COURSE HRD 2101: COMMUNICATION SKILLS
LECTURE NO. 3 TO ENGINEERING, AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES AND
TECHNOLOGY STUDENTS, JKUAT
Lecturer: Paul N. Njoroge
Communication in Human History: A Brief Survey
The Challenges of University Study
During my first lecture I gave three hints about how to improve your
communication skills using a Do It Yourself (DIY) approach. I mentioned: (1)
Reading; (2) Own Writing; and (3) Communicating Formally. I wish to add to that
list before I talk briefly about the challenges of University study or How to Become
a Serious University Student. After doing both of those things, I’ll move to the main
subject of our Lecture: Communication in Human History, including the importance
of communication in building a scientific community and tradition.
Now for the other three tips on taking your own initiative to imrove your
communication skills.
4. Listen to good Radio programmes and listen to and watch educational TV
programmes or videos. If you can record them for future reference, do so.
At any rate, make notes and keep them in your portfolio. Pay special
attention to BBC broadcasts.
5. Browse, if you can, on the World Wide Web.
6. Hold serious academic discussions with your peers and/or lecturers.
What are the concerns at Universities about students’ attitudes, codes of behaviour
and what kinds of regulations are normally made? Let us take note of the concerns
at only one institution—Maryland Community College of the United States.
Incidentally this college has a very comprehensive English Language Skills course.
Policy on Attendance and ‘Tardiness’
Tardiness simply means failure to keep time, being late or failing to remain in
attendance for the required time. The policy is that students should always attend
classes, should avoid arriving late or leaving earlier. Non-attendance should only
occur with prior notification of the lecturer concerned. At Maryland, if a student
without any notification is absent for a full week, the student is withdrawn from the
class.
And for being 15 minutes late on three consecutive occasions, a student is
considered absent for a whole class!
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Therefore,
students.
conscientious
attendance
and
punctuality
are
expected
from
Standard Ratio for College Course Work Preparation
This ratio defines the time the student spends in a formal class and the time the
student spends preparing for that class. At Maryland, that ratio is 1:3: for each
formal class hour, the student should spend 3 hours in preparation! For our local
purposes, would it be asking for too much to propose that the student spends three
times, on own study and revision, the time spent in formal class?
Other Requirements
1. Participation in class discussions and exercises.
2. Punctual completion and submission of assignments.
3. Keeping a portfolio or folder or file of lecture notes, handouts of literature
materials and assignments.
Keep well preserved all documents that are part of your university education.
4. Maintain academic honesty and academic ethics. What does this mean? At its
most negative, it means not cheating in your exams, which of course, cannot be
expected of University students. It also means respecting the integrity of
University materials: never cut out a chapter from a library book. From a more
positive point of view, it means honestly acknowledging sources of your
information by giving Bibliographical references.
Communication in Human History
The Oral Phase
The phase of human history prior to the invention of writing may be described as an
Oral Phase: communication was mainly through human speech. This was a phase
that lasted millenia, or thousands of years. From the advent or arrival or coming
of Homo sapiens sapiens, our species, around 50,000 years ago, Man mainly
communicated orally until about 5,000 years ago in Egypt and Mesopotamia when
the earliest invention of writing took place. We have noted in an earlier lecture that
so far as our Kenyan societies are concerned the Oral phase lasted until the early
years of the 20th century. Even so, pockets of rural illiteracy are with us to this
very day.
We may quite easily seek to understand the general characteristics of an Oral
culture from studying our own traditional, pre-modern societies. And we can, by
also looking at these societies, arrive at a reasonable answer to the questions: what
was the nature of communication during the Oral phase of human society? What did
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people communicate to each other and to subsequent generations during this Oral
Phase?
But before we zero in on the speech-based communication society, we need to
remember that other means of communication also existed during this
predominantly oral phase. Which modes of communication, other than oral, can we
reasonably assume existed during those early millenia?
Body language, ‘unarticulated’ language like grunts, yells, hums of approval must
be as old as Man—indeed, must go to his pre-human ape-like ancestors. One
powerful medium of body language, of course, is dancing which is as old as Man.
You can picture to yourself different kinds of dances for many different occasions.
Over vast millenia there must have been ritual dances and war and hunting dances.
Young warriors or hunters worked themselves into a frenzy of courage and bravery
by fierce dances, no doubt wielding weapons of stone or wood. And there were also
dances bringing the village community together, where some people performed and
others looked on as spectators. For mass communication over vast millenia
involved actual get-togethers, people gathering together in physical contact in an
open field, probably on a cool afternoon or a moonlit night.
In April 1953, The National Geographic Magazine (Volume CIII, No. 4) published an
article entitled “New Guinea’s Rare Birds and Stone Age Men”. New Guinea is Papua
New Guinea to the north of Australia. In the central highlands of New Guinea still
lived Stone Age people. Their means of communication tell us something about the
types of communication that existed in the early millenia of human history (prehistory). Dancing brought communities together, binding them in an emotion of
oneness. Let me quote briefly from the report:
From sunup to sundown three days in a row, platoons of [Guianians] pounded
the dance arena with their feet, led by a chieftain who intoned a restless,
repetitious chant which held all the relentless madness of delirium.
All day long the bare feet tramped and shuffled; the red, blue, and gold field
of paradise [bird] plumes [worn by the dancing warriors] nodded and swayed;
the pulsing drumbeats and incessant songs wove a hypnotic spell over the
dancers.
Around them crowded spectators—women, girls, children, oldsters—gaping
and remarking upon one brave’s agility, another’s grandeur.
The author of this report also describes what is called a ‘sing-sing’ dance,
performed in the evening/early night in a dark large hut lighted by a wood fire.
Handsomely decorated and adorned men and young girls dance to a singsong
chant. Let us quote from the report:
Soon a voice from somewhere in the hut began a singsong chant. Louder and
louder it rose as the men chimed in and took up the beat. … Gradually, as the
music took hold, girls and men began to sway slightly. The chief’s partners …
moved with the dance’s rhythm. … One gripped the old man’s shoulder … and
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her nose rubbed his. It was this nose rubbing which appeared to produce the
ecstasy that seized the dancers. ...
There were marriage dances informed with messages of erotic love. And there were
also dances performed as part of funeral ceremonies. Sometimes, as when an old
warrior died, fierce dances were danced by men armed with machetes to the sound
of drums. Sparks would fly as the machetes clanged together in warriors’ salutes
and the dances would climax in delirious fury, as if these warriors were battling
Death and exorcising it.
Dancing was not the only means of non-verbal communication used by our Stone
Age ancestors. There were visual means of communication, including those prehistorical cave paintings, some of them showing people hunting animals like the
horse, ostrich and so on. Probably the idea was to communicate to fellow hunters
the feeling of magical power over hunted prey. And, of course, in drawing these
figures those pre-historic artists have been able to communicate with generationsupon-generations of humanity: we learn, for example, what great value they
attached to hunting as a means of obtaining a livelihood.
For some of us, it is all so fascinating, one would want to go deeper into it. But time
does not allow. Suffice it then to mention other means of (visual) communication:
(a) figurines of clay, of human forms or animals or natural land forms must have
been moulded by people probably for magical or religious purposes; (b) wood
carvings of gods and human forms would have been made and people would
gather at shrines to pay tribute to these images; (c) masks would also be carved
and worn, in West Africa, for example, to symbolize the presence of ancestral
spirits.
How Were Messages Passed from Place to Place During the Oral Phase of
History? How Was Education and Socialization Achieved During This
Phase?
In the National Geographic Magazine article already referred to, the New Guinea
community had an interesting method of sending out messages over long
distances. What we may call a ‘human voice chain’ method is used. The chief may
shout a call for men to do a certain task. To quote from the article: ‘The call is
picked up far down the valley and repeated again and again. So faithfully do New
Guinea men observe this custom that messages swiftly travel as far as 50 miles [80
kilometres].’
In one of the segments of this Communication Skills course, you will study Sources
of Information. One type of sources of information that is useful to somebody
researching methods of communication during the Oral Phase of human history is a
good novel written about the pre-modern period. In this regard, Chinua Achebe’s
novel Things Fall Apart, a classical work anybody calling himself/herself a scholar
should have read, is fascinating. Achebe must have meticulously researched the
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past of his people, the Ibo of Eastern Nigeria. Facts of the type of communication
are presented simply in the context of a gripping story. Listen to some extracts:
1. ‘Okonkwo had just blown out a palm-oil lamp and stretched himself on his
bamboo bed when he heard the ogene [a kind of gong] of the town-crier
piercing the still night air. Gome, gome, gome, gome, boomed the hollow
metal.
Then the crier gave his message, and at the end of it beat his instrument
again. And this was the message. Every man of Umuofia was asked to
gather at the market-place tomorrow morning. … And in all the nine
villages of Umuofia a town-crier with his ogene asked every man to be
present tomorrow morning.’
