This post is inspired by a TED Talk given by Ron Eglash, titled “Fractals at the Heart of African Designs”, which talked about how fractal geometry is used in Africa. Ron Eglash traveled in Africa and discovered fractals everywhere in the continent, from the structure of villages in southern Zambia, to the Nankani village in Mali, and to the villages in the Mandara Mountains near the Nigerian border in Cameroon, Mokoulek. He observed fractal patterns in royal insignias and pathways through palaces and sacred altar sacrifices among other things. Fractals even appeared in board games all over Africa. For example, the Angola Chokwe people would draw lines in the sand in what is now known as a Eulerian Path, Omari in Ghana, Bao in Kenya, Mancala on the East Coast, and Sogo elsewhere. Eglash came to realize that these patterns were uniquely African as they were not common to any other indigenous architecture (as he initially thought). It was a shared technology in Africa with very sophisticated algorithms behind these fractals. The most complex example of a fractal algorithm that Eglash encountered was in Bamana sand divination found from East Coast to West. This fractal pattern used a symbolic code of a four-bit binary as a pseudo random number generator, using deterministic chaos.
The history of Bamana divination is little known. It was brought into Spain in the 12th century and this geomantic chart was shown to King Richard II in 1390, and was mentioned in the 1600s by the German mathematician Leibniz in his dissertation “De Combinatoria” where he introduced binary code. Later in the mid 1800s, George Boole took Leibniz’s binary code and created Boolean algebra, leading to the invention of the digital computer.
As Eglash quips, “So all these little PDAs and laptops— every digital circuit in the world— started in Africa. And I know Brian Eno says there’s not enough Africa in computers, but you know, I don’t think there’s enough African history in Brian Eno.”
The role of Africa in STEM is more often than not ignored, which explains a glaring shortage of people of African descent within these fields. Eglash implemented the Bamana binary code into hardware and found a statistically significant improvement in African American children who used this software in a mathematics class in comparison to a control group. If Black children can be taught that they too have a heritage in mathematics, this could change their entire perspective on the maths and sciences are primarily Western contributions with a majority White heritage. By furthering Eglash’s research and implementing his approach, we could see an increase of the African Diaspora’s presence in STEM fields.
– Chinaenye Ada Ozigbu