I held a chip in my hand last year in Shenzhen that should not exist. It was a Huawei Kirin 9030, fabricated by SMIC on a 5 nanometer class process, and it was made without the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that every industry expert said were essential. The engineer who showed it to me smiled
I walked into a home in Lekki last month and the lights came on before I touched a switch. The air conditioner adjusted itself. The curtains closed on their own. The owner, a Nigerian businessman in his forties, smiled and said something that has stayed with me. “I did not plan this. I bought one
I sat in traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge last year and counted the cars around me. Hundreds of them, all burning petrol, all contributing to the haze that hangs over Lagos most mornings. Then I noticed something that stopped me. A small blue hatchback with no exhaust pipe, gliding silently through the gridlock. It
I watched a robot walk across a stage in Beijing last month and beat Usain Bolt’s 100 metre world record. It clocked 9.39 seconds. The crowd cheered, cameras flashed, and the clip went viral within hours. But the moment that stayed with me came later, when I read what actually happened after the applause. That
I stood in a rice field outside Kano last year and watched a drone rise into the air. The farmer beside me, a man in his fifties who had spent his whole life working the land with a hoe and a handheld sprayer, watched it with the same expression I imagine his grandfather wore when
I was at a trade fair in Lagos last year when a Chinese supplier pulled out a small device and told me it was a translator that could handle Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa in real time. I did not believe him until he used it. That moment stayed with me because it showed something that
I walked through Computer Village in Lagos last month and watched a young man repair a Tecno phone using a replacement screen he had ordered from a supplier in Shenzhen. He had never been to China. He did not speak Mandarin. But he was plugged into a supply chain that stretches from a factory floor
I held a small silver cell in my hand last year at a trade fair in Lagos. It was a sodium-ion battery, lighter than the lithium packs I was used to, and the Chinese supplier told me it would work at temperatures that would kill a normal battery. I did not believe him until he
I watched a Nigerian teenager in Lagos last week do something that would have been impossible ten years ago. She opened TikTok, learned a dance move that originated in Seoul, added a sound that was trending in Brazil, and posted a video that within hours was viewed by people in Manila, Nairobi, and Berlin. She
I stood at the Apapa port gate in Lagos last year and watched a container truck sit idle for four hours. The driver, a man named Emeka who had been hauling cargo for eleven years, told me the delay was normal. The paperwork was manual. The gate was manual. The crane was slow. He said
