Hiace al camí de Lazareto a Mindelo (São Vicente [Cap Verd], 2015).
FROM
PERIPATETIC ANTHROPOLOGY TO THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF ROADS AND MOTORISATION IN AFRICA
Gerard
Horta
Abstract: This paper, which is based on 10 months of
field work between 2009 and 2015
in Cape Verde, provides an overview of the
anthropological literature in which motor vehicles and African roads are
studied as social phenomena. Until the end of the twentieth century, most
ethnographies have failed to focus on the countless social processes linked to
the development of mobility by road and the motorisation of transportation in
Africa, or on the role played by cars and roads as symbols of a globalised
modernity. This paper reviews the research by authors
who, from the 1930s onwards, mention African roads and the use of motor
vehicles as spaces in which social situations and processes take place. The
several symbolic and instrumental dimensions of the motorisation of road
transportation in Africa are discussed as well.
Keywords: Anthropology of African Roads, African
Mobility, Motorisation in Africa.
***
From
the late 1990s onwards, there are plenty of references made to the role played
by roads and motor vehicles in African societies, but its invisibilisation
during the previous period is obvious. If the
journey is the ethnographer’s object of observation, and also the object of his
or her reflection as an anthropologist (Augé, 2007: 71), then what is the reason for this invisibilisation?
The implicit multiplicity of approaches to the journey resides in the journey
itself, since any journey is at the same time a movement in space, in time and
–depending on the departure and arrival contexts- in social hierarchy
(Lévi-Strauss, 1969 [1955]: 79).
Even though the twentieth century is the
century of motorisation, the use of motorised land vehicles by anthropologists
in Africa does not usually appear in their accounts, neither past nor present.
Concepts such as “car”, “road”, “mobility”, “motorisation”, and even
“transportation”, are missing from analytical indexes and accounts. References to the presence of
cars and trucks in African roads have been late to appear in the
anthropological literature. Kuklick (1991: 151) mentions cars only once when
dealing with the 1929 expedition of archaeologist Caton-Thompson (when the
Rhodesian Transportation Department lent her a car). There are no theoretical
reflections on the social dimensions of roads and cars. Nevertheless, the
history of Africa is closely tied to social processes stemming from the
development of motorisation and roads. From May 1931 to February 1933, Marcel
Griaule, Michel Leiris and other European ethnographers carried out the
Dakar-Djibouti Mission from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The mission unfolded
as a gathering of objects for museum collections as well as a fruitful
ethnographic exploration. They travelled by foot, boat, canoe, train, truck,
mule, donkey, camel, cart... and by car, with the sponsorship of the Citroën
company. Michel
Leiris became the first anthropologist to mention roads and cars in his field
diary.
The Journey and the Road as Social Process
In his diary, Leiris (2007 [1934]: 795)
wonders: ‘Why travel? This way of seizing things, will it prevent us from being
unarmed on the occasions in which it is written that we should be unarmed?’
(27-XII-1932). The ethnographer travels by car through bumpy roads, and for the
first time he succinctly describes what happens in the course of the journey.
What happens to the car, to the people inside, to the people who they run into
and interact with, and to the road itself. If this first peripatetic
anthropology is indebted to “travel literature” (Delgado, 2012), then the
anthropology of mobility and the emerging anthropology of traffic should not be
alien to it.
The anthropology of roads shares with the
anthropology of traffic its focus on the culture of traffic, the culture of
risk and accidents, the social construction of the regulation of the traffic of
wheeled vehicles, and the development of the processes and systems of
transportation of people and commodities. Aside from this closeness –always verging on the
edge of incest-, roads embody a social process in
which the collective life of any society emerges to the surface through
movement. Every society flows onto its roads. Perhaps the roads express the
paradoxical confirmation of the triumph of sedentism, since they work as a
means of communication between points inhabited by people on a permanent basis
(tellingly, the hunter-gatherers don’t need roads to assert their never-ending
mobility).
