This has been a pet peeve of mine for a while: the laziness of the international media in relation to the (post-) colonial tower of babel. Articles in English about “Africa” suffer from the “Africa is a Country” lens, but I would go further and say it’s “Africa is a Country That Speaks English” lens.
The tech scene itself is guilty of this! (Ironic because the language of code, one would think, would break down barriers.) We hear about great projects in Nairobi, Capetown, Kampala, Accra, but we hear very little noise about some great smaller projects in DRC, Cameroon and Mozambique. (What happens in these countries is inevitably smaller due to structural and historical differences.) I was heartened by the recent initiative to map African tech hubs – but much more is to be done to highlight and nurture smaller-scale innovation.
CNN’s recent post on “Top 10 African Tech Leaders” seems to have at least provoked a reaction. Perhaps those who want a “top 10” are too busy to hear about what is bubbling up in unexpected places, but Jean Patrick Ehouman’s post cataloguing francophone tech leaders is more than necessary.
I am not great in French, but I can read and have learned from @Fasokan @JulieOwono among others. In the tech field, many are tweeting more in English than in French. (Also where do Rwandan and Cameroonian techies go on these lists, as both countries have a vocal cohort tweeting in English?)
The same could be said for the lusophone tech scene – much of their tweeting is in English.
As it turns out, my list is exclusively Mozambican (surprise surprise) but I have tried to highlight the gaps. Just as Jean Patrick Ehouman suggests in his post in French, let’s start a thread here below assembling the best tweets.
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Angola (small population, rich)
Google’s outreach wing in Africa was in Luanda late last year, but not one tweet with the hashtag #gangola appears to have survived. I have never seen too much tech activity in Angola on Twitter, and yet the country has quite a few ICT-related businesses. The perceived lack of tech tweets from Angola says to me that presence on Twitter is not about markets or financial capital. Please leave top tweets in the comments below!
Cape Verde (mini population)
Again, very absent on Twitter. Cape Verde was the only lusophone country with a winner in the Creatic4Africa #ICT4D competition, an academic called Simão Paulo Rodrigues Varela. But he is absent from Twitter and I could not even find a blog signed by him. Shame.
Guinea Bissau (mini population)
While not on Twitter, the Guinea-Bissau based Rising Voices project “Netos de Bandim” (Grandchildren of Bandim) is definitely worth a look – last I heard they had suffered flooding and rather large set-backs, and a microgrant only goes so far. Twitter is not a priority when even uploading photos and posts is a chore.
Mozambique (small population)
@Echaras – Erik Charas, founder of @VerdadeMz Newspaper in Mozambique – doing amazing things with social media and mobile. Tweets mostly in English.
Maputo Linux evangelist and tech community builder Celso Timana appears to have recently left Twitter (formerly @ctimana) – a real loss. His training center @Cenfoss is carrying the flag of opensource in Mozambique.
@_Mwaa_ Works by day in a Mozambican government ministry related to tech but tweets in English and Portuguese about all kinds of southern African topics.
São Tomé and Príncipe (micro population)
The only tweets from these islands appear to be tourism-related.
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This list seems to beg the question: can Twitter grow in the lusophone tech scene in Africa? If not with geeks, where will it grow?
I would question to what point some countries have the figure of the “public intellectual” beyond say poets, writers and maybe very dry university professors. Often it does not occur to technical-minded people that they could open this space, on Twitter for example.
I would also like to suggest that we need to consider where arts – especially hiphop – collide with tech, because most of the best tweets in Angola and Mozambique are about urban music, fashion, arts and protest. Instead of tweeting about technology, they are simply appropriating the tools and pushing things forward. For better or for worse, it is the nascent creative industries in these countries that seem to have more of a chance than the tech sector of being heard on a world stage.
Please comment on this post, it’s a mere attempt to start a conversation, nothing more than a very subjective view from outside. (I will be translating this post to Portuguese.)
Here’s the problem: programming code is Anglo-centric. Hardcore, deep level stuff like assembly language isn’t, but the most common languages like PHP and to an even greater extent, CSS, HTML markup, and Javascript all are heavily imbued with English terms. If you want an example, look at the tag list in the latest standard of HTML5 http://www.w3schools.com/html5/default.asp
It makes some degree of sense as large parts of these were developed in labs at UC Berkeley in California and at this point, there is little that can be done about that aspect. To write code, you need to understand at least a little if not a lot of English given that the majority of documentation and forums for supporting languages are in English.
Then there’s the issue of the nature of languages. Despite my grandfather being a fluent Portuguese speaker, I can’t speak a word of it and know nothing about the Lusophone language scene. After having worked on learning a degree of French though, I can say that it’s an extremely exclusive language. It fears change and is rigid.
This is in great contrast to English which a couple of years ago I called the Open Source language of the world http://www.hudin.com/blog/ehi1245634613/ It is extremely inclusive and takes all comers. When you compare the two and the issues of the foundation of programming languages being in English, you can see why so many in the tech world are gravitating towards English.
Is this an excuse for journalists to not cover tech projects in English? No, but it’s the reason that things are where they are and I really don’t see it changing. I might add that while it was done to tell the French to suck it, Rwanda changing their national language to English was probably the best thing they did for their future.
Re. the “plasticity” of Portuguese – it does not seem as “closed” to me as you indicate French is – in Mozambique, it absorbs tons of influences, from Brazil, from South Africa, just to name a few. I think the same is true in Angola.
So where does this leave us, Monsieur @Hudin? Everybody should speak English? Or only super polyglots can work in the tech scene?
That’s true. Given that there are more Portuguese speakers outside of Portugal than in, it’s forced a great many changes on the language. Same might happen with French given time.
I don’t think that everyone should speak English, but I think that we need lingua franca the world over. I’m of the opinion that no country leader should be allowed to serve without speaking at least three of the six official UN languages.
But, when it comes to tech (and more specifically, the web) I think that people have to pick up English the same as they would pick up a reliable computer or mobile phone. It’s just a tool that you need to be able to function in this particular industry. Also, if you don’t speak English, your chances of funding whether they be investors or NGO’s are extremely limited at the moment. With the rise in power of China, Russia, and Brazil, this might be changing. But again, they all speak different languages and typically use English as a common link as annoying as it is.
Well the two of the three tweets I mention above are often in English. Would be interesting to see of those who tweet in two languages, whether tech tweets are ever not in English. My hunch is that most of the Portuguese content is contextual, political, cultural. I have on occasion seen African portuguese speakers retweeting tech articles from Brazil.
In general have been shocked with the lack of exchange between Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Africa in what relates to open source software and open everything, which Brazil has become a beacon for across the world.
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[…] was also left out of the conversation on tech in Africa which did not sit well with GiantPanda. She writes on Menina do Javali: This has been a pet peeve of mine for a while: the laziness of the international media in relation […]
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