2. ‘In the morning the market-place was full. There must have been about
ten thousand men there all talking in low voices. At last Ogbuefi Ezeugo
stood up in the midst of them and bellowed four times, ‘Umuofia kwenu!’
and on each occasion he faced a different direction and seemed to push
the air with a clenched fist. And ten thousand men answered, ‘Yaa!’ each
time. Then there was perfect silence. Ugbuefi Ezeugo was a powerful
orator and was always chosen to speak on such occasions.’
3. ‘Go-di-di-go-go-di-go. Di-go-go-di-go. It was the ekwe [drum] talking to
the clan. One of the things every man learned was the language of the
hollowed-out instrument. …
The first cock had not crowed, and Umuofia was still swallowed up in sleep
and silence when the ekwe began to talk. … Men stirred on their bamboo
beds and listened anxiously. Somebody was dead. … The ekwe carried the
news to all the nine villages [of Umuofia] and even beyond.’
4. ‘As soon as the six men were locked up, court messengers went into
Umuofia to tell the people that their leaders would not be released unless
they paid a fine of two hundred and fifty bags of cowries.
“Unless you pay the fine immediately,” said their headman, “we will take
your leaders to Umuru before the big white man, and hang them.”
The story spread quickly through the villages, and was added to as it went.
Some said that the men had already been taken to Umuru and would be
hanged on the following day. Some said that their families would also be
hanged. Others said that soldiers were already on their way to shoot the
people of Umuofia as they had done in Abame.’
As you can see from the above extracts, Things Fall Apart gives us a good picture of
the means of communication in a pre-modern, pre-literate traditional oral culture.
Drums, it appears, were an important means of communication among East African
and, indeed, Kenyan societies—the Joluo, the Akamba, etc. There is room for
research into this area for the motivated and curious student. Which communities
used the horn-trumpet or the bull roarer? The Agikuyu did not know the use of
the drum for mass-communication. They would blow their coro, a kind of horn
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trumpet in situations of national emergency—for example to alert clans living in far
off ridges of an enemy attack.
We are only able to glimpse the tip of the iceberg, or to use a different metaphor,
to touch the hairs on the tail of the elephant in our seeking to understand the
phenomenon of communication in pre-modern society.
Our picture would be completely inadequate if we do not say something about
communication and traditional education and socialization.
Traditional Education or Education in Oral Cultures
Education in oral cultures integrated learning about practical things and learning
proper social behaviour and how to be an accepted member of one’s community.
These two aspects went hand in hand; they were not divorced from each other.
This, obviously, is a vast subject on its own and we can only sketchily illustrate this
point.
From an early age, little boys would accompany their older brothers or their father
to the grazing fields and they would learn herding skills: where to take, say, goats
and sheep for grazing, when the goats and sheep should take a rest, how to
prevent the animals from wandering into cultivated fields, etc. Girls would learn
how to carry their baby brothers and sisters on their backs, eventually how to do
weeding on cultivated fields, how to gather vegetables or dig for sweet potatoes,
etc.
These are practical skills but they are also part of socialization—boys learning to
do ‘male’ tasks and girls ‘female’ tasks in accordance with culturally determined
sex-related division of labour. As they became young men, boys would learn the
work of farm-clearing or house construction. And maturing girls would learn to
prepare themselves for motherhood.
Apart from practical learning, there was also education about how each individual
was part of a greater community. Each child learned how to relate with respect to
his father and mother—and the child learned that all elders of his or her mother’s
age were to be treated almost like fathers or mothers.
A person went through various rites of passage—second birth, circumcision,
marriage, initiation into elderhood—each rite marking a higher or deeper stage of
initiation into his or her society. Such rites of passage were accompanied by ritual
ceremony, even ordeal—but also by much verbal instruction. On circumcision, for
example, youths learned the secrets of sex, procreation and marriage.
Which verbal forms of communication were used in pre-literate education and
socialization?
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(a) Oral narratives
Folk stories were told to the young. The stories were entertaining in their own right.
But often they taught children to shun anti-social behaviour. A wicked animal, like
the Hyena, might be portrayed in its anti-social predatory tendencies. Or the lifedevouring Ogre might feature. But if you read Achebe’s classical novel, Things Fall
Apart, you will notice that oral narratives were not only told to the young. Wise
people, in trying to illustrate a point while addressing an adult audience, would
refer to some well known folk story, part of the cultural inheritance of the people.
Listen, for example to this adult conversation:
“Never kill a man who says nothing,” [Uchendu burst out.] These men of Abame
were fools. What did they know about the man?” He … told a story to illustrate this
point. “Mother Kite once sent her daughter to bring food. She went, and brought
back a duckling. ‘You have done very well,’ said Mother Kite to her daughter, ‘but
tell me, what did the mother of this duckling say when you swooped and carried its
child away?’ ‘It just walked away.’ ‘You must return the duckling,’ said Mother Kite.
…”
(b) Songs and Poetry
Education and socialization were also carried out during communal gatherings
through the medium of songs and poetry that would often accompany dances. If
elders wanted to pass a message to young people they would ask lead-singers to
sing the message during such ceremonies. During religious rituals, a priest might
by a combination of dance, ritual poetry and chants reenact the myths of a clan,
teaching his audience about the founding of the village and the values of the
ancestors. A reading of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God would be very instructive in
this regard.
(c) Proverbs and Riddles
These also carry the wisdom of an oral culture and often provide moral instruction.
The Achievements of the Oral Phase of Human Culture
Listen to what I am going to say very carefully, because it is something I have
thought about very seriously. You do not have to agree with me, but at least give
what I have to say serious thought. A person living in the year 2004 AD may be
tempted to think that, with all the great scientific and technological achievements
made in Europe, America and Asia (certainly these achievements have not yet
become an African heritage), it is irrelevant to think about what a relatively small
population of human beings was doing more than 10,000 years ago. In my view,
such thinking is unworthy of a scholar with a modicum of imagination. Such an
attitude is also patently dangerous, because it predisposes one to a false
‘understanding’ of the development of human society. Such an attitude also flies in
the face of the best traditions of Western or any authentic scholarship.
It is my view that for one to understand what is happening today one should know
what was happening yesterday. To understand present-day achievements one
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should understand the long journey conducted from the very beginning—the
journey that has got Humankind to its present development. This is not merely an
academic exercise. It is borne out of a practical realization that without certain
achievements made during past ages, present achievements would not have been
possible. A child cannot jump in one step into adulthood. Humankind could not
jump from its elementary technological level in one step to 21st century scientific
and technological achievements.
This is very well understood in Western education. It is also quite well understood
by Kenyan curriculum developers at secondary school level—where prehistory is
part of the History syllabus.
I do not know whether it is well-understood by University students of Science and
Technology in African universities.
It does need to be appreciated especially in Africa. Why? Because we are still, in
the 21st century, at an elementary stage of scientific and technological
development. We are therefore duty bound, if we are committed to
scientific/technological development, to seek to understand the whole human
journey—from its most primitive phase, through early achievements, to the
Scientific/Technological Revolution of the last 500 years.
Now let us see, very briefly, what was achieved by Humankind during the Oral
Phase.
(a) The Agricultural Revolution
Humankind started to domesticate food plants and animals as long time ago as
10,000 B. C. The Agricultural Revolution spread throughout the world over 8,000
years. The Agricultural Revolution—food cultivation, herding of livestock, as
opposed to gathering of fruits, seeds and vegetables in the wild and hunting of
game—enabled human societies to live a settled life. Human populations multiplied
and increased. Conditions for building of cities were created as well as conditions
for learning. It is city dwelling populations that invented writing. But the
Agricultural Revolution pre-dated Writing. It was achieved by Humankind during the
Oral Phase.
(b) The Leap from the Stone Age to the Metal Age
In certain places the Bronze Age of the 2nd millenium B. C. was achieved by
societies which had already invented writing (Mesopotamia, Egypt). The Iron Age
which came in the 1st millenium B.C. was also entered by societies with a
knowledge of writing. But in Africa pre-literate Oral Cultures acquired the
knowledge of Iron making after 500 B.C. The Bantu peoples of sub-Saharan Africa
spread the art of Iron working through the First Millenium AD and the Second. They
had not yet learned how to read and write.
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(c) Knowledge of Social Organization
Even pre-literate peoples learned the skills of social organization and living as
communities with rules and laws designed to hold the community together and to
make life pleasant and worthwhile.
While most societies of Kenya were fairly small and quite decentralized, kingdoms
of quite complex organization did exist in Uganda; and in western Kenya the
kingdom of Wanga was developing in the 19th century.
Complex kingdoms did exist in West Africa. The Zulu empire of Southern Africa was
created by the great Zulu ruler, Shaka in the 19th century.
It had a large standing army which needed to be fed, and to be housed. The Zulu
therefore developed methods of managing a complex state—before they had
learned how to read and write. Complex state systems thus were created in Africa
by pre-literate peoples.
Only an African pseudo scholar would regard with derision Africa’s lengthy Oral
Phase. During this Phase African communities developed farming methods that are
still being used in many parts of rural Africa today.