As pointed out by Estevan (1996: 208-209),
within the terminology of transportation the concept of “mobility” is a
quantitative parameter that refers to the movements performed by people and
commodities in a specific socio-economic domain. It is expressed in individual
terms, such as the average number of journeys or km travelled per person, or in
aggregate terms, such as the total number of journeys or km travelled by the
inhabitants of a specific place. On the contrary, the concept of
“accessibility” is a qualitative variable, since it indicates the ease (I would
add the ability or possibility) with which people from a specific place can
cover the distance to other places where they will find the means to satisfy
their needs or desires. According to Estevan, the standard view of
transportation understands the improvement of accesibility as the facilitation
of movement (the efficiency of the transportation system). This entails an
emphasis on the constant reinforcement of infrastructures, vehicles and the
system of transportation as a whole. All of which facilitates the increase of
motorised mobility and transportation. On the other hand, a different point of
view links accessibility with proximity: spatially or geographically speaking,
the less movement required to satisfy a need or desire, the more accessible
they will be. Different models –with different social consequences- are
developed depending on how each society constructs or asserts its
interpretation of transportation and accessibility. This is why we must
remember Hannerz’ claim –cited by Juan (1997: 25)– regarding the fact that
physical accessibility does not guarantee social accessibility.
Penny Harvey (Khazaleh [2013]) claims that
roads include different sorts of spatial dynamics due to the great variety of
social relations which are developed within them. How are the urban strands
–villages and cities- fused together other than through these traffic routes called
roads? Augé (2007: 33) argues that urban projects are conceived with respect to
the relationships between the urban “interior” and “exterior”. This implies
that the design of roads, highways, airports, train stations, bus lanes, taxis
–Hiace vans-, and motorised vehicles in general is shaped by the model of
social relations intended to be established. Where can we find, then, in the
universal megalopolis, the “empty” and “porous” zones (Augé follows Philippe
Vasset’s terminology), the dark side of universalisation? How much intensity,
how much life, is born, grows and dies in these “porous” zones so acutely
impoverished under colonization?
In the context of the process of
motorisation in Africa, Gewald/Luning/Walraven (2009: 1-18)
highlight the wide range of transformations caused by the introduction of cars
in the twentieth century: cultural, economic, political, military, urban,
medical, educational, religious, ecological, communicative, and regarding
interpersonal relationships. However,
the study of these transformations has been –up to a certain point– very
limited, even if in vast African regions transportation depends entirely on
motorised vehicles. Out of the more than 1,000 papers presented at the meetings
of the African Studies Association (ASA) between 1990 and 1997, only one dealt
with the impact of motorised road vehicles in Africa. The paper by Chilundo
(1992) for the ASA meeting was based on research on motorised traffic in which
the economical aspects had the utmost relevance.
Gewald/Luning/Walraven
claim that the ground-breaking scholarship on this topic has more distant
origins. According to them, it starts with the classic work by Hill (1963) on
the use of vehicles by the cocoa farmers in Ghana, which was followed by the
ethnographies by Lewis (1970) on the transporters association of the Ivory
Coast, by Silverstein (1983) on the local strategies of transportation in
Nigeria, and by Stoller (1989) on the importance of the regulation and
structuring of road transportation. We must add the ground-breaking studies by
Margaret Field (1960) on the rural drivers in Ghana from an ethnopsychiatric
point of view; by Jordan (1978) on the daily behaviour of truck drivers in West
Africa; and by Peace (1988) on mobility in South-West Nigeria.
The
real boom of scholarship in this field took place in the beginning of the
twentieth-first century. According to Gewald/Luning/Walraven (2009: 5), the
construction of African roads did not uniquely respond to the aim of
transporting goods and people since, of course, the mining and agricultural
products of colonial plundering had to be transported through somewhere.
Historically, roads have played a pivotal role in the control, repression and
imposition of colonial discipline over African societies by means of the
transportation of military troops and arms. Moreover, roads represent a key
factor of modernisation for African state bureaucracies, both before and after
the formal processes of independence.
As
communication and transportation devices, roads and their vehicles have been
useful to the revolutionary or anti-colonial causes as well, thus turning back
against their own promoters. This is the case of the Kikuyu taxis during the
Mau Mau revolution in Kenya, between 1952 and 1960, under British colonial rule.
The organisational structure of the taxi drivers’ associations and trade unions
was essential for the articulation of the movement, and the vehicles of the
Kikuyu were used both for carrying and hiding their leaders and for moving
information around (Ference, 2011). Walraven (2009) offers a similar example
concerning the uprisings in the French Niger between 1954 and 1966, in which drivers
offered their vehicles –and their lives- to the revolutionary cause.
