The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Recolonisation of Africa

The Coloniality of Data

Everisto Benyera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000396768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that the fourth industrial revolution, the process of accelerated automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices via digital technology, will serve to further marginalise Africa within the international community.

In this book, the author argues that the looting of Africa that started with human capital and then natural resources, now continues unabated via data and digital resources looting. Developing on the notion of "Coloniality of Data", the fourth industrial revolution is postulated as the final phase which will conclude Africa's peregrination towards recolonisation. Global cartels, networks of coloniality, and tech multinational corporations have turned big data into capital, which is largely unregulated or poorly regulated in Africa as the continent lacks the strong institutions necessary to regulate the mining of data. Written from a decolonial perspective, this book employs three analytical pillars of coloniality of power, knowledge and being.

Highlighting the crippling continuation of asymmetrical global power relations, this book will be an important read for researchers of African studies, politics and international political economy.

The Open Access version of this book, available at

http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003157731, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

1Data coloniality

A decolonial perspective of Africa and the 4IR

Introduction

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)¹ will not positively change the fate of Africa and Africans for various reasons outlined in this book. A key factor is that courtesy of the merging of nanotechnology, robotics, networked digital computation, biotechnology, and information and communications technology (ICT), new forms of humanity now exist, and these humanities occupy positions above the (formerly) colonised people on the ontological hierarchy. The 4IR must not be misconstrued as Africa’s moment to “develop”, that is, catch-up with the “developed” world. While post-anthropocentrism is fast emerging and consolidating, there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that Africa will remain on the darker side of the 4IR, accruing the same net negative impact as was the case with the past three industrial revolutions. The key issue addressed in this book is how and why Africa and other parts of the (formerly) colonised world will accrue minimum benefits and suffer maximum consequences in the 4IR. That Africa developed the Global West is indisputable, the question is, why is Africa not developing itself?

The Global North owes its affluent standards of life largely to the slave trade, colonialism, and other iniquitous vices perpetrated upon Africa and other parts of the (formerly) colonised world. Africa, especially Africa south of the equator, underwrote the economies of what became the “developed” nations. “Developed” nations of Europe and North America have a huge incentive in keeping Africa in the same conditions of material and epistemological retardation and impoverishment, lack of human rights and dignity; summed up as coloniality because if Africa does things differently, the whole global economy, especially that of Euro-North America will suffer drastically. Stated differently, the affluence of the Global North is funded by the poverty of the Global South. Global power institutions such as ideologies and all the “knowledge” that is taught in pre-schools, school, and universities are meant to keep Africa in the same conditions, so that those that are benefiting will continue to benefit.

One way that the world capitalist system has been maintained is by blaming Africans for their conditions. This tactic is efficacious in keeping Africans away from looking at and trying to solve their real problems and instead keeping them preoccupied with self-blame, self-hate, and intra-fighting. Africa today is impoverished, and lacks human rights, not because of the faults of Africans, but because of the effectiveness of four classes of European men who forerun colonialism. European traders, hunters, missionaries, and explorers laid a solid foundation for Euro-North American modernity, colonialism, and now coloniality. These traders, hunters, missionaries, and explorers who came to Africa and became part of the colonial project are still useful in maintaining the colonial asymmetrical relationship with Africa more than 50 years after the end of official colonialism.

There is a matter of life and death incentive for Western Europe, North America, China, and other countries benefiting from and looting Africa to keep Africa in its present state of appearing to be benefiting from these countries through aid and foreign direct investment, yet the opposite is the true. Africa supplies the world with the bulk of its raw materials almost for free thereby funding the luxurious lives of those in the so-called developed countries. They are developed because they are pilfering Africa and affording those lives because of their ability to keep Africa as a source of their material needs. If Africa is to do something differently such as to unite and form one currency, one central bank, have a unified foreign policy, the result will be that the standards of living in the so-called developed countries will fall because the resources that underwrite their high standard of life will no longer be available at the same prices. This necessitates the subjugation of Africa which I argue in this book will continue into the 4IR.

