Harvesting Ideas from African Rain Programming for Your Product Innovation

A Review of Python and the Rainmaker

Are you an engineer, a software developer, a designer, a researcher, a product manager, an entrepreneur, a student, or just a creative professional?

Ditch your mainstream approach to thinking up innovative ideas for your new products? Embrace the world of possibilities and novelties in multidisciplinary and multicultural insights. African cosmology represents such a world.

African cosmology is a diverse and very rich source of knowledge that has provided a basis for how Africans, since ancient times, have sought the meaning of life and achieved harmony with nature. Although this rich cosmological heritage has been little known outside of the continent, there has been growing interest by both African and non-African researchers, scholars and entrepreneurs to explore the cosmological world of the traditional African.

In this book Python and the Rainmaker, Ugo Eze presents an argument and a framework for how concepts, ideas and practices from the Igbo cosmology could be leveraged to build more innovative software products and technologies.

The book contrasts the dominant Western Technological worldview with the worldview of an 85-year old West African Shaman (aka Dibia, in Igbo) who makes rain and programs nature. It likens an African rainmaker to a computer programmer, and explores hundreds of dualities in science and art, science and magic, science and religion, science and python fat, and science and kola nuts.

Drawing from numerous examples in the Igbo cosmology, the book chronicles the experiences of a computer and a nature programmer, and illustrates the power in embracing the potentials inherent in multicultural belief systems, while drawing comparisons between concepts in Igbo cosmology and known concepts in mathematics, science and technology and elucidating them with examples from Darwinism to alchemy, Psi, electricity, neurosurgery and virtual reality.

As a developer, designer or entrepreneur, one way to come up with new and innovative ideas is to embrace and understand the synergies that lie between the seemingly opposing dualities outlined in this book.

The problem is that so often we find it more comfortable to stick to our comfort zone and confine ourselves to the discipline and belief system we were educated on. We are afraid of the road less travelled. We feel threatened by alternative paradigms.

For some people, this behavior is somewhat understandable. But for an African interested in innovation and seeking to make a mark in today’s technology landscape, it is utterly self-defeating.

The book is not an easy read. It combines concepts from African philosophy and Igbo spirituality with mathematics, physics, science and technology, medicine, and history.

It maps out a way for young Africans to innovate and contribute to technological advancement and escape the mindset that has compelled us to be mere consumers of technology. To achieve this, start thinking from first principles in a way that embraces African cosmology and leverages African knowledge systems. Besides rainmaking, the author draws upon scores of other examples in Igbo worldviews and traditional practices. For example, can you imagine the Igbo yam barn system, known as Ọba-ji, as a queuing model in computer programming? An the author notes:

“The limitation that has afflicted most underdeveloped nations is their faulty scientific outlook. … In the haste to close the technological divide, they have detached themselves from the irrational base from which science develops.”

They fail to realize that the history of innovation is the history of attempts that challenged conventional wisdoms by harvesting ideas from the outer limits of mainstream knowledge systems.

To innovate as an engineer, a software developer, a designer, a researcher, a product manager, an entrepreneur, a student, or just a creative professional (of African descent), you must return to your ancestral roots and learn to combine your native wisdom with your contemporary education. There lies the unique spot of your competitive advantage in the world.

The arguments in the books are well articulated and strongly compelling. As a seasoned software developer, mathematician and automobile engineer with deep interest in African traditional belief systems, Ugo is perhaps the only one capable of navigating this new terrain of research so excellently.

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