4.3

Generative Technologies from Africa

Ron Eglash

Abstract: Bottom-up technosocial innovations such as open-source software, makerspaces, DIY bio, urban agriculture, commons-based governance, and other forms in which value is circulated in unalienated form, rather than extracted and alienated from its generators, have created new possibilities for social justice and sustainability. This essay explores African cultural contributions to the history and future of these generative technologies.

Keywords: Fractals, sustainability, indigenous knowledge, commons-based production, computing

THE DISASTERS CURRENTLY FACED by the world—global warming, poverty, health inequality, environmental toxins, and so on—are all linked to the operations of large corporations, most under a free-market economy. But the historical record of communism shows little difference: USSR pollution was worse than that of the United States, and although some success is undeniable—for example, literacy rates under Mao Zedong or health care under Castro—issues such as human rights abuse and continued poverty make it hard to say which political economy is worse. While the discussion has been dominated by these horizontal ends of the left/right political spectrum, an orthogonal axis of bottom-up versus top-down has come into focus. Bottom-up technosocial innovations such as open-source software, makerspaces, DIY bio, urban agriculture, commons-based governance, and other forms in which value is circulated in unalienated form rather than extracted and alienated from its generators have created new possibilities for social justice and sustainability. We refer to this ethical domain as “generative justice,” and thus the technologies that make it possible as “generative technologies.” This essay explores African cultural contributions to the history and future of generative technologies.

BOTTOM-UP ARCHITECTURAL FORMS IN AFRICA

Almost all of the geometry we learn in school is Euclidean geometry—the world of circles, squares, and triangles that was the standard in Europe since the ancient Greeks. But nature is full of rough textures like that of bark, bushy structures like trees, wiggly edges like coastlines, and so on. Fractal geometry, which was fully understood only in the 1970s, can describe these irregular forms. A good way to understand fractals is with the concept of symmetry. For most of us, the word symmetry means the similarity between each side of a mirror reflection: the way one side of the face is similar to another, or one side of a car looks like the other side. There is just one scale to consider. Fractal geometry, in contrast, is based on similarity between scales; a fractal will show similar patterns as you “zoom in” to smaller sizes. Trees are composed of branches of branches; clouds are puffs of puffs—even your own skin shows crinkles within crinkles. While infinite fractals are only a mathematical abstraction, many natural objects exhibit fractal characteristics within a limited range of scales. These “self-similar” patterns are the result of the bottom-up process of self-organization.

Typically the word organize means there is an organizer: the general in an army; the composer of music for an orchestra; the school custodian who arranges the desks for students in a rectangular grid of rows and columns. It is no surprise that systems organized from the top down tend to create Euclidean shapes: if the custodian just left desks strewn around the room randomly, he might get fired. But some of the most beautiful forms of organization in nature have no leader. The swooping shapes of a flock of birds in flight; the buzz of activity that generates a beehive; the cells of a growing embryo that results in a plant or animal: none of these has a boss calling out orders to each bird, bee, or cell, telling it what to do. Rather, these structures are self-organized from the bottom up, and they often result in the self-similar patterns of fractal geometry.

In the book African Fractals I detailed the evidence that fractal structures, similar to those of natural self-organization, were used extensively in traditional African village architectures. For example, in this aerial view of a Karamajong village in Uganda we can see that there are circular houses grouped into circular clusters; circular clusters grouped together to form a subvillage; and clusters of clusters of clusters that form the village as a whole. (See figure 4.3.1.) Rather than the artificial grids typical of American cities, imposing order from above without regard to landscape or history, these villages organically grow to fit both the natural and social environments. This flexibility tends to be not only more ecologically sustainable, but more socially equitable as well. For example, anthropologist Pat Caplan described how women in a Tanzanian village were able to divorce or make room for other changes in family structure by building their own houses. Land in such villages is not “owned” like a commodity you buy at Walmart, but is rather a part of a commons—that is, a common pool of resources that are available to anyone in the community as long as you fulfill your obligations to use and sustain them.

FIG. 4.3.1. Karamajong village in Uganda. Photo by Robert Harding.

