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The Internet and the African Academic World
- Indiana University Press
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144 The internet and the african academic world any practice, technology, or form of expertise needs an account that can explain its basis and organization as well as its objectives. whether the internet is understood as a practice, or as a journey through a space that knows no borders, or whether one curses it as the latest example of human excess (hybris), its reality nevertheless raises questions about our experience of the world (experimentum mundi). by means of the internet, we test the world’s consistency and go beyond our assumptions to arrive at an exact measure of the relationship between humans and machines. with this in mind, a multicultural, multidisciplinary study was set up in the united States through the publication of Academy and the Internet, jointly edited by helen Nissenbaum and Monroe Price.1 The book sets out to examine the relations between the internet and economic issues, as well as the internet and social problems of equality, politics (the question of public space), and the communicative relationship in a virtual world. interculturally speaking, only the chinese contribution gives the debate—which is almost tribal since it is american to the core—an off-center tone. a debate makes statements and analyses, but it also may omit and skate over other perspectives. africa, which is absent from this debate, almost forces its way in via this paper. what is the relationship between the internet and presentday african experience? hardly coping as it is with the consequences of the recent introduction of writing, how is africa experiencing this internet adventure, in which the status of images, words, and time seems to be called into question? This brief presentation will look first at the status of technoscience—under which heading the internet is subsumed in africa—and then at the challenges the internet throws up in The Internet and the African Academic World | 145 the region. our method will be to examine internet capacities from the viewpoint of oral cultures that are dominated economically. The internet in africa: The Problem of Technological rationality On Messianic Expectations african society’s relationship to the internet should be viewed solely within the general context of the encounter between africa and techno-scientific rationality. until the end of the nineteenth century—the period that coincides with the effective colonization of the african continent—it was understood in europe that science and technology were uniquely european possessions. Given their low intellectual level, africans should be content merely with a smattering of science. in this connection, a quotation from Georges hardy, who was involved in colonial education in Senegal in the early twentieth century, is instructive. hardy quotes Maynard, an apostolic official who eventually became a bishop in the colonies, as saying “we must give a people a moral code before teaching them humanistic knowledge: for pride does not inculcate virtues whereas morality inspires people with the love of work, virtue and science. . . . Such people do not need sciences, they need religious principles, a pure, strict moral code.”2 in any case, the science that was offered was science as conceived by a kind of nineteenth-century positivism. it was a deterministic science that believed in the idea of progress—a progress that, in the case of the colonized peoples, was destined to take them from a lower to a higher stage. The model of rationality that this science gave colonized people was that of the understanding (Verstand)—a rationality that opts for an instrumental apprehension of relations between subjects as well as between subjects and objects.3 instrumental rationality had an economic implication in the colonies. Nature and the colonized peoples were to be treated as mere instruments of economic output. along with progress and instrumental rationality, the techno-science that was presented in the colonies was to cast off myth insofar as myth is an arrangement of narratives that cannot be judged by the criteria of scientific experimentation. it was in the name of this positivist science that the colonial enterprise constructed a whole hierarchy of civilizations, putting africans at the bottom of the scale. in order to criticize colonization, black african writers took that technological superiority as their starting point, either to set africa on the road to progress or to reflect ironically on the unscientific nature of african civilization. at the second black writers and artists’ conference, held in rome from 26 March to 1 april 1959, alioune diop, the publisher and founder of the Présence africaine publishing house in Paris...