In turn,
Graeber (2011 [2004]: 64) refers to the Tsimihety in the West coast of
Madagascar and to their rejection of the Sakalava monarchy’s authority when
arguing that a collective project lies behind every social group. Under French
colonial rule, the Tsimihety accepted to meet with the representatives sent by
the Administration, whose goal was to obtain an adult workforce in order to
build a road next to a Tsimihety village. But when the team in charge of the
construction works returned to the village, they found it abandoned. Its
inhabitants had fled to other places to live with their relatives, rejecting
participation in the colonial program of forced labor that was to be imposed on
them.
Writing
on the Bakoya in Gabon, Soengas (2009: 189) points out that the opening of
roads by the French army in the 1930s caused major changes in the social and
spatial organisation of the communities, which from then on came in contact
with “the white people”. The construction of roads and the beginning of
motorised traffic entailed a rise in inequality within rural populations, as
happened in Ghana and Nigeria (Porter, 2012), in a process that began in the
colonial period but extended beyond formal independence. In this context, a
mysticism of speed and modernity linked to motorised vehicles was developed, and
was immediately inscribed in representations of masculinity.
The introduction of vehicles in Africa also entailed
the visibilisation of several racial and class contradictions, inherent to the
same colonial system that had imported roads and motorisation into African
societies. The work by geographer Gordon Pirie informs us of the complaints
that both whites and blacks addressed to the South African authorities in
charge of the public bus system, a set of reasons in which the conditions of
transportation, the segregation and racial abuse, as well as the class
differences within the black population in the rural public buses between 1925
and 1955 are made explicit (Pirie, 1990). The same author offers us an overview
of one of the favourite -and exclusive- activities of the white social classes
in African colonies: motor racing clubs. Maps and guides of African roads that
included lodgings and supply points for motor vehicles multiplied from the
first decade of the twentieth century onwards. At the same time, literary
fiction linked to the exotic journey was in all of its splendour, stimulating
colonial representations (Pirie, 2013). In the 1920s and 1930s, the motorised
expeditions across the whole continent –sponsored by the manufacturing
companies themselves– brought to the rural parts of Africa a strange blend of
scientists, travellers and colonists (Pirie, 2011). In the context of the
colonial political rule of European societies over the African continent, a new
sort of journey defined by a taste for adventure became established: dangerous
trails, treacherous topographies and harsh weather appear as the main
“attractions” of the rallies that from then on race
through Africa.
Around the 1960s, in the new political contexts that led to the independence
processes –and also due to the takeoff of the aeronautical industry-, the motor
racing clubs gradually abandoned the cross-border routes and focused their
activities within the sphere of the State and on the promotion of road
maintenance (Pirie, 2013).
The wide
variety of dynamic processes in African societies is reflected in the social
universe of the development of transportation and motorisation. The anthropological and sociological approaches to the
culture of road transportation, the motorised vehicle, and the several
dimensions of its impact on social life have defined very specific research
fields. This has enabled both an increase in comparative analysis (Miller
[ed.], 2001) and the development of anthropological and sociological
scholarship on urbanisation processes, land transportation routes, risk,
safety, or traffic (the list is endless) beyond the explicit references to
Africa.
Ritualities,
processes of technologisation, “moral geographies”, “informal” economies, or
motorisation as agency, are central issues in the boom of scholarship regarding
Africa from the late 1990s onwards. Alongside the overviews on urbanisation and
interurban mobility in the continent as a whole, a schematic bibliographical
territorialisation of the wide variety of topics dealt with by this scholarship
(such as: commerce and transportation; construction of roads under colonial
rule; interurban transportation of passengers; urbanisation processes;
relationships between vehicles, drivers and “entrepreneurship”; relationships between
drivers and power or status; relationships between vehicles and pedestrians on
the roads; the symbolisation of vehicles; accident rates; etc.) encompasses a
big portion of Africa.
Regarding the ethnographic references on
mobility in African roads and the role of motorised vehicles by anthropologists
writing in the first two thirds of the twentieth century, we must recall some
aspects and situations which in later decades will become explicit topics of
study. However, we must take into account (Dalakoglou/Harvey, 2012: 462) the
scarcity of references to interurban mobility, roads and motorised
transportation in African urban anthropology –with exception of G. Wilson in
Zambia, E. Hellmann and B. Sundkler in South Africa, and by the Manchester
anthropologists affiliated to the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (Hannerz, 1993
[1980]: 162-163 and 179-187). This is an area in which research needs to be
undertaken, and it cannot be spared by referring to the long list of
anthropological studies about nomadic and cattle-breeding societies in Africa,
as Dalakoglou/Harvey (2012) do. On the whole, it results difficult to trace the
consideration of roads and motorised transportation in the ethnographies
written throughout the best part of the last century.
