Introducing City One
In the late 1800’s, a man by the name of Erasmus Jacobs, found a small crystal pebble on the banks of the Orange river in Kimberley, South Africa. It proved to be a 21.25-carat (4.3 g) diamond and was later dubbed Eureka. That tiny diamond sparked what later became an exodus of miners flocking to dig the precious mineral in a place called New Rush (later known as Kimberley). In 1872, one year after digging started, the population of miners grew to over 50,000 miners, digging with picks and shovels, and yielding over 2 tonnes of diamonds. As work progressed and became dangerous for miners to work on, the leaders of the various mines decided to amalgamate the separate diggings into one big mine, one big company known as De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited, with life governors such as Cecil John Rhodes, Alfred Beit, and Barney Barnato. Today, over 100 years later, the company is one of, if not the world’s largest diamond producer.
City One is built on a foundation similar to this. We believe we must inspire an exodus, a new age of undiscovered talented miners searching for invention, scientific advancements and scalable solutions to the problems we face today.
It is quite fashionable to focus and complain about the problems we as Africans deal with. It is also common to ridicule and suppress anyone starting a company to solve any of those problems. The most dangerous problem, however, is the perpetual and unconcious belief that our problems cannot be solved by us — the belief that we lack human ingenuity and maybe might never have it.
City One is one of many rising technological companies that seeks to disprove this.
The future we see is a world where young and smart people in Africa are brave enough to invent and build advanced solutions to the problems we see today. Like the African music industry that consistently invents new genres and dance styles, we believe Africa can usher technological advancements that are unique to who we are and celebrate our culture and heritage.
This is our genesis. #WakandaForever