The subjugation of Africa is maintained through various ways such as the production and deployment of Western knowledges and ways of knowing in Africa. When Africa’s brightest intellectuals are given scholarships and fellowships to go and study in the Global North, the rationale will be for them to learn predominantly Western ways of managing Africa and Africans so that Africa remains as a source of cheap raw materials, inter alia, for the Global North. Not only would Africa have been deprived of its brightest minds, but also these brightest minds will come back and act as native informants and informers, actively leading their own people astray and in the process keeping Africa subjugated and impoverished. Having been schooled in the Global North and on Western epistemologies, these African intellectuals will look at Africa from a Western perspective and will act as deployees of the Global North in the Global South. Together with other forms of Western “benevolences” such as aid, development, and foreign direct investment, the Global South is locked in a perpetual cycle of hope which emanated from one of the greatest myths in the history of politics, decolonisation. The 4IR is yet another point in the Global South’s cycle of hope of autonomy. The pair of decolonisation and development locked the Global South in perpetual hope, depositing their dark side there, while benefiting the Global North.

Decoloniality: Affirming a concept

The notion of coloniality denotes the continued asymmetrical power relations between the (former) colonisers and their (former) colonised. From its Latin American origins, the term “coloniality” has found much favour and usage in Africa, especially among African scholars (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013a, 2013b, 2016; Mpofu, 2014, 2017a; Nimako, 2015b; Sithole, 2016b, 2016a; Tafira and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2017; Benyera, 2018d, 2020a; Benyera, Mtapuri, and Nhemachena, 2018; Jazbhay, 2019). In this chapter, the notion of coloniality is deployed in the field of data, data harvesting, and broader datafication, to denote the continued asymmetrical and abusive extraction of Africa’s technology-based resources by predominantly Euro-North American multinational corporations and their networks. Other networks from Asia are also active and these include those from China and Japan, South Korea, and other Asian Tigers such as Samsung, Huawei, Baidu, Toyota, Sony, Panasonic, China Mobile, Tencent, Alibaba, and other tech companies.

Decoloniality denotes the continued asymmetrical power between the (former) colonisers and (former) colonised after the end of official colonialism. There are systems, norms, and structures that have maintained the colonial status quo and three of these were synthesised as power, knowledge, and being. Coined and developed by Anibal Quijano, coloniality of power denotes the structures of power, control, and hegemony which emerged from Euro-North American modernity to colonialism and started with the Spanish conquest of al Andalucía and the “discovery” of the Americans (Quijano 2000). These systems, mechanisms, institutions, and legacies of colonialism which remain highly efficacious against the former colonisers and in favour of the (former) colonised include debt servitude, misaligned economies, ungovernable colonial states, and extroverted economies which are too integrated into those of the (former) colonisers. The (former) colonisers continue to reap the benefits of their “colonial investments” while the (former) colonised continue to suffer the consequences of being first enslaved and then colonised.

The impoverished state of Europeans before their conquest of the Americans and the Iberian peninsula, their colonisation of Africa, Latin America, and Asia was well captured by Simon Martinot who wrote,

In the time prior to the conquest, Europe was a poor, rural peninsula on the western edge of Asia, with little of value to offer the world economy. At the centre of the world economy, between India and Baghdad, Europeans found themselves hopelessly outcompeted, or ignored. The only means they were able to imagine to gain access to this world economy was conquest: the crusades of the middle ages, the 15th century slave trade from west Africa, the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain, and the conquest of the Americas in the 16th. The project to enslave the American peoples enters the thinking of Columbus on his first voyage among the islands of the Caribbean.

(Martinot, 2016, p. 2)

Euro-North American modernity is anchored in the year 1614 when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas and opened that part of the world to European epistemicides, genocides, enslavement and colonialism. An important year in the development of coloniality is the year 1700 which marked the consolidation of the Atlantic economy, the intensification, commercialisation, and commodification of slaves, especially in the English colonies of North America and Africa (Martinot 2016, p. 2). During the year 1700 the Dutch and English also took full control of the shipping trade routes to the east. The year 1700 is a cardinal moment in Africa’s history because it impoverished Africa through the enslaving of its most economically productive and reproductive citizens, in the process created unprecedented wealth for Euro-North America. This period also marked the final seizure and transformation of land in Africa, the Americas and India from being communal assets into European private property with a market value. It must also be noted that by 1900 the indigenous populations of the colonised places of Mexico and Peru and the Caribbean and other parts of Latin America were decimated and replaced by African slaves. These events marked the shifting of the global power from the Orient and towards Europe, thereby inaugurating Europe as the centre of the world and the rest as the periphery. This was achieved through sheer power, brutality, genocide, plunder, and barbaric warfare.

