TEDxJohannesburg @ Arts on Main — 7 Nov 2010

Good morning. The crowd is trickling into the rather interesting warehouse-style building on Main Street where this year’s TEDx Johannesburg is about to kick off somewhat late. After a catastrophic computer failure, I’m on a borrowed MacBook Pro. I have no idea how to work an Apple, but at least I’m connected, so that’s a start.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #TEDxJhb.

This will be a single-post live blog. Reload this post regularly for chronological updates. Any regular text is (roughly) direct reporting or quotation. If I insert my own comments, I’ll put them in square brackets.

Hope you enjoy not being here as much as I expect those who are here will enjoy it.

Let’s go!

MC Justin Spratt looking handsome, getting us underway.

The Mac running the opening video has frozen. [I don’t feel so bad about my broken Ubuntu netbook now.]

Intro video explains TEDx, as a global project of independently organised events to promote “Ideas Worth Spreading”, including original TED videos and local speakers. Feedback is solicited to tedx@ted.com.

Alicia Woolf, the intrepid organiser, opening the show.

Justin Spratt shows chart of economist predictions versus economic performance. It’s a rather awful reflection on forecasts. Correlation between internet access and economic growth. Usage of data has skyrocketed, broken mobile networks around the world. AT&T had to wheel in towers to big cities. Mobiles are replacing printed materials, eg QR codes. Augmented reality is growing. People won’t pay for news, but will pay for opinion/editorial. Running through changes rapidly… Lessons (not) learnt from economic collapse. Markets aren’t efficient, or rational. Heuristics, behavioural economics is getting much airplay.

Stratfor postulates a Cold War between South Africa, a proxy for the West, and Angola, with its Chinese-controlled oil reserves. True? Likely? What happens if it does turn out to be true? One source of the tension is legacy technology. We know how to use less oil, gas and electricity, but we need to commit “legicide”.

Media Farms: Demand Media. Post-fact production of media, targeted at niches that prove to be popular on Google. What does that mean?
Food security. Cheap food is built on $30 a barrel oil. It’s now around $80.
Voice mail is broken. Unless we’re very close, we don’t want voice communication. Phone numbers are also broken. It used to be a good solution, but now we have universal handles. I’m @justinspratt. [I’m @IvoVegter.]
Customer service, being able to respond rapidly to negative comment in social media. Another game-changer. That’s why Twitter is successful.
France’s “Joie de Vivre” index. Will this take off?
The Pirate Party. 28 countries have them in parliament. Copyright laws are old and ancient. They suck. We need to change them.
China’s performance is increasingly correlated with Africa’s.
Search, giving us what we want, not what we ask for. The semantic web.

[Rapidfire review of major trends and changes in the world. Good stuff.]

MUSA MAPHONGWANE - by video, because he’s off to Harvard on scholarship.

I’m paralysed from the waist down. I followed in the footsteps of my grandfather, and started my own business, using a package from my employer, in 1999. I started delivering bread, milk, etc, to houses around Soweto. In 2003, I partnered with my cousin. I’d send kids to buy stuff to the spaza shop, but they just wanted to stay and play with my PlayStation. These kids don’t have this technology. So I thought they should have the experience of this technology. I did some research, found nobody was doing this. So I said okay, I need to be in the right spot, where kids can easily access this technology. I looked around, and shopping centres weren’t idea. They were far away from where the kids were, at community centres and schools. The rent was also too high. So I said why not use shipping containers? Locate them right where the customers are. [Pictures of grafitti-filled containers near schools.] This allowed us to price it very low, so kids can afford the entertainment. By 2007, we had seven containers. We entered a Virgin Group competition, when they opened in Maponya Mall. We won, and part of the package was legal assistance, mentorship, as well as a “Fast Track” scholarship to Harvard.

In our stores, we offer PlayStation, xBox, and Nintendo. R1 for 10min, R6 for an hour. We also run tournaments, where kids compete for prizes such as cellphones and bicycles. We do computer training on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Basic computer skills and internet. No playing then.

We create a safe environment, where parents don’t have to worry, and the kids are entertained and can learn. The parents are happy to give kids money to come here, because they know where their kids are. One school principal told us he likes these games because the children have to learn English, have to learn to read, have to learn to follow directions and instructions. They teach kids hand-eye coordination and reflexes, and prepare them for a technological world. They learn that life and business also have rules they need to follow.

PARKTOWN GIRLS HIGH - Marimba Band

Wow. These girls are amazing. Very, very good. You’re missing out if you’re not here.

[I’d transcribe the music, but they’re playing too quickly. Watch out for video coverage to be released later. It’s worth it.]

JONATHAN GEORGE SHAW

How many of you once wanted to be a musician, in a band? [Almost everyone.] I was one of those people who tried to crack it in the music biz. Those terms are contradictory: music — business. One of the big problems we face in South Africa is that we don’t have a large acceptance of our music. Even in our own country. So I got into the industry when I was in a band at school. Back when I had hair. I saw my brother play guitar, and thought it was a good way to pick up chicks. I wasn’t a nerd, but I wasn’t exactly cool either. But music was something I really wanted to do. I asked my guitar teacher, and he said no, don’t get into the music business. So you figure, why not? Surely I have the talent. The band broke up when the drummer went to study and got a real life. So I went on to university too. I went on holiday once, and we were driving back from Plett, and I said to my father I want to do music for a living. And he said, Son, you’ll never make a cent. So I set out to prove him wrong.

This started me thinking. How do I make money out of music? Sell a lot of records. Remember those? You used to buy them in shops. So I went to do a course — not Bachelor of Music — but B.Com. The parents insisted on “something to fall back on”. So I studied, and I applied everything they were teaching us to the music industry. And when I finished it, I still did not know how to be in the music industry.