This flexibility in land use is just one of many traditional African social mechanisms for maintaining an egalitarian society. These were not universal to all groups; and they often degraded as colonialism pushed people onto each other’s lands; created rivalries in a divide-and-conquer strategy; invented hierarchies where none existed before; or created wealth inequality and its tyranny through commerce (the slave trade, the ivory trade, etc.). Nonetheless, the survivals of these traditions were so striking that anthropologists in the twentieth century coined the term acephalous—meaning a society with no authority in charge—to describe the “bottom-up” organization in groups such as the Igbo, Tiv, Fulani, Dagaaba, !Kung, Hadza, Mbuti, and Batek, to name but a few. Many civil wars in Africa—for example, the Nigerian Civil War of Igbo secession in 1967—can be better understood once we take into account the bottom-up tradition of animists. (For example, a common name in Igbo is Ezebuillo, which means “a king is an enemy.”)

Closely related to these egalitarian political traditions is the concept of gift culture. Among hunter-gatherer groups in the Kalahari Desert for example, the hxaro gift-exchange system stipulates that meat belongs to the maker of the arrow, not the one who shot it. Thus those who do not hunt—such as women and elders—can still be credited with a kill. Even then, such status comes with the responsibility to “gift” shares to others. Such emphasis on equality is also related to fractal architecture. In the United States we might call the fancy mansion inhabited by a bank president or state governor a “house,” but it looks nothing like my little home in the suburbs; the architectural difference symbolizes our economic class difference. In most African villages, on the other hand, all houses look pretty much the same; the chief’s house is just a bigger version of an ordinary person’s home, symbolizing the lack of class distinctions. The self-similarity of fractal geometry is both a cause and effect of egalitarian social structure.

First disregarded as a “primitive” form of living, contemporary architects have rediscovered the advantages of fractal, bottom-up architectural forms. Working in Ethiopia, Xavier Vilalta leveraged the fractal African tradition to design a new vocational school (the Melaku Center) in which the clusters of clusters allowed a more humane, welcoming campus where nooks and crannies could be spontaneous meeting places or outdoor spaces for workshops. His shopping center in Addis Ababa was restrained by a much more limited footprint, so it had to conform to the usual boxy shape. (See figure 4.3.2.) But even here he was able to show how fractals could make a difference. He noted that the glass exterior of these buildings created a heat-trapping effect that required massive air conditioning, making it more expensive, and its climate control unreliable due to occasional power blackouts. He replaced that exterior with fractal perforations in concrete, thus creating a breathable skin that reduces energy needs. A fractal array of solar cells on the rooftop turns a potentially alienating space into a pleasant outdoor meeting spot, and generates enough electricity to keep the building powered during blackouts, making it more attractive to local merchants.

FIG. 4.3.2. Vilata’s fractal shopping center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Photo by Gonzalo Guajardo.

AFRICAN TRADITIONS AND BOTTOM-UP SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

In the 1960s, when MIT engineers were looking for new directions in machine architecture, they were trying to move away from the top-down, centralization approach, such as how a single central processor—the “Von Neumann bottleneck”—had to issue every command and receive every input in computers of that era. In his book The Media Lab, Stewart Brand describes a defining moment for them: “A book that inspired [Nicholas] Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group was called Architecture Without Architects, a provocative collection of photographs of beautiful vernacular—native—buildings from all over the world. Arch Mac was following that thread wherever it might lead—books without authors, films without scripts or directors. A grander scale of research, something like a Media Laboratory, seemed worth attempting” (p. 142). The best examples of truly bottom-up architecture in that book were all from Africa.

That is not to say that this was a one-way flow, from Africa to software designers. Rather it has been a gradual two-way exchange: as open-source information technology has become more popular, it has had a profound effect on how information technology has developed, including that in Africa. Above we looked at how Negroponte’s MIT media lab was inspired by images of African fractal architecture; in 2005 he returned the favor by attempting to develop an open source, low-cost laptop. The “OLPC” (“one laptop per child”) has been undergoing evaluations in a dozen different African nations, as well as elsewhere in the world. Coming from the other direction, software designers in Kenya created an open-source information-reporting platform called Ushahidi (Swahili for “testimony”) to collect eyewitness reports of violence during the 2007 election. The open-source status allowed it to be modified for other purposes: the system has been used to track pharmacy “stockouts” in several East African countries; to monitor elections in Mexico and India; and to map the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in the United States, forest fires in Italy, and many other “geosocial” events around the world.

