How Technology Preserves the Legacy of Colonialism Across Africa

As writer and critic, Amiri Baraka posited decades ago in his seminal work, Technology and Ethos, machines, ‘are an extension of their inventor-creators.’ They are infused with and project their inventors' values, ethics, mores and worldviews. Technology, in other words, is never neutral. Even the choice of what problems to solve or which features to build is value-laden. As the ideological alignment of the creator becomes the default that everyone else uses.

For instance, the absence of non-white human characters and lack of skin-colour diversity in early emoji sets subtly communicated a default human that erased non-white identities and privileged whiteness. Since most tech-company employees and executives are white and non-disabled, it’s no surprise that technology products and services default to a white, able-bodied perspective.

THE FALLACY OF TECH NEUTRALITY

The default whiteness of internet technologies became painfully apparent at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, many darker-skinned students who transitioned to remote learning struggled to write exams because online-proctoring face detection tools, trained primarily on white faces, either failed to recognize their faces or erratically flagged them as cheaters when these tools did not recognize them. The racist undertones of these systems were impossible to ignore when a Google engineer had to tender a public apology after the Google Photos app mislabeled two black people as gorillas. Most recently, in 2024, Google was enmeshed in yet another bias scandal when its generative AI tool, Gemini, churned out stereotypical and ahistorical pictorial depictions of people of colour. The system was temporarily suspended because it was over-sexualizing its depictions of black women and generating ahistorical images like Asian Vikings, black female popes and black Nazi soldiers.

Likewise, many AI voice assistants have female voices and feminine names by default. This is not by accident, as it draws directly on the social stereotype that women are naturally suited for assistant and secretarial roles. The under-representation of women in technology and the training of AI algorithms primarily on male data reflects the male domination of the technology workforce. It has meant that many technology products reinforce harmful gender stereotypes while exacerbating gender bias. In each case, the under-representation of women and people of colour in tech, along with algorithms trained on data reflecting a predominantly white, male view of the world, means these products mirror and amplify societal biases and stereotypes.

Also, shortly after Elon Musk took ownership of X (formerly Twitter) in October 2022, he revised the platform’s content‐moderation policy and reinstated accounts that had been deplatformed for spreading toxic content that sometimes helped incite public unrest. Notably, soon after, the platform’s weekly rates of hate speech climbed by roughly 50 per cent. This policy shift demonstrates that platform rules often reflect platform owners' priorities, values and ideologies rather than serving as a neutral baseline.

Moreover, the modern computer interface, aptly named the desktop, upholds a white-collar, office-based reality. Its icons and vocabulary—including files, folders, documents, inbox and outbox—replicate a world conceived by and for middle and upper-class office workers. For users whose daily lives revolve around a mechanic’s workbench, a factory floor, or a kitchen countertop, this metaphor signals that they are entering a space structured by corporate routines. This inscription of a white-collar worldview into how we organize digital information comes as no surprise, given that these artefacts were conceived by technology designers who were raised in, orbit, and inhabit affluent, white-collar environments. These designers projected their ideological framing onto computer interface metaphors, thereby privileging their mode of work and lifestyle over alternative ones. Former Y Combinator President and tech wunderkind, Sam Altman, posited in a 2019 episode of the Conversations with Tyler podcast that:

Founders aren’t superheroes... They may play extreme sports, respond to emails within seconds, and start billion-dollar companies, but they are rarely the product of extraordinary circumstance. In fact, they tend to be solidly upper-middle class, reasonably smart, and with loving parents.

These examples make the notion of value-neutral technologies untenable. From the perfect emojis on our devices to the policies that govern what we can and cannot say online, technology is anything but neutral. Although these corporate metaphors have over time morphed into a technology lingua franca that is intuitively accessible for individuals across all class lines, this evolution only partially masks their ideological framing. Ultimately, if Silicon Valley tech barons espouse racist, sexist, white-nationalist and hyper-capitalist ideologies, then the technologies they envision, fund and build will invariably reflect, reproduce and diffuse these biases at scale the moment a product launches. However, simply diagnosing the source of bias is only half the story. What truly matters is to explore how and where these biases are wielded once a product launches.

