Relationality or Hospitality in Twenty-First Century Research? Big Data, Internet of Things, and the Resilience of Coloniality on Africa

Abstract

Abstract
 African development will remain intractable in a world where Africans are conceived as constituting disorganised data subject to the supposedly organising gaze of knowledgeable Others. African people are increasingly datafied dehumanised and denied self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-organisation and data sovereignty. Arguing for more attention to questions of data sovereignty, this paper notes that the Internet of Things and Big Data threaten the autonomy, privacy, data and national sovereignty of indigenous Africans. It is contended that decolonial scholars should unpack ethical implications of theorising indigenous people in terms of relational theories that assume absence of distinctions between humans and nonhumans. Deemed to be indistinct from nonhumans/animals, Africans would be inserted or implanted with remotely controlled intelligent tracking technological devices that mine data from their brains, bodies, homes, cities and so on.
 Key words: relationality, Big Data, Internet of Things, coloniality, research

Kukumirwa Semombe Dzamavhu: When Voices Begin to Erupt from Bottoms, African Anthropology Becomes Colonial

“…While recent years have seen anthropological glorifications of African ubuntu as communalistic and collectivistic, such glorifications have to be understood in the global context where the Global North is aiming to establish “inclusive” digital connections and networks to extract profitable Big Data from different areas on the planet; Big Data is becoming the “new oil” in the emergent world touted as the information society or knowledge society (Nhemachena et al, 2020a ; Nhemachena et al, 2022 ). The point here is that the global infrastructure of “inclusive” digital networks, connections and entanglements deprive Africans of individual autonomy and of sovereignty even as they enhance the collection of Big Data; to legitimise and normalise such deprivations of autonomy and sovereignty, global capital, which also often funds anthropological researches, would want to depict African ubuntu as already denying autonomy and sovereignty to the “communalistic” and “collectivistic” Africans.…”

“…Conceiving voice sovereignty in terms of the space to decide what to say, when to speak, how to speak, to whom to speak and what happens to one’s voice once one has spoken, this paper contends that the colonial anthropological negations of African voice sovereignty are set to worsen as new technologies are being deployed to collect Big Data from the Africans who will be forced to adorn wearable devices and to endure technological implants, injections or insertions into their bodies (Nhemachena et al, 2020a ). In this regard, the paper argues that while colonial anthropologists dispossessed Africans of their voices, contemporary technologies, for scanning and uploading human minds onto the cloud systems and into technological substrates, similarly dispossess Africans of their minds which are transferred from the biological brains to the cloud or into technological substrates.…”

Hakuna Mhou Inokumira Mhuru Isiri Yayo: Examining the Interface between the African Body and 21st Century Emergent Disruptive Technologies

“…Such technologies are being celebrated, by some thinkers, as transhumanist human enhancement or human augmentation even as they turn human beings into digital/virtual assistants for those that control the technologies in the world. For this reason, when human beings are connected into the Internet of Things, Internet of Battlefield Things and the Internet of Humans that are remotely controlled; such humans are effectively reduced to virtual assistants or chatbots of those that own and control the technologies (Nhemachena, Hlabangane & Kaundjua, 2020;Nhemachena & Mawere, 2020). When, in a post-binary world, human beings become indistinct from nonhumans, including computers and from Artificial Intelligence, such human beings effectively become remotely controlled virtual assistants, digital assistants, voice assistants, or chatbots of those that own and control the disruptive emergent technologies.…”

“…The logics of these gospels are similar to the logics of globalization in which postulations of inclusivity are foregrounded. Of course in the 21st century, the global cows low for all calves in the world to be included and to be connected in the Internet of Things, Internet of Battlefield Things, and Internet of Humans from which transnational corporations harvest Big Data and by means of which they also exercise global surveillance, sousveillance, and uberveillance (Nhemachena, Hlabangane & Kaundjua, 2020). The point is that, once again, in the 21st century, the logic underlying the Internet of Things, Internet of Battlefield Things and Internet of Humans is one of a particular form of inclusivity that appears to be innocent and well-meaning even as it resembles the colonial/ imperial forms of inclusivism.…”

The decolonial turn in data and technology research: what is at stake and where is it heading?

“…Meanwhile Sabelo Mhlambi (2020) has argued that artificial intelligence governance needs to be enriched by 'Ubuntu', the African conception of relational community, which not only challenges the specific market-driven priorities of colonial data practices and the narrow philosophical sources recognized in computer science. Nhemachena et al (2020), in turn, offer a wide-ranging critique of the Internet of Things in African society, drawing on data colonialism, digital colonialism and coloniality, and calling for African data sovereignty in response to a threatened colonization of being (Bulhan, 2015) driven by data power. This summary necessarily leaves out still more work that, while not primarily concerned with decoloniality and data, has made important contributions to the debate.…”