Smartness from Below: Variations on Technology and Creativity in Contemporary Kinshasa

Abstract

of course, D. A. Masolo, whose critique was that Ngugi, Odera-Oruka, and Vansina did not go far enough and left open-after negritude, after Pan-Africanism, after African socialism, and even after the "sage philosophy" that Odera-Oruka actively promoted-the search for new archives and modes of African philosophy. I approached these scholars as a learner, and I was looking to apprentice in the African way, in which elders impart knowledge to the young at close quarters.The debt I owe to Mamadou Diouf for helping me understand the context of the question of the scientific and the technological in Africa from a combined philosophical, historical, contemporary, diagnostic, and prognostic perspective is, quite simply, unpayable. After my textual and face-to-face interactions with the above-mentioned scholars, it became quite clear that the issue at stake for the African reader of technology, the reader of technology in Africa, and better yet African technology, is not just the behavior of science, technology, and innovation but the intellectual work of making things and their strategic deployment. Can one see Africans as intellectuals thinking about and making technology based on intellect?This question was an acknowledgement of what I had witnessed in everyday interactions with people in different parts of Africa, but even more so during my own childhood in Zimbabwe. In people's mobilities I saw an archive, a statement, a critique, and an authoring of thought into reality through practice, operationalized through the movement of legs, hands, mouth, and other body functions. I wanted to locate the subject of conversation upstream of practice, to understand the intellection that drove it. Some micro-movements of and within the body were involuntary; the concern was with the voluntary actions, delegated by the mind-at-work.STS had prepared me to understand one version of science and technology, to recognize it when I saw it. This was a vital skill-but it also turned out to be quite blunt for the nature of knowledge I was looking at. Conventional (Western) STS is good at identifying banal forms of science and technology but is severely limited in non-Western contexts, in which things scientific and things technological are not readily recognizable.Here was the problem in the specific case of Africa. The project of addressing the meanings of science, technology, and innovation from Africa had to be philosophically grounded, because to my understanding the colonial ordering of knowledge had cut up African knowledge, knowledge production, and structures and modes of knowing into tiny pieces. What had once been a whole entity known as a composite was now scattered into specialist disciplines like philosophy, theology/religious studies, African languages and literature, history, economic history, anthropology, and so on. The philosophy I remember being taught in the University of Zimbabwe in the early 1990s was about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Marx, and so on. Where were the Africans?xii Preface xiv PrefaceAll in all, t...

‘We deserve new things’: (anti-)bricolage in Lomé’s makerspaces

“…The lack of basic infrastructures continues to distress citizens through the presence of potholed streets, intermittent power supply, lack of access to potable water, and substandard health services. Vernacular manifestations of creativity and technological innovation nonetheless exist (Pype 2017;De Boeck 2011) to counter the inaccessibility of basic infrastructures as well as the colonial and marginal experiences of African innovators in the global digital landscape. As the need to provincialize and decolonize global urbanisms becomes more pressing (Hart 2018;Sheppard et al 2013), postcolonial urban geographies such as Lomé serve as vantage points to advance critiques of the (neo)colonial globalization of digital technologies and its ideologies, through the existing urban practices of citizens who are taking matters into their own hands.…”

“…Vernacular practices of globally circulating ideologies on technology and innovation have a long history in the urban landscapes of African cities, for instance in 'smart cities' and the innovative urban practices of Kinois through 'smartness from below' (Pype 2017), alternatives to 'authorized' mobile phone repair in Kampala (Houston 2019), and local translations of the 'right to repair' for the informal solar grid repairers of Malawi (Samarakoon et al 2022). While urban practices are often carried out to bridge infrastructural gaps in cities of the global South (Nielsen and Eriksen 2022;Anand et al 2018;von Schnitzler 2013;De Boeck 2011;Simone 2004), I argue that the agentive practices of citizens are also shaped and animated by a certain self-awareness of their marginal position within the global technological landscape.…”