As a student of dialectics, I am forever cautious of fixed definitions. I am taught that reality defies stasis — that each idea contains its own negation, and that truth lives in the motion between what is, what is not, and what is becoming. And so, when I hear “Brand Africa”, I do not simply see a marketing slogan or an abstract continent stitched together by boardroom strategists and PR gurus.
Brand Africa is. It is the sum of its images — the wildlife postcards, the drumming heartbeats, the mineral riches and boundless potential, the warm smiles of our hospitality, the promise of a billion youthful dreams. It is the stories we sell at investment conferences and the hashtags we chant on Heritage Day. It is hope, colour, vibrancy.
Yet brand Africa is not. It is not the single story told by power-brokers from boardrooms in Europe or glass towers in Sandton. It is not the perpetual charity case, the passive frontier waiting to be discovered. It is not a commodity to be owned or a costume to be worn at summits. It is not a monolith — for Africa breathes contradictions: Lagos and Lilongwe, Mombasa and Maseru, oil rigs and barefoot herders, black tax and blockchain, protest songs and boardroom pitches.
But above all, brand Africa is becoming. It becomes every time a young entrepreneur reinvents an ancient craft for a global boutique. It becomes when storytellers reclaim our narratives on our own screens. It becomes when we speak back to history’s distortions and reframe them with our own voices. It becomes when a township coder, a village teacher, an activist, a miner, an artist, a child with a dream — all these living dialectics — refuse the fixed boxes and produce new meanings.
So, as I study dialectics, I know Africa will never be fully branded. A continent cannot be frozen in a tagline. Brand Africa is the tension between perception and reality, between past wounds and future promise. It is always in motion — becoming, unbecoming, becoming anew.
And so, as I sit with this contradiction, I realise that brand Africa is as much a mirror as it is a mask. It mirrors our ambitions, our longing for recognition, our hunger to be seen on our own terms. Yet it masks the unfinished business that still festers in the shadows: corruption cloaked in patriotism, inequality concealed by glossy tourism reels, the quiet betrayal of rural children whose futures are mortgaged for extractive deals signed in boardrooms far from the dust of their villages.
As a student of dialectics, I am compelled to ask uncomfortable questions: Who benefits when we package Africa for the world? Who is silenced when we speak in slogans? What truths do we trade away for the currency of global goodwill?
Yet I am not a cynic. If dialectics teaches me anything, it is that contradiction is not the enemy — it is the fuel of progress. We do not resolve our contradictions by burying them under branding campaigns. We face them — we hold “what is” against “what is not” until the friction sparks a new becoming.
For too long, Africa has been branded by others — colonial administrators with pens dripping with erasure, corporations whose marketing departments compress centuries of diversity into two minutes of feel-good stock footage. But we, the inheritors of these contradictions, are not passive canvases. We are co-authors. We are disruptors.
Brand Africa, in its truest dialectical sense, must be ours to interrogate, to remake, to rupture, to renew. It must allow for our failures alongside our triumphs. It must contain our messiness, our protests, our laughter, our heartbreaks — for all of these are the raw material of becoming.
When a young writer in Nairobi crafts a story that challenges old myths, when a tech innovator in Accra finds a solution for a problem the world overlooked, when a student in Johannesburg debates ideas that unsettle the comfortable lies — these are acts of branding too. Not the branding of a product, but the branding of possibility.
Perhaps, then, brand Africa is not a brand at all, but a question: Who are we becoming? And who decides?
If I, a student of dialectics, know anything, it is this — the answer will never be final. It must never be final. Because in the ceaseless becoming, in the refusal to stand still, in the insistence on our own complexity, Africa does not just brand itself. Africa reclaims itself.
So let the slogans come and go. Let the campaigns be launched and fade. Let the deals be signed and broken. We remain — a thing that is, a thing that is not, forever becoming. And that is more powerful than any brand the world could ever sell.
Tujenge Afrika Pamoja! Let’s Build Africa Together!
Enjoy your weekend.
Saul Molobi (FCIM)
PUBLISHER: JAMBO AFRICA ONLINE
and
Group Chief Executive Officer and Chairman
Brandhill Africa™
Tel: +27 11 759 4297
Mobile: +27 83 635 7773
Physical Address: 1st Floor, Cradock Square Offices; 169 Oxford Road; Rosebank; JOHANNESBURG; 2196.
eMail: saul.molobi@brandhillafrica.com
Website: www.brandhillafrica.com
Social Media: Twitter / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook / YouTube / Jambo Africa Online / WhatsApp Group / 101.9 Chai FM