EXTRACTING WEALTH, INFLAMING POVERTY: AFRICA IN THE TECHNOLOGY SUPPLY CHAIN

Once released into the global marketplace, these value-laden technologies function as instruments of socio-political, cultural and economic dominance, diffusing their creators’ ideologies worldwide. Digital technologies like cloud infrastructures, social media platforms, machine‑learning systems and artificial intelligence engines serve as modern-day master’s tools, transmitting and reinforcing American techno-cultural ideals—progress, modernity, whiteness, masculinity, religion, futurism—across the globe.

Nowhere is this diffusion more striking than in countries south of the Sahara. Across many African countries, Western tech corporations simultaneously extract raw materials, exploit labour and single-mindedly pursue a vision of hegemonic domination and techno-colonialism. In this context, my use of the term techno-colonialism is promiscuous. I employ the term to defy rigid categorizations. It captures not only instances of political and economic domination through technological means by imperial powers but also how the technology of the West subtly diffuses Western cultural and ideological influences that continue to shape global interactions.

Akin to how nineteenth-century colonial empires siphoned gold, rubber and cultural artifacts from their colonies, today’s global tech corporations unethically extract raw materials used in the production of mobile telephones, computers and electric vehicles from African countries. This exploitative economic interaction perpetuates the same rapacious logic of colonial rule. Despite being one of the world’s largest cobalt suppliers for global technology giants like Apple, Microsoft and Tesla, the Democratic Republic of Congo remains one of the world’s poorest countries. Similarly, mining operations, along with the data centres that power artificial intelligence systems, disrupt the balance of natural ecosystems, further straining already scarce water resources across many local communities in Africa.

While technology corporations rake in billions of dollars from the raw materials they dig up across communities in countries south of the Sahara, the spoils of that wealth seldom trickle back to these communities. Instead, they take more from those communities. On the pretext of providing free internet and social media services in Nigeria, Zambia, Ghana, Kenya, Seychelles and many other countries across the continent, global technology firms routinely disregard privacy rights to collect the data of numerous Africans surreptitiously. This data is converted into quantifiable insights to influence behaviour or sold to third-party businesses to generate outsized profits. This pattern of cut-throat capitalist extraction without reparation mirrors the old colonial pattern of economic exploitation. While profits flow north of the Pacific, poverty and environmental degradation ravage countries South of the Sahara.

THE ENDURING LEGACY OF RACIAL CAPITALISM IN AFRICA’S TECHNOLOGY WORKFORCE

In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, American professor Cedric Robinson contends that, ‘For more than 300 years, slave labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor, peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion.’ Drawing on Robinson’s conception of racial capitalism, the modern capitalist system within which the global technology ecosystem exists, exploits African tech workers to drive enormous profits for global tech proprietors. This system perpetuates economic exploitation along racial lines, much as the colonial system once did. Capitalism, from time immemorial, has been inextricably tied to colonial extraction and racial hierarchy, and today’s global digital economy is no exception. Either as content moderators, gig workers, or cobalt miners, workers from countries south of the Sahara toil for meagre wages to generate immense value for global technology conglomerates.

A concrete example is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children miners dig cobalt by hand under dangerous working conditions for pennies per day. This black gold powers our smartphones and electric cars. Yet Congolese miners, many of whom are underage, live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $2 a day. Many of these workers reap their reward in the form of life-threatening injuries, toxic disease and, in the most extreme cases, death, because they lack protective gear while slogging under hazardous conditions for a pittance.

This pattern of racialized labour exploitation is not limited to cobalt miners. Credentialed African tech workers who train AI, moderate content and write software code for global technology platforms, including OpenAI, Scale AI and TikTok, work under traumatic and stressful conditions. Besides, they earn significantly less and see almost none of the benefits that accrue to their counterparts in countries north of the Pacific.

