At first Arlene Mulder and Juanita Kotze co-founded the BiB app as a concept. South African entrepreneur Arlene Mulder utilized her time and space during the Covid 19 Pandemic to bring Bib to life. Pivoting to home recording technologies, BiB carried on with plans to facilitate the production of African storytelling by acclaimed voice artists made available on App store and Google play by the end of year 2020. Few months after developing the app, BiB announced a new partnership with Africa’s biggest publisher, Naspers-owned NB Publishers. The partnership enabled BiB gain access to the entire catalogue of African writers for transformation into digital audio formats. Additionally, BiB generated theatre pieces, children’s theatre and series, over 60 titles from the Naspers-owned NB Publishers that are currently available for listeners. BiB is meant to create a platform that will bring the richness of Africa’s story-telling heritage to the world through strategic partnerships with content creators, authors and publishers. BiB is delighted to include works from best-selling writers such as Deon Meyer and Dalene Mathee, read by some of South Africa’s best actors and voice artists like June Van Merch and Stian Bam. By documenting African literature and theatre productions, BiB is creating an employment platform for artists whose livelihoods have been negatively affected by the Covid-19 restrictions. The South African Startup has a pan –African focus that will go beyond the country’s 11 official languages and borders. In addition to this , BiB aims at presenting extraordinary diversity of African voices. BiB will accomplish all these by featuring content from across the continent and the African diaspora abroad. BiB is the ideal platform that is going to preserve and promote Africa’s deep storytelling culture and traditions that will enable safeguard the African stories for the future generations to come.
