A Great Ghanaian Scientist -Dr. Victor Lawrence

A Great Ghanaian Scientist In The Person of Dr. Victor Lawrence—Part l

In 1966, two scholars from the African world, W.E.B. Du Bois and Cheikh Anta Diop, received an accolade from the First World Festival of Arts and Culture. The honor reads in part: “Award of the Scholar who has exerted the greatest influence on Negro thought in the 20the century.” Ivan Van Sertima would later opine that it would take a whole generation for the African world to produce an intellectual as great as Cheikh Anta Diop. Certainly, the African world gave birth to these great men.

After all, was Africa not an intellectual Pangaea before the continental drift of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism tore her into clueless smithereens? Some accounts even have it that Egypt and Ethiopia, two ancient African countries, are disproportionately mentioned in the Torah compared to Israel. In fact, some of the closest friends of Prophet Muhammad are still buried in Ethiopia. And why do the Bible, the Greek Herodotus and his peers, Ama Mazama, Martin Bernal, Molefi Kete Asante, Cheikh Anta Diop, WEB Du Bois, Theophile Obenga, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, J.C. Degraft-Johnson, Maulana Karenga, and others heap mountains of praises on the historical greatness of Africa’s intellectuality?

And what did Charles Darwin and Louis Leakey say about Africa’s precious gift to humanity? What did Abraham and the ancient Hebrews go to do in ancient Black Egypt? Why did Jews hide Jesus in Egypt when the Roman King Herod ordered his capture, as crisply described in the “Massacre of the Innocents” and the Synoptic Gospels? Why did Bauval and Brophy dedicate their book “Imhotep: Architect of the Cosmos” to the ancient Black Egyptian polymath, Imhotep, a man they see as a unitary conflation of Galileo, Newton, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci? Why did Isaac Newton, after carefully studying the mensuration of Pyramidology, praise ancient Black Egypt in his Latinized “Principia Mathematica,” confidently believing the cosmology of ancient Black Egypt had anticipated his ideas on gravitation?

Why did Martin Bernal and George James (“Stolen Legacy”) attribute “atomic theory” to ancient Black Egypt and not to the Greeks? In fact, what were there in ancient Black Egypt which attracted throngs of men and women? Why does the African scholar, Theophile Obenga, one of the world’s respected Egyptologists and linguists, quote Aristotle who ranked ancient Black Egypt as “the most ancient archeological reserve in the world” and “that is how the Egyptians, whom we (Greeks) considered as the most ancient of the human race”?

Why does Obenga, again, quoting the ancient Greeks, say: “the ancient Greeks traced all human inventions to the Egyptians, from Calculus, Geometry, Astronomy, and Dice Games to Writing…Since the time of Homer, Egyptian antiquity functioned strictly as a highly memorialized component of Greek history? (See Obenga’s “A Lost Tradition: African Philosophy In World History” and Kwame Natambu’s essay “Ancient Egypt’s Role In European History”)? Further, philosophy itself began with Ancient Black Egypt of “the Nile Valley around 2800 BC, that is, 2200 years before the appearance of Thales of Miletus, considered the first of Western philosopher,” according to Asante (“An African Origin of Philosophy: Myth or Reality”).

Why the need for this rich history? In fact, was Africa once as intellectually rich as these snippets of data seem to demonstrate? Well, we need this history to introduce Dr. Victor Lawrence, a well-noted engineer based in America, to our reading audience. Who is Dr. Victor Lawrence? Is he a Ghanaian? How do we know if he is in fact a Ghanaian? Does it matter if he’s Ghanaian or African at all? Sometimes we need these snippets of information to teach our little ones the intellectual capability of the African mind as well as to boost their psychosocial and intellectual confidence.

Before we get into the intellectual biography of Lawrence, may we first ask: What is the present state of science in the world? The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy, has this to say: “A paradox of our times is that, while our societies have come to depend on technological advances as never before, the interest in basic sciences is diminishing at all levels. Particularly distressing is the lukewarm interest shown towards sciences by the brightest students at the high school level. This state of affairs holds true, to the lowest order, in developed as well as developing nations, and deserves our collective attention.”

Indeed, the ICTP’s definitional prognosis of the problem is unambiguously clear. What do we do about it? Let’s reserve the theoretical and experiential solutions for later paragraphs, probably for the sequel. In the meantime, the IPS Community website has the following useful snippet of information on Dr. Lawrence: “A native of Ghana, Lawrence joined Bell Laboratories in 1974 after receiving his doctorate from Imperial College, London. However, the Electrical and Computer Engineering website of Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, America, indicates that Dr. Lawrence obtained all his degrees, undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral, from Imperial College, University of London, UK.

Is Imperial College not the alma mater of Prof. Kofi Ampenyi Allotey, the mathematics and physics prodigy? Is Prof. Allotey not counted among “some of the most eminent scientists of our time,” as the ICTP’s book, “One Hundred Reasons To Be A Scientist (2004),” puts it? Can any of us recall the following statement made by Prof. Allotey: “I was the first to introduce electron-hole scattering resonances effect on soft X-ray spectroscopy”? Insightfully great and transformative.

Why is science so important? This is what Prof. Allotey thinks: “Apart from understanding the universe, and perceiving new potentialities, science is an essential means of meeting society’s needs for food, water, transport and communication, energy, good environment, health care, shelter, safety and alleviation of poverty (“Hundred Ways to be a Scientist”). Great.

