IEEE Spectrum: The African Hacker By G. Pascal Zachary

With home-brewed code and a little help from Microsoft, a programmer in Ghana launches Africa's first software empire

The first time I meet Hermann Chinery-Hesse, he is pouring diesel fuel from a plastic jug into an electric generator. I am in the West African country of Ghana, visiting his software company, Soft Tribe Ltd.

Chinery-Hesse is chief of the Tribe. He's made a small fortune writing software, working as a systems architect, and selling computer code to hundreds of businesses in his country of 21 million people. He drives a Mercedes. He wears imported Birkenstock sandals. He hails from a prominent family, was born in Dublin, and went to college in the United States. He could be working anywhere on the strength of his Irish passport, yet he's spent the past dozen years in Accra, Ghana's coastal capital and one-time slave-trade hub.

This steamy December morning, with deadlines looming, his electricity is out, his programmers are idle, and he's feeding fuel to a balky 50-kilovolt-ampere generator—one of the three he keeps at the ready.

Having emptied his container and thus delivered power to his 18 programmers—about one-tenth of all full-time code writers in Ghana—Chinery-Hesse relaxes and, for the first time, acknowledges my presence. Stroking his beard, he quips, "If we Africans are to develop, we must want to get our hands dirty."

Continued at the IEEE Spectrum web site...