Science and technology are considered the most significant driving force for development in the modern world, and their potential in Africa is tremendous. However, science and technology are often considered western innovations to be superimposed on Africa, creating a paradigm of a more advanced “Western world” and a backward Africa playing catch up — a view that ignores the contributions the continent has made to scientific discovery. The more we focus on the novelty of science in the African sphere, the more we perpetuate such old concepts and the greater the problems we create.

Rather than looking at science as something simultaneously progressive and alien to African ways of life, we must reimagine the continent as a locus of exchange for the cultural understandings of technology and science. Together, they could propel further discovery and leapfrog development within an African context.