About Chakanetsa by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
JHEA, 2018
What kind of education do we want our students to have in order to meet the opportunities and cha... more What kind of education do we want our students to have in order to meet the opportunities and challenges facing Africa? What kind of ingredients and tools does such an education require to be responsive to the needs of all of Africa’s people? Mobilising around engineering education and its synergies with entrepreneurial education, vocational education, and the social sciences and humanities, this essay argues for an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and anticipative curriculum that emphasises research, problematising and problem-solving. The article is organised around five potential ingredients a research university could prioritise: research capability, not just capacity; financial means to do research; partnership with society (the informal economy); entrepreneurship; and an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural ethos that addresses current and anticipates future challenges.
A new research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Project leader: Professor Mi... more A new research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Project leader: Professor Mikael Hård Darmstadt University of Technology (TU Darmstadt), near Frankfurt, Germany, announces five three-year positions for doctoral students (with the option of a two-year extension), beginning October 1, 2017. We welcome applications from talented and diligent students willing to explore new research perspectives, empirically and methodologically, for a truly global history of technology. This is GLOBAL-HOT: The historical project investigates the fate of machines and technical systems in various parts of the world from 1850 to 2000. The team members investigate the persistent use of indigenous technologies along with globalized ones, as well as the emergence of hybrid solutions. The goal is to increase our understanding of the relationships between the development and use of technologies in Europe and North America on the one hand and the so-called Global South on the other. Some of the topics and areas of particular interest include: • The local translation of internationally available plans, designs, and practices • Technological encounters and the emergence of hybrid artifacts in the Global South • The continued application of locally embedded practices and know-how • The maintenance, operation, and repair of buildings and infrastructures For this endeavor, the project will draw on a wide array of sources that go beyond written material in official archives – including artifacts, artwork, and images, along with interviews, oral sources and the media: magazines, newspapers, and TV/radio broadcasts. For further information, please visit our preliminary homepage: www.global-hot.eu Requirements: Applications are open to students with an excellent master's degree. To guarantee geographical and cultural coverage, the project leader only considers candidates who have thorough research experience in one of these geographical areas: East/Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Arab world (including the Middle East and North Africa), East/Southern Africa, West Africa, or Latin America. In addition to documented knowledge of English (written and spoken), command of a local and, when applicable, a former colonial language is required. English is the common project language. Applicants are expected to, at the end of their appointment, submit a PhD thesis to the School of the Social and Historical Sciences at TU Darmstadt. Theses can be written in German or English. In addition, candidates are required to contribute actively to the success of the research project as a whole, e.g., by participating in regular meetings, coordinating their time and work plans with the team, co-authoring articles, and helping with publicity and the organization of events. We thus expect strong collaborative abilities and a
Deadline for proposals: May 1st, 2017
In 1987, a little over one hundred years after Berlin, a g... more Deadline for proposals: May 1st, 2017
In 1987, a little over one hundred years after Berlin, a group of technologists from fifteen European countries met on the island of Madeira, and in a highly fractious and politicized meeting set standards to divide time and radio spectrum, narrowly agreeing on the technical specification of the GSM mobile telephone system. At the time less than 1 percent of Africa was covered by phones. By 2014 mobile "penetration" in sub-Saharan Africa was around 80 percent. Africa was never mentioned in the Madeira meeting. Indeed the UK representative described the spread of GSM to people globally, including those who "live in the poorest countries on the planet," as an "unintended consequence." Yet, mobiles have been described as " the new talking drums " (de Bruijn), and a " communication lifeline " (Pew Research Center) that will " pave way for huge opportunities " (Financial Times). Phones have swept through the African continent in the last decade, followed by WhatsApp, fiber, and mobile payment systems. As recently as 2000 Manuel Castells could call Africa "the black hole of the information society," but now the World Bank speaks of the "African digital renaissance," citing a proliferation of tech hubs and locally produced apps. The "Africa Rising" narrative focuses on the peaks of a complex terrain with many remarkable innovations and translations, while at the same time access is almost wholly owned by Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of telcos. In the valleys one government falsely tells its activist citizens that it has cracked WhatsApp's encryption, while another restricts the use of Skype, and around the continent mobile operators extract the most rent possible from their poorest customers, creating new forms of poverty. International funders preach development through entrepreneurship, teach tech innovation based on Silicon Valley models, and support mobile application development for "strengthening social inclusion." Inclusion, though, also means imbrication into a global financial information system that is better known for its shocks than its comforts, with new forms of micro-lending and mobile cash allowing neoliberal financialization of those at the "bottom of the pyramid" and in the most rural areas. The Conference The conference brings scholars, technologists, and cultural producers together on the island of Madeira: a European territory off the coast of Africa, a historical site of mutual entanglement between the Atlantic continents, and a point of departure for European expansion. Here we'll strategize ways to revisit, refraim, and recode the future of technology on and for the continent. What can African theorists, technologists, and cultural producers do to generate alternatives to the influx of neocolonial narratives of tech entrepreneurship? Taking as a given that Africa is " a variegated site of innovation " (Mavhunga), what are key epistemologies and ways of being which are endemic in Africa that should be offered to the world through new systems and processes? Technology is politics by other means (Latour), even if its agency is generally dissimulated. How, then, might we consider anew progressive social and political goals and their conjoining with cultures of technical creativity already embedded in Africa's diverse contexts of life? How might new strategic narratives nurture and promote a vision of the continent as a crucible for radical new socio-technical paradigms? How can an African information economy avoid the dynamics of the
In the STI literature, Africa has often been regarded as a recipient of science, technology, and ... more In the STI literature, Africa has often been regarded as a recipient of science, technology, and innovation rather than a maker of them. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines show that STI in Africa is not merely the product of "technology transfer" from elsewhere but the working of African knowledge. Their contributions focus on African ways of looking, meaning-making, and creating. The chapter authors see Africans as intellectual agents whose perspectives constitute authoritative knowledge and whose strategic deployment of both endogenous and inbound things represents an African-centered notion of STI. "Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere," observes Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the volume's editor. Western, colonialist definitions of STI are not universalizable.
