The African Tech Narrative Needs to Be Written by Africans

Open any major Western technology publication on any given week and you will eventually find a story about Africa. It will likely talk about 'the continent's untapped potential.' It will reference the mobile money revolution in Kenya. It will quote a venture capitalist based in San Francisco about the opportunity they see in Nigerian fintech. It will use words like 'emerging' and 'frontier' and 'leapfrogging.' And it will, almost certainly, have been written by someone who has never lived a single day of their life on African soil.

This is the state of the African tech narrative right now. The story is being told. It is being told loudly and with growing frequency as the world wakes up to the size and energy of what is happening across the continent. But the people doing most of the telling are not the people living the story. And that gap, between the teller and the lived experience, is not a small or cosmetic problem. It shapes what gets covered, what gets funded, what gets celebrated, and ultimately what gets built.

Who Controls the Story Controls the Direction

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED Talk in 2009 that has since been watched over 30 million times. In it she said something that has never stopped being true: 'The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.' She was talking about literature and personal identity, but the principle applies with full force to the tech sector. When the dominant narrative about African technology is authored from outside the continent, it will always be incomplete. Not because the writers are dishonest, but because they are working from a distance.

Distance produces a particular kind of blindness. It makes it easy to see the dramatic and the novel, the Mpesa story that fits neatly into a before and after frame, the startup that raised a record round, the founder who moved from Lagos to Silicon Valley and made it. Distance makes it easy to miss the texture of the day to day, the infrastructure problems that shape every product decision, the cultural context that determines what a user will trust and what they will not, the local knowledge that is invisible to an outsider but completely obvious to anyone who grew up here. When you write about a place from the outside, you write about its headline moments. When you write about a place from inside it, you write about its actual life.

Strive Masiyiwa, the Zimbabwean billionaire and founder of Econet, has spoken often about the difference between African entrepreneurs who build for African realities versus those who import solutions designed for entirely different contexts. He has said plainly that 'Africa's problems require African solutions.' That is not a nationalist sentiment. It is a practical one. The person who has navigated the erratic power supply, the underdeveloped logistics network, the trust deficit with formal financial institutions, the last mile connectivity problem, that person builds differently. They know things that no amount of research from abroad can fully transfer.

What Gets Lost When We Are Not the Ones Writing

The most immediate consequence of an externally authored narrative is a funding landscape that rewards the stories foreigners find legible. Investors, especially those who have never operated on the continent, tend to back what they can understand within frameworks they already have. This is why you see certain kinds of African startups raise money with ease, those that resemble Western models closely enough to feel familiar, while other kinds of companies, ones solving deeply local problems in deeply local ways, struggle to get in the room at all. The narrative creates the appetite, and the appetite shapes the capital, and the capital shapes what gets built.

Nneka Eze, a Lagos-based product designer and advocate for African design thinking, has written about how even the aesthetic language of African tech products is often borrowed from Western design systems that were built around Western users. The default assumptions baked into UI patterns, into onboarding flows, into how trust is communicated visually, these are assumptions born from a different context. When African builders are not in the room making product decisions, and when the inspiration and validation for those decisions comes from outside the continent, the products that emerge are not quite wrong, but they are not quite right either. They fit the user imperfectly in ways that are hard to articulate but easy to feel.

There is also the question of what gets celebrated. The African tech ecosystem produces extraordinary things every year that never make it into international publications because they do not fit the frame those publications are working with. They are too local. Too specific. Too embedded in a context that requires explanation before it can be appreciated. And so the coverage goes to the stories that travel easily, and the ecosystem's internal perception of itself is shaped partly by what gets covered. Young builders in Nairobi and Accra and Kigali and Lagos are consuming media that reflects their reality back to them through a foreign lens, and they are building their ambitions inside that frame. That is a real cost.

The Infrastructure of Narrative

Changing who tells the story is not just about individual journalists or individual founders deciding to write more. It is about building the infrastructure that makes African voices the default, rather than the exception, in conversations about African technology. That infrastructure is both institutional and personal. On the institutional side, it means investing in African tech media with the same seriousness that investors bring to African tech companies. Publications like TechCabal, Techpoint Africa, Disrupt Africa, and others are doing genuinely important work, but they are operating with a fraction of the resources that their Western counterparts have. They should not be treated as local supplements to global publications. They should be treated as primary sources.

Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, said something decades ago that feels newly relevant in this context: 'A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It pounces.' There is something in that for how African builders need to think about narrative. Not as a performance for external audiences. Not as a press release crafted to attract foreign capital. But as an act of pouncing, of taking the space, of deciding that the story will be told with authority and from the inside, regardless of whether the outside world is ready to receive it on those terms.

On the personal side, it means African founders, designers, engineers, and product thinkers making a deliberate decision to write, to speak, to document their thinking in public. Not as a marketing exercise, but as an act of contribution to a body of knowledge that is genuinely underdeveloped. When Paystack's Shola Akinlade writes about building a payment company in Nigeria, that is not just a founder update. It is primary documentation of what it actually takes to build financial infrastructure in a context that most of the world's business press does not understand from the inside. Every time someone with that lived experience chooses to make their thinking public, the collective narrative gets more accurate, more useful, and harder to distort.

This Is Not About Shutting Anyone Out

It would be easy to read this as an argument for insularity, for African tech to close itself off and reject outside perspectives. That is not what is being said here. Outside investment, outside partnerships, and yes, outside coverage, can all be valuable. The problem is not that the outside world is paying attention. The problem is the power imbalance in who gets to define the terms of that attention. When the narrative is controlled from outside, the inside becomes legible only to the extent that it translates into external frameworks. The goal is not to stop outside voices from speaking. The goal is to make African voices so present, so substantive, and so authoritative, that they become the primary reference rather than the secondary one.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization and one of the most respected economic voices to emerge from the continent, has consistently argued that Africa needs to move from being a subject of global economic conversations to being a shaper of them. The same logic applies to tech. The continent should not just be a market that gets analyzed. It should be a perspective that gets listened to. There is a difference between being written about and being heard.

Conclusion

The African tech story is one of the most interesting stories being written anywhere in the world right now. The scale of the problems being solved, the creativity of the approaches being taken, the speed at which an entire generation of builders is moving, it is genuinely remarkable. But remarkable things, told badly or told by the wrong people, still get misunderstood. And a misunderstood ecosystem attracts the wrong attention, the wrong capital, and the wrong expectations.

The work of reclaiming the narrative is not a one time act. It is a sustained, collective decision to show up and tell the truth about what is being built here, in language that is honest rather than translated for outside comfort, in forums that are African rather than always foreign, with ambitions that are grounded in the actual reality of the continent rather than shaped by what external audiences find palatable. The story is already happening. The only question is who will write it. The answer should be us.