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"Chapter 1 Introduction Colonialism and Africa's Future Paths The European ways were considered modern, the African old-fashioned. Lagos culture was such an unfortunate conglomeration of both that you ended up not knowing to which you belonged. Buchi Emecheta, The Bride Price (1976) This book examines past, present, and likely future paths for Nigeria and other countries in Africa through a lens of disruption. The Oxford English Dictionary defines disrupt as meaning "to break apart, burst, shatter, separate forcibly, interrupt the normal continuity of (an activity etc.) or to throw into disorder." This book combines this commonplace understanding of disruption with conceptions of disruption that have become prominent in digital economy discussions, significantly influenced by the work of Clayton Christensen. In his seminal 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma and later work, Christensen characterized disruptive innovation as a process "by which a product or service initially takes root in simple applications at the bottom of a market - typically by being less expensive and more accessible - and then relentlessly moves upmarket, eventually displacing established competitors." Disruptive innovation has become an influential concept in technology, finance, and other arenas, with much discussion about what constitutes a disruptive innovation. Disruption is celebrated in Silicon Valley, a global epicenter of technology disruption. This book is not an intervention into the extensive discourse about digital economy disruption. Rather, this book discusses how varied forms of disruption have had an impact in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the past, the impact of such past disruptions today, and the implications and potential future paths given disruptive digital economy technologies and innovations.
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