We have spent the last decade obsessed with the "windows" of African tech—the apps, the payments, the incremental fixes—while forgetting to paint the sky they sit under. To build a future that doesn't just look like a slightly faster version of today, we must reclaim a sense of the whole: a civilizational Gestalt that prioritizes grand ambition over opportunistic "problem-solving."

I like to think of Vincent van Gogh as one of my favourite artists. But I’m also afraid that it’s really because I don’t know that many artists in the first place—a gap that I want to remedy. For the uninitiated, van Gogh was a Dutch painter whose works were greatly influenced by the prevailing post-impressionist art movement of his time (1853-1890). Post-impressionist art emphasized natural lighting, softly distorted shapes, emotional expression, bold colours, and heavy brushwork. Van Gogh and painters like Seurat (another of the few painters whose name rings a bell in my novice repertoire) eventually came to define the post-impressionist era. Some say that the era became the foundation for modern art. Personally, given what passes for art (paintings) these days, I’m not so sure.

But back to van Gogh.

Broad brushstrokes are big stories

Many people know the tragic story of van Gogh and his posthumous rise to fame and respect in the finicky world of art. So I won’t have to rehash that—thankfully. If, however, you don’t, please scroll to the end of this essay for a quick backgrounder.

I don’t know why van Gogh painted the way he did. But one thing his style transmutes is that reality is not first apprehended in detail. It is first apprehended in movement, mass, energy, and mood. Only after the gesture comes the line. Only after the sky is alive does the church get its windows.

Broad brushstrokes allow us room for imagination and do not confine us to extremely narrow and pessimistic determinism. Determinism that, in effect, forces founders and investors to only walk well-worn paths. 

If anything, we need more imagination across all layers of Africa's social and economic life. The Kenyan researcher and political economist, Ken Opalo, has written extensively about this need in the political and public economic organisation of resources. His preferred term for this broad-strokes imaginative thinking is "elite ambition," that is, the lack thereof. Political economy is not my forte, and Ken does a good job of analysing the issues at stake. So I need not make it my forte.

But what I do spend a lot of time thinking about is the startup-technology-business-and capital world on the continent. And even here, the funding freeze of late 2022 to early 2025 has done a number on our collective psyche. The funding slowdown is not all to blame, though. As recently as 2021, the peak year for funding in Africa, tech/startup ambition on the continent was relatively lame and made up of payment service providers and buying things online. Make no mistake, these things are almost revolutionary by any respectable metric, given the immediate history of human beings on earth if you go back a mere 80 or even 50 years.

The critical failure has been the hesitancy on our part to take our imagination beyond the obvious. Of course, that is to be expected. The vast majority of people on earth only walk by putting one foot in front of the other. No one walks like a kangaroo—leaping several feet at a time. Yet, a lot of the time, that is precisely what we need to move forward. A critical mass of small progresses and a massive leap ahead.

Yes, I said "leap ahead". Today, the word "leapfrog" is much maligned in startup/tech/investment circles. Maybe it's a consequence of misuse over the last decade. Or people are just tired of not seeing Utopia yet. Whatever the case, it's an unfortunate tell on the average psyche of the people who are supposed to be building the future. The only futures we seem to see look exactly like today.

It's part, for example, of my tiny gripe with the current mass (electric) motorcycle-based taxi trend. There, the bet seems to be that motorcycle taxis, the socio-economic factors that created them, and the system they sustain and depend on, will remain a fact of life in Africa for a long, long time (12-25 years given what we know about the timelines needed to secure decent exits for non-asset-heavy tech businesses, to say nothing of heavy asset businesses).

"Reality is not first apprehended in detail. It is first apprehended in movement, mass, energy, and mood. Only after the gesture comes the line. Only after the sky is alive does the church get its windows."

Don't get me wrong. As a business play, I like, respect, and even understand a little of the appeal of two-wheeler mobility-based firms. In 2026, Aperçu will be supporting a couple of them across market expansion, GTM partnerships, and financing. But as a level of imagination, I am distressed by how elemental we still revert to.

