It started the way most good conversations do. Nobody planned it.
We were at a friend’s place on a Saturday night, maybe seven or eight of us crowded around the dining table. Drinks out, chips getting destroyed, someone had put on music that nobody was really listening to. The kind of night where you end up talking about everything and nothing at the same time.
I don’t even remember how AI came up. Someone might have mentioned ChatGPT or asked me about work. I do this thing where once you get me started on something I care about, it’s hard to shut me off. And that night, I had something on my mind that I’d been thinking about for weeks.
”AI is going to change everything”
I said it plainly. Not as hype, not as a tech bro prediction. Just as something I genuinely believe after spending years building and studying these systems. The way artificial intelligence is moving right now, it’s going to reshape how we work, how we make decisions, how we understand risk, how governments function. Not in some distant sci fi future. Now. In the next five to ten years, in ways that most people outside the field haven’t started to process yet.
Someone asked me what I meant specifically. So I walked them through it. I talked about how AI models are already making credit decisions for millions of people. How they’re being used to detect fraud, predict supply chain failures, flag suspicious transactions. I told them about agentic AI, systems that don’t just answer questions but actually take actions on their own, chaining together decisions without waiting for a human to press a button at every step.
The room got a little quieter. Not because anyone was scared, but because I think it landed differently when it wasn’t coming from a headline or a podcast. It was just their friend, standing at the table with a drink in his hand, telling them what he sees at work every day.
Then I took them somewhere they weren’t expecting
Here’s where the night really shifted.
I asked the table a question. “What if I told you that the basic principle behind all of this, the binary system that every computer on earth runs on, the zeros and ones, what if that concept existed in West Africa centuries before any European mathematician wrote it down?”
A couple of people laughed, thinking I was setting up a joke. I was not.
I started telling them about Ifa.
For those who don’t know, Ifa is a divination system from the Yoruba people of West Africa. It has been practiced for centuries, long before colonialism, long before anyone in Europe was thinking about computation. The way it works is this: a practitioner, called a Babalawo, casts what’s called an opele, a chain with eight half seed shells. Each shell lands in one of two positions, open or closed. That’s it. Two states. On or off. One or zero.
Eight shells, each with two possible states. That gives you 2 to the power of 8 possible combinations. Which is 256.
Those 256 combinations are called odu. And each odu corresponds to a massive body of oral literature, thousands upon thousands of verses that have been memorized and passed down through generations. When a Babalawo casts the opele and reads the odu that appears, he’s essentially running a query against a database. The input is binary. The output is a structured body of knowledge. The interpretation requires a trained human mind to apply context, weigh possibilities, and deliver meaning.
Tell me that doesn’t sound like a large language model.
The room went silent
I’m not exaggerating. The chips stopped crunching. Someone put down their glass. One of my friends, who works in software engineering, just stared at me and said “wait, are you serious?”
Dead serious.
I kept going. I told them about Olu Longe, a Nigerian computer scientist who published work showing that Ifa uses binary representation, Boolean algebra, and memory addressing. These are the same foundational pillars of modern computer science. I told them about Ron Eglash, a mathematician who traced a direct conceptual line from African binary systems through Arab geomancy, through European alchemy, all the way to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician who is generally credited with formalizing binary logic in the late 1600s.
Leibniz, by the way, is one of the intellectual grandfathers of every computer that has ever existed. And the tradition he built on had roots in Africa.
That blew the room open.
Voodoo, algorithms, and things we don’t talk about enough
Someone asked about voodoo. And I was honest. In the West, voodoo gets treated like superstition or horror movie material. But if you actually look at what’s happening in these practices, what you find is structured systems of knowledge. Pattern recognition. Probabilistic reasoning. Decision frameworks built on observable outcomes refined over generations.
I told them that what we call “artificial intelligence” today is, at its core, pattern recognition at scale. We feed data into a model, the model finds patterns, and it uses those patterns to make predictions or generate outputs. The Ifa system does something remarkably similar. It takes a structured input, maps it against a vast body of accumulated knowledge, and produces an output that requires interpretation.
The difference is the medium, not the logic. One runs on silicon. The other runs on oral tradition, palm nuts, and centuries of accumulated human wisdom. But the underlying architecture, binary input mapped to a structured knowledge base with a trained interpreter producing contextual output, that architecture is the same.
I watched the understanding spread across the room in real time. You could see it in people’s faces. That moment where something clicks and the world gets a little bigger than it was five minutes ago.
”Why don’t people know this?”
That was the question that kept coming back. And it’s a fair one.
The history of computing as it gets taught in schools and repeated in tech culture starts with Babbage and Ada Lovelace, moves through Turing, then Shannon, then the Silicon Valley origin story. Africa doesn’t show up in that narrative. Indigenous knowledge systems don’t show up. The idea that binary logic might have roots in Yoruba cosmology is something you can find in academic papers if you know where to look, but it’s nowhere near mainstream awareness.
I think that matters. Not just as a point of cultural pride, although it is that too. It matters because the way we build AI systems right now is shaped by who we think the intellectual ancestors of computing are. If we only look to one tradition, we build with one set of assumptions. If we acknowledge that computational thinking existed across cultures, in forms that embedded community, context, and ethical reasoning into the process itself, we might build different kinds of systems. Better ones.
Ifa doesn’t just produce an output and walk away. The Babalawo’s role is to interpret, to contextualize, to engage with the person asking the question. The algorithm is incomplete without human wisdom. That’s a design philosophy that modern AI could learn a lot from, especially as we rush toward autonomous agents that make decisions without meaningful human oversight.
We talked for two more hours
The original plan for the night was probably games or a movie or whatever people normally do on a Saturday. Instead, we stood around that table until well past midnight, going back and forth. People were pulling up articles on their phones. Someone found a YouTube video about the opele casting process. My friend in software engineering started drawing parallels to hash tables and database indexing on a napkin.
The conversation splintered and reconnected a dozen times. We talked about how schools in Nigeria teach computer science without mentioning Ifa. We talked about what it means that a West African knowledge system anticipated the same mathematical framework that powers every phone in the room. We talked about whether AI ethics today could benefit from studying how traditional knowledge systems built accountability and interpretation into their decision processes.
At some point, someone said “you should write about this.” So here I am.
What I actually believe
I’m not making a mystical claim. I’m not saying Ifa is magic or that ancient Yoruba priests were secretly building computers. What I am saying is that the logic of binary computation, the foundational principle that makes every digital system possible, was understood and applied in West Africa long before it was formalized in European mathematics. That’s not an opinion. That’s documented.
And I’m saying that as someone who works in AI every day, who thinks about how these systems make decisions and who they affect, I find something genuinely valuable in looking at knowledge traditions that built interpretation, community, and human judgment into their computational frameworks from the start. We’re spending billions of dollars right now trying to figure out how to make AI systems more transparent, more interpretable, more accountable. Meanwhile, there’s a system that has been doing exactly that for centuries, and most people in tech have never heard of it.
That’s the conversation I want to keep having. That’s what I told my friends that night. And based on the fact that nobody wanted to leave, I think it landed.