A Brief Historical Review of Tech Progress in Africa

Steem greetings gentle people. I can’t wait to begin the week tomorrow after four days of an imposed lockdown. Today I have been reflecting on the tech ecosystem in Africa; retrospections about how things were not so long ago and the exponential progress that we have witnessed in a brief period. I have decided to put my thoughts in this three-part series, starting with a historical review. Let me know your thoughts on the subject.

Have you ever looked back to the past, and I mean the past from just a few years ago, and wondered how our ways of life have evolved so rapidly? Or perhaps, the moments in your past when you pondered at what it would take for some of your wildest imagination to be made tangibly possible? Okay, let’s put things into context here, shouldn’t we?
Many folks of my generation have been internet users for about fifteen years or so today. That should count for something, shouldn’t it? And that’s in Africa. We’d starve ourselves for the one half of the day just to visit cybercafés after school to download wallpaper images of art, renders and concept technologies we were passionate about into our one gigabyte or two gigabyte USB sticks; in fact, many of the cars I see today were just 3D renders of concepts back then, not even prototypes. We’d ponder at what it’d take to ever produce such cars; maybe in another lifetime or perhaps another dimension. Dare I mention the internet speed in these cybercafés or the cost per minute of internet time? I leave that story for another day.
In school, we were introduced to terminologies such as artificial intelligence. Noticed how I said terminologies? Yes. That is because terminology was all it was to us young learners back then, not something of grave importance worthy of consideration out of the walls of the classroom. However, this had been a buzzword elsewhere and our peers had been taking advantage of the endless potentials of this revolutionary technology about a decade prior.

So what are the potentials and possibilities for Africans? Stay tuned as we explore that in the next chapter.