[junklight]

So yes - the western consumer machine has not penetrated so well.

But that does not mean they are not on the map at all - if you saw any of the recent "Africa" season on BBC 4 in the uk it was clear that mobile phone usage is high, there are big cities (like Lagos) with loads going on, film industry, music industry.

It all seems a bit chaotic to my western eyes but its clearly vibrant and resourceful and there is a huge amount of drive. In the Lagos programs a lot of the people featured had the endless inventiveness and ability to rise to challenges we would all think was fantastic in an entrepreneur.

I suspect that Africa will emerge with its own technology ecosystem - not dissimilar to ours but with an African slant. I also suspect it has probably had enough of the west coming and telling it how and what to do.

[djb_hackernews]

> if you saw any of the recent "Africa" season on BBC 4 in the uk

could you pass a long a link for that program? I tried to do a search but nothing relevant came up.

[junklight]

iplayer irritatingly only has stuff on for 6 days after transmission. BBC 4 does repeat their material pretty regularly. It will say on this pages when it does:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s3vdm

(in fact it looks like it was already repeated on BBC 2 from that page but it will come up again).

Would also highly recommend:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/music/features/african-rock.sht...

Fascinating stuff on people like Youssou N'Dour (to pick one of many examples) who have gone back to Africa after western success and are now building Africa labels for African artists.