What Would It Take to Export African Culture at Scale?

I've always wondered what peak Yoruba sophistication looks like.

Hear me out.

I'm Nigerian and Yoruba, and I've always wondered what it would have meant to be fully, absolutely Yoruba, stinkingly genius, and nothing else. To learn government and literature, maths and medicine, fully in Yoruba. What would it have meant if this was my normal? What would it have meant for our art forms and our expression?

A few months ago, I travelled three hours to eat at a Korean restaurant in Lagos, and travelled three hours back home right after. Best experience of my life. About a month ago, I listened to my first BTS song — Swim. Right before that, I watched the K-drama Flower of Evil, and every other show paled in comparison.

Just a year ago, I was not remotely into K-Pop.

Let's Start With BTS

Seven boys. Among them, only one English speaker. 44 million albums sold globally. Over $4.65 billion contributed annually to South Korea's economy.

How did seven non-English-speaking boys dominate the world?

1,500 Instagram reels (I'm not even kidding), three documentaries, about six articles, and a lot of thinking later, here's what I've absorbed.

Dignity and Dissonance

We cannot be dignified and dissonant at the same time. It's either one or the other.

When I say dissonance, I don't mean conflict or struggle. I mean being part yourself and part someone else's idea of who you should be. Performing a version of yourself that is half-Korean, half-British. Half-Yoruba, half-palatable-to-the-West. Dissonance is the gap between who you are and who you present — and audiences, anywhere in the world, can feel it. It reads as inauthenticity and desperation. And those do not scale.

BTS is exactly who they are. Unapologetically Korean. Nobody is confused or surprised about it, but everybody is listening to them. They did not start singing in English to become global, they were already global. The English songs came after they had built a massive international audience. They sang in Korean. They showed their food, their dress, their humour, their history. They were fully themselves — not to other people first, but to themselves. They loved being themselves. And that love, that lack of apology, is exactly what creates dignity.

Now — and this matters — BTS have also struggled enormously. The Korean idol system is one of the most psychologically demanding entertainment structures in the world. There is documented burnout. Members have spoken openly about periods of severe depression, loss of identity, and the suffocating pressure of the machine they operate inside. The system that produces them is, in many ways, in tension with the very authenticity that makes them magnetic. But here is what is remarkable: the authenticity, their friendship and their humanity broke through anyway. These two things coexist — the immense structural pressure and the genuine self — and it is precisely because they did not let the system eat their identity entirely that the world fell in love with them. Struggle and dignity are not opposites. They can live in the same body.

The laws of human relationships scale. If your brand's relationship with its audience is built on pretence, that pretence scales. What scaled with BTS was their realness; their friendship, their talent, their willingness to be fully, specifically themselves. The dissonance, had it existed, would have scaled just as powerfully in the wrong direction.

But Here Is Where It Gets Harder For Us

Korea's cultural continuity did not come easy either.

Japan colonised Korea from 1910 to 1945, and it was a deliberately, brutally suppressive colonisation, designed to erase Korean language, names, religion, and identity. During the Japanese occupation, it became a criminal offence to sing patriotic songs, including Korea's national anthem; people are forbidden from singing their own songs.

And yet — there was one song they kept singing anyway.

(I have goosebumps)

Arirang is a Korean folk song estimated to be more than 600 years old, with around 3,600 variations across 60 different versions. It is, at its core, a simple song; a refrain about crossing a mountain pass, separation, and longing. But through the colonial period, Arirang functioned as a vehicle for feelings that could not be expressed directly. The song's imagery of separation and longing mapped onto the experience of a colonised people without requiring any explicit political statement. It became something the occupation could not fully suppress because it did not look like resistance. It looked like heartbreak.

And heartbreak, in every language, is allowed.

Korean labourers taken to Japanese factories and mines sang it. Koreans who survived the colonial period described singing it as an act that maintained a connection to something the occupation was trying to dissolve. The song had become, without anyone deciding this, a piece of cultural infrastructure for Korean identity under pressure.

Then in 1926, a Korean filmmaker named Na Woon-gyu released a silent film also called Arirang — the story of a young Korean man driven to madness by colonial oppression. Its release in Seoul produced a response that went beyond what a film normally generates. Audiences reportedly sang the Arirang refrain together in the theatre, transforming a private viewing into a collective cultural act. A film. A song. A people refusing to forget themselves.

Korea emerged from colonisation directly into the Korean War, into the division of the peninsula, into decades of economic struggle. And yet: to this day, Arirang still rings through the air in both North and South Korea, forever reminding people of their unified identity and indelible history. Parents in both North and South Korea sing Arirang to their children, preserving the past while reminding them to stay true to their roots. It is associated with han — a culturally specific term referring to a deep sense of sorrow and endurance shaped by Korea's 20th-century experiences of colonial rule and civil conflict. A whole emotion, with its own word, carried inside a song.

