The Africarare Backstory
The dawn of modern humanity started breaking around 250 000 years ago when one group of about 250 primitive Homo Sapiens moved into a series of caves along the east coast of present-day South Africa. The caves proved to be a hospitable living environment, and other groups soon joined them. Living mostly off seaweed and shellfish harvested from rock pools, the combination of their healthy, protein-rich diet, generally fair weather and the demands of surviving a world not dominated by humans, led to the accelerated evolution of this pocket of southern African people. With this rapid evolution came a voracious yearning for knowledge, and small groups of these cave dwellers started to travel all over Africa to learn and find inspiration from other people and places; always returning home from their travels to share and apply their learnings and new ideas. Through the travels of these groups across Africa, news spread about this innovative society living in the coastal caves, which led to more people and groups from across Africa arriving. The community welcomed these newcomers because having more hands and brains around sped up the progress of their developing projects. Within a few thousand years, the settlement grew into a sprawling society, made up of many different tribes, that expanded inland from the caves.
Over the next 100 000 years, the society entered an era of unprecedented progress. Amongst other developments they evolved their understanding of agricultural, including fish farming; boat building; borehole-drilling; astronomy; creativity; the benefits of a balanced diet; and the importance of respecting nature. They built up collective wisdom by passing knowledge down across generations through carefully constructed parables that conveyed vital wisdom gained through thousands of years of trial and error. They also started what would become the world’s first university: the only place on Earth where people could learn skills, crafts and various subjects from teachers who had proved their command of their chosen subjects through years of practical application and real-world results.
Decisions were made on behalf of the society by an 18-member Mambo Council. Every issue considered required a 90% council majority in order for a decision to be made. All decisions were re-evaluated every 12th full moon after the initial decision was made. If by then the majority in favour fell below 90%, the original decision was revoked.
As the evolution of the society continued, skillsets improved. Experts in various fields were responsible for teaching others about their respective fields of expertise. This shaped a society in which key responsibilities were excellently managed, while everyone understood the big picture of what was needed to keep driving progress. The respect for each other’s wisdom eventually crystallized into the guiding philosophy of their society: I am because you are. They called this philosophy Ubuntu. And they named their ever-expanding home Ubuntuland. Not all Ubuntulanders approached life in the same way, though they all believed that their collective whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Like-minded Ubuntulanders were drawn to one another, resulting in groups forming communities that occupied different districts of the ever more sprawling ancient metropolis.
Trade between communities was conducted through bartering of goods, trade exchange, or the exchange of hard currency known as $UBUNTU Tokens and Kitos (hard, translucent crystals, mined from cave walls). Whatever the method of exchange, every transaction was recorded in a ledger. Each community had a scribe who recorded transactions in the ledger of that community. At the end of each day, scribes from all communities met, to go over the day’s transactions. During these meetings, every transaction was copied into each community’s ledger so that all ledgers in Ubuntuland matched by the close of every day. 10 percent of all transactions that involved non-perishable bartering commodities or $UBUNTU Tokens and Kitos were staked in a community cauldron – the world’s first treasury – in order to always ensure that Ubuntuland had liquid assets to support purchases that needed to be made with traders and suppliers from outside Ubuntuland. They emulated this system with their most prized natural resource, fresh water, by diverting about 10 percent of two nearby rivers into a dam system that builders set up in the middle of Ubuntuland, ensuring that the farms and people of Ubuntuland always had fresh water, even during droughts.
People from across Africa - often whole communities at a time - continued to make their way to Ubuntuland. And the Ubuntulanders continued to welcome these immigrants, and helped them to assimilate into the Ubuntuland way of life. Each new group arrival was assigned a village in one of Ubuntuland’s many districts, and given community status as well as a scribe to help the community immediately integrate themselves into the transactional ledger system. People who arrived alone or in small groups were temporarily housed in a shared village and allowed the time and space to integrate into whatever community best suited them. Owning land in Ubuntuland set the landowners up for life because the stronger the community got, the more land values rose, and the solidity of the Ubuntuland system protected the bottom of the land market from ever falling away.
One spring, a massive tribe of rich, avaricious money lenders, the Vamalek, arrived from the west. Their leaders tried to lobby The Mambo Council into allowing the Vamalek to set up a bank that would centralize commercial transactions in Ubuntuland. Their unspoken plan was to bring the populace under their control by lending money to as many people as they could while driving a campaign encouraging people to build bigger homes and expand their businesses. The Mambo Council told the Vamalek that the Ubuntuland way had no use for a centralized system. The Vamalek leaders left, then returned with their forces, though they were no match for the Ubuntulanders, who crushed them swiftly thanks to their superior strategy. The Mambo Council showed the Vamalek survivors mercy. They even allowed those who chose to stay on in Ubuntuland to remain the Vamalek tribe, and they helped the Vamalek community to assimilate into the Ubuntuland way. To strengthen Ubuntuland’s defences against future attacks, the Mambo Council contracted a group of builders to plan and start implementing a new circular layout into which Ubuntuland would expand, based on the kraal concept used on the savannahs of central Africa. Within a few years, Ubuntuland became a permanent, highly developed and ever-expanding kraal, open to all who came in peace, and impossible to breach by anyone with ill intent.
