‘Who Do We Imagine AI Is Built By and Built For?’
With AI proponents promising to ‘save’ Africa, Nanjala Nyabola asks an urgent question: what happens when a continent’s future is outsourced to someone else’s imagination? We discuss the politics of technology, the myth of the ‘cloud’, and why the next digital revolution must begin with African women.
Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, An African Manual for Debugging Empire. Buy the issue here.
‘Too often, when we think about technology in Africa, we think about it as something that is agentic in itself. It does things, it moves things, it fixes things without the agency of African people,’ Nanjala Nyabola told me on a Zoom call. She was speaking from her base in Nairobi, where she has spent the last three years developing a bold new project: an African feminist philosophy for regulating digital technology. At the heart of her work is a provocation: what if AI isn’t the future Africa needs? What if the real work is to radically rethink who technology is for and who it leaves behind?
It was early August, and I was preparing for The Republic’s forthcoming technology issue, which examines the last decade of Africa’s digital transformation—from the fintech boom to mobile money, and now the arrival of AI. But what stood out in my conversation with Nyabola was her insistence that we abandon the myths. Leapfrogging, she argues, is not a strategy. It’s a ‘magic wand’ we’re told will fix our problems without our participation. But where are African people in these narratives? For good or for bad, she asks, where is our agency?
Nyabola, a political analyst, lawyer, and author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics, is not merely critiquing technology’s rollout on the continent. She is asking deeper, paradigm-shifting questions about the infrastructure of digital power. What histories are being erased? What communities are being exploited? Whose labour is being ‘invisibilized’? In our conversation, she spoke of the ‘water bearers’—the rural African women whose realities are absent from AI design, yet who are most burdened by its environmental consequences. ‘If you have to walk 35 kilometres to get two litres of drinking water, and then someone tells you to design an AI system, water is not going to be an afterthought. It is not going to be something that we will get to once the technology becomes popular, it is going to be one of the first things on your mind.’
We talked, too, about the illusion of immateriality; how the myth of cloud computing conceals a brutal physicality. ‘When you are putting something on the cloud, it means that you are putting something on someone else’s computer,’ she said. ‘There is a computer somewhere that is consuming resources, there is no such thing as it is in the cloud.’ From Nairobi to Memphis to Dublin, data centres are draining towns of resources and raising energy costs, all while tech companies enjoy tax exemptions and legal grey zones. In Africa, where infrastructure is fragile and regulation weak, the risks are magnified, and the stakes are existential.
And yet, ‘We’re not anti-AI,’ she clarified. ‘We are interrogating the paradigm in which [such digital technologies] are being created and deployed. We are saying that we want deeper reflection.’ But the solution not simply more Africans in tech. It’s deeper, she argues. Instead, it’s about asking our own questions, drawing from our own intellectual traditions, and imagining technology from the ground up, starting with the lives we actually live.
Our full conversation continues below, edited for clarity and brevity...
This interview features in our print issue, ‘An African Manual for Debugging Empire’. To continue reading this article, Subscribe.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
