Africans are doing IT for themselves

One of the things that worries and frustrates me the most about the attitudes of people who live on the very cool continent of Africa is that we have developed a poverty mindset which often causes us to wait around for the Big Bad Developed World to come to our rescue in learning, adapting and providing tools for development.

But a bunch of Ugandan students from Makerere University along, with a team from Rhodes University (yay!) are proving me wrong. The students in collaboration with a group of linguists and support from translate.org.za held a two-day Translate@thon during which they translated the Mozilla Firefox browser into Luganda.

An article on Tectonic reporting the event explained the achievement by saying that the students’ work and commitment to the project “allowed them to make a practical contribution to their language’s presence in the digital age”.

And one of the most important aspects of this project is that the shared and adaptable nature of open source allowed for the modification of the browser to Luganda. This is a move away from the often culturally imperialistic reality that says software is written by elite and developed countries and those who wish to use it need to learn for the software, rather than making the software work for them.

The translation of software is a big issue in terms of accessibility and extension of new media. The more ICTs are opened up to people worldwide in their own language. The less ’strange’ and foreign they will become.

So well done to pioneering Africans.