By Eben and Kristi van Tonder, 28 November 2025
The Two Images: Goethe sits in formal eighteenth-century refinement, representing the disciplined interior world of ideas and literary humanism, while Humboldt is shown outdoors in Weitsch’s nineteenth-century painting, notebook and telescope beside him, embodying the outward turn of Enlightenment confidence into empirical observation and the direct study of nature.
Introduction
Working in Nigeria is not theoretical. It is a collision with chaos. You arrive with plans, and the structure built yesterday is ignored. Deliveries slip. Workers drift. A small core learns and tries, and they keep me here, but the rest grind you down. People argue not from data but from ego. A technician who has never left his state insists he knows more than protocols refined across continents. You ask yourself: Why am I here?
In countries with functioning systems, professionalism is reinforced by the environment. In Nigeria, every day is a negotiation with entropy. Standards are taken as insults. Experience is treated with suspicion. Some days, the disrespect is so blunt it feels violent. Eventually, you either adapt or reach for something stronger.
At the end of 2025, everything changed. Since Kristi and I met, we have interrogated the issue of Africa. Can the environment change? I often lashed out against the chaos. Developed deep depression. A feeling of helplessness engulfed me. I found myself treating others in a way that is shameful, speaking to them in ways that I would never have spoken to people, even at my worst and most immature. There had to be another way, and since 2024 Kristi and I set out to find it.
In response to my growing attitude of resentment against the average worker and my scepticism that real change is possible, Kristi reminded me of a phrase her dad often used to say, “Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut.” It is a quote from the famous German poet, Goethe. An affirmation that humans are noble when they are helpful and good. We traced the origins of this phrase in Edel Sei der Mensch: A Styrian Legacy of Nobility, Helpfulness and Goodness.
Our work continued to progress, and we found inspiration in the work of two scientists, Wenning and Shannon. Wenning demonstrated that industrial efficiency depends on structured standardisation, while Shannon established the mathematical foundations of information theory and showed how structure separates signal from noise. Both traced the basis of information back to ordered structure as the prerequisite for efficiency. I was reading about Goethe and von Humboldt, who knew each other well, when one account described them as pioneers of what history later called “Aufklärerische Zuversicht”. The best English rendering is “Enlightenment-era confidence in reason.” To our surprise, we discovered that Aufklärerische Zuversicht refers to enlightenment grounded in concrete structure. Was it possible that not only the Japanese industrial transformation after WWII, influenced by Wenning and the rise of information technology pioneered by Shannon, but even the Enlightenment itself, was founded on the same fundamental notion of structure? Structured order as the basis for all great system developments? This was an immense validation that for change to happen on the Nigerian factory floor, a revolution was needed in every respect, based on structure and order.
But there is a major difference between “imposed order” and order that grows from within the system. Here is the exact point where I went wrong!
In the title, I use the phrase “From Weimar to West Africa” to mark this. The distance between the humanist discipline and the resulting structure Goethe saw in his declaration, “Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut,” and where I tried to impose structure through command here in West Africa. Weimar symbolised this inherent ordered culture that grew from an understanding of the basic value of humans and our innate ability, versus my “imposed from outside” approach. Its loss serves as a reminder of how societies collapse when structure is abandoned, as happened in the Weimar state. It anchors the central tenet that real change must be predicated on the belief that, if taught faithfully and shown through superior and intuitive structures, transformation is not only possible but inevitable. It requires me to stand next to the worker and show them every step of the way as opposed to stand over them and tell them. Even more profoundly, it must be predicated upon my own very structured understanding of the workspace.
West Africa right now is the the opposite pole of structure, and denying this reality is counterproductive. Here, nothing carries you. Every principle must be rebuilt from zero. Evidence must replace ego, repetition must replace opinion, and reliability must replace entitlement. When I use these words, ego, opinion, reliability, and entitlement, I am not speaking first of Nigerians. I am referring to the expatriates who work here, including myself. Discipline must grow organically out of the essence of who the West Africans are, or we will all be consumed by disorder. The first recognition is that the West African, like the German, the Austrian and the Swiss, is edel, hilfreich and gut. A system must develop organically that “helps” and is “good”, honouring every human. Not one that imposed from above.