In spaces like these and more (think space, the value chains around silicon chip design and manufacture (yes, that too), edge AI, security applications, battery systems, food and energy industrial chains, and so forth), we need a lot more imagination. We need broad-stroke thinking and painting. And grand narratives to anchor healthy ambition for African civilisational progress in the 21st and into the 22nd century AD.

But this is only one way (a good way) of painting in broad strokes.

Because broad brushstrokes can also be a lie. As a narrative tool, it is only powerful when it is anchored to motion. And when it is not, a broad brushstroke becomes fog.

“The Starry Night” is one of van Gogh’s masterpieces. And you can still see the place that inspired that work of art today. I’m not an art critic, so please bear with me. But maybe one of the reasons that piece evokes the emotion it does, despite being far from a photograph, was that even though van Gogh distorted reality, he never really detached from it. The stars still obeyed gravity. The cypress still grew from the soil. The village still sits in a valley. And astronomers have confirmed that Venus was extremely bright and visible in the pre-dawn sky in the region during the spring of 1889, appearing to the right of the cypress tree in the painting. In other words, his exaggeration was disciplined by physics.

What I see instead is that we tend to use broad-stroke narratives to anchor ethereal ideals and subjectivity in social impact. You see it in our work language, fund theses, startup pitches, and government policy books.

What on earth, for example, does "position [X country] as a continental leader in digital transformation and technological advancement, creating a platform for investment, innovation, and job creation" mean? For context, it was said in reference to the construction of an AI hub in a particular African nation.

Thinking like this (no shade at all to the author, please) is a really close example of a brushstroke without an object. No implied mechanism. No constraint. It is an atmospheric perspective painted without a landscape. I respect that it is probably clouded with press release phraseology. But allow me use it to get my point across. The point being that thinking like this is rampant, and while it is polished enough to get a headline, maybe, it sidesteps important questions like:

1. What exactly is being committed to?

2. Which layer of the technology stack?

3. Which industrial competencies?

4. Which timelines?

5. Which failure modes are acceptable?

6. Which trade-offs are being made?

Building an AI hub is not a wrong aspiration, mind you. But without specificity, it is simply aesthetic fog. Without specificity, this type of broad-stroke thinking cannot really guide capital. It does not guide talent. It does not guide risk. It guides PowerPoint.

There is the delulu of “saving Africa” by ordering the latest gadget with 15-minute free delivery. There is also the delusion of extremely fast timelines to effect significant social change. (See Stephen Deng’s missives on Africa’s S-curves for a better treatment of this topic). 

But something that maybe should worry us a bit more than both is the delusion of raising venture equity capital from limited partners or getting VCs to write a cheque into “safe”, well-trodden paths. It may look less risky in the short term, no doubt. But it is also almost certainly punishingly hazardous in the world of the future. It is short-term de-risking that compounds long-term negative exposure. Such that when the future arrives, the villages optimized for yesterday’s paths will sit under someone else’s sky. Both literally and in terms of monetary returns.

I propose a third way. Can we combine the thin pencil of the architect with the thick directional strokes of the artist? One way to illustrate what I mean is, before we ask “What can we fund this year?” we should ask “What civilisation are we constructing?”

The ill-disciplined and happy-go-lucky of 2020–2022 indeed burned many fingers. So much so that we’ve collectively subscribed to the wisdom of overfitted incremental feasibility versus audacious composition. But one cannot truly succeed without the other.

Van Gogh once wrote: “I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.”

That’s really the essence of technological civilisation. And it is the ethos missing, or at least is sorely insufficient, from much of our current innovation narrative in Africa.

I suffer from it too, I’ll be the first to admit. But that’s why 2026 is the year I challenge myself to dare a small serving of naïveté. As a typical risk-averse person (I at least know myself this much), it is a personal challenge. As someone who does not want to sit on the sidelines throughout the stage of Africa’s innovation, it is a sacred duty.

"The vast majority of people on earth only walk by putting one foot in front of the other. No one walks like a kangaroo—leaping several feet at a time. Yet, a lot of the time, that is precisely what we need to move forward."

