There comes a time in the life of a people, a species even, when the very mirror they once fashioned to reflect their glory begins, slowly but surely, to distort their soul. We now stand at such a threshold – not merely of a new age, but of a reckoning. A reckoning where the echo of machines, once designed to mimic man, now threatens to muffle the voice of humanity itself.

Where intelligence, though artificial, ascends as oracle, and knowledge – once hard-won by the sweat of intellectual toils – becomes a digitized whisper in the datawind.

In this hour, swaddled in the luminous sheath of algorithms, we in the citadel of learning and thought – my colleagues and I in academics; we the researchers, scribes of the mind’s long journey, and custodians of civilization’s memory – must not be lulled into a slumber of convenience.

We must be watchers on the walls. For in this season of exponential adoption and propensitous embrace of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the true philosopher must learn to decipher the grain from this touted so called intelligence ‘grail’.

For the grain is what nourishes – rooted in nature, cultivated in seasons, and harvested with labour. This grail however, though dazzling, may be but a mirage – a glint in the eyes of a technocratic priesthood, promising transcendence while delivering enslavement. The grain is truth, soul-rich and borne of generations; this grail may be a chalice of code, bearing no moral compass nor ancestral grounding.

This moment is not merely technological. It is deeply ontological. It is epistemological. It is spiritual. We are witnessing the deconstruction of man’s place as centre, being subtly displaced by systems trained not on wisdom but on vastness; not on virtue but on velocity.

Afrika, in her eternal patience, must not be caught unaware. For ours is a people whose thought systems predate computation, whose oracles spoke before silicon, and whose philosophies were encoded in proverbs, not Python. If we allow this tide to sweep us into a whirlpool of passive consumption and reverent imitation, we shall, once again, become the harvest of another man’s algorithm. We must not lose the battle for authorship – of our knowledge, of our humanity, of our future.

Let no one mistake this for Luddite lament. No, this is not a dirge against advancement. It is a call for discernment. The tools of AI are vast, yes; they bear capacity to assist, to illuminate, to optimize. But tools, if unmoored from conscience and custodianship, become weapons. And what is a weapon in the hands of those who have no memory of your history? What is an AI trained on oceans of data, yet blind to the sacred river of your story?

There is an eerie quiet growing in the hallowed halls of scholarship, especially of Afrikan kinship – as if the ancient rigour of peer inquiry has been traded for prompt injection. The sacred doubt of the philosopher now scrolls endlessly through citations computed, not conceived. A generation of minds – raised not in mentorship but in models and modelling – may soon lose the ability to ask the primal question: What is man, and to what purpose is he driven?

We must be careful, extremely careful, lest this tide of artificial sagacity becomes the signal trumpet of the last days of a lost generation, especially of Afrikan essence and originality – a generation severed from the integrity of thought, from the sweat of knowledge acquisition, from the mentorship of moral scholarship. In such a generation, learning becomes layered mimicry, and research becomes retrieval, not revelation.

From the bowels of Afrika’s crucible – from Timbuktu’s manuscripts to Samaru’s chalkboards, from Ife’s cosmologies to the ink of the Nile — we were once the bearers of sacred knowledge. Let us not now become its eulogists.

Let us rise. Not to reject the machine, but to master it. Not to fear the code, but to anchor it. Let us imprint in the heart of every AI engine a conscience – an Afrikan conscience, a human conscience. Let us hold the line of scientific inquiry intellectual integrity, spiritual dignity, and governance responsibility.

For what shall it profit a generation if it gains the language of machines, but loses the soul of humans – created and molded by Divinity in His own image and likeness?

I write not as one on the outside, but as a sentinel within the fortress of thought. I speak not from the easy perch of abstraction, but from the broken benches of our public schools, the neglected laboratories of our institutions, the paper-thin journals of struggling scholars whose truths are eclipsed by trending tokens.

I write to remind – and to remember – that the mind is sacred. That truth cannot be fully mined by machines. That wisdom is not synthetic. And that in the silence of the Benue, amid the ghosts of colonial curricula and the whispers of ancestors who once taught under trees, a voice must rise. A voice that says: Not all that is coded is correct. Not all that is modelled is moral. Not all that is trained is true.

Let we the scholars awaken. Let Africa’s minds rise with both the fire of innovation and the oil of discernment. For in this day of silicon sorcery, we must walk with eyes open, and souls uncolonized.

And so, from this quiet corner where the Benue mourns in silence, I cast forth this scroll – not of warning alone, but of remembering, restoring, and reawakening.

I am Prof. Pastor Qrisstuberg msughTer Amua. I write from the ‘Silenced Banks of the Benue’