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Recorded at	August 27, 2017
Event	TEDGlobal 2017
Duration (min:sec)	11:31
Video Type	TED Stage Talk
Words per minute	147.07 very slow
Readability (FK)	39.65 very difficult
Speaker	Dayo Ogunyemi


1	00:12	As a child growing up in Nigeria,
2	00:15	books sparked my earliest imagination,
3	00:19	but films, films transported me
4	00:23	to magical places with flying cars,
5	00:27	to infinite space with whole universes of worlds to discover.
6	00:31	And my journey of discovery has led to many places and possibilities,
7	00:34	all linked with ideas and imagination.
8	00:39	A decade and a half ago,
9	00:41	I moved from working in law and technology in New York
10	00:44	to financing, producing and distributing films
11	00:48	in Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg.
12	00:52	I've been privileged to see firsthand how in Africa,
13	00:56	film powerfully explores the marvelous and the mundane,
14	01:01	how it conveys infinite possibilities and fundamental truths.
15	01:06	Afrofuturist films like "Pumzi,"
16	01:09	Wanuri Kahiu's superb sci-fi flick,
17	01:13	paint brilliant pictures of Africa's future,
18	01:17	while Rungano Nyoni's "I Am Not A Witch"
19	01:20	and Akin Omotoso's "Vaya"
20	01:22	show us and catalogue our present.
21	01:25	These filmmakers offer nuanced snapshots of Africa's imagined and lived reality,
22	01:31	in contrast to some of the images of Africa that come from outside,
23	01:35	and the perspectives that accompany all of these images,
24	01:38	whether sympathetic or dismissive, shape or distort
25	01:43	how people see Africa.
26	01:47	And the truth is,
27	01:49	many people think Africa is screwed up.
28	01:53	Images play a big part of the reason why.
29	01:59	Many tropes about Africa persist from pictures,
30	02:03	pictures of famine in Ethiopia 30 years ago,
31	02:06	pictures of the Biafran war half a century ago.
32	02:11	But on a continent where the average age is 17,
33	02:16	these tragic events seem almost prehistoric.
34	02:20	Their images are far removed
35	02:22	from how people in Africa's many countries see themselves and their neighbors.
36	02:28	For them, these images do not represent their reality.
37	02:32	So what is Africa's reality,
38	02:34	or rather, which of Africa's many realities do we choose to focus on?
39	02:39	Do we accept Emmanuel Macron's imagination of Africa in 2017
40	02:45	as a place in which all women have seven or eight children?
41	02:50	Or do we instead rely on the UN's account
42	02:54	that only one of Africa's 54 countries has a fertility rate as high as seven?
43	02:59	Do we focus on the fact
44	03:01	that infant mortality and life expectancy in Africa today
45	03:05	is roughly comparable to the US a hundred years ago,
46	03:08	or do we focus on progress,
47	03:11	the fact that Africa has cut infant mortality in half
48	03:14	in the last four decades
49	03:15	and has raised life expectancy by 10 years since the year 2000?
50	03:21	These dueling perspectives
51	03:25	are all accurate.
52	03:26	Well, aside from Macron's. He's just wrong.
53	03:28	(Laughter)
54	03:30	But one version makes it easy to dismiss Africa as hopeless,
55	03:36	while the other fuels hope that a billion people
56	03:38	can continue to make progress towards prosperity.
57	03:43	The fact that Africans
58	03:45	do not have the luxury of turning their gaze elsewhere,
59	03:48	the fact that we must make progress
60	03:51	or live with the consequence of failure,
61	03:53	are the reason we must continue to tell our own stories
62	03:56	and show our own images,
63	03:58	with honesty and primarily to an African audience,
64	04:02	because the image that matters most
65	04:05	is the image of Africa in African imaginations.
66	04:11	Now, honesty requires that we acknowledge
67	04:14	that Africa is behind the rest of the world
68	04:16	and needs to move swiftly to catch up.
69	04:20	But thinking of a way forward,
70	04:21	I'd like us to engage in a thought exercise.
71	04:25	What if we could go back a hundred years,
72	04:27	say to the US in 1917,
73	04:29	but we could take with us all the modern ideas,
74	04:33	innovations, inventions that we have today?
75	04:37	What could we achieve with this knowledge?
76	04:40	How richly could we improve quality of life and living conditions for people?
77	04:46	How widely could we spread prosperity?
78	04:50	Imagine if a hundred years ago,
79	04:52	the education system had all the knowledge we have today,
80	04:55	including how best to teach.
81	04:58	And doctors and scientists knew all we do
82	05:01	about public health measures, surgery techniques,
83	05:05	DNA sequencing, cancer research and treatment?
84	05:09	If we had access then to modern semiconductors,
85	05:12	computers, mobile devices, the internet?
86	05:16	Just imagine.
87	05:17	If we did, we could take a quantum leap forward, couldn't we.
88	05:22	Well, Africa can take a leap of that magnitude today.
89	05:27	There's enough untapped innovation
90	05:30	to move Africa a century forward in living conditions
91	05:34	if the will and commitment is there.
92	05:37	This is not just a possibility; it's an imperative for Africa's future,
93	05:42	a future that will see Africa's population double
94	05:46	to two and a half billion people in just three decades,
95	05:49	a future that will see Africa have the world's largest workforce,
96	05:55	just as the idea of work itself is being radically reconsidered.
