25 Africans to watch – The FT’s Africa team picks the continent’s rising stars

CONGRATULATIONS TO AYAN MOHAMOUD ASHUR (SOMALILAND0  AND FATUMA ABDULLAHI (SOMALIA)  AMONG THE CHOSEN!

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Regularly arrested and threatened, Kenya’s voice of the oppressed is dogged in his pursuit of social justice, fighting ethnic division and a corrupt ruling class. The 32-year-old photojournalist-turned-activist also loves a good stunt: whether spilling pig’s blood to liken overpaid MPs to greedy pigs or daubing city walls with politically minded graffiti.

Moise Katumbi,
Politics

The outgoing governor of Katanga, DR Congo’s wealthiest province, is owner of one of Africa’s most successful football clubs — and a friend to business. The 50-year-old’s presidential ambitions have rattled Joseph Kabila, who is due to stand down next year but may seek to prolong his rule.

Chika Anadu,
Arts

Chika Anadu’s first feature film, B for Boy, has made the 35-year-old Lagos-born film-maker a rising star outside her country’s Nollywood-dominated industry. Set in Nigeria, the film captures the tensions between traditional and modern culture and hints at discrimination against women perpetuated by women — delicate issues at play with widespread resonance.

Fred Swaniker,
Entrepreneur/networker

Energetic and bursting with optimism about Africa, Fred Swaniker typifies a new generation of African entrepreneur and business networker. The 38-year-old Ghanaian has founded the African Leadership Network, the African Leadership University and the African Leadership Academy in his quest to foster a new breed of African leader.

Ayan Mahamoud,
Arts

The founder-organiser of the Hargeisa International Book Fair spurns the risk of terrorist attack from al-Shabaab jihadis. Instead, the courageous arts guru draws sensual poet-performers, celebrates Somali culture and fosters education, equality and human rights wherever she can. She also puts on London’s annual Somali Week Festival.

Mmusi Maimane,
Politics

As the first black leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa’s main opposition party, Mmusi Maimane has the task of breaking the 21-year political dominance of the ANC. He is youthful and polished with impressive oratory skills but faces the challenge of convincing black voters that the DA, often perceived to be a white party, has their genuine interests at heart.

Victor Wanyama,
Sport

Victor Wanyama, the Kenyan midfielder, has made his mark in British football. After signing for Celtic in 2011, he was voted the Scottish Young Player of the Year in 2013. He was sold to Southampton for £12.5m — the highest transfer fee received by a Scottish club. Now 24, he is the first Kenyan to play in the English Premier League.

Ephrem Solomon,
Arts

This up-and-coming Ethiopian artist has big ideas delivered with a graphic bent. His works have been snapped up by Charles Saatchi, who says they “portray the distance between the governing and the governed”. The same regular motifs appear, sometimes pitting chairs — the seat of power — against flip-flops — the masses.

Amy Jadesimi,
Business/finance

Amy Jadesimi is an up-and-coming 40-year-old Nigerian managing director taking on the mighty Intels logistics group in Nigeria with her company Ladol. She represents a dynamic new generation assuming control of family businesses after returning home from London.

Kagiso Rabada,
Sport

The 20-year-old fast bowler enjoyed an amazing debut for the South African national cricket team this year, taking a hat-trick as part of a six-wicket haul against Bangladesh in a one-day international in Mirpur.

Sim Shagaya,
Business/finance

Sim Shagaya is doing to Nigerian retail what Jack Ma did to China with Alibaba and Jeff Bezos to the US with Amazon. Konga.com, his ecommerce start-up, has grown rapidly since its launch in 2012. A Harvard MBA, Shagaya is in the vanguard of Nigerian entrepreneurs, overcoming potholes and blackouts to tap a vast consumer market.

Nicole Amarteifio,
Arts

Ghanaian Nicole Amarteifio puts an African spin on Sex and the City with her TV series An African City , set in Accra. More than just a showcase of African fashion, the series also provides smart commentary on “reaspora” — the growing trend of Afropolitans in the diaspora moving back to the continent.

