🔅 A Black Gold Boom
And Forget the Textbook Trope That Early Humans Only Thrived on Endless Savannas
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
Nigeria’s One‑Fisted Knock‑Out Goes Prime‑Time
The African Warriors Fighting Championship just signed the streaming equivalent of a Las Vegas wedding chapel: DAZN (the “Netflix of Sport”) is now the exclusive global partner for Dambe, West Africa’s single‑glove smack‑fest that once entertained village harvest festivals and now boasts 15 million YouTube gawkers.
Come June 2025, the five‑stop Dambe World Series will sling Nigeria’s toughest fists against international hopefuls, because nothing says “globalisation” like a rope‑wrapped punching hand and a kick to the midsection.
Why the hype? Think UFC in its garage‑door days, but with centuries of Hausa warrior tradition and the occasional drum circle. DAZN brings 20 million paying subscribers, $2.8 billion in annual revenue, and investors who spell “billions” with a capital B. AWFC founder Maxwell Kalu is betting that slick production and bite‑sized highlights will convert casual scrollers into superfans.
The upside for AWFC: sponsorship cash, merch drops, and the chance to turn Dambe champs into household names. 2025 might just be the year the world learns to pronounce “Dambe.”
A Black Gold Boom
Forget oil rigs and offshore platforms, Africa’s hottest fossil is hiding in grain sacks and roadside shacks. Call it “briquette capitalism.” Roughly 200 million Africans, including a quarter of city-dwellers, still cook with charcoal, and demand keeps ticking up 2 percent a year. Why? Well because each kilo packs almost twice as much energy as raw wood, so it’s the perfect fuel for ever-growing megacities across the continent.
Money follows the smoke: The charcoal trade is worth tens of billions, rivaling cocoa and coffee. ‘Big people’ are inevitably muscling in (soldiers, officials, jihadists), while an army of small-scale burners turns forests into earth kilns: stack logs, bury under soil, smoulder for days, and voilà: one tonne of charcoal for every ten of wood.
Governments are zigzagging between taxing, licensing, or flat-out banning the stuff. And that results in midnight lorry convoys, checkpoint bribes, and Uganda’s surreal export-import loop (smuggle it out, stamp it in South Sudan, re-import it “legally”).
And so, as clean-cooking champions push LPG, metered gas canisters, and electric stoves, charcoal is still delivering jobs. This energy transition isn’t done smouldering yet, and The Economist has more on this..
Forget the Textbook Trope That Early Humans Only Thrived on Endless Savannas
A new Côte d’Ivoire study says that we started living in rainforests about 150,000 years ago… aka twice as old as we previously thought.
It is a true paradigm shift, because the African rainforest was always viewed as an “impenetrable barrier,” yet our ancestors set up camp, crafted stone tools, and probably complained about humidity for much longer than anthropologists have assumed.
You can read more on the study here, but for us, the major takeaways are that:
Adaptability is our superpower. Early humans weren’t one-trick grassland ponies. They surfed ecological diversity like freelancers juggling side gigs.
West Africa needs more digs. This region is serving up information that could rewrite human-origin timelines faster than you can say “ancestry DNA kit.”
Cultural variety = the norm. Stone-tool styles at nearby sites suggest that different environments led to far different solutions.
Food for Thought
“Lazy people are always tired.”
— Madagascar Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is taken from Togo! You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.