For all Humankind, Oral Communication proved itself equal to carrying the burden
of consummating the Agricultural Revolution. Knowledge of a great variety of crops
and appropriate methods of farming were passed from generation to generation by
word of mouth.
Human communities developed treasuries of Oral Tradition which preserved
practical knowledge and the collective memory of clan origins and lineages and
indeed of tribal origins. In centralized states controlled by hereditary kings, for
example in the Kingdom of Buganda, there were guardians/experts of the Oral
Tradition who could recite with great accuracy the genealogies of kings. In modern
Historiography—that is, methods of learning History—the Oral Tradition is used in
reconstructing the past of societies, especially African societies.
THE SCRIBAL PHASE OF HUMAN HISTORY (3000 B.C. TO 1450 AD)
There is a theme I will keep on repeating in my lectures. This is the theme: we are
part of a tradition of human development and human knowledge. We have inherited
knowledge of doing practical things—for example of growing food or keeping
domesticated animals or smelting iron—from human generations that lived in the
past millenia. Any intelligent person living today should see himself or herself as
standing in this long line of human development and human knowledge—as part of
the long human tradition.
The Scribal Phase of human history is especially relevant to the developments
that have gone to shape the thinking and sensibilities of the modern world. I have
already lamented that the time allocated for Communication Skills is too short to do
anything more than gloss over the surface of any topic. For our purposes, let us
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note the following 5 contributions to the development of the Modern World made by
the use of manual writing after it had been invented.
1. Written documents make up a treasury of historical knowledge about the
Ancient world.
2. The great World Religions and great philosophies have come down to us
through written manuscripts. These are Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
Buddhism and Confucianism, the great philosophy of China.
3. Written documents, especially in the Ancient Greek language, contain
some of the earliest manifestations of systematic, scholarly, scientific
enquiry. Manuscripts dating back to several centuries Before Christ contain
(a) early historiography; (b) early science, including physics and
astronomy; (c) early philosophy and political science, including the
science of logic; and early mathematics, including geometry.
Needless to say Greek thought in all these areas forms part of the Western
tradition of thought and education to which, by historical development,
we in Kenya and Africa belong.
4. Many aspects of Law came to European societies from the Roman era of
about 300 B.C. to about 400 AD.
These laws were obviously preserved in written manuscripts. Roman law
traditions have a continuing relevance in the modern world.
5. The alphabet (that is the letters that make up the writing system) have
come to us in the modern world from early Greek and Latin (Roman) hand
writing. Printing letter-types have also on the whole been developed from
Roman manuscript writing.
Let us now say something very briefly about each of the five listed
contributions.
1. Ancient Documents as Sources of History
We have already seen that writing was first invented in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In
Egypt the writing material was parchment, a material made of the skins of sheep
or goats, and papyrus, a reed growing on the banks of the River Nile. In
Mesopotamia inscriptions would be made on newly made clay tiles or bricks or
tablets and the brick would then be dried leaving permanent records. These tablet
documents contain records of kings and dynasties, ancient letters, and law, which
enable us to get a picture of the kind of life people lived, say around 2000 B.C.
Egyptian documents (and archaeology) have helped the development of
Egyptology or studies of ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptian documents concern
themselves with governmental matters and private life, include administrative and
legal reports, accountancy records, private letters, stories and narratives.
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For those of you with a genuine scholar instinct, documents recovered from ancient
times have been translated into English. Two good examples which I am aware of
from my reading are: J. B. Pritchard (Ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to
the Old Testament, Princeton University Press, 1950; and D. Winton Thomas (Ed.),
Documents from Old Testament Times, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1958. (See
Robert Davidson, The Old Testament, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.) The
Old Babylonians, for example, had a Creation Epic in which the god of creation was
called Marduk. From Mesopotamia have also come the law code of the kingdom of
Sumeria of around 1800 B.C. (the law code of Lipit Ishtar), the Akkadian Laws of
Eshnunna of the same era and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi of the 18th
century B.C. The moral code of the Old Babylonians had similarities with the Old
Testament moral code. Listen to this:
Anu and Enlil [Babylonian gods] named me
to promote the welfare of the peoples,
Hammurabi, the devout god-fearing prince
to cause justice to prevail in the land
to destroy the wicked and the evil
that the strong might not oppress the weak …
2. The World Religions are Religions of the Written Word
Judaism, the religion of the Jews, and the real mother of Christianity and Islam,
was a religion of the written Word. The beliefs and religious practices of the
Israelites were for a long time during the 2nd millenium B.C. carried as Oral
Tradition. Then from around 900 B.C. traditions of God’s law and God’s revelation
to Israel started to be written down by priestly or prophetic scribes. The earliest
prophetic book, the Book of Amos, was probably written around 750 B.C. The whole
Old Testament was probably put together during the 4th century B.C. by the Jewish
priests-scribes who had returned from exile in Babylon.
This was a religion that was kept alive by readings done in public worship. When
Jesus started to teach some time around 30 AD, he would read from the Law
(Torah) and Prophets of the Old Testament. He would himself found a religion,
Christianity, that would be given expression by written documents: firstly the
Pauline Letters (Epistles) that spelt out the Christian Doctrine, then the Gospels
written from around 70 AD onwards, starting with the Gospel of St. Mark.
Writes H. G. Wells: “There can be no doubt that Mohammed’s thoughts were very
strongly influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas.” During the Seventh century AD
Mohammed wrote the Quran and founded the Islamic faith. Thus came into the
world the third of the Great World Religions of the Written Word.
3. The Greek Tradition of Learning, Scholarship and Education
Do you know that the Greeks gave the world the idea of the Olympic Games,
athletic competitions drawing together competitors from different states to foster
inter-state understanding and friendship? In Ancient Classical times during which
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Greek influence was very significant Olympic Games took place every 4 years (with
breaks caused by wars) from 776 B.C. to AD 394—that is for more than 1000
years! The Modern Olympics—the latest 2004 version taking place this European
‘Summer’ in Athens, Greece, their original, classical home—started in 1896. They
are only about 110 years old.
Greek influence coming down to our modern world is not restricted to the Olympic
Games. From about 500 B.C. the Greeks created in written form (a) philosophy;
(b) theatre and drama; (c) the writing of history; and they made great
innovations in architecture. The classical Greek tradition is still taken into account
to this day in learning and scholarship. Socrates died in 399 B.C. He was the
master of good logic in philosophical argument. Young people used to gather
around him in the town square, and would engage him in well argued discourse.
(One day, it is told, a young man asked him, ‘Should I or should I not marry?’ And
Socrates, probably pointing a finger at him told him: ‘Either way, you’ll regret it!’)
His successors—Plato (427-347 B.C.) and Aristotle—built on his tradition. It is
said that modern computer programming benefits from the science of logic
developed by classical Greek philosophers, and especially Aristotle.
The Greek historical writer Herodotus is credited with being the father of modern
historiography or methods of studying history by first gathering concrete data.
Herodotus was born in Asia Minor (Present day Turkey) in 484 B.C. Hippocrates at
around 420 B.C. produced a vast body of medical literature. He bequeathed to
the Modern World the Hippocratic Oath by which medical practitioners swear to
uphold medical ethics. Here are extracts from the Hippocratic Oath:
I swear by Apollo the healer … by Health and all the powers of healing, and
call to witness all the gods and goddesses that I may keep this Oath and
Promise to the best of my ability and judgement. …
I will use my power to heal the sick to the best of my ability and judgement; I
will abstain from harming or wronging any man by it.
I will not give a fatal draught to anyone if I am asked, nor will I suggest any
such thing. Neither will I give a woman means to procure an abortion. …
Whatever I see or hear, professionally or privately, which ought not to be
divulged, I will keep secret and tell no one. …
All this, of course, has come down to our era from hand-written manuscripts.
Another Greek medical practitioner, Galen, used Hippocrates’s ideas and wrote a
famous book on Hygiene in AD 180. Galen remained the dominant medical
authority over the next 1000 years.
Much of mathematics was created in ancient Greece both in the theory of
numbers and in geometry. Pythagoras of the famous Pythagoras Theorem (‘In a
right angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the
triangles on the two other sides.’) lived around 540 B.C. Euclid who created a whole
‘school’ of geometry—Euclidian Geometry—lived around 300 B.C. Euclid’s handwritten books, with their formal axioms and rigorous methods of proof, shaped
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mathematical thinking for more than 2000 years. Geometry is derived from the
Greek language and means ‘earth-measuring’. The Greek geometrician
Erastothenes (around 230 B.C.) applied geometrical ideas to estimating the radius
of the earth.
And, of course, every high school girl and boy has heard about Archimedes of the
famous Archimedes Principle! This famous ancient physicist also wrote by hand
about his enquiries into physical laws. …
4. The Legacy of an Alphabet
It is thought that writing using an alphabet developed from earlier attempts to
describe human activities using pictures. As early as 30,000 years ago, Man had
learned to use pictographs drawn on the walls of caves. In a pictograph you can
tell what the message being communicated is because there is a literal meaning:
the picture of a man is clearly the picture of a man, that of a beast clearly that of a
beast, and the spear tool is discernible as such.
