By

Lulu Shabell 

For a long time, I have asked myself the wrong question.

I have spent years placing African designers in Porto, Paris, Dubai, New York, and London for international buyers who arrived with their own frameworks of value, selected what resonated with them, and then departed. The work has been meaningful, and I do not regret any of it. But the question I keep returning to is not how to get more designers through those doors. It is why the doors are always theirs to open, and whether we should be building our own house entirely.

The core issue was never access. It was architecture. We have been trying to contain an expansive heritage within structures that were never designed to hold it. The honest answer, when it finally came, was to build our own.

That is what ÀLKÉ is. Not a brand, not a fashion week, not an access programme with a finite horizon. ÀLKÉ is an institution, one designed to outlast all of us, grounded in a single clarifying truth: Africa has never been in the business of fashion. It has always been in the business of culture. The garment is simply one of the ways that culture travels. The bead, the woven cloth, and the pattern are vehicles, not destinations.

Once you understand that distinction, every question changes. The challenge is no longer how to integrate African designers into existing luxury markets. It is how to build institutions that protect, value and amplify Africa’s cultural intelligence for enduring economic benefit across generations. That is the question ÀLKÉ is being built to answer, and this essay is the first of a series that will lay out, in full, how it will do so. The architecture, the educational model, the venture framework and the endowment structure: each will be addressed in turn. This essay establishes why all of it is necessary.

Because when the world fully acknowledges Africa’s authorship, the consequence is not symbolic: it is the foundation for setting prices, controlling licensing, building sovereign creative institutions, and ensuring that the value generated by African cultural intelligence is held by African hands.

What History Is Trying to Tell Us

My heritage spans Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania. Having worked across more than thirty African countries, I have encountered the same reality consistently: Africa’s creative power is widely recognised globally, while what remains less acknowledged, or deliberately overlooked, is the ancient origins of that creativity and the continent’s longstanding solutions to challenges later rebranded as Western innovations.

History has already answered this question. We simply have not listened carefully enough.

On the southern coast of Africa, inside a sandstone cave overlooking the Indian Ocean, archaeologists at Blombos Cave discovered 41 perforated shells bearing microscopic traces of red ochre, evidence that they had been threaded, worn and used to communicate identity. They date back approximately 75,000 years. The same site produced what is now recognised as the earliest known human drawing: a cross-hatched image rendered in ochre, predating comparable European evidence by more than 30,000 years.

This is not the beginning of African fashion. It is the beginning of human communication through adornment.

What the world now markets as fashion is only the latest expression of practices Africa has carried for millennia. The Kuba Kingdom, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, was home to master weavers who created geometric pattern systems of extraordinary sophistication, deploying symmetry in ways that encoded lineage, ceremony, cosmology and power. Pattern was not decoration; it was language. Textiles functioned simultaneously as cultural expression, economic currency and political infrastructure.

Europe’s first major intellectual property framework, the Berne Convention, was signed in 1886. The Kuba had been operating systems of authorship, design value and cultural ownership for centuries before that.3

I hold these histories not as a source of pride alone, but as a cautionary reminder. The same logic that once denied the Ife sculptors their authorship, whose bronze portrait heads were considered so technically and artistically sophisticated that early European observers sought non-African explanations for their origin, is still at work today. It is simply more elegantly dressed.4

When a luxury house transforms Kuba geometry into profit while Congolese communities receive no royalties, recognition or ownership, that is not inspiration. It is extraction dressed as couture.

History, when examined honestly, does not flatter the current arrangement. It condemns it. And it does something more: it establishes Africa not as a claimant seeking recognition, but as the original rights-holder with standing to demand it. This is not nostalgia. It is the foundation of a valuation framework. The age and depth of Africa’s creative civilisation is not a sentimental argument. It is the basis on which pricing authority, licensing standing, and institutional sovereignty rest. Origin, when properly documented and institutionally protected, is leverage.

THE CLASSROOM IS WHERE IT STARTS, AND WHERE IT GOES WRONG

What concerns me most is not the market gap. It is the educational one.

Research published through the Design Education Forum of Southern Africa has found that the history of costume taught in many fashion schools continues to focus primarily on Western frameworks, with little to no African design knowledge addressed, despite Western designers having drawn extensively from African cultures and textiles for generations.5 Further research on decoloniality in African fashion education notes that students across the continent are still expected to treat New York, London and Paris as primary fashion reference points, even as Lagos, Dakar and Johannesburg have emerged as globally significant creative capitals in their own right. Curricula across many institutions continue to privilege European fashion histories while neglecting indigenous African design knowledge systems: Adinkra symbolism, Kuba textile traditions, Ndebele beadwork, and the draped philosophy of the Maasai.

Scholars, including Victoria Rovine and Jean Allman, have argued that African fashion must be understood not as peripheral to global fashion history, but as a central site of innovation, intellectual production and cultural authorship. A subsequent essay will address the full research landscape in detail, including the specific institutions and programmes ÀLKÉ is engaging with. What matters here is the structural consequence.

The educational approach conditions young Africans to see themselves as recent entrants to a narrative that their own ancestors shaped. Designers and artisans undervalue their work because the systems they inherit do not position them as originators. When you do not know you are the source, you negotiate as a supplier, not as a custodian of foundational design knowledge.

This is why education sits at the centre of ÀLKÉ. The institution exists to invest in a generation of African creative professionals who, from the earliest stages of their training, understand that they are inheritors of one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated design traditions. Where international study is pursued, it deepens market fluency and builds the cross-cultural relationships that any global institution requires, while remaining grounded in the knowledge that Africa is not a student of luxury, but one of its oldest teachers.

