GG Network

It is out.

The African Cultural Intelligence Snapshot Report, Volume I. A year of work, 271 events, 46 countries, 34 pages.

Inside there is a regional breakdown for all six regions, twelve festivals profiled in full, a section on where the real strategic openings are depending on who you are and a chapter on everything we still do not know.

One finding I keep coming back to. North Africa has the highest international media profile of any region in the dataset, and it is routinely filed as MENA rather than African. Marrakech, Mawazine, Cairo. How something gets classified decides where the money goes.

It is free, it takes an email and the link is in the comments. Volume II follows in Q4 as the Diaspora Edition.

Thank you to everyone who argued with me about this over the past year. It is a better document for it.

Ask most international cultural databases about the Hargeysa International Book Fair and you will get nothing back.

It has run for close to two decades. Writers, publishers and readers come in from across the Horn of Africa and the diaspora. By any reasonable measure it is one of the most important intellectual gatherings on the continent.

The reason it is missing is not size and not significance. It is that Somaliland is not internationally recognised as a state, so the festival falls outside the boxes those systems were built with.

That is the whole argument in one entry. An index that only finds the obvious is not an index. It is a highlight reel.

One of 271. The full report is now available.

Most people wait until someone else finds the holes in their work. I would rather publish ours.
Four things are wrong with our dataset right now.

Central Africa has only 22 entries, which is nowhere near enough for a region that size. Brazil and the Caribbean are not in there at all, and those are two of the oldest African diaspora populations in the world. Five whole categories sit at zero, including theatre, publishing and broadcasting. And a lot of dates and attendance figures are still unverified.

None of that is comfortable to write. It is also the honest position and it tells you exactly what the next phase of work is.

Two ways to help. We are paying regional correspondents across six regions, so if you are a researcher, journalist or cultural professional with real knowledge of your region, I would like to hear from you and we are opening a small group of founding institutional partners.

Swipe through, and send this to anyone who should be doing this work with us.

People ask why this has taken a year when there are festival lists all over the internet.

This is why.

Nothing goes in on one source. Not a press release, not an organiser’s own word. Two independent sources or it waits, including for events I personally love and would like to see included.

Nothing goes in on fame either. Some of the most significant entries in there are events you have never heard of and some very famous ones are still sitting outside because we cannot verify the details yet and it gets reviewed every quarter, because a cultural calendar nobody maintains is just a historical document.

Five rules in total. Swipe through. The full report publishes Tuesday.

A year ago I started counting. Here is where it landed.
271 cultural events across 46 countries and 6 regions. Everything from heritage ceremonies that have been observed for centuries to esports tournaments that did not exist ten years ago. 15 diaspora events dated and verified for the first time.
The number that stopped me was seasonal. 135 of these events happen in wet season and 89 in dry. More than half the calendar sits in the months most people plan around rather than plan for, because heritage and music events follow farming cycles and school holidays, not marketing calendars.
Swipe through for the rest of the numbers. Full report publishes Tuesday.

Here is something that still surprises people.
Felabration. Dak’Art. Nyege Nyege. Mawazine. Chale Wote. Calabar Carnival. If you are reading this, you probably know most of them. Some pull over a million people. Some are older than the countries they happen in.

Now try to find them listed together anywhere, with dates you can trust and details you can check. You will not find it. I have looked for years.
They are not hidden. They have just never been organised and that matters more than it sounds, because the brands, tourism boards and funders with real money to spend will not back what they cannot see or verify.

So the story we keep telling ourselves, that African culture needs more visibility, is slightly off. It is already visible. What it is missing is legibility.
We spent the past year quietly counting. Swipe through, and tell me in the comments: which African event would you bet the rest of the world has never heard of?

A decade ago you would have had to explain what Afrobeats was. Now it is on the global charts, African designers are on the Paris and Milan schedules, Nollywood sits in streaming catalogues, and art fairs across the continent have international buyers in the room. By every visible measure, it worked. But I keep asking a less comfortable question. Who owns the masters, the catalogues, the venues, the routes, the platforms, the data. And where does the money actually settle once the moment passes. A hit record is a moment. A sold out show is a moment. A festival that comes back every year without a circuit around it is still a moment. Moments do not compound. Systems do. This was never a talent problem. It is a structure problem, and structure is the part nobody posts about. That is the work at Griot Global. Studying the systems underneath Africa's creative economy, and publishing what we find.

Swipe through and tell me which part of the system you think is furthest behind.