Bangladesh’s software exporters publish annual reports, its telecom operators file quarterly results, and its tech journalists produce thousands of stories a year. Yet until this month there was not a single book about any of the people who started the industry. The gap is now a little smaller: at the Ekushey Book Fair, journalist and author Rahitul Islam has published Tathyoprojuktir Nayok S M Kamal — “Hero of Information Technology: S M Kamal” — the first volume of a planned series of ten.
Who S M Kamal is
Kamal was the founding president of the Bangladesh Computer Samity (BCS), the trade association of the hardware business, and later headed Beximco Computers. He belongs to the generation that had to persuade a government of the 1980s and 1990s that computers were something a poor country should import, teach and sell, and the book collects what is known and unknown about how he did it. It is published by Swapno 71, runs to a price of Tk 250, has a cover by Niaz Chowdhury, and is on sale at the fair and from Prothoma.com.
Why a series
“Today’s digital Bangladesh was built a little at a time by people like S M Kamal,” Islam says. “Many others contributed to establishing the IT sector, and their contribution is slowly being forgotten.” The plan is ten books on ten people, so that a younger generation can learn how the industry reached where it is. Publisher Abu Sayeed of Swapno 71 has confirmed the next subjects: Abdullah H Kafi, a former BCS president and pioneer of the local PC trade; Shaheda Mustafiz, the country’s first woman programmer; and Professor Jamilur Reza Chowdhury, the engineer and educator who chaired the national IT task force, with six more to follow.
Why it matters
Industries are remembered through the stories they tell about themselves, and Bangladesh’s IT sector has told almost none. Its founders are in their seventies and eighties; their archives are in filing cabinets and memories; and the students filling the country’s CSE departments know the names of Silicon Valley founders and not one from Motijheel. A biography series is a small correction, but it is the kind that has to start somewhere. Islam calls it a historical document of the sector. It is also, in the plainest sense, a record of who to thank.
Why the sector has no written history
It is worth asking why a biography of a founding figure is a first rather than a twentieth, because the gap is structural and it is closing on its own terms.
Bangladesh’s computing industry was built by people who are mostly still alive and still working, which makes writing about them awkward in a small market where everyone is somebody’s client. The archives that a historian would need — company records from the 1980s, the early BCS minutes, the correspondence behind the first VSAT licences — were kept on paper in offices that have since moved, and much of it is simply gone. What remains is memory, held by men and women now in their sixties and seventies.
What gets lost without it
Not the dates, which can be reconstructed, but the reasoning: why a particular licence was fought for, which decisions nearly went the other way, what the people involved believed at the time rather than what they say now that the outcome is known. That is the part no annual report preserves and no later researcher can recover once the person who remembers it has died.
A series of ten biographies is a modest answer to that, and it is still ten more than existed last month.