What does van Gogh’s method suggest as a corrective?

1. Start with motion, not structure.

Decipher what continental-scale technological movements you believe must exist 20–40 years from now. Not policies. Movements.

1. Paint mass before detail.

Declare domains where Africa must develop industrial depth—chips, energy systems, food bioprocessing, AI infrastructure, logistics autonomy. Even before the roadmaps exist—then go figure this bit out.

1. Accept thickness and mess.

Van Gogh’s strokes are uneven, imperfect, overpainted. Broad-stroke ambition will look naïve at first. That is fine. Precision comes later.

1. Let the sky govern the village.

Once the moving narrative exists, startups, funds, accelerators, and policies can align downward from it—not upward from small, well-worn, opportunistic business models.

I’m sensible enough to know that a lot of these are not new ideas. They’re just principles we’ve retreated from. I’m also sensible enough not to expect rapid success or even any success at all. It is not for everyone. But that is the point. Most people walk by placing one foot in front of the other. But every once in a while, someone comes along who is unlike “most people”. And they will kangaroo hop.

I want to be—we should all want to be—the impressionism of van Gogh or Seurat and the detail of da Vinci rolled up in one. 

Artists who capture the ordinariness of light and movement inside the grand atmosphere of being alive, making things, and being made. But also architects that bring attention to detail and execution rigour to the same canvas. We need competent draughtsmen and skilled painters. And right now it feels like we’re too steeped in “experience” (including yours truly) to see the sun lighting up the sky bright orange, for what it really is. That is understandable. But it is hardly ideal.

Featured image created with MidJourney.

Background on Vincent van Gogh: https://paintvine.co.nz/blogs/news/the-tragic-life-of-vincent-van-gogh?srsltid=AfmBOooqC7Nu2W0lbsusSY39mksSsJNNxo3aKF52xL0sRtDUU_tJlQMo

Posthumous fame: https://x.com/culturaltutor/status/1691082873082646529

We have spent the last decade obsessed with the "windows" of African tech—the apps, the payments, the incremental fixes—while forgetting to paint the sky they sit under. To build a future that doesn't just look like a slightly faster version of today, we must reclaim a sense of the whole: a civilizational Gestalt that prioritizes grand ambition over opportunistic "problem-solving."

I like to think of Vincent van Gogh as one of my favourite artists. But I’m also afraid that it’s really because I don’t know that many artists in the first place—a gap that I want to remedy. For the uninitiated, van Gogh was a Dutch painter whose works were greatly influenced by the prevailing post-impressionist art movement of his time (1853-1890). Post-impressionist art emphasized natural lighting, softly distorted shapes, emotional expression, bold colours, and heavy brushwork. Van Gogh and painters like Seurat (another of the few painters whose name rings a bell in my novice repertoire) eventually came to define the post-impressionist era. Some say that the era became the foundation for modern art. Personally, given what passes for art (paintings) these days, I’m not so sure.

But back to van Gogh.

Broad brushstrokes are big stories

Many people know the tragic story of van Gogh and his posthumous rise to fame and respect in the finicky world of art. So I won’t have to rehash that—thankfully. If, however, you don’t, please scroll to the end of this essay for a quick backgrounder.

I don’t know why van Gogh painted the way he did. But one thing his style transmutes is that reality is not first apprehended in detail. It is first apprehended in movement, mass, energy, and mood. Only after the gesture comes the line. Only after the sky is alive does the church get its windows.

Broad brushstrokes allow us room for imagination and do not confine us to extremely narrow and pessimistic determinism. Determinism that, in effect, forces founders and investors to only walk well-worn paths. 

If anything, we need more imagination across all layers of Africa's social and economic life. The Kenyan researcher and political economist, Ken Opalo, has written extensively about this need in the political and public economic organisation of resources. His preferred term for this broad-strokes imaginative thinking is "elite ambition," that is, the lack thereof. Political economy is not my forte, and Ken does a good job of analysing the issues at stake. So I need not make it my forte.

