The Spark Magazine (July 2018)

www.thesparkng.com
The Spark | Ignite/Connect/Achieve
Into The Mind Of A Digital Curator
Bankole Oluwafemi is the co-founder of Big Cabal Media, the publisher of Tech Cabal and other
media outlets. In this interview, he shares his journey into tech industry as a creative.
- By Ayandola Ayanleke
Tell us about yourself and what you do.
I’m a creative. I like to make things. Right now, I make things at
Big Cabal Media, a digital content company that makes cool
things for African audiences.
Big Cabal Media is the publisher of Techcabal.com, a magazine
website that covers the business of technology, innovation and
start-ups in Africa; and Zikoko.com, an entertainment website
that curates and amplifies young African culture and lifestyle.
We are also the makers of Ebolafacts.com and GetYourPVC.
com. And we’ve got more exciting stuff on the way.
Take us through your journey into the tech industry. When
and how did you first “interact” with the tech industry?
I kind of stumbled into the whole tech thing; and actually
consider myself a media guy, not a tech guy. For as long as I
can remember, I wanted to get into media, and didn’t quite
know how, because I studied law and had no media training or
obvious media skills.
In 2010, when I was in Law School, I got the idea to start
blogging. It began as a personal journal, and I’d write about
anything and everything that caught my fancy. But after
attending a tech event at Unilag, and interacting with internet
entrepreneurs and developers, I slowly developed an affinity
for technology blogging. More of the stuff I published started
to be about gadgets I had or wanted, and apps that I was trying
out. I was eventually invited to become a contributor to what –
at the time – was the largest technology blog in Nigeria.
What inspired the establishment of Techcabal and what
was the Spark to your success?
Contributing to an established technology blog made me
realise that I had a voice, even if it was coming out of an entrylevel
Samsung Android phone in the back of a Danfo on Third
Mainland Bridge. And people were not only listening to what I
had to say, they were sharing and engaging with it.
I eventually got tired of competing with TechCrunch in
California to review the latest apps or phones from Lagos.
At that time, devices that launched in North America/Europe
would take months to reach Africa, so it really made no sense
to go head to head with TechCrunch on phone reviews. What
did make sense to me was writing about local start-ups and the
people behind them.
In 2011, the start-up ecosystem in Lagos was incredibly tiny;
there weren’t a lot of page-views from writing about obscure
app developers and entrepreneurs. No page-views meant
no advertising revenue. Page-views came from writing stale
gadget reviews and recycling press releases from boring
but, established companies. That was the reigning wisdom. It
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