I found that getting information out of the industry was a major issue. So I studied sound engineering too. I was one of the only ones there who’d done a B.Com. So I started passing on some stuff to the others. Put together a whole lot of information, talking to other musos, engineers. Then I went back and did my honours, and did it by applying B.Com. principles to music. During this time I set up a recording studio, and kept talking to artists about how they thought they were going to make it. There was one artist, very good, to whom I gave my terms of service. Half the royalties, and so on. Then her lawyer phoned, and complained — you’re going to own this, own that, no deal. So I went to a lawyer myself, but I lost the client. She was Josie Field. She became very big. From that point on, I realised I could not lose business this way. So I went to go see a lawyer, Mark Friedman, a decent guy, and I asked him if there wasn’t a way to explain how this industry works to a lay person.

I kept talking to people, and it turned out that the whole industry was run by people with no formal business training, and no idea how the business really works. Everyone was making it up as they went along. There were a few who did well at the top, but the bulk, at the bottom, couldn’t even afford lawyers.

The industry all over the world is based on this notion that the people who create the music don’t really need to know the business and legal stuff. And as long as the industry got away with it, they did. Record labels and publishers are not evil, but they’re good businesspeople. Didn’t give away information they didn’t have to give away. So I thought we should improve the information available to the industry, so that everyone can pull together to make it grow. The situation where managers take advantage, musos take stupid loans, and so on, can’t continue.

The music industry is about creating music entrepreneurs.

[VIDEO INTERLUDE: WILLARD WIGAN. Here’s the link: Micro-sculpture. Pretty cool story. Ultra-miniature model making and sculpture. He’s insane. But very good. Imagine Charlton Heston in Ben Hur, on a chariot, made of gold, all on the head of a pin. Or the Statue of Liberty, in the eye of a needle, with the base carved out of a grain of sand using a sliver of diamond.]

STEVE COLLINS

Starts with his story as a student, being embarrassed by not knowing who Steve Biko was. Typical of white South Africa, in fact. He got involved in anti-Apartheid politics. The homelands are the legacy we have in South Africa, and I ended up working a lot with the communities near the Kruger Park, who were forcibly removed there. We’re a country with two worlds, an incredible urban world, and a rural world.

Livingstone Mahlangu is part of a community that now owns a piece of land in the Kruger Park which contains 75% of the park’s biodiversity. The community is now earning R2.5m from the land. He’s now employed by SANParks, used to be a principal. They own and operate Madikwe.

But I realised that mere conservation isn’t the hard part. The difficult part is making the communities sustainable. They rely on pension payouts and funeral policies. There are no jobs. Environmental resources are over-exploited.

So my idea was to establish LIFE Centres. Livelihoods, Information, Food, Energy.

We started building information resources, games that educate, introduce food technology and techniques, as well as energy solutions such as ethanol gel to replace paraffin, efficient wood stoves, LED lighting, play-pumps, biogas systems, and so on.

[Hippie stuff, but good hippie stuff. Innovation starts with individuals, in the communities where they need the solutions. I’m not sneering.]

“None but ourselves can free our minds” — Steve Biko and Bob Marley.

ANDI FRIEDMAN

As a kid, I grew up with Knight Rider and Star Trek. I loved technology. But growing up in Kwazulu Natal, what I loved seemed very irrelevant. After studying, I did what many do, move back in with the parents. I started a software development company with some friends, in the hope of doing some social good too. My father once mentioned challenges of getting data from rural areas using paper techniques. So we started work on a mobile application to allow case workers to do surveys, break down complex workflows into simple steps, using cheap mobile handsets. Even those without a lot of technical skill or formal education were able to use it. So we started thinking about other ways to use this technology.

We came across a website, a viral campaign, in which you could send instructions to a man in a chicken suit. This got us thinking. How can we use mobile phones to get people to perform tasks remotely. It took about two more years, but with the help of the Business Trust, we established Mobenzi, which comes from “Mobile” and “Umzebenzi”, Zulu for tasks. It gets tasks from clients, breaks them up, and farms them out to remote agents, who do the work.

In remote communities, the problem is not that people don’t want to work. The work just isn’t available where they are. So we wanted to make a change, and thought, what kind of work can you do on a mobile phone? Imagine a hotel chain is interested in what I thought of my stay. They send me an SMS, and I reply to it. The trick is to extract the information from my reply, and return that to the business in a usable form. Turning natural language into data is an evolving field, but the technology is not yet capable of handling all possible input — text-speak, slang, different languages, etc. So Mobenzi farms this work out to agents, who extract the relevant information and encode it in a useful way, and the client gets a usable report.

Distributed work can be done in many ways, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or SamaSource, or Mobenzi. The latter is aimed at people with only very basic handsets. It supplements people’s income. It’s amazing what an extra few hundred rand can do. Comment from a user: “I want the whole world to use Mobenzi, so everyone can do productive work” [paraphrased; lots more great feedback from users].

The labour pool is ready and rearing to go. The challenge is to educate organisations on how to get their work out to these people.

[Brilliant idea.]

LORI BERNSTEIN

I’m here to twist your taste-buds. I studied cooking, chef stuff. One day, on CSI New York, I saw people eat duck’s blood soup, and dandelions, and so on. They were using something called a “miracle berry”, which makes things you eat taste sweet, or pleasant. So I brought some of this stuff as a party trick.

Turns out, there are other applications. It helps people lose weight, by making ordinary food taste pleasant and sweet. It can help others gain weight, because it makes unpalatable food taste good. It’s useful for children’s medication. Useful for diabetics.

