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This paper locates the challenges and opportunities brought by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ideas and practices of sovereignty in Africa in the long history of the struggles individuals, social movements, and governments in Africa have endured to mediate between indigenous and exogenous definitions of statehood and citizenship. While acknowledging and examining some of the transformative potentials of AI, it seeks to resist the tendency to fall for hyped narrations of technological prowess and disruptiveness, asking instead how specific artefacts intersect with localised trajectories of control, resistance, and liberation. In does so in two ways. First, it opposes a definition of sovereignty as emulation of the ideal-type Westphalian states with traditions of flexible sovereignty that characterized pre-colonial Africa. Second, it analyses a specific case in which these two conceptions clashed, and what it is possible to learn from this tension. The definition of sovereignty that has prevailed after independence has followed what Achille Mbembe provocatively referred to as the “fetishization” of the concept of nation-state. African governments “borrowed concepts from the Western lexicon such as “national interest”, “risks”, “threats” or “national security” [which] refer to a philosophy of movement and a philosophy of space entirely predicated on the existence of an enemy in a world of hostility” disregarding Africa’s “long held traditions of flexible, networked sovereignty” (Mbembe, 2017). But, following Mbembe, it is by reconnecting with the epistemic traditions that characterized pre-colonial Africa (Mbembe, 2020) that it becomes possible to experiment with new forms of resistance and value making that seem more attuned to some of the realities brought by digital technologies, and Artificial Intelligence more specifically. As he explained, “precolonial Africa might not have been a borderless world. But where they existed borders were always porous and permeable. [...] Networks, flows and crossroads were more important than borders. What mattered the most was the extent to which flows intersected with other flows” (Mbembe, 2017). |