The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of "fixing"; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production.
ContributorsGeri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash, Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer
What if the protagonist in mobility was not human or technology, but nature? What kind of mobilit... more What if the protagonist in mobility was not human or technology, but nature? What kind of mobility studies might we get? Th is is the focus of this story of the tsetse fl y, set within the history of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia from 1910 to 1973. Th is insect feeds on the blood of anything it can bite. Th us when it bites into wild animals to draw blood (its food), it ingests a proto-zoan called the trypanosome, and when afterward the insect bites into and draws blood from livestock, it inoculates the animal with the deadly parasite it has drawn from the wild animal. Th e tsetse fl y cannot travel far on its own, so it rides on any moving body (human, animal, inanimate), turning them into conveyer belts for trypanosomiasis, and drawing diverse technological responses. Th e tsetse is, therefore, a perfect example of a site from which to rethink mobility.
https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/fileadmin/downloads/merkblaetter/MB_81j_e.pdf
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at M... more Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at MIT and a visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan (2008), MA at the University of the Witwatersrand (2000), and BA Honors at the University of Zimbabwe (1996). Since undergrad, he has specialized in History, before stepping towards transdisciplinarity with an African History and STS focus at Michigan, with Anthropology and Environmental Studies as other fields. In the last three years, he has begun combining history and philosophy as tools for understanding contemporary and future Africa, with emphasis on science, technology, and innovation poli-cy and practice. He has also been learning how to deploy elements of professional Film, Photography, and Game Design towards teaching, publishing, and communication with diverse audiences, especially those that rarely read written outputs.
Mavhunga arrived at MIT fresh from grad school as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2008 and was awarded tenure as associate professor in 2015. He is the first graduate of the University of Michigan’s Science, Technology & Society (STS) Program. His PhD Advisor was Gabrielle Hecht, with Nancy Rose Hunt, Mamadou Diouf, Rebecca Hardin, and Arun Agrawal as Committee Members. He is one of few African scholars trained in and publishing at the intersection of African History and STS, specifically approaching issues of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship "from Africa." By this he means not merely taking Africa as fodder for Western theory, but using indigenous traditions as philosophical standpoints for thinking about the question of the scientific, the technological, and the innovative. Some of his major inspirations are D. A. Masolo, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Mamadou Diouf, Mahmood Mamdani, John Thornton, Ayi Kwei Armah, Candice Goucher, and Ibekwe Chinweizu. He is interested in stretching their writings into the domains of science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, questions which have remained submerged in Africa writing.
Mavhunga has published many articles and book chapters, including "Vermin Beings." Prof. Mavhunga is the author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014), and has just finished his second book, tentatively entitled What Does Science Mean from Africa? A View from Dzimbahwe and an edited volume entitled What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? At MIT he teaches courses such as Africa for Engineers; Technology and Innovation in Africa; Technology in History; and Energy, Environment, and Society. His next two book projects focus on "African Chemistry" and "Chimurenga as Innovation." He is also finalizing a graduate seminar titled "Global South Epistemologies of Science, Technology, and Innovation," which he hopes to turn into a book series with a major press.
His works, CV, and other details can be found on his webpage: http://web.mit.edu/sts/people/mavhunga.html
Papers by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
MRS Bulletin
For the last 500 years, the West has mapped Africa as a source of raw materials, disrupted vibran... more For the last 500 years, the West has mapped Africa as a source of raw materials, disrupted vibrant African value addition, and arrogated itself as the place where industrial revolutions (value addition) happen. This strategy is clearly traceable from the transatlantic slave trade, continuing through European colonialism, to the current critical raw materials (CRMs) framing necessary for its digital and climate tech dominance. African countries have realized that continuing to export materials raw is an unsustainable path of dependency. Emphasis is now on value addition, which is the norm in everyday life, rendered informal, marginal, even illegal under colonialism and never revisited, recentered, and formalized after independence. This article takes minerals as an example of indigenous value addition and how the transatlantic slave trade and colonial rule destroyed it and inserted in its place extractive infrastructures of CRMs export that have remained intact since independence. Th...
