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We Should Begin to Think (Phillip Emeagwali - This Day (AllAfrica.com))
November 29, 2006 10:39 PM
14 October 2006
All Africa
English
(c) 2006 AllAfrica, All Rights Reserved
Lagos, Oct 13, 2006 (This Day/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) —
I once believed that capital was another word for money, the
accumulated wealth of a country or its people. Surely, I thought,
wealth is determined by the money or property in one’s possession.
Then I saw a Deutsche Bank advertisement in the Wall Street Journal
that proclaimed: “Ideas are capital. The rest is just money.”
I was struck by the simplicity of such an eloquent and forceful idea.
I started imagining what such power meant for Africa. The potential
for progress and poverty alleviation in Africa relies on capital
generated from the power within our minds, not from our ability to
pick minerals from the ground or seek debt relief and foreign
assistance. If ideas are capital, why is Africa investing more on
things than on information, and more on the military than on
education? Suddenly, I realized what this idea could mean for Africa.
If the pen is mightier than the sword, why does a general earn more
than the work of a hundred writers combined? If ideas are indeed
capital, then Africa should stem its brain drain and promote the
African Renaissance, which will lead to the rebirth of the continent.
After all, a renaissance is a rebirth of ideas. And knowledge and
ideas are the engines that drive economic growth.
When African men and women of ideas, who will give birth to new ideas,
have fled to Europe and the United States, then the so-called African
Renaissance cannot occur in Africa. It can only occur in Paris, London
and New York. There are more Soukous musicians in Paris, than in
Kinshasha; more African professional soccer players in Europe, than in
Africa. African literature is more at home abroad than it is in
Africa. In other words, Africans in Europe are alleviating poverty in
Europe, not in Africa. Until the men and women of ideas - the true
healers of Africa - start returning home, the African Renaissance and
poverty alleviation will remain empty slogans. After all, the
brightest ideas are generated and harnessed by men of ideas.
The first annual report by J.P. Morgan Chase, a firm with assets of
1.3 trillion dollars, reads: “The power of intellectual capital is the
ability to breed ideas that ignite value.” This quote is a clarion
call to African leaders to shift purposefully and deliberately from a
focus on things to a focus on information; from exporting natural
resources to exporting knowledge and ideas; and from being a consumer
of technology to becoming a producer of technology.
For Africa, poverty will be reduced when intellectual capital is
increased and leveraged to export knowledge and ideas. Africa’s
primary strategy for poverty alleviation is to gain debt relief,
foreign assistance, and investments from western nations. Poverty
alleviation means looking beyond 100 percent literacy and aiming for
100 percent numeracy, the prerequisite for increasing our
technological intellectual capital. Yet, in this age of information
and globalization when poverty alleviation should result in producing
valuable products for the global market and competing with Asia, the
United States, and Europe - shamefully, diamonds found in Africa are
polished in Europe and re-sold to Africans.
The intellectual capital needed to produce products and services will
lead to the path of poverty alleviation. Intellectual capital, defined
as the collective knowledge of the people, increases productivity. The
latter - by driving economic growth - alleviates poverty, always and
everywhere, even in Africa. Productivity is the engine that drives
global economic growth.
Those who create new knowledge are producing wealth, while those who
consume it are producing poverty. If you attend a Wole Soyinka’s
production of Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” you consume the
knowledge produced by Soyinka and Achebe as well as the actor’s
production, much like I consume the knowledge and production of Bob
Marley’s through his songs.
We will need wisdom, that which turns too much information - or
information overload - into focused power, not only to process, but
also to evaluate the overwhelming amount of information available on
the Internet. This wisdom will give us the competitive edge and enable
us to find creative solutions.
The following story illustrates the difference between information and
wisdom. Twelve hundred years ago, in the city of Baghdad, lived a
genius named Al-Khwarizmi, who was one of the fathers of algebra. In
fact, the word algebra comes from the title of his book Al-jabr, which
for centuries was the standard mathematics textbook. Al-Khwarizmi
taught in an institution of learning called the House of Wisdom, which
was the center of new ideas during Islam’s golden age of science. To
this day we computer scientists honor Al-Khwarizmi when we use the
word algorithm, which is our attempt to pronounce his name.
One day, Al-Khwarizmi was riding a camel laden down with algebraic
manuscripts to the holy city of Mecca. He saw three young men crying
at an oasis. “My children, why are you crying?” he enquired. “Our
father, upon his death, instructed us to divide his 17 camels as
follows:
‘To my oldest son I leave half of my camels, my second son shall have
one-third of my camels, and my youngest son is to have one-ninth of my
camels.’” “What, then, is your problem?” Al-Khwarizmi asked.
“We have been to school and learned that 17 is a prime number that is,
divisible only by one and itself and cannot be divided by two or three
or nine. Since we love our camels, we cannot divide them exactly,”
they answered. Al-Khwarizmi thought for a while and asked, “Will it
help if I offer my camel and make the total 18?” “No, no, no,” they
cried.
“You are on your way to Mecca, and you need your camel.” “Go ahead,
have my camel, and divide the 18 camels amongst yourselves,” he said,
smiling.
So the eldest took one-half of 18 - or nine camels. The second took
one-third of 18 - or six camels. The youngest took one-ninth of 18 -
or two camels. After the division, one camel was left: Al-Khwarizmi’s
camel, as the total number of camels divided among the sons (nine plus
six plus two) equaled 17. Then Al-Khwarizmi asked, “Now, can I have my
camel back?”
These young men had information about prime numbers, but they lacked
the wisdom to use the information effectively. It is the manipulation
of information to accomplish seemingly impossible purposes that
defines true wisdom.
Today, we have ten billion pages of information posted on the Internet
- more than enough to keep us busy the rest of our lives, and new
information is being added daily. More information has been created in
the last 100 years than in all of the previous 100,000 years combined.
We need the wisdom to sift through and convert these billions of pages
into information riches.
The genius of Al-Khwarizmi was not in his mathematical wizardry or
even his book knowledge: It was in his experiential knowledge - his
big-picture, right-brain thinking; creativity; innovation; and wisdom.
It was his wisdom to add a camel to make the total 18 and still get
his camel back.
Prime numbers are to whole numbers what the laws of physics are to
physics. Twenty years ago, I used an Al-Khwarizmi approach to solve a
notoriously difficult problem in physics. I added inertial force,
which enabled me to reformulate Newton’s Second Law of Motion first as
18 equations and algorithms, and then as 24 million algebraic
equations.
Finally, I programmed 65,000 “electronic brains” called processors to
work as one to solve those 24 million equations at a speed of 3.1
billion calculations per second.
Like Al-Khwarizmi, I derived my 18 equations through out-of-the-box
thinking in an in-the-box world, adding my metaphorical camel:
inertial force. In other words, I applied wisdom to known knowledge to
generate intellectual capital.
Unless Africa significantly increases its intellectual capital, the
continent will remain irrelevant in the 21st century and even beyond.
Africa needs innovators, producers of knowledge, and wise men and
women who can discover, propose, and then implement progressive ideas.
Africa’s fate lies in the hands of Africans and the solution to
poverty must come from its people.
The future that lies ahead of Africa is for Africa to create, after
the people have outlined their vision. We owe it to our children to
build a firm foundation to enable them go places we only dreamt. For
Africa to take center stage in today’s economic world, we have to go
out and compete on a global basis. There is simply no other way to
succeed.
- Philip Emeagwali was voted history’s greatest scientist of African
descent - and the 35th greatest African of all time - in a survey for
the September 2004 issue of the London-based New African magazine. He
won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, the Nobel Prize of supercomputing.
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