Being there mattered.

Before the first presentation began at Chris Seabrooke Hall on 16 April 2026, drums and string instruments were already filling the room. Laptops glowed. The continent felt present.

This was the Wits AI & African Music Project Showcase, a half-day event gathering engineers, artists, and researchers around five projects from a six-month pilot. Those that gathered had different stakes in the same question: what AI means for African cultural production.

One of the opening keynotes was delivered by Charles Goldstuck, a Wits University alumnus and founder of GoldState Music, a US-based music rights firm. He got straight to the point. African music is largely missing from the data that Big AI is being trained on. If African creatives do not act quickly, the continent risks being a consumer of AI that they had no say in building. He called for Africans (creatives especially) to collectively push governments to fund African music technology programmes.

This urgency seemed to resonate. Though I’m nearly certain that the two problems he was describing (what has already been taken or detrimentally excluded, and what can and should be protected going forward) have a single solution.

Worth mentioning that the person delivering that message built his career within the legacy Western intellectual property system that, as he warned, is consolidating in new, problematic ways. GoldState holds publishing stakes in catalogues including Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights,” Panic! At The Disco’s “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy,” and Avril Lavigne’s catalogue.

The five teams on stage were, in different ways, building a response.

Bɛ̀bɛ̀i Engine, presented by Cameroonian artist Joshua Kroon and Ghanaian AI engineer Emmanuel Apetsi, framed music as a tool of linguistic preservation. They showed their engagement with the Baka people, a community living deep in the Cameroonian rainforest, with almost no digital footprint and music that exists nowhere in any training dataset.

We were asked to sing along before anyone had time to feel self-conscious. Some of the people in the room were clearly reluctant to engage. Then, in real time: live vocals, guitar, saxophone fed into the system. English lyrics first, the output clean and refined. Then a drum, and the engine shifted, producing output in the Baka language. The room leaned in.

Watching Kroon perform live helped loosen us up. His artistic labour came together with the AI output and people around me couldn’t help but move their heads to the rhythm. Watching the output respond to cultural texture raised a thorny question: if this music gets preserved using AI, who decides who can use it, and who captures the commercial value?

TIMah AI, led by Kenyan producer Tora Nyamosi and engineer Lawrence Moruye, is building a repository for low-resource African languages. It archives traditional instruments, transcribes African language lyrics, and makes them available for remixing, all with a human expert checking the work.

Meanwhile, Heritage in Code, developed by Kenyan DJ Linda Nyabundi and Ethiopian AI researcher Gebregziabihier Nigusie, only accepts African sounds, instruments, and genres, archiving them with contextual descriptors. Nyabundi uses the platform’s audio in her own sets. The algorithm was built without borrowing from dominant Western frameworks. But where does the value lie for the African artist who spends years learning how to make singular African sounds?

Zazi, built by South African multidisciplinary artist Umlilo and Ghanaian AI engineer Gideon Gyimah, took this tension further. Described as Africa’s first AI music co-producer, it is built on African datasets to pronounce and work with African languages in ways that Western models have not. This directly challenges the lack of African representation that Goldstuck highlighted.

In presenting Zazi, also described as a “digital twin,” the creators said they were not building a tool, but a person — a claim to humanisation that stirred tensions about AI and its effects on human identity, sovereignty, and stability.

Umlilo and the AI performed together live, in isiZulu. By this point in the day, people got up more easily. Hearing this African language rendered faithfully and seeing the human behind the sound, performing and taking charge, did seem to make it easier for the room to dance.

Bina AI, created by Nigerian music strategist Ehinome Ogbeide and DRC-based technologist Muhigiri Ashuza Albin, is aimed at supporting learning for children aged four to six. It uses African sounds and songs to teach culture, language, and geography in a space designed for parents and kids together. This project is a digital iteration of community. According to the creators, the platform was built for education and belonging. Bina, meaning seed, drives this point forward. But electricity and internet access are not equal across the continent. An innovation that cannot reach the people it is designed for remains, in some sense, incomplete.