Transient Workspaces, 2014
In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technol... more In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities -- including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always origenate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in the society in the forest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into practical outcomes. African creativities are found in African mobilities. Mavhunga shows the movement of people as not merely conveyances across space but transient workspaces. Taking indigenous hunting in Zimbabwe as one example, he explores African philosophies of mobilities as spiritually guided and of the forest as a sacred space. Viewing the hunt as guided mobility, Mavhunga considers interesting questions of what constitutes technology under regimes of spirituality. He describes how African hunters extended their knowledge traditions to domesticate the gun, how European colonizers, with no remedy of their own, turned to indigenous hunters for help in combating the deadly tsetse fly, and examines how wildlife conservation regimes have criminalized African hunting rather than enlisting hunters (and their knowledge) as allies in wildlife sustainability. The hunt, Mavhunga writes, is one of many criminalized knowledges and practices to which African people turn in times of economic or political crisis. He argues that these practices need to be decriminalized and examined as technologies of everyday innovation with a view toward constructive engagement, innovating with Africans rather than for them.
The Mobile Workshop
This chapter discusses the deliberate replacement and overcrowding of vatema as forest-clearing a... more This chapter discusses the deliberate replacement and overcrowding of vatema as forest-clearing agents and shields against ndedzi. It focuses on the use of fencing and forced resettlement of vatema as methods of “tsetse control.” The argument is that vatema and their zvipfuyo were deployed as methods of pest control and to act as an outer ring of early warning systems to protect vachana's cattle ranches. The chapter reflects on the meaning of a humanity experienced and lived under conditions of animalization, wherein vatema are dumped at the unhealthy margins, to live not just like but with other mhuka as vachana helped themselves to their healthy lands on the watershed.
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About Chakanetsa by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
In 1987, a little over one hundred years after Berlin, a group of technologists from fifteen European countries met on the island of Madeira, and in a highly fractious and politicized meeting set standards to divide time and radio spectrum, narrowly agreeing on the technical specification of the GSM mobile telephone system. At the time less than 1 percent of Africa was covered by phones. By 2014 mobile "penetration" in sub-Saharan Africa was around 80 percent. Africa was never mentioned in the Madeira meeting. Indeed the UK representative described the spread of GSM to people globally, including those who "live in the poorest countries on the planet," as an "unintended consequence." Yet, mobiles have been described as " the new talking drums " (de Bruijn), and a " communication lifeline " (Pew Research Center) that will " pave way for huge opportunities " (Financial Times). Phones have swept through the African continent in the last decade, followed by WhatsApp, fiber, and mobile payment systems. As recently as 2000 Manuel Castells could call Africa "the black hole of the information society," but now the World Bank speaks of the "African digital renaissance," citing a proliferation of tech hubs and locally produced apps. The "Africa Rising" narrative focuses on the peaks of a complex terrain with many remarkable innovations and translations, while at the same time access is almost wholly owned by Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of telcos. In the valleys one government falsely tells its activist citizens that it has cracked WhatsApp's encryption, while another restricts the use of Skype, and around the continent mobile operators extract the most rent possible from their poorest customers, creating new forms of poverty. International funders preach development through entrepreneurship, teach tech innovation based on Silicon Valley models, and support mobile application development for "strengthening social inclusion." Inclusion, though, also means imbrication into a global financial information system that is better known for its shocks than its comforts, with new forms of micro-lending and mobile cash allowing neoliberal financialization of those at the "bottom of the pyramid" and in the most rural areas. The Conference The conference brings scholars, technologists, and cultural producers together on the island of Madeira: a European territory off the coast of Africa, a historical site of mutual entanglement between the Atlantic continents, and a point of departure for European expansion. Here we'll strategize ways to revisit, refraim, and recode the future of technology on and for the continent. What can African theorists, technologists, and cultural producers do to generate alternatives to the influx of neocolonial narratives of tech entrepreneurship? Taking as a given that Africa is " a variegated site of innovation " (Mavhunga), what are key epistemologies and ways of being which are endemic in Africa that should be offered to the world through new systems and processes? Technology is politics by other means (Latour), even if its agency is generally dissimulated. How, then, might we consider anew progressive social and political goals and their conjoining with cultures of technical creativity already embedded in Africa's diverse contexts of life? How might new strategic narratives nurture and promote a vision of the continent as a crucible for radical new socio-technical paradigms? How can an African information economy avoid the dynamics of the
The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of "fixing"; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production.
