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. 13 A career built abroad is portable until the day it has to come home. Tidjane Thiam became the first Black chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, then the first African to run a major global bank. In April 2025 an Abidjan court struck him from Côte d’Ivoire’s electoral roll,...

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...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 9 Africa holds roughly 15% of the world’s people and attracts about 1% of global venture funding. Within that 1%, four anglophone markets — Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa — absorb the overwhelming majority, and female founders take a fraction of what remains. Fatoumata Bâ built a fund around both gaps...

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...