Nairobi, Kenya is often called the "Silicon Savannah" and is considered Africa's tech capital.Even though it isnt funded as well as Israel it is far superior in areas of innovation! The city is home to many startups, tech incubators, and regional offices of global tech companies, and is a leader in the continent's tech startup scene. Kenya's tech sector is estimated to be worth $1 billion and contributes 1.1% of the country's GDP. Israeli-owned businesses occupy many street corners in Kenya’s capital. The wildly popular Artcaffe coffee and casual dining chain and the bustling shopping centre, Westgate Mall, are owned and operated by Israeli-owned companies. There are also other influential businesses with slightly less name recognition, like the agricultural company Amiran Kenya. Israel scouts the best tech wizards from Kenya to feed its own industry.
One company specifically seeks Kenyan candidates for employment. Candidates accepted into the MasaTech program receive unparalleled professional training and guaranteed full-time employment with an annual range of salary between $50,000 and $150,000. MasaTech is Israel's most elite recruitment program, matching top-tier candidates from around the world with premier tech companies.
"During the early to mid-twentieth century, the pseudoscience of eugenics gained popularity among elites throughout western Europe and the United States. Fascists and progressives of the time found comfort in the promise of regulated human breeding amid the demographic decline of caucasians brought on by Western industrialization and urbanization. In the United States especially, a massive flood of new immigrants prompted calls for so-called "race-purifying" policies-such as marriage restrictions and forced sterilization of black female prisoners to protect the "well-born" (white) from genetic annihilation." (A.Reddy 2008)
Those considered well-born were almost exclusively upper class and of Nordic descent. Eugenic validation of existing race and class hierarchies functioned tautologically: privileged ethnic groups were considered innately talented and biologically advanced. Although their was no scientific evidence to prove this. So a test was needed to support this theory of superiority that would make sure the outcome would support their ideas.
Alfred Binet's 1904 intelligence scale, a prototype for the Stanford-Binet IQ test,28 was developed with the sole purpose of identifying French children with developmental disabilities so that they could receive extra help in school. 29 Binet's scale assigned children a mental age based on a comparison of their skills with those of "normally functioning" children. Binet explicitly warned against dangerous and unsupportable extrapolation of his work, such as using his tests to peg normal children and adults on a single, linear scale of immutable intelligence. The Nazis would later use this scale to identify children and adults to be killed in the interest of improving the population.
Binet defined intelligence as “the components of intelligence are reasoning, judgment, memory, and the power of abstraction.” He measured intelligence as “general mental ability of individuals in intelligent behaviors.” He described intelligence testing as classifying, not measuring.
Notable American eugenicist, Henry H. Goddard, eager to catalog Americans along just such a scale, promptly ignored Binet's warnings, translated the tests into English, and pushed for their widespread use.Known as the father of intelligence testing in the United States, Goddard used a perversion of Binet's intelligence scale to rank those he considered feebleminded into varying degrees of mental incompetence: idiots (pre-verbal), imbeciles (illiterate), and morons (highfunctioning). For Goddard,"Moron" which he coined in 1910 from the Ancient Greek word μωρός (moros), meant "dull" and used to describe a person with a mental age in adulthood of between 7 and 10 on the Binet scale.
"He considered them the gravest eugenic threat because of the ease with which they could pass for normal and reproduce. Goddard found morons wherever he looked: criminals, alcoholics, prostitutes, all non whites and anyone "incapable of adapting themselves to their
environment and living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly." By using this scale and setting up a system of laws that sabotages a group anyone unable to succeed in the society would be deemed a moron. The major changes in the Intelligence Test pushed by Goddard was a focus on questions involving memorization of facts and lessons that were not taught to people outside the dominant culture. By basing the test on common knowledge of the popular culture you could guarantee foreigners and those denied access to education would fail or test in low numbers."
Goddard concluded that "immigration of recent years is of a decidedly different character from the early immigration .... We are getting the poorest of each race. Contemporary critics noted the obvious flaws of eugenicists' methods and gross misrepresentations of genetic knowledge. For example, prominent journalist Walter Lippman said this of the eugenicists' self-congratulatory findings: "Obviously, this is not a conclusion obtained by research. It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe. Noted Lawyer Clarence Darrow further cautioned, "the schemes for remolding society [eugenics]... is the most senseless and impudent that has ever been put forward by irresponsible fanatics to plague a longsuffering race.
Despite such scathing rebuke, eugenicists' efforts to quantify the innate superiority of the ruling classes continued to enjoy widespread support. The moneyed and powerful were fond of Social Darwinist narratives legitimizing the existing social order. The claim that there is a link between race and intelligence is the main tenet of what is known as “race science” or, in many cases, “scientific racism”. Race scientists claim there are evolutionary bases for disparities in social outcomes – such as life expectancy, educational attainment, wealth, and incarceration rates – between racial groups. In particular, many of them argue that black people fare worse than white people because they tend to be less naturally intelligent. This is why they fight so hard to hide historical truth and narratives that are not Eurocentric. It is also why outside of Kenya you will rarely hear of the excellence of that nation in the tech fields.
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