I bought my first Tecno phone in 2016 from a small shop in Onitsha main market. The seller told me it would last two years. It lasted four, and by the time I replaced it, three of my cousins had bought the same brand. That is the story of Chinese brands in Africa in miniature.
I was in Lagos last year, standing in a computer village shop in Ikeja, watching a young man unbox a Xiaomi phone. He turned it over three times, ran his thumb along the edge, and said something I still think about. “This one just feels different.” He was not talking about the processor or the
I was at a trade fair in Lagos last year when a Chinese supplier pulled out a small device and told me it was a translator that could handle Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa in real time. I did not believe him until he used it. That moment stayed with me because it showed something that
I walked through Computer Village in Lagos last month and watched a young man repair a Tecno phone using a replacement screen he had ordered from a supplier in Shenzhen. He had never been to China. He did not speak Mandarin. But he was plugged into a supply chain that stretches from a factory floor
I held a small silver cell in my hand last year at a trade fair in Lagos. It was a sodium-ion battery, lighter than the lithium packs I was used to, and the Chinese supplier told me it would work at temperatures that would kill a normal battery. I did not believe him until he
I watched a Nigerian teenager in Lagos last week do something that would have been impossible ten years ago. She opened TikTok, learned a dance move that originated in Seoul, added a sound that was trending in Brazil, and posted a video that within hours was viewed by people in Manila, Nairobi, and Berlin. She
I stood at the Apapa port gate in Lagos last year and watched a container truck sit idle for four hours. The driver, a man named Emeka who had been hauling cargo for eleven years, told me the delay was normal. The paperwork was manual. The gate was manual. The crane was slow. He said
I sat in a supplier’s office in Guangzhou in late 2025, and the conversation turned to Africa. The man across the table had been exporting to Nigeria for over a decade. He pulled out a map and pointed to three cities. Lagos. Nairobi. Johannesburg. “These are not export markets anymore,” he said. “These are home
I was in a meeting with a Nigerian importer in Lagos last year when he pulled out his phone and showed me something that stopped me cold. He had ordered a custom sample of a product from a supplier in Shenzhen, paid for it through a platform I had never used, and received it in
I’m the kind of person that pays attention to even the slightest details. I remember the exact moment I realized something had shifted. It was in a phone shop in Ikeja, and a man in his fifties was asking the seller for “the Chinese one.” Not a specific brand. Not a model number. Just “the
