“My philosophy in life is this, and I do say this to a lot of people: life is what happens when you’re busy making plans. I had a lifetime of ‘yes.’ I never said no to anything.”

Moky Makura has done a lot: publicist, TV anchor, actress, author, book publisher, communications executive, scriptwriter, and media entrepreneur. Today, she runs Africa No Filter, an organisation dedicated to shifting how the world tells the African story. Looking back, where she has ended up feels almost inevitable. But it wasn’t always like that. It was brute force, driven by sheer will, a refusal to be left behind, and an instinct to seize every opportunity that came her way.

Makura was born in Lagos and spent the first nine years of her life riding bicycles and roller skates through the streets of Ikoyi. “I had a very simple but nice childhood. We used to roam the streets; It was a very idyllic childhood, which doesn’t exist anymore.” Her father raised her to think for herself, to be assertive, and to form her own opinions. “My dad used to treat me like a little adult. So we’d talk about things, and he’d explain things to me.”

By the time she was nine, her older brother was heading to England for secondary school. She decided she was going too. “I was young. I wanted to go because my brother was going. You know, youngest children, sometimes you don’t see why you can’t do things.” The family could afford it, so she got her way. She was placed two classes ahead of her age group, which made the academics harder than they needed to be, mostly because she wasn’t putting in the effort. But boarding school itself suited her perfectly. “Not every child fits into boarding school. I did. I enjoyed it. I stopped missing home quite quickly.”

The one thing that didn’t fit was authority. Being told what to do without being told why didn’t sit well with her. “You couldn’t just tell me something, you have to explain why.” That quality, the refusal to simply comply, would follow her everywhere.

When it was time for university, she chose Buckingham University specifically because it had the highest concentration of Nigerians. The consequence was that the law course she wanted was full, so she ended up doing a mix of Politics, Economics, and Law instead. She graduated with honours and stepped into the job market just as her family circumstances changed significantly. Her father had died, and the family’s money had thinned. If she was going to stay in the UK, she needed a job quickly.

She found her answer in media sales, and it turned out to be the most important first job she could have had. “If you don’t have any money to take a course and you really want to be successful, learn how to sell. It is the best skill set you can have.” She came to believe that selling was at the core of almost everything. “In life, we’re always selling something. I’m selling an idea right now — I’m selling myself to you. Sometimes you’re pitching an idea. People don’t understand that there is sales in everything.”

From media sales, she moved into public relations, recognising it quickly as the same skill in different clothing. “PR people don’t call themselves salespeople, but they’re essentially selling.” She freelanced, then joined an agency, then another. She was good at the work. But she noticed something that bothered her. Promotions weren’t going to the most capable people. They were going to the most connected ones. “I realised that it wasn’t about your capabilities, your knowledge, your expertise, it really was about your connections.”

She decided she wanted to go somewhere her network would actually work for her. Nigeria seemed like the obvious answer, but the timing was bad, the country was under military rule, and her mother warned her off. “Why are you coming back? Now’s not a good time.” So she looked elsewhere. A magazine feature on successful Black women in marketing and communications in South Africa provided a blueprint for her. And even though she did not know anyone in the country, she booked a ticket there anyway.

South Africa brought its own turbulence. When a new job in Cape Town fell apart over a work permit, she drove the eleven hours back to Johannesburg alone, setting off before dawn, watching the sun rise over the flat, dead-straight road through the Karoo. “I remember just thinking: I will never ever let anybody else be responsible for my own destiny.” By the time she arrived, she had made up her mind to start her own business

She set up a PR agency and got her first client the same way she had learned to get everything, by selling. She cold-called an exhibitor whose ad she had spotted in a newspaper. He was taking an exhibition to Nigeria. She told him she had a PR agency there. She didn’t. But by the time the call ended, she had found one she could partner with, put together a proposal, and won the business. She worked with that exhibitor for the next three years.

She eventually sold the agency to the advertising group FCB in 2001, who then employed her to keep running it, retaining both the network she’d built and the freedom she’d been after. But she wasn’t done expanding “I didn’t want to just do PR in South Africa. I wanted to do PR across Africa. Because the gap I saw was that people wanted a one-stop shop. If you wanted to do advertising in 20 countries, you could go to one advertising agency. Nobody was offering that in PR, at least not from South Africa.”

What followed looked, from the outside, like a series of unrelated detours. She joined Carte Blanche, South Africa’s flagship investigative journalism programme, as a Nigerian presenter. She hosted a 26-part marketing show on Summit TV. She acted in the lead role in MNet’s pan-African drama Jacob’s Cross. She co-produced Living It, a lifestyle series about wealthy Africans. She wrote Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs, which launched with a foreword by Richard Branson and made the bestseller list in South Africa. She started a publishing imprint, MME Media. She created Nollybooks, a fiction series aimed at getting young Africans to read, and later adapted it for television, co-producing over 20 movies for eTV.

In a 2012 TED Talk, she explained the thread running through it all. It was about finding the other stories, the ones that didn’t make it onto the international news, the ones that looked more like the Africa she actually knew. But that tension, between the continent’s actual complexity and its flattened global image, had been with her since 1985 when she watched Live Aid Concert.

“I remember watching the concert, Queen, all these stars singing ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, and all these images of Ethiopia, the famine, were flashed up on the screen. And there was a moment when I realised: but hold on, this is not the Africa I grew up in.”

The Africa she knew was Ikoyi, bicycles, roller skates, and an idyllic childhood. Nobody was coming to save them. The gap between those two realities became the animating force of everything that followed. She was always trying to close it. She just didn’t have the words for it yet. The phrase, she would eventually learn, was narrative change.

She returned to Nigeria to work for Tony Elumelu as head of marketing communications, something she had long wanted to do. But Nigeria proved harder than she had expected, and after some time she returned to South Africa, this time joining the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as deputy director for communications in Africa. It was there that a project landed on her desk: an initiative called Africa No Filter. She loved it immediately. It was exactly what she had been doing her whole career. But there was no budget for it at the foundation, so she had to let it go.

Although the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation could not back Africa No Filter, the initiative secured funding from a consortium of investors, including the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg, the Mellon Foundation, Luminate, and the Open Society Foundation, among others. Not long after, a friend sent Makura a job listing. Africa No Filter was looking for an executive director. “The shoe just fit. Everything about my career, every skill set I have, had set me up for the job.”

Since 2020, Makura has been the Executive Director, leading an organisation that funds storytellers, journalists, and creatives working to change how the world sees the continent. For now, it is where she intends to stay, for as long as the work continues. The only thing that might pull her away is something she quietly thinks about: doing something like this specifically for Nigeria. “If there was something I was called on to do for Nigeria,” she says, “then yeah, I would absolutely put this on hold to do that.”

There is a particular kind of person whose story only makes sense in hindsight. Someone whose choices look scattered until, suddenly, they don’t. Makura is that kind of person. The publicist, the actress, the author, the entrepreneur. Each role was preparation. And now, sitting at the head of an organisation built entirely around the idea that Africa’s story deserves to be told better, she is exactly where all of it was pointing. She just had to get there her own way.

“I’d come home broken, covered in dirt, my uniform ruined. But I remember how it felt to make money. I got my first taste of financial independence through that, but also I had a taste of real life.”

Andile Masuku doesn’t fit into neat boxes, which makes his story hard to write. Maybe it’s because he never sits around waiting for opportunities; he hunts them down. At 17, while waiting for his O-level results, he was already pestering his mother to find him work.

She delivered. A family friend owned a large Spar supermarket and agreed to hire him, but warned he’d get no special treatment. He didn’t. Masuku worked 7 am to 7 pm shifts in the butchery, making sausages, packing bags, and hauling stock. He came home exhausted, uniform dirty, body aching. “It was beautiful work. It was honest work,” he says now.

That first taste of financial independence taught him lessons that still guide how he moves through the world. Today, he juggles journalism, publishing, consulting, and strategy. He’s a podcaster, editor, and advisor. But to him, these aren’t separate identities; they’re all pieces of the same puzzle. Before all that, though, there was just a curious kid who wanted to explore.

Masuku was born in Zimbabwe four years after independence to parents who were both educators. His father was a pastor and theologian; his mother started as a primary school teacher and eventually became a headmistress. “Both of whom, by the time they retired, were academics. They both retired as faculty deans,” he said to Communique.

His childhood was comfortable. He credits his Montessori preschool education with shaping his approach to learning and entrepreneurship. “Montessori preschool is unstructured learning and play that really sets you up to become an independent explorer in the world.” That independence got tested early. When Masuku was in Grade 3, his parents decided to advance their studies and moved the family to the Philippines. His father was pursuing a PhD in theology; his mother was earning her first degree after years of teaching with just a teaching diploma. Those three years were rough. According to local records, they were the only Zimbabwean family legally registered in the country. Masuku and his brother were the only Africans in their international school. “This is before the internet,” he points out. “People just think Africa is one big jungle, or one big desert. People tease you about your skin, and they’re touching your hair. The weather is different, the food is different, everything’s different.”

Masuku remembers those years as the most traumatic three years of his childhood. But they also taught him something valuable: how to be the only one in the room and still function. When the family returned to Zimbabwe, Masuku finished his secondary education at a church school. That’s where his relationship with performance took root. He sang, led a choir, took music lessons, and regularly spoke at church activities. “Speaking publicly was a very big part of school life in that school. And I took to it very well.”

This is remarkable, considering Masuku was born with what he describes as “a debilitating speech impediment.”

For university, Masuku enrolled at Helderberg College in South Africa’s Western Cape to study business management, a compromise with his father, who had initially pushed for accounting. “If I had been left to my own devices, I would have studied either music, advertising, or marketing,” Masuku says. But his father had concerns about all three. Music? “You’ll never make a livelihood.” Advertising? It had a reputation for loose morals. Marketing? “The marketer never rests.” Accounting was Masuku’s worst subject in high school; it was the only C on his report card. Still, his father insisted on business studies.

Helderberg ran on the American credit system, which meant Masuku could supplement his required business courses with electives from other departments. “I was able to supplement the stuff I hated, which is the business stuff, with media evaluation, psychology, sociology, history of earth and life. I was able to take theology courses.” He befriended the media studies lecturers and would skip his own classes (with permission) to join their field trips. One trip to the South African Broadcasting Corporation changed everything. He got a few moments on air with a famous DJ, and something clicked.

“I [needed] to get into voiceover work. Somehow, I was going to make my way into radio and broadcasting.” He spent the rest of that visit collecting phone numbers, then called them all from the payphone back at his dormitory. Everyone said no, except for one receptionist who, just before hanging up, mentioned two agents starting their own agency. She thought they should hear him. “I told her, I will not leave this phone until you call me back,” Masuku recalls. She called back and made the introduction. They asked Masuku to come for an audition.

He scraped together money from his student job at Subway to record a demo tape, wrote his own scripts for fictional bank ads, and showed up with nothing but raw talent. They played the first seconds of his clips. He braced for rejection. “And then they’re like, all right, cool. We’ll work with you.”

His first voiceover job came a few months later.

By graduation, Masuku had a small voiceover portfolio and some TV presenting experience from a Christian station that had set up on campus. But his path after university wasn’t straight. He taught briefly at a private school that had promised to help with his work permit, but then changed its mind. Next, he talked his way into a job at a high-fashion brand, literally approaching the founders at an airport after recognising them from a university economics paper he’d written about their export success. That job got him a work permit and taught him about retail, brand management, and working with international partners. But when the relationship with his employers soured, no new job materialised.

“If you spoke to me, then I would have told you that I chose entrepreneurship, but that’s not true. I stumbled into it,” Masuku admits. “If I didn’t figure something out, I’d have to go back to Zimbabwe.” With Zimbabwe’s economy already declining, that wasn’t appealing. So he registered his company and started putting himself out there for freelance gigs. Eventually, he landed representation with one of Johannesburg’s top talent agencies.

His voiceover career took off. At its peak, he was doing three to six recording sessions per week and became one of the early voices of Showmax’s ads. He also landed a TV presenting gig for a business advice show that ran for four years. Then the show got cancelled abruptly. He assumed other opportunities would follow. “I felt like such a big deal. I thought there’d be a line out the door waiting to work with me. Nobody was waiting for me.”

Humbled, Masuku ended up volunteering at a new community radio station. That’s where DJ Ian Fraser lent him a broadcast-quality Sennheiser microphone and introduced him to NPR-style storytelling. Inspired, Masuku started creating his own 15-minute audio stories, mostly business case studies. He published them on SoundCloud, but they didn’t gain traction. After running out of money, he stopped.

Five years later, BBC Outlook editor Munazza Khan discovered those old podcasts and started asking colleagues if they knew who made them. One person she asked was Kim Chakanetsa, a Zimbabwean broadcaster at the BBC who already knew Masuku from his tech writing for BBC Africa.

When Masuku later travelled to London, Chakanetsa met him in the BBC lobby and gave him a full tour, introducing him to colleagues as someone they’d be working with—before he even signed any deal. Khan called shortly after and offered him work. Masuku spent roughly a year as a near-permanent freelancer for Outlook, which reaches up to 100 million listeners globally. One of his most memorable pieces was about a Syrian refugee love story that started with a resume.

Around this same period, Masuku was four years into building African Tech Roundup. It started as a podcast partnership with the late Tefo Mohapi, who ran iAfrican, a tech publication popular among ICT professionals. The pitch was simple: Mohapi would provide the audience and technical infrastructure; Masuku would handle the broadcasting. About 100 episodes in, consulting inquiries started coming, the first from a Dutch venture capital firm. As the platform’s ambitions grew, Mohapi grew uncomfortable with the expansion beyond podcasting. The partners split, and per their agreement, the property went entirely to Masuku. His second co-founder, Musa Kalenga, joined about a year later.

More than a decade later, African Tech Roundup continues. Masuku’s Spar experience shows up here: he’s interested in the intersection between Africa’s digital economy and what he calls the “real economy”, where people “work, play, subsist, build lives, raise families.” “There’s a lot of aspects of that [digital] economy that are also imaginary—projections of what people want the future to be, or what they want their valuation to be,” he explains.

Today, Masuku splits his time between what he calls “creator journalism” and independent consulting. His newest venture is Future in the Humanities, a digital publication linked to the University of the Witwatersrand’s Digital Humanities Chair, where he serves as both executive editor and strategic advisor.

As part of that role, he coaches academics to translate complex research into public-facing writing, connecting specialists with live newsrooms. Recently, he helped an AI governance expert publish an op-ed in Business Day, South Africa’s equivalent of the Wall Street Journal.

Despite his apparent strategic thinking, Masuku resists taking credit for his career trajectory. He points back to that speech impediment that mysteriously disappeared, the chance encounters, the timing of opportunities. “I can’t sit here and say, I’m making it, I did it, no, I can’t do that,” he reflects. “I’m cooperating with providence and trying to steward the gifts and opportunities I’ve been given.”

“At some point, I thought I was going to be one of the best African writers.”

Jennifer Ochieng says this without hesitation. It is a memory of a very specific kind of ambition, one that shaped how she saw the world long before she found her place in it. Today, she is one of the East African film industry’s most important figures. With Sinema Focus, she has built something that didn’t exist before. In doing so, she’s quietly become a custodian of African storytelling, shaping how stories are told, received, and remembered across East Africa.

However, this might not have been a possibility without an almost unreasonable appetite for stories since childhood. Growing up, storytelling was a huge part of Ochieng’s life. She took every opportunity to consume them, from books to soap operas. “I was also such a fan of television. In every Kenyan household, you will find kids gathered around, and even for shows that were not allowed to be watched in African households, for example, The Bold and the Beautiful. And I remember just hiding behind a couch to watch it.”

She soon began to write. Thanks to school assignments, she had to write in both English and Swahili, and she really enjoyed doing both. By the time she finished secondary school, she was editing the school’s student magazine.

