Transient Workspaces - 9780262027243

In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an Africanperspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is alsosomething that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations orcreativities -- including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does notalways originate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in the society in theforest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into practicaloutcomes. African creativities are found in African mobilities. Mavhunga shows the movement ofpeople as not merely conveyances across space but transient workspaces. Taking indigenous hunting inZimbabwe as one example, he explores African philosophies of mobilities as spiritually guided and ofthe forest as a sacred space. Viewing the hunt as guided mobility, Mavhunga considers interestingquestions of what constitutes technology under regimes of spirituality. He describes how Africanhunters extended their knowledge traditions to domesticate the gun, how European colonizers, with noremedy of their own, turned to indigenous hunters for help in combating the deadly tsetse fly, andexamines how wildlife conservation regimes have criminalized African hunting rather than enlistinghunters (and their knowledge) as allies in wildlife sustainability. The hunt, Mavhunga writes, isone of many criminalized knowledges and practices to which African people turn in times of economicor political crisis. He argues that these practices need to be decriminalized and examined astechnologies of everyday innovation with a view toward constructive engagement, innovating withAfricans rather than for them.