Africa Is Not a Land On Challenging Narratives

“Afrika ist kein Land.” Africa is not a country. It’s a continent 54 countries, thousands of languages, millions of stories.

Yet Western media often treats it as a single thing: the developing world, the dark continent, a place of starving children and safaris.

That oversimplification isn’t just ethically lazy. It’s strategically dangerous.

If you’re building products globally, you can’t think of Africa as one market. Nigeria’s tech scene isn’t Kenya’s. Egypt isn’t Ghana. Different languages. Different infrastructure. Different needs.

A friend from Nigeria once put it plainly:
“Lagos has better internet infrastructure than some U.S. cities. You can’t design for us as a single use case.”

The point is simple: the categories we create often serve convenience, not truth.

For builders, this matters. The best solutions come from understanding specific contexts, not broad labels.

Your next market isn’t “Africa.”
It’s Lagos.
It’s Cairo.
It’s Nairobi.