Makerspaces in Africa

Discussion

Ron Eglash and Ellen Foster:

"Fixer practices are also quite prevalent in African countries--not as a political rebellion against planned obsolescence, but rather due to economic necessity: the expense of new devices, the paucity of products or even replacement parts, and as a means of employment. This puts hacker and maker practices in some African countries at an interesting juncture, as “making do” craft skills and economic necessity intersects with the democratizing politics of questioning top-down technosocial practices and informing innovation. The “fixer” side of maker/hacker cultures are geared toward regenerating value in objects on a local scale. This side is very prevalent in two of the African sites we visited in Ghana, the Creativity Group in Kumasi and the QAMP group in Accra, as will be discussed shortly. Similar to the findings of Foster’s work on US hacker and makerspaces, these groups and others in Africa have complex ecologies, politics and cultures.

For the purposes of this essay, we will focus on the African counterparts to makerspaces, which have been accelerating in popularity and prevalence across many different countries and groups. While they align themselves under the general ethos of bricolage, skill-sharing and creative collaboration among many different interests, they are also locally and culturally situated. From preliminary research conducted in Ghana, and our communications with other groups/places/spaces, it is clear that the fixer mentality is far more deeply entwined with the fabrication and making mentality in the African continent than in the US or Europe.

This became immediately evident in our conversation with DK Asare-Osseo of the QAMP project in Accra; he remarked that as soon as he first heard of makerspaces he immediately recognized the African scrap-yards populated by fabricators and fixers as their predecessors; he too noted a deeply entrenched cultural value around repair and making do with what is at hand. Contemporary cultural connections are also continually remade; for example in reply to a question about ablution in relation to toxic waste exposure, DK noted that many of the poor working in Accra now come from Islamic roots, and hence had a strong presence in the scrap yards.

Another example of generative traditions that blur both the fixing/making and traditional/contemporary lines would be the famous wire toys that can be found throughout the African continent. Davison and Skotnes (1986) note that analogous toys made from natural materials could be found prior to colonialism: for example in southern africa, bovine clay figurines were toys in traditional cattle herding cultures areas where wire cars are found today. As locals shifted from pastoral to industrial economies, both the object of reference (from cows to cars) and materials utilized in labor (wire for shipping, fixing and other applications) shifted along with it. Peffer (2009) examines the prevalence of wire toy copies of the police trucks used in the brutality of Apartheid surveillance and enforcement; in the context of DIY protest artifacts these children made these copies as a means to explore and in some cases gain a sense of mastery over their oppressors. Today African wire toys can be found in many African nations; they have become so iconic that in some places their manufacture is largely for the tourist market. At the same time they have become a part of international Maker lore, appearing in Make magazine, Afrigadget and other popular forums (e.g. Brucker-Cohen 2009).

Cultural connections have also been noted in Senegal’s Colobane market, where “making do” (se débrouiller) with repairs and salvaged materials can signify a collective ethos with spiritual resonance. Grabski (2014) quotes Colobane resident Aminata Diop: “”You know God has given the Senegalese people something, whatever we can see we can fix. Whatever we see broken we can make it work again.”” Schaller de la Cova (2013) notes that many Senegalese now use the term Góorgóorlus, the Wolof name of a family in a comic who is constantly making-do, as an indigenous translation for “recycling, repairing, mending, reusing, scrimping, and stretching... The world of góorgóorlus is one in which cracked plastic lawn chairs and calabash gourds are sewn together, not thrown away, where shoes are polished nightly because the dirt and the sand of neighborhood streets quickly dirties even the most shiny, rich leather with a coat of brown, white, or red dust” (pg 224). The term plays on the noun góor--man/male in Wolof--and Schaller de la Cova suggests that the connection is implying the duties of a family provider to improvise in the face of challenges.

While the corner repair stores of the US declined to almost non-existence, such that the Fixers movement seems to be only possible as an offshoot of makerspaces, or at least a new flexibility made possible with contemporary electronics, this relationship may be reversed in Africa. Ghana in particular has a rich informal economy of street vendors who will sell new wares, but also fix cell-phones, printers, and other electronics with complex circuitry. They learn their highly refined skills through attachments (or internships), and then aspire or move on to owning and running their own shops. In this vein, many self-described hacker or maker groups of Africa are geared toward preservation practices and the creative reuse of waste. They are simultaneously pulling the warp of innovation geared toward the future while also weaving in the weft of repair practices already deeply entrenched in their cultures.

This melding of a global Maker movement with localized skills, knowledge and mindsets opens rich possibilities. Repair cultures uphold an ethos of stabilizing feedback that works to keep waste at bay. Meanwhile, the positive loop of innovation, open source technology development and the establishment of makerspaces in which to gather and share ideas disrupts and creates new ways to think about and reinterpret the possibilities of repair and waste. The snake bites its tail; fractal complexities grow as one-to-one skill-sharing builds up to small working groups, networked together as a makerspace or tech-hub, and ultimately perhaps a community of makerspaces that share materials, practices and projects." ([1])