A panel closed the day. A few voices stood out to me. Gift Lubele (who made headlines for producing “South Africa’s first AI-generated amapiano album”) was direct: economic access is one of the biggest problems facing African artists. Wits legal advisor and research compliance manager Eleni Flack-Davidson highlighted that AI is pulling creative work closer to commercialisation. However, the law has not progressed as quickly as AI has, and the artists least resourced to negotiate those terms are often the ones whose cultures are most compromised.

Composer and University of Pretoria researcher Miles Warrington emphasised the perspectives of those who were more sceptical of AI in the room, expressing that there is real risk of appropriation with open access to African musical resources and that artistic value is something that can’t be coded around. Heads nodded. Wits computer scientist Pravesh Ranchod sensed the potential for African datasets and African-built programmes to shift where power currently sits. There was at least consensus that people care about the people behind the work.

I walked in convinced that AI was a threat to the African artist — technology built on stereotypes, unable to genuinely replicate African sound. I can’t say that this view has completely changed, but I did leave with a sense that there is some room, with enough protection and preparation, for African artists to harness AI meaningfully, productively, profitably...

That room is small and the conditions are not yet in place, but five teams from seven African countries spent six months insisting that it matters. That counts for something.

Hi, there... Andile Masuku, here.

Something I have been building quietly went public last month. I’m the Executive Editor of Future in the Humanities (FITH), an open exchange platform I am constructing alongside Founding Chair Professor Iginio Gagliardone, out of the SA–UK SARChI Chair in Digital Humanities at Wits University.

Welcome to it!

We’re building in public, with the kind of candour that makes institutional communications teams nervous. Our opening salvo, an op-ed by Dr Rejoice Malisa-van der Walt in Business Day on what the drone strikes on Dubai should mean for African policymakers silent on AI-powered military systems, is already resonating in South Africa’s defence research community.

What follows is an invitation behind the curtain. Gagliardone and I recently discussed Mastodon, the decentralised social media platform, and why it matters for how FITH shows up in the world. We didn’t agree on everything. That is the point.

The case for leaving

Gagliardone’s argument begins with sovereignty. When an African academic, politician or activist posts on X, the value of that interaction is extracted and monetised by a company headquartered in the United States. In a recent Forbes Africa feature by Tamsin Mackay on Africa’s AI divide, he pointed out that the United States Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, aka the US CLOUD Act, compels American-headquartered companies to share stored data on demand from US law enforcement, even when that data sits outside the United States. Data sovereignty is not an abstraction. It is a live policy concern.

Mastodon offers a structural alternative. It is not a platform in the conventional sense but a protocol: a federated network of independently hosted servers communicating through ActivityPub. If a university, government department or any African institution hosts a Mastodon instance, conversations remain on that server. No extraction. No algorithmic curation designed to maximise engagement at the expense of wellbeing. No billionaire owner whose political allegiances might reshape the terms of participation overnight.

Robert W. Gehl, in his 2025 book Move Slowly and Build Bridges (Oxford University Press), frames the Fediverse (the broader decentralised network Mastodon belongs to) as a covenantal project: small, self-governing communities connecting through shared ethical commitments rather than commercial imperatives.

Gagliardone takes that further. Mastodon, he contends, is “by definition not a hegemonic project.” It does not aspire to replace X. It aspires to demonstrate that a plurality of ways of being online can coexist. For him, as for Gehl, it’s as much a platform preference as it is a political position.

The case for staying

I find the argument compelling and insufficient in almost equal measure.

I have gone on record, including on camera in TechTides: The Take, as being an active user and, yes, a fan of LinkedIn and pre-acquisition Twitter, with serious qualifications. LinkedIn is the only platform where I’ve built professional relationships that translated consistently into real opportunities. Not followers. Not clout. Actual connectivity.

African Tech Roundup led to BBC engagements, international consulting and a career-defining introduction for my wife Sithabiso that emerged from a conversation initially unrelated to her work. Pre-X Twitter gave me verified credentialisation back when it wasn’t purchasable for USD 8 a month.

These outcomes happened (at least in part) because the platforms had scale, reach and, in LinkedIn’s case, professional norms that made predictably unpredictable connections possible. Mastodon has fewer than 700,000 monthly active users globally. It peaked at roughly 2.5 million in late 2022 and has been declining since.

