Echoes of Industry rediscovering Africa’s Lost Technical Heritage from Stone Mills to Steel Giants a Forgotten Industrial Edge and my journey Through Africa’s Industrial Amnesia”
From Stone Mills to Steel Giants: Africa’s Forgotten Industrial Edge.
In my quest to understand the underlying gaps that continue to hold back our manufacturing sector, I found myself unexpectedly captivated by the story of grain specifically, its journey from ancient African stone milling to modern high-speed industrial processing.
Grains like millet, sorghum,fonio,tigernuts and teff have been milled on this continent for thousands of years.
Early African communities developed rudimentary but effective milling techniques using stone innovations born not from luxury, but from necessity and ingenuity. This simple act of grinding grain was once a foundation of both survival and early technology.
And yet, fast forward to today, we find that the largest producers of grain milling machinery are countries like Switzerland and Turkey. Nations that, while geographically and agriculturally distant from the grain’s origins, now lead global markets in precision-engineered milling solutions.
It begs the question:
What happened to us?
Where did all the technical expertise go in chrome welding, steel galvanizing, turning, casting, mold-making, hydraulics and pneumatic?
These aren’t mysterious, unreachable fields. They were once known, practiced, and even pioneered here.
We must ask:
Did we stop valuing technical education?
Were policies and incentives misaligned?
Did we fail to industrialize because we were too focused on consumption over production?
Or was it simply a case of global economic forces pulling value out faster than we could build resilience in?
This is not just a lament it’s a call to reflection.
If we once had the know-how, what would it take to reclaim it? What would it take to not just rediscover our heritage of technical craftsmanship but modernize and scale it?
Africa’s future doesn’t lie in nostalgia but in connecting the wisdom of the past with the demands of tomorrow.
The grain tells us a story one of potential lost, but not beyond recovery.
A time to reflect !