Man with grand plans

The son of a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, Tekeste Sebhat Negga has embraced capitalism and the growing ties between China and Africa

The great US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said "a radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air". He obviously never met anyone like Tsinghua University senior class student and youth leader Tekeste Sebhat Negga, a man of action and ideals with one foot firmly planted in China and the other firmly planted in his beloved Africa.

His father was a guerilla fighter for 17 years. The political party he founded is still in power. While his father now heads up a think tank, he had served as chairman of the party for 13 years and was in the politburo and central committee.

Negga has had China on his mind as long as he can remember. "The first time that I heard of China was when I was very, very young. My dad was a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary so we had Mao books lying around and all 45 volumes of Lenin and a plethora of communist manifestos and socialist thinking. And that's how I first heard of China from my dad talking about it at home."

"Later on", he says, "I wanted to do something different from my classmates, my cousins, my friends. From Addis [Ababa, Ethiopia's capital] I could see where China-Africa and China-Ethiopian relations were going and I wanted to situate myself strategically between China and Africa." And indeed he did.

Negga applied to universities all over the world and got accepted to almost all of them but decided to go to Tsinghua. The electrical engineering and automation major did not confine himself merely to his classes.

Since he first moved to China, Negga has relentlessly pursued his goal of situating himself in the strategic sweet spot between China and Africa as the co-founder in 2009 and president of Young African Professionals and Students (YAPS), the only pan-African youth organization in China.

Negga says, "The initial plan was to have a platform for a China-Africa youth dialogue. Our premise was that there was a good and robust dialogue going on up there on the political and diplomatic level with our leaders, but when you went down to the grassroots, there wasn't anything. And you need the youth, the people, society to perpetuate any sort of relationship that we have.

"That was our goal initially but we found that there wasn't even a place for Africans in China to get together themselves. So we said, let's have a platform for young African professionals and students to talk about current China-Africa issues, while at the same time promoting Africa's brand in a good way. Since its founding YAPS has organized several Mandela Days commemorating the struggles and achievements of the ailing South African leader, held roundtable discussions on current events, and events promoting a number of Africa's abundant resources."

One of YAPS' missions is helping African students move on to the next life stage, employment, by hosting CV workshops. According to Negga, "Students in the West know how to get an internship, write a CV and so on but these are skills that we lack at Chinese universities that we need to make our African graduates employable."

Thinking back on his college years six months away from graduation in China and seeing an unaddressed need, Negga founded Kziga, which means a channel or circle in the Kignarwanda language of Rwanda.

"We've partnered with about 250 Chinese universities to accept applications on their behalf and built an online platform that an African student can come to and find all the information he or she needs to safely apply to a Chinese university as it's not easy to apply to them online. It's not easy to find someone to guide you through all the things you need to go through," he says.

"In addition we welcome people at the airport, pick them up, give them a welcome package, including a SIM card so they can call their parents when they arrive. And they have a sense of security because they can call us at any time."

You can't say that Negga doesn't think big. Right now he is concentrating on a project he says is the most important thing that he has ever worked on and truly believes can change the world, especially Africa. It's at a very early stage but has to do with cloud computing and desktop virtualization.

"Recent technology has enabled the separation of computing and input-output devices," he says. "This means that you can have your computer somewhere in the cloud, and all you'll need in front of you is your monitor, keyboard and mouse.

"It's called Vingu, which means 'virtual cloud'. It is derived from 'Wingu' the Swahili word that is used to describe a cloud or sky and we're building a virtual cloud in a box. With one small Vingu box we'll be able to virtualize 50 to 100 computers. And we plan to put these in small African villages, schools, clinics, and to sell them to SMEs there. Our technology dramatically reduces not only the cost of ownership but maintenance as well."

Negga says that he wants to make computing a human right and that he now has a plan to bring it to life.

"When you give people access [to computing] you are uplifting millions from poverty and in five years this model will take over the African continent. When you give people a computer, you are giving them the world," he says.

Negga is also an active member of Beijing Commons, a volunteer umbrella organization that produces events like BarCamp, which has nothing to do with bars or camps but is a participatory event in which anyone can speak about anything about which they are passionate. He also is active in the Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance.

Harambe is the Kenyan concept of community self-help and consists of Africans all over the world sharing their knowledge and skills with each other to help not only themselves, but to build a better Africa and a better world.

Negga doesn't spend all his time dreaming in the cloud however. In winter he likes to snowboard and in summer to attend electronic music festivals both in China and abroad. He also likes to share dreams and ambitions with his Rwandan business partner and two entrepreneur flatmates who are from Russia and Italy.

They spend time talking well into the wee hours about how to take their many plans from the dream stage and make them a reality.

Is this son of a successful Maoist Marxist-Leninist guerilla fighter a capitalist? "I do have a capitalist mind to a certain degree but I am not so sure about my heart", he admits. "What's right for my country? Capitalism with Ethiopian characteristics in the sense that our private sector is still very undeveloped so it needs heavy state involvement. I strongly believe that every country should be left alone to develop its own political model, as anything that is not internally driven and is prescribed from the outside is not sustainable and usually deadly."

And where is Negga himself heading? He has decided to divide his time between his native Ethiopia and his base in Beijing.

Negga is as relentless as he is fearless. Another famous saying by the great FDR comes to mind when thinking about Tekeste Negga's young life so far: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

China Daily

(China Daily Africa Weekly 08/16/2013 page29)