FRACTALS, RITUAL AND THE AFRICAN LAW OF TECHNOLOGY

A crucial distinction between African and Western approaches to technology, and the realm of African traditional law.
To set the stage: there are two broad categories within traditional law.

Natural Law describes the way things are in the natural world;
People’s Law governs the way of people.

The distinction has its origin in the universal mythological theme known as “The Fall”.
Before this time, there was only natural law, and it applied to all creatures. Natural laws just exist and are themselves evolving. 

THIS ARTICLE IS by Niall Campbell and Nicola Robbins (please credit in full and link if citing this article)

There’s a marvellous talk on TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design at www.ted.com/) by ethno-mathematician Ron Eglash, who travelled Africa courtesy of Fulbright exploring fractal designs in indigenous architecture.
Looking at aerial photos of African settlements, he noticed patterns repeating on ever-shrinking scales: circles of circular houses, rectangles inside rectangles, and streets branching like trees.

Eglash confirmed his visual intuition by calculating the geometry of the arrangements in the photos—they were indeed fractal.

"From a European point of view, that may look like chaos, but from a mathematical view it's the chaos of chaos theory—it's fractal geometry."

He was also excited to discover that the Bamana priests of Mali appear to use a related mathematical tool for generating divinatory patterns. Although initially disinclined to reveal their methodology, they conceded (following Eglash’s explanation of his passion for fractal geometry) that he already understood something of their art and agreed to teach him their divination process.
Access to this knowledge required ritual initiation as a Bamana priest, which Eglash underwent.

“Of course” he admits, “I was just interested in the mathematics”.

Eglash went on to write his fascinating book and uses his research on African fractals to inspire young African-Americans and Africans about their mathematical heritage. The most interesting question for me remains unexplored: why was he required to undergo initiation as a priest to be given this knowledge?
 
AFRICAN TRADITIONAL LAW
The answer to this question takes us to a crucial distinction between African and Western approaches to technology, and the realm of African traditional law.
To set the stage: there are two broad categories within traditional law.

Natural Law describes the way things are in the natural world;
People’s Law governs the way of people.

The distinction has its origin in the universal mythological theme known as “The Fall”.
Before this time, there was only natural law, and it applied to all creatures. Natural laws just exist and are themselves evolving. Dynamic balance, diversity, the trophic pyramid, hierarchy, fractal patterning, zero waste: these are natural laws. They are not simply the laws of physics—in the short term, they are not inviolable; rather they are systemic principles and can be pushed, to some degree.
Communities living close to the land simply experienced them and passed knowledge of their workings through the generations in songs, myths and dance.
People’s law is decided in a political process— ubuntu, governing the interactions between people, is a well-known example. The law of technology is another example and has been largely omitted from the current renaissance of African people’s law, for reasons we can probably surmise.
The law of technology informs human interactions with nature and is particularly pertinent when the technology in question holds the capacity to challenge the systemic principles of natural law. The laws of technology are about transformation; they are closely tied to the use of fire and everything that derives from it (notably in African cultures, mining, blacksmithing, and the activities that depend on them, such as agricultural technology).
Considered in today’s context, the indigenous law of technology calls into question the developmental path that forms the unquestioned basis of our economic system.
 
WHY TECHNOLOGY NEEDS A LAW
As technologies evolved, humans lost their intuitive connection with the natural world, requiring more conscious effort to anticipate their consequences.
In Iron, Gender & Power, Eugenia Herbert describes the traditional smelting process in North Western Togo: blessings from the ancestral spirits, a taboo on women, sacrificial offerings to the furnaces, symbols of fertility. Ritualising the learning and application of transformative technologies was a powerful means of ensuring that natural law stayed in communal memory. In other words, you didn’t just learn the technology, you also learnt how to place it radically into context. (The term radical is used here in its original meaning “at the root”.)
This probably explains some of the ritual element of Eglash’s process. As ubuntu contextualises action in the sphere of human community, so the law of technology contextualizes action in the community of all life. Commonly used in ritual processes, divination is an archetypal mind-mapping tool that explores the linkages between human actions and their broader context. Incorporating random configurations of possibility (65,000 variations in the above-mentioned Bamana system, for example), it allows people to engage with nonlinear futures to explore the potential consequences of their actions or innovations across any scale.
Applied out of context, without an understanding of human dependence on the natural world (often equated with the world of spirits), technology could get out of hand. (In systems jargon, the spectre of runaway positive feedback looms.) Without a larger system to check its growth, positive feedback spirals into chaos.
The growth of a cancer cell is an example of that. The accumulation of capital, perhaps, is another.
When Eglash said he was only interested in the mathematics, he spoke unconsciously for Western man who desired the progress of technology without the context of responsibility. Unlike the classic Western divide between science and church, between technology and its moral context, traditional Africa never separated these things.
 
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON OLD RIDDLES
The Western inclination towards reductive vision is hinted at in our myths. In The Ecology of Eden, Evan Eisenberg notes that Oedipus answered the Sphinx’ riddle from the limited perspective of individual man.
“[Oedipus] gave the right answer to the riddle, but for the wrong reasons… What the Sphinx meant to say was that man, in the grunting morning of his race, had walked on all fours; that he had then risen to proud erectness; but that now he was beginning to lose his animal vigor and to walk with a crutch. The crutch was what the Greeks called technē, what we call technology.”
In African terms, man once was governed by natural law alone; in becoming human, he created people’s law; but his growing dependence on technology caused him to lose his intuitive grasp of natural limits. It fell to the priests and their symbolic rituals, encapsulated in the indigenous law of technology, to keep memory alive in the human soul. The Sphinx, realizing that Western man had disconnected from the Earth and was now free to violate her, leapt to her death in despair. In traditional Africa, that never happened. At least, not for a few more hundred years.
 
An earlier version of this article was published in Mind//shift, May 2008.