutal devaluation of the naira among other challenges. Iroko TV is now banking on the equity crowdfunding trend to provide it with a new lifeline, while still officially pursuing plans to list on the London Stock exchange in 2022. The company announced its upcoming crowdfunding campaign on the Seedrs website, showcasing some of its assets including its social media strength. Any individual established in Europe or the UK will be able to become an Iroko shareholder for as little as 10 GBP.
Now, for the second complicated topic of the day after NFTs: Netflix is pushing back against South Africa's proposal of a local content quota included in the draft White Paper on Audio and Audio-Visual Content Services which was agreed upon in the country’s parliament in November last year. The new legislation would enforce a local content quota for all streaming services up to a maximum of 30% of the video catalogue available in South Africa which, of course, Netflix deems counterproductive. I’m afraid that this is a case of the South African regulators not knowing what the heck they’re talking about. To be fair, regulatory issues around the big global tech players’ operations in local markets are new and complex, and everybody’s been very confused about them just about everywhere. However, when it comes to the topic of global streamers’ investments in local content, a lot of work has already been cleared by the European Union and France in particular, and perhaps it would have been a good idea to study what they’ve come up with. France’s draft decree takes its inspiration from the country’s already robust set of laws protecting and supporting local creation. The core principle of the system is that those who broadcast content in France should pre-finance local content and guarantee some diversity, both in terms of the producers they work with and the content itself. The draft decree proposes for the streamers three separate rates of 20%, 22.5% or 25% (depending on the release window chosen) of their annual turnover in the country, to be reinvested in local film and series. There are other subtleties, which you can read about here, but the point is, the quota applies to the revenue the platform makes in the country and not to its entire available catalogue. South African regulators (and others), if you need help, please call me.
Finally, Ivory Coast-based startup StarNews Mobile, a hyper-local mobile video network allowing celebrities and influencers to monetize their fan bases in Africa, has announced a new partnership with Orange to deploy its service to the operator’s 150 million subscribers across 15 countries in Africa. StarNews Mobile already has a similar deal with MTN. Launched in 2017 and based on a micropayment model geared at the African mass market, StarNews Mobile has since reached a total of 11 million people with 2.4 million active users in Ivory Coast, Congo Brazzaville, Cameroon and South Africa. The startup, which has gross monthly revenues of $500,000, has raised seed investment from angel investors (including myself), African SME fund I&P, and Snapchat.
MEDIA
Leading digital media company Pulse has announced its expansion in the pan-African market with some staffing changes, new offices opening in South Africa, Ivory Coast and Uganda, and the launch of Pulse Insights, a newsletter on important trends in marketing and digital media. Pulse currently operates in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Senegal. Founded by German entrepreneur and investor Leonard Stiegeler and owned by Swiss media conglomerate Ringier, Pulse is an example of excellent execution and diversification in the tough African digital media space.
Pulse’s deep knowledge of the market will certainly serve it well as it prepares to face new competition from popular French media company Brut, which has recently announced its own expansion to Africa. Journalist and editor-in-chief Haby Niakate heads the new Brut Afrique team. The company will also be launching its streaming platform BrutX.
FILM
The Cannes Film Festival will take place from July 6 to 17 this year and, miraculously, IRL. I’m debating whether I should go - let me know if you are and that may convince me. The continent of Africa will be represented by two films in competition for the Palme d’Or: Haut et fort by Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch and Lingui by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun from Chad. Both are well established, eminent filmmakers and we wish them well, but where is the young blood?
