ABOUT THIS EPISODE
For this episode, we are joined by South African defense industrialist and philanthropist Ivor Ichikowitz. In 1994, as apartheid ended and most observers wrote off South Africa's defense industry, Ivor founded Paramount Group and built it into Africa's largest privately owned defense and aerospace company. He stepped back from daily leadership of Paramount in 2022 and has since put his energy into the Ichikowitz Family Foundation.
Much of our conversation focuses on two of the foundation's projects. The African Oral History Archive holds thousands of hours of testimony from every side of South Africa's transition from apartheid, and it produced the recent seven-part Netflix docuseries The Trials of Winnie Mandela. The African Youth Survey, now in its fourth edition, interviewed nearly 5,000 young Africans aged 18 to 24 across 16 countries earlier this year. Its findings show a generation more optimistic about its future than at any point since the pandemic, though, in Ivor's words, "optimism doesn't equal satisfaction."
We close on Ukraine, and on Ivor's view that Africa's ongoing experience of insurgency, coupled with Ukraine's war with Russia, makes the two geographies the laboratories for the next generation of warfare.
A note on audio: there are some minor issues with my audio levels during the conversation, but Ivor's audio is unaffected.
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Links mentioned:
The Trials of Winnie Mandela (Netflix), official trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZydib--qw4
African Youth Survey 2026 – https://africanyouthsurvey.org/
Books mentioned:
Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin – https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881530
