Critical Reception

Olatoun Gabi-Williams’ introduction sets the editorial frame of the volume in a piece which turned out to be the longest. She started by highlighting the civic purpose of the anthology, which is to present the SDGs as issues of lived African experiences for a general readership, particularly young people aged 15 and above. This is followed by spotlighting the structural distortions in education, health, infrastructure, finance and governance by extractive settler colonialism. She then argues that digital tools, creative economies and fintech offer a "turning point" in the decolonization of Africa. Working each of the essays into the contextual focus of the volume, she concludes by proposing an overarching thesis that AI and data ownership constitute decolonisation's new frontier.

Anna Leonard from Namibia reported a qualitative study on the use of social media in women-led economies in Windhoek. Based on literature review and interviews with Namibian women entrepreneurs, the study shows how WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are employed in marketing, networking and knowledge-sharing among the women. It documents difficulties for Namibians in accessing some social media services. These include restrictions to payment-platforms such as PayPal, TikTok/YouTube monetisation, and the negative effects of on-line scams, shipping costs and VAT, as well as high data costs. The study recommends digital-literacy training, funding, negotiation with platforms and VAT relief.

In an effort to pave indigenous pathways to SDG 9, Pelumi Olatunji from Nigeria argues that Africa’s pre-colonial industry and infrastructure should play a vital role in meeting Africa’s technological needs, even in a post-industrial information age. Citing examples of Yoruba courtyards architecture, the Benin Moat, Nok iron, Hausa mud architecture, Bida glass beads and Demas Nwoko's modern use of earth-wall architecture, Olatunji laments the abandonment of the old, just because it is old. He directs attention to the intrinsic cost-effectiveness of products of indigenous knowledge, highlighting issues of low-carbon emission, durability and inclusiveness intrinsic to indigenous production processes. He notes that modern revivals such as rammed earth construction techniques and cassava bioplastics demonstrate the validity and value of looking inwards rather than outwards for technology. AI may suggest ways of integrating the past in the present for a desirable future, but the piece ends with a warning that AI is only as culturally accurate as the data on which the model is trained. So indigenous knowledge must be documented now, and calls for a "side-by-side" development model.

Abdulazeez Shomade, also from Nigeria, is a writer and researcher at the intersection of climate, culture, and society. He opens with a memoir of his childhood in Ota, a Lagos sub-urb, then still in its natural state, characterised by alluring flights of butterflies in the view of an eight-year-old. Gradually, Otta turned into an urbanised sprawl, a ghetto of sorts, in what he described as the slow violence of urban expansion. Now an adult, he went on field research with hunters in Ajura village. Placing his Ajura experience side by side with his eight-year-old experience of Otta, he encountered, in a vital way, the "shifting baseline syndrome". Yoruba taboos, totems and oríkì, within which regulations for environmental conservation were embedded, had become little more than sentimental statements, valued only for their poetic formulation. Framing colonial planning and Western "scientism" as epistemic injustice, the study proposes three shifts. It advocates epistemic humility that encourages co-creation between scientists and knowledge-holders, legal and policy integration, and intergenerational transmission. It insists that communities retain ownership of their knowledge.

The author concludes by asserting that urbanisation is not evil, but as a blind march that erases everything that rooted us, it becomes a wound, dressed as progress.

Taiwo Egunjobi, yet another Nigerian, chose to look beyond Lagos in a filmmaker's first-person account of the sustainable micro-economy of independent cinema in Nigeria. Each of his productions employs 30 to 50 people. His business model depends more on earnings from streaming platforms than the old rush-to-market model. He spoke candidly about electric generator costs, low bandwidth, the lack of film schools, and the lack of unions, insurance and pensions. He concludes with a 2030 vision of three tiers of commercial, mid-budget streaming, and independent tiers, and advocates for policy intervention on tax incentives, IP protection and patient capital.

Joan Mwachi-Amolo presents a case study of Worldreader's mobile-first approach to the learning crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 87% of ten-year-olds cannot read a simple story, in contrast to the global average of 64%. BookSmart, an offline app that works on basic phones, offers culturally relevant books. The programme also targets caregivers through behaviour-change messaging. The essay stresses parental engagement and local content, presenting the model as scalable across SDG 4 targets.

A machine image generator's stereotypical picture of an "African elder", is the source of the inspiration of Malik Afegbua’s “The Elder Series” and his piece titled “Elder in the Machine”. Elders rendered as regal, playful, couture-dressed members of a thriving society are hardly ever the representation of African elders in European perception and models trained with data produced by European perception.

This is the sort of machine bias that motivated the AACIS Academy, which has now trained more than 5,000 people and earned the author a seat on Nigeria's Council for Creative Technology Futures. Admitting the paucity of training data required for much better representation, the author quickly brings to focus the problems of epileptic public power supply and tenuous communication networks characterized by perennially low bandwidth. These constitute a push factor leading to talent drain, which circles back to further complicate the problem of paucity of the data needed by generative AI to produce faithful images of Africa.

Training more than 5,000 people in AI and digital story telling is no mean feat. However, the fact that his piece concluded with a rhetorical question is quite telling. What more can Nigeria’s Council for Creative Technology Futures (NCCTF) do? How can the author better use the clout of a Salzburg Global Fellowship and his leadership roles in the private sector and in social entrepreneurial spaces to address data paucity as an elephant in the room? His closing question of whether Africa will be a "rules-inheritor or a rules-maker" in the emerging knowledge age of Generative AI comes across as rather bewildering, without any clear path forward.

“The Risks of AI for Gen Z & Gen Alpha” is Gabi-Williams’ deliberately non-essayistic piece built from a dialogue with ChatGPT. AI is cast as a mirror and foil, and not a shepherd. The identified risks are decision fatigue, identity confusion and false authority. She prescribes interpretation, presence, witness and slowness, with practical activities such as silent observation, unfinished stories and gardening. An appendix maps the concerns onto the Nigerian Child Rights Act 2003 and SDGs 4, 9, 11 and 16, with child-facing sharing norms.

In a tribute anchored on the author's memory of the 2019 IPA Nairobi seminar, Gabi-Williams remembers Chakava and Ngũgĩ. She reiterated Ngũgĩ's argument that African languages belong alongside colonial ones, citing the record-setting translations of The Upright Revolution, and presents a roll-call of successors such as Kwani?, Book Bunk, eKitabu, Storymoja, Positively African, Kistrech, and the Safal-Kiswahili Prize. She concludes that language preservation does not imply language sovereignty and calls for Africa to own her data and AI infrastructure, citing UNESCO's 2021 AI ethics recommendation and the AU Continental AI Strategy.

Gabi-Williams’ Afterword reflects on the anthology's inspirations: the Borders SDG Book Club and the UN SDG Book Club African Chapter. She positions the series as an "archive of contemporary African agency" and a quasi-civic curriculum. She argues for systems thinking beyond STEAM, using the example of questions about who owns the data, models and infrastructure. She invokes Aspirations 1 and 6 of Agenda 2063 and Keith Hart's vision of African cities as engines of innovation. Finally, she links Vol. 1 on knowledge systems to Vol. 2 on Digital Lives and previews Vol. 3.