Storytelling is infrastructure
A continent without distributed stories is a continent without distributed memory.
There is a version of the African tech conversation that I am tired of having. It goes: "What do you make?" "Games." "Oh — interesting. So when are you going to do something serious?"
I used to argue back with numbers. Gaming is bigger than film and music combined. The continent has the youngest population on Earth and the highest mobile-first ratio. The TAM slide writes itself. But the conversation never really moved, and I eventually understood why: the question was never about the market. It was about whether stories count as infrastructure.
Memory needs distribution
Every culture I admire has had moments where its myths got industrialized. Greek tragedy became Hollywood. Norse gods became Marvel. Japanese folklore became three generations of anime that an entire planet now speaks fluently. None of those happened because the underlying stories suddenly became better. They happened because somebody built the rails to distribute them at scale, and the rails outlived the stories.
The continent has thousands of stories larger than any Marvel arc. The bottleneck has never been the stories.
— A note to myself, 2022
Kongo Dynastie was our small attempt at proving the inverse. We took a piece of Central African mythology, shipped it inside The Sandbox metaverse, and watched something interesting happen: kids in Brazzaville, Brussels and Brooklyn played the same level on the same day, and three different definitions of "home" briefly converged. That is what infrastructure does. It makes shared experience cheap.
The cost of not building
If we do not build the rails, our stories still leak — but they leak into other people's pipelines, get rewritten in other people's rooms, and come back to us as products we have to buy. The continent has lived this loop with music, with fashion, with food. There is no good reason to repeat it with the medium that the next billion humans will spend the most hours inside.
- Build the studios so the stories have somewhere to be made.
- Build the distribution so the stories have somewhere to go.
- Build the fintech so the stories pay the people who tell them.
- Then, and only then, argue about whether games are "serious."
I do not know who needs to hear this, but: yes, storytelling is infrastructure. It is the most underrated kind. Treat it accordingly.