AFRICAN PARTICIPATION IN THE GLOBAL DIY MOVEMENT

The DIY (“do it yourself”) movement (sometimes renamed “DIT,” for “do it together”) encompasses a wide range of bottom-up activities. These include the maker movement, where lay enthusiasts share code, circuits, and physical construction techniques in an open-source commons (such as the Creative Commons described above; more often sites such as Instructables, Hackaday, and Makezine); upcycling, in which discarded materials are changed into new ones rather than destroyed for recycling or waste disposal; and urban gardens, where food-justice movements intersect civic “greening” efforts. The usual account of such activities in Africa emphasizes their external influences—the donation of equipment from a development agency or volunteers from a foreign university exchange program, for example. But just as self-organizing African traditions laid the groundwork for contemporary fractal architecture, contemporary DIY projects in Africa also draw on older practices.

Perhaps the best known of these are toy models made from scrap wire and tin—in particular, wire cars. Art historian Aneta Pawlowska notes that our fascination with such “transitional art” (mixing indigenous tradition with contemporary materials and subjects) cannot avoid the self-deluding wish to have it perform some form of “invisible mending” by which cultural catastrophes such as slavery and colonialism magically vanish. But transitional arts are also forms of resistance and rebirth. Art historian John Peffer documents how transitional art was used in the South African resistance to apartheid, such as coded symbolism in the combination of modern house paints and traditional Ndebele and Sotho-Tswana design created during that time. (For example, anti-apartheid activist Gary Van Wyk reported that one design, which he calls “the Cosmic Flower,” used fractals to invoke the idea of infinite creativity in a bounded space.) Peffer suggests that toy wire models of APCs (armored personnel carriers used by the South African police to patrol the black townships) had a more complex relationship, creating a space in which this deadly force could be playfully mocked at the same time it was feared. Wire car toys have become iconic tourist items throughout Africa, but as we will see below, they also played a “transitional” role in the ways they were embraced by contemporary DIY groups.

Tracking how these wire constructions gradually emerged to become part of the global maker community can be helpful in illuminating the ways that generative technologies can avoid the isolation and elitism that proprietary technologies entail. Recall that software developers in Kenya created the open-source information-reporting platform Ushahidi in 2007. One of the founders, Erik Hersman, had also been documenting the wire toys on his Afrigadget website, which had already amassed a huge number of DIY innovations in Africa. Thanks to this exposure, in 2008 African wire toys became featured on the website for Make magazine, a flagship publication of the maker movement. Another route to greater exposure occurred when artist Chido Johnson, who was familiar with the toys from his childhood in Zimbabwe, moved to the famed “motor city” of Detroit to teach sculpture. His 2009 wire “cruise car” in Detroit inspired an “Instructables” webpage for the toy. Johnson’s work grew into a series of wire-car workshops held across the city, and to cultural exchanges between Zimbabwe and Detroit artists that included their mutual struggles around labor movements. (For example, Johnson had workshop participants join an imaginary Wire Car Workers Union.) The first “maker faire” (public exposition of DIY works) occurred in California in 2006, and, because of the exchanges described above, maker faires began to appear in Africa as early as 2009. One of the widely publicized highlights—it made the BBC, the Guardian, and so on—was fifteen-year-old Nigerian Odo Gerald’s toy trucks created from scraps, in which he had modified the traditional form to include electronics and even a hydraulic system using syringes.

While the whimsical wire toys helped to bring African DIY traditions into global “maker” circulation, other technologies had a more complex relation to local culture. Social scientist Tolu Odumosu carried out research on cell phones in Nigeria around this same time period (2006–9), and found an extraordinary range of “appropriations” in which cell phones were adapted to local needs. This was made possible in part by the Nigerian Telecommunications Consumer Parliament (TCP), which allowed ordinary citizens a venue in which they could directly question corporate representatives, who would then be held accountable for issues in quality of service. Odumosu found that many of the TCP staff were citizens from the Ibo community—an ethnic group who were renowned for their bottom-up, egalitarian cultural practices. Thanks to that indigenous tradition, Nigerian mobile phones enjoyed strong technical support, which helped to enable innovations ranging from “flashing” (contacting someone and then disconnecting, just to send a free “thinking of you” message) to DIY fund transfers (buying and selling phone minutes as if it were currency). Since then mobile phone banking has become formally institutionalized (e.g., the Kenyan M-PESA), and African mobiles have become a broad innovation platform for many professional efforts in Africa. But we should not forget that its origins are in this grassroots form of DIY development.