It also turned out to be a popular product at the recent Sexpo. Use your imagination. [Getting people to try the magic pill. During the break, concentrated lemon juice and vinegar will be served. I’ll try it too.]

[Here’s the pill. A quarter of a tablet of “freeze dried powdered Miracle Berry”. It tastes vaguely sweet, but nondescript.]

Taste testing lemon, balsamic vinegar and grapefruit:

[My own experience: The lemon still had that back-of-the-mouth tang, but was oddly sweet on the tongue. Balsamic was only slightly sweeter, and the grapefruit tasted like grapefruit with a little sugar. Strange.]

LONG LUNCH BREAK

DAVID SHEEN

Can we agree that there’s something wrong with the way we live our lives, that each of us is part of the problem, and each of us can be a part of the solution? [Loud yes. I didn’t answer.]

Thank you for confirming my faith. Now I can tell you my story. Buildings consume 40% of our energy, and produce 40% of our CO₂ emissions. Some think new technologies can solve the problems. But while new technologies can solve problems, they can also create new problems, like this computer graveyard in Ghana. Take asbestos. It was useful, because it was flexible and fire-retardant. But it also causes lung cancer, which is why more people died of dust inhalation on 9/11 than from the collapsing buildings.

I call two approaches Eco and Tweako. The former makes major changes, and the latter makes minor changes. Tweako: economy is a given, and ecology is a variable. Eco: ecology is a given, and economy is a variable. If we’re not restricted by the values of the market, we have to ask ourselves what values are important to us: Health, Equality, Freedom.

So I spent some years crisscrossing the globe, trying to find a building material that meets these needs. The answer turned out to be earth. Most people don’t realise that 50% of the planet lives in houses made from earth. The oldest church and home in America, made of earth. Taos, USA, made of earth. In the southwest of the US, it’s common to imitate the look of earth. Devon, UK, many cottages made of earth, 300-400 years ago. And to preserve the architectural look of some towns, it is still being used, including for million-pound residences.

Earth is healthy. Unlike many other building materials, they don’t off-gas for years.
Earth is efficient. An intelligently designed house made of earth doesn’t waste energy on air-conditioning.
Earth is affordable. Low transport costs, high availability.
Earth is low-impact. As the major component, you exploit fewer other resources like wood. A comparison with straw shows earth to be superior.
Earth is tailor-made. You can sculpt the house into any shape you want. Incorporate objects, add friezes and niches, curves, etc.
Earth is also something that starts with a “y”, which I missed, but means it’s easy to use, and doesn’t require expensive tools and equipment.

Earth is the future of architecture. Ten years ago, I was a computer nerd. Today, I’m still a computer nerd, but I know how to build my own house out of sustainable materials. A friend of mine built a house from earth, and when her daughter needed extra space, the daughter, aged 9, built an extension.

We all want to move in the right direction, but we’re still taking baby steps. We need to take larger steps. We can still make monumental buildings, and express ourselves, but we can do so without needing to create another planet.

ANTHONY JOHN PHILBRICK

I build wetland swimming pools. They’re pools where the water is cleaned using wetlands, rather than chemical filters.

Johannesburg is the largest city not built on a major body of water, or waterway. But it has swimming pools equivalent to the River Thames running through London. In a way, they’re our body of water. The problem is, all of them are polluted. And much of that is backwashed out of the pools and into the stormwater drains, only to be replaced by precious tap water.

They’re polluted, because they’re mostly chlorinated to keep them sterile. Problem is, we’re also bio-organisms. Studies on airborne chlorine show that people in indoor swimming pools for an hour a day, had lungs as damaged as if they were smokers. Another shows chlorine can cause cancer. This study is inconclusive, and ignores the obvious benefits of swimming, but it suggests chlorine may be problematic.

Another problem is algaecide. This enters the natural environment when we backwash our pools.

So, how does a wetland pool work? It’s a pool with a very large particle-and-organic filter. The rule of thumb is the wetland is about the same area as the pool. Pump runs 24 hours a day. Water flows evenly through the larger volume of filter material, so we can use far more efficient pumps — down from 750W to 150W or even less. [That would make up for running it 24 hours.]

The second technology is biological filtration, which you might know from koi ponds. In the filters, are oxygen-creating bacteria. They break down organic materials to clean the water.

The third technology is hydroponic planting. The root surface area of plants increase the surface area for the biological filtration bacteria. They also absorb the broken down organic molecules and salts. Once a year, you cut back the plants and physically remove them. We don’t use plants for oxygenation. We use them because they compete with algea for nutrients and light, thus keeping algae problems down.

You get some amazing spinoffs. Firstly, because it’s a closed system, you end up with clean, pure water. This makes our hard water very soft. Water tested from some of our pools proved to be better than our drinking water. My daughter prefers drinking from the pool than from the tap.

It attracts animal life, like birds. It forms an ecosystem. Mosquitos are often raised as a concern, but they have natural predators. In the end, you have lower levels of mosquitos in the garden, because you have a complete ecosystem, which includes predation. You will get frogs. If you don’t like them, they’re easy to catch and remove. But many people like them. They’re also a negative alarm. If they suddenly shut up, there’s someone in your garden.

We create new habitats in our urban environment.

Benefits: they are cheap to run, because there are no chemicals, and the pumps are more efficient. We count on a seven-year payback period. They’re much less work than a conventional pool. You have to cut back plants once a year, but it’s just part of your gardening exercise. You get no allergies or reactions to chemicals. No backwashing algaecides into rivers and streams. You get more evaporation, but because you’re not backwashing, you lose less water. You have a new landscaped part of your garden, which is pretty much maintenance free. Birds, frogs, the waterfall effect — a calm environment. It’s an experiential thing you don’t get from a normal pool. You never have to put out water for your dog again, and in an emergency, you have a large body of usable, potable water to use in your household.

