Problematizing Cyber-Geography in Africa

Problematizing Cyber-Geography in Africa (Written December 2007)

“While we need food and we need water, we also need the tools and instruments that will allow us to create food and water and take control of our development…Affordable computing is necessary. What is going to power development in Africa is going to be lower-cost user interfaces."

African cyberspace, in its under-development, provides a parallel for much of the physical geography of that continent. Relatively few websites exist specifically serving the African citizen, and where they do they are less sophisticated than those in more developed countries. This paper seeks to understand how changes in telecommunications connectivity and changes in cyber architecture, alongside other global flows, may augur a new relationship between African governments and their citizens and between Africa and the rest of the world. This emerging geography of cyberspace may well be a critical enabler or constraint on democratic African development over the next ten years. This paper seeks to explore aspects of this question.

The underlying premise of this paper is that there is a geography to cyberspace, one that has a complex, contingent relationship with the physical world. Fundamentally it has a texture over which power is unevenly distributed. Not all actors in cyberspace have equal influence, as it privileges the computer-literate, wealthy citizen. Moreover, this geography is impacted by conceptions of power and space in the physical world and is subject not only to local conditions but also to the impact of global superpowers. These powers, with their economic, security, and energy interests, are rapidly reconfiguring their relationships with Africa. Moreover, the influence they are exerting arrives via different modalities and will more than likely impact the development of African cyber-space in different ways.

To understand the African case, I will apply the analytics used by Saskia Sassen in her article “Towards a Sociology of Information Technology.” I seek to explicate the geography of African cyberspace by understanding (a) the interface between Africa and cyberspace, (b) the mediating cultures that organize these relationships, and (c) the changes cyberspace may imply for existing hierarchies of scale. Subsequent to this I will conclude by pointing to what has been recovered.

An Approach to Understanding the Intersection of Cyber-Geography and Society

Much literature concerning the impact of technology has been written from a technologically deterministic perspective, which considers only the technical affordances in seeking to explain its impact on society. This literature falls short, as it fails to recognize, as Sassen writes, “the embeddedness and the variable outcomes of these technologies for different social orders.” Recognizing this embeddedness immediately reveals the complexity in the outcomes, but to do so is challenging, as it requires the researcher to abandon easy demarcations and to examine space, both electronic and material, as having a complex interrelationship.

It is also important to accept that digital communications tools and cyberspace will continue to exist as a complement to older methods of communication such as the fixed-line telephone, the television, the radio, and the newspaper. These new tools are not filling a void but rather replacing older methods of communication that are now recognized as having less communicative or sociological efficacy. Though this is a simple and somewhat obvious observation, as no prior method of communication has immediately and fully replaced an earlier one, it has significant implications for understanding the temporal impact of cyberspace. By implication, this suggests that impacts will be something not radical, utopian or dystopian. The change will more than likely be incremental yet complex as society learns to use the affordances of the new technology, and as technology adapts to those uses. Moreover, not only will the benefits accruing to actors for using cyberspace be different because of the embeddedness identified above, but these benefits will accrue at different rates for different actors, and this in turn will feed back into the processes and types of adoption and usage

Before I perform this analysis I must define what I mean by space and by cyber-geography in Africa:

Space. The analysis that follows accepts David Harvey’s definition of cyberspace, which he sees as conceptually different from the space we experience as material space – space that is defined in terms of the physical architecture. According to Harvey, cyberspace is instead defined in terms of its relational properties and how it permits communication and exchange. It is these properties that are at the center of my analysis.

Cyber Geography in Africa. Given that cyberspace is effectively borderless, how can one limit what is included and what is excluded from any consideration of African cyberspace? I have chosen to bound the scope by considering cyberspace from the perspective of a participant in Africa. As a consequence I will focus on understanding the space and its architecture as sites appear to be used by African citizens and organizations. Additionally, since this geography cannot be experienced if one cannot come into contact with it, I consider questions of access.

The Interface between Africa and Cyberspace

To understand the interface between Africa and cyberspace, it is necessary to understand how far cyberspace extends into Africa, how it is used, and how its development will be influenced.

