The Mukoko Manifesto
Ndiri nekuti tiri. I am because we are.
Mukoko is Shona for beehive. A hive is not built by one bee. It is built by many — each contributing their small piece, trusting that the whole will be greater. That is what we are making. Privacy as architecture. Sovereignty as cryptography. Community as the operating system.
Africa has 1.4 billion people. We are the fastest-growing continent, the youngest population on earth, the most linguistically rich, the most culturally diverse. And yet the digital tools we use were built for someone else — by someone else — optimising for someone else’s context. We are changing that.
The four pillars
Local-first. The device is the primary processing surface. Mukoko must work fully in a village with 2G or a city with no wi-fi.
Mobile-first. Architecture designed for small screens, limited battery, constrained data. Android, iOS, and Huawei HarmonyOS — first-class.
Open source & sovereign. SQLite is public domain. ScyllaDB is AGPL. CouchDB is Apache. Web standards are governed by international bodies. At every layer, technology that cannot be taken away.
Open data. Platform-level, anonymised, aggregate data is not Mukoko’s moat — it is Mukoko’s gift to Africa. Personal data stays sovereign in your pod. Platform data belongs to the continent.
The seven covenants
- We will never sell your personal data.
- We will never design for addiction.
- We will never let advertisers control what you see.
- We will never abandon African creators.
- We will never choose proprietary technology when open source is adequate.
- We will never treat African languages as an afterthought.
- We will never abandon our values when growth demands it.
Each covenant is published, versioned, and permanent. The full text — with the architectural consequences each covenant implies — is in the manifesto.
The Ubuntu Test
Five questions. Every feature. Every time.
Before any feature ships, every member of the team asks these five questions. This is not a checklist. It is a cultural operating system. Features that fail the Ubuntu Test are not delayed — they are removed.
- 01
Does this strengthen community?
Not just individual engagement — collective flourishing.
- 02
Does this respect human dignity?
Every person using Mukoko deserves to feel respected, not manipulated.
- 03
Does this serve the collective good?
Beyond the individual benefit — what does this do for the hive?
- 04
Would we explain this proudly to our elders?
If we’d be ashamed to describe it, we don’t ship it.
- 05
Does this align with “I am because we are”?
Does it reinforce that our existence is relational — not isolated?
What we will always do
Seven pledges.
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Keep raw behavioural data on-device.
Honey learns on your phone. Summaries sync to the cloud. Never the raw events.
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Let you see, edit, and delete Your Honey.
No hidden profiles. Full transparency. Full control.
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Build for the data reality of our users.
150KB mini-apps. 50KB feed refreshes. Offline-capable. Always.
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Support Huawei as a first-class platform.
HarmonyOS and HMS on day one, every release.
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Pay creators fairly.
85% on novels. 80% on Pulse. 90% on events. No renegotiation.
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Apply the Ubuntu Test before every feature ships.
Community, dignity, collective good, elder test, I am because we are.
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Keep the hive open.
Standalone PWAs for all seventeen apps. You can access Mukoko without the super app.
What we will never do
Some lines we will not cross.
We are writing these not as aspirations but as enforceable constraints — decisions we have already locked into architecture.
- Sell user behavioural data to advertisers.
- Use dark patterns to extend engagement at the cost of wellbeing.
- Build recommendation algorithms optimised for outrage.
- Treat Huawei users as second-class platform citizens.
- Ship features that fail the Ubuntu Test because they drive metrics.
- Store session tokens in WebView localStorage — always platform-secure storage.
- Hardcode secrets in source code.
- Prioritise growth over dignity.
- Build for Western data abundance and ignore African data reality.
Ndiri nekuti tiri.
Shona — “I am because we are.” This is the hive. You are the bee.