With an interest already formed, she pursued a degree in Journalism and Communications at the university. While there, she ran the magazine and kept a blog, one she has since made private and insists will never see the light of day again. It was a poetry and television blog. The poetry, she says, is why the blog stays buried, but for the most part, it was a place for her to write reviews of local and international shows she watched. Game of Thrones got a great deal of her attention. So did the wave of Kenyan productions that began appearing on local screens in the late 2010s. In these years, films like Nairobi Half Life and a generation of local TV shows started displacing the steady diet of American and Mexican content that had defined her younger years.

That was when something clicked. “I started to see that you can translate what happens in books to [the] screen,” she says. It changed how she thought about storytelling. It wasn’t just about writing stories to be read. Those stories could be visual. So she started writing scripts. None of them got produced. But that wasn’t the point. What mattered was the instinct behind them; the belief that local stories deserved to be told, and told well. Still, even as that interest grew, she knew one thing clearly. She did not want a newsroom. “I didn’t want to be on TV reading the news,” she says. “I wanted to do something more interesting.” She had studied broadcast journalism mostly as a container for ambitions, but now those ambitions were spilling over.

After university, like many young graduates, she took on different kinds of work. SEO writing. Academic writing. Freelance gigs. Anything that paid. Her first proper job came at a small magazine serving expatriate communities in Nairobi. It was a small operation. She was both the writer and the editor.

Then came MultiChoice. It started as a three-month freelance gig covering for someone on maternity leave. But Ochieng stayed for three years. She worked as a communications specialist in the digital department, managing the DStv and GOtv digital presence across East African markets such as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, interviewing actors and musicians, and writing stories that brought content on those platforms to life. It was during this time that she worked for Coke Studio Africa.

From MultiChoice, she moved to Showmax, where she focused on publicity. And it was there, managing campaigns for one of the continent’s most ambitious streaming platforms, that her real education began. Her most vivid memory from that period is not a triumph but a trial: The Real Housewives of Nairobi, a show that she describes as “a monster,” a chaos of difficult personalities and relentless scandal management that she would not trade for anything. “It was one thing after another,” she says. “But I usually say it’s my best campaign.”

It was during her time at Showmax that she began to notice something that would change everything. As a publicist, she worked closely with journalists, sending out press releases, pitching stories, and following up. Over time, a pattern became clear. Many journalists would take the press release and publish it almost exactly as it was. “No context, no interrogation.” At the same time, the industry itself was growing. More films. More shows. More talent. But the coverage did not reflect that growth. It was thin, surface-level, and largely missing the bigger picture. “No one was contextualising the industry and providing in-depth, incisive coverage.”

There was another problem, too. Data. “There was no data,” she says. “Filmmakers were moving blind.” No reliable box office numbers. No benchmarks. No way for investors or creators to properly understand the market. From where she sat, the gap was obvious. And she was in a position to do something about it. Ochieng had something few journalists had: access. She was already inside the industry rooms. She knew the actors, the filmmakers, and the deal-makers. Her calls got returned. And she could write. So one day, she opened an Instagram page, an X (formerly Twitter) account, a Facebook page, and started sharing. That was the beginning of Sinema Focus.

The social media pages grew quickly. People were hungry for exactly what Ochieng was offering: informed, insider-adjacent coverage of an industry that had been talked about in broad strokes for too long. This demand grew so big that she knew the social media pages weren’t going to be enough. She needed a website.

“I think at some point along the way, I was like, this can be bigger than what it is. And then I started building the website in the back end. The social pages were still doing their thing. I got someone to help. I started building the website, shaping it the way I wanted to.”

As she was doing this, she also began recruiting writers, building a team to help her do the work she wanted. So while the website was being built, the team was writing stories.

By the time the Sinema Focus website officially went live in October 2023, it already had a body of work behind it. And from the beginning, the mission was clear. “You cannot build an industry by always being nice,” she says. “You have to interrogate it.” Sinema Focus would not just celebrate the industry. It would question it. Challenge it. Hold it accountable. At the same time, it would also do the other half of the work: spotlighting filmmakers, telling their stories properly, and giving them the depth of coverage they deserved.

As Sinema Focus grew, so did its ambition. In December 2024, Sinema Focus became part of something larger. Ochieng helped launch the African Film Press, an alliance of three film journalism platforms spanning the continent. Together with Nigerian-focused What Kept Me Up and pan-African-leaning Akoroko, the alliance is a coordinated, continent-wide infrastructure for serious African film journalism. They launched the AFP Critics Prize in 2024 at the Surreal 16 festival, with the intention of extending it to other festivals across the continent.

But Ochieng is clear-eyed about the longer road. West Africa and East Africa are now covered. Southern Africa, Francophone Africa, and North Africa remain. The work of truly mapping the continent’s film culture is only beginning.

There is another gap that preoccupies her just as much: data. As she said, East African filmmakers are “moving blind.” Box office tracking is minimal. Nobody is aggregating the numbers that would allow a filmmaker to benchmark their theatrical release, or an investor to assess the market with any confidence. The Kenya Film Commission is not collecting this data. The Kenya Film Classification Board is not doing it. So Sinema Focus intends to.

“If no one is going to do that work, then we’re here,” she says. The goal is to produce the kind of industry data that feeds back into Sinema Focus’s editorial arm, informs filmmakers’ decisions, and gives investors the baseline they currently lack. It is, she believes, the most important work the platform can do, not just reporting on the industry, but actively providing the infrastructure that makes a healthier industry possible.

In August 2024, Ochieng stepped away from her publicity role at Showmax to focus full-time on Sinema Focus. The platform is expanding its East African coverage, actively growing its presence in Uganda and Rwanda, and looking toward Tanzania and Ethiopia.

On a personal level, she has not abandoned the older dreams. The scripts are still in the notes app. She still wants to write them. But to do that, she needs time, and for now, Sinema Focus takes up all of it.

“Every time people ask me, how did you start Noisy Streetss? I wish I had a more serious answer. But it started because of a boy band.”

Modupe Daramola is the CEO and founder of Noisy Streetss, a genuinely unusual organism in the African literary ecosystem. It is part publisher, part agency, part cultural lab. Its latest imprint, Ponmo is a Bird That Has No Place in a Cultured Culinary Sky & Other Stories, carries a title so audacious that it immediately raises a question: what kind of publisher would name a book like this? The answer lies in the unlikely way the company itself came into existence.

Much of Daramola’s story begins in Abeokuta, Ogun State, a city long associated with Nigeria’s literary and artistic tradition. But the deeper influence came from inside her home. Her mother, an obsessive reader, with shelves packed with romance and literary fiction, from Jane Austen to Nora Roberts. “My goal was to have as many books as my mom had,” Daramola recalls. “[She] had thousands of books in her room. She was constantly reading.”

Watching her mother disappear into novels taught her the pleasure of reading at an early age. But another influence helped turn that love into creative ambition: the novelist Yejide Kilanko, Daramola’s godmother and a close friend of her mother. Kilanko’s presence made writing feel real and attainable. Daramola likes to claim that one of the characters in Kilanko’s novel Daughters Who Walk This Path was named after her.

If her mother cultivated her love of books, Kilanko showed her that creating them was possible. By the age of twelve, Daramola had written her first manuscript and sent it to Kilanko for feedback. Another manuscript followed, then another. “I was constantly creating when I was a child,” she says. Yet the books she grew up reading were overwhelmingly Western. She attended a school with a British curriculum and spent much of her formative years immersed in European and American literary canons. African stories were largely absent.

Her parents, like so many Nigerian families before them, looked at a daughter who read a lot, argued, and wrote, and reached the logical conclusion that she should study Law. She didn’t resist. “Even though I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t think it would ever be something I’d ever do in my life. I thought I would just be like my auntie [godmother, Kilanko], in that I write a couple of books, but my main job is actually to be a lawyer.”

She enrolled at Durham University in the United Kingdom, where she planned to pursue a career in human rights and access to justice. Writing, however, refused to disappear. During her first year, she started a blog where she wrote legal commentary on trending issues alongside broader cultural observations. She was also surrounded by a circle of poets and writers who contributed to anthologies and literary projects. In retrospect, she was already living in a literary world; she simply hadn’t accepted it yet. Then the pandemic arrived in 2020.

Daramola had planned to move to London after she graduated and become a barrister. Instead, she was trapped in her apartment with nothing to do but surf the internet. It was during this time that she fell into a YouTube rabbit hole and emerged as an “Army,” a devotee of the Korean boy band BTS.

The band’s leader, Kim Namjoon, is well known for being a reader and an art-inclined person. If she ever met him, she reasoned, she needed something impressive to show for herself. So she gathered her friends on a call and posed the question: What talent could she develop quickly enough to impress a K-pop star? After ruling out singing and photography, a friend reminded her of the old blog. At the time, she wasn’t actively running it. She stopped in her final year on campus to focus on schoolwork.

“One day, what if he reads your blog and reaches out: I love your writing, let’s be together?” the friend said. And so, in December 2020, she relaunched the blog—renamed Noisy Streetss to impress Kim Namjoon.

She laughs as she tells the story now. But she also insists on its importance. “I did not have a deep motivator,” she says. “It was because I liked a boy.” What matters, she argues, is whether the thing you start takes on a life beyond its origin. Noisy Streetss did. Not long after relaunching, Daramola moved back to Nigeria for law school at her parents’ insistence, but kept running the blog, writing social commentary, film and music reviews, and posting occasional photography.

When the law school workload made it impossible for her to write on her own, and she didn’t want to quit the blog because of the Namjoon dream, she opened the blog to other writers. “I invited writers to submit stories to a thing called Love in the New Millennium. They weren’t even paid. All were volunteers, because I didn’t have any money.” That was the first-ever call for submissions on Noisy Streetss.

After completing law school, Daramola faced another crossroads. Her parents wanted her to return to the UK for a master’s degree. Reluctantly, she negotiated for more time in Nigeria. During that period, she joined the legal counsel’s office at Chapel Hill Denham, one of Nigeria’s leading investment firms, initially as an intern. She was later offered a role on the company’s finance team. The move to finance was a bid to buy more time. “I had started to enjoy Lagos and the work I was doing with Noisy Streetss, but I didn’t fully understand yet how big it could become.”

Meanwhile, the platform was evolving. Living in Lagos forced Daramola to rethink the direction of Noisy Streetss. Her original plan had been to build a UK-focused publication, partly because she believed it would offer quicker credibility and easier access to audiences. But being back in Nigeria changed her perspective. She began to notice how few platforms existed where young Nigerians could publish essays, stories or commentary without conforming to established expectations about what African writing should look like.

One early experiment was inspired by the popular podcast Modern Love, which features personal essays about relationships. Daramola wondered why there was no equivalent centred on African experiences. The result was Love Boat, a podcast telling African love stories.

Gradually, Noisy Streetss moved from being a Western-facing blog to a platform dedicated to Nigerian and eventually African voices.

Another turning point arrived in late 2021 during Lagos’s annual end-of-year cultural explosion known as Detty December. Watching the wave of concerts, parties, art shows and social gatherings unfold, Daramola felt a growing sense of urgency. “This thing happening in front of me is a cultural phenomenon,” she remembers thinking. “How do we archive it?” She put out a call for love stories set during that season. The submissions became the Love in Detty December anthology. The latest book, Ponmo is a Bird That Has No Place in a Cultured Culinary Sky & Other Stories, collects some of the strongest pieces from the series’s first three editions.

The move into publishing happened almost accidentally. During an editorial meeting, one of the Noisy Streetss editors expressed excitement about a group of submissions and wondered aloud whether they could become a book. Daramola paused.“What’s the hurdle?” she asked herself.

She began learning how publishing works, experimenting with digital tools, and researching practical steps, such as obtaining an ISBN. One article explaining the process helped demystify it enough for her to try. Soon after, Noisy Streetss released its first print anthology, A Man and a Woman and Other Stories.

Each project strengthened Daramola’s conviction that the venture deserved her full attention.

“My heart had grown so much to accommodate Noisy Streetss,” she says. “It went beyond doing something for Kim Namjoon and BTS. It became something I wanted to give to other people.”

In late 2022, she decided to focus on the venture full-time. The decision was met with some opposition from her parents, but they have gradually become supportive.

In December 2024, she formally registered Noisy Streetss as a publishing company. Her legal and finance training, which she once viewed as detours, had become unexpectedly useful. “Everything came together,” she says. “That’s why I always say you eventually get your way, by the grace of God.” Today, the company deliberately seeks out stories that challenge narrow definitions of African storytelling. Its catalogue includes fiction, essays and poetry that explore contemporary life in ways that feel fresh, strange or unapologetically specific.

Daramola insists that the goal is not to make African stories legible to Western audiences. Instead, the focus is on writing for Africans first. She often points to Korean film and television as an example. Those industries rarely dilute their cultural specificity for international viewers, yet their work travels globally. “People love K-dramas because they’re authentic. They’re not trying to explain themselves to anybody.” That is the future she imagines for Noisy Streetss: stories rooted so deeply in African realities that their specificity becomes their universal appeal.

Daramola still listens to BTS. Kim Namjoon remains her favourite member of the group. But what began as a fan’s playful motivation has evolved into something much larger, a restless drive to publish, amplify and circulate African stories wherever readers might be found.

The boy band, it turns out, was simply the door. The work on the other side had been waiting for her all along.

“When I drafted contracts, there would be corrections. And I would feel a type of way about not knowing things. So after work, I would stay back and read through old contracts to see how things were done.”

Nky Ofeimun describes her early days as a rookie legal executive in EbonyLife’s legal department. At the time, she was still learning the ropes of entertainment law, trying to understand the complex contracts and agreements that shape the business of film and television.

Seven years later, she has become one of the leading legal and strategy operators working in Nigeria’s film industry. But the path to that position did not begin in a law office or a film studio. It began with stories.

Ofeimun grew up in Port Harcourt as the first child and first daughter in her family. Her mother was a doctor, and her father an accountant who later became a businessman. Their household placed a strong emphasis on education. At home, her parents organised spelling competitions for their children. It was partly an exercise in learning and a way to keep them engaged.

Even as a child, she had a natural flair for language. She liked to write and was known among her classmates for telling stories. Reading was also a big part of her early life. Like many Nigerian children of her generation, she spent hours reading the adventure stories of British author Enid Blyton. By the time she reached secondary school in Enugu, writing had already become part of her identity. She joined the press club and continued experimenting with short stories. Naturally, she began to imagine a future as a writer.

But Nigerian parents tend to prefer more predictable careers for their children. When the time came to choose a course of study, her parents encouraged her to consider something more practical. “My parents said, ‘You’re good at English, and you can always write stories. Maybe go study Law. There are lawyers who write.’”

So she chose Law and enrolled at the University of Benin. Ofeimun arrived at the university unsure of what kind of lawyer she wanted to become. So she leaned on what she already knew—writing.

Alongside a group of fellow law students, she helped create a blog called Legal Watchmen. The site was essentially an informal publication for law students to explore legal topics, campus issues, and ideas that interested them. At the same time, she found other outlets for her writing. During her time in law school, she began sending short fiction pieces to BellaNaija. Sometimes the site published them, sometimes they did not. But the process allowed her to keep her creative instincts alive while in school.

After graduating from the university and attending the Nigerian Law School, Ofeimun was still not sure what she wanted to do with her legal career. But clarity came when she attended a conference focused on entertainment law. The event brought together lawyers, music executives, and media companies working within Nigeria’s creative industries. For her, the conference was eye-opening.

