Achille Mbembe keynote @ Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa conference, September 2, 2017

Achille Mbembe is a Research Professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of many books on history, politics and critical theory. His work has been translated in various languages, including English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. His latest book, Politiques de l'inimitié, was published in 2016. Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa was a conference hosted by the Critical Technical Practice laboratory at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute in Funchal, Portugal. "The conference brings scholars, technologists, and cultural producers together on the island of Madeira: a European territory off the coast of Africa, a historical site of mutual entanglement between the Atlantic continents, and a point of departure for European expansion. Here we’ll strategize ways to revisit, reframe, and recode the future of technology on and for both continents. What can African theorists, technologists, and cultural producers do to generate alternatives to the influx of neocolonial narratives of tech entrepreneurship? What are key epistemologies and ways of being which are endemic in Africa that should be offered to the world through new systems and processes? How can an African information economy avoid the dynamics of the resource curse, where connectivity is extractive and exercised upon African citizens rather than by and through them? What can Western technologists do differently, and what are the spaces for collaboration? This conference aims to reinvestigate these relationships and more in order to engender dialog between African and Western audiences and participants, who should leave Madeira equipped with new strategies and new collaborative partnerships."