Spirals Here Spirals There

I was lucky just when i started blogging almost 2 years ago i bumped into (or rather my house mate Gerry O’Brien) showed me this scientific website called TED.com. He was and is working on mind blowing, earth shaking and i don’t know what else theories and implementations of what we coined on one night of boring British TV as  ”Savantology”, but hey i digress.

Anyway in this TED website there is one scientist or what i would call Afrologist called Ron Eglash who posited the case that it was Africans who were the first ones to invented the Binary system.

This binary system which most of us know as the atomic building blocks of computing  i.e. 1′s and 0′s was intricately represented by the way Africans weaved their baskets and designed their villages.

Just to illustrate, in almost all cases the chiefs hut or building was usually designed to be the focal point of the village with his wives huts and other important peoples structures spiraling outside in a manner that suggested authority or importance to the community.

In essence the chiefs hut was the hub and the elders were his guardians or what we call today System Administrators.

This system also served well to banish the outcast/criminals out of the village to the outskirts of this spiral network.

The African oral tradition also ensured that information also flowed in a similar manner with more information being given to those who could handle the responsibility. I.e. the village seer was the Information Hub (iHub). In truth the Seer didn’t possess any magical powers (unlike Safaricom) but really correlated all the village information using his nurtured good judgement. Where this system was properly utilized it worked well.

In this manner the African Tribe had clearly created the internet in its most coherent form, where information flowed from the hub to those who were responsible over the masses and as it cruised down through the spiraling network it landed at the children’s feet as stories of Ogres, Wise Tortoises, Clever Rabbits and insanely Powerful Magicians.

This as you are probably imagining filtered out all the disinformation and corruption that is ever more present today because of our current chaotic system which  is very disorderly.

Well the rest is history and now we now find ourselves borrowing from the Anglo Saxon model which has brought, as Philip Ochieng would say, misery to people of all races with the Black African being the hardest hit.

Furthermore in its current corrupted form our capitalistic ways have ensured that globally we are now staring at the biggest depression and total collapse of this economic model.  Locally we face marauding too big to fail monopolies that are killing innovation ruthlessly and without second thought. We also face physically a real danger of a lower class cum religious revolution/uprising should evolutions such as the New Constitutional Dispensation fail to materialize.

So what are the mostly young Kenyans/Africans ment to do if everything is going to hell this fast.

The answer lies in my opinion in borrowing from Afrology the African way of Sustainable Community Organization.  From this so called Green Technologies that are sustainable will emerge. No one advocates for this more than the current U.S. President Barack Obama who hails from a tribe that not too long ago was a perfect example of sustainable development.  That is why perhaps i also have him at the top of my blog because he represents this kind of change that scientists (those with knowledge not information) are calling for.

In conclusion i think our African hereos will not only be Africans but people like O’Brien, Eglash and others who have dedicated their lives to understanding what Africa has to teach the rest of the world. Nairobi ancestral home of hugely ignored, often ridiculed and culturally rich Masai would be a good place to start finding this heroes, i heard many of them congregate at a place called iHub

Footnote: We need to somehow begin collecting African cultural and historical data to begin mapping some of what Mr Ron Eglash is talking about.

This will enable come up with both the hardware and software needed going forward.

At Whive we have developed a platform called Whiver.com to do just that, but we need more suggestions/criticisms on the best way forward.  I also suggest that we look at using Ushahidi to do the same the more the merrier.