Digitalization and the Field of African Studies

Urbanization in Africa also means rapid
technological change. At the turn of the 21st century, mobile telephony
appeared in urban Africa. Ten years later, it covered large parts of
rural Africa and – thanks to the smartphone – became the main access to
the internet. This development is part of technological transformations
in digitalization that are supposed to bridge the urban and the rural
and will make their borders blurred. They do so through the creation of
economic opportunities, the flow of information and by influencing
people’s definition of self, belonging and citizenship. These changes
are met with huge optimism and the message of Information and
Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) for Africa has been
one of glory and revolution. Practice, however, reveals other sides.
Increasingly, academic publications show that we are facing a new form
of digital divide in which Africa is (again) at the margins.

These
technological transformations influence the relation between urban and
rural Africa, and between ‘Africa’ and the World, and hence the field of
African Studies both in its objects as well as in its forms of
knowledge production and in the formulation of the problems we should
study. In this lecture, Mirjam de Bruijn reflects on two decades of
research experience in West and Central Africa and discusses how, for
her, the field has changed. The author was forced to decolonize her
thinking even further, and to enter into co-creation in knowledge
production. How can these lessons be translated into a form of critical
knowledge production and how does the study of technological change
inform the redefinition of African Studies for the 21st century?