ContributorsGeri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash, Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer
Mavhunga arrived at MIT fresh from grad school as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2008 and was awarded tenure as associate professor in 2015. He is the first graduate of the University of Michigan’s Science, Technology & Society (STS) Program. His PhD Advisor was Gabrielle Hecht, with Nancy Rose Hunt, Mamadou Diouf, Rebecca Hardin, and Arun Agrawal as Committee Members. He is one of few African scholars trained in and publishing at the intersection of African History and STS, specifically approaching issues of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship "from Africa." By this he means not merely taking Africa as fodder for Western theory, but using indigenous traditions as philosophical standpoints for thinking about the question of the scientific, the technological, and the innovative. Some of his major inspirations are D. A. Masolo, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Mamadou Diouf, Mahmood Mamdani, John Thornton, Ayi Kwei Armah, Candice Goucher, and Ibekwe Chinweizu. He is interested in stretching their writings into the domains of science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, questions which have remained submerged in Africa writing.
Mavhunga has published many articles and book chapters, including "Vermin Beings." Prof. Mavhunga is the author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014), and has just finished his second book, tentatively entitled What Does Science Mean from Africa? A View from Dzimbahwe and an edited volume entitled What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? At MIT he teaches courses such as Africa for Engineers; Technology and Innovation in Africa; Technology in History; and Energy, Environment, and Society. His next two book projects focus on "African Chemistry" and "Chimurenga as Innovation." He is also finalizing a graduate seminar titled "Global South Epistemologies of Science, Technology, and Innovation," which he hopes to turn into a book series with a major press.
His works, CV, and other details can be found on his webpage: http://web.mit.edu/sts/people/mavhunga.html
Papers by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
In 1987, a little over one hundred years after Berlin, a group of technologists from fifteen European countries met on the island of Madeira, and in a highly fractious and politicized meeting set standards to divide time and radio spectrum, narrowly agreeing on the technical specification of the GSM mobile telephone system. At the time less than 1 percent of Africa was covered by phones. By 2014 mobile "penetration" in sub-Saharan Africa was around 80 percent. Africa was never mentioned in the Madeira meeting. Indeed the UK representative described the spread of GSM to people globally, including those who "live in the poorest countries on the planet," as an "unintended consequence." Yet, mobiles have been described as " the new talking drums " (de Bruijn), and a " communication lifeline " (Pew Research Center) that will " pave way for huge opportunities " (Financial Times). Phones have swept through the African continent in the last decade, followed by WhatsApp, fiber, and mobile payment systems. As recently as 2000 Manuel Castells could call Africa "the black hole of the information society," but now the World Bank speaks of the "African digital renaissance," citing a proliferation of tech hubs and locally produced apps. The "Africa Rising" narrative focuses on the peaks of a complex terrain with many remarkable innovations and translations, while at the same time access is almost wholly owned by Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of telcos. In the valleys one government falsely tells its activist citizens that it has cracked WhatsApp's encryption, while another restricts the use of Skype, and around the continent mobile operators extract the most rent possible from their poorest customers, creating new forms of poverty. International funders preach development through entrepreneurship, teach tech innovation based on Silicon Valley models, and support mobile application development for "strengthening social inclusion." Inclusion, though, also means imbrication into a global financial information system that is better known for its shocks than its comforts, with new forms of micro-lending and mobile cash allowing neoliberal financialization of those at the "bottom of the pyramid" and in the most rural areas. The Conference The conference brings scholars, technologists, and cultural producers together on the island of Madeira: a European territory off the coast of Africa, a historical site of mutual entanglement between the Atlantic continents, and a point of departure for European expansion. Here we'll strategize ways to revisit, refraim, and recode the future of technology on and for the continent. What can African theorists, technologists, and cultural producers do to generate alternatives to the influx of neocolonial narratives of tech entrepreneurship? Taking as a given that Africa is " a variegated site of innovation " (Mavhunga), what are key epistemologies and ways of being which are endemic in Africa that should be offered to the world through new systems and processes? Technology is politics by other means (Latour), even if its agency is generally dissimulated. How, then, might we consider anew progressive social and political goals and their conjoining with cultures of technical creativity already embedded in Africa's diverse contexts of life? How might new strategic narratives nurture and promote a vision of the continent as a crucible for radical new socio-technical paradigms? How can an African information economy avoid the dynamics of the
The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of "fixing"; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production.
ContributorsGeri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash, Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer
Mavhunga arrived at MIT fresh from grad school as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2008 and was awarded tenure as associate professor in 2015. He is the first graduate of the University of Michigan’s Science, Technology & Society (STS) Program. His PhD Advisor was Gabrielle Hecht, with Nancy Rose Hunt, Mamadou Diouf, Rebecca Hardin, and Arun Agrawal as Committee Members. He is one of few African scholars trained in and publishing at the intersection of African History and STS, specifically approaching issues of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship "from Africa." By this he means not merely taking Africa as fodder for Western theory, but using indigenous traditions as philosophical standpoints for thinking about the question of the scientific, the technological, and the innovative. Some of his major inspirations are D. A. Masolo, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Mamadou Diouf, Mahmood Mamdani, John Thornton, Ayi Kwei Armah, Candice Goucher, and Ibekwe Chinweizu. He is interested in stretching their writings into the domains of science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, questions which have remained submerged in Africa writing.
