I have been writing about Egyptian television from Cairo for twenty-five years. I have watched Egyptian series travel across the Arab world and into Francophone Africa, watched them define the viewing habits of Ramadan for hundreds of millions of people across the continent and beyond, watched the Egyptian production industry develop one of the most sophisticated serialised drama ecosystems anywhere on earth. And I have watched, year after year, as publications that describe themselves as covering African film and television treat Egyptian content as if it belongs to a different continent.
Roll Call Africa covers Africa. All of it. Egypt is in Africa. This coverage begins now.
This Ramadan season — one of the most commercially significant television seasons of any year in North and Francophone Africa — has produced We Nensa Ele Kan (And We Forget What Was) as one of its most watched exports. The series, produced by MBC’s Shahid platform, is being watched from Morocco to Bahrain. Its viewership runs through Egyptian diaspora communities across Europe, through Francophone African households where Arabic-language television has been part of the cultural diet for generations, through streaming platforms that carry Egyptian drama alongside sub-Saharan African content without any of the industry conversations that would bridge those two worlds.
That bridge does not exist as an institutional structure. It exists only as a viewing habit that the industry has not yet caught up with.
The Scale of Egyptian Television Production
Let me put this in numbers that deserve to be stated plainly.
Egypt produces an estimated 250 to 300 television series annually. The Ramadan season alone generates 40 to 50 new drama series broadcast simultaneously across Egyptian and pan-Arab channels, competing for the attention of family audiences during the month’s evening viewing window. The production infrastructure that supports this output — the studios, the post-production houses, the costume and set departments, the casting agencies, the writers’ rooms — is the most developed in Africa and competes in scale with mid-tier European production ecosystems.
Egypt’s television exports generate revenue across the Arab world, Francophone Africa, and diaspora communities in Europe and North America. The Shahid platform, the Weyyak platform, pan-Arab channels including MBC, OSN, and Rotana carry Egyptian content to audiences that the Netflix Africa commissioning map does not reach and does not appear to be trying to reach.
Against that backdrop, the near-total absence of Egypt from the “African television” conversation in English-language trade coverage is not an oversight. It is a structural choice embedded in how the industry has defined its geography, and it is a choice that Roll Call Africa explicitly rejects.
The Barrier That Both Sides Maintain
The absence of exchange between Egyptian television and sub-Saharan African television is not entirely the fault of the English-language trade press. There are real barriers — linguistic, cultural, commercial — that make direct exchange difficult.
Egypt’s television industry operates primarily in Egyptian Arabic, a dialect intelligible across the Arab world but not in Accra or Lagos or Nairobi without subtitling or dubbing. The commercial infrastructure for distributing Egyptian drama in English-speaking sub-Saharan Africa does not exist at scale. The reverse is equally true: Nollywood drama in Yoruba or Pidgin, South African drama in isiZulu or Afrikaans, Kenyan drama in Swahili — none of these travel easily into the Egyptian market without the same localization investment that has not been made.
What does exist is the Francophone corridor. Moroccan television — which produces its own Ramadan content, including this season’s Chkoune Kan Igoul — circulates into Francophone West and Central Africa through shared language. Egyptian drama is subtitled into French for Francophone audiences. The linguistic infrastructure for a North-West African television exchange exists in French, even if it has not been industrialised.
What the Industry Could Build
The question of what genuine exchange between Egypt’s television industry and sub-Saharan African television would look like is one that nobody in the industry appears to be asking publicly. Roll Call Africa is asking it.
A co-production framework between an Egyptian production house and a West African broadcaster would require legal structures, rights management agreements, and financing models that do not currently exist. It would require casting and writing that can function across Arabic-English-French language registers. It would require distribution relationships between platforms that currently operate in entirely separate commercial ecosystems.
None of those requirements is insurmountable. They have all been solved in other contexts — the Moroccan-French co-production structure, the Nigerian-Ghanaian cast exchange, the South African-Kenyan financing arrangements that have begun to emerge in documentary production. They have not been solved for Egyptian-West African or Egyptian-East African television because nobody has decided to solve them.
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The continent has the largest population of any continent on earth, the fastest-growing young demographic of any continent on earth, and the most underserved television audience of any continent on earth. Its two largest television industries — Nigeria’s and Egypt’s — have never had a sustained creative or commercial conversation with each other.
That is the biggest underdeveloped story in African television. Roll Call Africa will be covering it.
— Nadia El-Rashid has covered African and North African television from Cairo for twenty-five years. She is Roll Call Africa’s continental television correspondent for North and East Africa.
