The new Indian Ocean technology trade

My friend Gregg Zachary, whose career is an illustration of Thomas Friedman's thesis-- first he covered technology in Silicon Valley, then he covered the culture of Silicon Valley, and now he writes about innovation worldwide-- has a piece (I saw it first in the Pakistan Daily Times; it's also on Project Syndicate) on the "browning" of African technology that, appropriately, has been republished in a large number of papers in Asia, but has hardly been seen in the U.S.

Africa boasts the world’s fastest-growing market for wireless telephony, and Huawei — with offices in 14 African countries — is running away with the business, sending scores of engineers into the bush to bring a new generation of low-cost technology to some of the planet’s poorest people.... According to Chris Lundh, the American chief of Rwandatel, “That’s the way things work in Africa now. The Chinese do it all.”

Well, not quite. Across sub-Saharan Africa, engineers from India — armed with appropriate technologies honed in their home market — are also making their mark. India supplies Africa with computer-education courses, the most reliable water pumps, low-cost rice-milling equipment, and dozens of other technologies.

The sudden influx of Chinese and Indian technologies represents the “browning” of African technology, which has long been the domain of “white” Americans and Europeans who want to apply their saving hand to African problems.

“It is a tectonic shift to the East with shattering implications,” says Calestous Juma, a Kenyan professor at Harvard University who advises the African Union on technology policy.

One big change is in education. There are roughly 2,000 African students in China, most of whom are pursuing engineering and science courses. According to Juma, that number is expected to double over the next two years, making China “Africa’s leading destination for science and engineering education”.

The “browning” of technology in Africa is only in its infancy, but the shift is likely to accelerate. Chinese and Indian engineers hail from places that have much more in common with nitty-gritty Africa than comfortable Silicon Valley or Cambridge. Africa also offers a testing ground for Asian-designed technologies that are not yet ready for US or European markets.

In a way, you can see this as the reconstruction of a set of trade networks-- trade in resources, ideas, and people-- that connected east Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia for centuries. These networks were disrupted by Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and eventually British merchants starting in the 1500s (all those East India Companies weren't breaking new commercial ground, but were muscling in on some of the richest markets in the world). Now, with the end of colonialism and the rise of India and China as countries seen as offering technical expertise equivalent to the West, those networks are reasserting themselves.

Heading east, and following another ancient trade network, the Silk Road, one sees a new interest in Indian education in Japan:

Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. But even in this fad-obsessed nation, one result was never expected: a growing craze for Indian education.... [M]any people here are looking for lessons from India, the country the Japanese see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.

Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan.

As the Japan Times reported earlier this year,

the arrival of Indian international schools here follows on the heels of the rapid growth in the number of Indian residents -- in turn largely driven by the IT sector's demand for highly skilled engineers, with whom India is famously well-blessed....

But it's not just Indian people who are welcoming Indian-style education here, with many Japanese becoming aware of the high academic standards it offers -- especially in mathematics. Rumors among people that Indian children "memorize the multiplication tables from 1×1 to 99×99 in India" have done a lot to fuel this interest, which has been reflected in press headlines such as "Indian schools boast astonishing math skills."

The schools also benefitted from a labor anomaly: "many Indian wives who come here with their husbands have a teaching license."

If reports in the Japanese press reflect the interest of parents, there are two things at work here. The first is a sense that because the Indian economy is growing so quickly, the educational system must be doing something right. Second, and more interesting, is a belief that what students are getting is an exotic combination of English-style rigor and something like ancient memory arts-- most notably, mnemonics and techniques to do rapid calculation.

It's another example of the remarkable globalization of learning that's led to lots of European universities opening campuses in China, Indian tutors working remotely with Silicon Valley students, but also a Malaysian private university opening a campus in Botswana-- not that far from Great Zimbabwe, where South Asian merchants traded for African goods a thousand years ago.

Technorati Tags: China, education, globalization, India, university, X2

Comments

Perhaps future thinkers can care to conceive that (imagine that) Africans are also able to think and contribute to their own technological future, are creating their technological future in innovative and incredibly adaptive ways that have nothing to do with the return of the Indians of Chinese with whom we have traded for eons. It is not about the browning as much as the coalescing of interconnected visions.