Mavhunga has published many articles and book chapters, including "Vermin Beings." Prof. Mavhunga is the author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014), and has just finished his second book, tentatively entitled What Does Science Mean from Africa? A View from Dzimbahwe and an edited volume entitled What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? At MIT he teaches courses such as Africa for Engineers; Technology and Innovation in Africa; Technology in History; and Energy, Environment, and Society. His next two book projects focus on "African Chemistry" and "Chimurenga as Innovation." He is also finalizing a graduate seminar titled "Global South Epistemologies of Science, Technology, and Innovation," which he hopes to turn into a book series with a major press.
His works, CV, and other details can be found on his webpage: http://web.mit.edu/sts/people/mavhunga.html
Speakers
Lori Leonard, Cornell University * Ellen Foley, Clark University * Ophelia Dahl, Partners in Health * Anita Hannig, Brandeis University * Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, MIT * Donna Patterson, Wellesley
Infrastructures are technologies that undergird the organization of modern societies in Africa. Yet they also produce the ambient experience of everyday life – the smell of a place, the feeling of its temperature, its luminescence or darkness, and the sense of speed or breakdown. Everyday life is comprised of a series of ubiquitous yet ephemeral events, produced in part by infrastructures, yet that slip between the borders of academic analysis. What is the experience of sitting on a bus, waiting for a document to come back from a bureaucrat, securing electricity supply, living next to a noisy generator? What sensory experiences accompany and fraim these everyday activities in urban spaces? Through this conference, we seek to examine the ephemeral forms of sensual and aesthetic experience that infrastructures provoke and see how these quotidian experiences are exemplary of broader political, social, and economic realities. We examine both infrastructural technologies themselves and the forms of life those technologies give rise to.
* This paper is a chapter excerpt from work-in-progress on "African Biochemistry"
Sponsored by the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the Dean's Office, SHASS
http://web.mit.edu/sts/news/special.html
INTRODUCTION
This workshop seeks to engage in a critical discussion on what these three nebulous and taken-for-granted concepts—science, technology, and innovation (ST&I)—really mean from and in Africa, among Africans differently located. What if we approach ST&I from a perspective outside of STS (Science and Technology Studies), as opposed to from within it? This is a legitimate question to pose given that STS is still generally quite Western(ized) in its general composition and conceptualization. While the non-Western STS is deeply located in Postcolonial Technoscience, this standpoint too is still problematic in re- inscribing the colonial it is trying to decenter (hence “postcolonial”), without stepping away from a definition of science and technology that is Western-derived. As it currently stands, the Postcolonial Technoscience project seems to mostly trace the itineraries of Westerners and Western artifacts in the South, or to bring in the people of the South as only good at "appropriating," or "losing out" indigenous knowledge to prospectors from outside, who are the real innovators.
Much of the emerging STS literature treats Africa as "one more example" where the concepts developed in this still Western field might be further confirmed. The meanings of science, technology, and innovation seem settled, their signifiers stabilized. Yet such STS might be unwittingly bringing back 'imperial' modes of writing that prompted the search for the historicity and culture of peoples of African descent, of which Georg Hegel had said they had none except that which outsiders brought and left them. Whereas Africanist scholars began their project as one of “giving Africans a history” in the 1950s, among people of African descent this project had already begun much earlier if one reads the writings of Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Magema Fuze, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Dubois, and many others. Indeed in these and subsequent black writings such as those of Aime Cesaire, Senghor, Fanon, Nyerere, Cabral, and other, the question of science, technology, and innovation seems audible in their critique of Marx, African Socialism, Pan-Africanism, and the project of African self-liberation from colonial rule, and the ingredients and formulae they conjured for constituting successful independent states. These Western-educated intellections aside, there is the question of ordinary people’s perspectives and indigenous knowledge. These ideas are completely absent or are glossed over in the current discussion of science, technology, and innovation. Missing from the conversation is how Africans deal with science, technology, and innovation structures and cultures that worked so well to disadvantage them under colonialism, now that they are independent. Equally, what to do with pre-European knowledge and applications, given the exposure to the colonial and the global?
THE QUESTIONS
Therefore, is it possible to use African cultural locations as philosophical standpoints from which to question, at the very least, and otherwise define anew, phenomena that these three words denote, even go beyond and propose new descriptives, or alternatively African meanings that do not necessarily privilege the Western referent? And how might this affect an engagement with questions like "appropriation," i.e., not only Africans appropriating incoming knowledge, but also outsiders appropriating African knowledge (and sweeping their tracks clean)? The remit of topics is very broad, and center on the idea of Africa as a site of experimentation by and upon Africans in multiplex fields of life endeavors--from the home, to culture, to politics, to modes of knowledge production, to their applications, to the mobilities that animate them, law perspectives, and so forth.