The
First References to Roads
Beyond describing the day to day of his almost
two-year-long research during the Dakar-Djibouti mission, Leiris includes in
his narration the events which occurred on the road whilst traveling by car. In
L’Afrique Fantôme [Ghostly Africa],
he deals with fundamental contexts for the study of roads as social phenomena.
The changing caravan of anthropologists, translators, chefs, assistants and an
endless list of companions rarely travels by van or by car. We will focus our
attention on the car. Leiris writes in his field diary the situations in which
the car takes part. In his account, the car appears as a means of business for
the indigenous (8-VI-1931); as a place of weariness due to the discomfort of
the journey (30-VI-1931); as a victim of the deplorable conditions of roads and
bridges, as well as of harsh weather (8-VII-1931); as a sign, by means of the
horn, of an imminent announcement (14-VII-1931); as protagonist of crashes with
animals which cross the road, as well as a moving device for hunting them
(25-VIII-1931).
In other occasions he describes how the presence of
the vehicle on the road provokes unexpected encounters (a sick man lying down
on the way) (15-XII-1931). The car also appears as a factor of accidental
deaths (30-XII-1931); as grounds for argument under the
pressure of a social environment demanding that ethnographers assist them with
the vehicle to transport them to other locations (15-I-1932) –see below the
testimony of Rabinow in Morocco, 40 years later; as protagonist of the forced
end of a journey due to a non-fatal accident in which the vehicle and its load
are left destroyed (17-I-1932); as a container of long trips –a day-long
journey of 100km along precarious roads (22-I-1932); as a vehicle which has
suddenly broken down and finds itself dependent on a greater vehicle (a truck,
in this case) (17-IV-1932); as a method of transportation that sometimes relies
on a drunken chauffeur (30-IV-1932); and finally, as a means of transportation
for animals, who like humans are also prone to vomit (22-XII-1932). In a final
note regarding the 8th and 9th of December, 1931 (Ibidem: 835), Leiris reflects on the social exceptionality of the
profound happiness of an administrator who has found a faster way to construct
roads and bridges, which would save the people he administered 'a significant
number of days of service' –that is, forced labour.
These
situations form part of any ethnography of roads. To the extent that Leiris’
field diary is significant for the analysis of the observed social relations
and his role in them, the fact that he considered necessary to leave written
testimony of what happened, and how it happened, when travelling by car, makes
him the first ethnographer to acknowledge the usefulness of cars and roads as elements
of anthropological reflection.
Soon
after the return of the mission directed by Leiris, another mission left for
Brasil: the 'French University Mission', in which Claude Lévi-Strauss
participated. From his time in the University of Sao Paulo, Lévi-Strauss
undertook, between 1935 and 1939, various trips to Mato Grosso and the Amazon,
where he studied the Kadiwéu, Bororo, Nambikwara, Aikanã and Tupi-Kawahib
societies. Of course, he comes across very few cars, but tells that the land
which spans the road from Santos to San Paulo is one of the first exploited
terrains in the country. He refers to the place as an 'archeological site
dedicated to a deceased agriculture'. In
the valleys, the vegetation reclaims possession of the soil again: what is
found now is no more 'the noble architecture of the primitive jungle'. The
European landscape is ostensibly subjected to mankind, hence the bewilderment
experienced when he is confronted with something that does not fit within our
traditional categories (Lévi-Strauss, 1969 [1955]: 89).
From
field work carried out in Zululand at the end of the 1930s, Max Gluckman (1940)
records the European domination and explains that groups of equal social status
are not separated. Whereas the Zulu cannot venture into the reserves of the
white group –except as domestic servants- Europeans can move freely amongst the
Zulu, observe them and at times take photos of them.
Gluckman
understands that the schism between the two groups of color is in itself the
pattern of their integration in a community. In a given moment, he tells of the
inauguration of a bridge in order to describe the supposed formal reason for
its construction (to facilitate the mobility of the magistrate) and its
immediate social effects (the access to a hospital by Zulu women). He makes
almost no ethnographical references to the experiences lived on the road, but
three observations can nevertheless be noted: firstly, he describes how, during
a trip to Nongoma in his automobile, he stops to pick up an elderly man; secondly,
he narrates another journey by car together with the Zulu king, whose car is
responded to by the Zulu with the royal salute; thirdly, he mentions the
automobile as an object of social status only accessible to Europeans and few
Zulu.
