A CURIOUS insecurity exists in South Africa, where many consider local products to be inherently flawed. It has become a compliment to label things "world class". But what on earth does that mean?
Outside of our government, which would clearly benefit from looking outside the continent for inspiration, South Africa is full of examples of innovation and ingenuity. These things are awesome because they're unique - not because they emulate what is being done elsewhere.
Last week I attended the inaugural Tech4Africa conference in Johannesburg, impressively executed by South African entrepreneur Gareth Knight and his team.
The event brought with it some of the top speakers in technology from around the world, including author and consultant Clay Shirky, CEO of Samasource Leila Chirayath Jana and Dustin Diaz, user interface engineer at Twitter.
Having attended more conferences than I care to remember on just about every continent, I can attest to the fact that Tech4Africa stands up to the best of them. But why should that be a surprise?
Over the weekend I had the pleasure of hanging out in the bush with most of the international speakers who came to South Africa for the conference. They all agreed that Tech4Africa rocked. One even suggested that it was one of the top two conferences he had ever spoken at.
I would not do Tech4Africa the disservice of calling it "world class". And I sincerely hope that Knight and his team don't ever concern themselves with matching what happens in the rest of the world - because we're capable of better. And because we'll end up with things that are globally common if that's all we aspire to.
By using nebulous terms like "world class" we devalue what we're doing in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent. How can something stand out when it's just more of what you'd expect to find elsewhere?
Shouldn't we rather be looking at ways to come up with something unique, so that it catches attention because it is wholly unlike what we'd expect from the rest of the world?
Of course, there is nothing wrong with applying the best practices that have been established globally, but that should go without saying. The problem is our short-sighted tendency to view inherently South African things as somehow inferior, based solely on their origin.
Meanwhile, other African countries are focusing on their own needs and abilities to forge uniquely African, and internationally superior, products. One of my favourite examples of this is crisis mapping software Ushahidi, created in Kenya to monitor violence in the wake of disputed elections in 2007.
Ushahidi allowed normal Kenyans to notify each other of outbreaks of violence using SMS messages. The system then collated this information and created heat maps that could be used to monitor the situation. And Ushashidi is open source, allowing it to be modified and used for crisis or other mapping anywhere in the world. It was used for tracking the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as well as post-earthquake crisis response in Chile.
Ushahidi is innovative, meaningful technology. In its space there is nothing like it in the world. And it came from Kenya.
In South Africa we have our own examples of stand-out technology by international standards. Mark Shuttleworth's company Thawte was acquired by American company Verisign at the height of the dotcom bubble, was acclaimed for being one of a kind and benefited from the fact that it was developed in South Africa, where it was free from the paradigms of the American market.
Shuttleworth created something unique and didn't try to replicate what was being done elsewhere in the world. He was rewarded with hundreds of millions of dollars and wouldn't have achieved what he did through emulation.
Even our reality television shows are cheap replicas. We try so hard to emulate the successes of our international counterparts and end up with cheap knock-offs as a result.
When the world looks to South Africa for solutions and potential investments, do we really just want to show them more of what they would expect to find back home?
The next person to use the term "world class" around me will be rewarded with a punch in the face. Let's aim higher.
- Fin24.com