Grimly, the vast majority of African miners and tech workers cannot afford any of the finished products that depend on their labour. The wealth they generate, whether by mining cobalt or reviewing toxic content to train AI systems, never ends up in their hands as finished gadgets or equal pay. This model reinforces racial hierarchies in labour practices, with workers receiving unequal pay and emoluments based on their skin colour, much like colonial powers did.

THE ATLANTIC KEEPS THE SCORE

In a poignant inversion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, there exists a parallel line between today’s colonialism by technological means and direct colonial domination. The same Atlantic waters that once ferried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic now carry fibre optic cables transmitting Western techno-cultural values that spread the cement of Western hegemony across the surface of African nations. This modern inversion shapes and amplifies far-right disinformation and white supremacy across the surfaces of African nations. Moreover, it threatens the fragile fabric of political and ethnic stability across many African countries.

This history comes full circle most vividly when we consider the significance of the Saint Helena Islands during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its importance today. Located in the South Atlantic Ocean, Saint Helena was a popular transit hub for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Today, it hosts the landing of Google’s undersea cable, symbolically named Equiano after the famous enslaved person turned slave abolitionist. Strikingly, this cable links West Africa to Europe and the Americas.

In the 19th century, colonial powers in partnership with wealthy individuals, prominent amongst them Cyrus Field, financed Atlantic telegraph lines to administer far-off territories. Today, modern undersea cables are built and owned by consortia of telecom operators, cloud-service giants (including Google and Meta), private equity firms and occasionally commercial banks. As with previous technology, these new infrastructures essentially enrich and benefit Western interests and shareholders. Though the consortium agreements that govern these deals are publicly available, these contracts often include terms that are kept confidential to shirk accountability and evade scrutiny. Likewise, the ‘Scramble for Africa’, one of the driving ideas of colonialism, continues to drive competition for the ownership of the undersea cables that transmit internet data from the Americas to Africa.

While today’s competition for cable capacity may lack warships, it carries profound implications for sovereignty vis-à-vis who decides which voices are heard online, whose platforms set the rules of engagement, and how local actors can build their digital futures. Digital connectivity cables may be neutral in and of themselves. However, there is very real power embedded in their use.

This parallel historical, ideological and economic conspectus reveals a direct line between colonialism and code. From cobalt mining pits to the lines of code powering chatbots, contemporary digital infrastructures are often touted as tools of progress. They are viewed as technologies that connect the world and effectively fuel social justice movements. However, these infrastructures are simply the latest layers of an enduring imperial economy, capable of imperceptibly perpetuating colonial power, even as they claim to connect the world. Dismantling these unjust systems requires more than banal ethical pledges or perfunctory Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. It demands fundamentally reimagining technology’s purpose, governance and distribution. Only by scrutinizing the ideological and value orientation on which technology is built and integrating humanistic perspectives into science education can we begin to steer humanity away from the moral nihilism of unethical technology practices and start building tools that truly serve a pluralistic, equitable future.

Most importantly, as Africans, we must prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term pecuniary gains by guarding our natural resources more strategically against exploitative mineral deals. We must free ourselves from the prevalent myth that technology is a silver bullet that can leapfrog decades of systemic socio-economic malaise. Rather, massive investment in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) education is crucial to drive the next wave of homegrown philosophical science and technology innovation⎈

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How Technology Preserves the Legacy of Colonialism Across Africa

THE FALLACY OF TECH NEUTRALITY

EXTRACTING WEALTH, INFLAMING POVERTY: AFRICA IN THE TECHNOLOGY SUPPLY CHAIN

THE ENDURING LEGACY OF RACIAL CAPITALISM IN AFRICA’S TECHNOLOGY WORKFORCE

THE ATLANTIC KEEPS THE SCORE

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