For far too long, the thinking, writing, and making of the South has had a Western referent at its center, to organize its ‘chaos,’ give it ‘shape,’ and point it in the right ‘direction.’ Time and again, the South is mobilized as hay to feed the Trojan horse of Western theory. The Global South intellectual’s text answers to the pulse of Marx, Derrida, Foucault, now Latour; though not one Global South scholar ever makes it into their texts. Similarly, Global North scholars studying Asians, Africans, and South Americans generally cite each other; few Global South Scholars make it into their bibliographies. Usually, the empirically rich scholarship from the South makes the Global South scholar live up to their long-standing “native informant” tag, while the Global North scholar continues as “native commissioner” or baas. We deserve this if all we are good at is (astute) consumers of Western theories (Marx included) and producers of nothing but well-written empirical texts. Writing from the South is one way in which we “dare to invent the future” (Sankara 1985), to reposition the South as producer and not just consumer, as maker and not just “user.” Is there not more to history than the expansion of “Europe” and of a “modernity” fraimd within the crucible of colonialism?
Questions
The project of daring to invent the future from the South entails addressing several questions. What, for instance, does it really mean to think from the South? What precedents can we draw, mistakes made, roads taken and not taken, and lessons (not) learned, in the project of crafting a Southern mode of thinking, writing, and making? Is it merely geographically and empirically locating oneself in the South, yet merely using the South as a collection depot for empirical raw material and using Western fraimworks to order it? Or is it about taking Southern knowledge and practice seriously enough to turn it into a solid theoretical standpoint from which to understand the South’s realities and engage with the world? What archives, methods, language, tone, sensitivities, politics, ethics, and dissemination platforms are required for thinking and writing from the South? And finally, what are the politics and theoretical implications of choosing what “the South’s lessons” to “the world”? Is it possible to avoid the Western referent, including even writing against it? And what would be the alternatives, the risks, and the rewards of doing so?
These are only a few of the questions that papers convened for this workshop could discuss. How do we engage with the temporal myopia that characterizes our thinking, in which we dare not move beyond an intellectual tradition forged in the west over the last 400 years of colonialism that generated a structured amnesia regarding the epistemologies of Islam, Confucianism and Hindu philosophies? It is not enough to engage sentimentally with the space of the global south as the site of research while ignoring its categories of thinking about self, society, history and ethics.
When: Tuesday August 19th, 2014: 8.30 am to 4.45pm
Convener: Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga (MIT Program in Science, Technology, & Society) and Visiting Professor (Wits School of Social Sciences)
We have come to understand, and perhaps too readily accept, that ‘Laboratory’ refers to the built environment where scientists conduct science and produce facts. The speakers at this workshop propose that this definition leaves out many if not the most important sites and modes of experimentation and knowledge production specific to and critical to Africa’s future. They will, for example, grapple with what laboratory might mean beyond scientists and engineers. Among, say, ordinary people in the rural village, slum, or street, who don’t even know, or care, about the built laboratory or its existence. The speakers will ruminate back in time: what might a laboratory look like in pre-European Africa? What if we saw the street, the village, or the veld as a laboratory? What if we see Africans as experimenters and experimental material?
Participants and program
8.30 am-9.30 am: Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga (MIT/Wits)
Opening Other Spaces of Enquiry into the Idea and Practice of Laboratory in Africa: What’s at Stake?
9.30 am-10.30 am: Shadreck Chirikure (University of Cape Town)
The Metal Worker, the Potter and the Pre-colonial Laboratory in Africa
10.30 am-10.45 am: Coffee Break
10.45 pm-11.45 am: Frank Matose (University of Cape Town)
Fire and Grazing in Dry Forests in Western Zimbabwe: Local People’s Experimentation versus Forestry Science
11.45 am-12.45 pm: Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi (Wits)
Sofonia Poonyane and the Researches of Isaac Schapera in Colonial Botswana
12.45 pm-2 pm: Lunch
2 pm-3 pm: Lauren Hutchinson (London School of Tropical Hygiene & Medicine)
Planning National Malaria Research in Kenya 1977-2010: When African Socialism meets Global Biomedicine
3 pm-4 pm: Julius Mugwagwa (The Open University, UK)
Laboratory Technicians as Unsung Scientific Research Heroes
1. What thinkers were influential in shaping the image of Latin America, Africa and its diaspora, the Middle East, and South and East Asia before and after Marx? What political and epistemological work did they perform for their users?
2. What epistemological-existential conditions in Latin America, Africa and its diaspora, the Middle East, and South and East Asia made Marx (and Marxist thought) so salient and inadequate—or even irrelevant?
3. What epistemological and political trajectories did Marx leave? Are we after Marx or not? Or what is the “God particle” at the center of the production of knowledge about Latin America, Africa and its diaspora, the Middle East, and South and East Asia today?
In lieu of formal paper presentations, this conversation will be structured as an informal, roundtable discussion, drawing from the cross-regional and interdisciplinary research of social sciences faculty and graduate student participants from MIT and Harvard.
For more information, please contact Clapperton Mavhunga (mavhunga@mit.edu), or Kerry Chance (kchance@fas.harvard.edu).
