Chapter 24
Africa’s Digitalization
From the Ecological Dilemma to the Decolonization of the Imaginary
Cédric Leterme
In this chapter I will briefly explore how digital technology depends on the mineral resources of Africa (and of many other places of the Global South) and how our digital life is usually blind to the places and processes that make it possible. The question, directly related to the issues discussed in this volume, is: Could digital knowledge—including DH resources and tools—exist without matter? And what are its social, political, and human costs? The official narratives do not engage with these basic (and perhaps genealogical) questions. They prefer to discuss, for example, how (and when) Africa will get its share of the digital economy pie.
“Africa’s future is bright—and digital.” The quote comes from a World Bank blog (Kandri, “Africa’s Future Is Bright”), but it sums up a widespread international mindset about the dual inevitability and desirability of digitization for Africa’s future. Two years earlier, Sanna Ojanperä and Mark Graham (“Africa Risks Fading”) had painted a bleaker picture, but based on the same assumptions: “Africa risks fading from the digital knowledge economy.” The authors pointed out that despite the continent’s advances in connectivity, Africa, and in particular sub-Saharan Africa, was lagging far behind in three indicators of digital knowledge production: academic articles, the uploading of computer code onto GitHub, and the registering of domain names:
Sub-Saharan Africa is the continent that contributes the least to all three categories. Its share of academic articles is only 1.1 per cent. With 0.5 per cent of collaborative coding and 0.7 per cent of domain registrations, the region produces an even smaller share of digital knowledge. (Ojanperä and Graham, “Africa Risks Fading”)
Their conclusion was therefore to emphasize that “merely increasing connectivity might not allow African countries to leapfrog to higher levels of digital engagement. Wealth, innovation capacity and public spending on education matter as well.” The insistence on education, in particular, is something found elsewhere, including in the text from the World Bank cited above: “We used to think of the three R’s—reading, writing, and arithmetic—as the foundational skills in today’s education systems. As we turn to a new decade, it’s time to add another: digital” (Kandri, “Africa’s Future Is Bright”). And the author added: “Nowhere is the need for digital skills more pressing than in Africa.”
These narratives suggest that there is a need for a “digital catch-up” for Africa, as urgent as it is necessary. The consensus is so broad on this issue that the only thing that still seems to be debated is the conditions under which the continent would be best able to benefit from digital technologies and the digital economy. But the question of whether digitization is in itself problematic is rarely, if ever, raised.
Yet as with “development” in general, digitization is based on a teleological and unequivocal vision of progress that masks the relations of exploitation, domination, and dependence on which it is based. In this context, it seems clear that it is neither desirable nor even possible for Africa to follow the same digital trajectory as the most “advanced” countries in this field, if only for environmental reasons. Indeed, digital activities are very far from attaining the immateriality that is generally attributed to them (Chen, “Materialist Circuits”). On the contrary, it is becoming one of the main sources of environmental degradation, and Africa is likely to pay the heaviest price.
Environmentally Destructive Technologies
This is the case, first of all, because many of the raw materials needed for the production and operation of various digital devices come from Africa. The production of smartphones, for example, requires the use of more than forty metals, some of which are found in very limited quantities and whose extraction has a particularly high environmental cost: deforestation, water pollution, mining waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and so on. One of the best-known cases is that of cobalt, a key metal for the manufacture of lithium batteries, used in laptops and smartphones. Currently, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alone provides 60 percent of the world’s supply, with terrifying environmental and health consequences, not to mention human rights abuses and the geopolitical destabilization that accompanies them (Braeckman, “Congo”). While this may be seen as an extreme case, it masks a more general reality: the digital economy is based on an “extractivism” that is at least as destructive and unsustainable for Africa as “traditional” industries.
The second problem is that the ever more massive and intensive use of digital technologies is also causing a colossal increase in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. In a study relayed by The Guardian, the Swedish researcher Ander Andrae expressed his alarm at a trend that is only increasing:
We have a tsunami of data approaching. Everything which can be is being digitalized. It is a perfect storm. 5G [the fifth generation of mobile technology] is coming, IP [internet protocol] traffic is much higher than estimated, and all cars and machines, robots and artificial intelligence are being digitalized, producing huge amounts of data which is stored in data centers. (Guardian Environment Network, Climate Home News, “Tsunami of Data”)
As a result, digital technology alone is expected to consume 20 percent of the world’s electricity by 2025 and to account for 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, thus contributing to global warming, the consequences of which are already disproportionately felt in Africa.
Finally, Africa also pays an extremely high environmental price in the last stage of the life cycle of digital technologies, namely their recycling or disposal. Friends of the Earth recently recalled that “one of the consequences of the high consumption and short lifespan of our products is the production of waste. In 2014, 41.8 million tons of electrical and electronic waste will be generated worldwide . . . a sad record” (“Les dessous de la high tech”). Most of this waste ends up being exported legally or illegally to countries in the Global South, particularly in Africa. In a documentary broadcast on the French TV network France 5 in February 2019, directors Coraline Salvoch and Alain Pirot showed how much of Europe’s electronic waste ends up in illegal and noncompliant landfills in Africa, such as the one in Accra, Ghana (Salvoch and Pirot, “Déchets électroniques”). This reality was confirmed by another survey, this time in 2018 by the NGO Basel Action Network, which estimated that Europe illegally exports 352,474 tons of e-waste per year, the equivalent of 2.5 billion smartphones. After having tracked the final destination of some of this illegally exported waste, the NGO found that more than two-thirds were sent to a country in the South, with “Africa as the destination of choice” (Holes in the Circular Economy).