My approach of “imposed order” is the distance from Weimar to West Africa. I tried to manufacture order, and I failed. When I allowed order to grow organically through the superior systems thinking of Shannon, Wenning, Goethe and von Humboldt, everything changed instantaneously. Goethe’s principles must survive here.
The words themselves: Aufklärung and Zuversicht
Let’s look closer at the term used by historians to describe the Enlightenment, namely Aufklärerische Zuversicht. Aufklärung is a German noun from the verb aufklären, meaning to explain, clarify, make understandable or investigate. In everyday use, the verb appears in expressions such as “eine Sache aufklären” to resolve a matter, or “ein Verbrechen aufklären” to solve a crime. In the eighteenth century, the term acquired a broader cultural meaning. Immanuel Kant, in 1784, defined it without ambiguity:
“Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.”
Enlightenment is humanity’s exit from its self-imposed immaturity.
The decisive point is responsibility. Immaturity is not the lack of information. It is the failure to use one’s own reason. An individual becomes mature by thinking independently, subjecting claims to scrutiny and refusing to submit unexamined to authority. The West African who accepts what I say, what an ordered system looks like, and the claim that the outcome is superior, is inherently “insane.” They can not and should not accept what I say without proof, and I do not give proof sitting in an office lecturing and expecting compliance! I do it faithfully, working alongside them day after day.
Zuversicht is an older word, linked etymologically to Sicht, sight or seeing. It expresses “looking forward with trust”, a grounded confidence rather than a blind hope. German dictionaries define it as the expectation of a favourable outcome based on knowledge, experience or sound judgement. It is the opposite of wishful thinking. It assumes that reality responds to method and that repeated, disciplined action yields results. When the two concepts are combined, aufklärerische Zuversicht refers to confidence built on clarity, optimism rooted in evidence, and trust in improvement because investigation and correct practice produce demonstrable outcomes. The superiority of order is rooted in evidence!
The phrase Aufklärerische Zuversicht was not coined by any figure of the eighteenth century. It entered academic vocabulary in the twentieth century when German philosophers and historians reexamined the Enlightenment in light of the moral collapse that marked the first half of the century. Hans-Georg Gadamer and later Jürgen Habermas used the term not as a moral slogan but as a descriptor of a historical attitude: the conviction that the world becomes intelligible through disciplined reason, measurable observation and methodical work. It is confidence grounded in practice, not in sentiment. When Gadamer published Wahrheit und Methode in 1960, he contrasted Enlightenment rationality with authoritarian certainty and passive historicism. Habermas continued the analysis in Erkenntnis und Interesse (1968) and Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985), arguing that Enlightenment confidence is not naïve belief in progress. It is trust in procedures, transparency and verifiable methods as tools that reduce error and restrain domination.
As research deepened, the usage of the term moved from describing a general posture to highlighting concrete embodiments of that posture. Scholars in the 1970s and 1980s turned to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt because both converted Enlightenment ideals into working methods. Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (1810) insisted on direct observation, comparison and repeated experiments. He rejected theories detached from experience. Humboldt expanded this approach into modern scientific practice. His work in the Americas was systematic rather than anecdotal. He carried barometers, thermometers and botanical cataloguing instruments, and recorded conditions with precision. His five-volume Kosmos (1845–1862) presented nature as interconnected systems discoverable only through long-term empirical investigation. These examples transformed Aufklärerische Zuversicht into an operational category. It became a way of working, not a mood.
In the late twentieth century, the term broadened again and began to describe the institutional structures that sustain knowledge. The Enlightenment was no longer centred on exceptional individuals. It was recognised as a framework that builds and maintains systems of learning. The Prussian Gymnasium, monastic libraries, research universities, scientific societies and administrative archives embodied this confidence. They did not depend on charisma. They depended on rules: documentation, peer review, stable curricula, cumulative improvement. Aufklärerische Zuversicht thus came to refer to the belief that disciplined procedures and educational structures preserve knowledge and elevate competence across generations.
In its contemporary usage, the phrase does not mean that everything will improve automatically. It refers to the conviction that improvement becomes possible only when actions are ordered, evidence is respected, and systems are allowed to function. It describes a posture toward reality: investigate rather than assert, measure rather than debate, verify rather than speculate and build institutions that withstand the chaos of personalities. Where opinion dominates, evidence intervenes. Where impatience threatens, method stabilises. Where disorder expands, procedure anchors. This is why the term remains relevant. It expresses a historically proven lesson: knowledge does not flourish through argument alone, and human dignity is not maintained through feeling. Both are sustained through structure, rigour and the readiness to apply them even when the surrounding environment resists.
