African languages face a tokenization premium of 1.88x to 8.92x compared to English in frontier LLMs, with Ethiopic and N'Ko scripts bearing the highest costs. This penalty translates to up to 8.9x higher inference costs and reduced context capacity, with some languages receiving as little as 11% of English's effective context window. The penalty persists across corpora and is not eliminated by current tokenizers, highlighting a structural digital divide.