In African Motors, Joshua Grace examines how Tanzanian drivers, mechanics, and passengers reconstituted the automobile into a uniquely African form between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories, extensive archival research, and his ethnographic fieldwork as an apprentice in Dar es Salaam's network of garages, Grace counters the pervasive narratives that Africa is incompatible with technology and that the African use of cars is merely an appropriation of technology created elsewhere. Although automobiles were invented in Europe and introduced as part of colonial rule, Grace shows how Tanzanians transformed them, increasingly associating their own car use with maendeleo, the Kiswahili word for progress or development. Focusing on the formation of masculinities based in automotive cultures, Grace also outlines the process through which African men remade themselves and their communities by adapting technological objects and systems for local purposes. Ultimately, African Motors is an African-centered story of development featuring everyday examples of Africans forging both individual and collective cultures of social and technological wellbeing through movement, making, and repair.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction / Africa, Motors, and a History of Development
- One. Walking To The Car / A Popular History of Mobility and Infrastructure in Tanganyika, 1860s to 1960
- Two. Overhaul / Making Men and Cars in Repair Garages
- Three. The People’s Car of Dar es Salaam / Buses, Socialism, and Technological Citizenship
- Four. Oily Ujamaa / Petroleum, Rural Modernization, and “Effective Freedom” before and after the “OPEC Bombshell”
- Five. Motorized Domesticities / Car, Road, and Home in Independent Tanzania
- Conclusion / Motoring Out of Time: Tanzanian Automobility in Unsustainable Times
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Texte
Audio
Adobe DRM
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