Goethe: Enlightenment as character, work and morphology
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is most widely known for literary works such as Faust, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and Wilhelm Meister. He was also an administrator and scientist. He served in Weimar from 1775 onwards as a privy councillor and was responsible at different times for mining, road building, financial matters and theatre direction. Goethe did not treat reason as abstraction. He applied it to governance, insisting on record-keeping, system and accountability.
His humanist ethic appears in the poem Das Göttliche, which is the heart of our consideration:
“Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut!”
Noble be the human, helpful and good.
This line expresses Enlightenment trust in dignity, duty and usefulness. In private correspondence, he stressed the formative role of action. In a letter to Charlotte von Stein (11 May 1784) he wrote:
“Tätigkeit ist alles. Der Mensch wird nur im Handeln sich selbst.”
Action is everything. Man becomes himself only in acting.
Goethe’s scientific work reflects the same orientation. In Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790), he argued that plant organs evolve through transformations of a basic leaf form. He condensed it in the formulation:
“Alles ist Blatt.”
Everything is leaf.
The claim is morphological, not metaphorical. It proposed that visible diversity arises from lawful variation of a fundamental structure. Nature becomes intelligible through pattern, not arbitrary difference.
Humboldt: Goethe’s principle extended into the world
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is one of the most influential natural scientists in modern history. Between 1799 and 1804, he travelled through present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Mexico. He measured altitudes, magnetic variation, barometric pressure, temperature and species distribution. His journals record systematic observations of geology, flora and fauna. Later in life, he synthesised these findings in Kosmos (1845–1862), arguing that nature forms an interconnected whole.
Humboldt and Goethe knew one another personally. Humboldt visited Weimar and Jena and corresponded with Goethe for decades. Goethe appreciated Humboldt’s empirical range; Humboldt admired Goethe’s morphological perspective. Their documented relationship shows mutual influence. They did not invent shared slogans; rather, they converged on the conviction that understanding arises from disciplined observation and that apparent chaos hides lawful interaction.
Humboldt repeatedly expressed that nature is a web of relations, not isolated facts. He noted this principle in his letters and later elaborated it throughout Kosmos. In contemporary summaries of his thought, the phrase “Alles ist Wechselwirkung”, everything is interaction, is used to characterise his central insight. This formulation accurately reflects Humboldt’s view: altitude influences climate, climate influences vegetation, and vegetation influences settlement and economy.
Goethe’s approach was inward: the unity of form. Humboldt’s was outward: the unity of systems. Both perspectives support aufklärerische Zuversicht. Neither treats disorder as destiny.
The intellectual soil: Austria, southern Germany and Catholic continuity
The German Enlightenment is often associated with Protestant northern cities, yet Austrian and southern German Catholic institutions played a foundational role in preserving knowledge and cultivating disciplined inquiry. Monastic networks were particularly important. Benedictine abbeys like Melk and Admont had copied manuscripts for centuries, maintained libraries and recorded agricultural and astronomical observations. The Benedictine rule emphasises communal labour (labora) and ordered religious practice (ora). Tools are to be treated with respect, and time is regulated by predictable routine.
Admont Abbey, founded in 1074, maintains one of the world’s most recognised monastic libraries. The present baroque hall, completed in 1776, symbolises organised knowledge: light-filled architecture, allegorical frescoes and orderly shelving. Its existence is not proof of Enlightenment ideology, but it is evidence that Catholic territories cultivated systematic learning.
This continuity mattered. Enlightenment in the German-speaking world was not uniformly revolutionary. In many regions, it took the form of administrative reform, educational standardisation and scientific curiosity, rather than violent breaks with the past. Austrian imperial reforms under Joseph II included toleration edicts and the abolition of judicial torture. These policies reflected a pragmatic belief in the improvability of institutions.