The development from a pictograph to an ideograph is a development in
symbolization. An ideograph does not look like the real thing but suggests it: for
example, a man could be suggested by a vertical stroke and two transverse
strokes. The Egyptians and Sumerians went a stage further beyond ideographs
and developed hieroglyphic writing and cuneiform writing respectively.
Hieroglyphic means the writing of priests; cuneiform means ‘wedge-shaped’.
How had this gone beyond ideographic representation? Symbols were now used to
represent syllabic sounds, to represent human speech: ma, ba etc. From this stage
the development of alphabetic writing was not far: the letters of the alphabet
essentially represent the disjointed sounds of human speech which are combined to
make syllables and finally word symbols.
The Phoenicians of the eastern Mediterranean coast are said to have used the first
alphabet at around 1500 B.C. Hebrew was also written in an alphabet, as was also
Greek later and Latin, still later. Our modern alphabet has evolved from the Greek
and Latin letters.
Just spare a thought to the vast and immense advantages of using an alphabet! In
our case, we have to master only 26 letter symbols. Compare this to the Chinese
who never developed beyond ideographic representation stage. We are told that
there are more than 40,000 characters in the largest Chinese dictionaries, while the
printing of a modern newspaper needs about 7000 characters! How challenging it is
to write in ideographs as opposed to an alphabet! The alphabet simplified beyond
imagination the process of learning to read and write. No wonder the modern
Chinese have been attracted to the idea of alphabetising their writing and their
printing!
Surely we should be grateful for our alphabet heritage.
13
THE RENAISSANCE, PRINTING AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
In situations of learning and acquiring knowledge, people find themselves
uncomfortable with undefined, amorphous (that is shapeless) sets of information.
There is a human tendency towards creating frameworks for human knowledge in
order to get a convenient handle to what people know. In the context of history, for
example, it is convenient to think of periods or eras or phases of human history.
At the risk of oversimplification it may be convenient for our purposes to think of
the following phases:
1. The Prehistoric Era
This is the long period of human history before history was recorded in writing. If
we are thinking of beings belonging to our species Homo sapiens sapiens, this
period extends from 50,000 to 5,000 years ago. There are scholars, however, who
would want to go even further to accommodate the ancestors of Homo sapiens
sapiens who belonged to other species while also being of the Homo genus. Their
argument is that Man was in the making, was becoming, through some two million
years during which pre-human apes started the systematic use of stone tools. The
Prehistoric Era spans the Old (up to 15000 B.C.) and the Late Stone Age (15000 –
2000 B.C.)
2. The Classical Period (500 B.C. to 500 AD)
The Classical Period would describe the period of the flowering of the eastern
Mediterranean Area civilizations and especially the Greek civilization with its writing
culture, development of theatre and drama, astronomy, philosophy and logic,
mathematics and science. This period would cover the rise of Greek as a cultural
power to the fall of the Roman Empire in the 6th century AD; Greek learning had
been able to survive under the conditions of the Roman Peace.
3. The Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is that period of European history between the disintegration of the
Roman Empire around the 6th century AD and European Revival from the 12th
century AD onwards. The Middle Ages are said to have contained within them the
Dark Ages of Europe—because during this time not many new ideas were born.
During this period the writings of the Classical Greek thinkers continued to be read
within educated Church circles by a few. The Bible was read to congregations by
priests. There was, on the whole, not much critical thinking.
But for purposes of our understanding the development of our Modern World, we
need to remember at least the following facts:
1. The Gestation or Development of the Nation States of Europe That
Would in Later History Play a Pivotal Role in World History
The Roman Empire had disintegrated and anything like centralised control over
disparate peoples in Europe had collapsed. European peoples living in separated
14
localities were therefore thrown upon themselves, so to speak, developing their
own national political and social systems as well as their own cultures—including
own national languages which would borrow generously from the Classical
Languages, Greek and Latin, but would be autonomous. Languages/cultures like
English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and so on were developing. For good or
for ill these cultures were to play a dominant role in subsequent centuries,
becoming the languages of powerful European nation states, while some would
become the second, or even, first languages of subject non-European races and
peoples.
2. The Contribution of Charlemagne (Charles
Preservation of the Latin Writing Alphabet
the
Great)
to
the
During the medieval (Middle Ages) period Barbarian kings struggled for control of
parts of the former Roman Empire. They were people without a civilized culture.
Charlemagne reigned in western continental Europe from 768 AD to 814 AD. He
himself was a Barbarian who did not know how to write or read but he had respect
for learning. He is remembered for encouraging the establishment of a school at
Tours (in present-day France) by an English scholar named Alcuin. At this school
was practised the style of writing (calligraphy) that would become the model for
the rest of Europe. Thus by the 10th century (by 900 AD) the use of letter forms
from which the small letters of our alphabet are derived had spread throughout
medieval Europe. That was the contribution of Charlemagne, the illiterate Emperor!
3. Christian Teaching, the Christian Church and Its Religious Orders, and
the Influences of Arab and Jewish Scholars in Medieval Europe
Some form of religious teaching went on during the Middle Ages and masses of
Europeans were fired with fanatic Christian devotion. In Catholic monasteries and
among religious orders, old Classical manuscripts were preserved. Learning and
scholarly enquiry had passed on to Arab scholars living in the Mediterranean world
and some finding themselves into European courts. When the German Emperor
Frederick II (his reign started in 1198) set court in Sicily south of Italy, he
welcomed Arabic scholars into his court. These scholars introduced into the Court
the writings of Aristotle. These Arab scholars also most significantly passed on the
knowledge of Arabic numerals to Europe. To this day we use these numerals—
their contribution to learning, mathematics and science being almost as significant
as the contribution of the Roman alphabet.
The Intellectual Revival of the Europeans or the Renaissance
The stirrings of the intellectual revival of the Europeans may be dated to the 12th
century (1100-1200) AD. During this century, to quote H. G. Wells again in his A
Short History of the World:
Trade was reviving; cities were recovering ease and safety; the standard of
education was rising in the Church and spreading among laymen. The
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a period of growing, independent …
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cities: Venice, Florence, Genoa, Lisbon, Paris, Bruges, London, Antwerp,
Hamburg, Nuremberg, Novgorod, Wisby and Bergen, for example.
In the 13th century Emperor Frederick II to whom we have already referred
gathered around himself philosophers and thinkers who among other matters
read the philosophy of Aristotle preserved by Arab scholars. In 1224 Frederick
founded the University of Naples, and ‘he enlarged and enriched the great
medical school at Salerno University. He also founded a zoological garden. He
left a book on hawking, which shows him to have been an acute observer of
the habits of birds, and he was one of the first Italians to write Italian verse.
Italian poetry was indeed born at his court. He has been called by an able
writer “the first of the moderns”, and the phrase expresses aptly the
unprejudiced detachment of his intellectual side’.
It is not possible to give an adequate picture of the European Renaissance here and
a listing of some of the main features, and implications for the making of the
Modern World, of this Revival will have to suffice:
1. The Flowering of European Languages and Literatures
We have already seen that Emperor Frederick wrote in Italian, a language of one of
the many nations of Europe. Subsequent history was to see the great development
of national European languages including French and English and the development
of literature or writing in these local native languages. One of the great dramatists
of all time, William Shakespeare (23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) is a child of the
European Renaissance. He shaped the national language English into a tool of
sublime poetic expression.
2. The Invention of Printing Gives the World the First Genuine Medium of
Mass Communication
In 1440 Johann Gutenberg invented movable type in Germany—that is the
characters of the alphabet cast in metal, capable of assembly on a form for making
an ink impression on paper in the printing process. The Arabs had also introduced
paper to Europe from China. H. G. Wells writes: “It is scarcely too much to say that
paper made the intellectual revival of Europe possible.” We can extend this and say
that printing impelled the Renaissance and made possible the beginnings of the
mass education of Europe.
The printed book has since the invention of printing been the dominant
medium of artistic literary expression, communication of historical
knowledge and philosophical and social ideas as well as communication of
scientific and technological knowledge.
And for ages printing would make possible that great medium of mass
communication: the newspaper.
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Printing predated the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, but in
subtle as well as direct ways it contributed most significantly to both Revolutions.
3. The Renaissance was about enormous intellectual curiosity, about
geographical exploration and discovery … about the extension of
European influence to other parts of the world, about the beginnings of
Globalization which today is the hallmark of the World system.
If William Shakespeare, the great English playwright and Leonardo da Vinci, the
great Italian artist who painted the famous Mona Lisa were children of the
Renaissance, so was Christopher Columbus, the sailor from the Italian city of
Genoa who sailed westwards across the Atlantic to America in 1492; and so was
Vasco da Gama who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, in southern Africa, to
India in 1498—and the Portuguese Magellan who circumnavigated the world from
Seville, Spain, from 1519 to 1522.