Up until then, entertainment law had not seemed like a realistic career path. But at the conference, she encountered several law firms and professionals working in the space. One person stood out in particular: Tomi Edwards, who at the time headed EbonyLife’s legal department. “She was quite young. I didn’t realise this was like a career option. And here was someone within my age bracket doing it. She sounded really smart, and I decided this is what I want to do.” She decided to pursue Entertainment Law.

Around that time, she had already begun working with The Wedding Channel, a niche television platform focused on wedding-related content. Initially, the job had little to do with law. She had first encountered the company through an Instagram ad seeking writers. When she eventually joined, the work was closer to executive assistance: preparing presentations, supporting operations, and assisting the small team running the channel. But once she began focusing on entertainment law, the company started sending legal work her way. “They gave me contracts to draft,” she says. “That was really my first actual foray into entertainment law.” It would not be long before a much larger opportunity would appear.

In 2019, Ofeimun joined EbonyLife as a legal executive, working directly under Tomi Edwards, the lawyer she had admired at the entertainment law conference. At the time, EbonyLife was one of the most structured media companies in Nigeria. Founded by media mogul Mo Abudu, the company operated a television network, produced films and television series, and was beginning to form partnerships with international studios and streaming platforms. For a young lawyer trying to understand the industry, it was the perfect training ground.

The legal department handled everything from film production contracts and distribution deals to partnerships with international studios. It was also an opportune time as global streaming platforms were beginning to take a serious interest in Nigerian content. “Netflix came in with their own standards and how they had to do things, and you could see that there was a different level of experience that was required. And because a lot of these deals were confidential, and it was the first time anything like it was being done in Nigeria, there was really nobody you could ask. So it was a lot of reading and figuring out stuff.” The learning curve was steep. But Ofeimun approached it with the discipline she had developed early in her career.

Over the next four years, she worked on a wide range of projects, including Òlòtūré and Blood Sisters. EbonyLife partnered with global companies including Sony, Amazon, and Netflix. She also worked on the legal agreements that supported EbonyLife Place, the company’s entertainment complex in Lagos. By 2022, she had risen to become the head of legal.

But by then she was already thinking about what came next. The experience at EbonyLife had given Ofeimun deep exposure to the business of film and television. She had negotiated deals, worked with international partners and managed the legal framework behind major productions. But she wanted to move closer to the industry’s strategic and operational sides.

“As far as Ebony Life went, I kind of knew everything that there was to know [about] entertainment law. And I wanted to now kind of explore what it would be like on the operational side of things rather than just being in legal advisory.” So she left EbonyLife and joined Papaya Studios.

Papaya was a different kind of organisation. Instead of simply producing films, it also helped finance and develop them. That meant the team had to decide which projects deserved investment. And that required everyone, including the legal team, to participate in creative and strategic discussions. “Papaya was a very heads-together kind of space. Everyone had to participate in reviewing scripts, looking at what it would look like to produce and market a film before we funded it.” For Ofeimun, this was the operational exposure she had been looking for.

She also became involved with Circuits, a streaming platform connected to the Papaya ecosystem. She worked on preparing the platform for launch and eventually served as its project manager after it went live. The role broadened her understanding of how technology, distribution, and content intersect in the modern film industry.

After several years moving between legal, strategic, and operational roles, Ofeimun began asking a bigger question: what kind of infrastructure does the Nigerian film industry still need? Her answer to that question is Backlots, a company that provides production support services for filmmakers.

Backlot works across several areas of the filmmaking process. One of its core functions is business affairs, helping filmmakers structure deals, navigate contracts and manage the legal aspects of production, particularly when working with international partners. But the company also tackles another often overlooked area: marketing.

Ofeimun believes many Nigerian independent films struggle to travel globally, not because the stories are weak, but because the surrounding infrastructure, marketing strategy, and packaging often fail to present them effectively. Backlots, therefore, works on marketing strategy and other services designed to help films reach broader audiences.

Ofeimun also operates Cast Closet, a platform focused on wardrobe and costume support for film productions. Both ventures reflect the same underlying philosophy. “A lot of my creativity is expressed via film and the film infrastructure and the film industry. And so that finds expression across different platforms.”

Ofeimun’s career has followed an unusual arc. She began as a child who wanted to write stories. Law was initially the practical compromise. Yet, in a way, she has returned to storytelling, just from a different angle. Through entertainment law, she has found a way to remain close to the stories she once wanted to write while shaping the systems that enable them to be produced. And in Nigeria’s fast-evolving film industry, those systems are just as important as the stories themselves.

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“I promised myself that any money I’m going to make has to be with my biro or with my brain.”

You might know Abayomi Semudara, “Bayomi,” from his videos breaking down tech industry news, or his game show Byte or Bail, or his Baraza events bringing together founders across African cities. For someone who started creating content out of boredom, that is an impressive portfolio. But impressive is what Bayomi does. His entire trajectory has been powered by a dogged refusal to settle for mediocrity.

Bayomi grew up on the outskirts of Lagos. Born to a primary school teacher and a trader. They didn’t have all the luxury things, but they had the necessities: food on the table and the means to attend school. And quite early, he realised that he could not follow the script that people around him did. After secondary school, most got married, learned tailoring, or took up carpentry. “I didn’t want that kind of life for myself,” he says.

His unlikely inspiration was Lex Luthor from Smallville, not the villainy, but the proof that intelligence and effort could unlock a different life. However, getting himself to that point wasn’t as straightforward as he would have liked.

He was smart. At his secondary school in Eti-Osa, the academic results had been dismal for years. Teachers told him after his WAEC results: in the past five years, not a single student had passed with five credits, including English and mathematics. Bayomi did it. A1 in commerce, B3 in financial accounts, and credits across the board. He was the first in half a decade to clear that bar.

“I considered myself one of the smartest in school,” he says plainly. “I just didn’t like being mediocre. The people writing this exam in other schools were passing. They didn’t have five heads. It’s the same exam. It just depends on how well you studied.”

After secondary school, he took a job as a motor-boy, loading 25-litre oil cans across Lagos markets. He lasted two days. His body was not built for physical labour. That is when he made his promise: any money would come from his pen or his brain. He cycled through other jobs while studying for JAMB, the entrance test for prospective higher-ed students in Nigeria: a pump attendant, a hotel front-desk assistant, and a cleaner at a Chevron Estate. Each job helped him stack up savings for his tertiary education.

He got admission to Yaba College of Technology, Lagos, in 2013, two years after he graduated from secondary school but when an eight-month strike stalled his education, he applied to the University of Lagos. This time he chose to study Educational Management, hoping to fix the rot in the system. He arrived at the University of Lagos as one of the top five in his cohort. But by the second year, his course work was no longer challenging. “I saw those things as something that if I woke up in the middle of the night before my exam and read, I’d still get a B or C.” He stopped prioritising the degree and started teaching himself design. First motion design, but his laptop could not handle the software, so he pivoted to brand design. Logos for classmates, then clients beyond campus. Before long, he told his family to stop sending pocket money.

In 2021, after his compulsory national service year, Bayomi made a public pitch on LinkedIn to Gradely, an edtech company he admired. They never responded. But Honey Ogundeyi, founder of Edukoya, saw his pitch and reached out. He was one of the earliest employees and spent a year and a half doing more than design: branding, user interface, marketing, and video production. His title resisted definition: lead designer and head of experimentation. When Edukoya raised $3.5 million, he designed the pitch decks.

Eventually, he got tired. He resigned, retrained in product design, freelanced for Recital Finance and Front Edge, and now leads design at a Ghanaian fintech helping global companies collect payments from Africa. He prefers not to name them. “They don’t make noise.” For a long time, neither did he.

Posting online content, as he is known for now, started without a plan. He started doing it when he was freelancing because he was bored, had some time on his hands, and wanted to share his observations. His first video was inspired by a tweet about a $30 million raise. He recorded a reaction and posted it. But since then, he hasn’t stopped. “I just kept doing it.”

His formula was simple: find interesting tech news, share his opinion. He trawled TechCabal, Techpoint, TechCrunch, and Twitter. “I find things I find interesting,” he explains. “If it interests me, I share it. If not, I don’t.” When one Sunday of posting three videos produced floods of views, he took note. Three videos daily for eight months straight.

One Sunday, he posted three videos and saw a surge in engagement. The pattern was clear. He increased his output and began posting three videos a day for months. The consistency built an audience.

Even then, he did not immediately see it as a business. He considered himself a designer first. Content was something he did at night, when his primary work was done. The shift in mindset came towards the end of 2025. He read an article about new media and the creative economy. It reframed what he was doing. He realised that he had become one of the more recognisable voices discussing tech in Nigeria. That influence could be structured.

Since then, he has begun thinking in formats. He plans more long-form content and documentaries. He has paid attention to positioning and narrative. He has registered the business, set up proper accounts and assembled a small team. Four people handle events. Two work with him directly.

Some of his experiments have matured into defined products. Byte or Bail is a tech game show that blends trivia with interviews. Founders and operators answer questions as they share their journeys. The show has accumulated over 100,000 views on YouTube. It is not mainstream television, but within its niche, it has found an audience.

Baraza extends his presence offline. It is a series of pop-up events across African cities that bring together founders, venture capitalists, and ecosystem operators. The first edition took place in Kigali. Lagos followed. Abuja, Nairobi, and Accra are part of the roadmap. The ambition is to create a networked community that connects operators across markets. There is also a shorter format in which founders present what they are building in one minute. Over the past year, dozens of startups have been spotlighted through this format.

The through-line in all of this is not a grand strategy. It is curiosity, applied consistently. He tends to follow what interests him, then build around it.

When asked about the larger direction, he does not outline a five-year plan. He returns to something simpler: he pursues what he finds interesting and lets that pursuit shape the outcome. And for now, his focus is on building one of Africa’s leading creator-led media brands.

“I kept on asking the pharmacist, ‘What else do we do? And he was like, this is what we do.’”

Biola Alabi remembers the exact moment she knew she was on the wrong path.

She was working as an intern at a pharmacy in the United States, following the familiar script many children of Nigerian immigrants know too well: pick one of the respectable professions, stay focused, build a stable life. Medicine. Pharmacy. Law. Engineering. Those were the acceptable options.

But as she stood behind the counter, watching prescriptions being filled, she felt restless. She wanted more. That restlessness would lead her to drop her pharmacy degree and go in search of something else.

Today, Alabi is one of Africa’s most influential investors working at the intersection of media and technology. She has been involved in more than 40 companies as an investor, board member, or advisor, including Big Cabal Media and Pulse, two of Africa’s biggest digital media companies. She has backed startups, built television networks, structured venture deals, and helped scale creative ecosystems across the continent.

But the seeds of Alabi’s career in media and investing were planted long before she knew what venture capital was. As a child, moving back and forth between Nigeria and the United States due to Nigeria’s political and economic instability in the 80s, young Alabi learned to create opportunity wherever she landed.

During one Christmas in Nigeria, bored by the lack of organised entertainment for children, she organised neighbourhood plays. She formalised the entire operation, complete with ticket sales and structured rehearsals. Even after she left, the model continued to sustain itself. “This became very big in the neighbourhood,” she recalls. “I was told that when we moved back to the US, the kids kept on doing the plays.”

Alabi went to university to study pharmacy, but she soon grew disillusioned. In looking for a new major, her only requirement was that it fit within her four-year school budget. With the help of the school counsellor, she settled on Public Health because she could later return to medical school. It was during the last two years of her stay on campus that she found something she loved. She took marketing classes and completed courses at a film school because the Public Health curriculum required her to learn about different communication methods. “I took these classes, and it just changed my vision of the world and the opportunities ahead.”

After graduating from university, she ended up in Korea, where she worked in youth marketing for Daewoo cars. Around that time, the car manufacturer was expanding to the United States and was focused on first-time buyers. Alabi was tasked with selling the cars to 16-year-old Americans. “I sort of became a youth marketing expert.”

Around this time, the internet and e-commerce were becoming a thing. She got a job at Bigwords.com, an e-commerce platform targeting students. She was employee number 15, part of the heady first wave of the dot-com era. When Amazon offered to buy the company four years after she joined, the young founders refused. “We’re like, Amazon, who are you? We’re gonna be bigger than Amazon.” Then the crash came, and the company folded, and she was back on the job market.

Fortunately, she landed a role as a project manager at Sesame Street for a trilingual release of their programs in English, Spanish, and Mandarin. The job was her first proper introduction to the media industry. “It was fascinating to work in a company I grew up watching,” she says. Her role soon expanded to managing international co-productions across Africa, Asia, and Europe.

At the time, Sesame Street had only one African co-production, in South Africa. Alabi pushed hard to join that project and later spent six months on the ground helping localise it. She led Sesame Street’s ten-country expansion across Africa, running pilots in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kenya. Her work during this period required her to strike broadcasting deals in each market, and that posed a huge challenge. “We needed a Pan-African broadcast partner. Doing broadcasting deals in each country was too cumbersome. Every country’s broadcasting ecosystem worked differently.” If the problem was not resolved quickly, she felt it could end Sesame Street’s operations on the continent.

She approached DStv’s parent company, Multichoice, about becoming a Pan-African partner for Sesame Street. Multichoice replied with a counteroffer: come run our Pan-African business. They wanted someone with global experience building global brands, someone who understood both creative excellence and commercial viability. Alabi fit perfectly.

What followed were six transformative years as an executive that taught her much of what she needed to know about scaling creative businesses. When she joined, there was one Africa Magic channel broadcasting five hours a day. When she left, there were eight channels, including indigenous language channels in Yoruba, Hausa, and Swahili.

But the real work wasn’t just launching channels; it was building the entire ecosystem to support them. Launching a channel required scanning markets for available content, negotiating with creators, managing technical teams, hiring schedulers and broadcast engineers. The other side of this was ensuring the content met the required standards. “About 50% of the submitted films weren’t even broadcast-quality,” she recalls. “But we’re not going to have any African content on those channels if we do not override the technical requirements.”

The solution required executive vision: massive investment in infrastructure and training. She helped organise training programmes for scriptwriters, cinematographers and filmmakers. “We spent so much of our budget on training at the beginning,” Alabi recalls.

She also launched the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards and helped transform the Big Brother Africa franchise, expanding it across Francophone and Lusophone countries.

After Multichoice, Alabi joined a telco trying to launch digital platforms and a corporate venture capital arm. The experience was revealing—not for what worked, but for what didn’t. Traditional companies, she learned, struggle with investing in startups. “They’re used to just acquiring…There was always a question like, well, is this an acquisition? Is this an investment?”

But something clicked. “I really got a very strong feeling that there was going to be a big opportunity investing in early-stage technology and media companies,” she says. The question was: could she prove it?

She decided to build a film and TV fund, convincing investors to back a slate of productions to demonstrate the return profile. She produced “Banana Island Ghost,” “Lara and the Beat,” and invested in shows like “Bukas and Joints.” Simultaneously, she began investing in media tech companies. One of those early bets was Big Cabal Media.

“I met the founders on Twitter,” she recalls. “We met at this Africa Tech Summit event where everyone was pitching.” She saw in BCM what she’d seen in Fast Company years earlier in the US—a platform that could become essential infrastructure for a growing ecosystem. “I really thought that this could be our own Fast Company. And I wrote a check and invested.”

But as she worked on the film fund, a painful realisation emerged. The distribution infrastructure didn’t exist to make the films successful on a global scale. More fundamentally, she realised she didn’t want to be a producer. “It did not bring me joy,” she admits. “I enjoyed investing in a production. I did not enjoy being part of a production.”

It was a crucial moment of self-awareness. As global streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon entered Africa, she could have easily become a first-call producer, making prestigious content and good money. Everyone encouraged it: “You’re so good at this.” But Alabi had learned to ask herself harder questions.

Despite the prestige and impact, she realised she was most energised not by creating content, but by identifying talent, structuring deals, and building the business models that allowed creativity to scale. “I knew I wanted to be on the investing side, I wanted to be spotting talent.”

