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Sheriff here!

A few weeks ago, I took the scenic route after being stranded on a walk in a new city.

It led me down a rabbit hole that reshaped my thinking about tech in Africa.

This week, I’m going to take you down that rabbithole.

But first, I have an announcement.

No phone in hand, no familiar face around, and certainly no idea how to get to where I was going.

So I did what anyone in their best sense would do: roam.

Through the sights of street food sellers, grocery vendors, and unfamiliar sentences, a movie stall caught my eye.

I moved in to talk to the stall owner. 

He asked me if I wanted a movie. I said I wanted a conversation.

That conversation led me down a rabbit hole.

One that changed how I think about technology and how different communities interact with it across Africa.

See, the prevailing narrative of tech in Africa is often a single story. 

It features startup founders, VC funding, and outsized ambitions that echo the hype cycles of tech scenes abroad.

But in Africa, that story is just the tip of the iceberg. If your idea of tech in Africa is centered around that, you’ve barely left the surface. 

Because when you dive beneath the surface, you’ll see tech being used in ways that don’t feature startups at all, but still matter a lot. 

And this has been true for decades.

This week, I’m taking you on a dive with me to see the underside of that iceberg. Starting with…

In the early ‘60s, a Nigerian salesman named Kessington Adebutu got bored and quit his job. 

His next move? Starting a lottery business called Premier Lotto, popularly known by many Nigerians as “Baba Ijebu”.

He started manually, running bookings on paper. 

His system was simple. Gamblers wrote down a sequence of numbers, and a drum with 20 balls and a possible sequence of numbers 1 - 89 spins up until there’s a result.

The results were instant: cash was counted by hand, and this system continued for 40 years.

Baba Ijebu grew by hiring “agents”. These people lived in communities and set up retail shops where people could place bets. 

The agents then sent these bookings to the HQ, which then sent back results after a few days, plus cash to pay out to the winners.

And they earned a small cut off the bookings they made.

In 2001, Baba Ijebu rolled out a new system. It started using small terminals to take bookings instead.

These terminals could log a bet and the gambler’s details, transmit them to HQ, and the gambler gets their results in less than 24 hours.

Today, its network has grown to over 16,000 agents across Nigeria, and they turn over billions of naira in bookings each month.

Baba Ijebu is low-tech, simple, and takes bookings in small amounts.

But by using a distribution network of agents powered by technology, it was able to grow into a behemoth.

Sound familiar? 

That’s because today many fintechs, like Opay and Moniepoint, have adopted this model, serving consumers wherever they are. 

They built unicorns off this model. But they’re not the first to use tech in this way. 

Premier Lotto did it, years before the phrase “agent banking” was coined.

Here’s another unorthodox way tech is used in Africa.

In 2009, religious law enforcement officers in Kano, a state in Northern Nigeria, staged a public bonfire of romance novels.

Their reason? Romance novels were morally indecent and had no place in the city.

But despite how many books they burned, they didn’t kill the readership. It simply went underground.

Out of the ashes of that bonfire, a new kind of erotica writing emerged. This time, they weren’t published formally as books, but as WhatsApp messages.

Young, female (and often Muslim) writers write erotic stories, and share them as messages in women-only WhatsApp groups.

These stories are centered around desire, marriage, and autonomy, issues that many women in the region contend with.

And these authors have figured out how to get paid. Here’s their business model:

When the series is done, the author shuts down the group.

Some writers hide their identities to avoid being judged.

Others don’t.

One of them is Oum Hairan, a 31-year-old who’s gained celebrity status for her writing.

She charges ₦300 ($0.20) for her regular group. This fee gets you the free chapters.

Then, to read the full thing, she creates VIP groups where she charges about ₦1,500 ($1.2) per person.

She simply drops her account number and waits for the money to come in.

The writers don’t need a publishing deal or even a printed version of their work. They can simply write from the comforts of their home and get paid.

The best part? It’s out of reach of government censorship.

Speaking of censorship and free access to media, let’s go back to the stall that caught my eye on the street corner.

Because what my friend, Abu, was really into was street film vending.

Abu earns a living doing two things:

Here’s something I noticed about Abu’s stall within a minute of being there. He had a charging station with at least 20 phones plugged into it.

Each phone represents someone who paid at least N200 (¢10) to plug it in there. As we spent time talking, different people came to either unplug or plug in their phones.

But nothing is too interesting about this.

Nigeria is a country with an epileptic power supply. Many of these people got less than 4 hours of power supply each day.

So it made sense that they’d need a local stall to charge their phones.

But missing out on electricity means that they’re also missing out on something else: entertainment.

Most of the people used feature phones from brands like Nokia, Itel, or Tecno.

They can’t access platforms like YouTube or Netflix.

And they definitely can’t stream the last episode of The Boys.

So, Abu solves this problem by pirating movies across different platforms and genres, then selling them to his customers at unit prices.

He had movies from Hollywood, Bollywood, mainstream Nollywood, and even the lesser-known Hausa subgenre, known as Kannywood.

A single American, Indian, or Chinese movie will set you back ₦100 (~$0.10). Same for a Hausa series.

Getting all the episodes of a TV show will cost you ₦800 ($0.60).

Downloading an app on your phone with his help costs ₦200 ($0.18). And getting a complete audio album costs ₦400 ($0.35).

Abu had essentially built a Blockbuster store from scratch. And it paid for his daily living.

He’s never heard of the famed “Blockbuster”, nor did he care to know what it was. 

All he knew was that in a day, at least 20 people bought movies from him. 

And at least twice that number gets their phones charged at his booth. 

I don’t think Abu is strange or even uncommon across Africa.

If you’ve been following, the point isn’t that the popular story of African tech isn’t real. 

We’re the continent with drones that deliver drugs, mobile payments that work via text, and software engineers that rank among the world’s best.

But we’re also the continent where Premium Lotto, Oum Hairan, and Abu are thriving with a version of tech that looks unsexy and barely makes the news.

When you read the cover stories on how tech is shaping Africa, these stories are often drowned out.

But they’re closer to the daily experience of the average person than you might think. 

And most times, they solve a core need that people face - whether it’s income, entertainment, or freedom of expression.

So, the next time you’re stuck in traffic in Lagos or walking down the street in Nairobi, or on a hike in Tanzania, look out for unorthodox ways in which technology might solve a problem.

Lose the comfortable scaffold of an app, an API, or a pretty interface. Sometimes, a simple corner stall will suffice.

What unorthodox ways have you seen technology be used in Africa?

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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