Other African generative technologies link the biological and technical worlds. Urban agriculture is a new movement in the United States, but it has long been the established norm in Africa. In contrast to the seed-based agriculture typical of the United States, which requires enormous space, irrigation, and machines or a mass labor force (slavery in the past and migrant exploitation today), African traditional food gardens were typically based on “vegeculture” in which one root is cut up and propagated into many plants. With different plants at each height, and the vines of beans, gourds, and other vegetables climbing up taller plants like bananas, the 3-D density of African vegeculture is perfect for small spaces in populated areas; inherently more supportive of biodiversity and therefore of better health; and often linked to better gender equity. Some evidence suggests that the prevalence of vegeculture in African-American gardens of the American South was influenced by this tradition; the ties are even stronger in the case of the Caribbean. In 2004 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization worked with the Venezuelan government to bring urban gardening to its largest cities. Rather than import experts from Harvard and Cornell, it brought in urban gardeners from Senegal and Cuba. This is not simply a “retention” of African tradition, but rather an ongoing innovation for generative technologies that combines indigenous practices from both Africa and the Americas with contemporary developments like an organic nutrient solution delivered to raised trays.

Perhaps the most profound case of bio/techno DIY can be found in the efforts of Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) in Ghana. Located in an area that is part e-waste dump and part recycling/repair shops, this makerspace program is run by the architect D.K. Asare-Osseo. In a recent interview with my students and me, D.K. remarked that as soon as he first heard of makerspaces he immediately thought of the African scrap yards, their associated fabricators and fixers, and the ways that prior traditions might lend themselves to a DIY effort. He frames this reuse as simultaneously an opportunity for cross-class collaborations (he has both low-income and middle-class participants) and for human/nonhuman collaborations—for example, ways to reduce the toxic waste leaching into the soil such that both low-income communities and natural communities benefit. Asare-Osseo’s group activities include creating a DIY drone from waste for mapping the area, exploring techniques for “upcycling,” and soil bioremediation—all with the goal of reclaiming the land as a productive biosocial ecology.

CONCLUSION

Dismissed by colonialists as merely “primitive” ways of life, African traditions of generative technologies are in fact harbingers of an alternative sustainable future. While capitalist or socialist economies tend to extract value and thus alienate both people and nature from the sources of their vitality, generative technologies such as open-source software and ecologically sustainable agriculture allow value to retain its unalienated form and circulate in “bottom-up” fashion among those who created it, benefiting human and nonhuman alike.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Benkler, Yochai. The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. New York: Crown Business, 2011.

Eglash, Ron. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999.

Eglash, Ron, and Colin Garvey. “Basins of Attraction for Generative Justice.” In Chaos Theory in Politics, edited by Santo Banerjee, Şefika Şule Erçetin, and Ali Tekin, 75–88. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2014.

Odumosu, Toluwalogo B. “Making Mobiles African.” In What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?, edited by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

Peffer, John. Art and the End of Apartheid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

• • •

RON EGLASH is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with a secondary appointment in Computer Science. He received his BS in Cybernetics, his MS in Systems Engineering, and his PhD in History of Consciousness, all from the University of California. His work as a Fulbright scholar was published as African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (Rutgers University Press, 1999) and featured in his 2007 TED talk. His NSF-funded Culturally Situated Design Tools software, offering math and computing education from indigenous and vernacular arts, is available for free at www.csdt.rpi.edu. Recently funded work includes his NSF “Triple Helix” project, which brings graduate fellows in science and engineering together with local community activists and K–12 educators to seek new approaches to putting science and innovation in the service of underserved populations, and to develop the theoretical framework for “generative justice.”