SHERAAN AMOD

[This should be fun. The anti-hippie libertarian.]

Media through the looking glass.

How many of you are from the media industry? How many are from the print media? [Far fewer.] Please don’t blog these words, it’s killing print. [Muhahaha.]

However, I’d like to think the print space is undergoing a bit of a rebirth. The same transformation is happening online. Transformation comes from innovation, at the intersection of different ideas. And nobody knows this better than me, because my story comes from that confluence too. I met an industrial engineer, who was in print. I was a computer engineer, into the web space. And all we talked about was how to combine the two to create a new idea that was bigger, better than either on their own. It was a stupid, crazy idea, but I couldn’t shake it.

Is print dead? Litho printing revenues are down, by a lot. But digital print revenue was up much more than the drop in litho. So the print industry turned out to be in decline and growing at the same time. That’s because offset litho and digital printing are completely different things. The first is how you produce 25 000 of the same thing. Digital printing is everything else. Anything you want.

The digital press is the future of print. Custom printing, any volume.

So my question was how you get enough data to create all this customised stuff. The answer: Facebook. Of course. It’s all there. Age, name, interests, photos, friends. The ultimate personalisation engine.

Niche content, personalised, social relevance. Family newsletters, sent from Facebook to grandma. Granted, that doesn’t change the world. The first applications aren’t the killer ones. Personalised calendars, with birthdays, events, and so on. Photo albums, with targeted advertising. Costs users nothing. Niiu, in Germany, creates personalised newspapers. In print, on your doorstep. Now we’re getting close top the holy grail: the personalised print magazine.

The trend is not only on how online is influencing print, but also the other way around. Design and layout, added to online. Example: paper.li. Or take flipboard. Your personalised social magazine on the iPad. Content laid out in magazine style, including collections created by editors, but also from what your friends are posting to your social network. Share, comment, all from your flipboard. [Good story on convergence, this.] “The stuff you care about, all in one place.”

That’s the future, and it’s hear today. We live in a busy world. And it’s stressing us out. We cringe at opening our twitter account or RSS reader. It affects me, and I am a geek, born to handle information overload. There’s a new medical term: information fatigue syndrome. That’s wrong.

The solution to the information overload age is the personalisation age. Driven by those crazy entrepreneurs that dream about what is possible. The future of media, is me, and you, and our friends, and all the stuff we care about. The rest is just noise.

ZEN MARIE

I’m not a sculptor, not a filmmaker, not a theorist, not a lecturer. These “nots” are the basis for what I want to share with you. I supervise students who do Masters in Fine Arts. They have to engage with theory. So I talk about practice-led research. It’s about doing things, producing objects, and engaging with the ideas that lie behind them. It’s about research, and art, and goes beyond both.

The M1 double-decker highway over Newtown was always there, but we just took it for granted. When I started to study, I began to notice it as something iconic, that represented Johannesburg in a way I had never noticed. Not in an obvious way, but in a much more integral way. It related to the way in which we use the city, and bypass the city, and interact with the city.

So I started to think about the concept of an ethnography. Not a strange concept, but it got us looking at the highway in an aesthestic way. We looked at people who worked on it — painters, towtruck drivers. People who live underneath the highway. The highway for some is a roof.

The research process was vital, and reflexive, and spontaneous. We couldn’t go there with preconceived questions and ideas. Hence, practice-led research.

Another project I did in Durban, around the World Cup 2010. The relationship of large-scale sporting events and public space. Durban taxi drivers love modifying their taxis. Spent some time with Mark, an owner-driver of a taxi called Dollarlicious. Turned out we’re from the same place in Durban, and he ended up talking more to me than he would have talked to a camera. So I got Mark to come to the gallery where I’d have shown the film, to have a conversation with the audience. Why did he paint his taxi the way he did? What did the badges mean? The yellow and purple seats? This challenged the idea of the taxi as a modified environment. What would city planners do with such an idea? Understanding the aesthetic of taxis seemed important to understand the relationship of many residents to their city environment. The idea that you know what questions to ask beforehand, is what’ll kill you.

So I’m situated somewhere between a filmmaker, a theorist, and an artist. The idea of the institutional networks that support this is important to think about. For my students, the idea of doing theoretical work on top of practical work, rather than slapping it on retro-actively, is key. You want a theory that is integral to your artistic process, and you want research to incorporate the most spontaneous ideas from art.

MANDLA TSHABALALA

I’m going to tell you a story. And it’s a dream at the same time.

In 2004, I was unemployed, living in Soweto, Pimville. The situation at home was trying. Only my grandfather and my uncle had access to money. My grandfather was a pensioner. We were six siblings, staying with my auntie. Going to town was difficult, because you had to wait for money to travel.

That problem was there, until I recalled a gift that my grandfather gave me. Books.

I started reading them. And I liked cooking. So I started thinking about the way people eat. They mostly eat refined foods, and they’re often sick. I saw around me lots of idleness, and the wrong diets. I started visiting people, sharing knowledge about medicinal plants and food.

Then one day I was visiting my sister in Yeoville, and I met a TV star, whose wife saw me brushing my teeth with activated charcoal. Our talk turned into a health talk. Later, she saw us eating fruit salad and bread. She said her father had a heart problem, and asked us to help. The books I’d read were “Back to Eden”, and “Original Food” on medicinal plants, gardening, and healthy food. I went to Bez Valley with her, where I was introduced to Prof Michael Rudolph, who was working on a food garden project. They said they couldn’t pay me, but I could volunteer.

