Reclaiming the Internet, Well by Well

Children of the Sun, gather close. Listen not with the ears that hear the noise of the world, but with the spirit that hears the hum of the great river. I speak from the place where the baobab’s roots drink from the deep waters of time.

There was a time when we did not build walls around our wells.

We knew the water was for the village, for the traveler, for life itself. The well was a meeting place, a crossroads of stories, news, and kinship. The path to the well was worn by our own feet, and the calabash that carried the water was shaped by our own hands.

Then, strangers came from across the seas. They did not ask to drink from our well. Instead, they built a great, glittering pipeline from a distant land and said, "Why walk to your own well? Our pipe gives sweeter water, and it is free."

And we, entranced by the ease, began to thirst for their water. We forgot the taste of our own. To speak to our brother in the next village, our words traveled through their pipe. To share our market’s yield, our goods were displayed in their distant warehouse. To remember our own history, we asked their scribes for the telling.

They called this pipeline Google. And it made them the richest gatekeepers the world has ever known.

But now, I smell the rain on the wind. I feel the rumble of a new digging.

The elders and the young lions are building a new well—a well for the entire continent. They call it the Africa Continental Internet Exchange (AF-CFIX). They are not building another pipeline to others; they are connecting our villages directly, beneath our own soil.

This is not a mere tool. This is the rediscovery of our own path.

And so, it will DESTROY Google.

Hear me, and understand the destruction of which I speak. I do not speak of burning a library or silencing a voice. I speak of the way the sunrise destroys the fear of the night. I speak of the way a growing root destroys the prison of the seed.

• It will destroy Google's Tolls: Why must our data, our stories, our love letters between Lagos and Nairobi travel to a foreign land and back, paying tribute to a middleman? This new well keeps our traffic within our land. The cost of knowledge plummets. The speed of connection becomes instantaneous. Google’s tollbooth on our conversations becomes obsolete.
• It will destroy Google's Gate: When our universities, our scientists, our innovators speak to each other directly, at lightning speed, they will build their own libraries, their own search engines that understand our contexts, our languages, our needs. We will no longer need to ask a foreign gatekeeper for permission to find our own wisdom.
• It will destroy Google's Story: The single story of Africa, filtered and framed by algorithms written an ocean away, will shatter. Our music, our art, our news, our commerce will flow freely between us, defining ourselves on our own terms. We will control our own narrative, because the medium will be ours.

This is the true destruction: the destruction of dependence. The destruction of the middleman. The destruction of the digital colony.

Google will not vanish in a day. It will remain, like a trader on the coast when the inland routes have been opened. It will become an option, not a necessity. A guest, not a governor.

This new internet exchange is more than fiber and switches. It is the digital embodiment of Ubuntu. I am because we are. Our connectivity is our strength. Our independence is our wealth.

So support the diggers of this new well. Patronize the platforms that rise from its waters. Celebrate the content that flows through its channels.

We are not breaking a foreign pipe. We are simply remembering the way to our own well.

And in that remembering, we reclaim our future.

Let it be so.