Coloniality of power is efficacious in understanding how colonialism was inscribed into the body and mind of the (formerly) colonised. A key aspect of coloniality of power is the use of a hegemony to establish and maintain colonial relations. Colonial inventions such as ethnicity, national identity, the state and concomitant hierarchical sub-colonies such as sexism, racism are all constituted by and constitutive of coloniality in general and specifically coloniality of power, where every aspect of life is hierarchised, racialised and follows the prescript of Euro-North American morality and normative order. Coloniality of power explains the seemingly puzzling phenomenon of (former) colonisers’ self-appointed entitlement to African natural resources, bodies, and public assets.

Geographically, the notorious region which the empire predominantly occupies is known as Euro-North America and is relatively small. It comprises not all of the Americas and not all of Europe. The empire sits in the United States of America, Canada, and Europe excluding Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. This region is the primary focus of this book as this region tries to recolonise Africa as a survival tactic for the many challenges it is facing at home. These manifold challenges include the American sub-prime lending rate (Moyo, 2009; Russell Sage Foundation and Jung, 2016), other various economic crises (Bond, Chitonge and Hopfmann, 2006; Sutcliffe et al., 2010; Bond, 2011; Xaba, 2011; Chatterjee Partha, 2012), and the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic (Filatov et al., 2020; Peeri et al., 2020; Sahin et al., 2020; Tanne et al., 2020; Millán-Oñate et al., 2021); Euro-North America is obviously turning to its trusted strategy, which is to (re)colonise Africa.

According to Martinot, the coloniality of power operates through a matrix of control which operates through the control of hegemony, authority, labour, sexuality, subjective, and most importantly African resources which include but not limited to big data (Martinot, 2016).

Multinational corporations, also referred to as transnational corporations, operate in many countries, but have one predominant centre of power, that is, the Global North.

But the curious thing about these, so-called, “multinational corporations” is the fact that almost all of them are controlled by the capitalist-imperialists of one or another single country. Thus, we have American MNCs, such as IBM, Microsoft or GM; Japanese MNCs such as Toyota and Sony; British MNCs such as BP; and so forth. All multinational corporations are multinational in their sphere of operation, but very few are “multinational” with respect to the bourgeoisie that controls them. This is a very important distinction to keep in mind.

(Baran, 2007, p. 5)

The multi in multinational corporations denotes their operations and not beneficiaries. MNCs have evolved to become very important tools of both diplomacy and foreign policies of their home countries. The French petroleum MNC Total was at the forefront of supporting the “democratisation” of Libya, with the resultant assassination of its sitting President Colonel Gadhafi, and rendering of the once thriving country into a failed state. MNCs work in tandem with their home countries from where they get political support and protection as well as financial support when needed. Data is no longer just a tool of informed policy decisions, but the latest weapon of mass destruction – a smart weapon to maintain the asymmetrical power relations between the Global North and the Global South.

Coloniality of data

Coloniality of data refers to the asymmetrical power relations resultant from the (ab)use of data generated from the various online platforms. In the coloniality of data, data is weaponised and used to initiate, maintain, routinise, and normalise asymmetrical power relations between the (former) colonisers and their agents and the (former) colonised. As a nefarious (mal)practice, it involves the broader data economy’s constituent sectors such as, but not limited to, data mining (Nhemachena, Mlambo and Kaundjua, 2016; Staunton and Moodley, 2016), data farming (Horne and Meyer, 2005, 2010; Wolfert et al., 2017), data harvesting (Richmond, Kappler and Björkdahl, 2015; Nhemachena, Mlambo and Kaundjua, 2016; Thatcher, O’Sullivan and Mahmoudi, 2016), data colonialism (Thatcher, O’Sullivan and Mahmoudi, 2016; Couldry and U. Mejias, 2019; Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, 2019; Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejias, 2019; Halkort, 2019; Hicks, 2019; Couldry and Mejias, 2020; Mejias and Couldry, 2020; van der Spuy, 2020), and data/digital slavery (Chisnall, 2020).

Data coloniality is the control over the flow of information and how it is transmitted. It is concerned with the acquisition of data, just like colonialism was concerned with the acquisition of both physical territory and epistemic territory and resources from which economic value is then extracted. The extraction, processing, and redeployment of data ensures the asymmetrical power relations and injustices which s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Data coloniality: A decolonial perspective of Africa and the 4IR
• 2 Historicising Africa’s subjugation
• 3 Contextualising the colonial project in Africa
• 4 Data mining, harvesting, and datafication
• 5 Networks, big data, and data coloniality: Whither Africa’s sovereignty?
• 6 The 4IR as the mother of all destructions and accumulations
• 7 Mapping Africa’s destiny in the fourth industrial revolution
• 8 Africa’s eunuch condition and the omnipresent footprints of the four industrial revolutions
• Index