Today, she has led angel syndicate deals alongside other investors and went on to invest with Acasia Ventures before joining Delta40, where she continues to back African startups. Through Delta40, she invests in climate tech, ad tech, and embedded finance. Meanwhile, in addition to Big Cabal Media, she is also on the board of Pulse Network and Akill TV.

After a career spanning four continents and as many industries, Biola Alabi has found exactly what she likes, and Africa’s creative and technology ecosystems are better for it. In many ways, she has returned to her earliest motivation: to create opportunity wherever she lands. Only now, instead of organising neighbourhood plays, she’s organising capital and networks that allow others to perform on a global stage.

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“We didn’t have running water. There was one tap in the whole village. You get a very real sense at the very base level of what people live with, like food, agriculture, water, and the inequalities that come with that.”

Sipho Kings is talking about his childhood in rural Botswana. But he might just as well be talking about the logic behind one of the most unusual media experiments on the continent today — a newspaper that does not live on a website, does not chase clicks, and does not bargain with algorithms for attention. Instead, it moves the way news once moved in villages: from person to person, carried along by trust and usefulness, shared because someone thought the next person should see it too.

Long before Kings ever sat in a newsroom, he learned that information was something you encountered together. In the villages where he grew up, there was no electricity, no television. There was a radio that connected the community to the wider world. And when the weekly newspaper arrived, it became a shared object to be read, discussed, and passed along.

Those early years planted an idea that would take decades to fully surface: that news works best when it behaves less like a product and more like a public resource.

Born in Swaziland to British and Irish parents who worked as volunteers in development, especially in water, sanitation, and community projects across Southern Africa, Kings spent his formative years immersed in communal life. His family moved to Botswana when he was young, and for nearly a decade, he lived in villages where daily life revolved around shared resources and collective problem-solving.

It was also where he began to notice the sharp lines of inequality. “People in the cities have things, and people in villages don’t,” he says. “And then a company has nice things and is destroying the farmland. So it’s very intense differences between people that you notice.”

Those observations did not turn him into a journalist. Not at first.

“As a kid, I just wanted to be the things kids want to be,” Kings says. “Like a lawyer or, I don’t know, a fireman. All the usual things. Just the fun things.” What stayed with him, though, was a steady curiosity about how other people saw the world, and why societies were arranged the way they were. That curiosity led him to university, where he studied history alongside journalism. He was drawn less to the thrill of breaking news than to the slow work of understanding systems: how power moves, how decisions are made, and who is left out when they are.

After graduating, he found his way to South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, one of the country’s most respected newspapers. It was there that he began his career, reporting on the same themes that had surrounded his childhood: land, water, development, climate, and the long reach of political and economic power into ordinary lives.

He joined the newsroom full-time in 2011, at a moment when the ground beneath journalism was already shifting. The global financial crisis had weakened advertising markets. Social media platforms were beginning to reshape how people found and consumed news. The old business models were starting to strain.

Inside the Mail & Guardian, Kings saw the effects up close. He did not only sit in editorial meetings. He joined the staff union and later served on its management committee, where he was pulled into conversations about budgets, restructuring, and retrenchments. He sat across from colleagues facing job losses. It gave him a view of journalism from the inside out. Not just how stories were made, but how newsrooms were held together, and how easily they could come apart.

After seven years, he reached a breaking point. “The organisation wasn’t fit for purpose, and I didn’t want to work there.” He applied for a Nieman Fellowship and won. The year in the United States took him out of the daily grind of the newsroom and into a global conversation about the future of journalism. “I spent a lot of time talking to really smart people from newsrooms about their jobs,” he says. “A lot of them were in management or had started newsrooms. And before that, I’d never thought about being in a leadership position in a newsroom or starting something new.”

He returned to South Africa in 2018 and took on the role of news editor at the Mail & Guardian. Around the same time, he began a long-running conversation with Simon Allison, a fellow journalist who shared his unease about where the industry was headed.

Their discussions circled a growing frustration. African stories, they felt, were increasingly being filtered through outside lenses. Newsrooms were tying their survival to platforms they did not control. Websites were becoming crowded, noisy spaces where journalism competed with everything from celebrity gossip to conspiracy theories.

People hate the journalism we have on websites,” Kings says bluntly. “It’s a terrible user experience. There’s a reason people don’t trust us anymore; it’s a crap product.”

They kept coming back to the same question: if this was not working, what would? Then the pandemic hit.

In 2020, COVID-19 disrupted newsrooms worldwide. At the Mail & Guardian, it coincided with a leadership vacuum. Both the editor-in-chief and deputy editor left, leaving the paper without clear leadership during one of the most uncertain periods in recent memory.

Kings found an unusual solution. He suggested that the staff vote for the next editor, arguing that whoever took on the role would need a clear mandate to lead through the crisis. The newsroom agreed. He was elected and stepped into the position for a year.

At the same time, the idea he and Allison had been circling began to take shape. The pandemic had exposed how fragile the media ecosystem had become. Advertising dried up. Social platforms became flooded with misinformation. News websites struggled to cut through the noise.

They decided to go in the opposite direction of the industry’s dominant logic.

Instead of building a website and chasing traffic, they would create a newspaper. Not a print one, but a simple, carefully designed digital that could be read on a mobile phone. And instead of building an audience through Facebook or Google, they would distribute it on WhatsApp, the one platform almost everyone across the continent already uses to talk to friends and family.

They launched The Continent under the Mail & Guardian’s non-profit arm, while Kings was serving as editor-in-chief. For a year, he did both jobs. When funding came through in The Continent’s second year, he made a clean break. He left M&G to focus full-time on the new project. “In the beginning, it was merely responding to a crisis,” Kings says. “We were just trying to make something that worked.”

Two or three years in, they realised they had built more than a workaround. They had built a different kind of relationship with readers. Reader surveys started using words like “fun,” “love,” and “trust” to describe a newspaper. For Kings, it was surprising. “Those aren’t words people usually use for journalism.”

Today, The Continent is a free, weekly newspaper distributed across Africa through WhatsApp. It is a non-profit owned by its employees. Its subscriber base runs into the millions, grown almost entirely through word of mouth.

For Kings, the connection to his childhood is not abstract. “I think that because we lived in villages and communities, there is a very strong sense of community,” he says. “That goes all the way through to The Continent. A subscriber base is a giant community. There’s a lot of focus on that.”

When asked about the future, he shrugs, half-joking. “For now, I’m here. This is the most interesting job in journalism,” he says. “Who knows, in five, ten, twenty years’ time, maybe I will die here. Or maybe Zuckerberg says, I’ll give you a billion dollars to retire. That would be quite boring. But you know, a billion dollars is a billion dollars.”

Behind the joke is a quieter, more serious idea: that journalism does not have to be built around platforms, or profit, or even institutions. It can be built the same way villages are built, on trust, usefulness, and the simple act of passing something along because you think the next person should see it too.

“I think I’ve had multiple opportunities, not because I was necessarily chasing them, I was just doing things I liked.”

Edwin Madu—better known by his stage name Dwin, the Stoic—says this like it’s an afterthought. Like he’s talking about picking a meal, not designing a life that has stretched across writing, tech, music, media, and now building a record label. But that one sentence explains almost everything about how he moves through the world.

For Madu, there is no master plan. There’s no moment where he decided, I will be this kind of person. What he describes instead is a series of “side quests.” Things he followed because they felt interesting, or necessary, or simply fun. Over time, those side quests started to look like a system.

To understand that system, we must first go back in time to his childhood home in Lagos. Born to two parents who he describes as basically teachers, Madu’s education began early and subconsciously. His mother, a fine arts teacher, filled the house with sculptures, paintings, and other half-finished art projects. His father, a travelling consultant, returned with books and records from all the places he had visited. He began reading those books and exploring the worlds they offered. “I think that something about reading literature in general is that it will always open your eyes to what life could be like in other places.”

Madu’s elder sister was a writer, and soon he began to follow in her steps. “I’d seen some of the stuff she was doing, and I just felt like, hey, I’m just going to try and express some of my thoughts.” An edition of Nigerian Idol got him hooked on songwriting, and he began to scribble lyrics in the back of his school notebooks. But he never put out anything until he lost his sister in his second year at university. His grief found an outlet in writing. And like many aspiring writers in the early 2010s, he started a blog.

But writing or music was never meant to be a career path. He was already a computer science student at Covenant University and would go on to graduate with a first class. Still, writing had taken root, and even though it was just a side quest, it kept pulling him in. “I wrote to just express the ideas I thought I had. But then, as I wrote, I was getting more people interested. And then I started doing short stories, and people liked them.”

It was around this time that he wrote and released his first song on SoundCloud. “I wasn’t trying to be a musician. In fact, I hid it from my parents because I got one low grade that semester. And the grade had nothing to do with the music, but I didn’t want them to make it a thing.” In 2015, he got into Chimamanda Adichie’s popular writing workshop. It was the first validation he received for his writing.

But Madu still did what was expected of him. After graduation, he followed the sensible path: first into advertising, then to tech consulting firm Inlaks, where he worked as a consultant helping banks and financial institutions across West Africa digitise their systems. On paper, it was a clean, respectable life. The kind that reassures parents and keeps family group chats quiet.

In the background, though, music never really left. After his first SoundCloud release, he kept dabbling with the craft. In 2017, he decided to take it seriously. This time, he didn’t hide it from his parents.

“At this point, I’m earning a salary. I’ve done the smart thing as a young man to get a job. So I sat them down and said, I’m working on an album. It’s not going to change anything. Monday to Friday, I go to work. Saturday and Sunday, I will go and work on the album.”

Madu released the album independently, without a record label’s support, and that freedom shaped everything that followed.

“I dropped an album that I don’t think anyone in the industry would have advised me to drop,” he says. “There were many genres. It was me writing songs how I would like to write stories. Some of them are slow. Some of them fast. I just thought music should sound like the music I grew up on.”

But freedom came with its own responsibility. There was no team to lean on. “I was keeping track of everything I was doing. I was talking to the press, making sure my publishing was registered,” he says. “I was doing all the things you read on those websites about what indie artists should do.”

But the album didn’t take off. There was no viral moment, no sudden spike that changed his life overnight. “All I got was just a lot of encouragement. People just going, ‘Oh, these songs are really good.’ And then that was it.”

For Madu, that was enough. The album proved what he was capable of. And once people saw that, doors began to open in small, unexpected ways. Songwriting work followed, including sessions with artists like Adekunle Gold. In 2018, Ndani TV reached out to license some of his songs for their popular web series, Skinny Girl in Transit. Around the same time, he found a creative partner in Rhaffy, a producer who would become a frequent collaborator. Together, they started a band, Ignis Brothers.

Then writing pulled him back again, this time to Big Cabal Media as an editor with TechCabal. “I was very much focused on the culture of tech. I wanted to talk about the people, the stories, and what it really means to be in this industry.” When the editor-in-chief role at sister publication Zikoko opened, Madu got the job, allowing him to do the culture storytelling he loved on a larger scale.

Madu’s music career kept growing, and before long, running a major media platform and building a life in music began to feel like running two startups at once. In 2022, he resigned from Zikoko to focus on music.

He initially did not plan to start a record label.

“I’m not a fan of the entrepreneurial life,” he says. “But life can be funny. It will take the thing you really love and make it so important to you that now you must start a business around it to sustain it.”

What he saw instead was a gap. Years of managing himself as Dwin, the Stoic and working with Ignis Brothers had taught him the workings of the industry, and he wanted to turn that hard-won knowledge into a platform for other independent artists.

In 2023, he started St Claire Records, named after his late sister. The first two artists were himself and Raffy. Together, they released Love Lane in 2023 and Master of Ballads in 2024.

The work, he admits, has been intense and relentless. “A lot of this is like running a startup. You’re everything,” he says. “At some point, I’m designing flyers for a tour, but I also need to get to rehearsal. I need to do this, and then I need to do that.” Still, the label kept growing. In 2025, St Claire signed indie artist Celeste Ojatula.

Now, when Madu talks about music, he doesn’t just talk about songs. He talks about structure. About governance. About education. He sounds less like someone curating a playlist and more like someone sketching out an industry.

And maybe that’s what the side quests were always leading to. Writing taught him how to tell a story. Tech taught him how to build systems. Media taught him how to find and hold an audience. And now, music has given him a reason to bring it all together.

“Up until recently, we would have people come for interviews to Chocolate Tribe, and they would be like, ‘I’ve always wondered who did these ads. Now it makes sense because I always thought it was some company in Europe or something.’”

Chocolate Tribe quietly became one of Africa’s most successful animation and VFX studios.

The studio has worked on everything from Disney’s Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire (“Surf Sangoma” episode) to Netflix’s iNumber Number: Jozi Gold, which featured the first computer-generated creature ever in a Netflix African production. Their fingerprints are also on projects that have triumphed at Cannes Lions, Ciclope, and Loeries.

But for a long time, few people connected that global-quality work to a studio based in Johannesburg. According to Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, Chocolate Tribe’s co-founder and CEO, that gap is about more than branding. It reflects how limited the idea of imagination can be when you grow up without examples of what’s possible. “Animation and VFX weren’t anything that, even as a young child, you learn about,” she says. “You may watch animation on TV, but for you, it’s like, this is not a career. This is for kids.”

Today, Chocolate Tribe is part of a small but growing group of African studios proving that animation is not only a viable career, but a powerful tool for storytelling. The irony is that Nosipho had to walk away from a stable, successful legal career to help build that future. Her life, like her company, has been shaped by movement—across countries, professions, and ideas of what is allowed.

Nosipho was born in the 70s in Soweto, at the height of the Soweto Uprisings and of apartheid in South Africa. Her father was politically active, and although her parents tried to shield their children from the political tension, the environment was inevitably intense.

When she was ten, the family moved to Zimbabwe. The change was immediate. “Living there felt different,” she says. “I saw what it felt like to be liberated.” For the first time, she found herself in an environment that allowed her to imagine freely. That freedom found an outlet in writing. She began writing poetry and short stories, using them as a private space to work through thoughts, desires, and confusion.

By the time she reached her A-levels, it was clear where her instincts lay. The sciences didn’t appeal to her. She admired people who could master formulas and equations, but she knew that wasn’t her path. She applied to Rhodes University and was accepted on her first try. But when she couldn’t afford the fees, she had to give up her place.

It would take four more years before she returned to university. During that time, she moved back to South Africa and lived with relatives, working whatever jobs she could find. Those years tested her resolve. Nothing about them was glamorous. But they were formative. “I pushed myself to realise that I wanted this,” she says. “I was going to find every way to get to university.” When she finally got another chance, it was at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), where she studied law.

It was also at Wits, in her second year, that she met Rob van den Bragt, who would become her husband and business partner. They met in a public laundromat. She was there to wash clothes and study for an exam. He was fresh from overseas, an animator and VFX supervisor, standing before the machines, completely confused. He asked for help. She ignored him.

“I didn’t want to be bothered,” she says, laughing.

A friend stepped in, helped him out, and later introduced them properly. They sat near each other, books open. “I’ve got my book. He opens this very big book with colours and pictures,” she recalls. “And my judgy self is thinking, how can you be reading a book with so many pictures?”

That book was about animation, and it became the bridge that connected them. Robert asked about her studies. She asked about his, too. She had recently watched The Lion King and was curious. The conversation flowed easily and never really stopped. They married a few years later.

After Nosipho finished law school, the couple moved to the UK. In London, she built a legal career and completed a master’s degree at Birkbeck College, University of London. One elective course, Law and the Moving Image, shifted her thinking. “I didn’t know you could connect law, politics and film,” she says. “I didn’t even know they lived in the same space.”

