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I focused on countries with known ICT development sectors. Attempting to explore the subject in the Central African Republic (CAR) for instance would not have been useful for this research. The CAR is one of the ten poorest countries in the world and has since 2004 been suffering under a succession of religiously driven bush wars. The number of

practitioners in the field of ICT and technology are minimal, and the relationship between contemporary cultures and communications technology limited. I had additionally decided to exclude North Africa in this research, even though I worked with artists from Egypt and Tunisia in the exhibition process. North Africa has strong development and cultural ties with Europe and the Arab world that put it on a separate economic trajectory to that of Sub Saharan Africa.

Language was a second qualifier. In 2012 I had begun working with Karen Dermineur based in Dakar, Senegal. The technology development sector’s relationship to culture in Dakar is interesting, as it is connected with art and culture concerns through projects at the

Dakar Biennial and a strong programme run by a digital arts Residency called Ker Thoissane.

Working with Dermineur in Senegal made clear the difficulties of working between

Francophone and Anglophone countries, from the perspective of both language and culture.

It was for this reason that when Dermineur and I started working together to produce the continent wide directory of practice for MDC: Digital Afrique (T. Bristow, 2013a), I worked with artists and cases from Anglophone countries and Dermineur (who has similar problems with English) engaged the Francophone cases. Though I did not engage practitioners from Tunisia, Egypt, Senegal, Cameroon and the DRC in the initial investigations I did however receive responses to the exhibition from artists working in these countries.

Nigeria and South Africa are two of the strongest economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, and are very influential in West and Southern Africa respectively. Kenya does not fit the same the economic rating, but its ICT development is hailed as being most influential in the East Africa region. The development of M-PESA and a crowd sourced data system for crisis situations, called Ushahidi²⁹ position Kenya as significant in the ICT development sector, with Nairobi being labelled the Silicon Savannah (South Africa has the Silicon Cape and Nigeria the Silicon Lagoon). The Nairobi iHub, from which the top two developments came, became a model for tech hubs on the continent and has been replicated with varying

degrees of success in South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda and Nigeria. Kenya, in addition to South Africa and Nigeria, was therefore an important location, and I identified the cities of

Johannesburg, Lagos and Nairobi as centres that could be used to explore practice in Southern, West and East Africa respectively. The three cities furthermore represented very real cases of the diversity in the African Cultures of Technology model, each with its own

29 Both M-PESA and Ushahidi (https://www.ushahidi.com/) are part of what is now the well-known Nairobi iHub. Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing, mobile-orientated reporting platform, was developed in 2008 to help manage outbreaks of violence after the 2008 elections. It was developed by a group of Kenyan developers who had recently returned to Kenya from the United States. They saw an opportunity to develop a platform that would put crisis

reporting in the hands of people on the ground. Ushahidi became an important

development with international interests and went on to be used in major crises such as that in Haiti. The success of the platform led to the development of the iHub, a tech hub designed to support research and education to grow local ICT development. It was out of the iHub that M-PESA and a number of other local ICTs grew.

socio-economic, socio-political and cultural implications for how technology was being culturally used, appropriated, critiqued and developed.

As the fieldwork processes went forward, making an investigation in Lagos became increasingly difficult. Not only did I have problems formalising a visa as a South African citizen, but more time and money than I had for the research, was required to enter and explore Lagos. Lagos is understood to be one of the most populated cities in the world. It is large, complex and difficult to travel. With these difficulties, which only became apparent after I had done the Nairobi fieldwork and as I had begun the Johannesburg fieldwork, I realised that I would not be able to focus my attention on Lagos, as it would be too

extensive. I found as I progressed that the comparison of Nairobi and Johannesburg was in fact more than sufficient and worked well to meet the needs of the initial investigation. I was however disappointed to exclude Lagos, particularly due to its culturally rich and fascinating locations. I did however keep in close contact with the cultural practitioners from Lagos, and did return to it as a location in the Post African Futures exhibition; artist Emeka Ogbho and the Imaginarium Collective participated in the exhibition.

The diversity in Nairobi and Johannesburg play an important part in how ICT, innovation and related cultural engagements are enacted in each. Their positions as

‘leaders’ in ICT was pivotal to being able to compare them. Furthermore each city is

influential in how these practices are seen in the regions around them. As part of my visit to Nairobi I made a quick visit to Kampala, Uganda; this was to compare Nairobi to Kampala, and understand Nairobi’s influence on Kampala. Comparatively, however, Kampala at the time was barely developed with regard to technology infrastructure. I found one successful group called Hive CoLab, which was active in exploring communications technology from a Ugandan perspective. Their role then and today is largely skills development, with a strong focus on supporting women developers. They viewed themselves then as an extension of the Nairobi scene and received support from an East African consortium of development spaces called Pivot Eastand m:lab East. This consortium is also active in Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. Despite Hive CoLab being an interesting project, the visit affirmed my decision to explore Nairobi only, as it identified Nairobi as both an originating and supporting

location.

In South Africa, a choice needed to be made as to whether or not I would include Cape Town in the initial investigation. For the purposes of clarity however, I chose to focus on a single city in each country. Johannesburg’s value over Cape Town is that it is more culturally diverse and is considered a more cosmopolitan African city than Cape Town. Johannesburg is home to a large number of foreign African nationals and is a trade hub for Southern Africa. Johannesburg is also the commerce capital of the country and is therefore home to more ICT development.

In the following section I briefly contextualise what it means to work in African cities as locations for research. I do this using the framework of African Urbanism; this is done to identify an approach to African cities that is sensitive to their ‘informal’ infrastructures and communality.

3.1.2 African Urbanism as lens on African Cities

African Urbanism is an offshoot of Urban Studies and is understood as falling within the frame of subaltern or Southern theory. While my research does not draw heavily on African Urbanism as a field, locating these cities within African Urbanism offers perspectives on the importance of informal networks and communality, thereby offering greater

perspectives to the fieldwork, in line with decolonising methodologies.

African Urbanism, like subaltern theory, is not an attempt at creating a dichotomy between North and South, rather it is an attempt to correct and offer alternatives to African cites being viewed as failed cities in light of Northern theory (Comaroff, 2013). African Urbanism presents new frames through which the diverse conditions of African cities may be viewed. Like subaltern theory, it grew in response to the development of differing intellectual traditions that seek to not be dominated by the contract of the West, and reflects rather (like decolonising methodologies) on historical contexts, as well as situated and subjective knowledge.