Africans delight on their oral tradition of folklore. In many
African villages, boys and girls gather around their elders to listen to
stories of hope, imagination, bravery and justice.
These students
of culture are expected to pass that tradition to newer generations.
For many centuries, Africans have lived that life - a life of 'more
talking, less writing'.
It helped shaped family values and
embedded the spirit of service and honor. For generations, except
Ethiopians, no African culture or nation was able to develop an
indigenous way of writing.
Contracts were executed with words,
marriages were concluded with words, lands were sold with words, and
indeed all was about the memory of the human species. When neighbors
disagree over land, an arbiter would come in to settle the disputes by
telling stories his own parents or elders had passed to him.
Typically,
Africans talk a lot. That was the tradition. It has remained like that
and will be the same for many generations to come. While the western
world works hard to document on black and white or in modern times on
bytes and bits, we still do not bother.
Many African universities
have no organized way of processing massive data or ideas that emanate
from their students theses, projects or dissertations. At the end of
every academic year, student dissertations are burnt, to make temporary
room for new ones.
It is the culture and no one has found a
solution for that. Only few of those works made it to the university
library. Years after years, we are burning ideas that can unlock the
future of better harvest, and curing diseases that corporations think
make no economic sense to invest resources.
Except for the efforts
of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, many tropical diseases have
lacked serious thoughts in the big Pharma companies. Why make drugs for
people that cannot afford them? So for the cholera or TB, not many
thoughts get into them in the big Pharma meetings. But Gates Foundation
has offered a new dimension to finding solutions.
Notwithstanding,
many of the works are still done outside Africa and in most cases their
contributions are overlooked. And Africans do not make things easier by
not having histories since they rarely keep records. So, how do you
access their capabilities? Very tough and the vicious circle continues
unabated.
Strange as it may seem, but that is the reality of many
African schools where we run round in cycles wasting time without making
progress. When you destroy your progress, you have to repeat it.
Instead
of preserving legacies which can be built upon, we have students
solving a problem someone that graduated a year before had solved. With
no means of sharing data or documenting these works, innovation suffers.
Besides,
it hurts the students because they spend money to recreate processes
which had been validated a few years ago. It brings a tradition of
constantly managing crises without a process to envision bold world
changing ideas. They deprive the schools opportunities to attract
funding because no one knows what they do. They are rarely published
because local conferences are not common.
I think that a
continental level effort must be put in place by African Union to ensure
that all projects, theses or dissertations from any African institution
are preserved and accessible on the internet. This is very important as
it will make the schools effective and more focused.
This does
not have to be expensive. The website must be designed in a way that
students upon approvals from their schools can post the works
themselves. It promises to become a way to help the world know our
contributions to knowledge. It can also help the world get refreshed
with new ideas and perspectives.
It has to be done immediately.
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