The Search Before Search Engines
Before the blue glow of our screens, there was the red dust of wisdom.
Before we typed questions into a box, our ancestors asked Afa.
They didn’t scroll, they listened.
They didn’t “Google it”, they divined it.
For every confusion, every crossroads, there was a way to consult the unseen. Afa wasn’t superstition; it was a system. An ancient search engine powered by symbols, rhythm, and spirit.
We’re here thinking we invented algorithms. But they already had theirs encoded in kola nuts, palm fronds, and proverbs.
What Afa Really Was
In Igbo land, they called it Afa. In Yorubaland, Ifa. In other tribes, different names, same intention: to seek answers beyond the ordinary.
The Dibia or Babalawo was the human search bar.
They’d cast sacred objects; palm nuts, cowries, and read patterns like ancient code. Each fall, each mark told a story.
It was a living database of wisdom, ancestral data encrypted in verses and symbols.
No Wi-Fi. No buffering.
Just clarity downloaded from beyond time.
The Old Intelligence System
Afa was never random. It was research through rhythm.
Our ancestors didn’t just “believe”, they decoded patterns.
They read the world like a living text.
They understood something we’re only now rediscovering:
Information is sacred. And not all knowledge lives online.
The Cost of Forgetting the Old Codes
Somewhere between colonization and modernization, we stopped listening.
We began to believe that anything ancient was outdated, that our ways were wild, our wisdom unverified.
We traded cowries for currency,
and truth for trend.
We let our codes fade, the proverbs, the silence, the signs.
But in losing them, we lost something else too:
the art of stillness,
the confidence to seek within,
the discipline to interpret life without needing validation.
Now we scroll endlessly, searching for direction that once came from rhythm, from wind, from ancestors, from the quiet intelligence of the earth.
The answers didn’t disappear; we just stopped speaking their language.
For Gen Z: How to Decode This Now
Today, we search everything but rarely search within.
We’re quick to ask Google “what’s next?” but slow to ask our spirits “why now?”
Our ancestors didn’t just seek data. They sought direction.
They paused, interpreted, listened.
They didn’t rush the answer; they honored the process.
To move smart, we must search deep.
Afa reminds us that wisdom isn’t lost, it’s waiting, disguised in our intuition, our heritage, our silence.
Maybe we don’t need new tools, we just need to remember the old codes.
The Mirror Moment
Before Google, there was Afa.
Before algorithms, there were ancestors,
decoding the world in symbols, not code.
They didn’t scroll to find meaning.
They listened.
To silence. To patterns. To spirit.
They understood that wisdom doesn’t rush, rather,
it reveals itself to the patient heart.
But somewhere along the line,
we traded depth for data.
We started mistaking noise for knowledge.Our ancestors didn’t need Wi-Fi to be connected,
they were plugged into something older,
something real.