Brook Abebe – I build systems and stories for Africa's digital future.

The Year I Stopped Hiding

Posted on October 3, 2025

This is the year I stop hiding.

I write this note as my effort to unmask my struggle, a refusal to delay, a step into public clarity after years of living underground. I am not complaining or planning a heroic parade, but something in between: an effort to discover myself at an age that demands I know myself better than I did a decade ago.

There’s a flawed assumption that age alone grants wisdom. I believe clarity comes not from the passing of years, but from the lessons of failure and the courage to be consistently vulnerable.

This is my effort here.

Progress has always been the word that has defined my search for meaning. I believe everything is born to grow, to become better than it was yesterday.

My challenge was my mind’s relentless pursuit of perfection. Therefore I waited. My sketchbooks stayed a graveyard of half-implemented ideas and projects.

A year ago, a fellow Christian told me she saw a dream where i was surrounded by open, pen, cluttered, and unfinished books. She said whatever you have accumulated is ample; now share it. I have always felt that way. Her words reminded me of the concept of “spiritual obesity, “ a tendency to hoard knowledge or revelation, and failure to live out faith.

Africa’s Digital War

Building Africa’s Knowledge Infrastructure: Huneta

Posted on September 23, 2025

Since childhood, the pace of knowledge and information in people’s lives has amazed me. On the contrary, I have seen how a lack of information shapes destinies, especially in Africa, where the system is usually rigged or blocked. Houses are demolished with little notice. Many walk around with a CV. Violence begins without warning. People still have to rely on oral or unreliable social media for information. Rumors spread faster than facts, and scams fill the gaps.

I also noticed how Africa was portrayed in the global media. CNN’s images of people with ashy feet walking in a slum or beside starving cows stuck in my head. This version of Africa gave me a headache.

But the Africa I know is full of talent, energy, and ambition. The real gap is in three ways: a true image, reliable knowledge, and a better way of knowledge exchange. How could those be seeds for change? That question became the seed for Huneta.

My childhood observations were not isolated. They are part of a deeper system failure, one that continues until this day, but in a different form.

Information is not scarce anymore. More than 400 million African youth use smartphones daily. However, many use it for Entertainment, not real opportunities. Jobs, scholarships, and useful information exist, but they are scattered, unverified, and rarely contextual. The result is wasted potential.

Africa’s Digital War

At the Mercy of Gatekeepers

Posted on September 16, 2025

I noticed my father worries whenever I sit on the computer for a long time. He studies my screen, my hunched body, my tired eyes; the screen doesn’t change much except for zooming in and out. Last Tuesday, he asked: “Why don’t you join the mayor’s office?”

“Why?” I replied.

“You won’t have to work this much,” he said.

I knew what he meant. Not the workload, but the security. I told him no. I am not a fan of bureaucracy. I didn’t fully know the meaning of the word, but it captured what I feel whenever I deal with government offices.

I remembered the stairs I took at the revenue office to make a simple payment. The transport office, where a clerk shoved me and ignored my questions. The passport office, where a long line of people waited, with no one to guide them through the process. The Woreda offices. The endless waiting.

I didn’t dare to explain these images of public offices I had in my mind. At least I teach at a public school. I heard stories of finance officers who delay payments until they get their share. Nothing more.

Today it happened to me. I was at the mercy of an old officer who tried to humiliate me in front of his secretary, while strangers watched and controlled the narrative and the project.

Africa’s Digital War

Africa Isn’t Underdeveloped. It’s Undersystemized.

Posted on July 16, 2025

We keep using the wrong word.

Africa isn’t failing because of a lack of development. It’s failing because it never built the systems development depends.

Development is not growth.

Growth is what happens when a seed finds the right environment. Development is the environment.

Development is structure. Capacity. Functionality.

You can’t develop what isn’t systematized.

A system is a repeatable structure that produces predictable outcomes. It doesn’t need constant micromanagement. It scales trust and coordination. A system is how a society remembers how to act.

Here is a simple way to understand systems. A market is a system for allocating resources. A school is a system for standardizing thought. A nation is a system for distributing power and shaping future options.

When you don’t have systems, you don’t have development.

Ghostwriting & IP

Signal Over Noise: How to Build Authority in the Age of Speed

Posted on April 21, 2025

How do you win in a world where a 10-second noise drowns 10-year ideas?

Last month, I sat with a CEO trying to break into the social game. Her frustration was sharp. “How can I be a signal in the age of noise?” She pointed to the paradox that mediocre dance videos get millions of views, and useful ideas go unnoticed. This is a fair concern for someone who values time, money, and legacy.

After 30 minutes of critical reflection (or call it complaining), we came to a conclusion: content is no longer rare because speed killed it.

Everyone posts but a few say anything valuable. Most content today is a dopamine factory dressed as a community. And that is by design.

Social media has industrialized what the 1933 concept of ‘Dumbing Down’ (a deliberate oversimplification of ideas to pacify the masses) warned us about. Social media only encourages frequency, outrage, and the shortest path to dopamine. It trained many of us not to think or reflect but to consume and react, to copy and post as new. (Aren’t you tired of Amapiano dances that keep repeating with different faces but the same mediocre movements)

Our discussion left me with a single concept: speed breeds noise, and signal creates authority.

Faith & Structure Systems & Power

Division Urbanism: How Cities Were Quietly Engineered to Separate Us

Posted on April 15, 2025

Title originally written in 2015. Lightly edited in 2025.

This essay was my first attempt at naming something I felt but couldn’t yet fully articulate—that cities, in the name of modernity, were quietly being engineered to divide.

Today, I think differently. But I still believe this idea was an early signal.

The follow-up essay, Division Urbanism 2.0, is now live here → [link]

The System Beneath the Street

The urge to be modern and the push of globalization that is observed in the metropolis and its consequences pressurizes the city of Addis Ababa to resemble the East, if not the West. The adopted structures present themselves as an alternative solution juxtapositioning next to the existing structures and lifestyle of the society, and shaping a new economic and cultural paradigm. The exposure extends from the intended function, which is the transportation system, to unintended consequences. The latter is the main inspiration for this paper.