Lifestyle, Arts and Culture: Oct 2019

This month’s Lifestyle, Arts & Culture was largely composed in the midst of the dramatic downpours of the October rains. If showers symbolise blessing, then may we all get our heads wet! After all, “rain does not fall on one roof alone”, as the Cameroonian proverb reminds us! Enjoy the month.

What we’re grooving to…

There should be a word for music that sounds like a place. Like ‘onomatopoeia’ but capturing the relationship between the Gulf of Guinea coastline and Fireboy’s Jealous or Wizkid’s Lagos Vibes. Hear minor keys, palm wine chords and polyrhythm; see Atlantic Ocean, yellow strip and green foliage atop red earth. The songs say so much of the creative industry opportunity, as well as its underlying drivers and challenges. Fireboy and Wizkid are products, in part, of the Nigerian education system (Obafemi Awolowo University and Lagos State). Their output is world class – songs and music videos alike – and the audience extends beyond Nigeria’s 180-200 million and even beyond the continent’s 1 billion people. 

The Gulf of Guinea also boasts collaborations in songs such as Another Story between sub-regional heavyweights Burna Boy and M.anifest. The Nigerian and Ghanaian artists have forged alliances not only in melody and rhythm, but also in history and ideology with the release of their track on 1 October, coinciding with Nigerian Independence. 

Alliances of a different kind are embodied in the jazz infused, Afrobeat-meets-electropop (a la S.I.A) sound of Allisn, an American songstress based in Ghana, who sings in English, Pidgin and Ga.  She’s already caught the attention of some of Ghana's biggest, including, Stonebwoy, Becca and Shatta Wale. Catch a sneak peek of her in action here - the album dropped on 8 October.

We have tingles listening to the layers upon layers of acapella harmonies of the Ndlovu Youth Choir from Limpopo, South Africa, in their vibrantly joyful cover of Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You. The choir’s tutor, friends with one of our strategic partners at Fitzrovian Capital, humbled us when he shared that, “being born into poverty doesn’t mean you are poverty”.

While a proverb from our continent reminds us that “music speaks louder than words”, it is both the lilt and the lyrics of “Brown Skin Girl”, popularised by Nigeria’s Wizkid, Guyana’s St John and Beyoncé, which moves our core. Unapologetically, the dancehall track punches holes in the prejudice of colourism by inspiring young dark-skinned black women to know that their “skin just like pearls”. 

The global population has been primed to receive the sound of these mostly-millennial Afrobeat artists by the use of African polyrhythms in popular music over the last 100 years (jazz, blues, indie and hip hop etc). So, hearing these contemporary sounds is not ‘foreign’ in a London pub, Barcelona club or on a New York radio station in a way that it would have been only twenty years ago. 

If the African music industry can find solutions to some of its current challenges: namely, weaknesses in copyright, contract enforcement, and insufficient quality domestic venue space, we believe we will see an industry poised for greatness.[1]

What we’re reading….

For Oscar-winning Kenyan actress, Lupita Nyong’o, the subject of colourism has found a voice across her 48-page children’s tale in Sulwe (meaning ‘star’ in Luo), about a girl whose skin is “the colour of midnight”. The book will be launched on 15 October and the actress-turned author was motivated to ink her debut “to encourage children (and everyone really!) to love the skin they are in and see the beauty that radiates from within”. 

Another book-launch we’re looking forward to is that of Be(com)ing Nigerian: A Guide, by Nigerian satirist, Elnathan John at the Wolfson Lecture Theatre, SOAS on 15 October. The Royal African Society describes it as “an outrageously funny and affecting guide…to the Nigerians you will meet at home and abroad, or on your way to hell and to heaven”. We go read am sharp!

What we’re debating…

A lot of important thought takes place on the ‘Africa is a Country’ platform. Ruth Murambadoro’s article, Mugabe and the Tradition to not Speak Ill of the Deadis another such example. Referencing a Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quote about the dangers of a single story, the piece addresses the painful complexities of the legacy of the late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. 

Ghana is in the grips of a social debate surrounding proposals by the Ghana Education Service to introduce a sex education module into the curriculum, Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE). As a traditionally conservative society, the voice of consternation has drowned out all others, claiming that it will expose children to overly explicit information and ‘unwanted’ exposure to LGBT issues. One of the nation's main advocacy groups, OccupyGhana, has penned its thoughts to government in a letter.

And in Senegal, social media has been going viral about KFC’s opening of its first restaurant in the capital of Dakar, not least of all because of its all-female restaurant staffers. KFC is also sourcing its chicken from indigenous, female-led poultry company, Sedima. Some feel it’s a nod to women’s empowerment while others have labelled it ‘false feminism’.[2]

What we’re adorning ourselves with…(!!)

Combining some of her favourites: shea and mango butter, lavender and jojoba oil, Abena Boamah, a maths teacher-turned skincare guru, is expanding her Hanahana Beauty range, specifically designed for women of colour. Sourcing her shea products from the northern parts of her native Ghana, Boamah is committed to a social mission by working with women from Katariga in the Sagnarigu District in the Northern Region, by paying them twice the Fairtrade wage and providing other social benefits such as formal education.

It is often said that an African woman’s hair is her crown and this month will see a celebration of this at London’s Curly Treats conference at Novotel Hammersmith on 26 October, said to be the UK’s largest natural hair event.[3] There will be natural hair products on sale and ‘afro hair education’ as more and more African women join the movement to ‘go natural’, in defiance of the strictures that the corporate world in particular can place on them. Chante Griffin elaborates on this issue in her piece, How Natural Black Hair at Work became a Civil Rights Issue.  The irony is that in the US, black women are a growing consumer segment for the lucrative hair care industry and were estimated to have spent US$2.51bn on hair products in 2018, with shampoo and conditioner growing by 12.2% and 7.3% in the last couple of years, respectively.[4]

 Going back to one’s roots is a theme that British Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief, Edward Kobina Enniful, underlines in this month’s edition of Vogue. It features African-American model Binx Walton on her first trip to Ghana (indeed, Africa) where she combines iconic African wax prints with urban-retro silhouettes. Ghanaian brands such as award-winning social enterprise StudioOneEightyNine[5] and high-end couture label Christie Brown[6] are showcased, alongside ‘bucket-list’ Accra haunts such as Republic Bar run by our friends, Kofi & Ryan.

What we’re gearing up for… 

This month we’re excited to be attending the Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) in Ethiopia, happening 23-26 October and the Lake Basin Investment Summit in Kisumu, Kenya in November. Both will bring together a range of social entrepreneurs, impact investors, development finance institutions, incubators and accelerators to explore the growing social enterprise ecosystem. We’re delighted to be collaborating once again with Social Impact Consulting to analyse the relationship between social enterprise and job creation across the continent over the coming months – so if you’re part of the African social enterprise fraternity, we want to hear from you!

To discuss further with the team, please do drop us a line: questions@songhaiadvisory.com 

[1]https://www.pressreader.com/france/the-africa-report/20190923/281556587543890

[2]https://www.theafricareport.com/18356/vips-fried-chicken-and-sexist-polemic-senegals-first-kfc/

[3]https://curlytreats.co.uk

[4]https://www.mintel.com/press-centre/beauty-and-personal-care/naturally-confident-more-than-half-of-black-women-say-their-hair-makes-them-feel-beautiful

[5]https://studiooneeightynine.com

[6]https://www.christiebrownonline.com