Thinking beyond pre-colonial nostalgia — the challenge for young African scholars

Young African scholars must reject outdated dogmas, embrace intellectual curiosity and modernise cultural and economic models to lead Africa into the AI era.

William Gumede is an associate professor at the School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand, and author of the bestselling South Africa in BRICS (Tafelberg).

In an era where emerging technologies blur the lines between physical, digital and biological systems, combining AI, automation and machine learning, young African scholars must step forward to challenge outdated, recycled ideologies and dominant public narratives.

The traditional factory model of employment has been permanently disrupted by automation, robotics and AI. The demand for humans on the factory assembly line has decreased. Job security is declining. Microchips are now the key engine of productivity growth. Modern business supply chains are increasingly global , with input sourcing, manufacturing, product distribution, logistics and marketing operating across multiple countries.

Many industrial countries now develop laboratory-grown minerals . Some developed countries are searching for minerals in space and near-Earth asteroids. China and Saudi Arabia are greening deserts. China is growing agricultural products in the laboratory. Israel produces soil-free, organic crops on city rooftops.

Dramatic changes are disrupting societal and cultural norms, institutions and identities. Digital friends, work-from-home and the gig economy have replaced real-life connections, communities and face-to-face get-togethers. People may be more digitally connected, but they are more isolated. Single-parent, child-headed households and non-traditional intimate partnerships are more common. The once fixed assumptions about how men and women should exercise their roles are gone. Many political, cultural and religious institutions have lost public trust.

These deep, irreversible structural disruptions demand new kinds of leadership, new ideas and imagination, and new approaches to problem-solving in South Africa and Africa, which slogan-shouting, rigid political, economic, religious and cultural ideologies will not solve.

Sadly, the public discourse in many African countries, including South Africa, remains frozen in an immediate post-colonial period mindset. Some Africans still call for simplistic solutions to the continent’s problems, encapsulated by sayings such as “give back the land”, or calls for a return to mythical pre-colonial communal African relations. Others complacently say Africa is rich because of its abundance of minerals, when industrial and emerging powers are now producing minerals in the laboratory or seeking them in space.

Some Africans also call for supposedly African-style education, when the developing countries that have become prosperous, such as Singapore, China and South Korea, have done so by outcompeting former colonial powers in education, specifically mathematics, technology and research.