In his
writings based on field work undertaken in Africa in the late 1940s, George
Balandier (1955 and 1962 [1957]: 191-224) makes no mention of automobiles.
Instead, he outlines the segregating character of the planning of urban spaces
by the colonial power, as well as the anomic uprooting of rural immigrants in
growing cities such as Brazzaville, Lagos or Dakar. Both are reflections of
colonial capitalism’s opulence and speculation, greatness and precariousness of
the material and social conditions of the majority of the population.
Reflections of the immense explosions of urban colonial societies, the
emergence of incipient labour unions which in fact collaborate with the
colonial power, the new heroes of western cinematic mythology, the changing
contexts of the commodification of sex and love, the submission to the tough
and implacable law of 'working without happiness', the effervescence of
saturday nights and sundays, the imposition of names on streets and squares,
the construction of an illusion to 'our' image and convenience, the gap between
reality and hope...
All
these processes have been historically parallel to the expansion of roads and
traffic as a means of colonisation and transportation of goods and people. The
reference to the fact that the construction of roads has brought to an end the
supposed isolation of certain human groups, as Levi-Strauss writes
(1966:125), has become a general
principle, although in his work we do not find the reflections of social life
on the roads. Beals/Hoijer (1965: 405-449) devote a section to the
transportation of animals and vehicles throughout history, focusing their
attention on the Baganda of Eastern Africa, who they describe as the builders
of an elaborate system of roadways used for walking, human strength being the
only means of transportation. And Knutsson (1976 [1969]: 124), when referring
to the polyethnic village-market in Mecha (Ethiopia), links the high mobility,
the creation of commercial villages and the growth of existing populations, and
points to the fundamental role played by the construction of roads in order to
understand this development. The expansion of motorisation in urban spaces
throughout Africa has been recent (Hannerz, 1998 [1996]: 14), and even more so
with regard to interurban transportation. Whereas generic comments regarding
the poor quality of road infrastructures -in comparison with the western
standard- span decades of anthropological research, the attention given to the
car and the road is very uncommon.
This
potential anthropology of roads has been dismissed for decades to the waste bin
of the social sciences. In anthropology textbooks, introductions to the
discipline and dictionaries, the references to the processes of construction of
roads and motorization in relation to colonial expansion are in general
inexistent, or to a certain point disparaging of a concept –‘road'- stripped of
the social universe which it signifies and in which it is inscribed. Peacock,
in his introductory anthropology textbook, defines the entrance into field work
in these terms (2001[1986]: 129): 'But neither is it a simple adventure which
ends in itself; one is not simply 'on the road', but 'on the field', and must
mobilise himself to find his place in it and, afterwards, to understand it'.
In his
field work in Sefrou (Morocco), Clifford Geertz states the centrality of the
car in saving time while travelling ('I hired a car. No more buses. No more
waiting’, in Slyomovics [2010]). And the amalgam of images that Paul Rabinow
offers us (1992 [1977]), also from his field work in Morocco, points towards
new dimensions. He describes tracks, trails, paths without asphalt, curving,
empty or tortuous roads with potholes dangerously close to ravines, night-time
journeys by car while arguing with an angry informant who gets out of the
vehicle and condemns himself to walking the remaining 8km. Rabinow (Ibidem:
112) tells of the relief he feels when his car explodes, because it spares him
from the unbearable pressure he suffers by way of a village demanding to be
driven here or there, for this and that: 'I stopped the car in front of the
hospital. No, they told me, go a little further up the street, to the market.
But didn’t you tell me that you were dying? Yes, she replied, but I have to do
some shopping' (Ibidem:
88).
In his
first field work in the Dowayo land, Barley (1989 [1983]) describes how his car
is used as a taxi and ambulance by the community. Half of the references
regarding the vehicle concern its repairs and the tremendous cost that they
imply. On another occasion he tells of the local interpretation of the arrival
of a car (Ibidem: 65): 'There were fields on both sides of the road. The
people who worked them stopped their tasks to watch us as we advanced
laboriously. Some fled. Later I realised that they believed we were sent by the
sous-prefet’. The
uneasiness caused by the bad condition of the roads appears regularly (Ibidem:
103): 'The old maps still indicate a roadway running through the valley, but
nowadays it is found to be in a pretty sorry state'. The first page of the book
(Barley, 1993 [1986]) based on his second field work with the Dowayo, some
years later, contains a map which distinguishes three types of roadways:
official roads, passable roads for vehicles and mountain trails. Screeching
breaks under threatening storms, illegal transportation of beer and the figure
of the anthropologist as the community chauffeur accompany the references made
to the vehicle.
