Colonialism, Independence and Digital Technology

2021

This paper provides an assessment of experiences and understanding of digital technologies from within an African place. It provides philosophical reflections upon the introduction and existence – appropriation – of digital technologies. Digital technologies are inherently linked to a colonialising power and, in general, unaligned with local, African ways of knowing. Imported technologies are set in modern, universalised doing and unsensitive to the importance of aligned being in African contexts. Sensitivities, it is argued, can be fostered by a decolonial turn, where focus shifts from the individual to the community.

Critical African Stuides, 2017

This paper is an exploration of research around and on the presentation of the Post African Futures exhibition. The exhibition, held at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg in South Africa in 2015, acted to challenge the understanding of contemporary digital and communications technologies in relation to contemporary African cultures. Through this the paper explores scholarship around African positions and philosophies of technology, both the paucity of theoretical engagement in this area and the development of new approaches. In extension, two primary frameworks are explored. The first addresses the importance of unpacking regional cultures of technology. The second is the conceptual framing and locating of concerns around historical and contemporary cultures of technology in Africa under the notion ‘Post Africa Futures’, which puts particular emphasis on a relationship to the global information economy. Cet article est un examen de la recherche relative et sur la présentation de l’exposition sur les Futurs post-africains. L’exposition, qui a lieu à la Goodman Gallery, à Johannesburg en Afrique du Sud en 2015, se voulait de défier la compréhension que l’on a du numérique contemporain et des technologies de communication concernant les cultures contemporaines africaines. Cet article explore à travers ceci les connaissances relatives aux positions africaines et aux philosophies de la technologie, aussi bien l’insuffisance de l’engagement théorique dans ce domaine que le développement de nouvelles approches. Par extension, deux cadres principaux sont explorés. Le premier traite de l’importance de l’analyse des cultures technologiques régionales. Le second de l’encadrement conceptuel et du positionnement de préoccupations relatives aux cultures technologiques historiques et contemporaines en Afrique sous la notion d’ ‘Avenirs post-africains’, qui met un accent particulier sur la relation avec l’économie mondiale de l’information.

Akademik İncelemeler Dergisi, 2025

This study explores the concept of digital postcolonialism, analyzing how digital economies perpetuate colonial dynamics and deepen global inequalities. Digital colonialism, much like historical colonialism, exerts control over developing regions through monopolistic ownership of digital infrastructure, data, and platforms by tech giants primarily located in the global North. By examining the labour conditions of digital workers, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, this study highlights the emergence of a “digital blue-collar” workforce facing precarious, low-wage conditions dictated by platform algorithms. Through the introduction of the concept “pooriat,” the study underscores the severe poverty and dependency that characterize this workforce, reflecting a new form of economic subjugation in the digital age. These conditions reinforce a digital hierarchy, where peripheral regions provide labour and data without fair compensation or control, paralleling colonial resource extraction. The study also discusses the potential of alternative frameworks, such as platform socialism, to challenge these power imbalances by democratizing control over digital infrastructures. This research contributes to the discourse on global inequality, digital dependency, and socio-economic restructuring, emphasizing the need for a more equitable digital economy.

Science as Culture, 2001

seminal essay, 'The race for theory', analyzed the ways in which the academic competition to create a theory of black women's writing had overshadowed the potent theoretical content of the writing itself. Similarly, this essay examines how the hype over the application of new information technologies to racialized social problems has overshadowed the potent technological content of the communities themselves. Focusing on the black diaspora, we broaden the category of 'information technology' to show how traditions of coding and computation from indigenous African practices and black appropriations of Euro-American technologies have supported, resisted, and fused with the cybernetic histories of the West: a potential source for changes in reconstructing identity, social position and access to power in communities of the black diaspora. j ANTI-RACIST TECHNOPHILIA Those of us who love both people and machines are often seen as traitors to both sides of the 'science wars', and are besieged by demands that we choose between the two. On the one hand, many of our political colleagues seek portraits for the technological underpinnings of race, gender and class domination. On the other hand, many of our technological colleagues seek culture-free portraits of technological progress and prowess. How can we approach science and technology in ways that simultaneously honor both a radical political critique and a technophilic jouissance? Let's begin with the early 1990s, when the Internet was ooded