I did. The garden was mostly a dump site. It took us about two more years to clean it up. We had to transform it, planting plants. I couldn’t afford some of the medicinal plants I needed at home.

After three years, it was a full-fledged food garden. This gave me opportunity to study permaculture, and share my experiences. Our garden turned into a lush place, which is a wonder even to myself. It became also a training site for an early childhood development centre, and students come to learn there. And I teach people stuff I never went to school for.

Today, it is ranked number one in Gauteng, and will get funding to establish a proper training centre. With the original book, I could give recipes that are healthy and life-giving, and we now even get US tourists coming here.

[Picture of beautiful garden.] I don’t have a university certificate. That’s my university certificate.

My Garden of Dreams. Hope, Gratitutde, Benevolence, Courage, Rejoicing, Trustworthiness, Kindness, Temperance, Knowledge, Wisdom and Understanding. Those two books were my wings. They helped me fly. [Standing ovation.]

DAVID KRAMER and JOHANNES COETZEE

I became interested in finding out whether the old forms of Afrikaans roots music still existed. The Rieldans, for example [video from the 1940s].

What you’re hearing now is a “blikviool”, a violin made from a tin can. Japie Jaers made this in the Namaqualand in 2001. Look at the neck, and the way the head is carved; it’s almost the same as one carved by a Bushman, //Khabbo, in the Breakwater Prison in 1871. The tunes are similar to what’s still used for the Rieldans today.

I’m going to play you a single-stringed Bushman instrument from the Karoo, the Segankuru. This stuff is older than the Blues. We have our own roots and folk music.

Some people think the blikviool is a copy of the European violin. I don’t think so. I think they were trying to copy the sound of the Segankuru.

So I was influenced by an American family, father and son, called John and Alan Lomax, who recorded an enormous number of roots blues music in the 1940s. That’s where Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter came from. I met with a man called Jan Horn, and did the same in this country: travelled about 10 000km, looking for musicians. You don’t find them any other way, because it was never recorded, and because of the segregation. Dirt roads, thousands of kilometres. You get to places like Stofkraal, because you heard that someone was living there, Fredrick Andrews, who might still be able to play one of those old instruments. [Fredrick looks 120 years old. The music sounds similar to early Boeremusiek.]

Tokas Lodewyk plays a wonderful guitar, percussive, melodic, almost jazzy style of country from Botswana and the Great Karoo. The Mouers family, near Victoria West, sort of like Malay-influenced roots blues, a tune called “Die Swart Hel” (The Black Hell). Dawid van Rooi, more like Boeremusiek again, with a home-made bow on an old violin. Hannes Coetzee, playing a guitar using a spoon in his mouth as a slide. Amazing sound. Helena Nuwegeld and Koos Lof, she was murdered recently in a stupid farm argument, but they created some of the most plaintive Karoo sound.

The guitars are all tuned differently, depending on who you speak to and where you are. So each guitar player, who has taught himself to play… They were born on the farm, never got schooling, and they’d make themselves a “ramkiekie”, a little guitar, and teach themselves how to play. Even if there was an instrument at home, the older people wouldn’t allow them to play. So they’d have to work out their own individual sound. They’re almost open tunings like I know from America, but they’re not, because you still have to press chord shapes. The kinds of tuning I came across had names like Naweek, Die Swart Hel, Langbeen, Halfseer, Langbeen Halfseer met ‘n Flat Daarby. [Wonderful stuff.] And sometimes the tuning would change between songs. [Video of Kramer with some Nama guy playing some unpronounceably funny tuning.

Hannes (Johannes) Coetzee is on stage with me today. He’s going to demonstrate the right-hand finger-picking style which is called, all over South Africa, “optel en knyp” (pick up and pinch). [Amazingly dextrous stuff. Look out for some video.]

Now he’s retuning. He’s developed a technique… he was bored sounding like one guitarist. So he developed a technique that would sound what they call a “voorspeler” and a “slaner” (a front player and a rhythm). Teaspoon slide guitar. Bow down. Wow. Bow down:

[Really. Get the videos from this event. This is amazing stuff.]

BREAK TIME

Impromptu entertainment during the break:

And we’re back.

YUSUF RANDERA-REES - by video, because he also got some cool award, which took him to Addis Abeba

[He’s the CEO of the Awethu Project, developing entrepreneurs in under-resourced communities. Rhodes Scholar to Oxford. Harvard. Polymath.]

Going to Harvard and Oxford was incredibly intimidating, and I thought I could never compete, and South Africa could never produce people like that. Then I realised these people weren’t super-human. They were ordinary people, but developed their talent, to become world-class leaders, scientists, businessman.

I realised in South Africa that we’re producing good people, but nobody’s looking for talent among South Africa’s poor people. Their communities are defined by their problems. Crime. HIV/AIDS. But there are millions of people here, and it struck me as a terrible idea to just write them off.

If you want to be cynical, you could say they had their chance, and they blew it. But everyone knows that our country has never had a fair system, and it’s still not fair. If I’d been in a classroom like this [poor school], I wouldn’t be here today. And I didn’t think the distribution of talent would be any different among these people than anywhere else. If you live in Johannesburg, or South Africa, you know we have talented people who aren’t using their talent optimally. Street vendors, repair people, who are really good, but don’t have the opportunities to develop their potential.

I was particularly interested in entrepreneurship, because although intelligence is distributed the same, it’s very difficult to become a world-class engineer or scientist without a decent education. It’s different with entrepreneurship. That’s about work, hustling, skills that anyone can develop. I’m not talking about people about which you say, “when you consider their background, they’re doing well”. The people you feel pity for. I’m talking about world-class entrepreneurs.

