Africans in Business. Afripreneurs. Where to Start?
by Louise Nunga
The most commonly asked questions I hear from my African people are, “Where and how do I start a business? How can I turn this great idea into a business like you have?” And after 13 years as an African entrepreneur, I have experienced a lot. However, as I state in my published book “Just Start It”, you start in your mind.
The mind, as we know it, is a battlefield that needs a lot of daily renewal. And in my case, it started with a three decade renewal of my mind. This was to remove every false doctrine I’d received, and also allow me to get clarity of who I am and whose I am. So, I say to you who wants to have a God gifted business that will exceed all you can dream of … Uncover who you truly are in Christ. Remove all the ancestral thinking birthed in traditions and rituals, after all, they block us from seeing who we truly are and whose we truly are. Our vision of what business to start is hidden in seeking the unadulterated and true Word and character of God.
A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. So, if we serve both God and our ancestors, then our vision will never be clear. Our focus will be double instead of it being pointed at the bulls-eye. So, before you start or expand that business, expand your seek of who you truly are worshiping. God is not an ancestor, and our ancestors are not God; there’s a clear difference.
In my 13 years of doing business as an African woman, I found out that the more I seek my identity in Christ, the more my business’s vision board gets bigger. This is mind-blowing. But this only happened when I cleansed my beliefs of African Christian traditions, and just sought God, His Word and His ways. I found out that my vision had been blurry all these years because my vision of who God is was blurry. When I found Him in His Word and did a background check on every African tradition, ritual, belief and system, I found some that matched His Word and some that didn’t match His Word. I trashed those that didn’t align with His Word, as painful as it was to find out that all these years of my Christian walk, I didn’t know God. So, seek ye first the true Kingdom of God and all the vision you need to have will be added onto you. How do you get a clear focus? You need to get wise Godly counsel. I had to intentionally submit to wise counsel, learn who God is and what His ways look like. Just like it’s important to get a business mentor, it’s even more important to get godly counsel to teach you the way you should go. Once who identify yourself in Christ, everything else becomes clear. You start getting the strategies you need for your gifted business. Your discernment helps you build the right team and partnerships. It takes a lot of faith to build a business out of just an idea. When you know yourself, you’ll develop crazy faith that no man can break. You’ll start walking upright in confidence because you know who you are and whose you are. So, just start it, but first, start seeking God.
Edited by Tiffany Buckner