Enjoy Boosting Your Enemy While Shooting Your Friends

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Enjoy this collection of “AFRICAN PROVERBS: African Cosmology & Epistemology”

There is a Kenyan proverb that says, “Talking with one another is loving one another.”
And today, by talking, we are showing love. Love for our students, for our communities, for Africa’s future. But let me warn you: love without action can quickly turn into betrayal.
Because Africa is in danger of doing something absurd. We are at risk of boosting our enemies while ignoring our friends.
The very title of this address — “Enjoy Boosting Your Enemy While Shooting Your Friends” — warns us, with humor and alarm, against the danger of strengthening foreign AI while ignoring our own learners, colleagues, and communities who urgently need equivalent tools. I, along with many others, have consistently observed that foreign AI systems carry algorithmic and cultural biases that do not favor people in the Global South. To rely on those systems without building our own equivalents is to deepen dependency and reinforce inequalities we already know too well.
The Sierra Leonean proverb says, “Rain beats a leopard’s skin, but it does not wash out the spots.” If African educators and innovators do not mark AI with African wisdom, it will carry the spots of others.
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What an AI Coach Really Is
Let us be clear about what we mean when we speak of an AI Coach.
An AI Coach is not a robot teacher. It is not just another gadget. An AI Coach is a personal mentor in your pocket.
This digital mentor can explain ideas in plain language. It can probe with questions. It can assign tasks, cite sources, and adapt its teaching to your background, your language, and your context.
At Tharaka Invention Academy, we designed our AI Coach in this way. If a learner is struggling to create, the coach might begin with a Yoruba proverb: “By trying often, the monkey learns to jump from the tree.” Then the coach asks: “So, what small step will you take toward your prototype today?”
The AI Coach does not replace teachers. Instead, it amplifies them. The coach takes on routine mentoring so that human teachers can focus on leadership, on inspiration, and on the distinctly human roles that machines cannot perform.

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How an AI Coach Works
How does an AI Coach actually function in practice?
Think of three layers stacked together:
• Framework Layer. Every AI Coach needs a structured backbone — a body of knowledge that gives it shape and discipline. For us at Tharaka Invention Academy, that framework is provided by our Innovate Now eBook, with its structured chapters, exercises, and case studies, and also by the detailed summaries derived from the large corpus of related multimedia content as well as the literature used in writing the book Innovate Now: Mastering AI for Creative Problem Solving. But in other contexts, the framework could just as easily be a company’s training manual, a university’s course modules, a farmer’s extension handbook, or the body of case law undertaken in a law firm. What matters is that the framework is organized, trusted, and directly relevant to the learners.
• Knowledge Layer. Beyond the framework, every AI Coach needs a rich library of teaching assets that bring depth and authority to its guidance. For Tharaka Invention Academy, this includes carefully curated summaries from innovation handbooks, intellectual property law references, and engineering design guides, all distilled into safe, usable teaching resources for learners. These are not raw internet scraps — they are trusted sources selected and simplified so that the coach can guide learners step by step without confusion or misinformation. But other contexts will have very different knowledge layers: a business might build its coach from industry reports and compliance manuals, a farmer might use crop-rotation guides and soil research bulletins, while a law firm might draw from case law precedents and statutory references. The point is not what field the knowledge comes from, but that it is reliable, well-digested, and ready to be taught.

