How Gomiz is constructing digital storytelling engine with MansA

The director of MansA Maison des Mondes Africains, Elizabeth Liz Gomiz, believes Africa’s future is dependent upon proudly owning the instruments that energy its storytelling.

“Creativity isn’t sufficient when the instruments, frameworks, and platforms don’t belong to us,” she stated at Moonshot by TechCabal on Wednesday, October 15. “The digital world has change into the place the place tradition is made, the place tales are written, the place symbolic and financial values accumulate. But, the infrastructures, platforms, and algorithms that form these worlds are, for probably the most half, constructed elsewhere.”

As AI, information, and digital platforms change into the brand new frontiers of cultural energy, Africa’s tales danger being filtered by techniques that neither know nor recognise its folks. Already, platforms like Netflix and Amazon’s Prime are the most important autos powering African storytelling at the moment. Gomiz needs to alter this by MansA, an organization that champions initiatives that make investments straight in African creators. 

One such undertaking, MansA Lab, is an incubator launching in November 2025 to help a dozen initiatives by entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and different creatives shaping the story of African worlds. The goal is to assist Africans reclaim their narratives and construct bridges between Africa and Europe, moderately than what Gomiz calls “organised dependencies.”

“Our objective is easy,” she defined. “To make sure that future AI fashions recognise our languages, our faces, our rhythms, our mythologies, as a result of the long run won’t be constructed on imported datasets. It will likely be constructed on our personal archives, our tales, and our sensibilities. For this, we have to speed up the second, and that requires funding. It’s necessary to spend money on creators as a lot as in know-how.”

Gomiz urges funding in storytelling on a nationwide scale or continental scale. The best way a rustic tells its story shapes how the world perceives it, influencing commerce, innovation, tourism, and even confidence amongst its residents, she argued.

“The way forward for the inventive business won’t be designed in Paris,” she stated. “It will likely be in-built Lagos, Dakar, Nairobi, Abidjan. The engine of Africa’s digital tradition are the creators, technologists, and dreamers. 

“It isn’t about connecting artists to platforms alone; it’s about giving them mastery over narrative, capital, and tempo. This engine can’t be imported. It should be tuned to our rhythms, our languages, our recollections. We don’t want a substitute engine. We’d like a dwelling, collective, rebellious one, and that engine already exists. It’s referred to as creation.”