The state as auteur: Timing digitisation in Africa's Silicon Savannah

Abstract

Kenya is in the midst of an information revolution and has recently unveiled a set of digitisation initiatives to become the Silicon Savannah of East Africa. While the African state is often examined through the notion of absence or failure, we argue that we need to pay more attention to timing as a mode of statecraft in a digital era. Drawing upon a Deleuzian conceptualisation of ‘time-images', we argue that the Kenyan state operates as an ‘auteur’ to give meaning and significance to a seemingly asynchronous set of disconnected digitisation initiatives across spaces, scales and institutions. Timing as a form of state power determines which initiatives are prioritised, what gets executed, in what sequence and at what pace. As an auteur, the state presents a linear narrative from the past to the future, but in the end, as with all auteurs, the state's identity and authority are defined in part through the actions of its actors and the experience of citizens.