Though constrained by barriers that have historically included staffing, an absence of necessary telecommunications infrastructure, environmental challenges, and low levels of literacy, access to African cyberspace has grown dramatically.  In 1996, it was reported that just five very low technology “store and forward” networks (used where it wasn’t possible to connect directly to the internet) provided access across four Sub-Saharan countries with only approximately 5,000 subscribers. Only South Africa had a direct connection to the internet. In contrast, Figures 1, 2, and 3 show the incredible increase in cell phone subscribers, internet users, and broadband subscribers across the continent since 2000. It is clear that some of the barriers to adoption posited in the 1990s have been overcome. In 2006, the statistics of the International Telecommunications Union record that 4.7% of people in Africa are internet users and 21.3% have a mobile phone. This is up from 1.6% and 5.7% respectively since 2003. The cell phone subscribers had risen to 198 million in 2006, dwarfing the number of fixed lines (23 million). These numbers are hugely important as they represent a fundamental change in the ability to communicate across distances. Moreover, as Africans will be, from a technical perspective, able to use the internet once it is available through mobile phones, the mobile subscriber numbers presage a subsequent increase in internet access.



Figure 1: Cell phone subscribers across Africa 

(Each line represents a country with each country stacked on top of each other. The majority of subscribers come from five countries: South Africa, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco



Figure 2: Internet users across Africa 

(Each line represents a country with each country stacked on top of each other. The majority of users come from six countries: Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria)



Figure 3: Broadband users across Africa 

(Each line represents a country with each country stacked on top of each other. The majority of users come from four countries: Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, South Africa

Note: The scale of Figure 3 is significantly smaller than for the Figures 1 & 2. All graphs drawn from International Telecommunications Union database (Available at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ICTEYE/Indicators/Indicators.aspx)

The important point is that in 1996, for all but sovereign governments and large multi-nationals, the resources of Africa were separated by a physical and time-lagged informational distance that could not be overcome. In contrast, it is now fair to suggest today that anyone in a moderately sized city can receive, process, and send information to the rest of the world almost as quickly as anywhere else in the world. This permits the accumulation, diffusion, and dispersal of capital in all its many forms in a fundamentally different way. 3.5G cell phones, multiple undersea cables, and national internet exchanges, as well as the massive investment commitments made at the Connect Africa Summit in October 2007, will solve the technical problems that have constrained the rollout of the internet to date. Ingenuity and grey markets in phones will solve others. Whether the leadership in African governments are right that every African village will have broadband internet access by 2015 I am not sure, but access in the next few years will certainly increase substantially. That said, the internet, even when it is available at a low enough cost, won’t be used by all on the continent by any means. Written and computer literacy deficits as well as high tariffs exist, and both are likely only to fall away gradually, the former likely taking generations.

Even with this great improvement, however, the internet connections in Africa are still mostly dial-up, as Figure 3 demonstrates. This means that the average internet experience in Africa today is more like that of 1998 in the West. Data that suggests how individuals in Africa are using the web is provided in Table 1, which gives a breakdown of the top twenty most popular websites in four countries across Africa. What is perhaps most surprising about this data is that only a few of the sites cater to the audience of solely a single country or are operated by organizations located within Africa. The list for South Africa includes a domestic bank and a local equivalent of eBay and a domestic Craigslist equivalent. The Nigerian list contains a Nigerian online community. Additionally, only a few sites serving French and Arabic speakers are in the top 20 lists. On the basis of popularity, the choice of the average user in Africa seems uncannily similar to that of an internet user anywhere else in the world. There could be many reasons for this user preference. Websites of organizations within African countries serve a much less sophisticated role for the user and are thus used less frequently. Or perhaps the small elite with high speed internet access who spend time on line is a cosmopolitan minority and large number of other users just use the web to check email. In some sense African users are embedded more concretely in the global internet than in any African conception of it.

Corporate use of the telecommunications infrastructure and cyberspace in Africa is very different. For the historically powerful actors – large foreign-owned (mostly extractive) industries (such as mining and oil interests) – the impact of these technological changes may be small, as they already use sophisticated private technology networks. For those industries that have a consumer orientation, such as banks, online retail stores or travel agents, the connectedness the internet provides will permit them to accumulate, distribute, and redistribute resources across the continent more efficiently than in the past and extend their business reach geographically. For this growth to occur, however, not only does the technology need to be built out, but a whole business understanding for web-based advertising and online purchasing facilitated by credit cards needs to be developed. Without substantial development of the business infrastructure in which the technology is embedded, the growth of these industries this won’t happen.

More interestingly, the use of cyberspace and the internet by national governments may permit them to achieve more effective governance over the great distances in the continent. Where it was previously impossible to exercise governance remotely, it may now be possible to do so. Similarly, for government to gain these benefits, the bureaucracy of the governments will need to understand the possibilities of new technology and modify their practices accordingly. There is parallelism between the physical and the digital. The paucity of functionality across much of the African internet is not so much because the functions haven’t been digitized, but more because they don’t occur in the physical world. For a government to have need for a social welfare portal on the web, for example, requires the existence of such a service. That said, the African internet may well be co-developed with such services, as they are extended to the village level.

