Chapter 13

The concept postcolonial ICT is for me almost similar to ICT4D (ICT for development). I am interested in the becomings of postcolonial universities on their own terms in a global context. I am inspired by and using postcolonial thinking without being a trained scholar in the area. I keep to the postcolonial as my preferred concept in this chapter.

The UN world summits put specific attention to the evolving information society¹⁶⁵ and performed not only one but two summits in this field – WSIS 1 in Geneva 2003 and WSIS 2 in Tunis 2005. The digital divide and gender issues were high up on the agenda fostered especially by WSIS Africa regional chapter. It is within the context of these issues this chapter also include shortly a story of e-learning research and development in Tanzania.

I am most grateful to my colleague Birgitta Rydhagen, whose voice in the text is crucial and for allowing me to use her participating material in this chapter.

Postcolonial ICT - feminist technoscience and technopolitics intertwined

we may never have been modern,… but some of us have certainly been more colonized than others (Redfield, 2002: 795 [referring to (Latour, 1993)]).

Feminist ICT research

Feminist technoscience with emphasis on ICT is certainly motivated by transformation goals. The reasons for transformation are not only seen in the ongoing difficulties of achieving appropriate ICT system solutions especially in low income countries¹⁶⁷, but in the way we face contemporary processes of knowledge and technology development (Gibbons et al. 1994 and Novotny et al. 2001). The prerequisites for the latter are still to be met, and urge for transformation not the least within academy and faculties of technology (Etzkowic & Leydesdorff 1997). Academic ICT and its applications in society and every day life force our attention towards the relation between dominating actors, of which the university is one. It stresses relevant knowledge about its prerequisites resulting in transformation challenges within the traditional universities. Feminist technoscience within faculties of technology is a driving force fore the transformation processes in demand (Trojer 2002). The reason why, is to be found in the identified potentials of feminist ICT research, which meet some of the prerequisites for the discussed challenges namely the potentials to:

• expand the knowledge frames and practices for technology development in increasingly complex realities.
• develop epistemological infrastructures relevant for a society heavily dependent on research and technology.
• create explicit cultures within technology related institutions at the universities (phase out “the culture of no culture”) and thereby make clear that no research positions are innocent.
• create driving forces for inter- and transdisciplinary constellations.
• open out preferential rights of interpretation in selections of standards, which always are reality producing activities.
• indicate alternative directions of ICT applications.
• establish new arenas for developing understandings of relations between research and politics.
• constitute a catalyst in the negotiations between, or better co-evolution of, science and society.
• contribute with competences for situating knowledge and for context dependence concerning resource allocation from high income to low income countries.

Vandana Shiva once said “New technologies travel on old social relations”¹⁶⁸. Experiences reveal that new technologies simply reinforce old social structures rather than transforming them. This means the discourse of ICT as a universal tool is highly questionable - a tool, which also must include the possibility to change deeply ingrained structures like gender structures,. The concern to understand the underlying cultural and cognitive structures, which are reality producing in the evolving information society, has been and still is comprehensive in feminist technoscience.

Participatory ICT design is emphasized in feminist research as well as in human work science, computer science and elsewhere. Birgitta Rydhagen (1999, p.75) regards the feminist understanding of power relations and their impact on the production of knowledge and technology as highly relevant in participatory research and technology design. Combining participatory ICT design and feminist research promotes:

• diversity potentials as strategies to handle non consensus situations
• enforcement of situated knowledge and technology development (Haraway, 1991, Gulbrandsen 2004)
• emphasis on the importance of power relations and their impacts, including complex understanding of gender structures
• process-oriented development through a broader understanding of transformation processes.

An example is given by McKinley & Jensen (2003), who have studied the emancipatory and participatory potential of a radio program. The purpose of the program was to address women’s health issues in remote rural areas in the Peruvian Amazon where a majority of the indigenous population lives. The listeners were encouraged to send in their stories and questions, which were then raised in sociodramas, answered by experts or investigated through interviews. Listener groups were also invited to produce the different programs together with the producer team. It turned out that both women and men listened to the program in single-sex groups (and not individually) in the villages. The producer received hundreds of letters from women, telling their life stories and raising specific issues of sex abuse, household violence etcetera. Through the radio, the women in these remote areas succeeded in connecting to each other, communicating about for them important issues with a radio studio as moderator.

Christina Mörtberg (2000) holds that equal access to ICT ought to be a basic principle, when the slogans are no longer “technology in a democratic society” but “democracy in an information society”. She problematizes the discourse of equal access by showing the limitations of equal access rendering visible by a multiplicity of variables such as gender, class, race, religion, etc. “There are no automatic links between the political goal of equal access and the opportunities that are opened up by information technology.”

Postcolonial ICT

Developing appropriate and relevant technology (system) solutions is a complex and context dependant issue and worked up in many technology fields (Rydhagen 2002).

The need for understandings of postcolonial ICT emerges, when ICT development issues are situated in the context of knowledge- and technology co-development between low and high income countries¹⁶⁹. For development the change of position from merely technology transfer to co-development is strongly in demand.

Referring to Harding (1998) postcolonialism is not monolithic. The term has many referents and meanings. Temporally, it indicates the period beginning in the 1960s, marking the end of formal European colonialism.

The postcolonial context in sub-Saharan Africa seems still to be characterised by a lack of leadership and understanding of new technologies, political instability and weakness in the regional institutional building, several basic issues to address, and a need for ownership¹⁷⁰. The imbalance in power remains, and makes it difficult for the postcolonial nations to define their own visions without having to rely on the intentions of donor nations and organisations. The colonial and postcolonial efforts to retain or change power relations affect the technological development. “It is not coincidental that the growing division between the techno-literate and the techno-illiterate replicates old models of hegemony and oppression, as evidenced in the use of terms such as information neo-colonialism and technological apartheid” (Mejias, 2001, p. 212). It is therefore necessary to investigate and de-naturalise the discussion of former colonies as nations in need of ICT transfer. As Albert Nsengiyumva has stated¹⁷¹, all electronic technologies have been brought in from outside.

E-learning in rural secondary schools in Tanzania

In Tanzania, secondary schools face a shortage of educated teachers, especially in the rural areas, as educated teachers tend to move to the urban areas. The problem is particularly severe in the science subjects as teachers in science find alternative, more profitable employment. At the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) and the Colleges of Engineering and Technology, a research project was developed during the time period 2005 to 2012. ICTs was tested as a tool to support rural secondary schools with teaching materials for the science subjects (Kalinga 2010, Lujara 2010, Simba 2012). The University of Dar es Salaam has a strong demand to focus research and education on areas of benefit to the wider society. The e-learning project was well in line with this ambition. The use of open source software (OSS) for the platform and the participatory content development and use were vital for the project.

During the research process, a more complex understanding of the participatory aspects of e-learning was developed. Secondary school teachers were participants in the initiating phases and when the material was developed. The e-learning material allowed for more or less participation among the students in the schools, depending on the structure of the platform and the content. The actual participation in the schools was depending on the preparedness among teachers and students to change the education context towards a more interactive mood when the e-learning material is introduced.

A number of institutions in African countries have taken up the challenge to address the Digital Divide. Already in 2001 the Regional Workshop on Engineering and Technology in Bagamoyo, Tanzania¹⁷², researchers from East African countries identified common interests to find ways to develop ICT for use in rural areas in the different countries. The argument was that urban ICT has advanced much easier. Appropriate applications were identified for rural citizens include e-learning, medical advice, agricultural advice, promotion of the farmers’ agricultural products and education through local computer centres in rural areas. This reduced costs for travels and increased the accessibility for rural citizens to expertise located in urban or distant rural areas. In addition, e-learning can address practical and local knowledge sharing outside the formal education system.

At the WSIS Africa Regional Conference¹⁷³, the participants identified a number of technical aspects of specific relevance for the use of ICT in African countries. These include African languages and voice/touch screen applications, free software and development of content suited to local needs.

At the same time as the postcolonial universities take on a role to develop ICT systems in their respective nation, the conception of the postcolonial has been problematized. Although legally, the nations have become free, the international relations still remain the same in many ways. People and institutions feel they continue to be in the position of receivers of financial and technological resources as well as development plans and knowledge (Trojer, 2004). The situation of ICT introduction and development in a postcolonial context thus needs to be discussed in terms of postcolonial theory, if ICTs are ever going to be(come) tools in and for the development of independent postcolonial societies (see Rydhagen, Trojer 2004).

The theories of postcolonialism have been criticised for not worrying about the material (see e.g. Kapoor, 2002). However, technologies producing realities will need to be included in the postcolonial theory, as the technologies interact with the human beings and societies in the determination of direction for future development (Anderson, 2002 and Mejias, 2001). In previous research, a number of issues relating to ICTs in postcolonial contexts have been discussed (Rydhagen, 2004). The introduction of a specific ICT in a certain location has very specific meanings and implications. In societies where oral communication and/or collective identities dominate, computers and the internet have very different connotations than they have in the literal and individual societies, where they were developed. Computers can be regarded as taking time from social interaction, thus being a negative thing. Similar, the language barrier to the internet for people with other first languages than English is both real and symbolic (Leonardi, 2003).

Some information systems are successful in one aspect, but regarded as negative or failed in other aspects. The employees might for example find the system useful for informal (but still work) purposes, while the usefulness is not reflected in increased income and thus not successful on management level (or the opposite). Gender and other social relations are affected by ICTs, but not necessarily in a way that resembles previous experiences in other parts of the world (see e.g. Apffel-Marglin & Sanchez, 2002). Technologies as such, as well as the way they are introduced and by whom will have effects on the impact ICTs will have in a postcolonial context. Old computers can be regarded both as ‘good enough to start with’ and ‘something the rich countries want to get rid of anyway’. In what way this is going to be taken into account in the closing of the Digital Divide is still to be explored more extensively.

Postcolonial technoscience

Anderson argues that ”a postcolonial perspective suggests fresh ways to study the changing political economies of capitalism and science, the mutual reorganization of the global and the local, the increasing transnational traffic of people, practices, technologies, and contemporary contests over ’intellectual property’. The term ’postcolonial’ thus refers both to new configurations of technoscience and to the critical modes of analysis that identify them” (Anderson 2002, p. 643). The development of postcolonial technoscience includes the study of how technologies travel, how ideas about difference act on technoscientific practice as well as a focus on the commercialisation of science and intellectual property. The implosion of the two - postcolonial and technoscience - will not only show how Western technologies travel outside the West. It will also destabilise Western technoscience at home (op.cit.).

Who is actually postcolonial, and what does it really mean in relation to the past? In her paper “Globalization meets Frankenstein? Reflections on Terrorism, Nuclearity and Global Technopolitical Discourse”, Hecht (2003) elaborates on the ’post-ness’ of the ‘post Cold War’ and the ’post-colonial’. “The infrastructures and discourses of Cold War technopolitics continue to shape the parameters of global and local action, just as the infrastructures and discourses of colonialism do. We ignore those roots – and the contradictions they produce – at our peril” (Hecht 2003, p. 7). In addition, Morley and Robins (1995) argue that if the ”post-ness” builds on a sense of dislocation, hybridity or displacement, these senses are new only to Europeans and white North Americans. For the colonised people in the world, the experience of fragmented realities is not new. With these perspectives, the postcolonial should be interpreted rather as a gradual change with many similarities with the past, than as the rupture that it is often argued to be. The similar could be said about ICTs, which in many ways as mentioned are ” travelling on old social relations”.

The images that reveal themselves on the internet and web sites are important, as the internet is an important arena of negotiation of the ”global identity crisis” that globalisation has brought with it (Fürsich & Robins 2002, p. 204). With reference to the local and contextual understanding of the world, the nature of the internet is not just a global blanket spread over us all, but a myriad of localities that are no longer entirely geographically local. Still, they are local, which is especially understood when the language is not English, but obviously, English, too, is local. The content of each web page is not of universal interest, but of interest to a specific group of people.

Global technopolitical discourses

Insights into the context dependence of technological applications are increasingly recognised in theory and in policy, but it is still often overlooked in practical applications. The reason is a lack of recognition that the actual technology is not a neutral device allowing the user to choose his or her own way of using it according to the local understandings. The actual difference in local understanding and preconditions is also often underestimated. The colonial time has indeed spread European ways of doing things, but these ways have also been adjusted to the local context. In Suchman’s (2002) account, the perspective from locations outside the West magnifies the situatedness and the fluidity of technologies, although these are actual within the western context as well.

Paraphrasing Donna Haraway, Suchman (2002) argues that the design from nowhere is a result of the idea that technical systems can be constructed with a minimal cultural connection ”as commodities that can be stabilized and cut loose from the sites of their production long enough to be exported en masse to the sites of their use” (p. 140). Suchman (2002) calls this phenomenon ”the fallacy of the empty vessel”; ”mistaking one’s own ignorance of what exists elsewhere – knowledges, information systems, practices – for their absence” (p. 140).

To complicate the discussion further, Suchman problematizes the distinction between designer and user, pointing both to the designers as users of their own products, and to the invisible design-in-use often taking place without rigorous documentation. ”Even to keep things going on ’in the same way’ in practice requires continuous, mundane forms of active appropriation and adaptation of available resources – discursive and material – to the circumstances at hand” (Suchman, 2002, p. 143).

Although local understandings and practices will influence the appropriation of ICTs in the postcolonial in different and unpredictable ways, the position of ”having never as much” (Redfield, 2002, p. 810) will for a long time be the position from which people in the low income countries will receive ICTs. Redfield showed what reactions and tensions this position may create. Are ICTs yet another way of imposing control, of deciding what is important to know and to have, of showing who is in charge of globalisation? Are they yet another demand on transfer from national to private and commercialisation of common goods? A tool ”to make the poor dream the same dreams as the rich” (Martín-Barbero 1993: 165)?