The final session of TED: Leadership and Truth opened with a short film with photos from the famine in Ethiopia. He opens with “My name is Salim Amin and I am an African.” The images from the film saved the lives of 3 million people. Images taken by his father, Mohammed Amin. A24 media project,…
Russell Southwood publishes one of Africa’s leading newsletters on technology: The Balancing Act. He’s talk was going to be about tech, wealth and culture. He was inspired by John Perry Barlow’s dream of wiring the Internet in Africa, as written in this great piece written Wired. Russell referred to what he calls Door Openers, which…
Ron Eglash is a mathematician and the author of African Fractals. According to him, concepts of fractal geometry resonate throughout many facets of African culture. He started out giving us a brief history of fractals. In the early 1900s, Helge von Koch was frustrated with the complex definition and set out to simplify the understanding….
Ivorian architect Issa is a partner in Koffi-Diabate Architects. His work marries African urbanity with local solutions. Exasperated with the worship of ethnicity, his goal as a designer is to create classic objects that travel easily. He shows a sketch by an artist of the city of Lagos, imagined 20 years ago. In seeking out…
Session 4 is entitled: Emergent Design Kwabena Boahen, PhD, is a Ghanaian bioengineer working at Stanford University. He received his first computer while growing up in Accra, Ghana. He starts out his presentation with a famous quote by Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, “In 30 years, it will be as easy to ask…