The cultural wholeness that Korea has today is not because their colonisation was gentle. It is because Korea, after immense suffering, fought vigorously to reconstruct and protect its identity. They chose to remember who they were. They built the systems — schools, institutions, cultural infrastructure — to pass it on.

And then, after the 1997 financial crisis nearly broke the country, the South Korean government made a further, deliberate, strategic decision: culture would be an export industry. This was not accidental. The government invested heavily — funding entertainment companies, building international distribution, creating trade frameworks, backing soft power strategy at the highest diplomatic levels. BTS's authenticity is real, and it matters deeply. But it landed on a runway that was intentionally constructed by a government that decided its culture was worth the investment. The K-wave is not just a story of seven authentic boys. It is a story of a nation that decided, at every level — from grandmothers singing to children, to government policy, to seven boys naming their comeback album after a 600-year-old folk song — to back itself.

Now consider what BTS named their most recent album. Not a Western title. Not something engineered for international accessibility. Big Hit Music stated that Arirang “captures BTS' identity as a group that began in Korea.” Like language, it is a living, ever-shifting thing directly tied to the joy, sorrow, longing, and resilience of the Korean people. Seven boys, at the peak of their global power, after years of military service and hiatus — and the first thing they did when they came back was name themselves after the song their grandparents sang in Japanese mines to remember who they were.

Like Arirang the folk song, the group's songs are inherently changed by the sociopolitical context of their breakthrough, and seem to embody the many dreams of the Korean heart.

That is the lesson.

The Language Problem — And Why It Is The Heart Of Everything

Here is what is different for us, and why the path is longer and more complex.

Our language was taken from us.

Not just our language — our entire framework for thinking, organising, naming the world, creating within it. The Yoruba child today learns mathematics in English. Learns literature in English. Learns to argue, to persuade, to dream, to aspire — in English. And this is not just a Yoruba problem. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages. Across the continent, the story repeats: colonisation did not just take land and resources. It reached into the most intimate infrastructure of a people — the language they think in — and replaced it.

This is the dissonance we carry as a structural wound, and it means that unlike Korea, where the culture was suppressed but not amputated, many of us are in the position of having to learn what it means to be fully ourselves. Not because it doesn't exist — it exists, richly, stubbornly, magnificently — but because the systems that would have transmitted it without interruption were broken.

There is a scene in Black Panther that has stayed with me. Wakanda — a vision of an African civilisation that was never colonised or interrupted, never made to apologise for itself. Advanced, specific, layered, gorgeous. The technology is Afrofuturist fantasy, yes. But the feeling of it is the real thing: the feeling of wondering, what would the fullest expression of African genius look like if it had been allowed to simply grow? What is peak Yoruba sophistication? What would Igbo architecture look like at its most evolved? What would Wolof literature look like if it had five centuries of uninterrupted development?

We do not fully know yet. And that is both the wound and the invitation.

There is something else about language that must be said. There is a particular quality to art made in the language the artist thinks in. Not translates into — thinks in. When Wole Soyinka writes, when Fela sang — the Yoruba grammar, the Yoruba logic, the Yoruba sense of time and irony is in the structure of the work even when the words are English or Pidgin. Imagine what it would mean to produce an entire body of art — literature, film, music, architecture — from a mind that has never had to translate itself. That thinks in Yoruba. That solves problems in Yoruba. That dreams in Yoruba. The specificity of that art would be unreachable by imitation. It would be, in the truest sense, untranslatable — and therefore, paradoxically, deeply compelling to the world. The things that cannot be copied are the things that travel furthest.

What Would It Take

This is a non-exhaustive list.

The Honest Caveat

I recognise the complexity in what I've written. Korea's path was shaped by factors we do not have in identical form: a government that made culture a strategic priority, a population that speaks one primary language, a post-crisis economic urgency that aligned political will with cultural investment, a geographic coherence that Africa, as a continent of 1.4 billion people and hundreds of distinct cultures, simply does not replicate.

These are not reasons to not try. They are reasons to be precise about what we are actually building, and honest about the distance we have to travel.

Greatness is hard to achieve. But the people who built Benin bronzes, who developed Yoruba as one of the most tonally complex languages on earth, who gave the world Afrobeats and Nollywood on essentially no infrastructure, who produced Fela and Soyinka and Achebe — these people were not small. They were never small.

That is a different thing entirely.