The problem we have here is that almost every institution defines you as an entrepreneur only after you’ve started a business. Then doors open. But we have one of the lowest early-stage and established business ownership rates in the world. [Stats on screen are shocking.] We just don’t have enough entrepreneurs. To limit it to the very few who actually have started a business excludes 90% of South Africa. Becoming an entrepreneur is very much dependent on circumstances, such as having an entrepreneur in the family. And a large part of our population was explicitly discouraged from owning businesses, and become workers instead.

So with Awethu, we wanted to create a model, we said, we don’t care if you have a business, or an investable idea, or work experience, or a matric. After all, only 23% of South Africans finish high school. What we care about is that you’re a young South African, without access to opportunity, and outperform everyone else in your environment. We tested for characteristics that are known to be associated with good entrepreneurs.

We’re a for profit business. We don’t operate from the safety of a non-profit. We succeed when our entrepreneurs succeed.

We started in Alexandra. Handwritten signs, umbrellas from home. Started identifying entrepreneurs, without any resources. It was a lot of hard work. Over the course of six weeks, we had 1000 people apply, and filtered them through our test. At the end of the six weeks, we selected our first three Awethu entrepreneurs. [Video. Chris, Ayanda and Mark. Very bright people, formerly stuck in manual labour jobs, or just scraping through school.]

We put them through about twenty different tests, cognitive tests, business simulations, you name it. If you want to be cynical, you say they’re the best of a bad bunch. But on the pure cognitive tests, these guys scored in the top 3% in the world. And they’re sitting not contributing to South Africa, at a time when our country is desperately short of skill.

So now they’re in our system, our incubator. Chris runs Straight To Your Door, delivery service. Ayanday runs U-Ctrl, Make It Simple, and Mark runs Jo Burrito, the best Mexican food in town.

I can tell you, there’s no reason to think these three guys would be any less productive or impactful than any of my classmates from Harvard or Oxford.

The results are amazing. We have some funding now, and we’ll identify fifteen more in the next year or two. Then we’ll roll it out country-wide, identifying, training and investing in people like these. We wanted to quantify what we meant when we say world-class. So we benchmark them, in terms of earnings, against Harvard graduates.

We’re doing this here because this home. There’s no place I know and love better. There’s the sense of responsibility. I wouldn’t have had my opportunities if it wasn’t for this country. And the third reason is I think the best opportunities are here, both to make a social impact, and to make money as a businessman. Africa is the next frontier. People who say “you could be in New York”, but that’s nonsense. “I come from a previously unexplored market, not a previously disadvantaged background,” says one of the entrepreneurs. McKinsey says ROI in Africa is higher than any other developing reason.

So ja, I’m excited. The thing I love most about it, is it’s young South Africans making things happen. Get involved. I love it.

[Awesome story. I love it.]

TARYN JACOBSON

Do you brag about living in the world’s biggest man-made forest? But there’s something missing. It’s not a full ecosystem. In our human quest for habitat and our own lives, we’ve moved our environment aside.

Nature uses plants and wildlife in so many ways. It’s a precious equilibrium. Creating healthy ecosystems is an important part of sustainability, and all facets of this are merely logical. What’s good for the birds and the bees, quite simply, is good for us.

We’ve been planting things for many reasons — food, beauty, shade, reduce noise and air pollution, privacy, security, medicine… — but because of our lack of knowledge, we didn’t consider the value of healthy ecosystems.

There are huge problems caused by foreign invader plants, though we needn’t be judgmental about them, or rashly eradicate them. We should, however, use what we know now to create balanced plant environments in our cities. This attracts wildlife and insect life, they help recover endangered species of plants.

Take Johannesburg. Its design makes it Rat City. There are no natural predators, and plenty food and habitat. So what we do is poison the rats, which kills the owls, and damage the entire ecosystem.

An important permaculture principle is to reuse what you have. If you want to remove a palm, to get rid of the rats, leave the trunk to become a bird home. Take a walk on Melville Koppies, or visit the Wilds, and discover the indigenous plants.

It can be argued that what we create in our cities is still a far cry from a natural ecosystem. But we won’t get any takers for destroying our cities. So we need to share our spaces.

Along the green belts and the northern suburbs of Jozi, we’re years ahead of many cities. All we need is to attract wildlife. If you want to know how difficult it is, it’s very simple. Just plant indigenous plants, and the wildlife will come. Many people are joining urban rejuvenation projects to revive our urban forest, to bring greenery to new suburbs or parts of the city that lack it, and improve the ecosystems of the urban forest.

I’ve seen restaurants supplying all their vegetable needs from rooftop gardens. I’ve studied lightweight cement and the use of living, growing structures in residential gardens. Urban agro-forestry brings me to the last chapter. In the Maboneng Precinct [Joburg CBD, the location of Arts on Main, where I’ve seen some of her work]. This is where an existing industrial landscape has been redeveloped for mixed communities, complete with well-designed permaculture and rooftop gardens. We see the precinct as an ecosystem, and recycle these old buildings into living, sustainable urban landscapes. [My transcription here was somewhat sloppy, sorry. I hope I got the gist, at least.]

CHERYL-SAMANTHA OWEN

“What a lot of water there is out there.” “Yes, and that’s only the surface.”

This is not planet Earth. This is planet Ocean. It produces most of our oxygen, absorbs most of our carbon dioxide, regulates the temperature… [paraphrased, taking picture.]

I spend a lot of time free-diving. We’re still discovering many new species. Less than 5% of the ocean has been explored, and less than 1% is protected.

