Discoverability and
Digital Colonialism
Firoze Manji
Acknowledgement: research assistance by ThoughtWorks ™
Elements of
disccoverability
 Technical
 Producer / author determined
 Political bias / digital colonialism
 Infrastructural
Historical context
 Mobilisations in 1950s
 Rise of independence movements
 Social contract
 Achievements
 Reversals
 Privatization of the commons
 Concentration and centralisation of capital
Set the context for
 Microtechnological revolution
 Bio-technological revolution
 Nano-technological revolution
 Effective re-appropriation of destiny of African
people (landgrabs, economic control, resource
extration, ‘repatriation’ of profits, tax evasion etc
Don’t Africans produce
knowledge?
Lack of content from
Africa?
 Economic Commission for Africa survey conducted
in 1999 : Africa generates only around 0.4 percent
(1:250) of global content.
 Excluding South Africa, the rest of Africa generates
a mere 0.02 percent (1:5000)!

http://213.55.79.31/adf/adf99/codipap3.htm
Articles in Wikipedia
 The whole continent of Africa contains only
about 2.6% of the world’s geo-tagged
Wikipedia articles despite having 14% of the
world’s population and 20% of the world’s
land.

http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/#the-geographically-uneven-coverage-of-wikipedia
Geographically reference
article in Wikipedia
Geotagged article in
English on Wikipedia
Educator vs Native
 Academic and scientific discourse tends to be from a
paternalistic / uninformed / and completely
‘educator v. native’.
(http://aidnography.blogspot.in/2012/11/olpc-inethiopia-thin-line-between.html)
 For no other continent is there so much written
about it by outsiders
Spatial Solipsism
 “This uneven distribution of knowledge carries with it
the danger of spatial solipsism for the people who live
inside one of Wikipedia’s focal regions. It also strongly
underrepresents regions such as the Middle East and
North Africa as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. In the global
context of today’s digital knowledge economies, these
digital absences are likely to have very material effects
and consequences.”

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2014/02/there-are-more-wikipedia-articlesabout-one-part-world-rest-it-combined/8486/
 (Solipsism = belief in self as only reality – polite term for
eurocentrism)
Access and bias
 Internet allows those with time and money and easy
access to the internet to control large proportion of
discourse
Cultural homogenization
 Since it is cheaper to send a data package from the
North to the South than vice versa, and since access
is greater in the North (Africa 13%, or 3% excluding
the big ones), there is structural built in dominance
of information coming from the North.
Google and silences on
Africa
Languages
 Africa has more than 800 languages spoken
amongst its various ethnic groups. However, the
Internet is an ‘English’ based medium which affects
the usability and content creation thereon. A vast
majority of programs, applications and services
continue to be provided in English thereby denying
access to large swathes of the population and
exacerbating the digital divide.
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-colonial/2031
What language?
Not ours!
Languages
Google search by language
Academic Knowledge and
Publishers
Location of academic
knowledge
User generated content on
Google
News travels
Infrastructure
Internet backbones
Back bones
onsdag 5 juni 13
Internet penetration
Penetration
Top Level Domains
 Africa has more countries than
any other continent, but only
10 of the ccTLDs have
functional registries within the
African countries they belong
to.
Most cloud services and data
storage sites are outside Africa
Data Centres in Africa
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Colocation of Data Centres
Coloca on Data Centers
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1200
1000
800
600
400
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Physical location of data
centers around the world
Google’s data centers, 2008
Microsoft Azure Data
Centers
Population size: no of
developers
Lack of employment
opportunity in ICT sector
Software import / lack of
production of software
 Nigeria imports 90% of all software used in the
country. The local production of software is reduced
to add-ons or extensions creation for mainstream
packaged software.
Patent applications filed in
Africa
 Only around 10% of applications for the registration
of intellectual property (IP) rights in Africa are
made by African citizens or residents.
 “Both anecdotal accounts by African IP agents and
WIPO statistics on IP activity in Africa show that
more than 90% of applications for registration of IP
rights in Africa are by foreign IP applicants”
http://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2013/digital-colonialism
Arm-twisting
 Microsoft has apparently attempted to arm-twist African
governments on policy issues repeatedly – for instance by
threatening to withdraw funding to Kenyan government
programs in view of its support of free software (OOXML), by
hiring government officials and their relatives as in Namibia
and Nigeria.
 Lobbying with governments to ensure use of Microsoft
products including by tying governments into long term
licensing agreements.
 Also see South Africa’s clamp down on open source in
education.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/144898/article.html/ https://netzpolitik.org/2009/misconceptions-and-failed-attempts-microsofts-strategy-for-africa/
https://netzpolitik.org/2009/misconceptions-and-failed-attempts-microsofts-strategy-for-africa/ http://www.webaddict.co.za/2013/10/09/south-africaeducation-department-bans-open-source-software/ http://techrights.org/2009/05/12/south-african-schools-windows/ and
http://techrights.org/2009/05/10/lobbyists-bribes-vs-free-sw/
Thank you
Firoze Manji
fmanji@mac.com
firoze.manji@codesria.org
Thinking about the future
Each generation must discover its mission,
fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.
Frantz Fanon
Thinking about the future
If you don't change direction, you will end
up exactly where you are heading.
Lao Tzu
Thinking about the future
If you don’t know where you are going, any
direction will do.
Anon
Thinking about the future
The future belongs to those who give the next
generation reason to hope.
Teillard de Chardin
The challenge of thinking
about the future
 Thinking outside the box
Recognizing that we are in a box, we are imprisoned
by our past.
 Cognitive hindsight bias
Our capacity to imagine the future is limited by our
knowledge of the present / past.
The task
 Imagine you are meeting 20 years from now.
Discuss what you achieved and how you got there.
 Imagine you are able to see your own funeral. What
would you like people to say about what you
achieved or made happen.