Catch-Up or Transform?
Of course, this is all the more scandalous as this environmental degradation is largely the result of digital production and consumption activities that benefit the region only marginally, when it does not widen the gap between the continent and the rest of the world (CETRI, “Impasses numériques”). In this context, however, many limit themselves to claiming for Africa a larger share of the digital cake, without questioning its size or the conditions under which it is baked. This is the case, for example, with proposals to deconcentrate and/or decentralize a global digital economy that currently benefits only a handful of American or Chinese multinationals (see, for example, Gurumurthy, Bharthur, and Chami, Platform Planet). Such a prospect is no doubt welcome, but it too often overlooks a fundamental fact: even if it is more democratic and fair, the current digital economy remains unsustainable from an ecological point of view. In this field as in others, the priority must therefore be to drastically reduce the global environmental footprint, in particular by moving toward what some people call “the age of low tech” (Bihouix, L’Âge des low tech) or “digital sobriety” (Ferreboeuf, Efoui-Hess, and Kahraman, Lean ICT), to use two titles from recent works.
In their most radical versions, the notions of low tech and digital sobriety refer first of all to the idea of a break with the very ideology of digital technology and its “ever more” (ever more devices, ever more sophisticated, ever more efficient). It would therefore be a matter of accepting a form of “digital degrowth” or “digital decolonization”—that is to say, combating the growing influence of digital technologies on all aspects of our existence (Casati, Contre le colonialisme numérique). It would imply, in particular, halting the trajectory of certain evolutionary trends such as the “necessary” digitization of schools, public administration, hospitals, and so on—and also of Africa?
Common but Differentiated Responsibilities
It all depends on what is meant by “digitization.” In the North, the term refers to the continuation of a process that has already far exceeded its sustainability thresholds. In the South, and Africa in particular, this is still far from being the case. Under these conditions, it is difficult not to think of the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” that prevails in international environmental law. Applied to the digital environment, it would mean that the bulk of the effort toward “digital decline” should be borne by the countries and categories of actors that have benefited most from it so far, so as to leave others a margin of development that is not immediately synonymous with increased environmental disaster.
The current 5G race is a good example of this. Indeed, the colossal environmental costs of this technology (Bloom, “5G”) are all the more unjustifiable as its first beneficiaries are in already hyperconnected regions, while half the world’s population and more than two-thirds of the African population do not even have access to the internet yet. Conversely, rejecting 5G could leave more room for the development of a more accessible and less environmentally destructive global connectivity, without widening the already huge gaps between those “excluded” from digital technology and those with the most advanced technologies.
To envisage a pure and simple digital exit would be a minority position, but one not lacking in arguments, including some from a political and philosophical point of view (Laïnae and Alep, Contre l’alternumerisme). It seems hard to conceive such a stand as feasible in the short to medium term, given the degree of digitization already achieved worldwide. However, if we wish to avoid both ecological disaster and the reinforcement of inequalities within and between countries, the very least we must do is to work a radical transformation of the way digital technologies are manufactured, used, and recycled, including in Africa. In concrete terms, this means, for example, favoring less sophisticated but more widely accessible and more easily repairable or recyclable devices, favoring community and/or shared rather than individual use, or promoting digital self-determination through decentralized infrastructures and the widespread use of open-source software (Bihouix, L’Âge des low tech; Vidalenc, Pour une écologie numérique).
African Advantages
In all these areas, it may well be that Africa’s “digital backwardness” could be precisely its main asset. This will be, first, because while much remains to be done in the region in terms of digital technology, it also means that much remains possible. The further a country or region has gone in for a given type of digital development, the more difficult and costly it is for them to get out of it, a phenomenon that specialists call “path dependency.” Conversely, there is therefore still time for Africa to avoid many of the mistakes that have been made elsewhere, but only if it acts quickly and, above all, if it gives itself the means to do so, including in terms of policy and regulatory spaces.
The second advantage will be that, because of the various constraints (economic, social, environmental, infrastructural, etc.) on the uses and users of digital technology in Africa, there have already been a number of initiatives and experiments, some of which are close to the “low-tech” or “digital sobriety” principles mentioned above. MIT Professor Ramesh Srinivasan, for example, describes how
In Nairobi, Kenya, I was amazed to see a 3D-printing business set up on a street corner, merrily printing everyday objects for passersby. Their custom 3D printers, which make everything from medical devices to household appliances, were cobbled together from circuits and wires salvaged from dumps and recycling centers. Not only are they a fraction of the cost of Chinese and even American printers, they are also far more robust and resilient, able to withstand the heat, noise, and elements of this East African country. Why? Because they were designed by Kenyans for their local environment and fellow countrymen. (Srinivasan, “Opinion”)
Decolonizing the Digital Imaginary
The point is obviously not to idealize this “culture of resourcefulness”—as for example does the World Bank, making it a key factor in “innovation” (Nonvignon, “Les innovations low-tech”)—and even less to overlook its ambivalences and very real limits. It is simply to stress, along with Srinivasan for example, that it is perhaps here that, in spite of everything, the outlines of a (more) desirable future for digital technology are taking shape—much more, in any case, than in the almighty fantasies of the Silicon Valley giants.
The challenge for Africa is therefore not so much to “catch up” or to seek at all costs to participate in a digital knowledge economy whose very conditions and functioning are structurally unfavorable to it. Africa—and the South in general—needs to chart its own course, starting by decolonizing its digital imaginary to open up new and alternative paths.
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