Dissertation Research: Conduits of Culture and Control: Roads, States, and Users in West-Central Africa, 1914 to 1980

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant examines the history of roads in West-Central Africa from 1914 to 1980, analyzing this technology along its material, political and cultural dimensions. The grant primarily supports travel to access published archival materials, published sources and to perform oral histories, primarily in France and West-Central Africa, in order to shed light on roads as material artifacts, political instruments, and the locus of cultural meanings, all built through the sometimes-clashing agency of Africans and Westerners. Over the course of the 20th century, roads of various sorts became increasingly important as a primary site or "contact zone" for encounters between westerners and Africans. But westerners and Africans each brought their own, sometimes widely differing, assumptions and expectations about roads to these encounters. Uncovering the ways both westerners and Africans perceived and used roads is thus crucial to understanding the nature and impact of encounters between Africa and the west, and to understanding the complex roles of technology in those encounters. The construction and maintenance of roads in west-central Africa during the 20th century posed significant challenges and entailed difficult (and revealing) decisions. The researcher will draw out the technological, political, social, and symbolic aspects of roads both over the course of the colonial occupation and as post-independence African nations maintained, expanded, and found new uses for road systems inherited from colonial governments. The project also argues for the pervasive and transforming role of a particular technology, roads, not only on a policy level but also in the day-to-day lives of and encounters between westerners and Africans in twentieth-century Africa. This dissertation, then, includes the voices of Africans, as well as westerners, who variously helped to build or repair roads, lived along (or away from) roads, and traveled along roads.