Something that cannot be forgotten as this development takes place is the global context in which this development is occurring, as for Africa information policy, just like infrastructure, will likely come from abroad alongside other interventions from foreign governments and large corporations.

The foreign direct investment pouring into a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa dwarfs that of the 1990’s, years that were characterized by the implementation of structural adjustment programs and the forgiving of debt. The inflows in 2006 were $36Bn, twice the level of 2004 and equal to the total investment in the last four years of the 1990’s. Regarding the less developed countries in particular, the investment in less developed countries totaled $8Bn, mostly in the field of extractive industries, but also in the field of telecommunications. Another important issue is where this investment is coming from. China is approaching Africa as both a source of oil, and as a market for goods, it is also desirous of good diplomatic relations. This is shown most clearly in the rise of investment from Asia $0.1Bn in 2005 to $9Bn in 2006. Moreover the tight coupling of Chinese diplomacy and business permits China to provide reassurance to the African government with which it is negotiating about the changes the investment will likely bring to the country. Partly as a result of this, the building out of much of the telecom infrastructure in Africa is being executed by Chinese companies. This is in addition to the Chinese satellite launched earlier this year to serve Nigeria.

European foreign direct investment (FDI) which has traditionally made up the bulk of such investment and still represents 33% of FDI stock, continues to flow into the continent. Moreover, on December 18th, 2007, Europe also launched a satellite to support African telecommunications.

In addition to the FDI by American corporations the US government has spent extensive sums on humanitarian aid to Africa. Moreover, the United States has recently decided to set up AFRICOM, a regional command of the United States military to protect its strategic interests. Interestingly, it has reportedly issued an initial contract to explore connecting African governments for the purposes of information sharing.

Many of the larger investments in telecommunications equipment and infrastructure, which are driven by a recognition that these moves will be profitable, will also perform a public policy function of extending communications into new areas. Whether the information policy of a particular country, that accompanies this investment, is supportive of open access or more tightly controlled might be more as a result of whether a country government’s leadership allies itself with China (a country not afraid to block access) or the United States (politically inclined to permit access). Importantly such partnerships will likely be based on reasons entirely unrelated to information policy. All of this shows that the likely rapid expansion in access is embedded not only in local constraints but also within even larger global flows of capital and the interests of superpowers and their sensitivities.

The mediating cultures that organize these relationships: 

The development of African cyberspace is going to have a very complex impact on the mediating culture in which it is situated. It will undoubtedly privilege those cultures with a richer written literacy. It may also tend to privilege languages spoken by large numbers of people and may result in minority languages being confined to a smaller sphere of activities. As a result, all participants may need to know a more widely spoken language in order to operate broadly. That said, this may enable the preservation of certain languages by enabling small groups of people to maintain contact with each other and sustain a viable communities online where co-located physical communities are of inadequate size. It could also reinvigorate connections with former colonial powers since it will provide a medium for those conversant in those languages – French, Italian, Portuguese, English – to build stronger relationships with those countries.

Furthermore such web services will be permeated by the cultures of the funders, designers, and developers, as much as the users. The list of the popular web services identified in Table 1 suggest that the web may be a westernizing influence. Yet the existence of an admittedly relatively small number of social networking services, such as Afriville (focused on Black Africans), Nairaland (for Nigerians), Student Village and Vrinne (both aimed at South African students), and Litnet (serving Afrikaners), all suggest that as the more parochial users come online, their local cultures will infuse African cyberspace. Additionally, cyberspace is likely to develop distinct digital cultures that will inform and impact both the physical and digital environment, such as the emerging, and increasingly sophisticated, beeping culture throughout the world.

How these contradictory cultural current will ultimately play out is entirely unclear at present. Moreover, whether the emerging African digitalized culture will permit a closer analogue to the norm of Habermasian deliberation is still an open question for Africa. As Sassen argues, the cyber is permeated by the power structures, values, and institutional orders of the material world, yet it is possible to think that the social spaces in which people are congregating permit individuals to “bracket” elements of offline identity and potentially permit deliberation which offline wouldn’t occur. Moreover, in agreement with Sassen, I support the idea that cyberspace may well provide, especially in Africa, a more concrete space for politics than at least certain national institutional environments do, since cyberspace permits a larger number of actors to participate.

