In 1992, with South Africa looking towards a new era, Vusi Mahlasela, a South African musical legend, released his long awaited debut album ‘When You Come Back’. The title track articulates a dream for a return to a prosperous, united Africa.  

“Mayibuye iAfrica, sing now Africa. Sing loud, sing to the people. Let them give something to the world and not just take from it”.

Introducing an integrated African economy, the lyrics again fit perfectly. The recently launched African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement is the boldest step towards that PanAfrican vision, since the constitution of the African Union (AU) - Africa’s continental union of 55 states. The AfCFTA seeks to create a single continental market with free movement of business persons and investments, progressively removing the tariff and nontariff barriers to the trade of intra-African goods and services, which have historically prevented the Creative and Cultural industries (CCI) practitioners from easily accessing the rest of the continent.  

AfCFTA embodies the ambition of significantly increasing intra-Africa trade and Africa’s exports to the world by ushering in an ease of doing business across the continent that hasn’t existed to date, particularly in Africa’s CCI. Filmmakers whose stories have been imagined against the background of different African landscapes, have had to rethink their plans because of difficulties obtaining visas and permits across multiple African jurisdictions. Attempting to take advantage of the enticing tax incentives for one project routinely requires extensive administrative resources. African art, crafts, textiles and jewellery intended for trade attract high tariffs, which in turn render African art, crafts, jewellery and textiles from other African countries, luxury goods in Africa. What is long overdue is a reimagining of the trading of goods and services produced in Africa’s creative and cultural industries (CCI).  The AfCFTA proposes a new way for African countries to do business with each other, and a new way for the world to do business with Africa, as we move into an increasingly shared regional economy. Currently, Africa’s trade with each other amounts to only 22% of African trade, while Africa’s exports to the world, amount to only 15% of African trade. AfCFTA is Africa claiming and taking up space in the global market, and removes 90% of trade taxes which is projected to improve trade by $925 million dollars. This includes trade of goods and services in the CCI. 

”Our lost African music will turn into the music of the people. Yes, the people’s music, for the people’s culture, and I’ll be the one who will climb up to the mountain, reaching for the top of our African dias”.

In 2021 the AU declared that the theme for 2021 would be: Art, Culture and Heritage - levers for building the Africa we want. The AfCFTA is one of the flagship projects of Agenda 2063, an ambitious, visionary document, conceptualised by the AU, for the future of the African continent and its diaspora. Agenda 2063 is“ the blueprint and master plan for transforming Africa into the global powerhouse of the future. It is the continent’s strategic framework that aims to deliver on its goal for inclusive and sustainable development and is a concrete manifestation of the Pan-African drive for unity, self-determination, freedom, progress and collective prosperity pursued under Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance. We aspire that by 2063, Africa shall have: An entrenched and flourishing culture of human rights, democracy, gender equality, inclusion and peace; prosperity, security and safety for all citizens; and mechanisms to promote and defend the continent's collective security and interests”. 

For the CCI, the promise of an African market remains elusive. Africa has several long standing regional agreements: The Treaty of Abuja establishing the African Economic Community Protocol on Culture and African Cultural Common Market; the AU Model Law on the Protection of Cultural Property and Heritage; the Statute of the African Audio-Visual and Cinema Commission; and most recently the Draft Revised African Union Plan of Action on Cultural and Creative Industries. These agreements sought to make it easier for Africans to share their talents across the continent but have yet to yield the intended impact.  

“Sing, sing Africa, sing, sing Africa. Let this illusion of memory be over from the people's minds and souls”

His Excellency Wamkele Mene, the 1st Secretary General of the AfCFTA has declared that “Africa is now trading under new rules, new preferences, because we want to build a single, integrated market on the African continent.” AfCFTA - signed by 54 of 55 countries -  is one of the most important agreements, between African countries, in existence right now. This is the fastest instrument to be ratified - the process by which a country which is a signatory to a treaty with other countries, adopts that treaty into its own local law -since the African Union’s constitutional documents. For 36 countries, AfCFTA, is now binding, national law and those countries agreed to start trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement on 1st of January 2021. 

What are some of the key proposals introduced by the AfCFTA?

It sets out to provide solutions across 5 broad categories - trade in goods; trade in services; settlement of disputes; competition (market monopolies) and intellectual property rights. The details of these categories will continue to be negotiated in two phases. The first phase creates a market for goods and services. The second phase deals with issues such as the harmonization of intellectual property (IP) rights and investment policy, and the development of trade remedies and safeguards, which have important implications for trade in goods and services produced in the CCI value chains. Can the AfCFTA create the market Africa’s creative and cultural industries (CCI) need to finally have their work consumed by a homegrown market of a billion people? Aspiration 5 of Agenda 2063 envisions ‘An Africa with a strong cultural identity, common heritage, shared values and ethics’.  

In terms of IP, AfCFTA attempts to stimulate the African economy by revising Africa’s IP systems, imagining a future where African creative and cultural practitioners would have the same IP rights irrespective of which African country they create in. It introduces a single, Pan African Intellectual Property Organisation (PAIPO)- a single Pan African IP organisation to harmonise IP and stimulate social and economic development in Africa. As explained by Dr. Titilayo Adebola, the AfCFTA presents an alternative to the Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle (OAPI) uniform system and the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO) flexible system. However Dr. Titilayo Adebola further challenges the AfCFTA IP Protocol negotiators to move beyond merely harmonising Africa’s IP laws, to supplying homegrown African centred IP systems that radically reimagine the normative configurations of IP. In the AfCFTA’s trade remedies and safeguards creative and cultural practitioners will also be seeking a regional standard for resolving disputes and enforcing their intellectual property rights. 
 
