Technology Studies in Africa

Keith Breckenridge, Paul Edwards, and Gabrielle Hecht  

I propose to pre-circulate the draft of an article looking at the role of technology, and specifically infrastructure in the production of contemporary class distinction in the African city. Most contemporary African cities are serviced with water, electricity, and sanitation through a range of temporary and individually arranged infrastructures such as generators, water tanks, and water pumps which provide both a commonality between the conditions of wealthy and poor, but also create distinction in terms of the quality, ubiquity, upkeep of these provisional infrastructures and the services they provide. Based on fieldwork in Luanda, Angola the paper presents various instances of infrastructural breakdown, construction and the experiences thereof to contribute to both the new emerging literature on class distinction in Africa and an investigation of the role of provisional infrastructures in the creation of urban experience in contemporary Africa. 

This paper considers how infrastructure became an end of post-apartheid politics in two senses. First, I argue that infrastructure has become a political goal: building houses, supplying electricity, water, paved roads and clinics was seen, in the countryside at least, as social transformation. Second, governance has become an increasingly technical matter in which the horizon of participation is shaped by infrastructure, and altered the terms of politics substantially. I explore both these “ends” of politics, reflecting on the one hand on literatures that includes recent writings by Ferguson, Chatterjee, and Gupta, and on the other, on ethnographic research in a KwaZulu-Natal settlement,  tracing the position of actors who administer infrastructure, such as the ward councillor and municipal manager. I point to major divergences in understandings of state obligations and its relation with citizens, and local ambivalences about infrastructure as the basis for an adequate political future. 

This paper explores sites of leisure such as swimming pools, movie theatres and hotels that were built at the height of colonial tourist aspirations in Beira, Mozambique (circa 1950’s) and that were formally reserved for white colonial elites, specifically in this case, Portuguese citizens, British Rhodesian sugar plantation managers/manufacturers who were stationed in Beira at the time, and visiting tourists, and their families. That these same swimming pools, theatres and hotels are very much in use today by a very different set of players says something about this “reluctant city”(Forjaz 2007) in the making. My ethnographic observations and impressions as well as photographs taken during daily strolls in the city in April 2009 will attempt to think productively with the “ruins of empire”(Stoler 2008) in order to chart a set of ruminations on present day Beira and are intended to show a complex city in its daily habitus by way of relationships (both of materiality and affect) between people and certain build environments. My focus will suggest that these particular sites (and by way of their detailings such as colours, tiles, textures) afford a window onto Beira’s condition of postcoloniality (as well, the simultaneity of its conditions of colonialism, socialism and war) through the creative ability of its African inhabitants to take specific urban infrastructures left behind by its Portuguese colonial possessors in the wake of Mozambique’s rapid decolonization in 1975, and adeptly adapt them to their own strategic and innovative purposes. 

Historical and contemporary forms of migration and mobility across the Indian Ocean have been central in shaping African histories, economies, and socialities. Drawing from an array of archives including medieval navigational manuals, practices of enskillment and boat-building, interdiction technologies for tracking migrants at sea and fieldwork with sojourners and pirates in the Western Indian Ocean, I want to focus on the materiality and mobility of navigation, including the embodied modes of seasickness that are central to life at sea. Specifically, how might thinking about bodies at sea help us navigate safely beyond analytic frameworks anchored in the terrestrial preoccupations of the nation-state on the one hand and assumptions of frictionless global flows on the other hand? How might a focus on bodies as they are tossed asunder, as they get seasick help re-engage a now burgeoning literature on infrastructure, logistics, and mobility that for all its emphasis on the material, often fails to account for the embodied ways in which mobility is experienced by various itinerant sojourners?  

The fascinating complexities of Lake Victoria’s contemporary fisheries situation and assumed fisheries crisis have motivated a recent florescence of social science scholarship. These studies have identified a central paradox: despite living next to and making their living from Africa’s largest freshwater fishery, residents of Lake Victoria’s fishing communities are surprisingly food insecure and eat surprisingly few fish. In this talk I introduce three ontological problems that implicitly frame studies of and attempts to address Lake Victoria’s contemporary fisheries crisis. These problems are: what constitutes a body of water, a complete meal, and fish themselves. Attention to these ontological problems configures a paradox otherwise: it is still possible to eat and live well with fish in a place where experts have already determined almost no one can.  

This paper examines the political life of materials, in this case of coal. Timothy Mitchell has described a “carbon democracy”, arguing that the presence of coal encourages democracy. But in South Africa coal mines have assumed the different political function, of firmly entrenching the political elite among the cash-generating corporations of the “Minerals-Energy complex” (MEC). Analysts have attributed South Africa’s slow take-up of renewable energy sources to the vested interests of the MEC. Nonetheless, the fallacy of the idea that the MEC is hegemonic has been demonstrated not least by the recent global slowdown in mineral demand. Coal contracts have also served as a buffer for the coal industry against the highly volatile world of mineral resource booms and busts. The domestic customers of coal, such as the state corporations who pursued a technologically sophisticated industrialisation strategy, were also concerned to protect their coal supplies from the export market. As such the coal industry’s receptiveness to relationships of patronage was conditioned by the risk aversion adopted by the country’s state corporations who under apartheid were relentlessly driven by the need to assure national self-sufficiency. 