Changes Cyberspace May Imply for Existing Hierarchies of Scale

Understanding the impact of the expansion of telecommunication connectivity, the availability of cyberspace, and how both are destabilizing the hierarchies of scale is a multifaceted question. I will seek to illuminate this question by focusing on only three aspects – the media, virtual worlds, and politics:

The Media. More than 600 African media outlets, most formerly offline only or domestic broadcasters, are available on the internet. While most of these are directed at providing information to audiences in their respective domestic countries, it is clear that cyberspace is providing them an opportunity to share information more broadly and, if they take advantage of it, the possibility to collaborate. A number of online outlets have also emerged, including the longstanding AllAfrica.com, which is now complemented by a Reuters Africa portal. In addition, the very exciting mobile phone reporting vehicle Voices of Africa, which has been operating since only May 2007 as a spin-off from Africa News, also attempts to cover multiple countries using cell phones to provide video coverage of stories. There is even one outlet created for South Africa in a similar spirit to the citizen media outlets of today in the USA, called Reporter.co.za. This all exists in addition to the large informal African blogging community, now numbering more than 1600 blog sites, much of it aggregated at “Afrigator” and summarized at Global Voices Online. The blog space, that also includes those blogs written by people outside of the continent, concerning itself with Africa is becoming known as the Afrosphere.

From the perspective of the media, the national is vanishing quickly online, and is being replaced in importance by the local and the continental. At the sub-national level, this media empowers not only cities online but also uninstitutionalized regions. Moreover, by permitting all those interested in Africa to exist in one space, as the Afrosphere explicitly sets out to do, it is breaking down barriers between the resident of a nation-state and its diaspora. That said, in countries with repressive regimes, such as Zimbabwe, the national is still important and from a political perspective it is unclear whether the “Afrosphere” media will have any impact.

Virtual Worlds. I turn next to “Virtual Africa,” an island that has been built within “Second Life,” a virtual reality web service. In some sense, this can be considered an iteration of an earlier effort of the advocacy movement around Darfur, as activists built a refugee camp in Second Life alongside several real world models for schoolchildren in the US. Virtual Africa, though undoubtedly built for an elite minority and seemingly untethered to the physical world, is being constructed with the explicit intention of exploring the use of participative media for civil engagement. It illustrates the point that this aspect of the cyber-geography of Africa is not just a means of transmission of information, but is also a place. Cyberspace is clearly providing for the embedding of any specific space in a relatively un-demarcated global space, as Sassen argued.

Politics. Just as states came into being with some association with the written word, the modern state, though it might not be changed in name, is being reworked. As an illustration of how the development of cyberspace in Africa is enabling actors to operate at different scales, it is useful to look at the issue of Darfur. It is on this issue that interfaces between the edges of the super-powers that were built in an industrial age are being challenged by international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) organizing via cyberspace crowd-sourcing oversight from the rest of globe. Agnew’s analysis of the spatialities of power provides a helpful way to see this dynamic. It is as if the model of ensemble of worlds — the lens used by the pastoralists of Darfur — is having to interact with an African state that has learned (the hard way) to operate in a field of forces model. At the same time, the West is living in a world of hierarchical networks, and human rights activists are living in a “world society” unanchored, for the most part, from the state, just as the pastoralists are. Without a doubt, imagining Darfur without cyberspace empowered INGOs, and the rapid flows of information enabled by cell phones and the internet would make for a very different situation.

Conclusion

Even the small amount of data presented above demonstrates that technology in the form of the internet and mobile telephony are providing significantly different affordances for different institutions within society, for those with different levels of technological skills, and in different cultures. Outside state powers see Africa as a market, a source of resources, a source of security threats, as well as a place of ongoing humanitarian disasters. Private actors in their search for profit see opportunity that may well play out in the development of a sophisticated cyber-geography, if only so that it creates a market for their internet and telephony services.

The open question is whether the digital formations that are arising, theorized by Latham and Stark as constituting unsystematically constructed digital communication structures and the inherent rationalities embedded by the communities of users, will impact Africa or merely be a sideshow to history. Whether this is the case will be not only a result of the accessibility and adoption of the technologies, but also the information policy environment under which these digital formations operate. What is clear, however, as the paper has sought to demonstrate, is that uncovering the richness and complexity of the question benefits from an understanding of the interface with the technology, the interplay between this interface and the culture in which it is being used within and an openness to considering how it may empower certain actors to operate at different scales.

Table 1: List of Top 20 most visited websites as at December 23 2007 according to Alexa (Available at www.alexa.com)