Angélique Kidjo, from Ouidah to Hollywood Boulevard Los Angeles, August 18, 2026 It took forty-three years to travel from a stage in Cotonou to a stretch of pavement on Hollywood Boulevard. On August 18, 2026, under the palm trees across from the Roosevelt Hotel, at 7011, Angélique Kidjo unveiled the 2,854th star on the Walk...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 14, and last Nigeria’s central bank caps non-executive tenure at twelve years, expressly to stop founders entrenching themselves atop the institutions they built. In 2026 the rule removed both of them: Jim Ovia from Zenith Bank on 5 May, Tony Elumelu from UBA on 21 August. In the months around his...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 11 A founder’s biography is not a legal defence, and a legal file is not a verdict. Mohed Altrad does not know what day he was born; he picked 9 March with his children. From a Bedouin tribe near Raqqa to 65,000 employees in more than fifty countries and a fortune...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 10 At end-June 2025, Nedbank carried its 21.2% of Ecobank Transnational at R1.8bn against a market value of R1.9bn. It sold the block four months later for $100m — roughly R1.8bn. The headline that a Cameroonian financier bought for a fifth of what the seller paid is arithmetically true and analytically...