Cement, sugar, fertiliser and now the continent’s biggest refinery. Africa’s wealthiest industrialist has built an empire on import substitution. Central Africa is one of the markets he has not yet conquered. Aliko Dangote’s method has been consistent for three decades: identify a product Africa imports in volume, build capacity at a scale that changes the...

She brought the World Trade Organization to Cameroon and left without a declaration. For the woman who runs global trade rules, the Yaoundé conference was both a personal achievement and a demonstration of how little consensus is left. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became the WTO’s Director-General in March 2021, the first woman and the first African to...

There are trajectories that command admiration, and Thuso Mbedu’s is undeniably of that caliber. In just a few short years, the young South African prodigy has shattered every glass ceiling to establish herself as one of the most magnetic figures in contemporary global cinema. A true bridge between the creative effervescence of the African continent...

How the heir to Black independent cinema’s founding revolution turned an act of cultural insurgency into a durable business model — and why Paris is about to crown him Some names are worn like a crown. Others like an anvil. Mario Van Peebles inherited both. He is the son of the most ungovernable filmmaker America...

Two Academy Awards, a Tony, four decades on screen. And, running quietly underneath all of it, a fifty-year debt that one man has spent his adult life paying back in instalments. This is the documented record of Denzel Washington’s philanthropy — what it funded, whom it changed, what it cost, and where the legend around...

How Imane Ayissi — dancer, model, self-taught couturier — became the first sub-Saharan African on the calendar of Paris haute couture, and why he is still the only one I. The dance at the end In July 2026, in the gilded salons of the Aéro-Club de France in Paris, a recorded voice asked the guests...

Among the choices that explain the critical success of the French diptych La Bataille de Gaulle — which, with more than 5 million combined admissions, became the surprise box-office triumph of the French summer of 2026 — one stands out as bolder than the rest: building the entire first part, L’Âge de Fer (“The Age...

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...