Speak Louder

We lack diverse thinking. We live in an English-centred knowledge production, which underrepresents worldviews, African histories and excludes indigenous knowledge systems.

The Sòrò Sókè Thinktank (SST) is created to facilitate the human exchange of ideas for grassroots change. This is the first think tank to take inspiration from the open-source framework, allowing modification, collaboration, and authorship directly on the platform. It is an Afrocentric think tank seeking to highlight border thinking and subaltern knowledges - to decolonise learning and research. Sòrò Sókè means "speak louder" in Yoruba (Nigeria), and this is exactly what this platform aims to do. Using AI sentiment recognition and categorisation, we will be able to measure and generate actionable grassroots implementation by the community for the community.

This project is as much an effort to recover a marginalised voice from the past as it is a future-oriented project to test new ways of thinking about key issues concerning humanity and the planet.

What makes us unique?

Drawing on my tech background, this is the first open-source think tank. This, among many things, means it allows for real collaboration. It moves away from the usual author-and-commentator structure of many platforms to create an idea-integration platform. It means that if a user, for example, creates a database of Black-owned businesses, it can be managed by the community, kept up to date, and built on each other's ideas, creating a centralised knowledge base.

Applying the open-source framework to the think tank allows it to uphold a very important aspect: community-centred governance. A research institution written not by a few but by all to impact many.

On The SST, we understand incentives: you do not accrue followers nor money; it works on people's want to contribute to something bigger than themselves - the advancement of subaltern research by the ‘subaltern’. We call this the ‘Awujo’. The platform fees are directed to the agreed grassroots changes. This is unlike any other platform.

What does subaltern mean?

The term “subaltern,” originally coined by Antonio Gramsci, refers to populations outside the established structures of political representation and economic power. Spivak’s core concept dismantles the idea that intellectuals can simply “let the subaltern speak” or that the oppressed possess an unmediated, pure voice.

Books, essays and articles that have inspired the enterprise

• The Quran
• Prison Notebooks — Antonio Gramsci
• Can the Subaltern Speak? — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Orientalism — Edward Said
• Necropolitics — Achille Mbembe
• The End of the Cognitive Empire — Boaventura de Sousa Santos