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Reflections on the Roundtable:
Changing the Nature of the Dialogue?

Maliq Simone, Karin Santi

There has been a great deal of discussion about how information and communication technologies (ICTs) lessen the "distance" between different areas of the world, and how they can be used to make diverse peoples more aware and informed about each other. Knowledge and best practices can be shared, and such linkages can promote greater equality and justice. It is clear that access to knowledge is being substantially enhanced through the expanded use of information technologies.

It is however not as clear just what opportunity this really gives for African realities to affect "knowledge" about areas such as democracy and development, which is largely produced at some distance from those realities. Even within Africa, considerable gaps remain between official policy environments or structures of governance and the actual social practices used by citizens in the pursuit of survival and coherent lives.

Two decades of economic and political reform in Africa have restructured the formal domains of governance and economy. This has however not substantially diminished an overarching sense of crisis, social conflict and poverty.

"Development" is still commonly perceived as catching up by absorbing packages of lessons from outside.

The particular challenges that African societies have faced during the postcolonial period have prompted the elaboration of new public domains, economic practices, and survival strategies. Yet the extensive body of actual or potential knowledge generated from these realities has little impact on the dominant global discourse. Can electronic communication be used to change the nature of the dialogue rather than just replicate outside perceptions with local data? This is one of the fundamental issues the APIC/ECA roundtable was trying to explore.

The roundtable was clearly conceived as a pilot project. In other words, our intention was not to implement some definitive version or ideal use of ICTs as they concern Africa work. Rather, the roundtable reflected a decision to start somewhere and to actively construct a history of practice, knowing that there would many interruptions, silences, and problems from which there could be a lot to learn.

The emphasis is clearly on elaborating practices, rather than on exploring all the "windows" opened up by the technological parameters of ICTs. The expansion of such practices can however not be done in isolation from an appreciation of the technological potentials and limitations. There are many assumptions about practices that seem to stem almost automatically from these technological developments and that require testing in the field.

There has been a great deal of understandable excitement concerning the application of ICTs to restructuring relationships among actors and contexts within Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world. What has been largely been experienced as a distant, sometimes impenetrable continent can now be rendered more accessible and engaging. The direct application of African sentiment to the demands of the ever-increasing speeds of decision-making and deliberation, and a more direct representation of African realities--all seem promised by the current capacities of ICTs.

Implicit in these prospects is a sensibility that the political and economic problems confronted by African societies might be largely attributable to past limitations especially in the ways in which these societies communicated with the larger world. Thus, by more comprehensively incorporating African actors within diverse networks of global interaction, what are conventionally viewed as intractable problems of development may be more accurately framed as the by-products of societies being "out of the loop."

Herein lie the problems in much of the excitement about the applications of ICTs. Instead of viewing the technologies and the practices that they enable as supplements to the restructuring of internal and external political and economic relationships, the enthusiasm embodies an assumption that they are both the content and means of such restructuring itself. While many enthusiasts would quickly downplay such an assumption, the intensity of policy and programmatic concentration and investment in ICTs "for" Africa belies any quick dismissal of such an assumption.

After all, there is nearly universal exasperation with either the lack of salient development interventions, the persistence of various forms of "bad" behavior--i. e., corruption, authoritarianism, civil conflict--and the indifference of the "developed" world to the intensity of African marginalization. For each of these different assessments or political positions, ICTs provide prospects for sweeping transitions.

At best, ICTs provide the possibility for substantiating the right to communicate and thus to construct ways of being social that can radically change the means through which knowledge is produced. At worst, the present enthusiasm for their use barely conceals a reiteration of the colonial preoccupation with a civilizing mission. That is the assumption whereby an untamed Africa, essentially relegated to superfluous positions in the accumulation of resources, is nevertheless, instructed to orient its attention to Western mores as the road to the "good" life. If only the world could be in more direct and continuous communication with Africa, then Africa would be more properly "socialized" in doing the "right thing."

This picture is even more complicated than this albeit somewhat harsh depiction of the current importance of ICTs to development work. Africa has been a distant object, not so much in terms of its geographical horizon, but in terms of its significance for what are considered the really important issues and dimensions of modern life.

In conventional renderings, this distance results in Africa being cut-off from the important flows of resources and knowledge. Being cut-off, Africa then makes itself present in our lives primarily through the economic migrants and political refugees that show up on our shores and the vivid depictions of political machinations and civil conflict that show up on our televisions. Africa becomes a "playground" for all the illicit, untamable, and diseased bodies and sociality that provide the convenient benchmark for our terrors.

Yet Africa is there. It assumes a reality, and not just one reality. Then, by making Africa and Africans seemingly more proximate to the rest of the world via a broad range of ICT applications, what is to be expected from this enhanced proximity? The issue concerns not only what Africans will say, but also, the implications for a wide range of African actors assuming very diverse positions in speaking within a new "closeness."

