These panels are one product of the SHOT effort to expand the international scholarly engagement with the field of the History of Technology. In July 2006 SHOT part-funded a workshop in South Africa on the History of Technology. The papers and panels have been selected to highlight the intersection of strengths and problems from these largely discrete historiographical fields that emerged at this workshop. On each panel we have selected commentators from the broader SHOT community who will tie the papers in to long-standing debates in the history of technology. We hope that these discussions will also open up new avenues for debate and research–in African studies and the international history of technology.

Panel 1: Making Africa, Making Technology: the complexity of social and technological systems in the history of Africa.

This panel will examine debates about the politics of colonial rule in African history overlaid with a new concern for the paradoxical and contradictory development of technopolitical systems. Tim Burke’s paper uses the concept of emergent systems to re-examine unanticipated consequences in the development of the system of indirect rule in the African colonial state. Dunbar Moodie’s work explores the interaction of technological systems and social and political constraints in the century-long history of deep-level gold mining. And Bill Storey reopens the arguments about the technological role of firearms in African history by comparing disarmament in the very different, but closely related, colonial contexts of southern African and New Zealand.

Chair: Gabrielle Hecht

Discussant: Nina Lerman

Tim Burke, “Emergence, Complexity, Technology: Towards an Anticipation of the Unexpected.”

Dunbar Moodie, “Getting The Gold Out Of The Ground: Social constraints and financial limitations on technical capacity in South African Deep-Level Mining.”

Bill Storey, ““Guns, Conflict, and Citizenship: A Comparison of Nineteenth-Century New Zealand and Southern Africa”

Panel 2: Technologies of the self and the other in colonial Africa: The technopolitics of subjectivity in a colonial racial order.

The papers in this panel focus on the politics of subjectivity at the heart of the technologies of representation in African history. Jeff Guy’s paper explores the camera as weapon and mirror, and the very different engagements of settlers and natives with each kind of photography. Vukile Khumalo’s paper traces the very largely unrecorded history of a new kind of political subject in the rise of writing and printing on the mission stations of colonial Natal in the 19th century. Lynn Thomas follows the paradoxical journey of skin-lighteners in the journey between South Africa and the USA, a study that provides a lens into the makings of new forms and arguments about women and modernity in 20th century Africa.

Chair: Håkon W. Andersen

Discussant: Rebecca Herzig

Jeff Guy, “Subjects, Objects, and the struggle for the image in the imperial era in South Africa”

Vukile Khumalo, “‘Warm oneself at the society of men, and women:’ Reconfiguring the idea of Ibandla in 19th century Natal and Zululand”

Lynn Thomas, “Skin Lighteners as Transnational Technology and Commodity”

Panel 3: Networks, Flows, Infrastructures: Africa in the world

These papers focus on the special problem of infrastructure in African history and the history of technology. The papers all draw attention to struggles over the built environment in the context of colonial rule, but they also examine the ways in which the maintenance of infrastructure assumes a special political position after the high moment of colonialism. Keith Breckenridge’s paper follows a large group of American mining engineers on the Witwatersrand in the 1890s in the effort to implement a progressive blue-print for capitalist development in the Boer Republic. Heloise Finch examines the social and cultural debates on Réunion Island over the development of urban infrastructure and housing policy since the 1960s. Libbie Freed explores the intensely contested, and paradoxical, development of roads in colonial and post-colonial Cameroun.

Chair: Paul Edwards

Discussant: Arne Kaijser

Keith Breckenridge, “Made in America: Progressive Mining Engineers and the origins of corporate capitalism in South Africa.”

Heloise Finch, ‘It’s like a child you see being born: landscapes of national progress in Réunion Island’

Libbie Freed, “The Empire’s New Roads: Colonial Africa and the History of Technology”