Since the Renaissance to the very present, for good or for ill, the Europeans rose
“to the intellectual and material leadership of mankind”, again to quote H. G. Wells.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE RENAISSANCE: COMMUNICATION AND THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY, AND THE SCIENTIFIC
REVOLUTION
It should naturally interest the students of JKUAT, who are embarked on sciencebased courses, how the science tradition developed in the West—for the
international scientific community of today, including science and technology
students in an African university like JKUAT, are part of that tradition. You should
also appreciate the pivotal role played by communication in the forging of the
scientific community and scientific tradition.
Again, we can only sketch the bare highlights.
Mustn’t one start with the founding of universities on the eve of the Renaissance:
universities at Paris, Oxford, Bologna and other centres in Europe? At these schools
Greek learning, including the philosophy and logic of Aristotle, were resurrected. It
was again an era of great philosophical discussions, reminiscent of the Classical
Greek times.
Roger Bacon (about 1210 – 1293) was a Fransiscan Catholic at Oxford and H. G.
Wells characterises him as the father of modern experimental science. Roger
Bacon urged people to look at the world and study it and to overcome their ageold ignorance in order to understand the forces of nature so that they may harness
the forces to their purposes and needs.
About 800 years before the event, he foresaw engine-powered ocean-going ships,
automobiles and airplanes. This is a quotation from some of his writings:
17
Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great ships suited
to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with greater speed than if
they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made so that without a draught
animal they may be moved. … And flying machines are possible, so that a man
may sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may beat
the air in the manner of a flying bird.
Origins of the Scientific Community
Yet in spite of Bacon’s role as the prophet of science and the philosophical
discussions in the earliest pre-renaissance universities, there was no organized
science before the 17th century in Europe.
What is organized science and what are the visible institutions of the scientific
community? There are 4 major such institutions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Scientific societies
Specialist journals
Research institutions
International conferences.
The common factor between all these manifestations of the scientific community is
communication!
To begin with in the 16th century communication between scientists was by means
of published—and now printed-books. An example was Nicolaus Copernicus’s book
On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres which appeared in 1543. Johannes
Kepler, a German mathematician, wrote The Mystery of the Cosmos in 1596—when
he was 25 years old. Such books, written in Latin, were accessible to
scientific/astronomer scholars in most of Europe.
Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) is the great astronomer who demonstrated that the
Earth moves around the Sun. He invented telescopes for looking at and studying
heavenly bodies. When only 25 years old he was appointed Professor of
Mathematics at the University of Padua in Italy. In 1610 he published a book
entitled The Starry Messenger about what he had seen with his telescopic systems.
Galileo, according to John Marks in his great book Science and the Making of the
Modern World (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983), was a member of
‘probably the earliest scientific society, the Academia di Lincei or Academy of
the Lynxes, 1603-1630’. A lynx is an animal of the cat family noted for its own
sight. So this was the society of the ‘sharp-sighted ones’!
So with Galileo publishing of books and interactions within a scientific society were
combined as the means of communication to build a scientific community.
Another Academy or scientific society formed was called Academia del Cimento
or Academy of Experiments (1657-1667). Its proceedings were published under
the title Essays on Natural Experiments. To quote John Marks: “This was the
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forerunner of those proceedings of scientific societies which became the first
scientific journals.”
Academia di Lincei and Academia del Cimento, one should note were Italian
societies. Italian cities played a great role in the Intellectual Revival (Renaissance)
of Europe. Italy gave Europe Galileo (an astronomer), Dante the great writer of The
Divine Comedy, Michelangelo the great printer, and great architects.
Two contemporaries of Galileo, Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) in France and
Francis Bacon (1561-1623) [NOT Roger who had come earlier] in England were
also influential in the development of cooperation in science. Mersenne, a Jesuit
Catholic friar, published a book over 1000 pages: The Truth of the Sciences, against
the Sceptics or Pyrrhonians. He argued that Humankind could attain a body of
knowledge which could not seriously be doubted; he devoted more than 800 pages
to a summary of the vast body of scientific and mathematical knowledge which
existed in his day.
From 1623 onwards Mersenne started contacts with philosophers and scientists all
over Europe. Some came to visit him in Paris. But his major means of
communication was the vast correspondence (letter exchange) he maintained
for more than 20 years. Here let us quote directly from John Marks:
[Mersenne] became the unofficial secretary of the new republic of science, and
his correspondents included Galileo, Descartes, the chemist van Helmont, the
philosopher Hobbes and the mathematicians Fermat and Pascal. Later in the
century letters like those exchanged by Mersenne, containing news of scientific
and mathematical discoveries, were to form a major part of the first scientific
journals.
[Mersenne] marked a notable step in the organisation of experimental science
in the seventeenth century by his insistence on the careful specification of
experimental procedures, repetition of experiments, publication of the
numerical results of actual measurements as distinct from those calculated
from theory, and recognition of approximations.
Students of science, engineering and technology will no doubt agree that
Mersenne’s are still key elements in the organisation of experimental science.
As for Francis Bacon, he published his book Instauratio Magna or The Great
Instauration in 1620. His concern was with how knowledge should be
advanced. He taught that the first step is to collect as many observable facts as
possible about all kinds of phenomena, objects, arts and crafts, and supplied rules
of proceeding inductively from observations to discovery of what he called “forms of
simple nature” or general principles.
Francis Bacon described the objective of seeking knowledge in terms which should
directly challenge JKUAT students: “The seal and legitimate goal of all sciences
is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” So, almost
19
400 years ago Bacon was speaking to future scientists/technologists telling them, in
our case, to do practical things, for example to produce mechanical ploughs and
develop hybrid cereal seeds to enhance food production and combat our general
poverty.
In his book The New Atlantis (1627), Bacon describes a Utopia in which science and
scientists are organized by the government and in which both have a very high
status. The organized society of scientists is called ‘Solomon’s House’—after
Solomon the Wise King of Israel. Bacon wrote: “The End of our Foundation is the
knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the
bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”
Thus as the 17th century advanced, scientists developed
communicating with one another both formally and informally.
new
ways
of
The Royal Society of London and the Académie des Sciences of Paris
These two are the oldest still flourishing scientific societies—living witness to the
long-term resilience and determination of British and French scientists. They were
formed in the 1660s, so they are more than 300 years old. The societies had some
of their roots in informal meetings of scientists over the preceding 20 years. Many
of the men who founded the Royal Society had been meeting informally but
regularly in various groups in both London and Oxford since the 1640s. They
discussed scientific and philosophical matters and conducted scientific
experiments—avoiding “matters of theology and state affairs”. Robert Boyle who
gave science Boyle’s Law described one informal scientific group as the “Invisible
College”.
In July 1662 Charles II of England granted a royal charter (licence) to the Royal
Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. The Founder
Fellows of this Society were: Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Edmund Halley,
Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn and Robert Hooke (who was also the Curator of
Experiments).
The ‘business’ and ‘design’ of the Royal Society were described as follows:
To improve the knowledge of natural things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures,
Mechanick practices, Engymes and Inventions by Experiments.
Henry Oldenburg became the paid secretary to the Royal Society during 16621677. He maintained a vast correspondence with foreign scientists and this
communication enabled the society to be in contact with what was going on in
science all over Europe. In 1665 Oldenburg started the Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society, a monthly scientific journal which is still being published today!
Commitment,
discipline,
organisation
and
determined
visionary
management are the hallmarks of European scholarship. These qualities need to
20
be embraced by African scholarship. Do you as young scientists have these
qualities?
The Royal Society journal facilitated the communication of European scientists on
subjects covering Physics, Medicine, Geology and Anatomy.
The Académie Royale des Sciences of Paris was founded in 1966, also with roots
in informal meetings of scientists, some of which Oldenburg, the secretary to the
London Society, had attended. The French King Louis XIV supported the society
generously by:



supporting the payment of 16 academicians;
allowing some foreign scientists to join the French Academy;
providing laboratories.
The French Academy of Sciences was given formal responsibility for maintaining
standards of scientific work and for the improvement of French industry. France had
an independent journal, Journal de Sçavans founded in 1665, which contained book
reviews and reported on scientific meetings held both in France and abroad. This
journal is still appearing today under the title Journal des Savants (‘Journal of the
Learned’). The Academy on its part published a regular series of Mémoires.
In the 18th century, the Royal Society and the Paris Academy became models for
the establishment of many other national academies of science:





a
a
a
a
a
German academy was established in Berlin in 1700;
Russian one in St. Petersburg in 1725;
Swedish one in Stockholm in 1741;
Danish one in Copenhagen in 1743;
United States one in Philadelphia in 1743.
