The Immense African Tech Advantage – Part 1

I was 16. I was about to do an alternate senior secondary graduation examination that happened to be one of the 2 main standard exams for entry into university from English-speaking West African secondary schools.

My dad, a school administrator had let us know the British Council’s library was open to members of the public who chose to use it and that was the only place my instincts told me I would have access to PC magazines.

The magazine was PC World. The year was 1997.

I paid my way in one direction but I trekked a good chunk of the way back from the British Council to my abode.

That was how much I wanted to know as much as I could about computers and the emerging world wide web which I was by some incessant soft and semi-manic urge drawn to.

If I can point to the time I started my journey down this path, that probably is a good place to point to.
From reading about RAMs and ROMs and the emerging network of computers and webpages surfable around the world, though I didn’t understand all I read at the time, I knew to repeat and just keep reading, as all the pieces of the puzzle would eventually obediently fit in my mind, and they did.

A few years down the line, I found myself immersed in tech (internet tech) and any covered trend.
The money, the deals, the duels between companies, these were the things that I immersed myself in, unhappy with the fact that I was still in university, with no money to pursue any of the massive opportunities I traveled through via the pages of Time magazine editions and Yahoo Tech and Yahoo Finance, my primary source of tech-related news.

You see, I say I had no money but what felt worse for me, a young lad with tech drumbeat rhythms beating in his young soul was having no programming skills – especially when you juxtapose that with the fact that I happened to be admitted in a university to study Animal Production & Health for five solid years!

You see, all through my years at my hated university, a few things kept me going, and one of them was the internet, and its pulsating emergence before my very eyes.

I was there when AOL merged with TimeWarner. I was there when that went south. I was there during the dissection of Microsoft’s pulverization of Netscape Navigator. I was there through the ascendence of Amazon, the birth of Gmail, the birth of Skype, its first multi-billion dollar acquisition, the tweedling of Yahoo!, the birth of Napster, and the emergence of Gnutella Net.

I was there when all these happened and all I could think was…
…”What an opportunity to be the first to capture the best of these ideas in Africa”
To be continued in Part 2.