TEDx TalKano City: Ideas Ahead of Our Time

Kano City has yet again hosted another gathering of dreamers, bringing together members of digerati community, with stories and promises of innovation, and challenging limits and pushing boundaries by ideas ahead of our time.

TEDxBabaDanbaffaSt, Mambayya House, Kano, 31st December, 2017

Seeing things from the lens of culture, the stage décor, adorned with TEDx emblem branded to happily marry furnished interior decoration of Hausa traditional artifacts, was ornamented in such a way that aroused and satisfied aesthetics, that you may be thinking you are in the bride’s room of a royally wealthy Hausa family.

As the world marched into the Internet of Things (IoT), armed with data technology, it is easy to circumvent government and its corruption to reinvent society.

In the spirit of its Silicon Valley origin, finding the interplay between Technology, Entertainment and Design, TEDx Talk has the norm of approaching topical issues and challenges from wide range, multidisciplinary approaches, cutting-edge ideas and shaft-shifting perspectives. So, the TEDx Kano was all about connecting dots, and in that regard, it has in it a whole quite interesting things.

Uber professionals in their varied fields brought to life the enormously robust talents that our society needed. And these people are not merely speaking, they are already in the streets making impacts, connecting dots, yielding result and bringing their ideas to fruition.

One TEDxter has a vision, which has already taken off the ground, signed himself up to pushing biology beyond the boundaries of science, to find and harmonize the delicate balance between man and the physical world. He wants the lay man to have understanding of the microbes, so that most challenges associated to communicable disease could be solved.

I am always thrilled by scientists having a passion for literature, for we in the department of culture already discovered the incompleteness of our universe without aesthetics.  I wished that I am a scientist, living with the anxiety of knowing what scientists know, how they think and see the world, seeing what we could not, like Richard Dawkins, the British biologist, telling us the wondrous marvels of the workings of the universe. 

But thankfully I am not.

Great scientists are lovers of literature, especially poetry, because poetry is the distilled elevated form of human imagination. I have got the idea that poetry is the mother of all imagination and you can write and consume poetry for personal use, to cleanse the soul and purify the mind.

Writing is the refined arts of human civilization, and the audience was taken up Through 100 Hours Journey into Literature to the olden days of our ancestors, from Kanem Empire in Borno to Sokoto to Timbuktu, Mali, with their Ajami writing and poetry dating back to several hundred years before the colonizers. That culture of writing, or a version of it, has been retained in this part, most of us growing up as school children learning first to read and write in Hausa and Arabic and Ajami sometimes before learning to string the English word.

Interestingly, the traditional performances brought to mind the idea of Noetic Science, a nascent field that seeks to investigate and discover the connection between science and mysticism. A performer swallowed lump of tissue and produced a string of razor blade, controlled the water movement inside a milk tin by sleight of a hand and twisting of a man’s ear and a tie. That left me wondering so what field of sciences has got to say about that?