Technology and Culture

In 2002 the Kenyan scholar E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo challenged historians of Africa to critically consider the direction of the field by asking the question: “is autonomy of African history possible?”¹ Atieno-Odhiambo wrote these words in the collection Africanizing Knowledge, which similarly charged scholars to make African Studies “more African,” or more specifically to center African epistemologies in the production of knowledge about the continent.² The scholars featured in this special issue of Technology and Culture extend the idea of Africanizing knowledge to the history of technology. The stakes of this project draw from the work of another Kenyan historian, Bethwell A. Ogot, who conceptualized the modern field of African history as one with an “antecedent historical consciousness”—a field that continues to resonate with “an African world order or an African vision of reality that informs the political, historical, philosophical, value-ethical, and epistemological fields of concern.”³ In short, African ways of knowing the world have shaped and continue to influence Africans’ interactions with technology and Africa’s engagement with the history of technology.

Along similar lines, scholars working in African Studies from multiple disciplines have asserted that Africa has long been a place of technological innovation, creativity, and adaptation despite contemporary Western media [End Page S1] depictions to the contrary. As the archaeologist Shadreck Chirikure has recently posited, the earliest African sites of pottery-making and metal-working might be compared to the laboratory in that they were spaces of experimentation and that they produced a rich diversity of material techniques and scientific knowledge.⁴ It is worth noting that the historian Hellen Tilley previously employed the laboratory metaphor in tracing how colonial scientists benefited from fieldwork in Africa—“the living laboratory”—in the development of Western scientific fields, such as ecology.⁵ However, in Chirikure’s use, precolonial laboratories such as iron ore sites, forges, and clay pits were distinct from the built world of the modern scientific laboratory, but also from Tilley’s notion of the laboratory because they were directed by African specialists and contributed to the development of African expertise. Chirikure explains, “precolonial Africa—like many other previously colonized regions in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere—had sites of work and knowledge production at which innovations, inventions, and experimentation took place.” He continues: “Such sites of work were deeply wrapped up in the view that knowledge is culture. Therefore, they were not built environments or laboratories in the modern or Western sense, but they nevertheless play an important role in knowledge production that networked the world from early on.”⁶ As Chirikure suggests, the places where potters, smelters, and smiths worked were adaptable and distinctive in their embeddedness in the natural world and daily life—from the materiality of quotidian labor to spiritual and symbolic action. They were also sites of intellectual labor.⁷

In the example of pottery production—an explicitly female technological practice, as explained by Chirikure—the “laboratory” drew together the sites where women located clay and the household. Women worked to produce pots, steamers, ritual vessels, and other earthen tools inside their homes, thus bringing together domestic life and the technological world. Significantly, women potters transmitted their technological knowledge to daughters, thereby establishing specifically female-centered technological networks.⁸ The key point here is that the multiplicity of female and male specialists working across Africa shaped the direction of their fields and their networks of material and intellectual exchange. [End Page S2]

Chirikure’s essay appears in the recent interdisciplinary collection What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa (2017) that aims to upend both popular and scholarly assumptions that leave little space to imagine Africa as a place of technology.⁹ Indeed, the study of African pottery production and metal working have offered important insights for scholars of technology. These technologies were tied to notions of power in African societies, which as the above example demonstrates was deeply intertwined with notions of gender in society. As historian Eugenia Herbert—whose foundational work Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies (1993) draws attention to the deeply gendered aspects of African technology—has...