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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Technology and Territorial Claims among Ghanaians at Home and Abroad
| Panel |
73. New Social Spaces. Mobility and technology in Africa
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| Paper ID | 242 |
| Author(s) |
Burrell, Jenna R.
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | This paper brings together research on communication technology use among Ghanaian transnationals in London and among Internet café users in Accra, Ghana. In both settings technology was used to address marginality and to make claims on physical and symbolic territory in a challenge for more central positioning. These technology adopters often confronted multiple forms of marginality in their everyday lives. While Internet users in Accra, as citizens of an African nation, faced the marginality of their disadvantageous position in the existing world order, transnational Ghanaians living in London dealt with a society that was often indifferent or hostile towards their presence. Furthermore, Internet users in Accra who were dominantly young and often still in school were marginally positioned in a society still in many ways ordered on gerontocratic principles. For youth, the consumption of illicit media from the Internet – ranging from American rap and hip-hop videos to pornography - served as a technique for contravening authority. The transfer of illicit imagery from the Internet café to the classroom or dormitory was one example of attempts to expand territorial claims via technology. Communication technologies were also viewed as paralleling and amplifying the territorial claims of migration by affording instantaneous, low-cost, unregulated access to distant locales. The Internet in particular was viewed both by Ghanaian transnationals in London and Internet café users in Accra as a powerful tool for making foreign contacts, building social capital, and potentially facilitating new migration opportunities.
The Internet, among other communication technologies, facilitated attempts to annex territory. However, the technologies themselves were also a symbolic territory to claim. Technological competence was thought to generate both social and physical mobility. Furthermore, the space of the Internet café was a physical territory that was also claimed and remade. The spatial metaphors employed in relation to these technologies allude unapologetically (and sometimes with subversive knowing) to images from a right-wing discourse in Britain that depicts migration as invasion, as an illegitimate claim on territory. At the same time, through these activities technology users encountered a tension between the desire to reterritorialize technology into a local vernacular and the appeal of the foreignness of technology and the possibility of being transformed in its image.
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