A platform that purposefully doesn’t keep you longer than you want to stay is admirable. But a platform nobody joins is effectively an empty room with excellent house rules.

FITH is showing up on LinkedIn, with more spots on the web set to go live in the coming weeks (think Substack and podcast vibes). We are, however, decidedly not on X — nor do we intend to be. That is the founding Chair’s line in the sand, rooted in the sovereignty and extraction arguments above, and I take it seriously. But the tradeoffs deserve naming.

LinkedIn’s recent algorithmic overhaul, well analysed by brand strategist Justin Oberman, now filters content through AI-driven semantic embeddings before your network sees it. Original thinking that does not match established engagement patterns becomes structurally invisible.

We’re poised to build a great deal of FITH’s public presence on a platform that may be quietly working against the kind of work we produce. Consistently reaching followers who sign up to our page, and new audiences who don’t yet know they’d benefit from our feed, gets harder when an algorithm decides what exists before a human being ever sees it. Unless, of course, we cough up cash to LinkedIn for the privilege of targeting exactly who gets to view our posts.

The governance question

My deeper reservation about Mastodon concerns what happens once you’re inside. Gagliardone describes its community governance as the equivalent of basic civility: you do not need to be told not to spit on someone’s floor when you walk into their home.

I am less sanguine. At what point does healthy community moderation tip into doctrinal enforcement? Gehl’s book documents this directly: the politics of defederation, instances blocking other instances over ideological disagreements, the burnout that accompanies collectively governing a space where the rules are written by the inhabitants. These aren’t hypothetical risks. They’re documented features of the system.

Gagliardone argues that absolute freedom online is overrated and points to X as evidence. I partly agree. Freedom is, after all, an unwieldy and inconvenient currency. The truth is, though, that the brokenness visible on X is not solely a product of its design, or even a product of its notorious overlord Elon Musk. It reflects something about human nature that no protocol can engineer away.

The question is whether, in correcting for the worst of platform capitalism, we create alternatives that demand a level of ideological buy-in the average user has neither the time nor the inclination to provide. Or worse, we unwittingly trade one worryingly fickle overlord for another.

Where this leaves us

Mastodon’s argument appears strongest when directed at institutions. I reckon a university or government department with the resources and mandate to host an instance and steward a community has a genuine case to make.

Gagliardone has plans to experiment with exactly that: testing the viability of Mastodon deployment in an institutional-led setting through collaborations orchestrated by the Chair. You best believe I will be riding shotgun to bring you updates on how that goes.

For individuals building careers and livelihoods across the African continent, the calculation remains different. The least convenient option often ends up being the most constructive one. But it has to be accessible before it can be constructive.

In the meantime, Future in the Humanities (FITH) will continue to build in public, on the platforms where our audience already is, while interrogating the terms on which those platforms operate. This isn’t a manifesto. It’s a working position, subject to revision.

Editorial Note: A version of this opinion editorial was first published by Business Report and African Tech Roundup on 17 March 2026.

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In December 2023, the Nigerian military launched an airstrike on Tudun Biri village in Kaduna State. Officials called it a targeted operation against insurgents. The reality, reconstructed from satellite imagery and survivor testimonies: 85 civilians dead, primarily women and children gathered for a religious festival.

No warning was issued. No explanation followed. No one was held accountable.

Tudun Biri was a system working exactly as it has been allowed to persist: unguided, unsupervised, and ungoverned.

War, upgraded

Nigeria has been in armed conflict for over fifteen years. Boko Haram, then the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), have displaced millions and exhausted one of the continent’s most formidable militaries. In response, the Armed Forces have turned, as militaries everywhere are turning, to technology.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), AI-enabled surveillance, and automated targeting tools are no longer speculative. They are actively deployed in Nigerian skies, over Nigerian villages. In a theatre as geographically vast as this, the case for these tools is real: faster logistics, sharper intelligence, reduced risk to soldiers.

The technology works. What surrounds it does not.

