Global platforms arrived in Nigeria with commissioning budgets, then pulled back. African producers rebuilt on the platform that never left: YouTube. For a few years, streaming money transformed African screen production. Netflix commissioned Nigerian originals, Prime Video followed, and budgets, salaries and ambitions rose. Then the global streaming business turned to profitability. Prime Video stopped...

Cameroon’s English-language film industry grew up in Buea, at the foot of Mount Cameroon. Then the region became a war zone. The films kept coming, from elsewhere. Long before streaming, a generation of Anglophone Cameroonian filmmakers built an industry around Buea, in the South-West region. It borrowed the naming convention of Hollywood and Nollywood and...

One phrase from a Cameroonian saxophonist’s 1972 B-side became one of the most recognisable refrains in pop music. The story of who got paid, and when, is the story of African music’s relationship with the global industry. In 1972, Manu Dibango recorded “Soul Makossa” in Paris. It was the flip side of a record made...

Africa’s best-known e-commerce company has spent a decade proving that selling online on the continent is hard. Its management says profitability is close. It has said that before. Jumia listed in New York in 2019 as “the Amazon of Africa”, a label its founders never chose and its results never justified. Under the current leadership...