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African Motors

African Motors

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In African Motors, Joshua Grace examines how Tanzanian drivers, mechanics, and passengers reconstituted the automobile into a uniquely African form between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories, extensive archival research, and his ethnographic fieldwork as an apprentice in Dar es Salaam's network of garages, Grace counters the pervasive narratives that Africa is incompatible with technology and that the African use of cars is merely an appropriation of technology created elsewhere. Although automobiles were invented in Europe and introduced as part of colonial rule, Grace shows how Tanzanians transformed them, increasingly associating their own car use with maendeleo, the Kiswahili word for progress or development. Focusing on the formation of masculinities based in automotive cultures, Grace also outlines the process through which African men remade themselves and their communities by adapting technological objects and systems for local purposes. Ultimately, African Motors is an African-centered story of development featuring everyday examples of Africans forging both individual and collective cultures of social and technological wellbeing through movement, making, and repair. In African Motors, Joshua Grace examines how everyday Tanzanian drivers, mechanics, and passengers reconstituted the automobile into a uniquely African form between the late 1800s to the early 2000s. Joshua Grace is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Africa, Motors, and a History of Development  1
1. Walking to the Car: A Popular History of Mobility and Infrastructure in Tanganyika, 1860s to 1960  33
2. Overhaul: Making Men and Cars in Repair Garages  82
3. The People's Car of Dar es Salaam: Buses, Socialism, and Technological Citizenship  143
4. Oily Ujamaa: Petroleum, Rural Modernization, and "Effective Freedom" before and after the "OPEC Bombshell"  185
5. Motorized Domesticities: Care, Road, and Home in Independent Tanzania  233
Conclusion. Motoring Out of Time: Tanzanian Automobility in Unsustainable Times  275
Notes  301
Bibliography  371
Index  401

“African Motors is an exhilarating contribution to recent African-centric histories of development shedding new light on the significance of automobility—meaning the entire ‘machinic complex’ of driving, roads, garage work, urban transport, and oil trading. Joshua Grace emphasizes the creativity and agency involved in vernacular invention, maintenance, and repair as part of urban mobility and ‘technological citizenship’ in Tanzania. This book is a welcome addition to the growing field of postcolonial mobility studies, decolonial mobility history, and African studies of technology and innovation.”
“In vivid prose, African Motors shows how motor vehicles became African technologies. Joshua Grace sets new standards for research and engagement, weaving tales of African technological expertise into an analysis whose import extends well beyond Tanzania. You will never see cars and drivers the same way again.”
“African Motors stands as an excellent contribution to both the history of science and African history fields. . . . AfricanMotors handily illustrates the effects that the automobile has had on both Tanzanian states and societies, as well as the technological agency Tanzanians have sought to work through the car in turn.”
“Tanzania’s automobility takes center stage in this scholarly work by Grace. . . . The book's five main chapters cover mobility in the region and infrastructure from the 1860s to 1960, masculinity, gender relations, and notions of citizenship tied to technological objects. Recommended.”

“African Motors is wide-ranging in its scope, taking the reader on a journey that provides needed insight into the layered and overlapping social and technological systems that have produced modern African systems of motor transport. . . . While set in Tanzania, this text provides insights that will doubtless resonate with scholars of other African and world regions.”

Additional information

Weight 2 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in