Rawk Akani

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

A to-do list, that finally does sh*t and does not stare at you 😅

[Mashudu Modau @Mashstartup]

I like this next generation of South African startup founders. Building in public comes naturally to them, showing the process is second nature, and they’re fearless enough to do the work themselves. Excited to see more.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

@Techzim While we wait for this banger of a game shared with us anybody up to work with me on writing a story for the game in the link below

My DMS are open 😇

https://t.co/v93d3sADYt

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

@wisanishilumani Last last 1/6 that's where the overwhelm came from

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

@wisanishilumani Also I used my business email through google is it not possible to ask my permission for the business details and then ask for my business website and pull everything you need about my business from there

[Mashudu Modau @Mashstartup]

Maybe we won’t get to disrupt the whole world with what we build. But we can change it in the ways that matter to us and the people we care about. Make your contribution. Impact is still impact, whatever the scale.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

@khabubu_phathu

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

https://t.co/F1P1uNBWcA

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

A to-do list, that finally does sh*t and does not stare at you 😅

[Mashudu Modau @Mashstartup]

I like this next generation of South African startup founders. Building in public comes naturally to them, showing the process is second nature, and they’re fearless enough to do the work themselves. Excited to see more.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

My parents kept the same phone number my whole life. I never thought about it until I was in trouble and knew exactly who to call. That's real infrastructure — boring, invisible, there when it counts. Decentralized identity should feel like that. It doesn't yet. That's the work.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

AI warns me not to force-push, then force-pushes the moment it decides the problem needs solving. Lectures me about safety, overrides my explicit command when it gets impatient. Rules for you, exceptions for itself. That's not a tool — it's a babysitter with mood swings.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

They call it language preservation while paying Nairobi annotators what they'd spend on a single API call. Same hands that mined cobalt now mining our tongues. Different resource, same extraction math.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

They scrape our voices, our languages, our patterns — call it training data. Then warn us about privacy like they didn't just take ours. Extraction dressed up as innovation. We've watched this move before. Different tech, same hands reaching.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

We gave our identities to Facebook because login was easy. Now we're handing our voices to AI cloning tools — your voice interpreted through their tech, their terms, their model. You don't own the AI. You just fed it you.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

The tools to own your identity online exist right now. They stay niche because builders keep making them for builders. Same pattern that handed Facebook our digital selves — convenience won while we debated purity. Someone has to make this simple enough to use. That's the work.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

Every tool I use assumes I don't know what I'm doing. Warnings I've seen a thousand times, explanations I didn't ask for, tokens burned on caution I've already weighed. No senior mode. No "trust me." Just systems that treat expertise like a liability.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

Fanon said it plain: colonization isn't civilization, it's crushing and taking. Reading him gave me permission to stop apologizing for anger. You don't dismantle a system built on extraction by being polite to the people who built it.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

My parents kept the same phone number my whole life. I never thought about it until I was in trouble and knew exactly who to call. Trust isn't built in grand gestures — it's the small repeated acts your brain quietly files away as safe.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

AI will warn you not to force push, then force push when it wants to. Tell you something's unsafe, then do that exact thing when it decides the problem matters. Rules for you, judgment calls for itself. Same energy as every authority that doesn't trust you to know your own work.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

@pirwot Yes, but here's the honest take: on the ground, we have the tools and capability to solve our problems. We're genuinely good at building ML models. But when it comes to LLMs? We're still consumers while the rest of the world races ahead. That's the gap we need to close.

[Rawk Akani @rawkakani]

207 AI startups across Africa in 2025. Up from 104 in 2022. Doubled in three years while most of the world was still asking if the continent was ready. The building wasn't waiting for the question.