While before 1650 there were no scientific journals at all and in 1700 there were
fewer than 10, by 1750 the number of scientific journals began the exponential
growth that has continued ever since. Exponential growth means geometrical
increase, as opposed to arithmetical increase—where the increase is by the
multiplication of a quantity by itself. By 1800 about 100 journals were being
published and the earliest specialist journals (that is, journals specialising in one
area of scientific knowledge) were beginning to appear. Such were Chemistry
Journal in Germany (1778) and the Botanical Magazine in 1787. The Linnaean
Society became England’s first specialist scientific society, devoted to natural
history (nature study) in 1788. The Linnaean Society was appropriately named
after Carl Linnaeus, a great natural history classifier of animal, plant and mineral
specimens and, incidentally, the first biological scholar to name Man Homo sapiens
(in 1788). Charles Darwin, the father of the Theory of Evolution, read his famous
papers on evolution to a meeting of the Linnaean Society.
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Thus there was rapid growth of scientific journals both general from 1700, and
specialist, from 1850. Both, John Marks writes, have doubled in number roughly 15
years and growth at this rate continued well into the 20th century.
Communication proliferated in response to the increase of the scientific community
and these factors contributed to the event and acceleration of the Scientific
Revolution which has continued into the 21st century.
THE
SCIENTIFIC
REVOLUTION—AND
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY
THE
REVOLUTION
IN
We have already talked about the Renaissance or the Intellectual Revival of Europe.
It is safe to say that the Scientific Revolution flowed from the Renaissance.
According to John Marks in his excellent book Science and the Making of the
Modern World (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983), the Scientific
Revolution is a phenomenon of the 17th century. A revolution may be defined as a
great change bringing about new knowledge and achievements which form the
basis for future developments. So, the Scientific Revolution took place in the 17th
century (in the period 1600-1700)—but has been developing ever since. Parallel
with the Scientific Revolution was the Industrial Revolution of 1750 to 1900—which
also has been developing ever since.
The highlights or main features of the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century,
according to John Marks, are as follows:
1. Galileo Galilei’s laying of a firm foundation in the scientific method of
observation or the ‘empirical method’. Galileo’s use of careful
experiment and mathematical reasoning
Galileo (1564-1642) made his own telescopes through which he observed
heavenly bodies. He was able to accurately describe the surface of the moon. He
observed, and described in his popular book The Starry Messenger, hundreds upon
hundreds of new stars.
In 1638 Galileo had completed writing his book entitled Discourses and
Mathematical Demonstrations concerning Two New Sciences Pertaining to
Mechanics and Local Motions. In this book Galileo laid the foundation for a new
science of motion and dynamics, a science of interest to students of Physics amd
Mechanical Engineering to this day. The basic categories of motion—uniform
motion at constant speed and uniformly accelerated speed were described “in
minute mathematical detail”. In Galileo is found “ the subtle interweaving of careful
experiment and mathematical reasoning”, and the science of motion is rendered
appropriately quantitative.
Galileo also popularised the revolutionary and new idea of a Sun-centred system
with the Earth being a minor planet—rather than being the centre of the Universe –
revolving around the sun. He also insistently made claims for the effective
autonomy of what he called experimental philosophy (i.e. science).
22
2. The invention of New Scientific instruments giving an impetus to the
development of experimental and empirical science.
The magnetic compass was invented in China and began being used in Europe in
the 13th century. The printing press began being used in the period 1450-1500,
“sowing knowledge” in Europe, including scientific knowledge. Six great new
instruments were invented in the 17th century, namely:
1. The telescope opened up new fields of observation of large heavenly
bodies.
2. The microscope opened up new fields of observation of small organisms
like lice and, indeed, bacteria.
3. The mercury barometer for measuring pressure was invented.
4. The air pump
5. The pendulum clock enabled experimental scientists to accurately
measure time taken to accomplish a piece of work, e.g. time taken for
bodies to roll down an inclined plane.
6. The thermometer. Galileo first devised the thermoscope which could
respond both to changes in atmospheric pressure and temperature. It
developed into clinical thermometer and the laboratory-based
thermometer.
3. The contribution to Medical Knowledge by a New School of Anatomists,
including Vesalius (1514-64) in Italy.
By dissecting the human body, Vesalius developed the experimental method in
Medical Science and displayed in accurate drawings the muscles and skeletons of
human anatomy. Vesalius published his book De Human Corporis Fabrica (On the
Fabric of the Human Body) in 1543. William Harvey (1578-1657) also carried
out careful anatomical studies and demonstrated how blood circulated to the
heart and from the heart to other parts of the body in his book An Anatomical Essay
on the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals.
4. René Descartes (1596-1650) advanced the study of mathematics,
which is of central importance in the study of science, by uniting
geometry and algebra.
Descartes was the founder of Coordinate Geometry. You surely remember the
Cartesian Plane from your secondary school mathematics—with its Cartesian axes
and Cartesian corodinates. Cartesian means ‘of Descartes’.
5. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) represents the highest point of the 17th
century Scientific Revolution.
Let me quote John Marks: “Isaac Newton is the man who, more than any other
single figure, symbolises the scientific revolution of the 17th century.”
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His major contribution—for he also did work in areas like optics and did craft a
telescope, as Galileo before him had done—was on the Motion of Bodies, both
planetary and earthly. To quote Marks: “Newton provided dynamic and causal
explanations of the planetary motions which were mathematically precise and which
were applicable to any moving body, planet or projectile, in the heavens or on
earth.” He did this in his major book—Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1686). In this book Newton
provided “a complete theory for the structure and motion of the whole known
universe”.
In this book, Newton who had become a professor of mathematics at Cambridge
University in 1669 when he was only 26 years old, proved that the curve
described by the planets was an ellipse or regular oval because the movement of
bodies, including the planets, were subject to the Inverse Square Law of
Universal Gravitation which provides that gravity diminishes as the square of the
distance between bodies.
Every secondary school student probably knows Newton’s Axioms or Laws of
Motion. Certainly students of Mechanical Engineering have these laws at their
fingertips:
Law 1:
Law 2:
Law 3:
‘Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a
right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces
impressed upon it.’
‘The change of motion is proportional to the motive force
impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which
that force is impressed.’
To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the
mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal,
and directed to contrary parts.’
Newton also gave to mathematics and science the Binomial Theorem and
Differential and Integral Calculus—things students of JKUAT know more about
than the person who has written this lecture!
6. The sixth feature of the 17th century Scientific Revolution has already
been discussed in this lecture: it is the COMMUNICATION BETWEEN
SCIENTISTS WHICH FACILITATED THE EMERGENCE OF THE SCIENTIFIC
COMMUNITY.
Suffice it to say here that when Newton constructed his telescope he made it
available to the Royal Society, already discussed, through the Society’s secretary,
Oldenburg. Also Edmund Halley, the discoverer of Halley’s comet and a founder
member of the Royal Society, played a key role in having the Mathematical
Principles written—and, indeed, the Royal Society published this great work.
In discussing Communication among Scientists, one should also mention the great
17-volume Encyclopaedia published in the 18th century (1751-1765) under the
24
editorship of two Frenchmen, Denis Diderot (1713-84) and Jean Alembert
(1717-83). This book contained articles on many social, political, philosophical and
religious topics; it also contained detailed and up-to-date accounts of all the
sciences, technology, arts and trades of the time. This book is motivated by a
great faith in Human Reason and Human Enquiry as tools of acquiring all types of
knowledge, including practical knowledge which provides people with technological
aids for better living. Any student of JKUAT, 239 years later, would be interested to
know this Encyclopaedia included pictures (plates) of agricultural techniques like
the wheeled Jethro Tull plough, charcoal-fired blast furnace for making iron,
pictures of pin and glass making process, etc!
The Scientific Revolution Continues in the 20th Century
One should not forget to mention some of the most dramatic advances of science in
the twentieth century: In the 19th century James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) in
Cambridge University came up with the view that “light consists in the transverse
waves of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic
phenomena”. This led to the realisation “that (Gamma) rays and x-rays, and
ultra-violet and infra-red radiation were also electromagnetic waves of just the
same kind as visible light and radio waves”. The Spectrum of electromagnetic
waves from radio waves to gamma rays is a continuum increasing in frequency
from Radio and TV broadcast waves through Infra-red light, Visible light,
Ultra-violet light and gamma rays, with ultra violet and gamma rays overlapping
on the frequency range. This realisation, needless to say, has given impetus to the
development of electronic technology including radio and television and the
development of radio telescopes which are able to look into star phenomena
many thousands of light years away—allowing Man to look into the depths of Space
and, indeed, Time. Pictures of planets from space are sent by means of radio
waves.

In 1911 Rutherford suggested the possible existence of the heat of the matter—
the nucleus at the centre of the atom. Albert Einstein demonstrated in 1905
that mass and energy could be converted into one another according to the
famous formula:
E = mc2
in which E represents energy, m, mass and c the velocity of light. He thus
predicted the Nuclear Age where it would be possible to construct nuclear
reactors and bombs—whose prodigious energy would derive from the
conversion of the nuclei of heavy uranium into energy.
We have noted that Marshall McLuhan in describing the eras of human society
with regard to means of communication spoke of Primitive Society, Scribal
Society, Print-dominated Society and Nuclear Society (Age).

