Introduction

African countries are home to dense sociotechnical arrangements of registration, monitoring, and spying that are increasingly transnational as well as digital. Despite decades of work devoted to the politics, histories, and techniques of surveillance and control in Western societies, there is very little work on the local exigencies and manifestations of surveillance in African contexts. This ASR Forum on Surveillance in Africa seeks to analyze some of the subtle and diverse political implications of identification and observation across the continent. We move away from the more sensational, headline-grabbing moments to the prosaic rhythms and negotiations around surveillance. If “the state” emerges in these collected articles as the locus of observation, it is crucial to remember that surveillance is a phenomenon that exceeds public bureaucracies. In many cases, the most pervasive form of monitoring is quotidian, the peer-to-peer assessment of “eyes on the street.” In other settings, from the Sahel to Somalia, surveil-lance occurs at a much greater distance; here, the eyes are in the sky, operated by distant geopolitical powers, often under the guise of the Global War on Terror. Increasingly, Africans are also surveilled by corporations, whether through digital technologies or more traditional market research. In other cases, monitoring follows a public health logic whereby surveillance aims to prevent and control disease, usually by tracking bodies deemed problematic. In practice, monitoring often combines each of these modalities: with peers, corporations, and states—foreign and domestic—sharing intelligence, technologies, and tactics.

The contributors to this forum work across the continent and in a variety of disciplines to study a topic that is often difficult both empirically and conceptually. The unprecedented recent attention to surveillance by the media, governments, and civil society very often remains confined to the global North. On the African continent, surveillance has received little attention. The reasons for this are multiple. Political power in Africa, it is often said, is too local, too violent, or too symbolic to necessitate much surveillance. This, we suggest, is the corollary of seeing African states as exceptions to the modernity that underpins surveillance techniques: bureaucratically enfeebled, lacking capacity, or altogether absent. In other cases, surveillance has not received much attention because the term, for many, conjures imagery of advanced technologies that historically were out of reach for many locales. Yet, as the articles below emphasize, political surveillance can and does occur in low-tech ways—for it is a component of vernacular forms of governance—and an increasing number of states have access to digital systems that enable expansive monitoring.

What is known about the rapidly emerging surveillance capacity of African states is often documented incompletely due to the secrecy under which it is undertaken. For example, the central role that non-African technology firms play in providing surveillance systems to states like Ethiopia is now better understood thanks to leaks of confidential documents and the commitment of journalists. In other cases, the work of human rights organizations has been crucial in providing evidence and awareness (e.g., Hosein & Nyst 2013; Human Rights Watch 2014). Surveillance & Society, the main academic journal dedicated to the study of surveillance, has published very few articles on African cases.¹ We hope that this forum will serve as an encouragement for other scholars of Africa to take on the topic of surveillance, and for scholars of surveillance to focus their attention on African contexts and controversies.

The articles in this collection demonstrate the fecundity of such an approach. Registration and monitoring are key techniques undergirding political power and social inequality. Following how they are accomplished reveals the ways state bureaucracies are interwoven with other forms of organization. For example, Mirco Göpfert’s ethnography of Nigerien gendarmes (39–57) demonstrates how a central imperative of the state—the imposition of internal security—is accomplished through networks of personal contacts. Despite recent investments in high-tech surveillance systems, policing in Niger is largely practiced by street-level personnel and their relationships with informants, chiefs, and acquaintances. In fact, because of the need to verify information gleaned from wiretaps, computer hacks, and drones...