Embedded in such contexts, Enlightenment confidence was not blind. It rested on accumulated habits: keeping records, maintaining institutions, observing nature and treating knowledge as a communal asset. It sounds simple, but this organisation of data was a key observation for Kristi and me. What later Reformers would claim as “new” insights, enlightenment by the Holy Spirit, was in fact predicated on the disciplined practices cultivated in these monasteries. Revelation became possible where structure dominates.
West Africa: structural difficulty and hidden capability
Measured against these traditions, Nigeria faces stark challenges. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that around 133 million people are multidimensionally poor, with deficits in education, health, housing and access to basic services. Electricity access remains limited. Independent surveys and reports from international bodies identify unreliable grid power and frequent outages as major barriers to industry. Manufacturing firms in Nigeria routinely list power instability and logistics as their primary constraints.
These conditions shape workplace behaviour. When costs change without warning and infrastructure collapses mid-shift, people learn to improvise rather than plan. This is rational adaptation. But it erodes long-term confidence and prevents structure from becoming habit.
At the same time, Nigeria has capacity. A young population, rapid urbanisation and a dense network of informal problem-solvers keep production lines running in hostile conditions. On the factory floor are supervisors who insist on weighing cuts correctly, operators who monitor brine levels, technicians who document breakdowns, and procurement staff who track deliveries. They may not use Enlightenment vocabulary, but they follow the same logic: cause, effect, record, adjust.
Their work shows that aufklärerische Zuversicht does not require Europe. It requires stable conditions in which competence can reproduce itself. It requires people to prove to them from the ground up. Develop systems “with the” and not “for them.” Kristi and I recognised what becomes possible when Shannon’s architecture of information, Wenning’s industrial discipline, and the Enlightenment, personified by Goethe and von Humboldt, converge. We began to see West Africa not as a deficit of capability or potential, but as Goethe had already warned: the human reaches his highest nobility when he is helpful and good. This desire exists in all people. The challenge became to unite these impulses into a single system.
GENAU: a practical bridge between environments
GENAU is not a philosophical experiment. It emerged from two lived perspectives and carries within it the spirit of men like Goethe and von Humboldt. Kristi and I took everything that Goethe, von Humboldt and the German intellectual tradition of Aufklärerische Zuversicht taught us and unified it into a complete management system called GENAU.
They demonstrated that clarity, disciplined observation and reproducible method are not cultural ornaments. They are instruments of survival. Goethe defined dignity through action rather than intention. Humboldt converted theory into measurement, treating the world as a structure to be mapped, indexed and explained. We applied the same logic to the factory floor.
We created a numbering system as the point of integration between crates, batches, boxes and pallets on the one side, and stock locations and processing areas on the other. Each number links to a full set of data: piece, weight, batch numbers, production date, species, ingredients and supplier. Interaction remains human and visual rather than mediated by barcode scanners. Data entry happens through simple actions everyone already understands: workers take photos with their phones, send them by WhatsApp to AI systems, or email spreadsheets exported from WhatsApp. Every ingredient flow and every yield becomes an empirical unit. Sorting, grouping and ordering are done by powerful AI systems.
GENAU does not ask workers to care more or work harder. It reshapes the environment so the factory behaves like a laboratory. Order becomes visible, and interaction becomes intuitive. It mirrors how West Africans already communicate: WhatsApp, email, pictures, documents, files. Nobody needs to be taught that language. The clarity of integration, the power of the resulting data and the immediate value to the company and to workers are obvious from the first day. Evidence becomes the final authority. Procedure replaces improvisation. This is not foreign to Africa. It resonates with ancient continental traditions grounded in ritual, continuity, apprenticeship and communal verification. We said that ENAU does not ask workers to care more or work harder, but suddenly, as we started implementing the principles and the system, we found that people worked harder and more focused and achieved more.
GENAU is not a European import. It is a framework forged in the collision between Austrian continuity and West African volatility. Kristi brought the memory of institutions: schools, research hospitals, archives, libraries and cities where procedures exist before you need them. I brought the reality of Nigerian plants, where nothing survives unless the person in charge imposes structure minute by minute. GENAU reconciles these worlds and makes them local. It recognises that many environments in Africa do not yet possess inherited order and therefore manufactures order at every operational node. Identification, routing, yields and cost structures are not left to imagination or memory. They are anchored in OSASS discipline.
