Chinenye Egbuna Ikwuemesi spent 25 years transforming complex organisations. Then she went looking for older models, and found them exactly where history said there was nothing to find.

She is the author of "Nigerian Mythology: The Shadow Sky," "Meet the Orisas" and "The Girl Who Climbed the Tree," and the founder of the Afrodeities Institute, which treats African myths, philosophies and governance traditions as serious civilisational blueprints rather than colourful anedotes.

Her talks take audiences into worlds most of us were never taught existed. The Kemetic concept of Ma'at, a framework of cosmic balance and accountability that predates Greek philosophy by two thousand years. The Yoruba Ifa system, whose mathematical architecture is structurally identical to the binary logic underlying modern computing. The West African empire of Wagadu, whose priests engineered a memory system sophisticated enough to outlast civilisational collapse.

These are not origin stories dressed up as inspiration. They are working models with something urgent to say about how we build institutions, make decisions, think about AI, and decide whose knowledge counts. Audiences leave with a different map of the world in their heads, a new set of questions about the systems they inhabit, and consistently, a strong desire to keep talking long after the formal session ends.