Academic inquiry

My ongoing research, conducted with colleagues across three African conflict states, examines the governance architecture that is supposed to regulate how these systems are acquired, tested, deployed, and reviewed. What we found in Nigeria was, in most meaningful respects, the absence of a governance framework entirely.

Nigeria’s Public Procurement Act of 2007 contains exemptions for “special goods,” a provision that has been systematically applied to high-value defence acquisitions, including the drones and autonomous systems now deployed in conflict zones. Defence contracts, technical specifications, and rules of engagement remain classified. Parliamentary committees struggle to scrutinise them. Civil society cannot audit them. Independent investigators must piece together what happened from satellite imagery and survivor accounts after the fact.

This is a deliberate structural choice — one that transfers decision-making authority over life-and-death systems from accountable institutions to opaque procurement processes.

When AI targeting systems ingest flawed intelligence or corrupted data, there is no human-in-the-loop mechanism to prevent tragedy. In private, military planners concede that current drone operations lack the rigorous target verification protocols standard in NATO-aligned forces.

I define this condition as an “accountability desert” — a state where high-consequence AI systems operate without the legal, ethical, or institutional infrastructure necessary for accountability.

State silence

The state’s response to Tudun Biri was telling. It rebuilt homes. It promised a hospital. It established skills centres. But it did not deliver accountability. No individual commander was held responsible for what officials quietly termed “command confusion.” No independent audit of the targeting failure was conducted.

This absence has fostered a dangerous resignation among affected communities. Technological errors are increasingly accepted as inevitable: acts of God rather than failures of governance. The state has been allowed to substitute charity for justice.

As Hamza Suleiman, an award-winning Nigerian conflict reporter who has covered the insurgency for over a decade, observes: effective drone operations require approximately USD 1 million in specialised training per air officer, for flight skills, intelligence analysis, mapping, geolocation, and target identification.

The Nigerian military’s current drone units lack anything approaching this level of investment. The result is a dangerous gap between operational hardware and human expertise, one that insurgents, often trained by foreign fighters, are quick to exploit.

Some of the autonomous weapons found on African soil — including Iranian Mohajer-6 combat UAVs — are sourced directly from Iran’s supply chain. The same class of systems currently threatening the Gulf’s most sophisticated defence architectures is already present on the continent. In some cases, non-state actors now field more capable systems than the governments attempting to contain them.

Reform

Closing the accountability desert requires more than localised reform. National policy must be brought into line with continental governance frameworks.

Nigeria signed the 2024 Responsible AI in Military Domain (REAIM) Blueprint for Action, alongside 59 other nations, committing to meaningful human control and transparent procurement. South Africa participates in the Global Commission on Responsible AI in the Military Domain (GC REAIM), a Netherlands-led initiative promoting the responsible and lawful deployment of such systems. The commitments exist on paper. The gap between those commitments and what is happening on the ground, in Nigerian skies, over Nigerian villages, is in fact a void.

Closing it requires specific, concrete action: direct access for elected officials to review classified AI defence programmes; independent third-party auditing of AI decision-making processes before and after deployment; and the codification of AI-specific rules of engagement within military doctrine that mandate human override, ensuring that personnel retain the authority to intervene when automated systems fail.

South Africa has the diplomatic standing within the African Union to champion continent-wide governance standards and prevent Africa’s co-option as a testing ground for unregulated foreign military AI. The institutional capacity for these reforms exists. What is missing is the political will to apply them to the most powerful and consequential domain of all.

The families of Tudun Biri accepted the new houses. But they, and millions of other Nigerians living under the watch of systems that cannot distinguish a religious festival from an insurgent gathering, deserve more than reconstruction.

They deserve the assurance that when a drone is deployed, it is guided by a system constrained by law, overseen by independent auditors, and operated by professionals who know that a mistake will cost more than a budget line for rebuilding.

They deserve a security architecture where the law, and indeed basic human decency, has the final word.

A shorter version of this argument was published in Business Day (South Africa) on 11 March 2026, examining what the Iran–Gulf drone strikes reveal about autonomous weapons governance on the African continent. This is the longer treatment.