After nearly a decade abroad, they returned to South Africa. Nosipho joined a law firm, but it didn’t feel right. “It was too dry,” she says. “I needed something more exciting. More purpose-driven.” She quit.

For a year, she stayed at home. She tried knitting—then arts and crafts. Ideas came and went. Friends and family questioned her choices. She stayed firm.

By the end of 2014, clarity arrived.

“I realised it’s not that difficult to run a company,” she says. “I had already done that as a lawyer—for other people. I understood risk, strategy. And I trusted that I could learn the rest.” With that conviction, she cofounded Chocolate Tribe with her husband.

Working with her husband wasn’t simple. “It was hard learning how to disagree at work and then go home and eat dinner together,” she says.

Still, they pushed forward.

Their big break came with Robot and Scarecrow, a short film by UK director Kibwe Tavares about an unlikely love story between a robot and a scarecrow. The project drew international attention and helped put Chocolate Tribe on the map. “That project was the gift that kept giving,” Nosipho says. It led to work with directors like Ravi Ajit Chopra, whose short film Cognition went on to hold the Guinness World Record for the most awards won by a sci-fi film, 383 in total.

For the first four years, Chocolate Tribe said yes to work others found impossible. “People told us certain things couldn’t be done in Africa,” Nosipho says. “We said, ‘Give it to us.” They worked long hours, took risks, and built a reputation for delivering what seemed impossible. Recognition came from outside first. But locally, the response was slower.

“From a South African perspective, people weren’t really alive to the possibilities that animation and VFX bring,” So Nosipho took on a new role—not just as a studio head, but as an advocate. She began visiting schools, universities, festivals and meetups, across South Africa and beyond. She spoke openly about creative careers and their economic potential.

“I felt like I had found this secret,” she says. “And I wanted to share it.”

That energy grew into AVIJOZI, the Animation, Visual Effects and Interactive in Jozi Festival. “For me, AVIJOZI is about awareness,” she says. “When you create an animated series, thousands of people can be employed. Why wait for the government?”

The festival’s first edition in 2022 drew about 1,000 attendees. By 2025, it had grown to more than 5,000, with Emmy-nominated artists and global studios participating. Nosipho envisions it becoming a continental movement, inspiring similar initiatives across Africa. Nosipho wants it to be even bigger, hitting about 10,000 attendees and having even more impact across Africa.

“We want to continue growing it to be this formidable movement again into the rest of Africa. I want you guys to come and come to our AVIJOZI and to Chocolate Tribe and feel a sense of comfort and pride that hey, this was done on our continent.”

Nosipho is also very optimistic about Chocolate Tribe’s future. The company celebrated its 11th anniversary in October 2025 and, over that period, has evolved from an animation and VFX studio to a full-content development company. The next phase, she says, is transitioning from being a “service studio” that works on other people’s projects and IPs to creating their own IP.

“It’s good to be a service provider because you learn all the skills and you learn how to deliver things fast and according to spec. But how about we do it for ourselves? How about we raise a production within Chocolate Tribe that can speak to a changing narrative in Africa, that can tell stories that represent us the way we want to be represented.”

Even with all she’s achieved, there’s one box still unchecked. “I still want to write that bestseller book that when people read it, they can’t stop,” she says, smiling.

It’s a fitting ambition for someone whose life has been a series of chapters, from law to building an animation/visual effects company to advocacy for the growth of the creative economy. Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt’s story is proof that imagination, when pursued with courage and conviction, can build both careers and industries.

“I dreamt of starting my own TV station, so I drew up a seven-day schedule of what programmes it would show. I was thinking about it a few days ago, and I was like, damn, that’s a funny thing for a kid to do.”

Long before Aanu Adeoye became a reporter whose byline would appear in some of the world’s most influential publications, he was a bored secondary school student filling an empty notebook with an imaginary broadcast schedule. Educational shows. Wrestling in the mornings. Carefully planned programming for a station that existed only in his head.

The childhood dream to work in media would eventually come to pass, just not in the way he imagined. Adeoye never grew up to own a TV station. Instead, he became a journalist, working as a reporter and editor for publications including CNN, TechCabal, Rest of World, The Continent, and, now, the Financial Times. His career has taken him from Ibadan to Lagos, Johannesburg, and London. Along the way, he has covered football, elections, startups, oil and gas, geopolitics, and global business.

At the centre of it all is one constant: curiosity. And that curiosity, Adeoye says, began at home.

Adeoye grew up in Ibadan with his mother and older brother. Newspapers arrived at their house almost every day. There was also a family friend who worked with the Oyo State government and received newspapers regularly. During holidays, Adeoye would spend time at their house and read those too.

Football pulled him in first. Growing up during Nwankwo Kanu’s time at Arsenal made him an Arsenal fan for life. The back sports pages became familiar territory. From there, it was a short step to the front pages and everything else the newspapers had to offer.

By the time he got to boarding school, that interest had hardened into obsession. Phones were banned, but transistor radios were allowed. Adeoye carried one everywhere. On weekends, he and his friends would gather around to listen to football commentary—often from the BBC World Service—through crackling signals and fading reception. It wasn’t only football. He listened to the news too, both morning and evening broadcasts.

Academically, everything pointed in one direction. Adeoye was consistently top of his class. In Nigeria, that meant being a science student, and everyone expected him to become a doctor. Reading Ben Carson’s “Gifted Hands” helped reinforce the message.

“At the time, I wanted to be a doctor, but now that I think about it, I didn’t really want to be a doctor. It was just a thing that I felt I had to do.”

At the beginning of senior secondary school, his principal introduced Literature in English for all students, including those in science classes. Most students complained. Adeoye loved it.

“We’d read Wole Soyinka books. We read Athol Fugard’s ‘Sizwe Banzi is Dead.’ We read poems as well. My favourite poem is ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’, and I read it when I was in secondary school.”

Literature gave him a different way of thinking about writing, language, and structure. Still, he stayed on the science track.

When the time came to go to university, Adeoye finally admitted to himself that Medicine was not what he wanted. He switched to Geology against his mother’s expectations. He didn’t really know what Geology entailed, but he knew he could not study Medicine.

University was a shock. Being brilliant in secondary school did not translate into success in a science-heavy course at Obafemi Awolowo University. He began to struggle. It was obvious he was forcing himself through something that did not fit. Eventually, he switched to Consumer Sciences, not out of passion, but survival. He just wanted to graduate.

After giving up on the education the university could offer, his real education began online. Adeoye started blogging about his first love: football. Blogging was still new in Nigeria, and popular blogs like BellaNaija and Linda Ikeji’s were beginning to take off. “There wasn’t a clear path for you to follow”

He wrote anyway. For free at first. Then, in 2014, he got his first paid journalism gig: a story for Vice about Equatorial Guinea’s long-serving president using the continental sports tournament to launder his reputation as a dictator. He continued to freelance for international publications, including The Guardian and FourFourTwo. By the time he graduated, he had built a small portfolio and growing confidence that he could turn journalism into a full-time career.

His first real newsroom experience came almost by accident. After his compulsory national youth service, Adeoye cold emailed, Lolade Adewuyi, the Nigerian editor of Goal.com, asking for a job. There was no vacancy, but impressed by Adeoye’s portfolio, Adewuyi went out on a limb for him and secured extra funds to pay Adeoye a stipend.

At Goal.com, Adeoye learned how a newsroom worked from the inside. The difference between freelancing and being on staff was stark. “Before I’d just send the copy and it was edited and you would find it on the website. Now I was writing, doing stuff on social media, choosing what images went with the story, involved with the whole story production process.”

From Goal.com he moved to CNN in Lagos. The work expanded his horizons. He covered elections, tech stories, and regional reporting assignments. CNN gave him scale and structure. It also taught him how global news organisations think. When CNN did not renew his one-year contract, he applied for the managing editor role at TechCabal. He was 25. He had never formally managed a newsroom. But he got the job anyway.

At TechCabal, Adeoye arrived with a clear idea of what needed to change. Nigeria’s tech ecosystem had grown up, he felt, but coverage had not fully caught up. “When I came in, my sense was, this industry is mature now. We need to cover them with a critical lens. We cannot be cheerleaders.”

He believed that founders raising millions of dollars were power brokers and should be treated as such. Journalism, in his view, was not PR. It helped that Adeoye was not from a traditional tech background, so he wasn’t worried about being punished for his reporting. “Before TechCabal, I didn’t have any friends in tech. So, I didn’t care if they did not invite me to their parties.”

During his short tenure, he helped professionalise the TechCabal newsroom, adding team members like Alex Onukwe, who would later become Semafor’s Africa correspondent, and Muyiwa Olowogoyega, who would go on to become TechCabal’s editor-in-chief. He also introduced columns like My Life in Tech. Again, as he did when he started blogging, he was figuring things out in real time. “When I left, people would tell me I did a really great job. And I would think, well, you didn’t know that half the time I was screaming internally. Because I was making things up as I went.”

After five months, Adeoye left TechCabal for a journalism fellowship in South Africa. In Johannesburg, he wrote for Rest Of World and joined South Africa-based publication The Continent just as it was launching, eventually becoming its news editor. He later moved to London for a fellowship at Chatham House, where his focus shifted toward geopolitics and international relations.

Then came the Financial Times (FT). Moving back to Nigeria to cover the wider West African region wasn’t in Adeoye’s immediate plans, and he wasn’t sure he would get the job because he had applied unsuccessfully to a similar job at another publication.“I don’t have the appropriate level of arrogance or confidence to think that if I apply for something, I will get it. But it was the FT.”

Adeoye applied anyway, and after a rigorous screening process, he got the job. At the FT, he covered West Africa in all its complexity: politics, business, oil and gas, elections, culture. The role demanded range, speed, and constant learning.

“When you join the FT, there’s this expectation that you’re curious about the world.” That curiosity became the skill that tied everything together—helping him translate complex topics into simple terms.

After almost four years covering West Africa for the FT, Adeoye transitioned into a new beat: global pharmaceuticals. The move came through an internal opportunity while a colleague was on leave, and it allowed him to apply the same curiosity and rigorous reporting he had honed over the years to an entirely new field.

Curiosity has now led him to his next project: a book on African geopolitics. “Last year, I turned 30, and I thought maybe I should do something. Most normal people just get married. I decided to write a book.” The book focuses on the shifting geopolitical landscape in West Africa, particularly the decline of French influence and the rise of new players like Russia.

Looking back, Adeoye’s career feels improbably large for something that started with a transistor radio and a pile of newspapers. It may not be the TV station his younger self imagined, but what he has now is just as good.

“I’m a 31-year-old guy from Ibadan. I’ve interviewed presidents, prime ministers, Dangote, Elumelu and the likes. I’m sitting with these people because I have this tiny badge that says I’m a journalist from this or that publication, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything else.”

“I was destined for a political career. That was my family business.”

If Claude Grunitzky had followed the path laid out by his family, he might have been a statesman, an ambassador, minister, or perhaps president of Togo. His lineage nearly demanded it: his father once served as finance minister, and two of his uncles had been presidents. But legacy didn’t predict his trajectory.

Instead, today, he is recognised not as a politician (or an economist, another contrasting but very likely path) but for his work in Africa’s media and creative industries. In 2002, he co-founded hip-hop music station TRACE, helping introduce the genre to Africa. Now, he focused on amplifying new African voices through True Africa and its Limitless Africa podcast. Through it all, Grunitzky has lived many lives. But the values guiding him have their roots in Lomé, where he first began to understand the importance of stories.

Grunitzky’s life began in Lomé, the capital of post-colonial Togo. His early education reflected the zeitgeist of the newly independent country: ambitious, hopeful, yet deeply bound to French systems. “A lot of what we were taught was still driven by French curricula. And that was a bit of a problem for me. I understood that our African identity and history [were] being undervalued.”

A diplomatic appointment for his father took the family to Washington, D.C., when he was eight. He spent four years of his childhood in the US before being sent to France for school when his father was dismissed as ambassador. “After he was fired, my father couldn’t work again. So he sent me and my sister to France,” he recalls. “I ended up in a Catholic boarding school outside Paris.”

There, far from home, Grunitzky’s academic gifts flourished. He excelled in every subject, economics, the humanities, and even mathematics. “I see myself as somebody who can dabble in different subjects. And I’m, in that sense, a bit of a generalist as opposed to some of my friends who are much more specialists in either the arts or humanities or math and physics and science.”

He went on to earn degrees in political science from Sciences Po in Paris and a master’s in economics from the University of London. “I was drawn to the Anglophone mentality, which was a lot more capitalist than the French.”

However, as he climbed the academic ladder, another force was tugging at him: hip hop. Grunitzky had discovered hip-hop as a child while visiting his uncle in New York. “Those were the early days of hip hop,” he remembers. By the time he was a teenager in Paris, hip hop had crossed the Atlantic and had begun reshaping youth culture in Europe. Grunitzky saw that this was a global movement in the making.

“I decided to make it my dream. I had a sense that the subculture of hip hop would become mainstream and that hip hop would become the new pop culture. And I essentially started a business around that conviction.”

So at 23, fresh out of university, he launched True Magazine in London with his cousin. It was his first attempt at entrepreneurship, and his first major failure. The partnership collapsed after a year due to disagreements between the two. Grunitzky didn’t let that stop him. Within months, he launched TRACE Magazine, expanding on the same vision but on a larger scale. His goal was audacious: to show how hip-hop could shape global culture through music, film, fashion, and art.

Within a year, the magazine was a hit in London. Soon after, Grunitzky moved to New York, the epicentre of hip hop, to grow the business. “I decided to move to New York in order to be in the centre of gravity of hip hop, the birthplace of hip hop, because I wanted to expand my business from New York as opposed to just London.”

Building TRACE was brutal. Aside from the fact that he had no direct example to emulate, it was hard for him to justify the project to his family. It wasn’t an obvious path for a boy from a family of presidents and diplomats. His relatives couldn’t make sense of it. “They thought I was crazy,” he says. “You know, African families, sometimes, when people try to do things that are too artistic or creative, they don’t really understand. And here I was trying to be a creative entrepreneur in my 20s, and not knowing anything about accounting, not knowing anything about making payroll, and just going on instinct and making it up as I went along.”

But those instincts proved correct. In 2003, he raised $15 million from Goldman Sachs to launch TRACE TV, turning the publication into a global media powerhouse that gave African and diaspora artists a platform long before “Afrobeats to the world” became a slogan.

By 2010, after 14 years of building TRACE, Grunitzky was exhausted. He had built an empire, but it had become a cage, which took all of his time.“My ex-wife once said, ‘You’re married to TRACE, not to me,’” he recalls. So he walked away.

In the years that followed, Grunitzky began teaching at Harvard University, leading workshops for the Obama-era Young African Leaders Initiative, and mentoring young entrepreneurs across the continent. More importantly, he began to think about what it would mean to tell the African story as media platforms and consumption habits became increasingly digital.

In 2015, Grunitzky launched True Africa, a digital media company built on the idea that Africans should tell their own stories. “I wanted Africa to be seen,” he says, “and I wanted the Africa story to be told by Africans, not by outsiders who don’t understand our mindset.”

He poured over a million dollars of his own money into True Africa to get things started. When his pitch to African investors fell on deaf ears, he turned to global partners. Google eventually backed the venture, drawn to his vision. Today, True Africa’s flagship product, the Limitless Africa podcast, is published in English, French, and Portuguese, and it reaches millions across the continent and the diaspora. The company also airs not only online but also through partner radio stations. The show explores the intersection of technology, policy, and creativity across Africa, blending storytelling and insight in a way few others do.

Beyond media, Grunitzky has moved into investing. His latest venture, Equity Alliance, is a fund he co-founded with his late mentor, Dick Parsons, the former CEO of Time Warner. The fund backs early-stage startups led by women and people of colour who are often excluded from traditional investment circles.