The nature of ICTs theoretically accords Africans from different walks of life an equivalent ability to participate within communication networks without their speech being filtered by the rules or structures that otherwise govern public speech in specific societies. If there is access to a computer and connectivity, there is nothing to stop a peasant from communicating with whom ever she wants wherever she wants. While this may be theoretically true, we know that practically, with the given distribution of phone lines, computers, and other factors of accessibility, this opportunity remains more that of potential than reality. These constraints remain both economic and political, as authoritarian states still loom large over what particular citizens believe it is possible or not possible to do or say.

Important as these constraints are, they are not the most important story here. African societies faced the interdictions of a more powerful outside world and the fragmentation occasioned by how they were ruled by external powers. As such, they have long histories of using the modulations of communicative practices as a means of producing opportunities for livelihood in contexts where political and economic resources were limited.

In other words, intricate practices for handling "what gets said by whom and under what circumstances" made up critical domains for producing "real economies" in highly contested and often impoverished societies. The paths of communication--of who communicated to whom--constituted important vehicles to ensure that Africans from different walks of life not only paid attention to each other, but sought to establish some basis to operate in each other's lives. What ensued were highly intricate communicational webs that proved to be important circuits of economic accumulation and distribution capable of making up for some of the woeful deficiencies in the ways both public and private regimes ran economies.

This is not matter of making more visible the extent to which Africa is indeed far removed from the centers of power and authority. It is not a matter of showing the extent to which certain groups of Africans have virtually no opportunities to connect with the increasing number of institutions and mechanisms that incorporate African spaces within various development agendas, human rights machinery, or poverty reduction campaigns. Neither is it a matter of displaying, if not necessarily accounting for, the extent to which certain means through which livelihood is secured and social life reproduced may be incompatible with modern nodes and standards. Rather, in this interplay of closeness and distance occasioned by various instances of globalization, there are opportunities for those supposedly "left off the map" to navigate ways of being in the world that leave them neither marginal nor integrated.

ICTs represent an important means through which African actors, and Africa, are to be increasingly brought in to the "fold" of more globalized economic transactions and civil societies. However, the assumption tends to be that this incorporation will amplify the extent to which Africans are "just like the rest of us." But we also have to keep in mind that the extensiveness of global communications also amplifies--and seeks to amplify--distinctions and differences. This constitutes the elements through which new conjunctions and hybrids can be made, both as new objects for consumption and as new consuming subjects.

Thus, while ICTs hold out prospects for closer collaboration among actors in different contexts, there is also the prospect for greater dissociation. Faced with experiences, ways of speaking, and actors we find strange or who disrupt our sense of familiarity with them attained at distance, we often keep them "far away" the closer they come to us. In such a renewed distancing, people will not speak in terms of their experience but what they think that others will be willing to hear, and thus "dissociate" themselves from themselves.

We also can make the mistake of thinking that new, more direct forms of cooperation and knowledge production that diminish the importance of borders and mediating institutions inevitably advance the cause of political emancipation. But we must keep in mind that the expansion of economic capacity today increasingly thrives on circuits of mixture and movement and on the production of new territories and frontiers. It thrives not by leaving peoples or societies outside of some means of being "enjoined" to a larger world.

The expansion of capitalist economies operates through "differential inclusion", where the lives, and experiences of diverse people are incessantly being connected in different ways under highly flexible systems of control and production. For example, peoples and societies who may have little, nevertheless, can be quickly accessed, engaged and used as indicators of a more "authentic" or "exotic" world--one with singular capacities and features that can become components of some form of the increasingly immaterial nature of global capital. Africa--its purported anarchy, invisible spirit world geographies, buoyant cities, and dynamic fashions--is increasingly something sexy and important.

Rather than viewing Africa as some marginality or distance that has to be bridged, we have to consider the various means through which it is already a highly visible present. It may be possible to demonstrate, through inventories of economic transactions and flows, that the continent is the least integrated within proliferating and heterogeneous economic networks at various scales. Yet, it is also crucial to consider the mechanisms through which Africa's intensified incorporation within these economies is taking place. In other words, if a "decision" has been made to accelerate the process of integrating Africa into the world economy, what form will this integration take?

Economic expansion requires both the increasingly "smooth" and friction-free" spaces of uninterrupted capital flows, homogenized consumption patterns, global civilities and the proliferation of local differences, capacities, and styles. This is key both as factors in re- calculating the costs of production and feeding the expanding production of immaterial "goods" and services.

What are the different positions different African actors, societies and processes assume in this global economy? Just as we assume Africans to be marginal actors in need of coming out of the "cold", we also have to assume that they may be the predominant actors within different versions of time and space. Because it is precisely these "Other" versions that increasingly become the "fodder" for the ongoing elaboration of global-level economy and rule. While these may be somewhat abstract considerations, they are crucial to the overall project of conceptualizing new judicious and empowering practices of the use of ICTs, either within Africa or between Africa and the rest of the world. Of course, progressive actors have to take their "openings' where they can.