OSASS is the skeletal structure of GENAU. It provides the physical grammar that turns chaos into information: Order, Sanitation, Arrangement, Standardisation and Self-discipline. When these five anchors are present, behaviour becomes predictable. GENAU grows from that skeleton. It is a complete data and stock management system built on the physical realities of the factory floor. It forces the plant to translate every movement into information that can be verified, analysed and improved.
GENAU converts captured information into operational data. It manages stock, yields, processes and profit measurement. It stabilises manufacturing. It is not a theory of how factories should behave. It is the physical environment that leaves factories no choice. The system forces reality to be recorded, and it happens seamlessly. The data is timely, complete and accurate. It is collected through simple floor-level structures and transformed by powerful AI platforms into information that guides decisions and improvement.
GENAU is the synthesis, acting on three foundations:
• Order precedes data. Every crate, batch, ingredient and box must have a unique identity linked to species, cut, cost, supplier and date. Without stable reference points, analysis is meaningless.
• Behaviour follows environment. Clear capture points and predictable pathways shape how teams act. When the factory is structured correctly, the correct behaviour becomes the easiest behaviour.
• Technology follows order. Artificial intelligence becomes useful only when the data arises from disciplined human work.
On a micro scale, this is what the Enlightenment looked like in workshops and universities two centuries ago. On a modern scale, it is what a Lagos plant looks like when the effort to impose order becomes collective.
Why transformation start from below
European intellectual history does not support the idea that progress begins exclusively with leaders. The German Enlightenment involved professors and statesmen, but also printers, teachers, commercial clerks and local administrators who stabilised schools, postal services and guilds. Their influence accumulated slowly until institutions changed.
Africa’s industrial sector shows similar dynamics. A plant that enforces crate numbering, yield discipline and documentation is not waiting for a policy decree. It is training people to expect that structure produces results. Those expectations spread. The scale is small at first, but habits are contagious.
Conclusion
Aufklärerische Zuversicht is not only a nice sentiment. It is the refusal to surrender to chaos. Goethe expressed it through disciplined character and the conviction that nature reveals form only to ordered perception. Humboldt extended it across oceans, proving that the world becomes intelligible when one measures it directly and refuses inherited assumptions. Austrian and southern German institutions preserved this attitude not through slogans but through habit: recording, cataloguing, teaching and building continuity that outlives individuals.
Nigeria exposes the same truth without mercy. Where institutions are fragile, systems do not survive on goodwill. Standards hold only for as long as someone enforces them. Arguments proliferate where data is absent. Opinion becomes a weapon in the absence of process. In this environment, Enlightenment confidence is no luxury. It is a discipline of survival. Evidence must outrank ego, structure must replace improvisation, and repetition must displace rhetorical certainty.
This is where GENAU finds its place. GENAU is the management architecture that makes modern manufacturing possible in African conditions. It uses the principles of OSASS to create the environment in which data collection, traceability and AI brilliance become viable. OSASS is not the outcome. It is the scaffolding: Order, Sanitation, Arrangement, Standardisation and Self-discipline. These are not philosophical ornaments. They are the physical grammar that allows professional behaviour to appear. GENAU builds on this grammar. It converts the reality created by OSASS into measurable information. Stable capture points, traceable routes and coherent numbering systems turn floor activity into analysable data. When every crate, batch, ingredient and yield exists inside this structure, AI is no longer a gimmick. It becomes an instrument.
From Weimar to West Africa, the same principle holds. It does not merely travel. It confirms that we were correct to make this principle foundational. Dignity is not sustained by argument, emotion or posture. It is sustained by structures that force reality to reveal itself. The Enlightenment never promised that people would behave well. It promised that the world would become navigable when disorder yields to measurement. Societies are not judged by their declarations but by how they conduct themselves when conditions are hostile. If Goethe’s principle has meaning, it must survive where infrastructure collapses, and respect is not given. If Humboldt’s legacy is real, it must stand where evidence is the only language that cuts through noise.
Where opinion dominates, evidence intervenes. Where power threatens, structure protects. Where chaos grows, procedure anchors. This is the work. Not because the world deserves it, and not because it is easy, but because without disciplined action, accurate observation and systems that resist ego, there is no society to preserve.
For a complete treatment on GENAU, visit GENAU: The Complete System for Meat Factories: Stock Control, Yield Accuracy and Quality Management.
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