Cyber seer / Cane scrutiny
Today: Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Nigerian writer, linguist, co-editor of Best Literary Translations, founder of Olongo Africa, and writer and producer of the documentary, Ebrohimie Road; and Brian Hioe, Taipei-based editor, translator, activist, DJ, co-founder of New Bloom, and author of Taipei at Daybreak.
Issue No. 584
Internet Prophet of 1995
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún
The Kuomintang Is Coming… For Your Behinds
Brian Hioe
Internet Prophet of 1995
by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún
A number of years ago, shortly after I left high school, or maybe in my first year of uni, I came across this book called Being Digital, written in 1995 by a columnist at Wired named Nicholas Negroponte. I lived then in Ìbàdàn, Southwest Nigeria, and was still undecided about what I wanted to do with myself. I don’t know whether I saw a copy of the book first, or came across the media frenzy about it. But being at the time already interested in digital technology, I took some interest. In any case, the book was everywhere. I didn’t get far with that first attempt at reading it, though I realized it held something fascinating about the future of technology.
I’d seen a desktop computer perhaps just once before, back then, in the house of a neighbour who ran the private nursery school I had attended. Cable TV was something we’d seen only in the house of another rich neighbour down the street, provided via the huge satellite dish parked in their garden. Mobile phones were not yet a thing in Nigeria, except in the hands of the very rich or the very fraudulent—big, clunky, bulky-looking things, but glamorous all the same. James Bond films showed fascinating new technologies, like self-driving cars and teleconferencing.
I got my first email address in 1998—this I remember. It was a Yahoo email, but in time I also got one on coolmail.com, and another from Hotmail, which seemed like a fancy thing to do. There were others, with names like Eudoramail and Pegasus. In Ìbàdàn in the late 1990s, the only place with public access to the internet was the “Business Centre,” later to be renamed “Cybercafe.” Email at the Business Centre was a complicated affair. You wrote your “email” out by hand and handed it to an assistant, who typed it for you into the computer, and then sent it on for you via their email server. Almost like a telex system, connecting via “modems” that hooked up to the internet with a whirring tone that sounded like an intubated hospital patient trying to speak. You then went home and returned in a few days to check for a reply to your email. If it had arrived you’d pay for the message, the BC assistant printed it out, stapled it for privacy, and handed it to you.
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