Ron Eglash is a mathematician and author of African Fractals. According to him concepts of fractal geometry resonate throughout many facets of African culture. He started out giving is a brief history of fractals.
In the early 1900s Helge von Koch was frustrated with the complex definition and set out to simply the understanding. This lead to the the famous Koch snowflake illustration. In 1977 Benoit Mandelbrot brought fractals into the mainstream. He coined the term fractal to describe self-similar structures. With a Fullbright scholarship he began travelling around Africa doing his research and interviewing people.
This was a complex presentation to describe. Again I think Ethan Zuckerman did a superb job doing so on his blog here.