Khalifa Sall,
Politics

The mayor of Dakar since 2009 and a former minister of the economy, Khalifa Sall’s efforts to transform the Senegalese capital could propel him to the top of the Socialist party. This ruled Senegal until 2000 but has since struggled to recover its standing in one of the continent’s most developed democracies.

Trevor Noah,
Arts/media

Trevor Noah, a South African comedian raised in the sprawling Johannesburg township of Soweto, looks set to become one of the continent’s most globally recognised faces. At just 31, he was the surprise choice to succeed Jon Stewart in the hot seat at the highly successful US satirical news programme The Daily Show.

Vera Songwe,
Development

Vera Songwe is a rising star in the World Bank. An adviser to the managing director of the bank and former Nigerian finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Songwe is currently the country director for Senegal, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Mauritania. She is based in Dakar.

Dan Matjila,
Business/finance

Dan Matjila, 53, is arguably South Africa’s most powerful investor, holding the purse strings of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), a state-owned pension fund manager with more than $130bn under management. Known as “Dr Dan” — he holds a PhD in maths — he was appointed chief executive of the PIC last December, after almost a decade as chief investment officer.

Lai Yahaya,
Politics/development

Lai Yahaya calls himself a “policy entrepreneur” — formulating strategies to reform Nigeria’s chronically underperforming electricity and energy sectors. He was part of the team at the Bureau of Public Enterprises when Nigeria’s state companies were being privatised en masse at the turn of the millennium and is now influential in pan-African networks.

Fatuma Abdullahi,
Social activism

Abdullahi is managing director at Warya Post, an influential Somali platform for debate that challenges the conservative Muslim orthodoxy. Based in Mogadishu, Abdullahi is part of a growing Somali “reaspora” determined to transform the country.

Joshua Oigara,
Business/finance

Joshua Oigara’s elevation in 2013 to lead Kenya Commercial Bank, one of the biggest banks in the country, made him, at 41, one of the youngest CEOs of a major Kenyan blue-chip. Twice elected chair of the Kenya Bankers Association, Oigara is the face of a new generation of corporate leaders.

Zitto Kabwe,
Politics

This tireless Tanzanian corruption-buster and opposition politician has become a lightning rod for a swath of aggrieved young Tanzanians. This year, the economics graduate, 38, founded his own party, the Alliance for Change and Transparency, dedicated to social justice and holding government to account.

Robtel Neajai Pailey,
Social activism

Robtel Neajai Pailey’s response to the Ebola charity single “Band Aid 30” — “We got this, Geldof, so back off” — was typically blunt. The Liberian academic, writer and activist has emerged as a fresh and confident voice, applying the same plain speaking to the aid industry, corruption and reductive descriptions of Africa by outsiders.

Quadri Aruna,
Sport

Table tennis is played across Africa but until this young Nigerian came along, the continent had yet to find someone capable of taking on Asian players. After reaching the quarter finals of the world championship, Aruna was named star player of 2014 by the International Table Tennis Federation.

Rafael Marques de Morais,
Social activism

The Angolan journalist Rafael Marques de Morais has gambled life and liberty to expose corruption. Recognised internationally for his human rights campaigning, he is a perennial target for harassment. In May he received a suspended prison sentence after he accused senior army figures of complicity in diamond field abuses.

Jean Noel Ntone Edjabe,
Arts

Cameroonian Jean Noel Ntone Edjabe, based in Cape Town, is one of the most influential voices on the African literary scene. He founded arts journal Chimurenga, a radical pan-African magazine. He has also set up a quarterly “newspaper” the Chronic, embracing experimental journalism, hip-hop culture and indigenous aesthetics.

Chibundu Onuzo,
Arts

At just 19, Chibundu Onuzo became the youngest female writer that Faber & Faber had ever signed. The Spider King’s Daughter appeared in 2012 to wide critical acclaim. Inevitable comparisons to fellow Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie may be premature but each has a sharp eye for the faultlines in Nigerian society.

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Photographs: Panos Pictures; Getty; Jim Bennett; Kate Stanworth; Nichole Sobecki; Corbis; Pete Muller; Kate Lloyd; Reuters; Rex Features

Source: Financial Times