Fast-changing Africa
For Africa, innovation is critical. Because the continent is fashioned like a pistol, its fresh innovations would fire across the globe. And she’d defy any prevailing economic trend.
It isn’t that unpopular for Africans to embrace innovation.
Allow me to combine a few texts from several sources to show you something:
People in present-day Zaire, as well as Yoruba people in what is now Nigeria, devised their own numeration system 8,000 years ago.
The Yoruba system used units of 20 (rather than 10) and required a significant amount of subtraction to distinguish between different numbers. This occurred during a time when there was no such thing as civilization, and most individuals did not have access to numeracy.
Egyptian engineering marvels include the perplexingly raised obelisks and more than 80 pyramids. The largest of the pyramids is 13 acres in size and built up of 2.25 million stone blocks.
These are incredible architectural accomplishments that most people wouldn’t dare to attempt at the time.
Later, in the 12th century, and considerably further south, Zimbabwe and Mozambique had hundreds of major cities. Massive stone constructions served as the city’s nerve centers. A 250-meter-long, 15,000-ton curving granite wall was one of them.
Large castle-like compounds with multiple chambers for specialized tasks, like iron-smithing, were found in the cities.
Mali’s empire included spectacular cities, notably Timbuktu, with grand palaces, mosques, and universities in the 13th century.
Forward in time, Philip Emeagwali, born on August 23, 1954, in Akure, Nigeria, invented the CM-2 massively the parallel computer. For oil-reservoir modeling, the application used computational fluid dynamics.
With a performance figure of around 400 Mflops/$1M, he won the Nobel prize in the “price/performance” category.
The CM-2 was used by Mobil Research and Thinking Machines to process seismic data and achieved a higher ratio of 500 Mflops/$1M.
All of these developments will become more pronounced in Africa’s future, and Africa will be poised to do more.
“For centuries, the world’s nerve has been deadened to the vibrations of African genius.”
- the late Ivan Van Sertima, a Rutgers University associate professor(Ref: ASMBToday, Wiki)
