Estonia has been bothering me. And I know it is a strange country to be bothered by, especially because I am writing from the heart of Lagos, thousands of kilometres away. But it all started yesterday when I came across a statistic about this tiny Baltic nation, a place of barely 1.4 million people, having produced more than ten billion-dollar technology companies while the whole of Africa, this enormous breathing mass of more than a billion people, has produced only a handful more. And I know all the reasons why this is an equally dangerous comparison, because Africa is not a country and billion-dollar technology companies are certainly not a measure of civilisation. As someone else put it, “a unicorn is a privately negotiated valuation reflecting VC depth, customer purchasing power, ARPU, currency and sovereign risk, exit opportunities,” and so many other factors that must be accounted for so we don't mistakenly flatten the story. But again, I am one to get lost in my absurdities, and inside this one was an old thought I have carried around, which is that there is something about the future of Africa that I do not believe can be reached by linearity. And I am willing to at least admit that perhaps this is my impatience speaking, but then again, I also don't think I have two hundred years. So maybe the question for me is: what can I do with just this one unit of life I have been handed? There is an Africa I have somehow already seen, and if you grew up optimistic about the continent, then perhaps you've seen it too. But whenever I put the maths together, everything comes together like some improbable lofty dream, and perhaps that is why young people up and leave at times. The African reality and the dream of Africa seem to be worlds apart. And immediately you seek comfort in that; you're again jolted by the reality of China and other countries that have pulled a material world from an improbable reality. And whenever I talk about this with friends, particularly when I drift toward the things I think Africa needs more of, like philosophy, introspection, abstraction, culturally native systems of thought, people with enough interior depth to stare at the continent as it is and still conceive of forms of life that have no obvious precedent here—someone eventually says some version of, "you need a full stomach to philosophise." And every time, the sentence defeats me because it is true. It is incredibly easy to romanticise thinking when thinking is what life has given you room to do. The man hawking something beneath the sun at a traffic light is not less philosophical than I am because he is not reading Dostoevsky. So yes, perhaps a full stomach is a privilege. And again, this is where I find my mind locked between two oceans of divergent thoughts. We will think deeply when we are prosperous; we will become prosperous when our institutions improve; our institutions will improve when the people who build and govern them learn to think differently about power and human beings and incentives and justice and responsibility and the future; and those people will apparently begin thinking differently once we are prosperous. So what comes first? And how long do we wait for that to happen? Because these luxuries of prosperity, and I mean philosophy, moral imagination, one's private conception of human dignity are all standing in the way of us, and we can't even see it. Every act of corruption started somewhere in the deepest fabric of human thought, and then cascaded into the self-constructed stories we tell ourselves: I deserve this. Everybody does it. My family comes first. Nobody will know. These people would steal from me if our positions were reversed. There is nothing romantic about deprivation, but perhaps one of the cruelties of our particular position in history is that we may have to produce some of the things normally born after prosperity while still struggling toward prosperity itself. Perhaps we need people wrestling with the meaning of a good society while generators are bursting outside the window, people imagining new economic arrangements while their currencies are collapsing, people thinking seriously about dignity while bureaucracy humiliates them, filmmakers constructing magnificent African futures while folding their pants as they move through water on the way to set. Because what if some things have to exist twice? Once where nobody can touch them. And then here. And this is what I mean when I say “Africa’s Immaterial Greatness”. Because almost everything humans have accomplished first had an immaterial origin. Before a company employs fifty thousand people, it is sometimes nothing more substantial than two people carrying the same improbable idea in their heads. The material world has always been haunted by things that existed before they could be held. We are much stranger creatures than we like to admit, because it is the same Homo sapiens who turned stone into an instrument of fire and, eventually, turned it into compute. And whether you think the world is a boring and imperfect place, the truth is that we are living in improbable dreams and stories of Homo sapiens, separated only by time. So I say again, perhaps we were not dealt that linear path, to first prosper before we can think and philosophise. Perhaps the only way out is through. Because the alternative is significantly more complex than just waiting for things to unfold differently; as we wait, we continue to be shaped by anti-values to the world we want. And now I am back to my single unit of life, asking myself what I can do to move the needle in my time? Someday soon, I will tell you how our work at Notto has become deeply aligned with my own vision of pulling an improbable Africa from an immaterial place.