But what I do spend a lot of time thinking about is the startup-technology-business-and capital world on the continent. And even here, the funding freeze of late 2022 to early 2025 has done a number on our collective psyche. The funding slowdown is not all to blame, though. As recently as 2021, the peak year for funding in Africa, tech/startup ambition on the continent was relatively lame and made up of payment service providers and buying things online. Make no mistake, these things are almost revolutionary by any respectable metric, given the immediate history of human beings on earth if you go back a mere 80 or even 50 years.

The critical failure has been the hesitancy on our part to take our imagination beyond the obvious. Of course, that is to be expected. The vast majority of people on earth only walk by putting one foot in front of the other. No one walks like a kangaroo—leaping several feet at a time. Yet, a lot of the time, that is precisely what we need to move forward. A critical mass of small progresses and a massive leap ahead.

Yes, I said "leap ahead". Today, the word "leapfrog" is much maligned in startup/tech/investment circles. Maybe it's a consequence of misuse over the last decade. Or people are just tired of not seeing Utopia yet. Whatever the case, it's an unfortunate tell on the average psyche of the people who are supposed to be building the future. The only futures we seem to see look exactly like today.

It's part, for example, of my tiny gripe with the current mass (electric) motorcycle-based taxi trend. There, the bet seems to be that motorcycle taxis, the socio-economic factors that created them, and the system they sustain and depend on, will remain a fact of life in Africa for a long, long time (12-25 years given what we know about the timelines needed to secure decent exits for non-asset-heavy tech businesses, to say nothing of heavy asset businesses).

"Reality is not first apprehended in detail. It is first apprehended in movement, mass, energy, and mood. Only after the gesture comes the line. Only after the sky is alive does the church get its windows."

Don't get me wrong. As a business play, I like, respect, and even understand a little of the appeal of two-wheeler mobility-based firms. In 2026, Aperçu will be supporting a couple of them across market expansion, GTM partnerships, and financing. But as a level of imagination, I am distressed by how elemental we still revert to.

In spaces like these and more (think space, the value chains around silicon chip design and manufacture (yes, that too), edge AI, security applications, battery systems, food and energy industrial chains, and so forth), we need a lot more imagination. We need broad-stroke thinking and painting. And grand narratives to anchor healthy ambition for African civilisational progress in the 21st and into the 22nd century AD.

But this is only one way (a good way) of painting in broad strokes.

Because broad brushstrokes can also be a lie. As a narrative tool, it is only powerful when it is anchored to motion. And when it is not, a broad brushstroke becomes fog.

“The Starry Night” is one of van Gogh’s masterpieces. And you can still see the place that inspired that work of art today. I’m not an art critic, so please bear with me. But maybe one of the reasons that piece evokes the emotion it does, despite being far from a photograph, was that even though van Gogh distorted reality, he never really detached from it. The stars still obeyed gravity. The cypress still grew from the soil. The village still sits in a valley. And astronomers have confirmed that Venus was extremely bright and visible in the pre-dawn sky in the region during the spring of 1889, appearing to the right of the cypress tree in the painting. In other words, his exaggeration was disciplined by physics.

What I see instead is that we tend to use broad-stroke narratives to anchor ethereal ideals and subjectivity in social impact. You see it in our work language, fund theses, startup pitches, and government policy books.

What on earth, for example, does "position [X country] as a continental leader in digital transformation and technological advancement, creating a platform for investment, innovation, and job creation" mean? For context, it was said in reference to the construction of an AI hub in a particular African nation.

Thinking like this (no shade at all to the author, please) is a really close example of a brushstroke without an object. No implied mechanism. No constraint. It is an atmospheric perspective painted without a landscape. I respect that it is probably clouded with press release phraseology. But allow me use it to get my point across. The point being that thinking like this is rampant, and while it is polished enough to get a headline, maybe, it sidesteps important questions like:

1. What exactly is being committed to?

2. Which layer of the technology stack?

3. Which industrial competencies?

4. Which timelines?

5. Which failure modes are acceptable?

6. Which trade-offs are being made?

Building an AI hub is not a wrong aspiration, mind you. But without specificity, it is simply aesthetic fog. Without specificity, this type of broad-stroke thinking cannot really guide capital. It does not guide talent. It does not guide risk. It guides PowerPoint.

