A groundbreaking investigation of Western conceptions of Africa.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is upending life, work, and play as we know it, and it's only just getting started. The rise of AI is a milestone on par with the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, and the creation of the internet. In short, AI is going to change everything. For some, that's an exciting prospect. For others, it's terrifying. However you feel about AI, there's no escaping it, whether you're in a global metropolis or a farmer in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Dr Mark Nasila has been watching AI's ascent for over a decade, studying its effects on everything from agriculture and aviation to healthcare, education, entertainment, crime prevention, energy management, policy creation, finance, and anything in between, and applying them to his role at one of South Africa's most successful financial institutions, First National Bank, a division of FirstRand Group. African Artificial Intelligence is a comprehensive and fascinating journey, tracing the rise of AI and its evolution into the emerging technology underpinning all others – from connected devices and smart chatbots to the metaverse. Mark combines unexpected use cases and tales of cutting-edge innovation with a unique and potent argument: harnessing AI to solve Africa's problems requires embracing it from an African perspective. African nations can't afford to simply import AI solutions from afar. Instead, Mark contends, they need to rework, remix, and refine AI so it's able to meet uniquely African challenges in uniquely African ways, and to take advantage of the once-in-a-generation opportunity AI represents for every industry, sector, and person, everywhere.

AI in and for Africa: A Humanistic Perspective explores the convoluted intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) with Africa’s unique socio-economic realities. This book is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive overview of how AI is currently being deployed on the African continent. Given the existence of significant disparities in Africa related to gender, race, labour, and power, the book argues that the continent requires different AI solutions to its problems, ones that are not founded on technological determinism or exclusively on the adoption of Eurocentric or Western-centric worldviews. It embraces a decolonial approach to exploring and addressing issues such as AI’s diversity crisis, the absence of ethical policies around AI that are tailor-made for Africa, the ever-widening digital divide, and the ongoing practice of dismissing African knowledge systems in the contexts of AI research and education. Although the book suggests a number of humanistic strategies with the goal of ensuring that Africa does not appropriate AI in a manner that is skewed in favour of a privileged few, it does not support the notion that the continent should simply opt for a "one-size-fits-all" solution either. Rather, in light of Africa’s rich diversity, the book embraces the need for plurality within different regions’ AI ecosystems. The book advocates that Africa-inclusive AI policies incorporate a relational ethics of care which explicitly addresses how Africa’s unique landscape is entwined in an AI ecosystem. The book also works to provide actionable AI tenets that can be incorporated into policy documents that suit Africa’s needs. This book will be of great interest to researchers, students, and readers who wish to critically appraise the different facets of AI in the context of Africa, across many areas that run the gamut from education, gender studies, and linguistics to agriculture, data science, and economics. This book is of special appeal to scholars in disciplines including anthropology, computer science, philosophy, and sociology, to name a few.

This open access book contributes to the discourse of Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) from an African perspective. It is a unique collection that brings together prominent AI scholars to discuss AI ethics from theoretical and practical African perspectives and makes a case for African values, interests, expectations and principles to underpin the design, development and deployment (DDD) of AI in Africa. The book is a first in that it pays attention to the socio-cultural contexts of Responsible AI that is sensitive to African cultures and societies. It makes an important contribution to the global AI ethics discourse that often neglects AI narratives from Africa despite growing evidence of DDD in many domains. Nine original contributions provide useful insights to advance the understanding and implementation of Responsible AI in Africa, including discussions on epistemic injustice of global AI ethics, opportunities and challenges, an examination of AI co-bots and chatbots in an African work space, gender and AI, a consideration of African philosophies such as Ubuntu in the application of AI, African AI policy, and a look towards a future of Responsible AI in Africa. This is an open access book.

There are essential questions surrounding Africa's digitalization journey, including whether or not the continent can truly serve as the last frontier for socio-economic transformation through digital innovation. An examination of countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and Rwanda, which are actively pursuing digitalization, may provide some answers. To evaluate the potential implications, both real and potential, that arise from this focused pursuit, a critical analysis is necessary. Scrutiny of digital infrastructure by companies like Huawei, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and the advent of quantum computing will open new pathways to understanding and establishing promising approaches to the advancement of this region. Examining the Rapid Advance of Digital Technology in Africa offers a comprehensive exploration of the transformative power of digitalization in Africa and its implications for the continent's socio-economic development. It engages with the field of science and technology studies, linking it with socio-economic impacts and transformation, to track, analyze, understand, and critique Africa's contributions to digitalization. The chapters cover a wide range of themes, including ICTs and the business environment, education, healthcare, creative industries, media, culture, tourism, agriculture, ecology, artificial intelligence, blockchain and cryptocurrency revolution, algorithmic governance, the quantum age, and urbanization. This book is a must-read for researchers, scholars, investors, and policymakers who are interested in Africa's digital transformation, as it offers valuable insights into the latest empirical and theoretical aspects shaping the continent's ongoing digitalization.

How does anxiety impact narratives about African history, culture, and society? This volume demonstrates the richness of anxiety as an analytical lens within African studies. Contributors call attention to ways of thinking about African spaces—physical, visceral, somatic, and imagined—as well as about time and temporality. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the volume also brings histories of anxiety in colonial settings into conversation with work on the so-called negative emotions in disciplines beyond history. While anxiety has long been acknowledged for its ability to unsettle colonial narratives, to reveal the vulnerability of the colonial enterprise, this volume shows it can equally complicate contemporary narratives, such as those of sustainable development, migration, sexuality, and democracy. These essays therefore highlight the need to take emotions seriously as contemporary realities with particular histories that must be carefully mapped out.

This volume addresses questions at the intersections of cinematic form and the African city. It examines the contribution of cinema and audiovisual media to our understanding and experience of contemporary cities from an African perspective. “Reading” the African city as form, this volume problematizes the circulation of terms such as “Afropolitanism,” “Afro-polis”, “Afro-modernity” and “Afro-urbanity”, which often define the kinds of sentiments invested in or associated with the African city. Situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that reads the urban African cinematic form through affect theory and the city as a matrix of feeling, critical black geography and the racialized construction of city spaces, the urban as a temporal consciousness, and representations of social inequalities and urban geographies of exclusion, this edited volume frames the city and screenscapes as co-constitutive, foregrounding the diegetic and extra-diegetic elements that inform the “African urban”. Chapters engage thematic areas such as aesthetics and African cinematic urban form; visuality and the infrastructures of the African city; audiovisual narratives, social inequality, and urban geographies of exclusion. Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City is a significant new contribution to African Studies and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of African Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.