15/02/2022
IN SEARCH OF THE NEW AFRICA
By
Evans Woherem, Ph.D
9th February, 2022
We desire a new Africa, an Africa with audacity – the audacity to think moonshots. We want Africans that plan and go about achieving things that are a 1000x – 10000x what we are used to. I can do it, you can do it, and together, we can do it!
Can you imagine the audacity of Elon Musk in reaching out to produce electric cars in a world still swimming in petrol? He is also building a whole set of underground highway system called “The Loop.” As though that is not daring enough, can you imagine his audacity in thinking of making humans an interplanetary civilization? He has set his mind on the above goals, focused on them, and is meticulously working towards achieving each of them. That is audacious! I want Africans that have audacity! We want Africans that would come up with projects that would generate billions of dollars and affect at least a billion Africans! Massively Bold Projects!
The same audacious moonshot mindset enabled Steve Wozniack and Steve Job to form Apple and to reduce the hitherto 30 ton mainframe computers into personal computers. It is also what gave us the internet, and now all the exponential technologies that are exploding and intersecting every day. We need men and women in Africa (and in the African Diaspora) that have the inner hunger or passion to go for goals that are bold, audacious and moonshot in nature. We need more Dangotes, Allen Ifechukwu Onyemas (Air Peace), Innocent Chukwumas (Innoson Motors), Tony Elumelus, Muzalema Mwanzas, Beth Koigis, Thomas O. Mensahs, Herman Chinery-Hesses, and many other Africans excelling both locally and in the Diaspora.
Most disruptive science and technologies are products of people with moonshot mindsets, not of linear and incremental thinking. In today’s exponential world, let us have men and women in Africa that have an audacious moonshot mindset, men and women that are true progenies of Imhotep, the polymath from ancient Egypt who built the step pyramid as well as numerous other structures. He was the Chancellor to Pharoah Djosef and High Priest of Ra, a great physician and healer, who taught Hippocrates of Greece from whom the medical world of today received the Hippocratic Oath. Where are our present progenies of Imhotep? In the late 1970s, the Japanese tried to duplicate or reconstruct the great pyramid, using both old and even modern technologies, and failed. The perfection and ingenuity of those ancient Africans are still very difficult to duplicate even up to today, and we, modern Africans, still have the same genetic archetypes of our ancient forebears.
Why can’t we bring back the ingenuity and level of perfection exhibited by our ancient fore-fathers? What was constructed in ancient Benin, which were described by the Guinness Book of Records as “the World’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era”, also comes to mind when considering the ingenuity that abound in Africa. The work was constructed between the 13th and 15th century AD.
Change your mindset and you change your reality. Let us change our mindset. We need to develop a non-linear moonshot mindset in Africa. It will reawaken in us the genius that was the spirit of our ancient Africans in Kemet, in Axum, and in Benin, Shaka Zulu’s Zululand, Great Zimbabwe, and Mansa Musa’s Mali. We need new Africans – Africans with the audacity to reclaim the world, to bring back Africa as the epicenter of the world.
