Can AI Replace the Fâ?

Millions of people ask an AI every day what they should do. That is exactly what the Gulf of Guinea has been asking the Fâ for centuries. Except a machine calculates, and the Fâ receives.

The Fâ does not predict, it sheds light

The Fâ is the great divination system of the Gulf of Guinea. It goes by that name in Benin, by Ifá among the Yoruba of Nigeria, and it reached the Americas, carried there by the crossing. A diviner, the bokonon, throws a chain whose half nuts land open or closed. The combination points to one sign out of 256, and each sign opens onto stories, proverbs and chants that the diviner interprets for the person consulting. Not a prediction: light shed on a decision, and the decision stays yours. UNESCO inscribed it in 2008 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The Beninese professor Mahougnon Kakpo, who has devoted several books to it, calls the Fâ total poetry. The Du are not result sheets. They are built texts, sung and interpreted.

So why imagine a machine replacing it? Because the gesture is already here. Every day, millions of people ask an artificial intelligence what they should do. Leave this job, take this offer, go or stay. Asking a question that weighs something, receiving an answer that sheds light: that is exactly what generations asked of the Fâ. If a machine can answer, why still consult?

To find out, look at what the two systems really share, then at what will never transfer.

What looks alike: the binary system

Open or closed: two states. Your phone runs the same way, on 0s and 1s. And the coincidence goes further. Eight half nuts with two positions give 256 signs. Eight bits give 256 values: the byte, the base unit of all computing. Same logic, same number, with several centuries of head start for the chain. Two state computation was not born in Silicon Valley.

So an AI could learn the 256 signs and recite the verses. The Yoruba professor Wande Abimbola published the reference exposition of that corpus back in 1976, so the material exists. Structurally, nothing stands in the way. Which is exactly why the question deserves better than a shrug.

What the machine will always lack

First, what the Fâ really is. In the tradition, it was born of the meeting between Mawu, the supreme divinity, and human beings: a sacred language given so that we could speak with the invisible. When the bokonon draws the signs, he is not consulting his memory the way you query a database. He opens a conversation between worlds. The answer does not come from him. It comes from the divinities and the ancestors, and he alone, through decades of initiation, knows how to receive it and how to translate it.

The AI receives nothing. It knows only what it is given. Its answer depends entirely on what you explain to it: tell it half of your situation and it will answer on that half. It will not reach beyond your words, because for it there is nothing beyond. The bokonon can tell you what you did not say, what you did not know yourself. It is the invisible speaking, not your description.

It can learn the 256 signs and recite every verse. But reciting is not receiving. It is connected to nothing: no alliance with the invisible, no lineage, no initiation. And no one answers for its answer, where the bokonon stakes his word before the living and before the ancestors. An AI predicts nothing. It calculates the most probable continuation of what it was given. The Fâ makes a word circulate between worlds. The machine runs a calculation inside its own. You do not replace an alliance with an algorithm.

Our answer, at We Are Blackness

We asked ourselves this question for real. AI is one of our tools: our visuals, our collection images are born with it. We could have kept quiet about it. We would rather claim it.

Because embracing the future, for us, is not adopting a fashionable tool. It is a position on everything: technologies, languages, forms, ways of making and handing down. Our memories are not museum pieces to be protected from the present. They are alive, and everything our era invents can carry them further. That is our idea of afrofuturism¹: the past is not behind us, it moves forward with us, in every tool we choose to put at its service. The chain counted in base two before our processors did. Using the machine to tell the story of the Fâ is not betraying the heritage. It is keeping it in circulation with the tools of our time.

Honor the past, embrace the future. It is not a trade off between the two. It is the refusal to choose.

¹ Afrofuturism: a way of projecting yourself into the future without leaving your heritage behind. It is not decorative science fiction. It is the idea that Afrodescendant cultures have the right to invent the future with their own references, their own stories and their own tools, instead of being sent back to the past.