We Keep Saying ‘Africa Forward.’ It Is Time to Say What Forward Means
“Africa forward.” The phrase has become ubiquitous — emblazoned on summit banners, embedded in brand strategies, and repeated in the careful language of development finance. It sounds like a destination. But as culture writer and creative producer Ekow Barnes argues in a pointed essay, the phrase has too often floated free of any concrete meaning, serving as a slogan that flatters without committing to anything specific.
Barnes, who has spent a decade building productions across the continent, is not interested in dismantling the optimism. He is interested in sharpening it. His argument is straightforward: attention is not the same as progress, and being noticed is not the same as moving forward.
“We are living through what the world likes to call Africa’s moment,” he writes. “Our music sets the tempo for global pop. Our designers are studied and borrowed from every fashion capital. Our films travel, our writers win prizes, our cities turn up as backdrops in campaigns shot for audiences far from here.” The attention is real. But a moment, he warns, is not a direction.
The heart of Barnes’s critique is an old one, dressed in contemporary urgency: extraction. For all the talk of partnership and creative collaboration, he argues, “forward” has too often meant the world arriving to take — to take the talent and credit it elsewhere, to take the sound and own the master, to take the image and keep the copyright. “That is not forward,” he writes. “It is extraction with better manners — and a continent cannot build a future on being the world’s most generous, least compensated supplier of culture.”
He has seen the pattern play out repeatedly. A production arrives. Everyone is dazzled by the place, the faces, the light, the effortless excellence of the local crew. The work gets made, and it is often beautiful. Then the cameras pack up, the edit happens in another time zone, the ownership settles into a contract no one here was ever invited to read, and what remains on the ground is a day rate and a story about how Africa is having a moment.
What, then, should “forward” actually mean? Barnes is specific. It means ownership — of masters, intellectual property, catalogues, and the long tail of revenue that a good idea generates for decades. It means infrastructure: studios in Accra, Lagos, and Nairobi where work can be finished rather than merely started; financing structures that do not require a flight to London or Los Angeles to be taken seriously; institutions that transform individual brilliance into a sector that employs millions.
It means, too, narrative ownership. “For most of modern history the continent has been narrated by other people, for other people,” Barnes writes. “Forward is the day we tell the story ourselves, and are paid and credited for telling it, and decide for ourselves which parts are worth telling.”
The essay acknowledges recent progress. The Africa Forward summit in Nairobi, co-hosted by France and Kenya, marked a shift in vocabulary from patronising cultural exchange to genuine economic co-investment, with billions pledged in structural commitments. But Barnes is clear-eyed: billions on paper are a starting gun, not a finish line. A commitment is only as good as the willingness to enforce it.
His closing argument is both a challenge and an invitation. When partners come — and in a year when global attention keeps turning toward Africa, they will keep coming — the questions must change. Not only “what will you pay?” but “what will you build?” Not only “will you feature us?” but “will you leave capacity behind?” Not only “can we appear in your story?” but “can we own a share of the one we make together?”
“Forward, if the word is going to mean anything at all,” Barnes concludes, “can only mean” an Africa that owns what it makes, finishes what it starts, and sets its own price. It is a vision that demands more than applause. It demands architecture.
Image Source: MYJOYONLINE
