This conversation examines Huawei’s rise in Kenya as part of a broader transformation in African digital governance. The sections trace how telecommunications liberalization shifted the state from direct infrastructure provision toward regulation, procurement, and partnership with external firms, creating the institutional terrain in which Huawei could expand. They then situate the company’s growth within China’s own pursuit of technological autonomy, state-supported finance, and overseas market development. The broader argument of the book is that digital infrastructure does not simply expand state capacity; it reorganizes the conditions under which that capacity is exercised. Huawei’s projects can extend connectivity, technical capability, and public services while simultaneously embedding governments within external systems of finance, proprietary technology, expertise, and maintenance. The concept of operational dependency captures this tension: sovereignty is not simply lost or surrendered, but performed through infrastructures that states can deploy without fully controlling. Huawei therefore offers a lens for moving beyond binary accounts of China as either development partner or geopolitical threat, toward examining how risk, authority, capacity, and dependency are redistributed through digital infrastructure.
WISER Seminar Papers
- WISER's TRUST seminar is hosted on-line every Monday afternoon from 16:00 - 17:00 SA time during the teaching semester. Forthcoming seminars are available here, and past events are detailed in our archive.
- Please register on Zoom in advance of the meeting on this link.
- Participants should please read the paper (below) prior to the seminar; it will typically be available by the Friday preceding the seminar.
In this semester, the Trust seminar will explore questions of credit and debt on the African continent. In contrast with the argument that trust and confidence are synonymous (most evident in the Edelman Trust Barometer and the reporting around it), some of the most convincing scholarship argues for the direct association of trust with credit. Other researchers, studying informal African institutions, have found credit everywhere on this continent, but little that can be associated with trust. Some state institutions (like SACCOs in Kenya) and simpler penalties, like efficient bankruptcy laws, seem also to be instrumental in shaping the politics of credit. One key driver of credit systems is a secondary market, which depends in part on institutions and information that derive from (and support) fiduciaries. These are especially important in the contemporary tensions between firm-based and individualised credit systems. The seminar series this semester will explore some of these dynamics, examining how they have shaped the cultures and politics of debt and credit from the precolonial to the contemporary period.