28th May, 2024

Abstract: From Hegel’s (1822) description of Africa as a “… dark mantle of Night” and Kipling’s (1899) insistence on the savagery of Africans and the White Man’s Burden to civilize Africa, Western theory has inundated and orientated the African intellectual sphere such that Franz Fanon’s Black Skin White Mask still holds true. From modernism (here exemplified with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), post modernism and now the much talk about the death of postmodernism and the rise of Digi modernism, Africa has been ignored, such that the Hegelian “nocturnalization” of Africa still holds true especially in the sphere of digital theory. Such discourse goes unnoticed due to the crumbs of technology making its way into Africa serv ing as the people’s opium in the face of digital orientalism, colonization and the third generation exploitation (data). What is the image of Africa in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? How does this denigrated image appear in Western contemporary media and theo ries? What theory or concept can aptly present African reality in the digital age? The analyses in this study are realized through a review of critics of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and a review of theory with attention to Frederick Jameson, Jean Francois Lyotard and Alan Kirby. The analyses deconstruct the relevance of contemporary western theory on Africa as well as demonstrates the inapplicability of predigital African philosophies and theories to the dynamics of the digital age, towards establishing a case for Digi-Africanismas a concept that best presents the African reality in the digital era.

Global Labour Journal, 2023

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2024

Normative articulations of cosmopolitanism have recently come under criticism for their omission of non-Western cosmopolitanisms. As a result, cosmopolitanism from below has emerged, bringing with it a sharp focus on alternative forms of cosmopolitanisms. One such alternative is digital cosmopolitanism, which this chapter explores from an African positionality. A range of important African voices and platforms have emerged within the African and global diasporic digital discursive space. This chapter highlights some of these and asks if and how they might collectively constitute an African digital cosmopolitanism rooted in African digital representational agency that counters cynicism about the agency of Africa and Africans.

There is no doubt about the penetration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Africa and the impact of their uses, in particular gendered, has been the subject of mixed analyses. This contribution analyzes the exact link between these impacts and the continental gender inequalities using a critical feminist grid.

In the 21st Century, the capacity to communicate will almost certainly be a key human right. Nelson Mandela Information technology has traditionally been the instrument of the powerful. Newspapers, radio, television and the Internet are used worldwide to incite racial and ethnic hatred and justify the denial of human rights to millions of poor people. Internet Web sites, for instance, have been used to disseminate racist propaganda, incite racial hatred and reorganise the white supremacist movement in Europe and the United States. Yet, these information technologies are not valuespecific. Though controlled by the powerful, these technologies can be turned into instruments of liberation. Recent examples include the use of the Internet to organise the African reparation movement and anti-globalisation protests. Throughout history, progressive forces have appropriated communications technology to advance, rather than hinder, the campaign for justice and human rights. This paper examines the counter-penetration of information technology by people of African descent in the struggle against human rights violations produced by slavery, colonialism, apartheid and globalisation. Historical anti-racist movements like abolitionism, Pan Africanism and the anti-apartheid and civil rights movements all used communications technology to expose the extent and brutality of white supremacy and to create international networks of resistance movements. They sought to disseminate information about the extent of racist violence through an appropriation of information technologies that had erstwhile been used to oppress people of African descent. From the outset, the anti-racism movement's forte was building a counter-hegemonic discourse to challenge human rights violations created by white racism around the world. This paper argues that just as the anti-racists of the past used the pen, typewriter, printing press, microphone and camera against the whips, guns, bombs, and concentration camps of the racists, anti-racism activists of the 21 st century must wield the computer, Web site and e-mail discussion list against the guns, bombs and prisons of oppressors and their corporate and government sponsors in the West.

2020

IntroductionConcerns about the possible effe cts of the mass media on individuals and cultures have been a preoccupation of academic research since World War 11. The Electronic colonialism Theory posits that mass media when exported carry with them broad range of values. These values are economic, social, cultural and sometimes political or religious in nature. Increasingly, they carry with them the English language in terms of music, movies, or the Internet. The World Systems theory elaborates and extends the Electronic Colonialism Theory (ECT) further by dividing the nations of the globe into three categories; it then expands on how the core category works to influence the two subordinate categories. However, within the Core nations, some are concerned about the impact and penetration of ECT as well, countries such as Canada, France, the U.K, Israel, New Zealand and Australia are prime Core nations that continually worry about the Americanization of their domestic cultural industr...