Which digital futures from and for Africa?

Article by Anna Katharina Osterlow and Michaël Bourdon.

Anna Katharina Osterlow and Michaël Bourdon are PhD students at Sciences Po's History Center and International Research Center (CERI), respectively. In January 2026, they launched the research seminar “Desirable Futures and Digital Technologies in Africa” with the support of the Africa Programme and CERI. This seminar is organized under the scientific supervision of Laurent Fourchard (CERI).
 

The idea of this seminar is to offer a platform for young researchers working on digital technologies in Africa to explore the recompositions these technologies entail in terms of power relations and imaginaries: politically, economically, and socially, as well as the new forms of subjectivation emerging from these processes.

A few examples of issues we aim to explore include the role of the postcolonial state within the digital economy, particularly in contexts of shared or fragmented sovereignty, as well as the role of elites, whether as intended beneficiaries of these transformations or as actors actively shaping and appropriating them.

What we want to emphasize is the articulation of a multiplicity of dynamics at play: on the one hand, the financialization of development, unfolding in a context of aid withdrawal; on the other, the paradigm of Africa Rising, and the visions it conveys: of the continent, of the promises attributed to new technologies, and of the futures projected both onto Africa and onto its elites.

This articulation also brings to the fore new figures of development and success, embodying new forms of modernity, new itineraries of accumulation, and new social ideals. The figure of the entrepreneur, as explored in Michael’s research, is one of the most emblematic of these transformations.

Our aim is not so much to adopt a radically new perspective on dynamics that have already been widely studied. We believe it is useful to provide a space for young researchers to collectively discuss the epistemological, ethical, and methodological issues raised by these objects of study.

A key objective is to question the purportedly disruptive nature of digital technologies: what does this disruption actually entail? What is at stake? and how we might historicize, contextualize, and localize knowledge?

An important point raised by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga is particularly relevant to us: knowledge must be rooted, and cannot be assessed or interpreted solely through an external analytical framework. Therefore, taking an interdisciplinary approach, the seminar further aims to historicize current debates about digital technologies in Africa and to examine the African actors who shaped the development and spread of digital technologies in the past. Refraining from the idea of a linear diffusion of technology from North to South, the different research perspectives coming together in the seminar reveal the transnational character of the spread of technological knowledge and practices, as well as the tensions, power structures, and negotiations that are involved in tech cooperations. The historical perspective allows to trace the roots of current tech discourses that link the contemporary promises of tech entrepreneurism to past imaginations of the modern, independent nation state through computers in the 1960s. The similarity of past and present visions of desirable digital figures in Africa questions the notion of newness and disruption, which is often articulated alongside technological ideas, and invites us to examine the diverging interests and changing actors behind past and present imaginaries.

Imaginaries seem to us central to understanding these new development projects. The idea is to examine how certain actors gain traction over the future, over the social order that may emerge from it, and over the imaginaries that sustain both their engagement with these technologies and the forms of modernity with which they are associated. Johanna Siméant-Germanos has suggested this notion of Desirable Futures as a way think beyond this concept of imaginaries, or to articulate it with questions of dispositions, ethos, and socialization processes.

A significant part of this process unfolds at the level of elites, understood as strategic intermediaries and local translators of syncretic forms of modernity. Those forms are often shaped by their own internationalization, whether through extraversion or through overlapping socializations, affiliations, and positionalities. In this respect, one might, for instance, think of the Lebanese trajectories in West Africa described by Andrew Arsan in his book Interlopers of Empire (2014).

Through these imaginaries, we often encounter productive and developmentalist imaginaries. This is precisely how political actors in Africa tend to apprehend new technologies: as enablers or facilitators of development. We can think, for example, of biometric projects, whether mobilized for electoral purposes or for population identification. Across these cases, we find the same narratives, the same technological “gospels” mobilized around new technologies and their almost demiurgic power. Drawing here on Marielle Debos, who herself cites Michel Callon, we are confronted with a form of problematization of technologies as development solutions: quasi-miraculous answers to problems deemed otherwise intractable. 

Ultimately, what do these developmentalist projects amount to? Are we dealing with vertical, pharaonic projects serving national prestige, as in the case of Digital Public Infrastructures? With purely elitist projects? With an extension of the frontiers of capitalism? Or with the concomitant emergence of urban middle classes, new consumers, and thus new markets?

Opening up a dialogue between contemporary tech trends and the histories of African tech tools and historical uses of informatics, the seminar intends to grasp the seemingly new processes in more depth and bring to the fore the African partakers who shaped technological developments at their beginnings. From this perspective, it can be asked how current efforts towards indigenous AI and African innovations are linked to the former ambitions of African experts in the 80s who argued for the development of particular software and hardware that would fit African conditions.

Learn more about the subject : 

Anna Katharina Osterlow, The Digital Orientalist. ‘African Tech Inventions, Inclusive AI and Digital Innovation: A Historical Perspective’, 15 October 2024.