This article questions the extent to which ‘Africa’ can simply buy into the creative economy discourse. This is necessary because the relative lack of attention to the cultural and creative industries on the continent in the academic literature creates a double blind. First, the empirical context in which culture is created, traded, and consumed remains absent from the largely Western literature. Second, the same Western literature serves as a way to make cultural production on the African continent fit the notion of the cultural and creative industries. This creates a tension between the cultural and creative industries models and the context in which most cultural stakeholders on the continent work. My argument is that far greater empirical attention is needed to the practices in the cultural sector across the continent, because ‘Africa’ cannot simply pick and adopt a model, it needs to conceptualize and theorize its own models and approaches to the cultural industries for this discourse to become a useful tool.