Read or Print PROVERBS: African Cosmology & Epistemology

• Context Layer. This layer adapts guidance to the learner’s goals, language, style of learning, and cultural background. Here is where African proverbs, oral histories, and community projects are woven into the learning journey.
Surrounding all three is a protective layer of guardrails — safety checks that remind learners about intellectual property, caution them when professional advice is required, and protect their data.
And let me be clear: at Tharaka Invention Academy, we take this responsibility seriously. Every AI Coach we develop carries clear guardrails. The guidance it gives is for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for legal, medical, or professional advice of any kind. We cannot know what each learner will choose to do with the information they receive, which is why the Coach consistently reminds them to pause, to verify with qualified human experts, and to treat every task as a learning experience — not as professional instruction. These safeguards are intentional, because TIA’s mission is to democratize innovation education responsibly, not recklessly.
An AI Coach is therefore not just a chatbot with random answers. It is a carefully engineered mentor, one embedded in a culturally-rooted learning ecosystem.
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Why AI Coaches Matter for Africa
Africa faces a dual crisis. On one side, the continent needs 17 million more teachers by 2030. In Kenya alone, the gap is 72,000 teachers. Even if we doubled our teacher-training programs tomorrow, the shortage would remain.
On the other side, we have the youngest population in the world. Sixty percent of Africans are under the age of 25. These young people will need training for jobs that do not yet exist. Without mentorship, they risk becoming a lost generation.
This is why AI coaches matter. They tie directly into the Sustainable Development Goals:
• SDG 4: Quality Education. AI Coaches can bring personalized learning to scale, delivered even in rural villages and on basic smartphones.
• SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth. AI Coaches can reskill workers, support entrepreneurs, and empower innovation.
• SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities. Without local AI coaches, African learners depend on foreign systems — systems already biased against them.
A Ghanaian proverb warns us: “The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people.” If we neglect learners at home, decline begins at the very roots of our societies.
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What It Takes to Build AI Coaches
First, people. Educators and technologists must co-create. Teachers will not be replaced — they will become trainers of AI, embedding their wisdom into the system.
Second, infrastructure. Affordable devices, reliable connectivity, and hosting solutions that respect African sovereignty.
Third, data. Not just textbooks, but African proverbs, our languages, our indigenous knowledge, our oral histories. Without this, AI coaches will not speak with our voice. And here lies a danger: foreign systems come with their own biases. If Africans ignore the task of building equivalent tools, learners will be shaped by algorithms that reflect someone else’s culture, someone else’s priorities.
Fourth, policy. Safeguards against bias. Protections for privacy. Frameworks for intellectual property. As the Yoruba proverb says: “When a king has good counselors, his reign is peaceful.” Wise policy will steady this transformation.
Finally, resources. But money is not the prime barrier anymore.
Today, there are powerful open-source AI systems available to all. From China we see DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Chinese-Vicuna. These systems are free or nearly free to adapt. Africans can take them, localize them, and build coaches that speak our languages and carry our proverbs.
As the Zimbabwean proverb reminds us: “There is honey but no bees.” The honey is already here. If we do not bring the bees, others will harvest it while we go hungry.

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Storytelling Interlude: A Learner’s Journey (Biofabrication with Ethical Probing)
Imagine a young apprentice who has heard that the world is drowning in plastic waste. She wonders: Could there be a better way? She opens her phone and asks her AI Coach.
The coach introduces her to the frontier of biofabrication — the science of growing new materials from fungi or algae. It explains that innovators around the world are already creating packaging from mushroom mycelium and textiles from seaweed fibers. Then it gives her a simple, safe experiment she can try in her own kitchen with agar and fungi spores.
But the coach does not stop there. It asks her deeper questions:
“Why do you want to do this? Will it help children yet unborn? Will it spread prosperity? Is it in harmony with Ma’at, with Ubuntu? Is it ethical — will any living being be harmed?”
To ground her thinking, the coach offers a Hausa proverb from Nigeria: “Wisdom is like fire; people take it from others.” And then it asks: “Whose wisdom will you seek as you grow your experiment?”
In that moment, the learner is not just experimenting with science. She is engaging in cosmology-driven innovation — guided by ethics, by community, and by the long view of humanity’s future. She is learning to ask not just “Can I build it?” but also “Should I build it?”
This is the true power of AI coaches — not merely to explain the technical steps of innovation, but to probe the learner’s conscience, their purpose, their relationship to community and creation.
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Call to Action
So, what must be done?
• Educators: Step forward. Do not fear AI — shape it. Feed it your insights and your cultural wisdom.
• Policymakers: Build the infrastructure and protect our data.
• Students: Do not just use AI — create AI that speaks your grandmother’s wisdom.
• Businesses: Deploy workplace AI coaches to reskill employees, to prepare them for a future where adaptability is survival.
And let us remember the East African proverb: “Cross the river in a crowd and the crocodile won’t eat you.” Collective action is our protection.

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Closing: Proverbs and Punchlines
Let me close with two proverbs from Nigeria.
The first: “By the time the fool has learned the game, the players have dispersed.” If Africa waits too long, the opportunity will vanish.
The second: “Before shooting, one must aim.” We must act with strategy, not fear.
Avoiding AI means ignoring our friends — leaving learners and workers without the mentors they need. Blind adoption means boosting our enemies — strengthening foreign systems, shaped by biases, that erode our opportunities.
Ignoring AI is like feeding an army that will march against us while starving our own defenders.
But there is another path. One where every African learner has a coach that speaks our languages, cites our sources, poses our proverbs, and guides us from idea to impact.
And so I leave you with this: “Better to laugh as we boost our own learners with our wisdom than to cry when we realize we’ve been boosting our enemy while shooting our own future.”

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