Individually, the economies of African countries are small. The Seychelles is populated by less than 100 000 people. At least 10 African countries have a population of less than 2 million people. Only three African countries - Nigeria, Ethiopia and Egypt, boast a population of more than 100 million people. As a result, the world does not pay Africa what Africa is worth, it pays what it can get us for. Investments made by global companies into African start-ups, African films, rarely exceed $1 million dollars per individual project indicating that small economies attract small investments. Yet Africa is the 8th largest economy in the world, worth $2.5 trillion and with 1.2 billion potential customers (and that's not even considering Africans in the diaspora). With a population of 1.2 billion people, it represents 17% of the global population… that’s 17% of the global audience… and AfCFTA presents an opportunity to ensure that what is consumed by that audience is African. 

Creating a free trade area which allows content created by Africans to be more freely distributed at this scale enables Africans to distribute widely, change their global narrative and exit the poverty cycle. For the CCI, AfCFTA presents an opportunity to decolonize, and rewrite colonial history. It is an opportunity to curtail Africa’s existence as a net importer and disrupt colonial distribution. It is an opportunity to claim back Sara Bartman, claim back the African art that only yields value in encyclopedic museums, claim a market large enough to draw back everyone who has had to leave to be successful: Trevor Noah to Charlize Theron, Nnedi Okorafor, Neill Blomkamp and Blitz The Ambassador, Cyrus kabiru, Thuso Mbedu, Nakhane and so many others from the African continent and its diaspora. 
   
The cross border promise of creating within the framework of the AfCFTA means that Africans have the opportunity to revisit delineations of their creative and cultural output, across borders and cultures. If we claim a market of 1.2 billion people, how does Africa redefine its CCI? Acclaimed writer Nnedi Okorafor famously rejects the label ‘African science fiction’ for Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism, which far better explains films like Black Panther, District 9, Chappie and television series Lesilo. Without a western gaze and without borders breaking down audiences, how do Africans describe their art, their textiles? Would the music of Fela Kuti and Burna Boy both be described as Afrobeat if it were being packaged for an African audience? Even the question of the Black Aesthetic was explored in the exhibition curated by Dr. Same Mdluli who questioned labels like ‘township art’ and ‘street art’ which no longer seem fitting when African Art is brought together across generations and geographies. 
 
Cross continental trade is about getting to know each other, and ourselves. Trade can be a key instrument for transformation in the African economy. The AfCFTA builds the requisite trade infrastructure within the borders of Africa. But the CCI needs to advocate for more. We need to ask, how will AfCFTA enable Africa to build. How do we create an infrastructure network of special effects and post-production studios? How will AfCFTA enable a continental factory for fabric and textile production? How will AfCFTA enable a cross continental network of podcast studios, movie studios, recording studios? How does AfCFTA create a single collections society for each sector with cross border accounting protocols? How does AfCFTA create a single standard of technical support for gigs, for concert venues, for roadies associations? How does AfCFTA create regional models for funding? How does AfCFTA catalyse a single trade union for each artistic and cultural discipline? Cross border funding and accounting protocols.  

The AfCFTA creates a continental wide African Trade Observatory, which will create a continental wide trade information portal. It will collect information from all African countries, from governments, market players, non governmental organisations and think tanks about information that every creative and cultural practitioner would want to have easily accessible when doing business across the continent - exchange rates, tax incentives, competitive indicators and foreign direct investment data. This will better set up African creative and cultural practitioners for success, as they seek to reframe their business in the context of  Pan African economic integration, to ensure that Africa’s CCI finally crystalizes at the right moment, which is now.  

This is an example of solutions to non-tariff barriers being proposed in the AfCFTA. Other non-tariff barriers include a lack of coordination and regulatory coherence in all areas affecting CCI, a lack of cross border unions for artists, too few regional co production treaties, and most directly applicable to the AfCFTA, a coherent approach to visas for creative and cultural work.
  
The overwhelming majority of Africans require visas to travel and work in other African countries. In the CCI this may include shooting a movie in another country to take advantage of a co-production treaty or tax incentive, performing at a music festival like AfroNation or exhibiting at a film festival like FESPACO, accessing a distribution market like DISCOP or the Durban Film Market or showcasing artwork at Chale Wote. While the free movement of Africans across borders envisioned by the AU, is largely set to be dealt with by the introduction of the African Union passport, the AfCFTA does make provisions for the free movement of business persons. This potentially paves the way for the CCI to be conceived within the priority sectors, in order to advocate for creative and cultural practitioners to be categorised as business persons within the framework of the AfCFTA. This would mean that the skills they possess could be defined as critical skills that would inform visa exemptions or relaxations. If free movement is endorsed, CCI practitioners will be able to trade  talents and content all over the continent with great ease. 

African content travels yet we are exporters of raw material - our arts and talent - and ‘buy’ it back as a market for global platforms, perpetuating the misconception that we prefer foreign content. Yet this pattern merely reflects a preference for content that has been ‘beneficiated’ or packaged with ‘value adds’ and merchandising.  

In the fourth industrial revolution, content is king, and Africa is the content of the future.

Whether it is on social media platforms, music platforms, film and television platforms, digital museums and galleries or Non Fungible Token (NFTs). As AfCFTA begins to take shape the CCI should, in 2021, use the year of Arts, Culture and Heritage to demand equitable and effective representation in the agreement. The CCI should demand that bodies that represent creative and cultural practitioners are given the relevant documentation on time to consult, and in formats easily digestible for the CCI to have a meaningful engagement.  

“Our lost African music will turn into the music of the people Yes, the people's music, for the people's culture”