As a child, I grew up 7500 feet above sea level, on a coffee farm in Kenya. But every school holiday, I’d spend it in the Indian Ocean. I only discovered much later how much it gives me, and gives the world. Medicines, tourism, fishing, transport. I never recognised the value of mangrove forests and coral reefs. Sharks are widely misunderstood, as monsters. Yet only five people a year actually die of shark bites. Diving with them is a perfectly sane thing to do, and I’ve spent many hours with them off Kwazulu Natal. They’re beautiful, and very important in the ocean’s ecosystem.

Shark diversity in South Africa is very high, exceeded only by the East Asian seas and South Pacific. South Africa’s seven endemic species are extremely vulnerable, and yet they’re targeted by fishermen. The greatest threat is the appetite for seafood such as shark fin soup. They’re among the 79% of fish species that are fully fished, overfished, or depleted (as opposed to under-fished).

[Shows a sticker for an acquarium, which says “Warning: Predators Beyond This Point”. It’s mirror-imaged. Aimed at the sharks.]

Locally, fish stock depletion is showing a similar pattern. Global per-capita fish consumption has increased steadily. It’s seen as healthy, trendy. This is not always the case. The larger the fish, the more heavy metals and toxins are accumulated in their meat. And would you order rhino steak? Well, red stumpnose is in a worse condition, population-wise. Yet they’re being fished. If the war against fish were on land, people would be in an uproar about the ethics.

Thousands of turtles are killed as by-catch by trawlers or long-liners. For your fish, a turtle died too.

The solution is not fish-farming either. It’s four times less efficient.

Not all seafood is created equal, and it’s not too late to save fish stocks. But you have to ask some questions about what you’re eating. Refer to the film “The End of the Line” [also recommended to me by Sheraan Amod] and the SASSI resource information on stock sustainability. There’s a number you can SMS on the SASSI card, with a fish species, and it will respond with an indicator of how healthy the resource is.

Another thing I’ve been fighting everywhere I swim is plastic litter that I see everywhere, no matter how remote the beach. All the chemicals and much of the refuse we produce ends up in the sea. Check your blood for them. You’ll find them. They come from the sea.

The pH of the ocean has also been dropping, because of the higher levels of CO₂ it absorbs. It’s dropped significantly, and this is a doomsday scenario for creatures dependent on calcium, such as shellfish. Ditto for plankton, the base of one of the largest food chains.

Ignorance of our relationship to the sea is the biggest danger to oceans. But all is not lost. There are wonderfully healthy regions, and I’ve seen them.

The oceans can rebound. We just need to let them. It’s yours. Protect it as if your life depends on it. Because it does.

FRANCOIS BONNICI

What’s the most dangerous day of your life? The day you boarded a plane? Did some rock climbing? When diving with sharks? No, it’s the day you were born.

[Skipped backgrounder on him, despite being an impressive CV. Photo duty. He established credentials as a doctor, and as a thinker on social entrepreneurship.]

I recall attending to a premature baby in a tiny village miles from nowhere. It was brought to us, wrapped in newspapers, in a box. Within a few hours, we lost the child. I lost the child. It was for a simple reason: hypothermia. It was not transported in an incubator. This is one of the reasons I became interested in the risks newborns face.

Risk in the UK, 1 in 333 babies die in the first month. In Somalia, it’s 1 in 16. The discrepancy is unacceptable. And compared to the risk of flying? Only 1 in 3.4 million passengers die per year. I’d rather fly than be born again. [Hooting, applause, as the joke sinks in.]

Two million HIV deaths, 2.2 million stillbirths, 3.4 million deaths of newborns. Mostly preventable. Yet we have made great strides in reducing child mortality. Investment in vaccines, healthcare, economic conditions of families, works. However, the gains in sub-5 mortality rate are much better than the gains in newborn mortality, which accounts for 41% of child mortality.

Yet we don’t talk about it. It’s even hard to find newborn mortality statistics.

The good news is that there has been a move to try to raise awareness of the problem. Academics and governments are starting to research it and take action.

Let’s look at the causes. Asphyxia, a birth complication. Newborn infections. We know what to do about these. We can reduce the risk to very, very little. There’s a total mismatch between where the newborn deaths occur, and where the healthcare workers are.

One solution: skin-to-skin care. Instead of incubators, conduct heat skin to skin. It keeps babies extremely warm. It can save premature babies. Deaths can be reduced by half. It’s not a high-tech solution. It’s not a low-tech solution. It’s a no-tech solution.

For some solutions, we need certain measures to make decisions. Example: monitoring a newborn’s heart rate. The WHO said every woman in childbirth should have their baby’s heart rate measured.

The cost of ARVs has gone down dramatically. The same hasn’t happened yet with equipment. Not surprisingly, the most profitable industry in the world is the medical equipment sector.

There are huge gaps in the market, to “manage the mismatch”, as the WHO puts it. So we’ve been working on design principles.

They must be low-cost. Easy to use. Safe and effective. Robust. No consumables (there’s no supply chain). Energy independent, if possible.

Can we design something like that? Yes, we can. The Foetal Heart Rate Monitor is a low-cost, robust, wind-up medical device. The technology has been around for several decades. It’s nothing new. We’re just making it appropriate and accessible. [Demonstrates, it works with water, rather than ultrasound gel.]

Another WHO recommendation for many problematic births, oxygen monitoring. [Similar device, wind-up, measures oxygenation of blood.]

These devices are being used in many locations throughout Africa now.

We have a PET Project, Power-free Education & Technology, a South African non-profit. Involves John Wyatt, John Hutchinson, Dave Woods, Joy Lawn. The foetal heart rate monitor won a global award for innovation.

We’re trying to fill the gaps, and bridge the divide. It’s our responsibility to develop such devices, and get them to this father and this mother. Or we can tell them that their baby’s heart doesn’t count.

