BY SOUMANOU SALIFOU, FOUNDER/PUBLISHER

One early evening in December 2000, I went to the Prince George’s County branch library closest to my residence back then with my children who needed to use the library’s resources to complete their school projects. As we walked into the library, there it was: a copy of The African was wide-open on one of the tables, with a young Black man probably in his early twenties enjoying it, with his head buried in it. Four years earlier, in 1996, I had received a heartwarming letter from a New York high school student named Yussef whose grandmother was from Africa, who wrote: “Me and my classmates had a heated argument the other day because they said that the picture of ‘Abidjan by Night’ in the July issue of your magazine is not real, that Africa is just a jungle. I don’t believe so. I’m proud of your magazine.”

Over the past 30 years, I have seen with pride The African on display in several distribution outlets in the United States and in Africa, in major hotels and visitor’s lounges in presidential palaces. Flight attendants have served me my own magazine a couple of times on Air Afrique flights after I had it placed aboard as passenger’s reading material for promotion purposes.

I obviously fully appreciated all the above and my exclusive interviews with some of the most influential world leaders, including American billionaire Maurice Tempelsman, African oil mogul Samuel Dossou-Aworet, and African heads of state and a governor who let me in their glamorous palaces and mansion. However, the interest of the young Black man in the library and the New York high school student Yussef and people like them who are the magazine’s primary target audience justifies more than anything else the risk and pain of starting and growing in the United States a magazine about Africa—a continent that has been struggling for centuries with the negative image cruelly cast on it by the so-called developed world.

The story has been broken up in the following three parts to allow you to enjoy it one sip at a time. Please share your thoughts with us at publisher@myafricanmagazine.com

Click on the images below to read each segment.

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