Movement-in-the-Making: Tech engagements and the acclaimed ‘digital youth’ of Lomé’s digital transformation

This research looks at how a certain type of ‘maker movement’ takes shape in the city of Lomé, Togo, as it is understood, interpreted and practised by its acclaimed 'digital youth.' In Togo, where the majority of the population of 8.8 million is 35 years old and below, a youth-led digital ecosystem is seen as the foundation for transforming Lomé into the coveted digital-logistics hub of West Africa. In a move to individualize risk typical of neoliberal approaches to development (Ferguson 2009), digital app development, start-ups, co-working spaces and incubators, as well as Fab Labs and makerspaces, are seen as welcome opportunities and responsibilities to be taken up by what the state refers to as ‘the digital youth’ (la jeunesse numérique) who are instrumentalized to further the country’s digital strategy.

As we bear witness to the lived experiences of digital youth, moving from universities to makerspaces, from repair apprenticeships to coding workshops, we see how they are far from the homogenous bloc that the state has shaped and reified in abstraction. Through the makerspace founders, university students, participants, children, interns and mobile phone repair apprentices of Lomé, we see the digital youth’s diversified dreams and aspirations that, while sometimes congruent with state blueprints, are in and of themselves their driving forces for action. While Lomé’s makerspaces have established their presence in the global Maker Movement, primarily through prototypes such as the e-waste 3D printer W.Afate, we see how Lomé’s makers critique and challenge media narratives and the Euro-American Maker Movement through their already-existing practices in the urban landscape, and in their making and remaking of urban infrastructures and materialities. Taking the ‘absence’ of the Maker Movement in Lomé as a starting point, I seek to answer: How is Lomé’s maker movement assembled, otherwise? How do Lomé’s acclaimed ‘digital youth’ make and remake themselves, their city, and their futures, as they engage with present materials and digital infrastructures within the particular socio-politico-economic context of Lomé’s digital transformation?

I address these questions in the dissertation by building upon the archives of feminist new materialisms and African philosophies, and developing the concept of ‘tech engagements’ as embodied, agentive and ethico-political practices of accessing and making futures concrete through intra-actions with present materials. Through the ideological and vernacular forms of hacking, dreaming, making, bricolage, prototyping, repairing and democratizing technology, I explore how these engagements foster and shape the dreams and aspirations of digital youth, as well as their relationships with materials, with themselves, and with other ‘makers’ in and of the city in confronting the socio-political milieu they find themselves in. By taking these concepts and practices as they exist in the urban landscapes of Lomé, I attempt to de-center and decolonize these foundational concepts of the Maker Movement and academic discourse (Wiredu 2002), and explore ethnography’s affordance for epistemic resistance by putting the words and lived experiences of interlocutors, together with the works of scholars in the region, as central to co-producing knowledge and critique.