Africa Is a Country

Africa, Now With Internet

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Africa, Now With Internet

By
Sonja Sugira

Does it sometimes seem like all technology and internet-related projects in and on Africa have to serve some grand purpose?

Photo: Frereike, via Flickr CC.

Paul English, the co-founder of travel search engine Kayak.com, who is embarking on a project to blanket all of Africa with free and low-cost WiFi, asked the other day: “… The continent of Africa has been so fucked over from an economic standpoint—as an engineer, how do I use my skills to do something that’s transformative?”

Kayak’s project, called JoinAfrica, would provide residents with free basic Web service, including access to email, Google, Wikipedia, and various news sources. Downloads of data-rich video, porn, or other non-essential sites would be limited (similar to what libraries in the U.S. do now), via a process called “bandwidth shaping.”

Turns out English has helped hook up villages in a number of African countries over the past decade, from Burundi to Uganda and Malawi to Zambia. It’s time, he says, to raise it up a couple of notches. For more, read his interview about the project with Fast Company here.

Now, obviously, this has the potential to significantly increase internet penetration on the continent, which is a good thing, or rather, it’s not a bad thing. And, well, I’ll take it over AMREF’s Facebook Status for Africa campaign any day. But (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?), as I tend to give all such projects the side eye, I have to pause.

Mostly, I’m a bit confused about drawing the line at “non-essential sites” (how is that even defined?). Is it me, or does it sometimes seem like all technology and/or internet-related projects in and on Africa have to serve some grand purpose? Maybe people across Africa also want to watch silly videos of cats on YouTube like, seemingly, all Americans do. Maybe not, but you know what I mean. Maybe they’d like to blog or listen to music or, you know, update their own Facebook statuses. The internet is supposed to be fun too, isn’t it? Does it really always have to be about saving Africa?

But, of course, it’s free. Although, what, as Kennedy Kachwanya asks, does free mean for entrepreneurship and innovation in Africa?

Africa is a Country readers, what are your thoughts?

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.