Let’s move on: What is the locational expertise of Lawrence? Electrical engineering. What has been some of his outstanding achievements? Again, the Electrical and Computer Engineering website (SIT) lists the following: “Lawrence was an early champion of VLSI for ATM/IP networks and helped create two generations of ATM/IP silicon, including the industry-leading ATLANTA ATM/IP chip set. Over the years, Lawrence spun several ventures, internal and external to Lucent, to maximize the impact of technology developed in his team…”

On the other hand, in the article, “Dr. Victor Lawrence of Stevens Institute of Technology is Named Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors,” posted on Stevens’ website (“University News”), the school attributes these to Dr. Lawrence: “Lawrence is renowned for his pioneering work in global telecommunications which have paved the way for many developments in broadband, DSL, HDTV technologies and wireless data transfer and helped to spur the growth of the internet worldwide.”

Therefore, we may say Dr. Lawrence somewhat fits the innovative and managerial profiles of the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. That said, we may want to ask: What is it with our indigenized educational institutions which render them incapable of producing such great minds? For instance, NASA’s Ashitey Trebi-Ollenu, a robotics engineer, was educated at Queen’s Mary College, UK, after his pre-university education at Ghana Secondary Technical School (GSTS). Similarly, Ave Kludze, a rocket scientist, received his education at Rutgers University after his pre-university at Adisadel College. So were the Malian-born aerospace engineer, Cheick Modibo Diarra; the Nigerian-born computer scientist, geologist, and engineer, Philip Emeagwali; the Nigerian-American anthropologist and educations, John Ogbu; the Ghanaian-American spine reconstruction scientist, Oheneba Boachie-Adjei; and several others.

Not that we find anything objectionable with our students’ seeking education outside the seven corners of Africa. The fact is simply this: Why can’t our institutions produce this high caliber of bright and innovative men and women? The book “Eminent Educators: Studies in Intellectual Influence” ranks John Ogbu as “one of the four intellectual giants of the 20th century.” But how much did Ogbu directly contribute to pedagogy in his native Nigeria or Africa? In fact, John Ogbu, Howard Gardner, Carol Gilligan, and John Dewey constituted the quartet of the “four intellectual giants of the 20th century.”

Could our educational environments not be conducive to the free exercise of intellection? Yet Kofi Annan, Ashitey Trebi-Ollenu, Ave Kludze, Kofi Allotey, Kofi Awoonor, Atukwei Okai, Ama Ata Aidoo, and several others received some preparatory, or, even full, education in Ghana. True, the West produced Taiya Selasi and Africa produced Ama Ata Aidoo. That means Africa can rub shoulders with the West. But what can we say beyond these isolated examples?

Molefi Kete Asante once opined that Africa harbors creative potentiality for internal development. If that is true, why do we lag behind the rest of the world in science, technology, and mathematics? Could it be a problem of language? Cheikh Anta Diop did make a strong case for a continental African language. Again, Diop, for instance, translated Einstein’s theory of relativity in its entirety into Wolof, his native tongue, to prove that European languages were not technically and organically more developed or advanced than African languages. Furthermore, both Diop and Obenga also used the ancient African language of ancient Black Egypt to show how ancient Egyptians used their language to develop complex ideas. In fact, the Greeks did not come to ancient Africa to study in Greek.

Actually, Maurice Delafosso first invented the linguistic portmanteau “Afro-Asiatic.” Later, the American linguist, Joseph Greenberg, would appropriate it to describe groups of language families sharing a geopolitical commonality between African and Asia. In no time, Diop and Obenga quickly took Greenberg to task, calling his attention to the inadequacy of his linguistic taxonomy. Diop then used a linguistic comparative methodology he had fashioned to undermine Greenberg’s classification scheme. Obenga did likewise, demonstrating the organic and genetic relationship between contemporary African languages and ancient Egyptian (See Obenga’s “Ancient Egypt and Black Africa”). Finally, Diop’s “melanin dosage” test confirmed the blackness or Africanness of Ancient Egypt.

Interesting, it turned out that there was an insidious attempt on the part of certain unscrupulous scholars to take Ancient Egypt out of Africa and make it part of the so-called Middle East, or South West Asia. Meanwhile, the investigative diligence of the British-American Sinologist, Martin Bernal, makes a similar contention in his “Black Athena,” demonstrating how European scholars uncomfortable with the high civilization of ancient Ethiopia (Aksum, Meroe, or Kush) chose to use “Abyssinia” for “Ethiopia” because the ancient Greeks, like Herodotus, associated Ethiopia with blackness.

What do comparative linguistics, Ancient Egypt, Greeks, Dr. Victor Lawrence, and African history have to do with the present state of science, technology, and mathematics in Ghana (and Africa)? They have everything to do with African ingenuity as well as with a lack of intellectual continuum between our past and present .

Let’s take a final look at some of Dr. Lawrence’s achievements: He’s a founding director of the Center for Intelligent Networked Systems (SIV), member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), managed an international R&D organization (China’s Shanghai/Beijing, Netherlands’ Twente/Hilversum, US), and holds numerous patents (telecommunications). And he is named Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

His greatest achievement, contribution, we think, is helping to introduce fiber optic connectivity to Africa. In fact, his company, Baharicom Development Corporation, is constructing a high-capacity, broadband underwater cable along the west coast of Africa (University News, SIT), according to Stevens’ website.

But who should have the last word? Let the last word go to the respected senior scientist and mathematician, Prof. Allotey: “As I wrote more than twenty years ago, “We (in the developing countries) paid the price for not taking part in the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century because we did not have the opportunity to see what was taking place in Europe. We now see that information and communication technology (ICT) has become an indispensable tool. This time we should not miss out on this technological revolution.”

Need we say more? Indeed, our wise elder has a placed a great burden on our shoulders. Ghana must listen. Africa must listen.

We shall return with Part ll…