There is the delulu of “saving Africa” by ordering the latest gadget with 15-minute free delivery. There is also the delusion of extremely fast timelines to effect significant social change. (See Stephen Deng’s missives on Africa’s S-curves for a better treatment of this topic). 

But something that maybe should worry us a bit more than both is the delusion of raising venture equity capital from limited partners or getting VCs to write a cheque into “safe”, well-trodden paths. It may look less risky in the short term, no doubt. But it is also almost certainly punishingly hazardous in the world of the future. It is short-term de-risking that compounds long-term negative exposure. Such that when the future arrives, the villages optimized for yesterday’s paths will sit under someone else’s sky. Both literally and in terms of monetary returns.

I propose a third way. Can we combine the thin pencil of the architect with the thick directional strokes of the artist? One way to illustrate what I mean is, before we ask “What can we fund this year?” we should ask “What civilisation are we constructing?”

The ill-disciplined and happy-go-lucky of 2020–2022 indeed burned many fingers. So much so that we’ve collectively subscribed to the wisdom of overfitted incremental feasibility versus audacious composition. But one cannot truly succeed without the other.

Van Gogh once wrote: “I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.”

That’s really the essence of technological civilisation. And it is the ethos missing, or at least is sorely insufficient, from much of our current innovation narrative in Africa.

I suffer from it too, I’ll be the first to admit. But that’s why 2026 is the year I challenge myself to dare a small serving of naïveté. As a typical risk-averse person (I at least know myself this much), it is a personal challenge. As someone who does not want to sit on the sidelines throughout the stage of Africa’s innovation, it is a sacred duty.

"The vast majority of people on earth only walk by putting one foot in front of the other. No one walks like a kangaroo—leaping several feet at a time. Yet, a lot of the time, that is precisely what we need to move forward."

What does van Gogh’s method suggest as a corrective?

1. Start with motion, not structure.

Decipher what continental-scale technological movements you believe must exist 20–40 years from now. Not policies. Movements.

1. Paint mass before detail.

Declare domains where Africa must develop industrial depth—chips, energy systems, food bioprocessing, AI infrastructure, logistics autonomy. Even before the roadmaps exist—then go figure this bit out.

1. Accept thickness and mess.

Van Gogh’s strokes are uneven, imperfect, overpainted. Broad-stroke ambition will look naïve at first. That is fine. Precision comes later.

1. Let the sky govern the village.

Once the moving narrative exists, startups, funds, accelerators, and policies can align downward from it—not upward from small, well-worn, opportunistic business models.

I’m sensible enough to know that a lot of these are not new ideas. They’re just principles we’ve retreated from. I’m also sensible enough not to expect rapid success or even any success at all. It is not for everyone. But that is the point. Most people walk by placing one foot in front of the other. But every once in a while, someone comes along who is unlike “most people”. And they will kangaroo hop.

I want to be—we should all want to be—the impressionism of van Gogh or Seurat and the detail of da Vinci rolled up in one. 

Artists who capture the ordinariness of light and movement inside the grand atmosphere of being alive, making things, and being made. But also architects that bring attention to detail and execution rigour to the same canvas. We need competent draughtsmen and skilled painters. And right now it feels like we’re too steeped in “experience” (including yours truly) to see the sun lighting up the sky bright orange, for what it really is. That is understandable. But it is hardly ideal.

Featured image created with MidJourney.

Background on Vincent van Gogh: https://paintvine.co.nz/blogs/news/the-tragic-life-of-vincent-van-gogh?srsltid=AfmBOooqC7Nu2W0lbsusSY39mksSsJNNxo3aKF52xL0sRtDUU_tJlQMo

Posthumous fame: https://x.com/culturaltutor/status/1691082873082646529