Afrilition: Engineering an operating system for the future, By Adéwálé Àjàdí

Afrilition offers a critical and creative discipline for the incredible future that is unfolding. Building this and other systemic frameworks makes the foundation of tomorrow robust and adaptive, not in competition but in offering an authentic alternative for humanity.

Afrilition as a path of evolution outlines key areas, chapter by chapter. It starts by setting out the critical role that women play and will play in African transformation. They make up about half of the African population and are primary child rearers, as well as key contributors, not just to the family but also to the wider African economy. The role of women cannot be overestimated. The African future, without the critical development and full partnership of women, is not just that of poverty but also a severely damaged family unit and fundamentally impaired community. In this part of Afrilition, it explores prototypes of fuller participation, while highlighting some African and Caribbean countries where great strides are being made to build a better and more interdependent world of gender inclusion. It points out the kind of results that this understanding and practice can bring to the African world.

Afrilition, in its following chapter, focuses on the youth, which as a demographic defines African transformation. As the rest of the world ages, Africa enters its own position as the beacon of global youth. Afrilition focuses the mind on the work of turning this demographic phenomenon into the transformative blessing that the African world needs. The discipline of ensuring the values that express the critical and creative potential of incoming generations are explored and practiced, whilst emphasising the power of a truly engaged younger Africa that builds its influence into a valuable leadership practice within an African world. A newer African world that learns to value the contribution and capability of the young in an age in which wisdom is not exclusive to years of experience, but also to critical technological understanding and engagement. Recognising the culture-shaping leadership that even now is available to the youth of the African world, decades before the demographic optimum is realised. The practices that are needed from now to engage and guide the emergence of this Afrilition generation.

Another chapter explores the critical pathway to the global African marketplace. It places the emergence of a Pan-African global economy as a platform of value creation and exchange. Starting with the African Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which is continental, and its potential connection with the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America, with the crowning glory of pockets of subnational clusters across Europe and the rest of the world. Not unlike the International Chinese, who critically contributed to Chinese transformation, leveraging African production, consumption, purchasing, remittances, and investment will be a powerful contribution to African evolution. The possibilities are not only immense but offer the kind of cooperation across the world that will not only leverage economies but also insulate them when required from the inevitable shocks and dips of isolated national economies.

The capacity of African excellence to flourish in the incoming decades is closely linked to its ability to move beyond being a brand new second-hand European. The kind of authentic and original contribution that can emerge from an Africa in which the language of thought is also the language of communication, especially in schools, means a truly efficient, as well as effective ownership of knowledge and enlightenment, rather than a photocopy.

Afrilition covers the intangible challenge of the worth and brand that is African, with the tangible consequence of seeking external validation. The cost is the regular game of positioning the African world as despair and failure, while especially cherry-picking standards that are self-congratulatory to the colonisers of the continent. It is about understanding the power of this dynamic in trying to ensure that the operating system of the continent is always one of inferiority and reaction. About building new standards of exploring African progress so that they are not based on artificial scarcity but abundance and continuous improvement. It is about African authenticity that becomes a global aspiration.

This is built into a chapter about the transformation of the kind of indoctrination that currently passes for education. It is about exploring the pathways of reforming schooling into educational excellence and the critical transformation to prepare the African world for the kinds of future in which it is educated in a truly eclectic manner. One in which the schooled are grounded in their own humanity and genuinely not jaundiced or indoctrinated into colonial propaganda.

The capacity of African excellence to flourish in the incoming decades is closely linked to its ability to move beyond being a brand new second-hand European. The kind of authentic and original contribution that can emerge from an Africa in which the language of thought is also the language of communication, especially in schools, means a truly efficient, as well as effective ownership of knowledge and enlightenment, rather than a photocopy.

Deeper in the book, another chapter looks at the power of an African world imbued with the economics of abundance, rather than the scarcity that drives the current global economic system. Going beyond being trapped in a few so-called ‘material winners’ and a mass population that is considered poor. Redefining wealth beyond the amassing of material and the measuring of attributable collections towards greater interdependence, so that the reward is communal prosperity, rather than individual extraction.

The crowning chapter is focused on diversity, as Africa is not just the home of all humans but also the genetic and cultural diversity that it contains is more than the rest of the world, especially genetically. Understanding and owning this makes the use of Black or any other form of conformity redundant.

The African world of the future flourishes when it is not a playground of individual amassing of wealth but a space where the potential progress of the multitude is the definition of success. This is already baked into social systems across the African world as it struggles with the pathogens of individual materialism. In this chapter, Afrilition reflects on the importance of interdependence and cooperation as a driver of prosperity.

The crowning chapter is focused on diversity, as Africa is not just the home of all humans but also the genetic and cultural diversity that it contains is more than the rest of the world, especially genetically. Understanding and owning this makes the use of Black or any other form of conformity redundant. This treasure trove that is only surfaced as exotica needs the critical documentation and exploration of knowledge systems and cultural frameworks. Most importantly, it is the reservoir of human genetics that must be properly captured and protected for the emerging future.

Afrilition offers a critical and creative discipline for the incredible future that is unfolding. Building this and other systemic frameworks makes the foundation of tomorrow robust and adaptive, not in competition but in offering an authentic alternative for humanity.

Adéwálé Àjàdí, a lawyer, creative consultant and leadership expert, is author of the newly released Afrilition: 21st Century African Manifesto, and Omoluwabi 2.0: A Code of Transformation in 21st Century Nigeria.