African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development

Product Description
In
African Motors, Joshua Grace examines how Tanzanian drivers, mechanics, and passengers reconstituted the automobile into a uniquely African form between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories, extensive archival research, and his ethnographic fieldwork as an apprentice in Dar es Salaam's network of garages, Grace counters the pervasive narratives that Africa is incompatible with technology and that the African use of cars is merely an appropriation of technology created elsewhere. Although automobiles were invented in Europe and introduced as part of colonial rule, Grace shows how Tanzanians transformed them, increasingly associating their own car use with
maendeleo, the Kiswahili word for progress or development. Focusing on the formation of masculinities based in automotive cultures, Grace also outlines the process through which African men remade themselves and their communities by adapting technological objects and systems for local purposes. Ultimately,
African Motors is an African-centered story of development featuring everyday examples of Africans forging both individual and collective cultures of social and technological wellbeing through movement, making, and repair.
Review
“
African Motors is an exhilarating contribution to recent African-centric histories of development shedding new light on the significance of automobility—meaning the entire ‘machinic complex’ of driving, roads, garage work, urban transport, and oil trading. Joshua Grace emphasizes the creativity and agency involved in vernacular invention, maintenance, and repair as part of urban mobility and ‘technological citizenship’ in Tanzania. This book is a welcome addition to the growing field of postcolonial mobility studies, decolonial mobility history, and African studies of technology and innovation.” -- Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Drexel University\n“In vivid prose,
African Motors shows how motor vehicles became African technologies. Joshua Grace sets new standards for research and engagement, weaving tales of African technological expertise into an analysis whose import extends well beyond Tanzania. You will never see cars and drivers the same way again.” -- Gabrielle Hecht, author of ―
Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade
About the Author
Joshua Grace is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina.