Tanja Bosch and Tony Roberts, eds. Digital Citizenship in Africa: Technologies of Agency and Repression. London: Zed Books, 2023. 227 pp. Illustrations. Index. $43.95. Paper. ISBN: 978-1-350-32445-9.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: The past two decades have witnessed a surge in African digital citizenry, with the rise of mobile and digital technologies profoundly reshaping the continent's political landscape.This pervasive use of digital media coincided with the failure of many postcolonial states to protect civil liberties, pushing people towards online spaces to contest their marginalization.However, these supposedly expressive digital spaces also enable new control mechanisms and constraints, leaving a widening gap between digital media as a battleground for active resistance and actualized citizenship.In Digital Citizenship in Africa, Bosch, Roberts, and the other contributors critically examine this double-edged nature of digital media, exploring how Africans navigate the complex interplay of agency and repression.The book opens with Francis Nyamnjoh's insightful foreword about the inclusionary promises of citizenship, which exist in tension with prevailing exclusionary practices.Citizenship, he argues, must be conceived from the perspective of incompleteness not as a universal ideal but as a flexible, permanent work in progress open to reinvigoration in the struggle to reclaim the political field.His intriguing analysis animates the eight chapters of the entire collection.The book assembles scholars from multiple disciplines, with chapters demonstrating how the digital turn fosters resistant, disruptive, and, crucially, alternative expressions of African citizenship.The perennial question about the Africanness of digital citizenship in Africa, and what is digital about digital citizenship in Africa, gains perspective from the carefully curated case studies spanning various African regions, including West Africa, Southern Africa, and East Africa.This multi-regional approach showcases unique patterns of digital engagement shaped by diverse local political cultures, infrastructure challenges, and historical legacies.It delineates emerging sociopolitical circumstances and economic contexts of various societies, making the book an important addition to the literature in the studies of digital activism in Africa, given that the African continent was largely written out of accounts on technology and digital citizenship scholarship, as it were.What remains debatable and contentious in the different social domains in these chapters is how these hypermediated spaces democratize civic spaces while accommodating preexisting norms that limit the agency and capacity of the user.Moreover, the editors make it clear at the outset that the book's aim was not necessarily to resolve the problem of digital
Source: African Studies Review
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2025.34
Author: Ochega Ataguba
Institution: University of Cape Town
Language: English
Topic: Social Media and Politics
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4409442381