Five months after Paramount shut down BET Africa, a restructured Best International Act category produced the first ceremony since 2018 with no African winner.
BET Africa signed off for good at 9 a.m. on January 1, 2026. The channel, which had broadcast on DStv Channel 129 since April 2015, went dark as part of a wider restructuring by parent company Paramount, which had already announced a 15 percent workforce reduction and a $3 billion savings target tied to its shift away from linear television. The shutdown pulled BET Africa off DStv and GOtv across South Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region.
The timing is hard to separate from a leadership change at BET itself. Louis Carr had been named president of the network in December 2025, succeeding Scott Mills after 23 years at the helm, the first change at the top of BET in over two decades. Weeks into Carr’s tenure, BET Africa was gone. The closure was not, on its own, a total surprise. BET International, the London office that had carried BET’s US content into UK, African and MENA markets since 2008, had already stopped operating as a linear channel in the UK and Ireland back in 2021, folding that reach into streaming instead. What made January different was that this time the African channel itself, not just a regional distribution arm, went away entirely.
A category that had run for eight years without a single blank
Then came the awards show. BET unified its regional international categories into a single Best International Act award in 2018, explicitly framed at the time as a move to bring African artists onto the main stage of the ceremony rather than keeping them boxed into a side category. It worked. Davido won the inaugural unified award, and the years that followed produced ten different African winners across eight ceremonies, including Burna Boy, who won three times, along with Tems, Tyla and Ayra Starr, the category’s final champion in 2025.
For 2026, BET restructured again, folding the international category into the main competitive race. Tems, Burna Boy, Wizkid and Asake, and Tyla were placed head to head with Kehlani, Doechii, Clipse and Kendrick Lamar instead of against each other. When the ceremony aired, no African artist won a single award, the first total shutout since the unified category began in 2018.
The gap nobody mentioned on stage
In a pre-show interview on June 27, Carr spoke broadly about BET’s mission, describing a network that tries to make sure people understand its impact not just on its own community but on all communities. What did not come up in that conversation was Africa specifically, the channel’s closure five months earlier, or the category restructure that would play out on stage the next night. That is not proof of intent. Press junkets rarely get into programming strategy, and a single interview is a thin data point on its own. But it is a real one, and it sits alongside a channel closure and a category cut that both point the same direction.
The contrast becomes sharper against what Netflix was doing during the same period. The streamer’s 2026 African content slate includes a second season of Aníkúlápó, the Nigerian series Yoh! Bestie, South Africa’s Love Is Blind and a third season of Fatal Seduction, alongside Ghana’s Two, described as the country’s first neo-noir feature. Netflix has said it has invested roughly €160 million in African film production since 2016, work that the company credits with helping generate around 12,000 jobs across Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. One company pulled a channel and folded a category in the same year that another kept greenlighting new seasons. Readers can draw their own conclusions about what that says regarding where the industry believes African audiences, and African talent, actually sit.
For the DMV’s own community of Afrobeats fans, Nigerian and Ghanaian creatives, and anyone who has followed the rise of Afrobeats on the Billboard charts, this is not just a programming footnote. It is a live question about which platforms are actually investing in African stories and which ones are quietly stepping back while still cashing in on African culture at the awards podium, a tension that echoed through the site’s earlier coverage of the 2026 BET Awards.
FAQ
When did BET Africa shut down?
BET Africa, which aired on DStv Channel 129, went off air at 9 a.m. on January 1, 2026, after launching in April 2015.
What happened to the Best International Act category?
BET folded its standalone Best International Act category into the main competitive race for the 2026 BET Awards, ending an eight-year run in which ten different African artists had won since the category unified in 2018.
Did any African artist win at the 2026 BET Awards?
No. The 2026 ceremony marked the first time since the category unified in 2018 that no African artist won an award.