Ekibaaju is curious about the world. He has spent his working life in the scientific enterprise, and keeps returning to traditional African culture and traditional Christianity for what they know about living well.
Modern advice assumes difficult relationships improve through openness and constant communication. Many African societies approached the problem differently. Some relationships, they believed, needed boundaries first.
Europeans saw mud, thatch, and compound clusters and called it primitive. They were looking at architecture the whole time — they just did not recognise the language.
From vaccination to caesarean sections, the medical breakthroughs credited to Europe were practiced across Africa centuries earlier. Here is the history they left out of the textbooks.
Long before colonialism, African secret societies like the Poro, Sande, Ogboni, and Ekpe ran courts, trained leaders, regulated trade, and held power accountable. Then colonial rulers dismantled them — and Africa is still paying the price.
South Africa’s post-apartheid curriculum overhaul, imperfect and contested as it remains, represents a serious attempt to decolonise what children learn.
What if Africa's pre-colonial civilizations were solving a completely different optimization problem than industrial Europe? And what if the very cultural technologies that made us resilient for millennia are now the barriers we must consciously evolve past?
