Let Us Talk About Africa December2004 Edition

Collected Speeches

with Commentary

by Philip Emeagwali

CONTENTS[MSOffice1]

Foreword – One of the Great Minds of the Information Age

Preface –A Note to the Readers

Ideas, Not Money, Alleviate Poverty

Globalization Not New: Look at Slave Trade

How Do We Reverse the Brain Drain?

African History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed

I Believe I Can Fly

Africa Has Imprisoned it’s Men of Ideas

They Laughed When I Told Them … But Their Laughter Turned to Stunned Silence …[MSOffice2]

My Search for the Holy Grail of Immortality

My Search for the Lost Igbo Tribe

Why Is America Battling for Africa?

My Search for the Holy Grail of Immortality

Globalization Not New; Look at Slave Trade

One Wife, One Child

Do I Believe in God?

Why Is Oil-Rich Nigeria So Poor?

Waiting for Oil Cargo

The Party's Over; The End of Oil

A Black Scientist Speaks About Racism

Am I the Anti-Christ?

Forgive Me, Father, for I Have Sinned!

An Emeagwali Photo Gallery

Chronology of Emeagwali’s Life

Afterword

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One of Our Great Minds [MSOffice4]
by Bill Clinton

“One of the great minds
of the Information Age
is a Nigerian American
named Philip Emeagwali.

He had to leave school
because his parents
couldn't pay the fees.
He lived in a refugee camp
during your civil war.
He won a scholarship
to university and went on
to invent a formula
that lets computers make
3.1 billion calculations
per second. (Applause.)

Some people call him
the Bill Gates of Africa.
(Laughter and applause.)

But what I want to say
to you is there is
another Philip Emeagwali
-- or hundreds of them --
or thousands of them
-- growing up in Nigeria today.

I thought about it
when I was driving in
from the airport and
then driving around
to my appointments,
looking into the face
of children.
You never know
what potential
is in their mind and
in their heart;
what imagination they have;
what they have already
thought of and
dreamed of
that may be locked in
because they don't have
the means to take it out.

That's really what education is.
It's our responsibility
to make sure
all your children
have the chance
to live their dreams
so that
you don't miss
the benefit
of their contributions and
neither does the rest of the world.”

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Where is Africa Going Wrong?

Ideas, Not Money, Alleviate Poverty

by Philip Emeagwali

emeagwali.com

Keynote speech by famed supercomputer pioneer

[University of Alberta, Canada, September 23, 2006]

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 (#1) 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. For his speech video recordings, visit emeagwali.com.

Philip Emeagwali delivering his speech at the University of Alberta, Canada. (Photo of Philip Emeagwali taken in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on September 23, 2006 at about 8:00 p.m.)

Philip Emeagwali at a Meet & Greet with African students at the University of Alberta, Canada, after delivering a lecture on “Where is Africa Going Wrong?” (Photo of Philip Emeagwali taken in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on September 25, 2006)

Globalization Not New;

Look at Slave Trade

Delivered by Philip Emeagwali on September 18, 2004, at the Pan-African Conference on Globalization, Washington, DC. This transcript was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers[MSOffice6] .

Globalization - or the ability of many people, ideas and technology to move from country to country - is not new. In Africa, it was initiated by the slave trade and given impetus by colonialism and Christian missionaries.

The early missionaries saw African culture and religion as a deadly adversary and as an evil that had to be eliminated.

In 1876, a 27-year-old missionary named Mary Slessor emigrated from Scotland to spend the rest of her life in Nigeria.

For her efforts in trying to covert the people of Nigeria, Mary Slessor’s photograph appears on Scotland’s ten pound note, and her name can be found on schools, hospitals and roads in Nigeria.

The introduction to Mary Slessor’s biography titled: “White Queen of the Cannibals” is revealing:

“On the west coast of Africa is the country of Nigeria. The chief city is Calabar,” said Mother Slessor. “It is a dark country because the light of the Gospel is not shining brightly there. Black people live there. Many of these are cannibals who eat other people.”

“They're bad people, aren't they, Mother?” asked little Susan.

“Yes, they are bad, because no one has told them about Jesus, the Saviour from sin, or showed them what is right and what is wrong.”

These opening words clearly show that Mary Slessor came to Africa on a mission to indoctrinate us with Christian theology.

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She told us we worshipped an inferior god and that we belonged to an inferior race.

She worked to expel what she described as “savagism” from our culture and heritage and to encourage European “civilization” to take root in Africa.

We accepted the mission schools which were established to enlighten us, without questioning the unforeseen costs of our so-called education.

These mission schools plundered our children’s self-esteem by teaching them that, as Africans they were inherently “bad people.”

Our children grew up not wanting to be citizens of Africa. Instead, their education fostered the colonial ideal that they would be better off becoming citizens of the colonizing nations.

