The Republic 2025 Student Writing Competition Winners

Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s ideas on linguistic decolonization, Prosper Ishaya warns that the rise of Artificial Intelligence risks deepening linguistic inequality and urges African nations to embed indigenous languages into AI systems to resist digital colonialism. 

While acknowledging the benefits of Artificial Intelligence, Azubuike Obi calls for responsible use and initiates deeper conversations about its long-term social and educational consequences. 

African data is being used to build Meta’s language model and targeted advertising algorithms. Despite this, the systems built with this data neither understand nor represent African values and cultures. 

For Africa, if artificial intelligence should not just be a far-fetched dream, then it is necessary that the AI we integrate be free from colonial thinking. 

The spatio-historic relevance of an artwork ensures that the original, although replicated a thousand of times, remains the original. AI art is aura-less.