One of my favourite quotes of all time comes at the end of Don Quixote. Cervantes, about to be hauled before the Spanish Inquisition, is told by another prisoner that he should stop imagining and come to terms with his fate. Turning to fantasy, like Cervantes's great, mad character Don Quixote, is turning one's back on life, he says.
Living in Africa is not about finding a way of replicating what has been done elsewhere, in the so-called “first world”..
Tallulah Habib, Social media activist
Cervantes replies: “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness; to surrender dreams, this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
This past month has seen a parade of fantastic tech events in SA. It has been its own kind of madness - all those techies in one place at one time. Microsoft TechEd, in Durban, had over 3 500 delegates from every level of SA's technology industry. myBroadband2011 had all the major telecoms players and an audience of over 1 500. Tech4Africa had representatives from enough start-ups to populate a new Silicon Valley.
What struck me most about these events, however, was not the proliferation of golf shirts, nor the startling amount of coffee consumed (one exhibitor at TechEd counted 900 cups from his stall alone). It was the atmosphere of hope and optimism that blanketed everything, like that light you get in Joburg following a thunder storm.
These are challenging days for the local tech industry. Our bandwidth is still expensive, we have huge last mile issues, our import taxes can be quite ridiculous, the world is still struggling to recover from a recession, and, of course, there's the skills shortage to contend with. Based on reading the news and watching Twitter you'd think these events would be full of whining, moaning and maybe even a few tears. Not so. Instead, they were filled with people who see the world, not as it is, but as it can be.
Take for instance, Herman Chinery-Hesse, one of the speakers at Tech4Africa who left the audience weak at the knees with his PowerPoint-less presentation. He built an African tech empire from the ground up, starting with nothing. His face shone with enthusiasm as he spoke of a world where even the most rural African citizens have their own businesses and are empowered enough to say no to unjust governments. By the time he was done, we all believed it was possible.
Ex-Cell C CEO, Lars Reichelt, gave his own impassioned speech at myBroadband2011. He pleaded for better education in SA and demonstrated Web sites where people teach for free. 'Anything is possible if we band together' was the message he left delegates with.
At TechEd, it was all about the cloud. It could give small businesses amazing power, numerous speakers said. It was a discussion that went beyond Microsoft's own cloud products and into the realm of “what ifs”. We haven't begun to see the true power of the cloud yet, they said, but we will, soon. I can't speak for the other 3 499 delegates, but I was left feeling that we are on the brink of something amazing.
There are challenges in the African tech world, challenges that other continents don't have to face (the frequent power outages and bandwidth limitations for example), but thank goodness for people like these who remind us that there are also opportunities.
When America first started getting its infrastructure together, finding its independent feet, it was known as the land of opportunity. Every person born there was entitled to the American dream.
Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost that fondness for the dream. Like the prisoner in Don Quixote, we want a practical solution and we want it now. Opportunity has become a euphemism for challenge, and dreaming is something we do as children and in college and then grow out of.
Yes, there's something to be said for a plan, there's something to be said for the roadmap to better days, but there's also something to be said for the fantasy, for the visionary who declares, “We can have something better and I can make it happen. I just have to figure out how”.
Living in Africa is not about finding a way of replicating what has been done elsewhere, in the so-called “first world”. Living in Africa is about dreaming our own dreams, and having the guts and the drive and the space to put them into action.
So all hail the dreamers and, to pull another quote from Don Quixote:
It is the mission of each true knight...
His duty... nay, his privilege!
To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go;
To right the unrightable wrong.
To love, pure and chaste, from afar,
To try, when your arms are too weary,
To reach the unreachable star!
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