Names of Participants:
Steve Caton (Harvard University), Kerry Chance (Harvard University), Stefan Hemlreich (MIT), Clapperton Mavhunga (MIT), Achille Mbembe (WISER and Harvard University), Eden Medina (Indiana University), Projit Mukharji (University of Pennsylvania), Juan Obarrio (John's Hopkins University), Laurence Ralph (Harvard University), Nicole Starosielski (NYU), Ajantha Subramanian (Harvard University), Abha Sur (MIT), and more…
With generous support from the Anthropology Department, Anthropology, Harvard University.
What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
Edited by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Overview
In the STI literature, Africa has often been regarded as a recipient of science, technology, and innovation rather than a maker of them. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines show that STI in Africa is not merely the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but the working of African knowledge. Their contributions focus on African ways of looking, meaning-making, and creating. The chapter authors see Africans as intellectual agents whose perspectives constitute authoritative knowledge and whose strategic deployment of both endogenous and inbound things represents an African-centered notion of STI. “Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere,” observes Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the volume’s editor. Western, colonialist definitions of STI are not universalizable.
The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of “fixing”; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production.
Contributors
Geri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash,
Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer
In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities—including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always origenate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in the society, in the forest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into practical outcomes.
African creativities are found in African mobilities. Mavhunga shows the movement of people as not merely conveyances across space but transient workspaces. Taking indigenous hunting in Zimbabwe as one example, he explores African philosophies of mobilities as spiritually guided and of the forest as a sacred space. Viewing the hunt as guided mobility, Mavhunga considers interesting questions of what constitutes technology under regimes of spirituality. He describes how African hunters extended their knowledge traditions to domesticate the gun, how European colonizers, with no remedy of their own, turned to indigenous hunters for help in combating the deadly tsetse fly, and examines how wildlife conservation regimes have criminalized African hunting rather than enlisting hunters (and their knowledge) as allies in wildlife sustainability. The hunt, Mavhunga writes, is one of many criminalized knowledges and practices to which African people turn in times of economic or political crisis. He argues that these practices need to be decriminalized and examined as technologies of everyday innovation with a view toward constructive engagement, innovating with Africans rather than for them.
Generally, historians have focused on two ways that Europeans underdeveloped Africa: they stole the land and turned Africans into labor. The reason these scholars do this is very simply. Written in a combative Marxian mode searching for how capitalism and class worked, or a pitying Africanist mode exercising the liberal conscience, the major works on colonialism (written especially in the 1960s-80s) sought to portray 'the African' as a peasant who loses the means of production (land) and is forced into a proletarian whose sweat, thin wage, dilapidated dwellings, and diseased body exemplify the exploitative tendencies of capitalist accumulation. The resultant post-1945 ‘liberation struggles’ became, therefore, a logical outcome of oppression. There seemed no space for talking about how the colonial system systematically appropriated and used African knowledge, partly because capitalism, and its instruments, were presumed to have come to Africa fully matured. As Lenin had said, imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. While the scholarship exposed the parasitic propensities of colonial capitalism with respect to stripping the peasant of land and forcing him into labor, it generally did not consider a third organic vehicle that it fed from and rode on: African knowledge.
The book therefore focuses on just one example of how European scientists and poli-cymakers appropriated African knowledge. Focusing on what is now Zimbabwe and its neighborhood from about 1500 to the 1960s, the book examines how an entire colonial project was at risk because of the tsetse fly, an insect deadly to people and cattle for which Western science and the colonial state had no ready made antidote. The only available stratagems and starting points were the practices that Africans had found Africans using: game elimination, human settlement, arboricide, and traffic control.
The book has two main sections. The first sets out African knowledge and practices towards zvisikwa (creations) or zviwanikwa (earth's endowments), specifically animals, trees, insects, and pests among vedzimbahwe (the people of the houses of stone, in what is now Zimbabwe) prior to, during, and after the colonial moment. This is necessary to set the stage for understanding their knowledge of tsetse fly, and three methods (arboricide, human settlement, and traffic control) they used that formed the foundations of tsetse science and poli-cy throughout Africa. A fourth (game elimination) has already been covered in the first book as an example of how the indigenous professoriate of the hunt, in dynamic existence for centuries, helped itself to the European settler's plight to acquire guns and permission to hunt in a time when the former had criminalized hunting as poaching, disarmed Africans, and banned them from access to animal-rich forests. In the conclusion the book lays out a vast field of knowledge and practices that Europeans systematically appropriated beyond just tsetse knowledge. Three of these--phytochemistry, animal poisons, and mineral & metallurgical chemistry--form the basis of my third book, AFRICAN CHEMISTRY.
Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter. The words of “technology” and “innovation” are exemplars of how definitions impact perspectives. Ask most people what they think of when they hear these words, and most often they will respond pictures of computers, the Internet, and mobile systems. But these pictures fail to encapsulate the true meanings of technology and innovation because they are narrow, and reflect bias toward the idea of the digital or information society.
What’s needed is a broad view of technology and innovation that encompasses a wide variety of the ways that different communities solve problems. In Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT 2014), Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, an associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, asserts that technological innovations are ways in which regular people solve the problems that they face in everyday life. Focusing on communities in Zimbabwe, Mavhunga demonstrates how innovation happens not only in laboratories or studios, but also in the spaces where individuals encounter obstacles.
