Trajectories — Portrait No. 8 In 2013, Fast Company appended an editor’s note to its profile of Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu. It removed a claim that soleRebels was the world’s only Fair Trade-certified footwear company, and noted the brand was no longer carried by Urban Outfitters. Thirteen years later, the uncorrected version is still the one...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 7 A tenure cap moves a person. It does not necessarily move power. On 21 August, Nigeria’s twelve-year limit on non-executive directors ends Tony Elumelu’s chairmanship of UBA — the second time the same central bank has removed him from the same bank. His successor is the former group chief executive...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 6 Every Cameroonian exporter who negotiates a letter of credit, writes “FOB Douala” into a contract, or signs an arbitration clause is applying rules drafted by the International Chamber of Commerce. Those rules are texts, written by people, in rooms, and revised on a schedule. Until June 2026 no African woman...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 5 Africa’s largest technology exit is usually reported as $682m. The figure adds a payment that was made to one that may never be, and excludes the stake the buyer already held. What actually happened is more instructive than the headline: a Tunisian mathematician came home from a comfortable European career,...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 4 Infrastructure is a rent asset. Airports, ports and power grids earn their returns from the absence of a substitute, not from competitive advantage — which is exactly why long-horizon capital wants them, and exactly why a weak regulator turns a partnership into a transfer of pricing power. Adebayo Ogunlesi built...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 3 Central African economies pay better for trading than for making. Importing a container requires working capital and a licence; building the factory requires energy, a supply chain, trained labour and capital you cannot get back if you are wrong. Célestin Tawamba trained as a financier, spent a decade pricing exactly...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 2 Ursula Burns took over a company whose product was being erased by the internet, and spent $6.4bn — the largest acquisition in Xerox’s history — buying a different business to become. Six years later the group was split back in two under pressure from an activist holding roughly 15% of...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 1 Strive Masiyiwa spent five years and most of his money in court, arguing that Zimbabwe’s telephone monopoly was an assault on free speech. He won, switched on his network, and then left the country for twenty-six years. The infrastructure group he built from exile is now being tested by the...

For the best part of a decade, Ousmane Dembélé was football’s most tantalising unfinished sentence — all gift, few moments. Then came a June night in Boston, three goals, and the unmistakable sense that a career had finally caught up with its talent. On 26 June 2026, against Norway, Ousmane Dembélé did something he had...