Talking Heads
Providing unique platforms for Africa’s thought leaders to share their knowledge.
Talking Heads is a multi–layered, knowledge sharing platform conceived to identify, showcase, network and expose Africa’s thought leaders. It profiles the ideas, visions and manifestations of the extraordinary people living on this Continent.
Talking Heads Gallery
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Talking Heads
Looking into the continent from the outside or from within it, the mainstream messages that define Africa rarely articulate the subtlety and nuance of its people or their existence. How can almost 1 billion people in 52 countries speaking over 2,000 languages all be living in chaos all the time? The clichés and commonly held notions of Africa and Africans are that they are HIV positive, poor, corrupt and criminally inclined. These notions get punctuated and perpetuated by our insatiable appetite for what is burning or destroyed versus what is thriving. These views, messages and perspectives crowd out a balanced understanding of the extraordinary diversity of everyday existence on this continent.
Talking Heads exists to disrupt the clichés about Africa and what it is capable of by offering alternative realities to the commonly held notions of continental collapse. These new realities are birthed through the sharing of Africa’s thought leaders’ extraordinary knowledge, ideas and expertise in fresh and engaging ways to as many audiences as possible.
Our approach is to develop a model that can be easily replicated anywhere in Africa and with scale, can offer an alternative narrative of who and what we know about this place we call home. This model is comprised of four components.
Intimate Conversation – Talking Heads Live
The Talking Heads Live events use the art of conversation as a potent way to exchange and build knowledge about the world and ourselves. Conversation allows us to share, debate and adapt our thoughts in personal, interactive, multi-dimensional and compelling ways; we remix ideas through spontaneous, unrehearsed collaboration.
Talking Heads Live creates an unusual platform of social interaction, in which the vast wealth of knowledge that is often stored in isolated pockets around us can be released through thought provoking intimate conversation. In practice, we construct a public event where participants have the opportunity to engage in an intimate 20- minute conversation (two audience members and one expert per table) with four different experts. Each event presents 40-50 experts ranging from cosmologists to economic forecasters to futurists to sex worker activists to nuclear physicists, a real Wikipedia evening of African thought leaders.
The advantages of this approach are that it encourages the cross-pollination of ideas and provides a fertile ground for transforming how we perceive and locate our society and ourselves.
Broader Access – Talking Heads Media
There is currently no consistent programming on Africa’s broadly accessible media channels that highlights African thought leader’s knowledge in interesting and accessible ways. Talking Heads Live has the benefit of progressing and disseminating ideas though conversation, but its format and scale prevent it from reaching a broader audience. To achieve broader audiences, mini-documentaries of 5-8 minutes in duration will be created from the most compelling participants from the Talking Heads Live events. This content will then be packaged and made available free of charge to the widest reaching media channels in Africa, including television radio and mobile phones. In addition, an archive of these films will be available online and can be downloaded as video casts and radio casts.
Network – Talking Heads Connect
Another benefit of hosting the Talking Heads Live events are that the experts or thought leaders also get to be an audience member. Through the common experience of serving as an expert and engaging with other experts a network of extraordinary people is realised. Part of the Talking Heads ambition is to create a living on-line archive of those who have participated that includes a small bio, and video/audio cast about their particular fields of knowledge. This archive is intended to become a tool for encouraging and facilitating exchange and collaboration across disciplines to address some of the more intractable issues that African leaders are confronted with.
Do-it Yourself – Talking Heads Seed
To escalate the impact that Talking Heads can have on knowledge exchange, collaboration and profiling the 95% of Africa that never gets exposed, we will establish a social entrepreneur franchise approach to replicating the project. The intention is to migrate Talking Heads Live, Media and Connect to four new cities in Africa each year. Each iteration of the Talking Heads activities in the host city will be done in collaboration with local partners. After the initial live event the partners will be given the licence to host their own future Talking Heads events. The partners will then feed their local thought leaders into the central online network platform and make their own mini-documentaries for distribution locally and as part of the broader offering made by the Africa Centre. Replication of the Talking Heads model in other African cities provides a simple and cost effective model for spreading the possibilities of platforming Africa’s great wealth of talent and ideas.
To find out more, or become a Talking Head contact robinj@africacentre.net
