The Portal to African Intelligence is opening for the first time on June 26. It will be your opportunity to connect more deeply with a radiant African past and present, and the contributions of Black storytellers to a radically Liberated future. A radical take on the museum as we know it, the Portal is a fun, interactive way to be immersed in historical and futuristic Black Genius, and it’s something we’re all very excited about at NOIR Labs. This piece will introduce you to the Portal concept, and detail its origins.
The term African Intelligence first became a part of my lexicon last year when speaking with Alex Tsado on his Black Genius interview. His organization, Alliance 4 Africa’s Intelligence, has been organizing Artificial Intelligence talent on the Continent since 2018. By using their name to shift the meaning of Ai from Artificial Intelligence to African Intelligence, they were expressing something quite significant, albeit not yet fully explicated.
Defining Ai
Alex and I agreed to work together to define African Intelligence, but that proved a daunting task. How do you begin to define African intelligence? Is it just about tech talent on the Continent using Artificial Intelligence? Or does it begin with something much more ancient, more innate than that? And if it is something more ancient, where would that begin? The hieroglyphs? Kush? The Opon Oromiyan? If we are to start that far back, how do we then choose what best reflects our intelligence and what is most valuable for our survival and our thriving?
Google defines intelligence as “the collection of information of military or political value” and even includes “people employed in the collection of military or political information.” With this meaning, the idea of African intelligence would still be unmanageably broad, considering military intelligence can be cultural and macro, or as detailed as the brand of tea you drank this morning. Defining African Intelligence then requires a sharper focus on what is most valuable across the breadth of historically valuable military or political information from across the African continent and beyond.
Seeing how much there was to define, we kind of left it alone for sometime. But when I received the completed NOIR Co emblem, designed by Vukile Batyi last summer, I was transfixed. I found myself staring at it endlessly, consuming its details, hoping it would give me some magical powers. As I observed the merkaba and the hieroglyphs embracing it, I did receive something I wasn’t expecting. A phrase that I’d never heard before suddenly emerged as an interpretation of this symbol: The Portal to African Intelligence.
I knew this term had to be significant–I certainly found it sexy. But after sharing it with my co-founder at the time, we put it down for several months, not entirely prepared to explore it fully.
How the Portal Discovered Us
This is probably a good time to reiterate that this entire journey–building NOIR Labs–has been quite mystical. Full of synchronicities, random blessings and incredible hardships, the platform you see, and its products, tend to emerge seemingly out of magical thin air. For us to have a roster of teammates from the ivy league and beyond, multiple websites, a 13K member audience and a growing list of institutional partnerships–having raised only $8K towards it in the last year is quite unheard of in the “startup” world.
What we’ve actually been able to build is an extensive framework of liberation-focused ideas supported by an even more expansive network of geniuses. But these ideas have felt scattered to many until recently. We’re now at the stage of delivering these ideas in a more targeted manner.
I ended 2020 with a knowing that the first quarter of 2021 would have to be about the Spiritual intersecting with the technological. In developing our content, we would need to focus on the intersection between African Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, but the Portal to African Intelligence was still an obscure message.
When my friend Wale asked me to present the vision of NOIR Labs to the CNBC community for Black History Month, I sat down to put a deck together, and the Portal concept took on a life of its own, sliding from latent phrase to experiential immersion.
I realized in that process that NOIR Labs would actually provide a portal, a funnel, a secret pathway to African Intelligence, just by exhibiting visionary African Diaspora art and storytelling in the most creative ways.
The meaning of African Intelligence became a bit clearer at this point. African Intelligence is about rewriting our history, using information that has been suppressed for millennia but that is eternally/essentially accessible through the connections we can now draw between highly intelligent people, institutions, geographies, sciences, and storytellers. By rewriting our collective history, without the interference of a white supremacist gaze, we can easily craft a Liberated future that connects the Oromo to the Akan to the Brooklynite to the Inglewoodian, weaving together their destinies in a way that unlocks the infinite wealth that will be essential to building the New Liberated World.
100,000 year old art studio discovered in Blombos Cave near Cape Town South Africa with yellow and red pigments, spatulas and grinders. The Nzundza Ndebele house painting tradition which was popularized in the 19th century. Muralized Ndebele art
Thus the Portal is here to help us achieve this. Through its striking aesthetic, ease of use and rich collection of knowledge and art, it’ll be the place to go to download the collection of historical and futuristic information most valuable to the present generation of Black thinkers, builders and Liberators, as well as to those of all backgrounds who seek to unlearn whiteness.
As a member of the Portal, you’ll be able to refill on African Intelligence whenever you need to be reminded that Blackness has always equated power, glory, beauty and wealth, and always will.
I’m particularly proud that this Portal is being developed by Nigerian youth under 30, who are braving state-sanctioned terror, of the psychological as well as physical kind, to share their gifts with the world through their passion for delivering a just and humanist future for all. Shoutout to Lanre, Azeez, Chidozie and Uchenna.
We will continue to write about the Portal, refining it’s purpose as we iterate on its identity and introduce you to the artists and artifacts featured.
If you would like to experience the Portal, you have a few options, you can become a Patron of the Nigerian Genius Fund for extended access to all exhibits through September; or, for one-day access you can register for NOIR FEST LITE, taking place virtually on June 26–the first public viewing of the Portal. The immersion on the 26th will be followed by a Family Meeting, in which we’ll discuss the Portal journey in the context of the current state of global/local Black unity, and then breakouts on Innerpreneurship, Digital Divination and Black Genius.
I’d like to thank Yale African Studies, Yale Tsai CITY and the Yale School of Management’s African Business Club for their support of the Portal thus far.
NOTE: This post has been updated to reflect the postponed opening date for the Portal.
