US news weekly Time’s eagerly awaited 100-strong list of the world’s most influential people in various fields of endeavour was released late last month. Proving that our continent is coming into its own, a few sons and daughters of the African soil made the prestigious list.

None of the names may be easily recognisable by readers of this column, however, the reason being that they all hail from beyond our Southern African neck of the woods. But that doesn’t mean we should not join in celebrating their recognition by Time magazine, a paragon of excellent journalism.

The Africans on the list – compiled by Time’s editors, with recommendations from the magazine’s international staff and Time 100 alumni – include two Nigerians, Tony Elumelu and Tunji Funsho, a Nigerian-American, Tomi Adeyemi, and Abubacarr Tambadou and Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, who are nationals of the Gambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) respectively.

Elumelu’s claim to fame is his entrepreneurship – which has seen him amass multiple million greenbacks – and philanthropy. He is most remembered for leading the takeover of a struggling Nigerian bank in the late 1990s, before turning it into a profitable enterprise and merging it with the United Bank of Africa, a financial behemoth with a presence in 20 African countries, as well as in the US and the UK. Through the Tony Elumelu Foundation, which he founded about a decade ago, the fifty-something business mogul provides seed capital, mentorship and funding for wannabe businesspeople from across the continent.

Elumelu’s compatriot, Funsho, is a cardiologist who chairs Rotary International’s polio eradication programme in Nigeria. Working in partnership with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and others, he has spearheaded an immunisation campaign in the West African country, the upshot of which has been the absence of any wild polio case in the past four years, qualifying Nigeria and the rest of the continent as free from the disease.

Nigerian-American Adeyemi, aged only 27, made the list on the strength of her literary prowess. Her 2018 first novel, Children of Blood and Bone, was on the New York Times bestseller list for a consecutive 90 weeks. It won the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Debut Novel and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. What’s more, Fox 2000 has bought the film adaptation rights to the novel.

Tambadou, a 47-year-old former attorney-general and Justice Minister in his native Gambia, currently serves as the registrar of the United Nations’ International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals.

In 2019, while still a Minister in the Gambia, he and his country’s government took on Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi at the International Court of Justice over alleged crimes against the Rohingya ethnic group. In January this year, they won an extraordinary initial ruling against Myanmar and Suu Kyi, in terms of which the country was ordered to take “all measures within its power” to stop the violent attacks against the Rohingya.

A microbiologist, Muyembe Tamfum is currently the director-general of the DRC’s National Institute for Biomedical Research and is at the forefront of the Central African country’s response to the Ebola and Covid-19 outbreaks.

In 1976, Muyembe Tamfum was a member of a team of researchers who investigated the first known outbreak of the Ebola virus. Nineteen years later – in 1995 – he worked with a WHO team that implemented the detection and control measures in the first documented outbreak of the deadly disease in the DRC.

Muyembe Tamfum has established multiple research facilities, including a polio and influenza laboratory.

To these sons and daughters of the African soil, we say, “Congratulations!”. And thanks for putting our continent on the map.