Abstract
Cyberization has become the new inescapable reality of contemporary life. Cyberization points to the ways in which daily living in the last thirty years has become decidedly entangled in digital artifacts, infrastructure, and networks. The recent COVID-19 pandemic provides the most recent empirical, incontrovertibly global, and demonstrable snapshot of this reality. This chapter concerns itself with what all this means for Africa's place in the scheme of global power mediated by the era of cyberization. Using Ghana's attempt at scientific and technological advance under President Kwame Nkrumah and its cyberization experience in the era of neoliberal capitalism as a case study, and drawing insights from the fields of techno-politics, science and technology studies (STS), development studies and international relations, the chapter offers some conceptual building blocks wound around the idea of digital imperialism as a starting point for catalyzing theorizing about Africa and the power dynamics of the cyberization turn in the global political economy.
Across the parapet……I can see springing up cities of Africa becoming the metropolis of science and learning and architecture and philosophy.
-Kwame Nkrumah (1976)
If we have not learned anything in the past century, it is that technology confers power, but that the consequences of that power are anything but predictable.
-Headrick (1991, p.3)
TopNkrumah’S Scientific And Technological Vision For Ghana
The Saint Lucian economist, Arthur Lewis, who eventually went on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1979 was appointed Chief Economic Advisor in the year (1957) Ghana gained her independence from colonialism. He left that position in 1958, following policy differences (Tignor, 2006) between him and then Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. The differences stemmed from the irreconcilable views the two had on industrial policy. Nkrumah was interested in heavy industries. Lewis, on his part, felt that Ghana should concentrate more on light industries and the agriculture sector. While this, on the surface, was a worldview clash between a politician and an economist, it was deeply revelatory of the role of science and technology in the nation building efforts of former colonies. The Nkrumah era, and Ghana’s scientific endeavours under him, elicit even closer scrutiny because they represent a paradigm case of the global politics of science and technology in the global South that has scarcely been thoroughly analysed (Amoah, 2014; Mayer, Carpes and Knoblich, 2014). Given that Ghana was the first country in Black Africa to gain her independence, its experiences navigating the complex and ever shifting terrain of global science and technology merit scholarly attention for useful lessons.
Nkrumah considered the big push for Ghana’s rapid industrialization, the most visible and eloquent evidence of Africa’s full utilization of its technological and scientific capabilities and prowess and a sure basis for engaging a doubting world on an equal footing. For Nkrumah, industrialization which turned on specialized knowledge, was very much linked to the place of Ghana and Africa in the global power equation. In other words, those nations with knowledge had industrialized and dominated the world. In that sense, in his mind, a modern state propped essentially on agriculture and primary products was bound to be dominated by industrialized ones. Thus, he made the point incessantly that “returns on the export of primary products from mining, agriculture and forestry” could not “provide to any important extent the looked-for capital for investing in industrial foundation.” (Nkrumah, 2004, p. 234).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Cyberization: The constant reshaping of contemporary life conditioned by the myriad ways in which through network protocols, computers and various terminal devices at different locations are interlinked.
Digital Imperialism: The contemporary instantiation of imperialism afforded by the internet and wider globe spanning telecommunications infrastructure which are increasingly unchallengeably employed by powerful states and corporations-on account of their inventing them and holding the intellectual proprietary rights- in the Global North and richer parts of Asia as the core instruments of production, distribution, consumption, control, power, hegemony and domination.