For the next 5000 years, Ubuntuland thrived and the population swelled to over a million people. It had become a place of creativity, exponential technology and innovation. They perfected the art of terraced farming and fresh water sourcing, which greatly increased their food output. Fishing expeditions covered bigger distances as boat building and navigation skills improved. And artistic output accelerated as the Ubuntulanders became aware of art’s power to reflect the nuances of society, drive cultural growth, and entertain. What started as simple, painted scenes on rock faces, developed into a rich, multi-media culture of artistic creation and innovation. The artistic community produced plays, stories and music, and curated exhibitions to display art works. They built a massive cultural complex alongside the university that included a theatre, a concert venue and two art galleries: The Mila and The Inuka. The Mila displayed the works of famous artists, while up-and-coming artists had their works displayed in The Inuka. Ubuntuland became the centre of the art world, and a constant stream of painters, sculptors, actors, musicians and other types of artists from across Africa made pilgrimages to Ubuntuland to perform, exhibit their work and get the opportunity to rub shoulders with other artists in an environment that lent itself to collaboration, inspiration and continuous artistic production.
As the society’s artistic evolution accelerated, Ubuntulanders started to create other ways to express themselves and act on new ideas. One of these expressions led to the growth of a dynamic gaming sub-culture. The gamers of Ubuntuland specialized in creating adventure games that were played in the physical world though set in elaborate imaginary landscapes and locations. The games involved players progressing through challenges that tested both their physical and mental skills. Game developers teamed up with scribes to write stories that described the game worlds. Once a game caught on, sets of rules were logged and constantly refined by a gaming council, the members of which were elected by members of gaming forums that grew as gaming became a bigger part of Ubuntuland’s culture. Many of Ubuntuland’s greatest ideas, inventions and innovations came from people within the gaming sub-culture because their minds evolved in previously unexperienced ways, driven by the fact that they were constantly coming up with new ideas that tested their skills in the worlds of the progressively more sophisticated games that they played and loved. As gaming gained more traction, gamers started spending more time on developing, refining and playing the fast-growing array of games on offer. This led to a whole gaming economy being created. At the peak of Ubuntuland’s evolution the gaming sector became one of the most dynamic and profitable parts of the Ubuntuland economy, and both game developers and game players being able to earn excellent livings from full-time gaming.
Then, 145 000 years ago, the first of a series of cataclysmic natural disaster happened. A massive volcano, underneath present-day Yellowstone National Park in the USA, erupted with such force that it cracked the earth’s core. Some mountain ranges shot up overnight. Others crumbled. Tsunamis were triggered, destroying everything in their paths when they reached land. Within two years, 90% of human life on earth was no more. The eruption and an ongoing roll of volcanic eruptions that continued across the world for a thousand years spewed up so much debris that the entire world was enveloped by a dust cloud for 40 000 years. Sea levels rose, reclaiming low-lying areas on every continent, including Ubuntuland, and forcing people and animals to move into the mountains. During this age of darkness, all remnants of progressive human civilization were stripped away and life became a daily struggle to survive. By the end of the 40 000-year period, the less than 100 000 humans remaining on Earth had reverted to a splintered existence in which hunting and gathering became the only priorities. No conscious memories of Ubuntuland remained. However, the memories did still live deep in the collective subconscious of humanity. And there’s something that even 40 000 years of devastation can’t eradicate: dreams. The dreams never stopped. In dreams and the collective subconscious, the old knowledge still lived.
5000 years ago, the climate stabilized and the world’s population started swelling. More people led to more dreams. People dreamed of things that, in their minds, hadn’t been done before, like new ways to build, to create art and to exchange value. Ever since, humans have been living in the age of ideas, fuelled in part by the dream memories of Ubuntuland. However, people have no longer had the mix of different opinions and views that existed alongside one another in Ubuntuland, so balance and harmony have not been strong in this recent era. And while the descendants of Ubuntuland dreamt their dreams and followed them up with ideas that have accelerated humanity forward, so did the descendants of the Vamalek dream and act on the ideas that followed. All these dreams and ideas led to the world that we find ourselves in today: a world in which the spirit of Ubuntu is alive though has not permeated through everything because the dreams and ideas of the Vamalek have thrived too, flooding the world with wars, algorithms that tell us what we should see and read, and power mongers who try to divide us so we don’t come together to realize our true potential. Their intentions aren’t evil. They’re just acting on the dreams of their ancestry, without the balancing influence of the Ubuntu spirit to temper their ideas.
That’s over now. Balance is being restored. The ideas and actions resulting from the dreams of Ubuntuland have led to the digital recreation of Ubuntuland’s decentralized ledger system, in the form of the blockchain. Spaces exist in which we can speak and share new ideas freely. People are coming together in both real life and virtual worlds called the metaverse to create magic and to express themselves.
Like-minded descendants of Ubuntuland, starting with artists from across the creative spectrum, have rebuilt this great society in a metaverse called Africarare. Everyone is welcome to stake their claim in Africarare, including the Vamalek, because the Ubuntu yin and the Vamalek yang thrive together. All that’s required in the Africarare metaverse, is for Ubuntulanders is to respect our neighbours, share ideas, act on our dreams and create.
Yes, we’ve recreated Ubuntuland in the Africarare metaverse, and you’re invited to stake your claim.
Last modified 1yr ago