A decade later, however, many of those promises remain unresolved. Currencies have depreciated. Inflation has become a permanent condition of everyday life. Startups once celebrated as continental success stories have collapsed. Across much of Africa, the conversation has shifted from disruption to survival, from scaling businesses to navigating uncertainty. Yet to describe this simply as economic decline would be to miss something equally important. For while formal economies have faltered, countless other economies have flourished. This issue begins there.
Africa’s Hustle Republics explores what we have come to think of as the social life of money. Money is never merely money. It is obligation and aspiration; performance and prestige; trust and speculation; labour and imagination. It shapes families, cities, industries and political systems. It creates entire worlds.
Across the continent, Africans are continually inventing new ways of making, moving, protecting and performing value. Some of these systems are centuries old. Others emerged only yesterday. Some operate through multinational corporations, container ports and financial districts. Others depend on handwritten ledgers, WhatsApp groups, roadside kiosks, wedding planners, tea cooperatives or informal networks of trust. Some are spectacularly visible. Others remain almost entirely hidden.
Taken together, they reveal a different picture of African capitalism, not one defined solely by GDP figures or investment reports, but increasingly by the everyday infrastructures through which millions of people organize economic life.
That idea extends also to our cover: rather than illustrating a single essay, we commissioned an imagined aerial view of the African continent transformed into a sprawling economic landscape. Inspired equally by illustrated atlases and amusement parks, the cover presents Africa as a collection of interconnected ‘hustle republics’: miniature worlds of factories and farms, ports and markets, mines and megaprojects, weddings and warehouses, financial districts and roadside commerce, musicians and industrialists, informal traders and infrastructure builders. It is intended as a visual essay in its own right—one that rewards slow looking, much as the stories inside reward careful reading.
We begin in
the Gambia, where Yero Bah
explores how migration has transformed not only household finances but also family authority, social status and the very meaning of success. In his telling, remittances are more than financial transfers; they are emotional contracts that bind together lives lived thousands of kilometres apart.
From there, we travel east to
Nigeria, where Oyindamola Depo-Oyedokun
takes readers inside the extravagant economy of Lagos weddings. Beneath the glamour lies an enormous industrial ecosystem sustained by planners, designers, photographers, caterers, stylists, musicians and content creators, revealing how celebration itself has become one of the country’s most sophisticated businesses.
Further east, in
Sudan, Eglal Hamid
examines how civilians rebuilt an entire financial infrastructure after war fractured the country’s banking system. As formal institutions collapsed, trust itself became a form of economic infrastructure, allowing millions of people to continue moving money across borders through informal yet remarkably resilient networks.
In
Kenya, Martina Jebet
follows a single kilogram of tea from hillside farms to international markets. Along the way, she uncovers a deeper story about digital scales, cooperative politics, subsidies, debt and the hidden arithmetic of one of Africa’s most valuable export industries.
Although these stories emerge from different countries, they are united by a common question: what happens when we stop treating money as an economic object and begin treating it as a social one?
The answers are often surprising. Weddings become industrial ecosystems. Tea becomes an accounting system for entire communities. Trust becomes banking infrastructure. Emigration becomes not a loss but an investment. Throughout the issue, money appears less as currency than as a force that organizes relationships, determines authority, produces identities and continually reshapes the societies through which it moves.
The phrase ‘Africa Rising’ encouraged us to see the continent through the language of markets, investment and growth. Africa’s Hustle Republics invites a different perspective. It asks us to look not only at economies but also at economic life; not only at wealth but also at the countless ways people create value under conditions of uncertainty; not only at institutions but equally at the informal systems that sustain millions of lives every day.
For if the defining economic story of twenty-first-century Africa is still being written, it may not be found first in stock exchanges or ministerial reports. It may instead be found in markets and weddings, on tea farms and refugee settlements, in logistics corridors and neighbourhood savings groups, in digital platforms and roadside businesses—in the extraordinary social worlds that Africans continue to build around money.
This issue also features original short stories by Victor Ehikhamenor and Elnathan John. Edited by Chigozie Obioma, Ehikhamenor’s story
follows a Nigerian immigrant in the United States of America who, after an American photographer dismisses West Africa as unworthy of photographing, responds with an unforgettable portrait of a village whose greatest wonders are its people, not its wildlife. In ‘Soph(y)ie’, John
crafts a tender and unsettling portrait of modern loneliness, where the person who knows a woman best may not be another human, but the AI she publicly condemns.
Additionally, this issue features quizzes, puzzles and other interactives. It also features a
First Draft interview with Nigerian historian and the founding president of the Lagos Studies Association, Professor Saheed Aderinto. According to Professor Aderinto, ‘History is as much about animals as about humans...by considering animals as colonial subject, we can best understand the full extent of human colonial subjecthood.’
This issue also features authors writing on topics ranging from
Gender to
World Affairs. In our
Gender section, Ololade Faniyi
explores how institutional structures such as the office of the first lady and the Ministry of Women Affairs more often reinforce than challenge patriarchal norms. In
Science & Technology, Georges Macaire Eyenga
argues that President Paul Biya’s digital modernization agenda in Cameroon masks deeper structural failures, asking whether technology can truly transform a state without first transforming its institutions. In
World, Mustapha Isa
reveals how the African passport has become a marker of inequality, mobility and citizenship, exposing who gets to move freely and who remains confined by borders.
Our Money Issue, this edition is our third of 2026 and was developed with funding from the Open Society Foundations (OSF).
As usual, we encourage our readers to engage with our essays and articles, and to provide insightful comments. Readers may send their views directly to the editor by addressing emails (of no more than 700 words) to
wale@rpublc.com, with the subject, ‘Comment on Xyz Essay’, or ‘Letter to the Editor’ as applies. Comments and letters will be archived and, depending on the quality of the arguments presented, we may reach out to assist in developing your letters and comments further for publishing in the magazine.
At The Republic, we will always prioritize the meaningful exchange of ideas. We commit to pressing forward: on the most critical of social, political and economic issues; by innovating through knowledge gaps; and by providing guidance through thickets of opinion, ignorance and misinformation—three key features of our time—in search of glades of insight⎈
Comments
Sign in to comment.