What is Digital Imperialism

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.