Other
examples of the generic attention paid by anthropology to roads and and motor
vehicles as social phenomena can be found in the work of Marjorie Shostak
(1990: 23 and 349). In her field work with Nisa, the !Kung woman from the
Kalahari desert, she describes the situation in the !Kung village as follows:
'Roadways with transport trucks, shops, schools and even a clinic exist today
in the Dobe land...'. She also narrates the night-time arrival to a !Kung
village located beyond the road on which she has driven the Land rover. In
turn, Jean and John Comaroff (2002) mention roads in contextual terms in their
account of the incendiary apocalypse witnessed in South Africa’s Cape
Peninsula. The roads are described as victims of this great fire (since they
are closed to traffic), as the object of pyromaniac desire (it is the case of a
rural roadway), as space for the establishment –in its margins- of camps of
settlers from the rural interior areas (it is the case of the main roads), and
as a place for the sale of small packages of braai wood to mostly
suburban, white, and middle class travelers.
Centrality of the Vehicle in African
Social Life
Gewald/Luning/Walraven
(2009: 10) address the obvious impact of motorised vehicles in almost all
aspects of African daily life. This makes it all the more intriguing why
anthropologists, during the twentieth century, have disregarded cars and roads
as a research focus. Every social scientist in Africa has experienced being on
the streets and roads, waiting for the bus, a collective taxi, or a Hiace van.
In his pioneering work, Kopytiff (1986) suggests the need of considering the
motorised vehicle as a central element of African social life.
As Geest
claims, perhaps anthropologists, in their anxiety to discover 'the exotic',
have overlooked those material elements -like the car- which come from the West
and are too familiar to their eyes, considering them for this reason little
worthy of anthropological attention. Or perhaps, we might add, motorisation
evokes dimensions of the colonial process that are too terrifying. Whatever
it might be, anthropologists have only recently treated the car in Africa as an
object deserving of their attention. Peace (1988) mentions this absence in his
ethnography about the organisation of transport, the owners of vehicles and the
drivers of a Nigerian village in the north of Lagos. At the same time he
laments that the analysis of transportation and its economic, legal, and
political dimensions, remain relegated to the domain of economists and
geographers.
More
recently, Klaeger (2009) has claimed that an anthropology of roads must go
beyond the functional perspective (the social impact of the infrastructures,
their causes and the political corollary of their construction) in order to
address the representational aspects: 'The study of the semantics of symbols,
metaphors and narratives' (Ibidem: 216). It
results paradoxical that, the car being a means of transportation as well as a
force of power and prestige on a global scale, it has been neglected by
anthropologists in their research. Some years ago, Verrips/Meyer (2001: 156)
made a compilation of anthropological literature on cars and motorised driving
when they began their study in this area. They found little material regarding
Africa (the already cited Field, Jordan and Peace), mostly focused in social
networks and contact with passengers, thus confirming the lack of research on
the material dimensions of the car as an object.
Conclusion
Roads
condense the global circulation of a society to the extent that they unite one
point with another. At the same time, roads are found between us and between
those two points, allowing for physical and social connections and
disconnections. The presence of roads tends to transform the relations and life
of a social group, and all class of economic, political and cultural processes
converge on them. The role of cars and vehicles for the transportation of
people and goods is, in this context, fundamental to the general history of
Africa. In fact, the development of colonisation itself is inseparable from the
development of motorisation and overland communication. Although Africanist
anthropologists and sociologists have not deepened their research about cars
and roads as social phenomena, some of them (beginning with Michel Leiris in
the 1930s) deal with the different dimensions of this phenomena. What has been
put forward, therefore, is a brief overview of those pioneering studies and
their descriptions and representations of the relationships between road,
automobile and society.
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2. For an analysis of the wide set of
social phenomena which transportation encompasses, see: Ward (1996: 52).
