Building an African digital content industry

• Author: George Twumasi
• Position: CEO, ABN Holdings Limited, London, United Kingdom

Recognizing the huge creative potential of Africa’s cultural resources, the power of the media and the need to renew confidence among Africans in our creative potential, the African Public Broadcasting Foundation (APBF) is supporting efforts to establish a viable African public broadcasting landscape that harnesses digital technologies and encourages the production of high-quality, compelling content made by Africans for Africans.

The APBF, which was established by ABN Holdings Ltd in collaboration with Professor Emmanuel Akyeampong of Harvard University and key African broadcasting organizations, is a pan-African electronic media organization that brings together broadcasters and academic researchers. Its vision is to support Africa’s economic transformation by establishing a creative workshop in which a succession of authentic and inspiring development-oriented story arcs are developed, produced and distributed across African television channels, targeting millions within Africa and beyond.

Drawing on Africa’s deep cultural wealth, the APBF is recreating Africa’s inspiring storytelling tradition for television with content made by Africans for Africans. The goal is to take advantage of the immediacy and audio-visual power of television to celebrate the continent’s lush history of folk tales to entertain and enlighten viewers.

For centuries, Africa’s uplifting storytelling tradition went uncelebrated. This has generally dampened interest among Africans in the rich cultural wisdom of our narratives, effectively curbed any appetite to exploit its creative potential, and obscured a vision of a future of infinite possibilities in which noteworthy achievements are the norm.

An archive of African culture emerges and inspires

Over the last 65 years, however, researchers have been amassing an expanding archive of African knowledge ranging from its archaeological and historical roots to its literary and folkloric traditions. Initiatives such as the African Writers Series sponsored by Heinemann Educational Publishers since the 1950s – which enabled writers like Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe to get started – also now represent a considerable literary archive. Similarly, the six-volume Dictionary of African Biography, published in 2012 by Harvard University Professors Emmanuel Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, which traces the events shaping the continent’s history over the past 5,000 years, provides another rich source of information about Africa’s...