I speak of the price Africans have paid for their education and “enlightenment” from personal experience.

I was born “Chukwurah,” but my missionary schoolteachers insisted I drop my “heathen” name. The prefix “Chukwu” in my name is the Igbo word for “God.” Yet, somehow, the missionaries insisted that “Chukwurah” was a name befitting a godless pagan.

The Catholic Church renamed me “Philip,” and Saint Philip became my patron and protector, replacing God, after whom I was named.

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I have to argue that something more than a name has been lost. Something central to my heritage has been stripped away.

This denial of our past is the very antithesis of a good education.

Our names represent not only our heritage, but connect us to our parents and past.

As parents, the names we choose for our children reflect our dreams for their future and our perceptions of the treasures they represent to us.

My indoctrination went far deeper than just a name. The missionary school tried to teach me that saints make better role models than scientists.

I was taught to write in a new language. As a result, I became literate in English but remain illiterate in Igbo - my native tongue.

I learned Latin - a dead language I would never use in the modern world - because it was the official language of the Catholic Church, which owned the schools I attended.

Today, there are more French speakers in Africa than there are in France.

There are more English speakers in Nigeria than there are in the United Kingdom.

There are more Portuguese speakers in Mozambique than there are in Portugal.

The Organization of African Unity never approved an African language as one of its official languages.

We won the battle of decolonizing our continent, but we lost the war on decolonizing our minds.

Many acknowledge that globalization shapes the future, but few acknowledge that it shaped history, or at least the world’s perception of it. Fewer acknowledge that globalization is a two-way street.

Africa was a colony, but it is also a key contributor to many other cultures, and the cornerstone of today’s society.

The world’s views tend to overshadow and dismiss the value and aspirations of colonized people. Again, I must impart my own experiences to illustrate this point.

I grew up serving as an altar boy to an Irish priest. I wanted to become a priest, but ended up becoming a scientist. Religion is based on faith, while science is based on fact and reason - and science is neutral to race. Unfortunately, scientists are not neutral to race.

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Take, for example, the origin of AIDS, an international disease. According to scientific records, the first person to die from AIDS was a 25-year-old sailor named David Carr, of Manchester, England.

Carr died on August 31, 1959, and because the disease that killed him was then unknown, his tissue samples were saved for future analysis.

The “unknown disease” that killed David Carr was reported in The Lancet on October 29, 1960. On July 7, 1990, The Lancet retested those old tissue samples taken from David Carr and reconfirmed that he had died of AIDS.

Based upon scientific reason, researchers should have deduced that AIDS originated in England, and that David Carr sailed to Africa where he spread the AIDS virus.

Instead, the white scientific community condemned the British authors of those revealing articles for daring to propose that an Englishman was the first known AIDS patient.

If these scientists were neutral to race, their data should have led them to the conclusion that Patient Zero lived in England.

If these scientists were neutral to race, they should have concluded that AIDS had spread from England to Africa, to Asia, and to America.

Instead, they proposed the theory that AIDS originated in Africa.

Even history has degraded our African roots. We come to the United States and learn a history filtered through the eyes of white historians.

And we learn history filtered through the eyes of Hollywood movie producers.

Some of us complained that Hollywood is sending its distorted message around this globalized world.

Some of us complained that Hollywood is a cultural propaganda machine used to advance white supremacy.

George Bush understood Hollywood was a propaganda machine that could be used in his war against terrorism. Shortly, after the 9/11 bombing of New York City, Bush invited Hollywood moguls to the White House and solicited their support in his war against terrorism.

Some will even argue that schools play a significant role as federal indoctrination centers used to convince children during their formative years that whites are superior to other races. Fela Kuti, who detested indoctrination, titled one of his musical albums: “Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense.”

It scares me that an entire generation of African children is growing up brainwashed by Hollywood’s interpretation and promotion of American heroes.

Our children are growing up idolizing American heroes with whom they cannot personally identify.

We need to tell our children our own stories from our own perspective.

We need to decolonize our thinking and examine the underlying truths in more than just movies.

We need to apply the same principles to history and science, as depicted in textbooks.

Look at African science stories that were retold by European historians; they were re-centered around Europe.

The earliest pioneers of science lived in Africa, but European historians relocated them to Greece.

Science and technology are gifts ancient Africa gave to our modern world.

Yet, our history and science textbooks, for example, have ignored the contributions of Imhotep, the father of medicine and designer of one of the ancient pyramids.

The word “science” is derived from the Latin word “scientia” or “possession of knowledge.” We know, however, that knowledge is not the exclusive preserve of one race, but of all races.

By definition, knowledge is the totality of what is known to humanity. Knowledge is a body of information and truth, and the set of principles acquired by mankind over the ages.

Knowledge is akin to a quilt, the latter consisting of several layers held together by stitched designs and comprising patches of many colors.