The Recording Academy created a Best African Music Performance award. Its winners so far have come from South Africa and Nigeria. The gap says less about talent than about infrastructure.

The category was introduced for the 2024 ceremony. The first award went to a South African artist for a song that had already conquered global playlists; the following year a Nigerian singer won. West and Southern Africa dominate the nominations. No artist from the six CEMAC states has won.

The infrastructure gap

Winning a Grammy is a function of exposure, and exposure is a function of industry.

• Labels and distribution. Nigeria and South Africa have local subsidiaries of global labels, distribution companies and publishers. Central Africa mostly does not.
• Playlist placement. Streaming editorial teams are staffed in Lagos, Johannesburg and Nairobi.
• Voting membership. Grammy voting is done by industry members. Few Central African professionals are members, and membership requires credits, sponsorship and paperwork.
• Campaigns. Awards campaigns cost money: submissions, publicity, travel, showcases.

What Central Africa has

Talent has never been the constraint. Congolese rumba shaped the continent’s popular music. Cameroon gave the world makossa and bikutsi, and Cameroonian producers work on international hits. The missing pieces are the intermediaries: managers who can negotiate, publishers who can register, and labels able to fund a campaign.

The piece to write

An analysis with data: nominations by country since the category was created, a count of Central African members of the voting body, and a costed breakdown of what an awards campaign actually requires. Then a straightforward question to the region’s biggest artists: are you even submitting?