Through Equity Alliance, Grunitzky has become the very thing he once sought: a backer of bold visions. To him, Africa’s creative economies are “engines of transformation.” “Film, fashion, music, design, gaming, digital media—these are some of the fastest-growing sectors on the continent,” he notes. “They already contribute over $58 billion to GDP and employ nearly 8 million people. But I want that 8 million to become 50 million.”

It’s an ambitious goal, but then again, this kind of audacity has always been Grunitzky’s compass. His career is marked by conviction. Trusting his instincts long before trends, investment logic or global validation arrived. Now that conviction is focused on getting Africans seen, heard and backed in the global creative economy.

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“I am as old as Kenyan independence. Most women like to hide their age. Not me. I brag about mine, because I’m more energetic than a 20-year-old.”

This is one of the first things Njoki Muhoho tells me as we settle into our seats to have a conversation on the sidelines of Creation Africa, a conference celebrating Africa’s creative economy. We’re sitting just outside one of the conference halls, close enough to feel the energy of the event, but far enough to speak without raising our voices.

Muhoho is in Lagos for the multi-day creative economy event, and her presence here already proves her point about energy. For the past three days, she had moved across the conference grounds like someone half her age; greeting people warmly, attending panels, asking questions, exchanging contacts, and taking part in conversations long after most attendees have slipped away to rest.

She participates fully and intentionally. She joins conversations; she laughs easily with strangers. Everywhere she goes, people recognize her, greet her with warmth, or stop to say thank you. Yet, her presence here is not about being seen. It is about remaining connected to the ecosystem she helped grow.

Muhoho is one of East Africa’s most respected film and television figures. She has written award-winning TV dramas, trained hundreds of African filmmakers, and served on prestigious juries including the International Emmys and the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards. Her influence is woven into scripts, actors, producers, and entire production systems across the region.

But her path into storytelling wasn’t direct. It has been meandering, shaped by her upbringing, her caution, and eventually, her courage.

Muhoho’s life began in Kenya’s highlands, a place layered with colonial history, and the tea plantations where her family worked. She calls herself “a child of two worlds.” Her home was deeply rooted in traditional Kikuyu culture, but it was also full of books and education.

Her father, one of the first Kenyans formally educated through Catholic missions, raised his children to respect books. “There was never an idle moment. If you were sitting down and doing nothing, my father would ask, ‘Have you read every book in this house?’ And it was a cardinal sin to tear a book.”

Muhoho’s love for storytelling revealed itself early. At fourteen, she wrote a school play exploring political power and independence. It won at her local district level and kept progressing until it got to the national level, where it was supposed to be performed before President Daniel Arap Moi. Instead, the girls were told their work was “too political.” The play was banned, and she and her classmates were questioned by the state security service. Kenya was experiencing a period of intense political repression, and leading writers like Ngugi Wa Thiong’o had gone into exile. For Njoki, the lesson was that: stories could threaten power.

That moment shaped her understanding of the power of storytelling to influence people and the inherent risks. So when it came time to choose a course at Kenyatta University, she resisted the obvious choice: literature, and chose business instead. “I told my father, ‘I don’t want to study literature, because I don’t want to get into trouble with the government like Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.’” She also wanted to be rich, and for her, studying business was the quickest way to get there.

After graduating from Kenyatta University with a degree in Business Education, she started her first role as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Although consulting in Kenya at the time was dominated by older, foreign male consultants, Muhoho rose through the ranks quickly. By her late twenties, she was already a director at the firm, travelling across Africa, training leaders, and advising institutions. But the creative instinct never left. In her spare time, she wrote poems, essays, and short stories. Then in 1994, she saw a call from M-Net for a short film script competition.

Muhoho had never seen a film script before. But she treated the competition guide as a brief, the same way she treated her consulting briefs. She completed the script and submitted it a few hours before the deadline. Six months later, the winners of the competition were announced. Muhoho had won.

One of the benefits of winning was that she got to travel for a filmmaking workshop in Senegal. At the workshop, she was the most unqualified. “I was the only person in that group who was not a filmmaker. I was the one asking all the stupid questions. But that’s okay. I tell people the most important question is the stupid question.”

Muhoho left the workshop with more questions than answers, and the most pressing question was: What if she took storytelling seriously, not as a hobby, but as a career? The question stayed with her. She continued consulting, travelling, and teaching leadership and management, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was meant to be a storyteller. Winning the competition didn’t convince her she had “made it.” Instead, it pushed her to ask whether her success came from talent or luck. She had to know if she was going to start a career around storytelling, and the only way to know was to learn the craft properly. So in 2004, she paused her consulting work and headed to the New York Film Academy.

When Muhoho returned to Kenya after the New York Film Academy, she went back to consulting. But a call from Multichoice changed everything. “I got a phone call from Multichoice. They were starting their first East African high-end drama series, and they needed someone on the ground.”

That project became the pioneering Kenyan drama Changes. It set the tone for a new generation of high-quality East African drama. It also marked Njoki’s transition from writer to producer.

In 2008, Njoki founded Zebra Productions, her own company. At Zebra productions she favoured short-form, episodic storytelling; 12 to 15-minute dramas designed for mobile viewing. “I was doing it for the mobile phones. When we had to give it to the local TV stations we had to combine two episodes. Fortunately, each episode had a beginning and an end, like the CSI approach. Now everyone wants to make short form content.” Her first series captured everyday life in Kenyan communities, giving audiences stories they recognized, in English and Kiswahili.

Njoki’s work soon extended beyond production. MultiChoice invited her to help establish the MultiChoice Talent Factory in Kenya, a program designed to train young African filmmakers. “They wanted someone with a reputation. I had to show that I could mentor, guide, and build a system for storytelling,” she says. Under her guidance, dozens of emerging talents learned everything from scriptwriting to production management, creating content that now circulates across the continent.

Her influence didn’t stop there. Njoki has served on prestigious juries including the International Emmys and Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards, sharing her insight and elevating African storytelling on the global stage.

As we round up our conversation, one of her students recognizes her and comes up to say hello, greeting her with a mix of reverence and excitement. This moment, simple yet profound, captures the essence of her impact. Njoki Muhoho has not only shaped the stories that East Africans see on screen; she has nurtured the people who create them. Through mentorship, training programs, and her own productions, she has elevated the standards of storytelling in the region, making it richer and more authentic. And this more than anything will be her legacy, the confidence, skills, and ambitions of an entire generation of East African filmmakers whom she has helped train.

“When people ask me for something, I take it seriously. I’ll show up, even if I don’t want to be there.”

Mayowa Idowu is explaining why, more than a decade into building one of Nigeria’s most influential youth culture media platforms, he still turns up to events—press conferences, panel discussions, brand activations, product launches—the sort of gatherings that most media founders would have long outsourced to younger editors or interns. For him, it’s his way of remaining in the arena and honouring the relationships that have built the ecosystem, the same one he’s been working in since Culture Custodian launched in 2014.

Culture Custodian exists somewhere between a magazine, a creative studio, and a cultural archive. It has produced everything from irreverent commentary and longform essays to original podcasts and experimental series that mirror the way young Nigerians consume content. Its power lies not in its size but in its sensibility: informed, curious, plugged into the heart of Nigeria’s youth culture, and quietly self-assured.

That sensibility traces back to Idowu’s childhood. He grew up in a home where the media wasn’t an abstract idea. His father, a journalist, and his mother, a lawyer, filled the house with books, newspapers, and magazines. “I used to write for an audience of one,” he says, “and that audience was my dad.” Holidays ended with essay assignments, and every piece of writing was graded with the same seriousness his father gave his newsroom. If his father taught him rigour, his mother taught him range: she read everything from Danielle Steel novels to gossip magazines like City People. “So I never learned to look down on stories,” he says. “I just consumed everything, and to a large extent, that’s what shaped my sense of culture.”

In secondary school, his curiosity found a workshop. Idowu attended Corona Secondary School, an institution known as much for its academics as for the kind of students it produced, some of whom would later become the architects of Nigerian pop culture, including visual artist Dennis Osadebe, founder of The Republic, Wale Lawal, and a sapling African giant, Burna Boy.

He was good at English and Government, terrible at maths, and drawn to anything that allowed him to write, argue, or perform, like debates or yearbook committees. Beyond the classroom, Idowu ran his first business, Blue Magic, a food company formed under Corona’s business education programme, Junior Achievement. Blue Magic was a real business, complete with shareholders, products, and dividends. “We raised capital, sold food, and actually paid out dividends at the end of the term. It was the first time I understood how ideas could become something real, something you could hold, sell, or build on.”

After secondary school, he moved to England for A-levels, where he could for the first time choose the subjects he wanted. He picked History, Literature, Sociology, and Psychology. “It was the first time I actually enjoyed school. I wasn’t forced to do Maths or Biology,” he said. The British education system, with its emphasis on interpretation rather than rote memorisation, suited him. “I realised I was actually kind of smart.”

Law, however, remained the family expectation. His mother had studied it, and his maternal grandfather was a judge. Studying Law was less ambition and more inheritance. “It was one of those legacy things.” But even in Law School, Idowu’s real education was elsewhere. At the University of Kent, he began writing seriously, first on a personal blog where he posted essays, profiles, and interviews. One of his earliest pieces was a conversation with Burna Boy, then an upstart making his debut. Others were profiles of classmates, musicians, and people he found interesting. During one holiday he took a summer school course in International Journalism at the London School of Economics.

His blog grew a small following, but he disliked that it bore his full name. “I didn’t want my name to be the brand. I wanted something less me-centric,” he said. “Something that reflected more than my own taste.”

That impulse to create something bigger than himself led to the creation of Culture Custodian. He launched it in his final year of university, funding it with money his godmother had given him for his 21st birthday. “Instead of using it to have a good time, I used it to build the website,” he says. “I wanted it to be proper-proper, not just a blogspot.”

When he moved back to Nigeria after Law School, Culture Custodian was still finding its identity. “At the beginning, we didn’t really have one,” he admits. “We knew we wanted to do something like Complex or Fader, but created by Nigerians, with Nigerians in mind.”

After graduating and returning to Lagos, Idowu worked briefly as a lawyer. It paid the bills, but it didn’t fit. His real work lay with Culture Custodian. In 2018, he quit. “If I was going to take Culture Custodian seriously, I had to give it everything.”

Through it all, Culture Custodian’s engine has been experimentation. “I read a lot, I consume a lot,” Idowu explains. “When I find something I like, I ask, ‘What does this look like in a Nigerian context?’” That question birthed many of the publication’s signature projects, like Sex Diaries and My First Million

For instance, with My First Million, Idowu wanted to create a series on how Nigerians earned, spent, and understood wealth. For months, he had been workshopping the series, but then Zikoko beat him to publication with Nairalife. Idowu was livid. “I remember coming on the timeline one day and seeing Nairalife. I was so upset.” But the frustration became fuel. Watching Dragon’s Den and reading a Financial Times article helped him rethink the concept, reshaping it into something distinct.

He describes his editorial philosophy through an old-school metaphor. “I think of media like a newspaper,” he says. “When you ask people what their favourite part of the newspaper was as a child, some say sports, some say politics, some say cartoons. The goal isn’t to please everyone, but to make sure everyone finds something they love.” That approach explains Culture Custodian’s range, from podcasts like Carnivores to TikTok explainers about the figures on Nigeria’s naira notes. “We just keep trying new ways to tell stories, and the audience tells us what works.”

That philosophy extends beyond formats to the brand’s entire ethos. Last month, Culture Custodian launched the first edition of The Custodian, their annual print magazine. The Custodian is Idowu’s attempt at creating the ultimate collector’s item to reach a new audience with highbrow storytelling.

As Culture Custodian enters its second decade, Idowu is restless. “This can’t be our final form,” he says. “We’ve not made a billion off this.” He laughs, but then turns serious. “My priority now is how to make Culture Custodian the best it can be. The work we do is very important, and I’m obsessed with how we can be better, how we can be bigger.”

His ambitions stretch beyond media, into film, books, and strategy. “I want to make documentaries, I want to write books, I want to sit on boards and advise people,” he says. “I think I have access to information, and if I can use that to help people get the outcomes they want, I’d love to do that.”

But for now, he’s still showing up at events, in meetings, in the culture. “Sometimes when I meet people and they say they’ve never heard of Culture Custodian, I’m like, how can you not?” he says, smiling. “But then I remind myself: you need to work so that people will hear of it.”

And so he keeps working, still in the arena, one story, one experiment, one idea at a time.

“I just found out that people use animation to do ads and stuff. So I told my dad, ‘I’ll go study animation, come back to Uganda, start a company, and make ads.’ I only said that because I thought it would make sense to him.”

That’s how Raymond Malinga began his pitch to his father. He was nineteen, a computer programming student at Makerere University, desperate to convince his parents to let him abandon coding for a career in cartoons. Animation sounded frivolous in mid-2000s Kampala, so he framed it as advertising; something serious enough for an African parent to believe in. That moment became the first scene in what would turn into a decade-long odyssey, one that would make him a central figure in East Africa’s emerging animation industry.

Today, Malinga is the co-founder and CEO of Creatures Animation Studio, one of Uganda’s most recognisable animation outfits. His short film, “A Kalabanda Ate My Homework” (2017), was one of the first Ugandan animations to earn international acclaim. But that success began, as most unlikely dreams do, with one uncomfortable conversation.

Malinga was born in Uganda but spent his early years in Belgium, where his father worked for the World Customs Organisation. “I grew up in Belgium from age one to eight,” he said. “It shaped how I see the world — that mix of European and African perspectives.”

Returning to Uganda in the late 1990s was a jarring experience. “It’s like travelling in a time machine,” he said. “All your friends are gone, and you have no one here. I was teased for my accent; it was trial by fire.”

That culture shock between the disciplined structure of Europe and the rougher edges of Kampala life would later influence his creative outlook. “I think that’s where my imagination really took root. When the outside world felt confusing, I built my own worlds inside.”

He devoured Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling, enchanted by the way the books could open up new worlds. At school, he filled notebooks with stick figures and imaginary creatures, fragments of worlds that existed only in his head. The idea that adults could make a living doing animation arrived by accident, through a cousin who mentioned it offhand. For the first time, the dream felt real.

But dreams don’t always survive practicality. Despite his creative instincts, Malinga followed a familiar script: he excelled in science, so he pursued a career in science. He ended up in Makerere’s computer programming department, and almost immediately knew he had made a mistake.

So he pitched the animation as a career idea to his father. His father wasn’t convinced at first. “He made me go through the most,” Malinga said, grinning. “He told me, ‘Find the schools, find out how much they cost, show me your plan.’”

Malinga spent hours at internet cafés researching animation schools. He eventually found one in Malaysia that fit his father’s budget. “My dad said, ‘If you really want this, it doesn’t matter where you go, just work hard.’” Armed with that advice, he headed to Malaysia.

For Malinga, Malaysia was a rude shock. Most of his classmates could draw better than he could. They were younger, faster, and more confident. By contrast, he was the awkward older student struggling to keep up. “I couldn’t draw,” he admitted. “Everyone around me was so good it was intimidating.”

He compensated with effort. He stayed late in class, built relationships with professors, and asked questions until he understood everything. His lecturers came to know him as “the Ugandan who wants to start an animation studio.” After graduation, he landed a job at Wau Animation, a small Malaysian studio which was then working on Ejen Ali, a Malaysian super-hero which would later become a national hit.

Working at Wau taught him what animation could look like as a profession. But even then, the idea of home lingered. He had made a promise to return to Uganda and build something of his own. In December 2014, he fulfilled his promise.

Malinga arrived back in Kampala with one computer and a head full of ambition. He and his brother Robin set up a workstation in their parents’ garage. “That first year was brutal,” he said. “We made no money. My brother looked at the first animation I did, and I could see the dream leaving his eyes.”

Still, Malinga kept going. “It’s very hard to get people to buy into your dream,” he said. “Most of the guys who joined us at the beginning weren’t chasing the dream; they just wanted to leave the house so their parents could say they were working.”

He started paying small stipends out of his own pocket, from the little money he made teaching part-time at an art school, to cover costs. “I walked to and from the school to save money.”

Their first real break came through a friend’s sister, who connected them to a producer on MiniBuzz, a popular Ugandan comedy show. The work was modest but validating. They impressed the client, who referred them to others. Those small jobs, explainer videos, educational clips, and experimental ads, kept the studio alive long enough to move out of the garage and into a space at Design Hub Kampala, a co-working centre for creatives. “We finally had a real address. It felt like we’d levelled up.”

During a short trip back to Malaysia, Malinga met his former boss at Wau, who asked if he had made any of the stories he used to talk about. The question haunted him long after he returned home. So he decided to take the shot.

The story he chose was inspired by a childhood myth about a mischievous creature called Kalabanda that eats children’s homework. It became the studio’s first original short film, A Kalabanda Ate My Homework. Initially intended as a six-month project, the short film stretched for two years. When Kalabanda premiered in 2017, over 200 people attended the event. It was the first time an animation team in Uganda stood on stage to present their work. But after the premiere, there was silence. No calls, no commissions, no investors. Malinga wondered if that was the end.

Then, recognition slowly arrived first from a film festival in Côte d’Ivoire, and then from the African International Film Festival in Lagos. “Those small wins kept us alive,” he said later. “They reminded us that this mattered.”

By 2019, “A Kalabanda Ate My Homework” had earned Malinga a reputation as one of East Africa’s most promising animation voices. That year, he travelled to Cape Town to speak at the International Animation Festival, where he met executives from DreamWorks and Triggerfish, as well as Spider-Verse director Peter Ramsey.

Months later, Triggerfish CEO, Stuart Forrest reached out about a new project, a collaboration with Disney called Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, an anthology of futuristic African sci-fi stories. Malinga was invited to direct one episode, The Herders, set in a reimagined East Africa.

It was the studio’s first time working on a global production. Five members of Creatures joined him on the project. For Malinga, it was both validation and education. “Before, it took us three months to make one episode,” he said. “After Kizazi Moto, we could do one a week.” The experience changed everything, not just their skills, but their sense of what was possible.

Years after that first conversation with his father, Creatures Animation is no longer a dream or a proposal. The studio recently partnered with the United Nations Development Programme to train young animators across Uganda. This time, Malinga isn’t the one teaching; his team is.

“When you teach what you’ve learned, it concretises it,” he said. “You grow into a manager.”

These days, Malinga spends more time thinking about policy and advocacy than production. He sits in meetings about creative economy frameworks, trying to ensure that animation has a seat at the table. “Someone has to be in the room,” he said. “If we don’t build the system, no one will.”

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“It hasn’t been that long since I started doing this, so it’s too early to look back,” he says with a small laugh. “I know that I had fun making the first short films, and I’m still having fun making the short films I’m making now.”

For someone who insists it’s “too early to look back,” Dika Ofoma has already built a body of work that demands attention. At just 25, he’s one of the most promising new voices in Nigeria’s burgeoning independent cinema movement. A self-taught filmmaker whose shorts have earned critical praise and festival recognition while redefining what Nigerian stories can look and feel like outside Lagos.

His latest project, Something Sweet (a Zikoko feature), was praised as “a breath of fresh air” for its intimate and unconventional take on love. Before that came A Japa Tale (2023), The Way Things Happen (2022), and God’s Wife (2025), which earned him the Rising Star Award at the S16 International Film Festival. Each film feels distinct, yet all are tied together by the same thing that defines Ofoma himself: an instinctive curiosity about people and the quiet moments that reveal them.

Ofoma grew up in Gombe, northern Nigeria, in a middle-class neighbourhood that mixed cultures and languages. “We lived in Sabongari, then later in Yelenguruza,” he recalls. “It wasn’t completely Igbo-dominated, but there were enough of us around that it felt familiar.”

His home was a place of stories, both written and spoken. His father kept a small library, and long before Dika could read, he was listening to retellings of Macbeth and Julius Caesar. “I think I knew the stories of Shakespeare before I could read,” he says. “My dad would tell them to me like bedtime stories.”

When he did start reading, he devoured everything: Macmillan novels, Pacesetter series, Achebe’s Chike and the River, and The African Child by Camara Laye. Television opened another world entirely. “We had cable TV early, so I watched everything—Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood. Then I would gather my cousins and friends, and we’d reenact what we saw.”

That blend of books, films, and imagination became the foundation of his storytelling. By junior secondary school, he was writing plays for graduation ceremonies. “Everyone else was performing the same plays year after year,” he remembers. “I wanted something different. So I’d write a new one and direct it myself.”

It wasn’t a path his teachers expected. He excelled in math and sciences, even representing his school in the Cowbell Mathematics competitions. Choosing the arts track in senior secondary school caused a minor crisis. “There was an actual staff meeting about it,” he recalls. “In Nigeria, when you’re smart, people assume you’ll study science and become a doctor. But I’ve always been sure of what I wanted.”

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University followed, though not exactly as planned. He had wanted to study Law, but when his chosen university lost its Council of Legal Education accreditation, he ended up at Imo State University studying History and International Studies instead. He wasn’t particularly bothered. “I knew I was going to school just to get a degree,” he says. “If I could’ve studied what I truly loved, it would’ve been Theatre Arts, but nobody was going to pay my fees if I put that on my JAMB form.”

Ofoma knew where he was going, but he still had not figured out how to get there. In the meantime, he continued writing short stories, reading film scripts online, and watching more and more films. The films Tango with Me and Ijé made him realise that Nigerian storytelling could be more deliberate, more emotional, and more cinematic.

Clarity arrived in 2020, during his National Youth Service in Enugu. At the time, Ofoma was freelancing as a pop culture writer for local and international publications, but that December, he resolved to start learning filmmaking.

“I downloaded Celtx, bought The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field, Story by Robert McKee, and started studying YouTube tutorials, especially the StudioBinder channel. Their videos broke down directing and cinematography really well.”

Then came the conversation that changed everything. “I was walking back from a hike with a friend, we’d been talking about Phantom Thread by Paul Thomas Anderson, and he asked, ‘You talk about film a lot. What’s the end goal?’ I said I wanted to be a filmmaker. Then he asked, ‘So what are you doing about it?’” That question stuck. Within weeks, he wrote a script and shot it on his friend’s phone. “We uploaded it to YouTube. Some people liked it. When I posted it on Instagram and Twitter, it got attention.” That short film was Soma, his unofficial debut.

Around that time, filmmakers he admired began to take notice of his work. Among them was Jade Osiberu, award-winning producer and founder of Greoh Studios, who invited him to Lagos to collaborate on a project. It was his first professional screenwriting job.

In that same year, he reunited with his friend to make another short film, The Way Things Happen (2022). This film gave Ofoma a first taste of widespread fame. “The response blew my mind,” he says. Acclaimed director CJ Obasi reached out to him, encouraging him to take the festival route in distributing his films. That advice changed his outlook. His next short, A Japa Tale, premiered at Obasi’s S16 Film Festival and later went viral on YouTube. By 2023, Dika had established himself as a thoughtful chronicler of everyday life, using small, contained stories to explore big emotions.

“I don’t see short films as practice for features,” he says. “They’re complete on their own. I’m drawn to slice-of-life cinema, picking a moment from someone’s life and saying something true about it in ten or fifteen minutes.”

Unlike many of his peers, Ofoma built his career in Enugu, far from the noise of Lagos. “People think you have to move to Lagos to make it,” he says. “But I’ve made every one of my short films here, except Something Sweet. I love this city. It gives me peace and perspective.”

That love now fuels his first documentary, a commission exploring Enugu’s creative and tech communities. “It’s my love letter to Enugu,” he says. “My career started here, and I want to show that great stories can come from anywhere.”

Ofoma’s filmmaking remains a deeply collaborative and personal process. His early films were self-funded; shot with borrowed cameras, edited on a laptop, made with the help of friends. “We raised money from our circles,” he says. “Sometimes ₦100,000, sometimes more. Nobody expected returns; they just believed in the work.”

Today, his budgets have grown into the millions. He works with professional crews and actors, but insists the approach hasn’t changed. “I still make films to learn, to experiment, to connect,” he says. “I just have better tools now.”

When asked what success looks like, his answer is immediate. “The goal has always been to build a community of people who are interested in my films,” he says. “That’s why I put my work on YouTube. I’m not chasing awards. It would be nice to have them, but it’s not what keeps me up at night. What keeps me up is getting people genuinely interested in my work.”

Five years from now, he hopes to still be making the kind of films that make him happy. “It’s easy to lose focus,” he says quietly. “To start thinking about what the industry wants or what’s trending. I want to keep telling the stories that matter to me. I hope I’m a better filmmaker by then, but more importantly, that I hope I haven’t lost the reason I started.”

“I used to walk around as a college student with business cards in my hands.”

Abdulai Jalloh says this with a nostalgic grin that hovers between pride and disbelief. Back then, the cards read CEO, Borderline Pictures, though there was barely a company to speak of. What existed instead was a restless imagination, a knack for storytelling, and the stubborn belief that he could build something meaningful before anyone else thought it possible.

Twelve years later, that conviction has turned into Bordernation, a global storytelling and media company connecting African and Western audiences through film and documentary work.

Jalloh’s story is defined by duality: two continents, two upbringings. He was born in Conakry, Guinea, and spent his first decade surrounded by family and community, raised mostly by his grandmother while his parents built a life in America. Guinea, he recalls, was defined by warmth and rhythm, a place where everyone belonged.

Moving to Brooklyn at twelve upended the tranquillity of his childhood. The language, pace, and culture were foreign. Yet the chaos of the city, much like Lagos, demanded confidence and adaptability. “Brooklyn is like Lagos on steroids,” he says with a laugh. “Where it’s just fast, and chaotic, but it’s the most amazing place to be as well, because it instils in you a spirit that you can take anywhere around the world and know that you’re good.”

In adulthood, Jalloh often describes himself as the product of these two places: the empathy of Conakry combined with Brooklyn’s fearless hustle. It is this blend of sensitivity and grit that would guide him from adolescence into entrepreneurship.

From an early age, Jalloh’s ambitions were vast and somewhat scattered. “I wanted to be three things: a diplomat, a banker, or a journalist,” he says. Diplomats, he recalls, seemed like the most successful people in Africa. He joined his school’s Model United Nations, where he represented countries at mock UN sessions. But while he thrived there, storytelling began to pull harder.

His high school was located near the New York Film Academy, and he applied to study there after graduation, but the cost of tuition made that dream impossible. Instead, he found another path: a community programme called Reel Lives, which taught inner-city kids to tell stories through film. There, he learned to handle a camera for the first time — a Canon 7DS — and discovered the language of light, lenses, and framing.

The experience was transformative. Mentored by Lyle Kane, founder of Reel Lives, Jalloh left the programme determined to start something of his own. “Once it ended, I told them, ‘I want to form a company to do this.’ I had no idea what I was doing, but they helped me set it up, anyway.” And just like that, Borderline Pictures, a nod to his cross-continental identity, was born.

Running a company as a teenager came with predictable chaos. Jalloh barely understood the workings of a business, but he had conviction. In the university, he juggled his classes with full-time work at the Rockefeller University Research Centre to fund his shoots. Each semester began with Jalloh negotiating with professors for flexible deadlines in exchange for completed assignments. “I’d be on a film set in San Francisco on Saturday and back in class on Monday,” he says. The grind, he insists, built his discipline. “That balance taught me everything about deadlines, about never giving up.”

There were setbacks, but also small wins. One of Borderline’s early commissions came from the Africa Society in Washington, D.C., for a documentary titled Bridging the Gap. The film’s success led to an invitation to screen it at Harvard. Another project, centred on the Nigerian diaspora in America, introduced him to a network of African executives in the U.S. who became early collaborators and mentors.

His small teenage passion project was now becoming a company. But when he tried to trademark the company name, he discovered that someone else already had the trademark, forcing a rebrand. Borderline Pictures became Bordernation.

By 2017, Jalloh’s attention had turned to the continent he left as a child. Living in the United States made him aware of how Africa was represented, or more often, misrepresented in Western media. He noticed the paradox of Africans excelling in business and academia while remaining invisible in mainstream storytelling.

That imbalance inspired Explore Africa, a travel documentary series showcasing the continent’s modern reality. “The idea was to go to different African countries and show that Africa has cities, universities, science centres, not just animals and safaris,” he explains. Partnering with Ethiopian Airlines and local tourism boards, his team filmed across the continent in 2019. “As I travelled, I realised we hadn’t even scratched the surface of what Africa really is. That was the moment we went all in on Africa.”

From then on, Bordernation’s mission became explicitly Pan-African: to bridge perception and reality through media and storytelling. It does this primarily through Explore Africa and a series of events which highlight African success stories. In 2023, Bordernation partnered with Time Magazine and the Rwandan Development Board to host the first African TIME100 dinner in Rwanda.

If Bordernation’s work sounds like activism through storytelling, that’s because it is. Jalloh’s frustration with Africa’s media dependence runs deep. “We wait to be validated by institutions that aren’t in the business of validating us,” he says. “How many of our leaders would give Communiqué an interview before giving it to an international outlet? We prioritise others instead of ourselves.”

He’s especially critical of how African media ecosystems are structured. “Look at the BBC, most of its funding comes from the UK government. CNN advances American interests. But how many African media houses are subsidised to tell our true stories? None. We have 1.5 billion people on this continent, yet our narratives are still told through Western lenses.”

To him, this imbalance isn’t just about journalism but about power. “Media companies function based on their audience. We have the audience. What we lack are systems and processes to sustain independent storytelling.”

Bordernation’s next chapter pushes that idea further. The company is preparing to launch a private equity fund focused on African entrepreneurs. “We’re using our media platform and access to anchor these entrepreneurs across Africa and globally,” he says. “Creating a fund is still storytelling. We’re just telling a different kind of story now about African innovation.”

Through all the pivots, what stands out in Jalloh’s journey is consistency. He has never worked for anyone else and has built his company piece by piece since his teenage years. The milestones — screenings at Harvard, partnerships in Africa, a growing international network — matter less to him than the endurance it took to get there.

His proudest achievement, he says, is simply that Bordernation still exists. Twelve years after it began as a one-man operation, the company has survived the instability that swallows most creative ventures. “We built something and sustained it,” he reflects. “There have been ups and downs, but we never gave up.”

Thank you for reading Communiqué! Help us give Africa’s media and creative industries the coverage it deserves by making a donation here.

“I look forward to retiring one day, and then I’m going to basically spend my whole retirement going through all the books that I’ve missed over the last 20 or 30 years.”

That’s Lisa MacLeod, the Director, Global News Clients at FT Strategies, thinking aloud about what her life will be when she retires from her career as a journalist turned media consultant.

MacLeod has spent decades helping newsrooms around the world, from The Financial Times (FT) in London to News24 in Cape Town, learn how to survive and adapt to digital change. But when she talks about journalism, she sounds less like a strategist and more like an anthropologist. “I’ve realised a lot of my work is anthropological,” she says. “It’s about observing how people and organisations respond to change — and helping them think differently.”

It’s a fitting description for someone who studied journalism and anthropology at Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, two disciplines that now seem inseparable in her life’s work.

MacLeod grew up in East London, a small port city on South Africa’s coast. When Macleod got into Rhodes University in 1991, Nelson Mandela had just been released from Prison.“I grew up in apartheid South Africa,” she says. “A lot of things that seemed normal then — like Black South Africans not being allowed into our suburbs at night, I only realised later were far from normal.”