TADDY BLECHER

Everybody told us not to start it, but our new institute, the Maharishi Institute, has just won a global award in Bahrain. We’ve been educating 5000 people, who will in their lifetimes, even if they never get a raise again, generate over $9 billion for the poor.

We can end poverty, crime, sickness and unemployment. But only by developing the most under-developed resource in South Africa, human resources.

I grew up very poor, of Lithuanian parents. What my father did learn was the importance of education. So now, we have 30 university degrees between us, in my family.

I became an actuary, because I was too scared of blood to become a doctor. I was earning over R1.3 million a year. In 1994, when South Africa changed, so many people hung up their running shoes — for running away from the police — and many others emigrated. I thought of doing so too. Actuaries are very risk-averse. I had jobs and backup jobs lined up in America, New Zealand, and Australia. I came back to South Africa, packed up my whole life in 43 boxes which I put in my mother’s cellar, and I prepared to leave.

Soon, I was starting to feel sick. I didn’t know why. Eventually, two weeks before emigrating, I ended up sobbing, thinking about life, and the problems in this country, and of the fact that fear is the only thing that stops us doing the things we believe in.

And I realised that we won’t realise our potential unless everyone has access to university education. I wasn’t a brave person. I didn’t know anything about doing good. But I thought we had to do something about education.

Hamlet said: “What a piece of work is a man. How noble of reason, how infin…. [look up the quotation]”

2.4 billion people live on less than $2 a day. We can send rockets to the moon. We rape each other every eight minutes. These are human problems.

I saw schools in the US, that take people and take them from the 50% percentile, to the top 5% [?]. I read about this model, and I started investigating it. I found an organisation that was involved with children in townships, education, meditation, and so on. So I told them I know nothing about what they do, but I asked them if I could get involved. 45 minutes later, they asked me to be the CEO.

On my first day, in Alexandra, I got people yelling at me and rocking my car. So I bought a purple car so they could find my corpse. Within days, I completely fell in love with the youth of this country. By day 100, I’d been working with them every day, and we’re achieving great results. Then I discovered that the education that they were getting was completely unrelated to the lives they were leading. Most of them had been raped. None of them saw any real future.

By day 1000, we’ve educated 9000 kids, we’d increased pass rates by 25%, we thought we were doing very well, only to find out that a huge number of these kids were ending up on the streets. It was better for them to stay in school and keep failing, than to leave school without a job and no money to go to university.

So we wanted to start South Africa’s first free university. We had nothing. Only debt. We wanted to charge R350 for a whole year of university. At the time, we had 43 black dentists. We’d just doubled the number of black actuaries. To two.

Many of the things we did we did out of complete naivete. We wanted to prove that you could take someone from the street, and turn them into a chartered accountant, or stockbroker. We got 3500 students to a university that didn’t exist. (CIDA City Campus, the Community and Individual Development Association). Downtown Joburg, dump of a building, no computers, no library, just 400 plastic chairs. We said, “Welcome to South Africa’s first free university. Meet the founders.” Five people stepped forward. “Meet the teachers.” The same people stepped forward. “And the administrative staff.” Same five people.

Soon, we got others involved, making private companies our faculties. Our students had nothing. They played imaginary games with imaginary equipment. Imaginary cricket, with imaginary wickets, an imaginary ball, an imaginary bat… I watched them day after day, and they ended up competing in a real competition, and they won nine matches in a row.

Miracles happen to us. “Just begin to weave, and God will provide the thread.” We never got a cent from government. We just started to dream, and all this thread arrived, and we’ve been able to get buildings and books and computers.

And thousands of these kids are now graduates, earning millions… and we want to multiply this 100-fold.

This is when we started the Maharishi Institute, to make an economically self-sufficient university in rural areas. They run BPO operations to fund the university. They learn while they work, earn money while they learn… We want to get to 100 000 students in the next 15-20 years. This will put $650 billion in the hands of the poor.

Einstein said: “Everything is a miracle, or nothing is a miracle, and it’s your choice.”

[Standing ovation for Blecher. “One of the giants of South Africa,” says the MC, Justin Spratt.]

SEDRICK THEODOSIOU

[Ahem. A guided meditation. By an “NLP Master Practitioner”. I’m supposed to switch off everything, while this fellow talks to my unconscious mind. My unconscious mind is sad and tired and not in the mood, though he won’t know the reason. But I won’t blog. Just to appear nice about it. Lovely words, admittedly. No doubt he’s good at mass psychology. Many people appear to be catatonic. I hope he knows what he’s doing. I’m anticipating the silent conductor, coming up next. Oh good, a child yells. Throws toys. “Small streams. A bridge.” BLOW IT UP! Sorry, I’ll be quiet now.]

STEVE BARNETT

[The silent conductor. The only person who was also at last year’s event. Does a wonderful job conducting the audience, all wielding improvised “instruments”, in a performance. I’ll post some pictures.]

Starting off slowly.

Getting people to play their pipes. Last year, there were tubes that you banged against your hand, of different lengths for different notes. This year, it’s pipes you play like a panpipe.

The crowd is getting the hang of this.

My cellphone camera is struggling with this. Rapid movement, low light. But the crowd is doing well. He’s now got them synchronised, playing a full tune, on their different coloured pipes. Very cool, once again. And he really does remain entirely silent throughout the performance. Only his backing musicians provide a guiding line.

[Standing ovation, of course. TEDxJohannesburg loves this guy.]

And finally, Alicia Thomas-Woolf, the tireless organiser of TEDxJohannesburg, thanks all the volunteers who put this together, and gets a rousing thanks herself.

Beer, Capitalism and Freedom, in that order, is on my name tag, as things that give me hope. And the greatest of these is beer. I’m outta here.