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Contents
editorial
KOFI AGAWU
African Art Music and the Challenge of Postcolonial Composition
PAUL ZILUNGISELE TEMBE
China’s Effective Anti-Corruption Campaign
DILIP M. MENON
Changing Theory: Thinking Concepts from the Global South
BEN WATSON
Talking about music
Theme AI in Africa
blk banaana
An (Other) Intelligence
VULANE MTHEMBU
Umshini Uyakhuluma (The Machine Speaks) – Africa and the AI Revolution: Exploring the Rapid Development of Artificial Intelligence on the Continent.
OLORI LOLADE SIYONBOLA
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence in Africa
CHRIS EMEZUE & IYANUOLUWA SHODE
AI and African Languages: Empowering Cultures and Communities
NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
Toward Misrecognition. | Project notes for a haunting-ting
SLINDILE MTHEMBU
AI and documenting black women's lived experiences: Creating future awareness through AI-generated sonics and interpretive movement for the future of freeing suffering caused on black bodies.
ALEXANDRA STANG
Artificially Correct? How to combat bias and inequality in language use with AI
BAKARY DIARRASSOUBA
Bambara: The Jeli (Griot) Project
ROY BLUMENTHAL
Artificial Intelligence and the Arcane Art of the Prompt
AI GENERATED
"AI on Artificial Intelligence in Africa" and "Exploring its impact on Art and Creativity"
JULIA SCHNEIDER
AI in a biased world
MBANGISO MABASO
Bana Ba Dinaledi: Telling African Stories using Generative AI Art.
ALEX TSADO & BETTY WAIREGI
African AI today
BOBBY SHABANGU
Using Artificial Intelligence to expand coverage of African content on Wikipedia
DARRYL ACCONE
Welcome to The End of Beauty: AI Rips the Soul Out of Chess
VULANE MTHEMBU & ChatGPT
Hello ChatGPT - A conversation with OpenAI's Assistant
DIMITRI VOUDOURIS
Evolution of Sιήκ
STEFANIE KASTNER
Beyond the fact that most robots are white: Challenges of AI in Africa
MARTIJN PANTLIN
Some notes from herri’s full stack web developer on the AI phenomenon
galleri
THANDIWE MURIU
4 Universal Truths and selected Camo
ZENZI MDA
Four Portals
TIISETSO CLIFFORD MPHUTHI
Litema
NESA FRÖHLICH
Agapanthus artificialis: Biodiversität im digitalen Raum. Vierteilige Serie, Johannesburg 2022.
STEVEN J FOWLER
2 AI collaborations and 9 asemic scribbles
PATRICIA ANN REPAR
Integrating Healing Arts and Health Care
SHERRY MILNER
Fetus & Host
borborygmus
JANNIKE BERGH
BCUC = BANTU CONTINUA UHURU CONSCIOUSNESS
GWEN ANSELL
Jill Richards: Try, try, try...
VULANE MTHEMBU & HEIKKI SOINI
Nguni Machina remixed
AFRICAN NOISE FOUNDATION
Perennial fashion – noise (After Adorno).
RAJAT NEOGY
Do Magazines Culture?
NDUMISO MDAYI
Biko and the Hegelian dialectic
LEHLOHONOLO MAKHELE
The Big Other
frictions
KHAHLISO MATELA
At Virtue’s Zone
DIANA FERRUS
In memory of “Lily” who will never be nameless again
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Six Poems from the Shadows
SIHLE NTULI
3 Durban Poems
SIBONELO SOLWAZI KA NDLOVU
I’m Writing You A Letter You Will Never read
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships episode 3
claque
SIMON GIKANDI
Introducing Pelong Ya Ka (excerpt)
UNATHI SLASHA
"TO WALK IS TO SEE": Looking Inside the Heart - Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s Pelong ya Ka
VANGILE GANTSHO
Ilifa lothando – a Review of Ilifa by Athambile Masola
ZIZIPHO BAM
Barbara Boswell found in The Art of Waiting for Tales
WAMUWI MBAO
Hauntings: the public appearance of what is hidden
CHARL-PIERRE NAUDÉ
Dekonstruksie as gebundelde terrorisme
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili - A Review
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
Taking radical optimism beyond hope - Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South Africa’s Shack Settlements
PATRIC TARIQ MELLET
WHITE MISCHIEF – Our past (again) filtered through the lens of coloniality: Andrew Smith’s First People – The lost history of the Khoisan
CHANTAL WILLIE-PETERSEN
BHEKI MSELEKU: an infinite source of knowledge to draw from
JEAN MEIRING
SULKE VRIENDE IS SKAARS - a clarion call for the importance of the old and out-of-fashion
GEORGE KING
Kristian Blak String Quartets Neoquartet
ekaya
PAKAMA NCUME
A Conversation with Mantombi Matotiyana 9 April 2019
KYLE SHEPHERD
An Auto-Ethnographic Reflection on Process
PAULA FOURIE
Ghoema
DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN
The Art of Cape Town Singing: Anwar Gambeno (1949-2022)
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
Something in Return, Act II: The Blavet-Varèse project
STEPHANUS MULLER
Afrikosmos: the keyboard as a Turing machine
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Ubizo and Mental Illness: A Personal Reflection
off the record
FRANK MEINTJIES
James Matthews: dissident writer
SABATA-MPHO MOKAE
Platfontein, a place the !Xun and Khwe call home
NEO LEKGOTLA LAGA RAMOUPI
A Culture of Black Consciousness on Robben Island, 1970 - 1980
NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES
Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality*
ARYAN KAGANOF
An interview with Don Laka: Monday 10 February 2003
JONATHAN EATO
Recording and Listening to Jazz and Improvised Music in South Africa
MARKO PHIRI
Bulawayo’s movement of Jah People
STEVEN BROWN
Anger and me
feedback
MUSA NGQUNGWANA
15 May 2020
ARYAN KAGANOF / PONE MASHIANGWAKO
Tuesday 21 July 2020, Monday 27 July, 2020
MARIA HELLSTRÖM REIMER
Monday 26 July 2021
SHANNON LANDERS
22 December 2022
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Facebook
the selektah
CHRIS ALBERTYN
Lost, unknown and forgotten: 24 classic South African 78rpm discs from 1951-1965.
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
the back page
CHRIS BRINK
Reflections on Transformation at Stellenbosch University
MARK WIGLEY
Discursive versus Immersive: The Museum is the Massage
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #08
  • Theme AI in Africa