At Rhodes University, where she studied journalism and anthropology, South Africa’s political transformation and her own intellectual awakening happened side by side. The campus buzzed with debates about freedom and democracy; protests and marches became part of student life. MacLeod absorbed the urgency of that moment, learning not just how to write the news but how to read society.

Her choice to pair anthropology with journalism was deliberate. Growing up on National Geographic and her parents’ novels, she had developed a fascination with people and how they behave in groups. Studying anthropology offered her a lens to understand culture; journalism gave her a way to document it. Together, they became the foundation of a worldview that would later shape her career.

After university, MacLeod joined The Daily Dispatch, a small regional paper known for its tight-knit newsroom. Her early assignments were light and lively: features about music, local culture, and community life. Then she was moved to the news desk. There, the work grew heavier. “I quickly realised I didn’t have the right temperament for hard news,” she admits. “I had to interview people who had just lost family members, and I found it very emotionally draining. You have to be really tough for that.”

She soon realised she was less drawn to breaking stories and more to shaping them. Editing came naturally; spotting gaps in structure, sharpening angles, helping other writers find their rhythm. That shift from reporter to editor was the first major turning point in her career. It revealed a strength that would come to define her professional life: the ability to help others adapt, refine, and grow.

Her next role after The Daily Dispatch was to be an editor at Business Day, a prominent newspaper in Johannesburg. She quickly rose through the ranks to become Managing Editor within six years of working there. Her work at Business Day earned her a fellowship at the Poynter Institute in Florida, followed by a short-term secondment at the Financial Times in London, which led to a permanent move to the UK and a position at the “pink paper.”

Her first assignment at the FT was not glamorous: help roll out a new digital publishing system. But that project became the launchpad for her career in digital transformation.

“When I think about digital transformation, for me, it’s really about helping people think differently,” she says. “You’re asking journalists to change habits built over decades. You’re changing how they see their work.”

At the time, the FT still printed multiple international editions every day. The internet was young; smartphones didn’t exist. “We had to figure everything out as we went along,” she says. “It was dramatic, fascinating work — and I had a front-row seat to all of it.”

Her background in anthropology gave her a rare lens for understanding what was happening. It was like watching a tribe forced to evolve overnight. “Journalists are tribal people.” And the rituals of the newsroom tribe, the hierarchy, the language, all of it had to change.

After 11 years at the FT, and moving up the ladder to be the Managing Editor, she called it quits and moved back to South Africa for family and personal reasons: She wanted her daughter to be close to her parents. While there, she worked for two of the biggest media companies in South Africa.

She led major change projects at News24 in Cape Town and Tiso Blackstar Group, now Arena holdings, the parent company of Business Day in Johannesburg. “I came back to South Africa somewhat like a visitor from the future,” she says. “The UK was about ten years ahead on digital, so I could say, ‘Here’s what works. Don’t waste your time on that.’”

Her experience convinced her of one thing: Africa’s journalism challenges are not just technological but structural. “One of the reasons African publishers struggle,” she says, “is because people can’t easily go work abroad and come back with new skills. If it were easier for Africans to move between markets, we’d see faster progress.”

MacLeod eventually returned to the UK. Back in England, she took on consulting work, including with Women in News, a global program under the World Association of News Publishers. “They work across Africa and the Middle East, helping women journalists grow in leadership,” she says. MacLeod developed and taught The Digital ABC, a course that helped journalists understand the economics and mechanics of digital publishing.

She soon found herself back in the FT family, this time not in the newsroom but in FT Strategies, the group’s consulting arm. “I called my old colleague at the FT who was setting up the division and said, ‘Please take me back,’” she recalls. “FT Strategies was perfect for me. It lets me draw on everything I’ve learned, in different jobs, countries, and crises — and use it to help other publishers thrive.”

She now works with news organisations across the world, including in Kenya and Uganda. “I almost made it to Lagos last year,” she says, laughing, “but there was a cholera outbreak.”

After decades of steering newsrooms through print decline and digital disruption, MacLeod still looks forward with optimism. “I’m working on a project to help strengthen local journalism in South Africa,” she says. “I’m hopeful it could serve as a blueprint for sustainability anywhere in the world.”

And one day, when she finally slows down, she’ll return to her first love — reading. “I think we’ve lost our ability to concentrate because of mobile phones,” she says, a little wistfully. “But I’ll get back to it. When I retire, that’s what I’ll do — just read all the books I’ve missed.” It’s a fitting plan for someone whose love of books led her to transform the way stories are told and shared.

“I have huge respect for where I came from and our immigrant mentality of how we work. When you’re an immigrant in a country, you usually have to work five times harder than everybody else. That’s what Wimbart represents: we’re unapologetically intense, put in a lot of effort, and get great results.”

If you had told Jessica Hope twenty years ago that she would one day run a public relations agency shaping how the world views Africa’s tech industry, she probably would have laughed and returned to her daydreams about travel. But that’s her life now. As founder and CEO of Wimbart, Hope leads one of the most respected PR agencies in Africa’s start-up ecosystem.

And if you ask her how she got here, she’ll tell you: by working hard, staying adaptable, and leaning on her community.

Hope grew up between London and Devon: half city, half countryside. Her father’s family came from Guyana in the Caribbean, and her grandparents built a life together in 1950s Britain. The street where they lived, Wimbart Road in South London, would one day lend its name to her company.

“I was a geeky, nerdy kid,” she says, laughing. “I played chess, loved reading, but also liked to party a bit. I was really lucky. I had great friends and very supportive parents.”

Her father, a trailblazer in the British police force, modelled ambition and discipline early. He rose to become the youngest inspector, the first Black chief inspector, and later a borough commander. “He worked incredibly hard,” she says. “So did my grandparents. I was brought up to understand that you have to work very hard, whatever you do.”

By age thirteen, Hope was already juggling jobs. Saturdays in a bakery, paper rounds on Friday nights, waitressing during weekends and holidays. “I worked all year round so I could travel,” she recalls. “I loved travelling. I used to travel a lot with my dad when I was much younger, and from sixteen, I started travelling on my own.”

Those early adventures, travelling across Europe, built her confidence and curiosity. When she enrolled at the University of Manchester to study History and French, later adding a master’s in Religion and Political Life, she already knew she was drawn to storytelling. “I always wanted to be a journalist,” she says. “I liked researching and writing. I think I had a flair for it.”

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Hope started out writing for university publications. After graduation, she worked at two Manchester magazines, one of them with a young entrepreneur named Jason Njoku. Together, they tried to launch a lifestyle magazine for young professionals, but advertising revenue never came through. “It just didn’t make money. We were young, experimenting, and print was expensive.”

After the second magazine folded, reality set in. “I’d worked for two publications in Manchester, neither of which worked out financially. So at that stage, I thought, ‘I need to get serious.’”

That seriousness led her to her first PR job at a Manchester agency. The transition made sense; the skills she had developed as a journalist, including writing, research, and understanding audiences, overlapped with the requirements for PR. But the pace and professionalism were new. “It taught me how to deal with clients, how offices really worked. I learned quickly because my bosses were amazing, and I worked really hard.”

She grew within the company and got promoted, but she became restless. When she got a job offer in London, she tendered her resignation. Her employers matched the offer, but after spending seven years in Manchester, she knew it was time to move on.

Her next chapter led her to a government press office specialising in the construction industry. It was stable and well-structured work, but she missed the creativity. “I’d always wanted to work in the arts. I’m a history student — I’ve always wanted to work in museums,” she says.

She first moved to a sister government agency focused on the arts, but she was made redundant after three months. One day, while browsing on Gumtree for a bar job, she stumbled on a posting for the Natural History Museum’s press office. She applied on her birthday and started two days later. “It was amazing,” she recalls. “Fast-paced, one day you’re doing consumer PR, the next day it’s science PR.”

That short contract led to a role as Head of Press at the Jewish Museum in London, where she stayed for nine months.

Then Jason Njoku came calling again. At the time, he had just raised $3 million for his new company, iROKO, which was helping to bring Nollywood films online. And he wanted Hope to handle the company’s communications.

Joining iROKO meant diving into the heart of Africa’s emerging tech scene. Hope helped open the company’s New York office and handled everything from corporate communications to celebrity partnerships. The work was chaotic but thrilling. It taught her how to manage complexity, build systems from scratch, and communicate across continents.

Hope’s work with iROKO made her popular in the African startup scene, and other founders who had seen iROKO’s success wanted her to work with them. She recognised the opportunity and, in 2016, with a three-month-old baby and her father helping with admin, she launched Wimbart — named after the street where her family’s story began.

Wimbart started as a one-woman operation. Soon, Hope hired Maria, a former colleague from iROKO. Together, they worked from home, managing a handful of clients. Every hire was a careful decision. The company grew organically, with no investors, no big office, and just word of mouth and results.

Their early clients included Ringier, Silvertree Capital, and iROKO itself. But the turning point came when they secured Andela. The deal took over a year to close, but it transformed Wimbart from a small boutique into a serious agency. Over the next several years, Wimbart would go on to work with Kobo360, Paystack, 54gene, and PiggyVest, among others.

Hope saw her role as more than just securing press. In the early days, she often had to educate international journalists about Africa’s tech scene. “In the early days, international journalists wanted rags-to-riches stories,” she says. “We had to help them understand that there’s a middle class, a sophisticated market, and real innovation here.”

Nearly a decade later, Wimbart has worked with more than 160 companies. Hope’s leadership has evolved with the business. In the early years, she handled everything herself, including writing press releases, fielding media calls, and managing clients. Now, she focuses on strategy, growth, and mentoring her team. “For a long time, I was working in the company, writing press releases, sitting on client calls, instead of on the company. Now, I’m focused on strategy, growth, and direction.”

As Wimbart approaches its tenth anniversary, Hope is thinking about the future. The company is expanding its scope beyond traditional PR into strategic consultancy, advisory, and network building.

Hope often describes Wimbart as a product of the values she inherited: resilience, discipline, and an unshakeable belief in hard work. “When you’re an immigrant in a country,” she says, “you learn to work five times harder than everyone else.”

That spirit, passed down through generations, is now enshrined in company culture and continues to define both her and Wimbart.

“I said, ‘I’m never doing this again.’ And then they told me, no, you have to, because most people’s natural reaction is to run out of the way and yours is to block it.”

Molly Jensen gets really passionate when she talks about football, or as Americans like to call it, soccer. When you eventually probe deeper, you discover she was a former elite goalkeeper, and then the dots start to connect. The painful encounter she’s recounting was her 14-year-old self blocking a ball at a goalkeeping tryout. She had started playing because she felt left out when her siblings played sports while she wasn’t doing anything. They put her in goal because she was tall, awkward, and couldn’t play well as an outfield player.

But her coaches saw something special in that instinctive reaction to stand her ground rather than flee. Her parents encouraged her, hired a coach, and Jensen rose through the ranks to become a goalkeeper for a Division One team in college. Even though she no longer plays competitively, she credits that athleticism as a core part of her identity and the work she’s doing now as CEO of Africa’s premier and largest podcasting platform, Afripods.

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“I was an athlete—that’s not something I tell everyone, but it’s really important and special to me,” Jensen explains. “It makes me who I am. It helps me get through really hard challenges, whether personal or otherwise.”

Born to an American father and a Ghanaian mother, Jensen spent much of her childhood between New York and the UK, with maternal grandparents. These experiences immersed her in West African culture, its expectations, and its nuances. Coupled with her parents’ entrepreneurial spirit, this upbringing shaped her career vision early on. “My mom runs her own business. My dad worked in corporate publishing. When I thought of jobs, I thought of business.” That perspective guided her decision to apply straight to business school from high school, where she eventually studied Business Administration with a focus in marketing at George Washington University.

From her first business school class, Jensen knew she had chosen the right path. She supplemented her studies with internships at advertising agencies, and sales roles.

Fresh out of college, she was introduced to the fast-paced world of entrepreneurship through Techstars New York, where she worked with Lean Startup Machine—a global workshop series that taught entrepreneurs how to rapidly test and validate business ideas. She was responsible for organizing hackathons and events around the world, including the company’s Munich program, which became the best-attended event in its history. That experience sparked her interest in the startup ecosystem.

“It was really like my first foray into the tech space,” she recalls. Building on that experience, Jensen went on to take on marketing roles at a real estate and fintech company, growing her expertise at the intersection of tech, startups, and media.

Jensen began to pay closer attention to Africa’s growing tech and innovation scene and felt a strong pull to be part of it. Having spent much of her life between the US and West Africa, regularly visiting Ghana and making trips to Nigeria, she wanted her next chapter on the continent to feel different. She began visiting Kenya in 2018, building relationships and understanding the ecosystem. She eventually moved to Kenya in December 2019.

She moved at a fortuitous time. Not long after her arrival, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and with people stuck at home, the consumption of digital content, such as podcasts, soared. A podcast enthusiast herself, Jensen leaned into the moment and began consulting for Afripods, a platform building the infrastructure for podcasting in Africa.

Contrary to popular belief, Jensen is not the founder of Afripods. Instead, she was appointed to the role of CEO in 2021 through what she describes as an organic progression. “I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I was consulting with the company. Then there was a change in leadership, and I stepped in. I met someone, we started having conversations, I started consulting and doing research, and then I stepped in as CEO.”

At the time, Afripods wasn’t the structured company it is today. It was still very much a passion project, driven by the idea of building a podcasting infrastructure native to Africa that mirrored what already existed globally. Jensen is considered the de facto founder because it was under her leadership that the platform truly took flight. The numbers tell the story: “We went from 292 podcasts to over 3,000. We have over 1,600 podcasts hosted on the platform. We can categorise content in over 50 languages from over 50 countries. We have some of the largest networks in Ghana and Nigeria on our platform.”

Jensen is fascinated with people. Long before she stepped into the C-suite, she immersed herself in the study of emotional intelligence, attending seminars and training with organisations like Six Seconds. “I was really interested in emotional intelligence—about just how to be a better person, how to be a better friend, how to be a better colleague, how to be a better partner, how to be just good to people and understanding them,” she recalls. “It helped me articulate my feelings, manage other people’s feelings, and ultimately connect with people in a meaningful way.”

That instinct to prioritise connection became central to Afripods’ growth strategy. Rather than just building a distribution platform, Jensen and her team invested in building a community. They hosted regular meetups with podcasters across the continent; gatherings in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, and beyond, where creators could share challenges, exchange ideas, and shape the platform’s direction. “When people feel seen and heard, they’re more invested,” Jensen says.

This approach also drove product innovation. The platform’s Broadcast to Podcast (B2P) feature, for instance, emerged from testing a hypothesis that radio stations could repurpose their content as podcasts for digital audiences. By reaching out directly to radio stations, Afripods convinced over 110 stations across nine markets to use the platform. Radio stations now make up a significant portion of streams on the platform.

Jensen’s competitive soccer career ended in 2019, but she remains philosophical about the transition. “Goalkeeping is not like just being a football player on the field where you’re running. I’m literally diving, somersaulting, going for breakaways. You’re the last line of defence. You’ve got to give it your all.”

That goalkeeper instinct still surfaces in unexpected moments. “Sometimes if there’s a ball flying somewhere, or someone throws car keys, my reflexes are really fast. People are always surprised, especially kids, because they don’t know,” Jensen humorously recounts during our conversation. It’s a fitting metaphor for her current role at Afripods because today, she continues to block, not footballs, but obstacles that limit African podcasts from growing.

Editor’s note:

An earlier version of this article misstated a few details. The subject spent time between the UK and the US, not Ghana and the US; was a paid member of Lean Startup Machine during its Techstars New York program; and did not make regular trips to Ghana and Nigeria until after relocating to Kenya in January 2020.