Timothy Burke, Swarthmore College
The historiography of colonial Africa is replete with genuflections at the shrine of contingency and agency. These gestures rarely amount to anything but ceremony, however, because to take them seriously requires historians to see the development and outcomes of colonial rule as substantively variable or it requires seeing colonialism as far less powerful and determinant of social and cultural life in African societies than it has commonly been represented. More typically, contingency is analytically boxed in to the narrow space of resistance to colonial rule by African subjects, or sometimes to encompassing mild variations in the forms and structures of colonial authority in a given locality.

In this paper, I will discuss the ways that attention to technology can open the door to a more meaningful engagement with contingency and agency in the 20th Century history of African societies. Here I use the term in the sense of technique, referring to repeated processes and institutional methods as well as tools and machinery. Whether in the sense of Daniel Headrick’s book Tools of Empire or the encompassment of technology within attention to production, most colonial African historiography treats technology as the visible material evidence of instrumental intent or as the guarantor of the social and political power of imperialism or capitalism.

Using a variety of examples including consumer goods, official correspondence between colonial administrators and subjects, and the administrative and conceptual structuring of “indirect rule” within British colonial possessions, I want to highlight very different conceptual approach to technology that is evident in a range of more recent scholarly works on colonial Africa, one that suggests that the uses and incorporations of technological objects and processes over the last century has been much more open to contingent and unexpected outcomes. Moreover, I want to suggest as a consequence that colonialism in Africa was indeed less ubiquitous and powerful in its social and cultural power, and less coherent in its forms and manifestations, that in many cases, the uses and applications of technologies were subject to a variety of interpretations, conscious and unconscious aspirations, and competing forms of social power, but were not ruled, controlled or comprehensively encompassed by any overarcing system or interest.

Outside of an African context, the historiography of technology pays much more serious attention to the concept of unexpected consequences. I not only want to bring the insights of that work to bear on African contexts, but to move from those works to an argument on behalf of incorporating the concept of emergent processes into the way historians approach causality and colonialism in modern Africa. Emergence is a general term that refers to the self-organizing and often unpredictable evolution of complex systems or patterns from simple initial conditions or rules. A key part of emergent systems is the complexities they give rise do not require designers, controlling agents, or strong underlying structural determinants, that in some important sense these complex systems are accidents of processes that are not intended or directed to give rise to those systems. In particular, I will suggest that the technical apparatus of indirect rule in colonial Africa, which is still reproduced within the structure of postcolonial states on the continent, ought to be reconceptualized as the result of emergence.