The Ebuka Mama restaurant in Istanbul’s cosmopolitan neighborhood of Kumkapi has a Nigerian flag in its window and a smell of spiced roasted fish wafting through the open door. Its customers eat large plates of jollof rice as Afrobeat plays in the background. A man asks the waiter to play Congolese music and introduces himself to Al-Monitor as William, a businessman from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Like many entrepreneurial and middle-class Africans coming to Turkey, William is in Istanbul to buy wholesale textile and manufactured Turkish products. Cargo links between Turkey and many sub-Saharan African countries make the process easy and affordable for small business owners to keep their stores stocked from Istanbul. This is in part a consequence of the consumer explosion in many West and Central African countries as the increase in their disposable income feeds a taste for foreign-produced products. The total volume of trade between the African continent and Turkey reached $20.6 billion in 2017 — a rapid growth from the $3.68 billion in 2003, according to Turkey’s official Anatolia News Agency.