CONCEPT
African Agency in the Digital Turn
The thesis that African populations are not merely subjects of the AI revolution but agents in it, with specific traditions of creativity, improvisation, and collective intelligence that constitute resources for engaging AI on terms the metropolitan center has not dictated.
Mbembe's work refuses both the triumphalist narrative in which African developers are simply empowered by access to AI tools and the catastrophist narrative in which African populations are simply victims of digital colonization. Between these poles he insists on African agency: the capacity of African thinkers, creators, institutions, and communities to engage the AI moment on terms informed by the continent's specific histories and traditions. The continent's youthful population, its traditions of oral creativity and improvisation, its experience of navigating systems designed without its participation, and its relative freedom from the cognitive ruts of metropolitan tech culture constitute, in Mbembe's reading, resources rather than deficits.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The argument is partly empirical and partly normative. Empirically, there is already a vibrant African AI ecosystem that the metropolitan discourse largely ignores. Masakhane, the community-driven machine translation effort for African languages, has produced