Audiobooks app Afrikan Echoes will tell unheard African stories

“In today’s world, the oral tradition can be translated into electronic audio,” Chinery-Hesse tells CNN. “So suddenly, we have Africa’s oral tradition on steroids, which is what we are trying to achieve here.”

“We would like a situation where non-Africans can listen to African stories told by Africans, in an African way,” he adds.

Reaching rural areas

His vision is that one day, “if you drive into an African village, you’ll be able to find everyone sitting at the back of the chief’s house, speaker on, with an audiobook playing about some event in another African village, in another African country, and they’re all listening attentively,” he says.

That’s why Chinery-Hesse is creating a model that allows people to share audiobooks while offline. He says this could work through an in-app button which will allow some people to bulk buy audiobooks and then distribute them to others via Bluetooth.

Afrikan Echoes also uses SMS texts to alert registered customers to the latest audiobook releases.

Funded by SOFTtribe, Afrikan Echoes currently runs out of Chinery-Hesse’s home in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and is stocked with recording equipment that is used to record up to five stories a week.

Chinery-Hesse says the startup has spent under $100,000 to launch and that he purposefully avoided fundraising to ensure the company remained entirely African-owned.

Overcoming language barriers

Michala Mackay, the chief operating officer and director of the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation in Sierra Leone, predicts the app will improve digitization in Africa, as well as educating children and giving people opportunities to tell stories the African way.

“One of the constraints in being able to sell our stories is the language barriers that we have,” she tells CNN. “Afrikan Echoes gives you the opportunity to tell your story as you know it, in another language that somebody else in another country whom you have no connection with, can understand, learn from, and be able to experience the same experiences that you have.”

“You could be a fisherman that’s uneducated, has never gone through the doors of any schoolroom, but be able to tell your story,” she adds.

Among the unpublished authors telling their story on the app is Frank Karefa-Smart, whose story recounts his colorful life working in New York during the time of the civil rights movement, and across West Africa in the diamond trade.

Chinery-Hesse hopes that stories such as these will connect the continent in a unique way.

“The stories we are going to produce are coming from all of Africa. It’s not city to city. It’s mobile phone to mobile, so village to village. The whole world gets to watch and hear African stories from Africans across the continent,” he says.