Will African Stories Ever Make Waves in the 3D Economy?

I grew up watching Ben 10, Tom and Jerry, and SpongeBob SquarePants. So did much of my generation across Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra. These shows shaped how we joked, how we understood conflict, even how we imagined heroism, and none of it truly conveyed the message of African culture.

None of it was ours.

We became fluent in the folklore of Bikini Bottom while often knowing less of the stories carried by our own grandparents. That is not nostalgia. It points to a deeper gap in the infrastructure of African storytelling, and that gap is now replicating itself in the next great medium: the three-dimensional, spatial internet.

This matters more than it did twenty years ago. As animation, gaming, and extended reality converge into what is increasingly described as the “3D economy”, Africa's gaming market reached an estimated $1.8 billion in 2024, with roughly 349 million gamers. This market, according to Carry1st and Newzoo, is growing six times faster than the global average. That same year, Netflix released Supa Team 4, its first African original animated series, while Disney+ commissioned Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, an anthology featuring creators from Egypt, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa. On paper, African stories are finally entering rooms they were long locked out of.

But volume is not sovereignty.

African stories can appear in the 3D economy. The harder question is whether Africa controls what those stories are built from: the accuracy and dignified representation of African people, places, objects, materials, and environments. Without that foundation, African narratives are often being assembled from assets created for other contexts; quite literally, from someone else's spare parts.

That is the infrastructure problem a small cohort of African creative-technology companies, Blizmo Labs among them, is beginning to address.

The Asset Gap

In 2019, media artist A.M. Darke went looking for African hairstyles on major 3D marketplaces such as TurboSquid and CGTrader for a personal project. Searching directly for Black characters returned almost nothing usable; searching for “African American” instead surfaced racist caricatures, including Jim Crow-era mammy figures, minstrel models, and so-called “voodoo warrior” archetypes.

Her discovery contributed to the Open-Source Afro Hair Library and later helped inspire Dove’s Code My Crown initiative, which teaches developers how to model textured hair accurately.

This is one specific incident, but the underlying problem is broader. The global 3D asset economy was not designed with African bodies, homes, landscapes, materials, or visual references as a default case. The result is a production environment in which an African creator can have a story, the artistic skill to tell it, and an audience waiting for it, yet still struggle to find the digital building blocks required to construct its world.

The industry's economics make that problem harder to ignore. Africa has a growing population of animators, game developers, 3D artists, and world-builders, particularly in countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda. Many have built their skills through outsourced production and annotation work for foreign companies. The constraint, then, is not simply a shortage of talent. It is what surrounds that talent: production capacity, financing, tooling, and access to high-quality local assets.

Supa Team 4 illustrates the point. Zambian writer Malenga Mulendema first pitched the concept through a pan-African talent search run by South Africa's Triggerfish Animation Studios in 2015. Netflix picked it up in 2019, but the series did not premiere until 2023. Its production ultimately involved companies across South Africa, the United Kingdom, and France.

That is not a failure of imagination.

The imagination existed by 2015; the production capacity was distributed elsewhere.

Building the Infrastructure

This is where Blizmo Labs fits in. Rather than producing another finished animation or game, Blizmo is attempting to operate further upstream: systematically capturing the physical African world through photogrammetry and spatial-data production, then converting real markets, textiles, architecture, foliage, and other references into licensable, production-ready 3D assets.

The thesis is straightforward: if creators cannot reliably find an accurately modeled African building, textile, hairstyle, landscape, or object in existing libraries, then one way to accelerate African-led storytelling is to build the library itself.

The objective isn't just more African content. It's greater African control over the raw material that content is produced from.

That same logic extends beyond asset libraries. Investment is needed in African-owned spatial datasets, African-trained generative models, creative-technology companies, and the communities already beginning to connect practitioners across the continent. Networks such as ARVR Africa and the XR Africa Community offer examples of the kind of connective tissue needed to turn scattered pockets of expertise across Lagos, Nairobi, Kigali, and Cape Town into a more coordinated ecosystem.

Participation Without Dependence

Yet this is not a simple story of extraction versus liberation. Global platforms have created genuine opportunities. Netflix and Disney have provided budgets and distribution that many African studios could not yet match. Cross-border production has enabled African creators to access technical capabilities and audiences that would otherwise be difficult to reach. Freelance and outsourcing markets have also allowed African artists to develop skills while earning foreign-currency income.

The goal isn't to retreat from the global 3D economy; it's to participate without permanent dependence on someone else's assets, datasets, or models. Africa doesn't need to build everything alone, but it does need enough ownership that participation isn't conditional on someone else's infrastructure.

None of this will be solved through goodwill or nostalgia for oral tradition. It requires datasets, models, tools, production capacity, and the patient work of digitizing the continent's physical and visual world so that its storytellers, and eventually the rest of the world, can build from a richer and more accurate foundation.

Blizmo Labs is one bet on that future. Whether it succeeds, or whether another company ultimately builds this at greater scale, the underlying question is larger than any single startup.

Will Africa write the ground truth of its own 3D future, or once again let others render it on the continent's behalf?

That choice is being made now, asset by asset.