“Until the lion learns how to tell its story, tales of the hunter will always be glorified.”
Chinua Achebe, Nigerian author
Tech entrepreneur Herman Kojo Chinery Hesse’s innovative Afrikan Echoes is a storytelling app from the Sierra Leone- based software company theSOFTtribe Ltd, one of the leading software organisations in Africa. The company’s novel idea is to launch audiobooks of African stories, unheard of, unpublished stories created by Africans and passed down the generations. The books will be available in multiple African languages, including Yoruba, Amharic and Swahili, making African stories from across the continent accessible to all. Ghanaian Chinery Hesse’s timing is right –many of us have virtual libraries that we keep in our pockets via e-readers, an e-book market that is worth upwards of 2.6 billion dollars.
The Afrikan Echoes app is due to be launched in March this year (on Android) and will feature unpublished works, including poetry and artistic works such as plays and music, transcribed and translated into many languages by the Afrikan Echoes production team. But here is the genius of the initiative: in a continent with a long tradition of storytelling, approximately 35% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot read or write, but now people will have access to authentic stories that they will be able to listen to, in their own language. The stories will cost about a dollar per download and text messages alert registered customers to new releases of books. A major challenge for the company is how to overcome the problem of the lack of WiFi and mobile money in rural areas. According to 2019 data from the International Telecommunication Union, less than a third of Africans use the internet. The Afrikan Echoes team have come up with a solution whereby consumers will be able to share the audiobooks offline, perhaps using an in-app button to allow people to bulk-purchase the books and then distribute them using Bluetooth.
Those wishing their stories to be published by the app can do so by sending audio notes of their stories in their native language to Afrikan Echoes. The team at Afrikan Echoes will then evaluate the stories prior to registering them.
The app has many clear benefits, including educating children and giving opportunities for Africans to tell their stories to other Africans, and to the world – their way, and not as presented by Western media. And, by removing the language barrier to telling stories to speakers of other African languages, the app democratises storytelling. Finally, Afrikan Echoes is also a great way for the youth of today to have their heritage at their fingertips.
The app is not the first innovative idea from theSOFTtribe Ltd. Other groundbreaking products include Hei Julor!!! – a low-cost, mobile, security alert system; government payroll systems, point of sale systems, electronic payment systems and nationwide utility billing systems. Chinery Hesse has been named one of the 20 Notable Black Innovators in Technology, one of Africa’s Top 20 Tech Influencers and one of the top 100 most influential Africans of our time, amongst other accolades.
Bonus: If you liked reading about this, head over to this article on the art and forms of African storytelling.