With the development establishment’s endorsement of pro-poor economic growth, a concern with water and sanitation is now at the top of the international development agenda. Yet, at the same time the bottom billion struggles to fulfill basic needs, their more prosperous neighbors invest in ostentatious properties on par with cosmopolitan lifestyles and consumption standards. All the while, national and local governing bodies beset by the strictures of neoliberalism lack the revenue or capacity to reliably provide public goods to their citizenry. 

This project – an exercise in critical design anthropology confronting the actually existing conditions of wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness, influence and disregard, in urban Africa – lays out a series of urban design solutions to bridge the gap. Drawing on field observations from Ghana’s fastest growing urban hub, a selection of architectural cum infrastructural models marrying sanitary provisioning, high-end housing, and urban investment opportunities are laid out for inspection. African solutions to African needs making up for lapses in state services, these arrangements are attuned to the experience of the urban poor at the same time they advance the status aspirations of the upwardly mobile. 

Visitors are invited to study and respond to the models and the associated explanatory materials, which are designed to resemble popular real estate offerings.  Viewers are encouraged to take these proposals at face value and, with the aid of in-situ photographic projections, to step back and critically assess what is obscured by the visual and verbal stylistics shared across academe, advertising, architecture and the development industry. 

This paper explores the racialization of toilets and their role in creating regimes of waste that mirrored the hierarchies of imperial rule in East Africa beginning in the 1870s. It makes two arguments. The first is that perceptions of Africans as irresponsible and unskilled defecators had to be imagined by explorers, epidemiologists and other health officials during the colonial period. This imagination created fecal fears that not only ignored vernacular regimes of waste and cleanliness, but also helped officials justify infrastructural interventions that separated the colony’s European, Asian, and African populations through toilet types (the former received a WC and the latter two squat toilets). Though these toilets did not sanitize the colony, they inscribed colonial and post-colonial social order onto technologies of human waste. 

Second, the paper examines the technological construction of this difference in the pit latrine. Though epidemiologists blamed the spread of cholera in Swahili towns on pit latrines in the 1870s, the toilets were enshrined in Tanganyika as a sanitary and cheap solution to growing African populations. But as cities grew by tens and hundreds of thousands after independence, pit latrines gained an infrastructural momentum that its proponents did not foresee. I show that this colonial infrastructure is being used, once again, to portray Africans as technologically backward because of a supposed inability to perform a universal human act properly. 

This chapter of my dissertation examines the emergence of sanitation technologies in colonial and postcolonial Mahajanga, Madagascar over the course of the 20th Century. 

Building on existing STS literature concerning experts and publics (Akrich 1992; Wynne 

1996, 2003) and infrastructure (Anand 2011; Chalfin 2014; Larkin 2008; Star 1999), I look at the points of friction and convergence between expert and vernacular urban planning and construction practices and knowledge. I argue that local contingencies and vernacular forms of knowledge mitigated and at times reconfigured the utopian colonial visions, plans and artifacts for dealing with human waste and filth. At the same time, this colonial project of sewage sanitation infrastructure both exposed the fractures in the vision of a cohesive colonial populous and provided unexpected means through which some colonial and post-independence subjects contested the terms of governance, citizenship, and moral notions of purity. As a colonial sewage system based on a model of individual household latrines was gradually established, new material and human investments – steel barrel drums, housing regulations, cement septic tanks, mechanical sewage extractors, and laboring bodies- were summoned. These investments served to cement the decentralized character of sewage infrastructure of the city and narrow the possibilities for large-scale modifications in the future. But they also served as a means through which city dwellers constructed and contested moral lexicons and valuations of worthy work and human worthiness. 

This paper develops a tentative framework for thinking about waste as an index that signals a relational position within contested, historically layered conceptions of human order. It follows two contrasting frameworks for thinking sanitation infrastructure: 1) a quest to redesign the toilet at a global level for underserved populations and 2) popular conceptions of rights, citizenship and dignity grounded in inequalities of sanitation infrastructure in post-apartheid South Africa. By integrating highly abstract understandings of value with intimately embodied qualities of experience, the problem of sanitation simultaneously connects and divides human populations: uniting them at a species level only to distinguish them at a social one. From this perspective human waste is hardly a neutral substance, defined by its chemical properties alone. Rather, it remains an active element registering human status and position within a shared ecology of needs. 

We propose to give a double-header Pecha-Kucha presentation on the usefulness of science and technology studies (STS) to understanding practices and politics of bodily self-fashioning in Africa and beyond. Our interest in this topic stems from our respective research on hairstyling and skin lightening, and our participation in a collaborative research project, based at the University of Cape Town, on skin lightening.  

What are the analytical gains and possible liabilities of applying STS approaches to the study of bodily practices of beautification and modification? When we cast peoples’ efforts to arrange hair, alter skin color, and adjust body parts as technological practices – as opposed to or in addition to analyzing them as beauty rituals, consumer habits, or modes of self-expression – what do learn? What might we lose? Should the decision to designate such practices as technological lay with scholars, the historical and ethnographic subjects they study, or in some combination of these perspectives? What elements are indispensable to STS approaches? Must they necessarily include an attention to the materiality of the objects and processes involved?