ALEX TSADO & BETTY WAIREGI

African AI today

More practical applications. Scaled talent training. Supercomputer access. These are the next 3 catalysts needed to spur Africa forward in the global race for artificial intelligence (AI). Africa, indeed, has come a long way from where it started in 2017 when most of the strong initiatives started. 

In fact, AI in the world actually started to move out of being a lab dream in just 2012 when a researcher named Alex Krizhevsky in Canada entered into a competition to use machine learning to predict different images and used the Nvidia GPU, different from the usual Intel chips that the remaining participants were using. What he found out was that to train his model with Nvidia GPU, he was able to leverage parallelized programming to run up to 1000 parts of the code at the same time. With this, instead of waiting many days for the model to train, it took only a few hours, finally making it practical to build AI solutions. That completely revolutionized the world of artificial intelligence and sent engineers and governments around the western and eastern world to invest heavily in applications of AI even for everyday life.

AI startup competition in 2021.

By 2017, you will find that the largest companies in the world and the largest governments in the world are powered by artificial intelligence. Think about Google Microsoft, Alibaba, Baidu, and the United States government, all with many applications of AI using it to win in competitive markets. At this time, the work of AI in Africa was not a coordinated one. It was one where there were innovators scattered around the continent working on small projects. The rest of the world had the bias that Africa was not participating in AI: global reports and indexes on AI would draw maps of AI in the world and leave Africa blank. Yes, they were incorrect in that there was a decent amount of AI happening in Africa. But they were correct in that a lot less was happening than needed to happen. It’s incredibly important for Africans, and more broadly speaking, every group of people around the world to participate in the development of artificial intelligence tools. It’s a lot more critical than any other tools of the past because there tends to be a direct correlation between the representation of the group that is designed for an AI tool and how effective the tool is going to be working for different groups of people. Said differently, as a Black person anywhere in the world that will use an AI tool, you really need the team that built that tool to include Black people that had the influence to ensure that the tool is tested on people like you 

By 2017 several Africans in the diaspora who work at the largest companies recognized this as they could see the challenges and dangers of the future head-on and started to create communities, and nonprofit organizations, to spark grassroots movements to get more Black and African people into artificial intelligence. Notable organizations include Black in AI which was formed in the United States of America, the Deep Learning Indaba founded in South Africa, and Alliance for Africa’s intelligence (Alliance4ai) which we founded in California with an office in South Africa. We founded Alliance4ai to be the centre of information and network for everything happening in AI in Africa. We created a database of over 100 notable Africans in AI, over 100 training centers, and communities in Africa and put together a policy group that advised several African government agencies on AI strategies. These included the presidential office of South Africa and the Africa Union’s Smart Africa Initiative which designed Africa’s first AI blueprint. Working with the grassroots, we created a program to help university students create AI clubs that would allow them to learn topics that the universities do not teach. The topics span three areas. Firstly, it was an introduction to the technical side of artificial intelligence. Secondly, was a strong embedding of AI in the history of African people, showing the strong contributions of Africans to ancient and modern AI. The third piece is around building workplace skills that are necessary to promote one’s work and get the funding or employment one needs after building technical skills. 

Today, Alliance4ai has trained hundreds of students who have graduated from the program as alumni to do things from getting scholarships to Masters and PhD programs to getting jobs at top companies in Europe and the United States, to founding startup companies that have won grants and awards. The most special testimony came from a 17-year-old girl in Ghana that said,

“Before my first Alliance4ai club meeting, I thought artificial intelligence was only meant for White and Chinese people. But after seeing the 100 leaders listed on the Alliance4ai website, I’m convinced I can play a role and will study AI in college.”

We are proud of the progress the continent has made, and that the rest of the world is finally beginning to notice what Africa is doing in AI as shown by the much higher investments in African AI companies, the opening of engineering offices by the largest companies in the world and the invitation of African innovators and inventors to international AI conferences like the UN’s AI for the good summit. 

The current challenge is that many of the initial attempts to build AI have been in spaces where they are targeting markets that cannot afford their services. For example, many diagnostic tools in agriculture have been marketed to subsistence farmers who have not been able to afford what’s being built. It’s now the work of African practitioners to find better ways of building solutions that work economically for the audiences they’re building for. 

South African tech roundtable in San Francisco, USA, 2019.

On the government side, it’s most crucial to note that data is the new oil, and we must stop making the same mistake we made with oil. With oil, our governments only built processes to extract crude oil, export abroad, and import more expensive finished products. We are missing refineries. Today similarly to what happened with oil, our governments are working with NGOs to make it easy to extract African data. They are failing to build access to Supercomputers so the smartest African minds can get access to building quality finished products that work best for Africa. Failure to do this will leave the continent exploited again like in the last hundreds of years. 

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BOBBY SHABANGU
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute