Africa Has Parts: See Them

Africa is an exceptionally diverse continent. Much attention is paid to the different governing systems between former French and British colonies, but that is only the first layer of diversity. Across fifty-four states, Africa today has six official languages born of its colonial history and the migration of Islam. Preceding these are hundreds of distinct ethnolinguistic and tribal groups, many of which do not correspond to national boundaries. In addition to these tribal differences, Africa is religiously diverse, with both Abrahamic and traditional faiths having significant influence.

Figure 3–1: Official languages of Africa

Source: NordNordWest, provided to Wikimedia July 14, 2011.

If you approach Africa as an undifferentiated whole, you approach it at your peril. Scangroup’s Bharat Thakrar grows livid about the mistakes made by international firms with a single marketing approach for all of Africa:

Why do global companies make a mistake when entering Africa that they would never make elsewhere? You’ve got to be able to communicate to the consumers in a language the consumer understands. When you go to Europe do you look at Europe as one market? You know the Italian is very different from the Spanish, the Spanish is very different from the French, so you don’t want to create a single communication and blast it out to them.

Figure 3–2: Religions of Africa

Source: Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C.

They do that to Africa thinking all Africans are idiots. Africans are not idiots; they see themselves or they do not see themselves. A Tanzanian will look at an ad and will say, “I don’t see myself there. That’s a Kenyan, that’s a South African there, so that’s not for me.” The communication does not meet with them, so they do not buy your product.

Figure 3–3: Ethnolinguistic groups and tribes

Source: Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C.

Africans are long used to others painting the continent with a single brushstroke. It obscured the nascent success in Africa, in particular when the brush tip was dipped in blood.

Sam Jonah experienced that effect firsthand when raising capital for AngloGold Ashanti. In 1996, Sam had come to New York to pitch the company to U.S. investors. He was CEO of the largest gold mining company in the world, with a low cost structure and favorable price forecasts for its product. Sam had just led the company’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange, making it the first African company on the Big Board. The trip was to be a routine follow-up to the listing. It wasn’t routine. That week, the Rwandan genocide filled the airwaves with images of African rivers choked with bodies and African faces distorted in rage. The nightly news was a window into a horrifying dystopia emerging in real time.

Sam knew what was happening in Rwanda would reflect on him, and on home. “Most investors then still thought Africa was a country, ” he recalled, “one country. When we did our road show for the listing, no matter how many times we told the investors our operations were in Ghana, they thought we were in Guyana, or Guinea. And once Rwanda hit the airwaves, I knew we were in trouble. We were all Rwanda.”

Sam had spent a lifetime moving his company, and Africa, away from such images. He was born in the town where Ashanti Goldfields (the predecessor to the current AngloGold Ashanti) had its largest mine, and Sam was raised in the mine’s shadow. His father was a contractor by trade, and built his business up sufficiently to send his boys to school in Ghana. Against his parents’ wishes, Sam went into mining and won the attention of the mine manager, who recommended him for a corporate scholarship to study for a certificate in mining in the U.K. He returned to Ashanti and climbed the organization chart into levels few black Africans had obtained. In 1986, at the age of thirty-six, he became the company’s first black CEO, and its youngest. In 1995 he successfully listed the company on the New York Stock Exchange.¹ He then spent the better part of the following year trying to recover from the events in Rwanda—a country where his company had no operations, and where he himself had never been. It was an object lesson in where Africa stood at the time.

The risk of the red brush is still real. In 2012, as this book was being completed, Mali experienced a coup and subsequent insurgency. In the short term, it was reasonable for business confidence to falter... in Mali. However, the falter extended, with little real justification, to all of Africa. An editor at a major global news organization wondered aloud to me whether Africa was “headed back to the bad old days.” We still seem just one event away from painting Africa with a single brush.

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