97	06:00	Now taking the leap forward isn't that far-fetched.
98	06:03	There are tons of examples that demonstrate the potential
99	06:06	for change in Africa.
100	06:09	Just 20 years ago,
101	06:11	Nigeria had fewer than half a million working phone lines.
102	06:14	Today it has a hundred million mobile phone subscriptions,
103	06:18	and this mobile miracle is mirrored in every African country.
104	06:21	There are over three quarters of a billion mobile phones in use in Africa today,
105	06:26	and this has spurred justified excitement about leapfrogging,
106	06:30	about bringing the sharing economy, artificial intelligence,
107	06:34	autonomous machines to Africa.
108	06:38	And this is all promising,
109	06:40	but we need to think about sequencing.
110	06:44	Forget putting the cart before the horse.
111	06:47	You can't put the self-driving car before the roads.
112	06:51	(Applause)
113	06:56	There's a whole infrastructural and logical layer to innovation
114	07:00	that we take for granted,
115	07:02	but we have to triage for Africa,
116	07:05	because some of the biggest infrastructure gaps
117	07:08	are for things that are so basic
118	07:09	that Westerners rarely have to think about them.
119	07:13	So let's explore this.
120	07:18	Imagine your internet access went off for a day,
121	07:23	and when it came back,
122	07:25	it only stayed on for three hours at a time,
123	07:27	with random 15-hour outages?
124	07:31	How would your life change?
125	07:33	Now replace internet access with electricity.
126	07:38	Think of your fridges, your TVs, your microwaves,
127	07:40	just sitting idly for days.
128	07:43	Now extend this nightmare to government offices,
129	07:47	to businesses, to schools,
130	07:50	to hospitals.
131	07:54	This, or worse,
132	07:57	is the type of access that hundreds of millions of Africans
133	08:00	have to electricity,
134	08:03	and to water,
135	08:05	and to healthcare,
136	08:07	and to sanitation,
137	08:09	and to education.
138	08:12	We must fix this.
139	08:14	We must fix this because ensuring widespread and affordable access
140	08:18	to decent infrastructure and services
141	08:21	isn't just low-hanging fruit:
142	08:24	it's fundamental to achieving the hundred-year leap.
143	08:28	And when we fix it,
144	08:30	we might find some unexpected benefits.
145	08:35	One unexpected benefit of the mobile miracle
146	08:38	was that it led to what is perhaps the greatest cultural resurgence
147	08:43	that Africa has seen in a generation:
148	08:45	the rebirth of African popular music.
149	08:49	For musicians like P-Square,
150	08:53	Bongo Maffin
151	08:55	and Wizkid,
152	08:57	mobile phones paved the path to local dominance
153	09:00	and global stardom.
154	09:04	And the impact isn't limited just to music.
155	09:08	It extends to film, too.
156	09:10	Beautiful, engaging films
157	09:12	like these stills of "Pumzi,"
158	09:15	"Vaya," and "I Am Not A Witch" show.
159	09:19	For while its external image might be dated,
160	09:22	Africa continues to evolve, as does African film.
161	09:26	Now, every now and again, the rest of the world catches on,
162	09:30	perhaps with Djo Munga's hard-hitting "Viva Riva!"
163	09:34	with Newton Aduaka's intense "Ezra,"
164	09:37	or with Abderrahmane Sissako's poetic "Timbuktu."
165	09:41	With mobile, Africans are discovering more and more of these films,
166	09:45	and what that means is that it really matters less in Kinshasa or Cotonou
167	09:50	what Cannes thinks of African film,
168	09:53	or if those opinions are informed or fair.
169	09:58	Who really cares what the "New York Times" thinks?
170	10:01	What matters is that Africans are validating African art and ideas,
171	10:06	both critically and commercially,
172	10:08	that they are watching what they want,
173	10:10	and that African filmmakers are connecting with their core audiences.
174	10:15	And this is important.
175	10:18	It's important because film can illuminate and inspire.
176	10:22	Film can bring visions of the future to us here in the present.
177	10:26	Films can serve as a conveyor belt for hope.
178	10:30	And film can change perspectives faster than we can build roads.
179	10:36	In just over a decade,
180	10:38	Nigeria's film industry, Africa's largest,
181	10:40	has taken the country's words and languages
182	10:45	into the vocabulary and imaginations of millions
183	10:49	in many other African countries.
184	10:52	It has torn down borders,
185	10:54	perhaps in the most effective way since the Berlin Conference
186	10:57	sowed linguistic and geographic division across Africa.
187	11:00	Film does speak a universal language,
188	11:03	and boy, Nigerian film speaks it loudly.
189	11:06	Making Africa's hundred-year leap
190	11:09	will require that Africans summon the creativity to generate ideas
191	11:13	and find the openness to accept and adapt ideas from anywhere else in the world
192	11:18	to solve our pervasive problems.
193	11:21	With focus on investment,
194	11:23	films can help drive that change in Africa's people,
195	11:26	a change that is necessary to make the hundred-year leap,
196	11:29	a change that will help create a prosperous Africa,
197	11:33	an Africa that is dramatically better than it is today.
198	11:37	Thank you.
199	11:38	Asante sana.
200	11:39	(Applause)

Dayo Ogunyemi: Visions of Africa's future, from African filmmakers