Empire in the Sky: How Africa’s Digital Future Is Being Colonised Again

It begins with a promise. A satellite dish on a tin roof. A blinking terminal in the middle of rural Kisii. Suddenly, a boy can watch a YouTube video without buffering.

A teacher downloads a lesson plan in seconds. A clinic sends health records to the capital without delay. It feels like the future has finally arrived. But beneath the signal lies the story. And it is older than it looks.

In the late 1800s, European empires built telegraph lines from Cairo to Cape Town not to connect Africans but to control the continent. Telegraphy was not a communication service.

It was a surveillance weapon. Whoever controlled the cables controlled the empire. Today, the names have changed. The cables have moved to orbit. But the logic has returned.

By the start of 2024, the African Union estimated that just 35 percent of the continent’s population had access to the internet.

This is the lowest regional rate in the world. In Sub Saharan Africa, more than 800 million people remain unconnected. The solution, we are told, is disruption.

Enter Starlink, Elon Musk’s low Earth orbit satellite network, designed to beam internet to every corner of the planet. No cables. No towers. No waiting for states to act.

Starlink began targeting African markets in 2023. It entered Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, and Mozambique. In each case, the rollout was fast and framed as liberation.

In Nigeria, the terminal cost over 400,000 naira, more than 500 US dollars, and the monthly subscription was priced at over 30 US dollars.

This is more than double the country’s minimum wage. In Kenya, Starlink initially priced its hardware at over 90,000 shillings, nearly 700 US dollars, before reducing the cost to 39,500 shillings after public backlash.

In Rwanda, the government offered subsidies to make the service affordable, paying for over 60 percent of the cost.

But nowhere in Africa does Starlink share ownership. It does not pay corporate tax in the countries where it operates. It does not invest in local infrastructure or job creation beyond distribution.

It does not comply with local content laws. Its satellites serve millions from space, but its power is terrestrial. It collects revenue directly from African users while evading African regulation. This is not access. It is dominance.

In South Africa, where Starlink has not launched, the state refused to issue a license unless the company complied with the Electronic Communications Act.

This law requires any telecom operator to have a minimum of 30 percent ownership by historically disadvantaged groups. In other words, Black South Africans.

Starlink declined. The company offered no willingness to find a local equity partner or comply with transformation rules. Elon Musk, born in Pretoria, responded with frustration.

He reposted misleading stories about white farmers being killed. He hinted that South Africa was hostile to progress. He framed his refusal not as arrogance but as resistance to discrimination.

This was not accidental. Musk has long positioned himself as an anti-state entrepreneur. His companies, from Tesla to SpaceX to Starlink, are designed to operate beyond national control.

He has described government regulation as a threat to innovation and has consistently resisted labor rights, environmental standards, and platform accountability in the countries where he operates.

South Africa’s demand for shared ownership was not simply a legal hurdle. It was a threat to his philosophy.

Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal with Musk and also grew up in South Africa, shares this belief. Thiel is on record saying that democracy and capitalism are not compatible.

He funds projects that promote private governance, offshore data havens, and what he calls sovereign individualism. His firm Palantir, named after the all-seeing crystal in Tolkien’s novels, sells surveillance software to police and military agencies around the world.

In the United States, Palantir’s systems have powered immigration raids and predictive policing. In Europe, they have been used to monitor refugees. In Africa, Palantir has begun embedding itself in public health, customs, and security systems through opaque partnerships.

Thiel and Musk share more than a birthplace. They share an ambition to build systems that operate above the state and beyond accountability.

Palantir seeks to control data. Starlink seeks to control distribution. Both rely on a narrative that frames African states as obstacles and their own platforms as saviours.

Across the continent, governments are accepting this logic. Google’s Equiano cable, Meta’s 2Africa cable, Microsoft’s Azure regions in South Africa, and Amazon Web Services’ presence in Cape Town all signal heavy investment.

But nearly all of it is owned, controlled, and operated offshore. According to the African IXP Association, over 80 percent of African internet traffic is still routed through Europe, even when both the sender and the receiver are on the continent.

This means a simple email from Kampala to Nairobi is likely to travel through London or Frankfurt before arriving.

This is not a technical inevitability. It is a failure of infrastructure sovereignty. Africa has fewer than 150 internet exchange points, and most are under-resourced.

Only a handful of countries have functioning local cloud services. Most African governments host their data in foreign-owned data centres or lease server space without any ownership clauses. The continent accounts for over 17 percent of the global population but less than 1 percent of global data centre capacity.

The African Union’s Data Policy Framework, adopted in 2022, calls on member states to establish legal frameworks for data ownership, protection, and localisation. But implementation has been slow.

In practice, governments are signing agreements with global tech firms faster than they are drafting laws. In many countries, there is no meaningful regulation of cloud infrastructure, satellite services, or platform behavior.

Tech companies operate with near-total freedom.

They do not just serve African users. They shape the African internet.

When states do try to push back, they are often vilified. South Africa is one of the only countries that has drawn a clear line. Its refusal to license Starlink without equity participation is not protectionism.

It is precedent. Because it affirms that even satellites must answer to the law. That even the most powerful tech empires cannot hover above African sovereignty.

The future of the African internet is not just a question of coverage. It is a question of control. Who owns the platforms? Who stores the data? Who routes the traffic? Who writes the code? These are not technical questions. They are political. They are economic. And they are urgent.

If we want to avoid becoming tenants in our own digital economies, we must act with the clarity of a continent that has seen this playbook before.

We must build regional internet exchange points. We must mandate local equity in cloud infrastructure. We must tax satellite operators fairly. We must refuse partnerships that offer access without accountability.

The empire has returned. It does not wear khaki. It wears keycards. It does not conquer with flags. It conquers with fiber and satellites and predictive models.

But Africa is not passive. We have our own ambitions. And if we insist on sovereignty, if we legislate it, build it, protect it, the future will not be written in California. It will be written here.

In the soil. In the law. In the sky above us, on our own terms.