The goal is not arrogance. It is accuracy. Because knowledge of origin is not sentiment. It is negotiating power.

CULTURE IS ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE

There is a tendency to use the word “culture” in ways that inadvertently diminish its structural weight, as though culture were supplementary to the real work of economics rather than one of its most durable engines. I want to be precise about what ÀLKÉ is building.

We are not building a celebration. We are establishing institutional infrastructure to transform African cultural intelligence into safeguarded, cumulative, intergenerational economic value.

The data makes the urgency clear. Africa’s fashion industry generated approximately $4.2 billion in fashion exports in 2022 and, despite its profound global influence, accounts for only a marginal share of the global luxury economy. The broader African creative economy, encompassing fashion, music, crafts, film and design, exported $2.4 billion in creative goods and $4 billion in creative services in 2022, according to UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Outlook 2024. Africa’s share of the global creative economy stood at approximately 1.5 percent in 2022, up from 1 percent in 2018, a meaningful but still modest share of a sector generating $713 billion in global goods exports and $1.4 trillion in services. With the right structural investment, Africa’s creative economy could generate between $150 billion and $160 billion annually by 2030, according to BCG projections, with targeted investment in women-led and culturally grounded enterprises playing a central role in that expansion.10 The gap between that potential and current capture is not a reflection of the quality of the work. It is a reflection of the absence of institutions built to hold and grow its value.

ÀLKÉ is designed to capture a specific share of that opportunity through three interlocking mechanisms: a craft centre that preserves, innovates and commercialises indigenous design knowledge; a venture studio that builds African creative enterprises with the infrastructure to scale; and an endowment that ensures the financial returns compound across generations rather than dissipating with any single founder or funding cycle. Each of these mechanisms will be addressed in subsequent essays, covering their governance, their operating models, and the specific institutions and precedents they draw from.

This has never been a talent problem. It is an institutional one.

Every enduring luxury institution understands that value does not reside in the product alone. It resides in lineage, protected heritage, generational mastery and the narrative of permanence. What the African creative economy has historically lacked are institutions capable of articulating this value consistently, legally, economically and on a global scale. The existing global intellectual property framework, built largely without African input, has been widely criticised for failing to protect traditional cultural expressions and for perpetuating a system that favours Western interests over the knowledge and heritage of communities in the Global South.

There are promising precedents to build from: the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization has adopted model laws incorporating traditional cultural expressions, and Kenya’s constitution explicitly mandates that communities receive compensation and royalties for the use of their cultures and cultural heritage.

ÀLKÉ is designed to operate in that same institutional register, building the archives, the educational pipelines, the creative enterprise infrastructure and the permanent endowments that African cultural intelligence has always deserved, at continental scale. These pillars are interdependent. They cannot be treated in sequence or in isolation.

The argument is not merely cultural. If Africa is recognised as the original author of luxury, then Africa has standing: to set the terms on which its creative heritage is used, to establish licensing frameworks that return value to source communities, to build institutions with the sovereign authority to define what African luxury means and what it is worth.

The ÀLKÉ Ball and Endowment are the opening instruments of that standing. The continental touring model is how that standing is claimed across the full breadth of the culture it represents.

The dress is the vehicle for this broader mission. The civilisation behind it, 75,000 years deep, documented, specific, and unbroken, is the source of its value.

WHAT WE OWE THE PEOPLE WHO COME AFTER US

My son, now a teenager, will inherit the outcomes of whatever we choose to build or neglect. That responsibility is present in my thinking every day.

Historical dispossessions occurred not solely because of bad actors, but because there was no institutional language to define what was being taken. There were no archives to substantiate ownership, no endowments to sustain advocacy beyond individual lifespans, no educational systems to ensure each generation understood both its inheritance and its right to protect it.

We have the opportunity now to build those systems permanently, not project by project or grant cycle by grant cycle, but with the long-term commitment of people who understand they are building for generations they will never meet.

In 2023, approximately five million Africans were working in creative industries, with that number expected to grow substantially over the coming decade.The question is not whether Africa’s creative economy will expand. It is whether the institutions exist to ensure that expansion generates enduring wealth for the communities at its source, rather than accruing elsewhere.

The inaugural ÀLKÉ Ball will take place in Cape Town, close to the coast where, 75,000 years ago, a human being threaded a shell, marked it with ochre, and wore it as a quiet declaration:

I am someone with a story worth telling.

The Ball will launch the ÀLKÉ Endowment, the institutional foundation through which that declaration becomes a permanent economic fact. Future editions will move across Lagos, Nairobi, Dakar, Addis Ababa, Accra and Cairo, because this institution belongs to the continent, not to a city, a season or a founder.

ÀLKÉ is not selling fashion. It is building the institutional language through which Africa remembers what it has always known.

That civilisation has value. That culture is infrastructure. That which began here must never again leave without ownership.

Lulu Shabell is the Founder and CEO of LULUBELL Group and one of Africa’s leading creative economy strategists. Over nearly three decades, she has driven the global expansion of more than 90 African fashion brands across 30 African and Caribbean countries through initiatives including Portugal Fashion, TRANOÏ Paris and The Mercado Project at Rockefeller Centre. She is the spearhead behind The ÁLKÈ Ball, a continental institution dedicated to securing long-term cultural sovereignty for Africa’s creative industries, and has contributed to the UNESCO report on the African Fashion Industry.