By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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Y’all remember the Scholars of Timbuctu of Mali who kept scrolls in the Middle Ages of Africa onwards? The scholars and their library that started getting destroyed by the Empire after its last questionably “great” king Sonni Bey rose, hated on a centuries-old tradition of scholarship and intellectualism, and did other things to signal the imminent decline of said glorious Empire?

So I found out about another instance of book burning: A conquistador and genocidal gold obsessed Hernan Cortez who helped destroy Mexico City (Tenochtitlan really) back in the 1520s and opened the doors for the brutal repression of the people and their culture and ways by destroying as much as possible of the rich Aztec records. And then I woke up in a cold sweat and realised: that’s one of the components of a serious unravelling of civilisation.

Library of Alexandria? Burned. The Inquisition? Burned people and books. French Revolution and the incredibly bloody reign of terror? Books got burned. Hitler? Book burner. Boko Haram, Isis et al? Burning and destroying cultural artefacts and knowledge repositories without a qualm. Oh, and freely available information that seems fairly harmless? Disappearing quietly, which is the modern equivalent of burning books.

There is censorship and then there is this incredible, recurrent, systemic flaming of knowledge that societies undergo.

The present-day irony? We’re living in the Age of Information and never has information been more monetised, politicised, controlled and erased. I know the Generation Independence (okay, Boomer) actually think that Millenials who grew up with the Internet spend all our time obsessing about Influencers and the latest TikTok videos but therein lies the surprise.

Anyone who remembers dial-up and Napster is actually quite adept at this new information landscape and we are either struggling on the side of keeping the Internet open and private and free, or working with governments and other organisations to step up the destruction of these ideals.

I am proud of African innovations in the cyberworld, between Kenya and Rwanda there is incredible innovation, my favourites being the mobile banking system and incredibly cool health care systems stuff. But as a writer I am also watching my and other independents’ online followership grow suspiciously fast in this election year, while keeping an eye on the various epicentres of innovation in the arts of burning the Internet in Age of Information.

Russia, Cambridge Analytica, False News, Hong Kong protests, Cameroon internet switch-off, Black Lives Matter footage manipulation, Tanzanian laws and regulations governing everything information, Chinese facial recognition technology as well that social credit system straight out of an Orwellian nightmare.

The Flames of State and Civilization glow, much as a massive bonfire of freedoms put to flame in the dark of a looted ancient city, even if today it is just done in the cool bunkers of servers whose lights blink ominously where we cannot see them.