Heroes of the Road: Race, Gender and the Politics of Mobility in Twentieth Century Tanzania

Abstract

This article follows the careers of two African drivers in social environments that circumscribed their movement and access to technology. It begins with Vincent Njovu, whose memoir,The First Driver of Tanganyika, describes the driver's ability to navigate racial hierarchies of movement and technology, including the unlikely circumstances in which he fell in love with an ideal colonial machine. It then explores post-colonial cultures of gender and modernization by using the unpublished memoirs of Hawa Ramadhani, a woman who used automotive skills learned among nuns in the 1940s to become Tanzania's most respected driver. Paired together, the life histories of these drivers challenge historical narratives in which movement and technology (roads and motor vehicles, in particular) are used to discuss Africa's marginalization and decline. Instead, they show how transgressive practices of mobility can be used to challenge social and political orders and inspire new ways to think and act at uncertain historical junctures. Roads in these narratives are defined less by their danger than by their potential to turn unlikely individuals into heroes.

Histories of Technology and the Environment in Post/Colonial Africa: Reflections on the Field

“…For sub-Saharan Africa, even the "big three"-steam ships, railways, and the telegraph-have only been selectively explored [26,[140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147] 19 . Research on road, energy, or electricity infrastructures had been a particular lacuna which has recently been tackled more systematically in post/colonial history of technology and the environment ( [148][149][150][151][152][153][154][155] on roads and transport; [15,19,20,[156][157][158][159] on energy and electricity). Most studies focus on urban infrastructures, exploring how water supply or sanitation systems contributed to-or undermined-the creation of colonial spaces in line with the "dual city" model of segregated urban planning [18,29,[160][161][162][163][164][165][166].…”

Building on the ruins of empire: the Uganda Railway and the LAPSSET corridor in Kenya

“…Several authors have discussed the LAPSSET corridor in relation to Kenya's colonial history (eg Elliot [2016] and Bachmann and Kilaka [2019] in terms of frontier transformation, or Kochore [2016] in terms of state-building). This article derives its content from a growing literature on analyses of the (colonial) politics of infrastructure (Bachmann and Schouten 2018;Freed 2010;Grace 2013;Graham, Andersen, and Mann 2015;Larkin 2013;Mitchell 2002). In particular, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio's (2019) article juxtaposing the LAPSSET corridor with colonial-era infrastructure-led developments in Kenya's 'Northern Frontier District' prompts a critical discussion about the ways in which recent infrastructural projects continue or depart from their colonial predecessors.…”