COMEDY
According to Montreux Comedy Festival founder Gregoire Furrer, “humor is serious business”, and I agree. Furrer is now looking at expanding his activities in Francophone Africa as part of the network of comedy festivals he is building across the French-speaking world. After DYCOCO, a permanent comedy club which opened in Abidjan last December, Furrer will produce the Africa Stand Up Festival in Douala this fall, and is developing projects in DRC as well as a comedy TV series. Eventually, he also hopes to create a new festival in the Great Lakes region.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
The Chinua Achebe estate has partnered with consultants Dayo Ogunyemi of 234 media and Joe Seldner of Seldner Media to bring the legendary writer’s Chinua African trilogy —the novels Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God— to the screen. Considered one of the world’s greatest novels ever written, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart charted a new course in African literature, selling tens of millions of copies and in more than 60 languages across the world.
Orange Studios will be financing the production of female-centric thriller Tanzanite by Swiss-Rwandan filmmaker Kantarama Gahigiri. The script was written by Gahigiri and Gray Matter director Kivu Ruhorahoza, and will be co-produced by Urucu Media and Close Up Films. Tanzanite is centered on a futuristic and lawless version of Nairobi in 2045.
Meanwhile Netflix will adapt Bare: The Blesser’s Game, the debut novel of renowned South African self-published author and social activist Jackie Phamotse. The story is a true-life account of blessers and slay queens in South Africa.
PODCAST
Podcasts are the perfect tool to record and preserve Africa’s oral traditions, as illustrated by Xam sa démb, xam sa tey (“Know your past, know your present”), a podcast project that aims to make Senegalese history accessible to the youth. The product of a partnership between Senegal’s National Archives, the Goethe-Institut, and the House of Orality and Heritage, a cultural center founded by famed Senegalese storyteller Massamba Gueye, Xam sa démb, xam sa tey’s 50 episodes each tackle a different topic in Senegalese history, from the well-known slave-trading post of Gorée island, to the story of Ndate Yalla Mbooj, a Wolof queen who fought against French colonization in the mid-1800s.
GAMING
One year after closing a $2.5 million seed investment, mobile games publishing platform Carry1st has raised a $6 million Series A round from US VC firm Konvoy Ventures, League of Legends developer Riot Games, Tokyo’s Akatsuki Entertainment Technology Fund (Dragon Ball Z), Raine Ventures and fintech VC TTV Capital. Founded in 2018 by Cordel Robbin-Coker, Lucy Hoffman and Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu, like most gaming companies in Africa Carry1st started as a game studio, before smartly pivoting to become a regional publisher with the goal to open the continent to international studios. According to CEO Robbin-Coker, the company learned that “African users don’t need their own games; they want to play the best games in the world,” and adjusted its strategy in consequence. Carry1st now provides a full-stack publishing platform for studios and licenses their games on exclusive, long-term contracts, while handling localization, distribution, user acquisition, monetization, customer experience. For African studios struggling to find a business model with their own games, the publisher strategy is a solid strategy, but it is not the only one. Another option would be to partner with owners of top IP (leading sports leagues, clubs or stars, comic book publishers, Nollywood studios) to develop games based on existing properties.
ANIMATION
African animation is in the spotlight this week at the Annecy International Animation Festival, which is taking place both physically and online. Among the many other opportunities that African animators will get to shine at the festival, South African studio Triggerfish will be receiving the MIFA Industry Award and presenting its upcoming feature Seal Team, which will be voiced by an impressive cast of Hollywood heavyweights.
But the biggest animation news this week is that Garbage Boy and Trash Can has been given the green light as Cartoon Network Africa's first local animated series. The 10 x 2’5 series, which was created by Nigerian animator Ridwan Moshood and developed with Baboon Animation’s Mike de Seve and African Animation Network’s Nick Wilson, is currently in production and set to premiere in 2022. Ridwan Moshood is one of the most impressive animation talents on the continent and he is firmly on his way to become a global superstar. Consider this another official HUSTLE & FLOW prediction and you can call me out on it in a couple years.
And finally, YouTube Originals Kids and Family has ordered a second season of animated series Super Sema produced by Kenyan outfit Kukua. Made by an all-female team and executive produced and voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, the show is about a young superhero girl called Sema and her adventures saving the world using her STEM skills.
