More than three million years ago, on the shores of Lake Turkana, one of our ancestors shaped a stone into a tool. That gesture is the first act of a long story: humanity handing over, revolution after revolution, part of its intelligence to tools. Fire, speech, writing, printing, the steam engine, electricity, the computer. And now, artificial intelligence.
Africa was the cradle of the tool, of fire and of writing. Yet it missed all three industrial revolutions of modern history.
Three missed appointments
The first industrial revolution began in England around 1760, at the very moment the Atlantic slave trade was draining the continent of its strongest people. Africa did not just miss that revolution: it paid for it in blood.
The second, the revolution of electricity and chemistry, coincided with the Berlin Conference and colonisation. Roads ran from mine to port, rarely from one African city to another. Cocoa was grown for factories elsewhere. Very few engineers were trained.
The third, the revolution of electronics and computing, arrived with independence. This time we were masters of our own destiny. The Cold War, the debt crisis and structural adjustment weighed heavily. But we must also name our own responsibility: regimes that chose palaces over laboratories.
A fourth chance, perhaps the last
Artificial intelligence opens a new window. It will not stay open for long. Every previous revolution followed the same law: the peoples who kept pace prospered, the others were dominated.
The good news is that falling behind is not a fate. South Korea and China have shown that rapid catch-up is possible when the State, universities and businesses pull in the same direction.
Africa carved the first stone. It must build the intelligences of tomorrow.
In Les Bâtisseurs d’Intelligences, I propose eight major projects to seize this chance: a corridor of green data centres, an African large language model, a network of smart university cities, an African data bank, a diaspora fund for deep tech, local processing of our minerals, smart agriculture, and interoperable digital identity and payments.
These are not dreams. They are construction sites. And construction starts the day someone decides to lay the first stone.
