If Not This... by lola odelola_
Issue #1

Could the Web Have Been Created in Yoruba Land?

“Universal access to a large universe of documents”

What if the web was created in 1980s Lagos, Nigeria within markets as a way for vendors to share and access wholesale produce prices? Or what if it was created as a way for Babalawos to better share divinations for the sick and those who couldn’t travel to the shrines?

As a recipient of the Netstalgia Error 417 Expectation Failed grant, these are the kinds of questions I’m exploring with my project Out of Scope. I’m challenging the W3C’s Ethical Web Principle “There is one Web”:

“ When we are adding new web technologies and platforms, we will build them to cross regional and national boundaries. People in one location should be able to view web pages from anywhere that is connected to the web.^[1]

While this principle speaks about new web technologies, it echoes the very first website:

“ The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.^[2]

I can see where the creators and current web standards folks are aiming for a universal web, it’s a good faith effort, however, the web was not (& is not) created in a vacuum. There is a Western Web, there is a Chinese Web (using super and mini apps^[3]), but there is no African web nor are African technologists massively contributing to the creation of web standards. And “simply importing foreign technologies has often failed to meet Africa’s needs” (Ndasauka 2024)^[4]

With Out of Scope I’m suggesting a decolonial approach to creating the web by looking at what was created, the context it was created in, and speculating what could have been. The impact of both the transatlantic slave trade (which overlaps with Europe’s scientific revolution) and colonisation can’t be overstated. Colonisers intentionally limited what kinds of technology Africans were allowed to learn as “technical training for Africans focused on basic vocational skills [and] Additional training was contingent on Africans adopting Western culture and religion rather than building on indigenous knowledge systems” (Ndasauka 2024)^[5]. It’s difficult to read about the dismantling of African Knowledge Systems while also trying to imagine a past where inventions like the web could have been created in Yoruba Land.

What happens if the web is created by a Yoruba teenager who wants to share stories, instead of a White British academic? Or if the internet is created for Nigerian civil engineers to connect with Malaysian civil engineers, instead of its actual genesis within the US Military? Western Knowledge Systems underpin the foundations of both the web and the internet but what if we looked to the ancient Yoruba instead of the ancient Greek?

The Yoruba Ifá religion and knowledge system still exists today. It travelled with enslaved people to Brazil, Cuba, North America and is still practiced in Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Togo and other places where the Yoruba are.

Ifá is a divination practice and an information system and technology. The sacred texts are encoded within a binary system and a Babalawo uses an ọpẹlẹ or ikin to share these texts and messages. The ọpẹlẹ is a chain and has eight pods, two columns of four, which have been halved so that there’s a concave and a convex side.

An ọpẹlẹ concave sides up

Each pod can give you a 0 or a 1 and each row can give you a 0 1, 0 0, 1 0, or 1 1 while each column can give you 16 possible binary outputs. These outputs are called Odu and each have a name, there are 256 possible Odu compounds. Binary numbers also independently developed in both the West and Middle East, however, what’s unique to Yoruba is that the binary in Ifá isn’t used for counting or calculations, it’s used to index and retrieve complex data. Each Odu is a message which when compounded with another Odu creates a new message.

The binary number is a key and the Odu is a value, the ọpẹlẹ/ikin is a database, and the Babalawo is the database admin.

If colonisation didn’t erode Yoruba Knowledge Systems, what kind of computers could we have created? Would our internet utilise talking drum technology? How would we use the Odu as data structures? What foundation would the market vendors or Babalawos have to build their web?

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