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Herman Chinery-Hesse inspired generations of Africans with his enthusiasm for technology’s disruptive promise and laid the ground for younger tech entrepreneurs from the continent to thrive.
The Ghanaian tech guru, who has died at the age of 61, was a radical innovator with a devilish sense of humour and a generosity of spirit that won him friends and allies across Ghana, the continent and beyond.
Early in his career as a software programmer he was dubbed the “Bill Gates of Africa”. It was always something of a misnomer. He never converted his brilliance into monetary billions. But he left Africa much richer for his ideas.
Chinery-Hesse believed in the power of technology to upend the legacy of colonialism, reshape corrupt bureaucracies and connect African producers more equitably with global markets. But for much of his life, cut short by a cardiac arrest last month, he was way ahead of his time, expounding an African way of doing things that peers have yet to catch up with.
He pioneered what he called “tropical tolerance” — an ethos that underpinned the software company, theSOFTtribe, he launched when he returned to Ghana from the US in 1991, armed with an industrial technology degree from Texas State University and an Amstrad XT.
Tropical tolerance was about tailoring software to African realities, to withstand power cuts and network outages, and making it easy to use at a time when digital literacy was at its infancy. Until recently you could still find the original MS-DOS powered payroll and purchase ledgers that he created in the early 1990s operating at petrol stations around Ghana.
“Herman was all about developing software for Africa and Africans, that was light, appropriate and resilient,” said David Kwamena Bolton, another digital prodigy in his day and co-director of theSOFTtribe. Kwamena Bolton said millions had been wasted over the years dumping US and EU technology that didn’t suit the African market.
Chinery-Hesse was also a mentor to younger Ghanaians. One of his greatest legacies, according to friends, is the network of fellow pioneers he built up, who could often be found meeting at his weekend retreat in the Aburi hills overlooking Accra, germinating ideas.
“If you look at Ghana’s tech space today, most people who occupy positions that matter have either passed through theSOFTtribe or were personally mentored by Herman,” said Tetteh Antonio, a friend and theSOFTtribe chief executive. He was great at nurturing creative talent in part because of his own unorthodox and non-judgmental ways, Antonio said.
Chinery-Hesse, who was married to Sadia with whom he had two children, was born in Dublin to Ghanaian parents in 1963. He had no money to build a manufacturing business when he returned to Accra aged 28. But he decided his PC was factory enough; he taught himself to program and set about building a company that within a decade had become the gold standard for software development in Ghana and parts of west Africa.
His business was bootstrap.
“We didn’t have the infusion of Silicon Valley-type money. Most of us had to really scrape the bottom of the barrel and drive our adventures with revenue capital,” said Bright Simons, another fellow traveller in Ghana’s emerging tech scene. During years of toil and hustle, “Herman made the case that there was a distinct African entrepreneurial culture”, one that was self-generating and lean, Simons said.
His model worked in part because of Africa’s economic constraints. Chinery-Hesse saw these as opportunities. Ghanaian manufacturing might not be able to compete on the global stage, but Ghanaians could compete with ideas and in code, he believed.
“Every feature of underdevelopment represented a business opportunity. I still believe that,” Chinery-Hesse explained many years later of the promise he saw on his return to Ghana when the country was recovering from coups and military juntas.
Although his software was tailored to African realities, his personality often rubbed up against them. Together with Kwamena Bolton, he computerised Ghana’s civil aviation networks, digitalised much of the private sector, electronically formatted utility bills and later cleaned out thousands of ghost workers from the public payroll — a challenge that donor millions had failed to fix.
But they were reluctant contractors for the state and were often at odds with it. Their efforts at digitalising the civil service met stiff resistance from vested interests. A legal row with the state water company remains stuck in the courts. He got little if any state backing when he sought to expand his business abroad.
While the huge African tech companies that followed in his wake — Flutterwave, Jumia and Konga — have raised millions from Wall Street, Chinery-Hesse hesitated to call on foreign capital, or replicate Silicon Valley models. He wanted Africa to build its own. Yet some of his boldest ventures, into payment systems and ecommerce, struggled to get off the ground for want of cash.
“I felt we could not compete against the global giants,” said Joe Jackson, a co-founder of theSOFTtribe who ultimately went his own way. “I felt that we should find a way of putting ourselves in the value chain rather than creating a new chain. Herman thought that was a cop out,” he said. “Every society needs its dreamers. The people who are really thinking and dreaming of a future that maybe some of us like myself are too real about.”