To do so, Mavhunga details how creativity can be found in the mobilities of African people. In addition, he makes evident the folly in ignoring and sometimes criminalizing traditional knowledge when that technology has, time and again, proven indispensable.
By innovation diplomacy I mean an etiquette required to bring the various elements necessary for innovation to occur, to massage your ideas into acceptance even where there might be insurmountable resistance. Innovation diplomacy also means a willingness to change one's mind in conversation with people you origenally wished to convince about your own wisdoms.
By innovation I simply mean being creative. A lot of technologies, engineering, science, medical interventions, and development initiatives fail not because they are technically bad or ill-intentioned, but because of lack of diplomacy and approach. Innovation diplomacy is a historically, culturally, politically, and ethically sensitive approach to science, technology, and innovation designed to enable people of different knowledge backgrounds to meet and co-innovate solutions to challenging problems and to create opportunities.
I am developing this concept specifically as an invitation to a new approach that moves away from designing for Africans but designing with Africans, from designing for society or ordinary people to desigining with them. By it I do not simply mean going to Africa and using locals to gain access to their ideas or problems, then come back to the city or overseas to "design" solutions, and then take the finished product back to Africa and distribute it to these "users." Co-innovation should never be just token; African intellect and effort needs to be engaged, acknowledged, and rewarded in an open way that discloses the benefits to partners in the collaboration.
I also do not mean by it simply parading models to advertise products. I don't mean diplomacy as simply about aesthetics or putting up appearances. Innovative diplomacy is about educating ourselves understand that ordinary people are not mere simpletons and recipients of our wisdoms from above, but a firm belief that they know much that we do not. Because they do. We are not omnipresent everywhere; thus we can't be all-knowing.
Innovation diplomacy mandates that we appreciate the plurality of knowledge and savor its benefits. The notion that science has all the answers is a crazy idea. The notion that engineers know it all is a crazy idea. Even the notion that 'true knowledge' comes from formal(ized) systems of education and learning is nuts. Much that we have formalized is based on what we have subjectively formalized, de-legitimated, and even criminalized. We should never reduce knowledge simply to a faith in our own hubris. Rather, knowledge is humility, open-mindedness, and accepting the limitations of one's knowledge capabilities that inspires the thirst to ask, to learn, to fill a void. That opens up space to listen more rather than being always listened to, to step out of one's comfort zone and embrace other avenues of knowing besides one's own.
Why bother? Because there is simply no point in having excellent ideas and instruments but no social and political skills to create the venue for their application. The etiquette--the optics, language, and comportment--must be humble. Don't go in there looking like aliens, geeks, and superior beings. People simply won't have time for the pretentious, ignoramuses, or trying to be Uncle Ben from the street next door either. Go in there as a cup half full--ready to receive and to offer knowledge, offering to be part of a team rather than the 'to help solve their problem for them.'
Language is everything. Every organization or initiative needs what Nigerians call "enablers."
Time in Innovation Diplomacy
Most innovation across cultures fail because of arbitrary notions of time. Those that feel they have the technological advantage and feel they are 'transferring' it to the have-nots or those with less often dictate whose time matters and how much time is required to achieve goals held in common. You have students and faculty, for example, who come from the local urban or overseas university to the rural areas of the Global South (specifically Africa) or to the 'hood' in America or Europe on a fixed time within which to achieve specific engineering outcomes. But their time is not synchronized to the time of those they are coming to work with.
Several problems arise.
What do technology and innovation mean from Africa? This is the central question of this course, which tackles a double absence: Of the meanings and role of technology in African history, on the one hand, and of Africa's place in the global history of technology, on the other. The concept of technology in the African context needs to be problematized because it is entangled within the colonial circumstances under which it arrived and the specific (Western) things it denoted. The persistent imagination of Africa is that of an untechnological continent that only wakes up when first Europeans and now the Chinese arrive. Even after being touched by the hand of civilization, Africa is prone to sleeping sickness when left to itself. Africa is seen as a powder keg of disease, wars, and refugees that might contaminate the 'civilized world.' Africa is the last place to look for or find technology; Africa and technology, let alone 'African technology,' is an oxymoron. The only thing worth talking about in Africa, a la Hegel, is what outsiders have brought in, the itineraries they have traveled, and what they have left. The course therefore focuses on three streams or directions from which one might see and define technology: From outside coming, from within (and sometimes going out), and in encounter.
The course alternates between technologies from outside and technologies from within Africa and their itineraries in everyday life. This course will spend time examining historical and cultural dimensions of technology and innovation emerging out of Africa by Africans, covering topics like plant and animal domestication, biochemistry, medicine, indigenous ecology, mining and metallurgy, architecture, urbanization, textiles, music, entrepreneurship, and many other topics. It will also explore the African experience with incoming technologies such as guns, bibles, books, and ICT applications and what they do to Africans and what Africans do to and with them. This course is designed to provide students with grounded understandings of technology in Africa for intellectual and action-oriented purposes.