An Africa that speaks

We spent twenty years connecting the continent. Submarine cables, towers, licences, billions. It was necessary and it largely worked: Africa is connected as it has never been.

And yet a vast share of its people remain outside. Not for want of network. For want of language.

You can be perfectly connected and still be outside, if everything on the network is written in a language you do not speak.

I believe the coming decade will be decided less on access than on use, and that use is decided on language. A digitised public service in a language the citizen barely commands does not remove the counter: it replaces it with a wall. A poorly understood banking interface does not create an autonomous customer: it creates a vulnerable one. A summit with an improvised interpretation chain does not produce a bad translation: it produces a bad decision.

What I refuse

I refuse the idea that the continent should wait. Wait for models to take an interest in our languages, wait for platforms to translate our interfaces, wait for a foreign institution to fund our corpora. That wait has lasted twenty years and produces nothing, because nobody has an economic interest in ending it on our behalf.

I also refuse the opposite story, the triumphant Africa that has supposedly solved everything already. Our infrastructure remains fragile, our skills too scarce, our funding too short. Nothing solid is built on a compliment.

What I believe

Digital sovereignty is not inaugurated. It is built in layers, over ten years, with engineers trained at home, network routes brought back home, registries administered at home. That work is not photogenic. It is the work that counts.

Our languages are not heritage to be preserved but infrastructure to be built. A language absent from the rooms where decisions are made eventually disappears from those rooms, then from minds. What is at stake is not nostalgia: it is the capacity of half a billion people to take part in decisions that concern them.

And both things must be done at once: document and build. Observing without building leads to commentary. Building without observing leads to solving the wrong problem. That is why I hold a microphone and write code.

What I do

Every week I give the floor to those who build, and I record what they do. Every day I work on one piece: making Africa’s international events operable in the languages of their participants, and securing the chain that makes them possible.

One piece, not a continent. But a continent is made of pieces, and someone has to start with theirs.

Moïse Bienheureux Selph — Brazzaville, Algiers.