3. Previously, the 1923 “Citröen Mission” had crossed the
Sahara (Touggourt-Timbuktu) in 21 days. The cars, the wheels of which were
reinforced with chains, covered the 1,100 km stretch between In Salah and Tin
Zeuaten. In 1924, three cars from the Renault company travelled from Bechar to
Burem, by the river Niger, in six days (Costa Morata, 1978: 94-95).
4. Their survey is almost
systematically limited to the literature written in English. This practice
applies to most publications in the Anglosaxon context. The Francophone
literature shows the same endocentrism.
5. For an analysis of the motor vehicle in Africa as a
generic symbol of colonisation, see: White (1997) and Alber (1998). There were
no cars in the Sahara until 1916, but in 1920 there was already a remarkable
number of cars in Tamanrasset, which played a vital role in the military
subjugation of the population in the Hoggar (Costa Morata, 1978: 94).
6. The first major racing championship
in Africa –the Méditerranée-Le Cap rally (16,000 km from North to
South)– took place from 1950 up to 1961. From 1953 onwards, several rallies
took place as legs of the world championship: Coronation Safari, Safari,
Morocco and Ivory Coast.
7. For a first approach to Angola: Lopes (2009 and
2011); Algeria: Boesen/Marfaing (dirs.) (2007); Benin: Beauving (2004); Burkina
Faso: Luning (2009); Cape Verde: Grassi (2003), Dias Furtado (2007), Malet
(2011), Horta (2010 and 2013) and Horta/Malet (2014); Ivory Coast: Luzón (1988)
and Wrangham (2004); Ethiopia: Ramos (2010) and Alem (2013); Gabon: Soengas
(2009); Ghana: Field (1960), Dickson (1961), Date-Bah (1980), Geest (1989 and
2009), Grieco et alii (1996), Akurang
(2001), Verrips/Meyer (2001), Lyon (2007), Asiedu/Agiey (2008), Chalfin (2008
and 2010), Klaeger (2009, 2012a, 2012b and 2013), Hart (2011), Ntewusu (2011),
Porter (2012) and Stasik (2013); Kenya: Wainaina (1981), Munguti (1997),
Chitere (2004), Kimani (2004), Carrier (2005), Mungai/Samper (2006), Mutongi
(2006), Melnick (2010), Ference (2011), Chavis (2012) and Lamont (2012 y 2013);
Madagascar: Cole (1998) and Thomas (2002); Mali: Fiori (2010); Mauritania:
Godard (2002), Retaillé (dir.) (2006), Chenal/Pedrazzini/Vollmer (2009),
Chenal/Kaufmann/Cisse/Pedrazzini (2009a and 2009b), Choplin (2009) and Alfonso/Nucci
(2011); Mozambique: Chilundo (1992 and 1995), Agadjanian (2002) and Nielsen
(2012); Namibia: Gewald (2002); Niger: Masquelier (1992 and 2002) and Chilson
(1999); Nigeria: Hannerz (1979), Okpala (1980), Berry (1983 and 1985), Afejuku
(1988), Lawuyi (1988), Peace (1988), Masquelier (1992 and 2002),
Fourchard/Olawalle (dirs.) (2003) and Porter (2012); Senegal: Bredeloup/Bertoncello/Lombard
(eds.) (2008), Lombard (2008), Chenal
(2009) and Green-Simms (2009); South Africa: Lee (2011 and 2012); Tanzania: Liebnow
(1981), Banyikwa (1988) and Rizzo (2002); Zaire: Poutier (1990); Zambia:
Hansen/Vaa (eds.) (2004), Hansen (2010) and Kalikiti (2010); Central Africa in
general: Fairhead (1993), Giles-Vernick (1996), Fourchard/Olawalle (dirs.)
2003), Hansen (2010), Simone (2004), Coquery (ed.) (2005), Elouga/Nga
Ndongo/Mebenga Tamba (eds.) and Freed (2006), Diaz Olver et alii (2008
and 2010) and Dia Mwembu (2009).
8. Evoking the centrality of the canoe among the Trobrianders studied
by Bronislaw Malinowski, Geest (2009: 258-259) highlights that, following the
same logic that signifies it (object of desire and beauty, aimed at the
domination of nature, decorated, and an inspiration for stories and ballads),
the car would be the means of transportation that would occupy centrality in
Ghana (and maybe all over the world), claiming the “honour” (we would add) of
rising as the central object of the representations of the global culture
(Miller, 2001).