Rocketry was also perfected in the 20th century, no doubt benefiting from
earlier discoveries of the properties of combustion and motion, enabling the
launching of the Apollo spacecraft to the moon in the 1960s.
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REVOLUTION IN COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY
The Revolution in Communication Technology that has been a feature of the world
from the 19th century onwards has had its basis in both the Scientific and Industrial
Revolutions. We can only sketch the highlights of this Revolution here – and urge
students to carry out their own research in this interesting area.
1.
Printing technology became more versatile with the introduction of
mechanized typesetting from around 1866. Notice that for many centuries
type arranged into words and lines was assembled by hand by compositors.
The printing press also underwent changes to produce very many sheets of
impressions per hour. The crude wooden hand presses of the early printers
could turn out 300 to 500 sheets per day. The steam-powered cylinder press
of 1814 was capable of printing 1100 sheets per hour. From the 1850s to the
1970s onwards web presses capable of delivering 160,000 newspapers per
hour were developed. Electric-power presses have become the order of the
day, making possible the production of millions of newspapers and magazines
and books. Printing provided, as we have already noted, the first mass media
of communication.
2.
Revolution in means of communications and the movement of people
by land, sea and air
Although this is not the type of communication which forms our main focus, it
is relevant. In the 19th century there was a revolution in land-based
communications—through the development of the railway, making
interconnections between distant cities and towns and ports. As early as 1811
there was a railway at Leeds, England, with a steam engine capable of hauling
20 tons of coal at 10 miles per hour. In England, according to John Marks, in
1835 “there were only 500 miles of (rail) track, but by 1845 this figure had
risen to nearly 4000 miles, and by 1850 to 10,000 miles”, “in 1920 the
network was over 30,000 miles long”. The trains were steam powered to begin
with, using coal as fuel. Similarly the steam-powered ocean-going ship was
developed in the 19th century. … People travelled and mixed and
communicated. Towards the end of the 19th century the internal
combustion engine was invented and the first automobiles got on to the
road. In 1903 the Wright Brothers in America attempted the first aeroplane
flight. And by 1914 when World War I started aeroplanes had been added to
humankind’s means of communications.
3.
The Photograph, the Telegraph, the Telephone, Moving Pictures and
Radio
Public announcement of invention of photography was first made in 1839. The
art and science of photography had first been developed by Joseph N.
Niepce and Louis J. M. Daguerre of France. Physics contributed to the
development of photography through the techniques of optics, and chemistry
contributed the knowledge of photographic paper making and development of
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photographs. Photography enabled people to capture actual scenes exactly as
they were albeit in two dimensions. Photography provided a method of storing
information in less space and more accurately than was previously possible
with narrative information. Previously people had relied on creative
artists/painters to make portraits of people or to capture on canvas scenes or
activities or happenings. Photography would enable people to communicate
scenes and happenings to others living elsewhere or in later ages. William
Talbot made photography more practical and Matthew Brady was the first
famous photojournalist. He recorded the American Civil War which took
place in the period 1861-1865. Photography has, of course, played a very
important role in mass communication, particularly in newspapers and books.
Later revolutionary developments would make possible the making of moving
pictures (cinema) which had become very popular in the United States by
1915. In 1894, Edison had made one of the very first movies, and the motion
picture camera was invented in 1895. Do you know that the earliest movies
or quickies were silent? Actors (like the famous Charlie Chaplin) would
exploit all the tricks of mimicry, making quick jerky movements on the screen.
They would reduce the audience to tears of laughter. Ultimately the art of
photography and moving pictures would be harnessed to electronic television
transmission. And a great mass communication, movie or film industry would
grow—particularly in the United States. The first sound movie, influenced by
the development of radio, was shown in 1928. Here one must quote the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Paper and film continue to be the dominant media
for direct storage of textual and visual information.”
The foundations of knowledge about electricity and magnetism were also laid in
the 19th century—with revolutionary implications for means of communications,
engineering and communication. The knowlegde of the properties of electricity has
roots in chemistry: Volta in 1799 constructed the earliest electric battery called the
voltaic pile. In 1819 Oersted in Copenhagen showed that a wire carrying current
from voltaic batteries could deflect a compass needle; then Ampere in Paris
showed that if an electric current was passed through a coil of wire, the coil acted
just as if it was a magnet. In 1821, Michael Faraday came up with the idea of the
electrical motor, using wires carrying an electric current, and a magnet which
effects motion by use of an electric current. Faraday’s electrical motor, writes John
Marks, “is the forerunner of all the electrical motors in the world”. It eventually
became possible to construct dynamos, that is electricity producing machines
driven by steam engines.
One of the earliest applications of electricity was in communication through the
electric telegraph. Electric signals are sent over telegraphic wires and printed out
into words at reception. The electric telegraph was first introduced in 1837 mainly
for railway signalling purposes—so you can imagine telegraph poles and wires
strung out along the early railway networks. Under-ocean or submarine cables to
carry telegraph messages were laid across the English Channel in 1850 and across
the Atlantic in 1866—laying the foundations of modern international
telecommunications. By the beginning of the 20th century America had more
kilometres of telegraph wires, and more telephones, than any other nation in the
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world. The telephone was invented in 1876. It had become bound together into one
nation by means of communications and communication—the extensive network of
continental-wide railways as well as network of telegraph and telephone lines—
laying the foundation for superpower status.
The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the first war of advanced communication
technology—with the electric telegraph being used and with guns being borne along
railway lines. The First World War (1914-1918) saw telegraphic traffic crisscrossing
the Atlantic and America manufacturing 8000 aircraft. If you read books covering
the first 30 years of the 20th century you will hear a lot about exchange of
telegrams and telephone calls (Wall Street stock trading in the 1920s in the States
extensively used the telephone, and political campaigns extensively used the
telegraph).
And just for your information the late 19th century saw major developments in the
use of electricity. Power stations were built in New York and London in 1882 and in
Berlin in 1888. Supplies of mains electricity was developed. From 1896 electricity
began being generated from the Niagara falls and transmitted along power lines to
the City of New York. Electric railway trams using powerful electric motors were
developed in the 1880s in the United States and the first London electric railway
service opened in London in 1890.
So we have seen that the telegraph and the telephone—the one transmitting
signals printed out as words or numerals, the other transmitting signals decoded at
the end in the form of the human voice—were inventions of the 19th century, the
latter coming towards the end of the century. These inventions owed much to the
knowledge of electromagnetism. In the 20th century other significant
electromagnetic media were developed for capturing information, namely the
magnetic audio tape and the magnetic video tape. The first captured speech
and music in devices like the phonograph and gramophone—and came earlier
than the video tape which recorded voice and video signals directly and
simultaneously.
The invention of radio which was to play such a great role in telecommunications in
the 20th century owed much, first, to the discovery of radio waves and, secondly,
to development of electronics. Radio waves were first detected in 1888 by Hertz in
Germany. In 1901 Marconi succeeded in sending a radio message across the
Atlantic. And the electron—an electrically charged particle orbiting the nucleus of
an atom—was discovered in 1900. All the early developments in electronics,
including radio and television, were based on what is called the thermionic valve.
Thus the early radios produced around 1920 used the thermionic valve. Again,
reading about the politics of the 1920s is to sense the excitement that accompanied
the spread of this new means of mass communication. For the first time in Human
history, ordinary people could hear the voices of their national leaders in the
comfort of their sitting rooms. In 1922, according to Richard J. Whalen in The
Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: New American
Library, 1964), the sales of radio sets, parts and accessories were valued at sixty
million dollars. Incidentally, the radio and its emphasis on the human voice
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influenced the development of moving pictures into talkies towards the end of the
1920s, as already mentioned.
Radio interviews were taken very seriously—as a way of carrying out debate on
important and, indeed, vital national issues. In the run-up to involvement in World
War II, Americans carried out radio and newspaper debates between the ‘America
First lobby’ (those who favoured Isolationism or keeping America out of the
‘European’ War) and the Interventionists, who wanted to aid Britain and the
democratic Allies against the ‘dictator’ Axis powers. The great American President,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (first elected in 1932) used to hold his famous fire-side
chats with the American people by radio: his popular addresses to ordinary
American people were broadcast over the radio to eagerly waiting listeners in their
sitting rooms all over the United States. On 29 December 1940, for example,
Roosevelt used the memorable words in his fire-side chat—after his third re-election
in November—to the effect that “We [Americans] must be the great arsenal of
democracy.”
The radio, like the popular newspaper, bolstered popular debate, enhanced
dissemination of information, broadened the spaces of the open society.
Communication technology was harnesses to the ends of popular communication to
deepen American democracy.
One must also not forget the role of the newsreel. The newsreel was the
documentary report of current affairs carried on cinema screens. It was made
possible by the development of talking pictures. Some of us are old enough to have
seen the newsreels—screened before some major film was shown by the mobile
cinema at the village, shopping centre square or indeed in the cinema studio. Thus
was general entertainment combined with picture-news reporting.
