An African Manual for Debugging Empire

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

Artificial intelligence has become one of the defining technologies of our time, shaping economies, societies and the intimacies of daily life. Yet, as global debates focus on Silicon Valley breakthroughs or Chinese innovation, Africa’s place in this unfolding story is often overlooked or treated as marginal. This erasure is not accidental. It reflects longer histories of technological dependency, the undervaluing of African labour, and the persistent framing of the continent as a consumer rather than a co-creator of knowledge. To speak of Africa and AI, then, is not simply to ask what AI might ‘do’ for the continent but to insist on a broader reckoning with the asymmetries of power, representation and material resources that shape the digital present.

We’ve chosen to title this issue using a line of code. In programming, while(empire): disrupt() is a loop, a condition (to disrupt) that keeps running as long as the variable ‘empire’ exists. For us at The Republic, it’s a metaphor. A way of thinking about how power replicates itself in new forms, and why disruption, resistance and reimagining must be ongoing practices, not just events.

There’s a quiet persistence to how empire adapts; how it learns to dress itself in the language of innovation, of neutrality, of code even. In the story of Africa’s digital future, we’re often told we’ve entered a new ‘frontier’, one driven by data, automation and intelligence. But beneath the headline terms, familiar patterns remain. The extractive logic hasn’t changed—only the interface has.