Lost History of Africa’s Innovative Past, and Its Place in Today’s AI Revolution
Did you know Benin was the first smart city in the world?
Don’t worry, most people don’t. So let’s engage in this exciting discovery through history together, and find our ways to charting out the future we want to live in together.
A well-researched Guardian article by Mawuna Koutonin is instructive here. Describing the layout of the city, he writes, “Benin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as fractal design. The city and its surrounding villages were purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village in mathematically predictable patterns.”
Kutonin also writes about the sophistication of the main streets which “ran at right angles to each other, had underground drainage made of a sunken impluvium with an outlet to carry away stormwater.” Other researchers write about the impressive walls of the city. British geographer, Patrick Darling, in particular, draws comparisons to the pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China.
Alas in 1897, the city got destroyed by British soldiers. This explains why, when I was born and bred in Benin in the 1990s, I never saw or heard stories of its greatness. I only saw the bad roads, chaotic markets and beggars on the streets. Thankfully my parents found ways to imprint on me self-value and a reason to believe I could find progress in that world.
Most of African history prior to the 15th-century got suppressed by colonial nations as a strategic act to strip the people of their self-belief. Thankfully some of the stories are beginning to resurface through the works of scholars like Dr Ron Eglash and Zeinab Badawi in their edifying Ted talks.
As we build the 4th industrial revolution, Africans today should use these historical accounts of innovation as the stepping stones for their continued progression.
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