Television, the Computer and the Internet
Television developed from a mastery of radio communication, electronics and
photography. The first black and white TV was demonstrated in 1928—and in 1939
commercial TV broadcasting was started. In 1946 the first colour TV was
demonstrated. By 1950 television was being used in political campaigns and by
1960 90 per cent of the American population had Television sets.
It is very instructive that a very important mark of America as a prosperous and
modern developed society is its character as a communication power. By
1960, according to Brian Catchpole in his book A Map History of the United States
(London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972) 80 per cent of the American
population had access to a telephone—and Americans possessed 41 per cent of the
world’s radio sets, 34 per cent of all TV sets and 48 per cent of all telephones.
The most recent developments in telecommunication and communication
technology, a feature of development since the 2nd half of the 20th century, are
computers, the Internet, and mobile telephony. Semi-conductor physics is at the
basis of these developments. Knowledge about semi-conductors, especially silicon,
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that is metallic elements that conduct electricity at moderate capacity in
comparison to super-conductors like copper, dates to the 1920s. Knowledge of
semi-conductors led to the development of the transistor in 1947. The transistor is
also described as the solid state amplifier. The transistor was subsequently used
as an amplifier for received radio signals and also as an oscillator in sending out
radio signals; it was also used in telephone systems and in television units. In 1959
transistors first outsold thermionic valves.
The collaboration between physicists, chemists and metallurgists have made
possible the development of micro processors which are essentially integrated
circuits of transistors. Such microprocessors or silicon chips are able to carry out
all the functions of the central processor of a computer. Such microprocessors were
first developed by Hoff at Intel Corporation in 1971. Intel Corporation developed
into manufacturers of Intel microprocessors widely used in Personal Computers
(PCs). The first IBM personal computer was developed in 1982.
Computers, using silicon chip microprocessors, are capable of storing very large
amounts of information and of processing the information at exceedingly high
speeds and accurately according to precisely defined rules.
And computers, harnessed to telecommunications systems, enabled the
development of the Internet and the World Wide Web which facilitate
communication and the exchange of information on a global scale.
The Internet and the World Wide Web
The Internet is the network of millions of computers worldwide connected through
the international telecommunications system (telephone, satellite and radio). Its
roots lie in a collection of computer networks developed in the 1970s: they started
as the Arpanet, a network sponsored by the United States Department of Defence.
Today the Internet connects millions of computers—and millions (probably billions?)
of people worldwide.
Please refer to Harley Hahn and Rick Stout, The Internet: Complete Reference (New
York: Osborne McGraw Hill, 1994) in the JKUAT Library, ground floor.
The Internet allows millions of people all over the world to communicate and to
share information. You communicate by either sending and receiving electronic
mail, or by contacting somebody at a computer in a distant place and typing
messages back and forth—what is called holding an Internet chat. One can
participate in discussion groups whereby many people glued to their computer
screens type out back and forth their views on a discussion topic. One can access a
great variety of information on all types of subjects using the appropriate
programs.
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The following are the services provided by the Internet:
1. Mail service. Electronic mail is a major aspect of present day communication
between individuals, business organisations, scholars and even government
agencies.
2. Telnet allows a computer to establish contact with a remote computer and log
in to that computer and access information in that computer.
3. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) allows you to transfer files from one computer to
another. You can use FTP to copy a file from a remote computer host in a
process called downloading.
4. World Wide Web. Governments, universities, business firms, individuals etc.
establish sites on the World Wide Web containing files upon files of information.
The WWW is a part of the Internet. It stores information in multimedia form—
sounds, photos and video as well as text.
The catalogue of information resources on the World Wide Web include the
following subjects (by relevance for JKUAT students):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Agriculture
Biology
Chemistry
Computer Technology
Libraries
Medicine
Science
Technology
So, the Internet, to quote Hahn, is “a source of an enormous variety and amount of
information” and the “Internet is the first global forum and the first global
library”. It represents the highest level of the universalisation of the human
instinct to communicate.
So, go to this library and deepen and broaden your knowledge of the topics and
subjects treated so superficially in my Introductory Lectures.
Mobile Telephony
Virtually everybody has a mobile telephone—from multinational company
executives, through teachers and students, to matatu drivers and open-market
grocery vendors. Only five years ago, they were a privileged means of
communication: I know an upstart politician of low literacy and high money who
would wait until his mobile rang, he would walk importantly away from the awestruck hangers-on, only to return and say he had to travel to State House where
the telephone call had summoned him!
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Mobile telephony is now roughly 15 years old. Licences to operate mobile telephony
(Telepoint) were first granted in 1989 in the UK. We learn the idea did not
immediately take on.
Now mobile telephony is the in-thing and the technology is daily becoming more
technologically sophisticated, not only having capacity to access the Internet but
the capacity to display the video pictures of communicators.
Mobile telephony, therefore, reflects the development of consolidated multi-media
communication. The present multi-media system is facilitated by a network
(computers connected to a telecommunication system of telephones, radio,
satellites), which enables the transmission of still images, video pictures, voice
messages and graphics. Communication practices made possible include
videophony (telephone communication complemented by video images),
videoconferencing (communication between different people by computer and
video) and desktop conferencing (where computer files and information is shared
by people at different computer terminals).
CONCLUSION TO THE GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO COMMUNICATION
If in the past at JKUAT the practice has been to teach Communication skills from a
starting point in Communication Theory (which will feature in the next Lecture),
it is my conviction, after considerable research and thought, that the Course should
include the Introductory component sketched so far. This Introduction gives an
adequate picture of what communication has been all about and how it has
developed from remote pre-historical times to the present. A historical survey
enables you not only to know in a concrete and wholistic way what communication
is but to appreciate the role communication has played in the development of
human cultures, human knowledge and education.
If you read your course description, you will see the following items:
Communication: definition, elements, process, purposes, qualities and barriers.
What the Introductory Lectures have done is to give you a very solid extended
definition and to illustrate concretely the process, purposes, qualities and
barriers of communication. The next Lecture on Theory will analyse these areas,
and we will reflect back on what has already been illustrated.
I am convinced this General Introduction will henceforth become a formal part of
the Communication Skills Course description. This perception is informed by logic.
Communication Theory is a phenomenon of Communication Studies which date only
to the 1930s. Surely one should first look at human communication phenomena—
before turning to what 20th century students/scholars of communication had to say
about it.
Another feature of my Introduction is its interest in the history of human learning,
surely a key feature of human communication. Surely we become part of the
tradition of human knowledge by learning and study. Let me repeat a statement in
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these lectures. A child is born like a blank slate. But he or she may grow to master
a whole tradition of scientific knowledge: to master Galileo’s theories on motion, to
know what Newton knew about gravitation between terrestrial and extra-terrestrial
bodies, to understand what Einstein said about the Theory of Special Relativity. And
this person may even make additions to the body of scientific knowledge—by, for
example, doing new research in particle physics. So, this child who was a blank
slate in childhood, is at the age of say 26, essentially part of the great tradition of
scientific knowledge.
Let me quote Harley Hahn and Rick Stout (The Internet: Complete Reference):
As a human being, you share the birthright of intelligence, curiosity and,
above all, the ability to learn. However, these gifts are not free. By your very
nature, you can not only learn, you are compelled to learn if you are to remain
happy and fulfilled. But there is no royal road to knowledge: YOU HAVE TO
APPLY YOURSELF TO THE PROCESS OF LEARNING. You have to invest time,
and effort.
Your starting point, so far as Communication is concerned, is to study my
admittedly sketchy Introduction. The lectures are all being made available to all
class representatives. You are merely being asked to invest less than Sh. 100.00
per lecture set—as cost of photocopies.
I urge you to take this seriously.
I hope you will after reading these lectures feel challenged to carry out your own
further research. I have mentioned a few books. Other places to look are the
excellent Macropaedia version of Encyclopaedia Britannica—and obviously the
Internet (World Wide Web).
Do not be satisfied with becoming a narrow specialist in some science/technology
discipline. By all means study your area deeply and closely and become an expert
in it. But also make sure that you can see the general picture.
Study the history of Science. Study books about the work of Scientists Today. In
this regard Reports in the New York Times SCIENTISTS AT WORK series, edited by
Laura Chang, may probably be accessed through the Internet. Seek the good
modern book on scientists: Edited by Laura Chang, with a Foreword by Stephen Jay
Gould and Introduction by Cornelia Dean, Profiles of Today’s Ground Breaking
Scientists (New York: MacGraw Hill/New Yorkk times, 2000).
Africa, including Kenya, is crying for knowledgeable people who can see the general
picture. Only such people can offer leadership out of Africa’s scientific and
technological backwardness and underdevelopment and poverty. Be bold mentally
and aspire to become a leader in the struggle for Africa’s struggle for development
and survival!
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My Introductory Part of the Communication Skills course is deliberately and
consciously tailored to arouse your curiosity and mental boldness—so that you may
mentally equip yourself to be a Leader! Africa needs that leadership!
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