In many ways, the human experience can be described as an eternal search for a home. Maya Angelou describes it best in her autobiography All God’s children need traveling shoes.
We understand this feeling - the ache for home. At our core, we are driven by it - the need to recreate home. Perhaps nothing describes the experience of living in the Diaspora as much as the loneliness of being away from home. This is where we must start the Afropolitan story, the story about creating for the African diaspora, a home that is more than just a place.
We hosted our first events catering for the African Diaspora in 2016. It is well-documented that no one throws parties like they do in Africa. Teju Cole muses on it in this essay about the Lagos nightlife, accompanying a similarly inspired playlist. Andiswa Mkosi documents it in her photo essay titled Mid-Groove. In style, form and feeling, the African party is like no other. The first phase of our story was recreating the African party: in style, form and in feeling.
The Afropolitan party features the biggest Afrobeats stars, from Davido to Burna boy, from Mr Eazi to Tiwa Savage, and from Wurld to Olamide. We curated live experiences that represented what it meant to be young, African and free. These events recorded attendees from over 30 African nationalities, as well as members of the African American community, Afro-Latinos and people across the Black diaspora.
One of the major highlights of this phase of our story is 2019, earmarked Ghana’s year of return. In 2019, Ghana recorded a 45% increase in tourist visits compared to the previous year. Barbara Oteng Gyasi, Ghana’s Minister of Tourism, even went as far as reporting that the year of return accounted for an injection of $1.9bn into the Ghanaian economy.
We express the world’s changing nature all the time. We proclaim to want to change the world and exclaim about how unprecedented the time we live in is, but nothing could have prepared us for just how much the world would change in 2020. Unprepared as we were, still bright-eyed from the successful execution of the year of return, the world changed in 2020. The events industry more or less seized to exist; according to Variety, Live nation, the top event promoter in the United States, lost 95% of its revenue.
In the new world, we had to redefine our mission to create the feeling of home. We could no longer do it through live events, so we turned to media. With the rise of the social audio app, clubhouse, we created the Afropolitan lounge and built a community of about 50,000 Afropolitans. Through conversations and events, we built a self-serving network that led to new jobs, new investments and new partnerships. People made friends and even kindled firing love stories. Our community was also able to garner support for worthy causes like the EndSars Movement and the refugee crisis in the Ethiopian conflict.
The medium of audio played a crucial part in our ability to curate this community and so it was not lost on us as the world of audio content grew. In 2021, we launched the Afropolitan podcast with a maiden season of 14 episodes. Each episode featured the stories of Afropolitans and their journeys through today’s world. The guest list spanned multiple industries. It included notable individuals like MI Abaga, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Preston Ideh, to mention a few. We brought them to share their working formulas and the hard facts about leaving familiar terrain, embracing the unknown and staying relevant afterwards.
In our new vision of home, we created a community. We created a network of people with shared values and motivations. We gave these people a place to feel a kinship and connected people with means to people in need of helpful p. We illustrated the power of change that a caring community possesses.
This is the big hairy audacious goal of the Afropolitan group. We are reimagining the Afropolitan nation as more than a group of people bound to a geographical location.
There is something about the past couple of years that has sparked the necessity for a reckoning. Since 2020, a wave of outrage has swept over the black community globally. We have been forced to confront the realities of brutality and unfairness stacked against the black community.
Upon scrutiny, the Afro-centered world tells a narrative of scarcity, weakness and Poverty. 9 out of the 10 poorest countries in the world are African. Democracy is still a fickle thing in many African nations; there have been 11 attempted coups in the past 5 years, and 6 of them have been successful. Africans worldwide are subjects, not citizens. Access to opportunity is scarce. Security is not guaranteed. For the most part, life is just about surviving, not thriving.
At Afropolitan, we know that this image of Africa as a failed idea is not a true one. All around the world and in every industry, black people are at the forefront of innovation. This dichotomy between what we find when we look around and what we know to be true has forced us to ask a big question
The nation-state experiment has failed for Black people worldwide. It has yielded nothing but poverty, genocide, police brutality, ethnic strife, inflation, weak government, and the failure of our ecosystems.
With this in mind, we have decided to imagine what it would mean if the diaspora were a nation. To begin, by population, it would be the 10th largest nation at 140 million people.
Historically, nations have formed first as a geographical place; the idea of a community with mutual interests and beliefs has come second. In Africa’s case, the geographical idea of a nation was not even formed by the people the nation was intended for. But what if we built a new network and migrated it into the real world via a city (or Network of cities)?
Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, in a 2021 article titled How to start a country, proposes the idea of the Network State, a digital nation launched first as an online community before materializing physically on land after reaching critical mass.
The internet enables people to organize around shared values at scales that were previously unthinkable before the current century. These scales are no longer unthinkable. So we ask you to imagine with us, the Afropolitan nation.
A digital nation comprising the best black minds, unbounded by historical and colonial constraints. The Afropolitan goal is to create a digital nation to enable all Africans to live abundant lives. Instead of the Land of Opportunity, we propose the Network of Abundance: Abundance of Tools, Abundance of Opportunity, Abundance of Joy. Today, we are building a Network comprising the best Africa and the diaspora offer across art, finance, tech, and media. Specifically, the Afropolitan Network is a Curator of Black and African talent, culture, capital, information, and experiences.
In many ways, the human experience can be described as an eternal search for a home. The Afropolitan nation is an attempt to create that home. The one we deserve. The Afropolitan nation is a feeling and a community, it is not simply a place. Join us in creating a home.
Learn the strategies behind tech and crypto within the African diaspora. We demystify the pathways to limitless value creation within these emerging technologies and the communities around them.