The values of the dialogues

These discussions on economy and development, democracy and human rights, peace and security may not break any new conceptual ground. Rather, they reflect a broad canvass of ideas and sentiments, and they demonstrate the degree to which reflections on these issues are full of contestation and divergent approaches. Instead of presenting a "smooth" distillation of the key arguments and points of view, something else is allowed to run through this representation of the dialogues. These interchanges do not move toward consensus or build-up an ever more proficient edifice of rationality. Rather, they are full of "stops and starts", awkward articulations, "knee-jerk" reactions, as well as solid efforts in presenting sensible depictions and arguments.

These awkward interchanges, as well as the prolonged silences that run through the dialogues and which are necessarily suppressed in a publication of this kind are as important in emerging projects and practices of electronic conferencing as are elegant efforts at making cases. For what this medium of interchange amplifies, is that all of us are something more than calculating individuals, representatives of institutions and civil societies, or members of specific religious, national or ethnic communities. We are also beings who don not fit into nor represent communities with their collective stories, and we are also beings, which are not simply persons who carve out a sense of individuality through more or less rational interactions.

If this is a medium without a necessarily identifiable grounding and place, then we who participate in it are not necessarily obligated or most usefully conversant with each other on the basis of having to represent or speak from a specific platform. Electronic dialogue is distinctive not as a more proficient aid to the ways in which we have been conversing in the past. Rather, it is a means to make new kinds of actors. Thus, these dialogues should be read not only to learn something about the topics at hand, but, rather to think through what will be an arduous but exciting process of constituting nothing less than, in this instance, new ways of being African.

It is important to progressively dispense with the assumption that such dialogues can produce solutions, consensus or better understandings. While these are certainly worthwhile prospects, they do not summarize or exhaust the potentials of these electronic encounters. For the desire to keep speaking and to keep "encountering" is not fulfilled in such resolutions. Rather, the desire to keep engaged is located in the process of keeping things open and in producing new openings, with surprise turns and unexpected events.

In this regard, such encounters are also about arguments without an end, which refuse to be "wrapped up." It is the disputes themselves which often keep the interaction going, that keep people involved in them, and that maintains a sense that no one kind of actor, nor any kind of majority of them, have either the right or capacity to declare anything resolved.

It is vital that the ongoing processes of experimenting with ICTs and evolving new communication practices not simply reiterate the predominance of a rationalist morality through which participants all come to make a "right choice." What needs to be acknowledged is that distinct communities live through various ways of understanding and talking about their lived realities. The task is not to reduce these differences to some kind of common denominator. Instead, the task is to promote interaction among them so that the scope of their affects can circumvent the specific identities and places to which they have either been attributed or appropriated.

This interaction must go beyond "affirmative action", i. e. giving groups and communities an equal shot at "giving it their best shot." It must open up opportunities for participants to "try on" different ways of making themselves known, for finding different vehicles for inserting their experiences into larger domains- and to do this with the cooperation of unfamiliar others. When a community "comes to the stage" to make itself known, it does so not by claiming to be "special" or "extraordinary"- and therefore capable of being dismissed or rendered completely strange. They do it in the name of a specific way of being ordinary; i. e, something that allows them to stand out, but in a way that is not reducible to the social identification of an identifiable group.

The "problem" of the problems discussed in this dialogue is perhaps that it is only the existence of problems that brings these participants together in the first place. Even if the "problem of Africa" becomes an arena for participants to vent feelings that have little to do with the problems at hand or to simply display knowledge and other facilities, the "problem" still remains the primary organizing feature. If the "need" for the problem is to be displaced, then space for a broader range of desires and aspirations has to be made available.

This space is available only through an accruing process where many different "affects" are being created--i. e. participant actions operating on participant actions. In other words, where people are convinced that their capacities are being enhanced in the ongoing dialogue. What we see in this book is just how closed off discussions about Africa conventionally are from such prospects. There remains a strong need to reign in the possible implications of an "affecting" dialogue--one which would reorient participants to each other and allow something else to take place besides the well-worn invocations that usually accompany discussion of issues such as development and democracy.

Nevertheless, these dialogues do demonstrate a push toward something in the making. They reflect some tentative momentum toward creating a form of interchange that allows a highly disparate group of participants to feel the impact of each other's situation and experience. In this way, talk about democracy in Africa tentatively pushes toward exemplifying democracy. For what shapes and holds individuals and groups together as "citizens" and peoples are not specific contracts or agreements. Rather, it rests with the very process of them "calling something into being" through their inquiries, autonomous responses, mutual consultations, provocations, and experimentation- all practices applied to changing the ways in which people and their experiences are accorded value and significance.