Asili Africa

In 1991, a butcher at ABC Place in Westlands, Nairobi, suggested that the shopping centre needed a vegetable shop. Sukhwinder Jandu, a young biochemist, opened one in a corner of C…

Commercial Bank of Africa was founded in Dar es Salaam in 1962 by a consortium based in Switzerland, moved to Nairobi, and was later bought and then sold down by Bank of America. N…

One Africa Media was built on one idea: that Africa's separately founded job, car and property sites were worth more as a single company. Founded in 2010 by Justin Clarke and Carey…

One Africa Media was built on one idea: that Africa's separately founded job, car and property sites were worth more as a single company. Founded in 2010 by Justin Clarke and Carey…

Copia, launched in Nairobi, made a small shop stand in for the customer's address: orders were placed at the counter, delivered to the shop and paid for there. It grew to tens of t…

Since 1969 the value of Botswana's diamonds has been divided at one table, between the state and De Beers, through the company now called Debswana. The state started with fifteen p…

In 1920 a dahir created OCP to hold Morocco's phosphate, a mineral with no substitute, and the state has never sold the company. Over a hundred and six years that hold has widened:…

Ethiopia's telephone network began with an 1894 line from Harar to Addis Ababa, and its only constant since has been the owner. The state opened it on its own terms, one dose at a…

KenGen sells every unit of its electricity to one buyer, Kenya Power, and by its own reporting supplied 59 per cent of what Kenya Power bought in the year to June 2025, on average…

Kenya Power began as a 1922 merger of two small electricity franchises, and it is the part of Kenya's electricity system every customer touches: the wire, the meter and the bill. G…

In 1924, Rift Valley dairy farmers met because none of them could get a steady price alone. The creamery that followed, Kenya Co-operative Creameries, became in effect the only buy…

FARO is a Cape Town retailer that sells global brands' surplus and returned clothes at about sixty percent off, after cleaning and repairing them in its own warehouse. Its co-found…

Healthy U began by teaching people to eat in Westlands, transforming strangers into a community through testing and measurement. Its founder, Sailesh Rach, led this quiet mission a…

African farmers in Kenya were legally barred from growing tea until 1956. Today about six hundred thousand smallholders deliver leaf to factory companies they own, and fifty four o…

In 1965 Kenya's government designed a pineapple business with two halves: a foreign company's estate and factory, and smallholders around them selling in. Within a few years the sm…

In 1979 a clothing retailer bought an eight-store Cape Town chain for about a million rand. Shoprite then took over Checkers, and bought OK Bazaars for one rand while the seller gu…

Shantilal Thakkar opened a counter-service shop in Parklands, Nairobi. In 1989 his three sons took over, and by one account their father questioned the rent when Anil pushed for a…

Tuskys installed every mechanism a professional company is supposed to have, and undid each one from inside. It hired an outside chief executive; the founder's grandchildren threw…

Precision Air flew from Arusha chasing safari trade dreams since nineteen seventy nine, relying on Kenya Airways until it nearly collapsed twice. The state stepped back in only to…

Kenya Airways began in 1977 as a government decree, created because East African Airways had collapsed and nothing else existed. It was privatized in 1996 and became the first Afri…