Book Review: African Motors

African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development, by Joshua Grace (2021). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

It is common to refer to “car culture” (Miller, 2001) to describe the ways in which automobiles are symbolically integrated into people’s lives, which vary according to historical, political, and economic contexts. When we consider the significance of the car – and more broadly of “automobilities” (Urry, 2006) – countries such as the United States often come to mind, where the automobile is an inherent part of daily life. This is evident in that over 90 percent of the population in the contemporary United States owns at least one vehicle.

In this light, associating the automobile with a country like Tanzania, might seem, highly unusual, considering that only 6 percent of urban families owns a vehicle – just over 1 percent nationwide – while 60 percent of Tanzanians use public or other collective forms of transport (277). It is this theme – the relationship between culture and motors – that Joshua Grace takes up in order to examine the history of development of Tanzania. In African Motors, the author’s starting point is to rethink the political histories of technology and development by rectifying a common stereotype: that automobiles are somehow antithetical to African nations and cultures.

The analysis in African Motors covers the period from 1860 to 2015 in what is now Tanzania and focuses on the histories of cars and “motoring economies” in the country. Engines, according to Grace, are key to understanding the relationships between automobiles and society in the context of a nation-in-formation. In defining this perspective, and drawing from classics in the anthropology of bureaucracy and infrastructure (Scott, 1998; Larkin, 2013; von Schnitzler, 2016), Grace shows how “infrastructure” becomes a central way in which the state materializes itself and is perceived in everyday discourses.

African Motors is organized into five chapters that foreground oral histories and point to Grace’s intention to write a history of non-elite Tanzanians and their everyday lives. Data sources include documents from eleven different archives in the United Kingdom and Tanzania such as workshop manuals, reports of the country’s Transit Department, and newspapers such as The Daily News (UK), The Standard, and The Nationalist (two state newspapers in Tanzania); photographs and interviews with political figures are also important sources. Additionally, the author collaborated with several research assistants who collected stories from local truck drivers, while Grace himself worked in a garage in Dar es Salaam so as to better understand car maintenance.

One of the main axes of the book is its discussion of engine-based mobilities and the discourses surrounding these, whether during the colonial period (1891-1961) or in the post-1961 period of independence and socialism. The colonial project is what “introduces” the car to Tanganyika and, at the same time, posits that this Euro-American technology is somehow alien to African cultures. Chapter One, “Walking to the Car,” highlights how the automobile emerges as a prime “tool of empire” (35), a symbol of the colonial regime’s attempts at modernization and its policies of control and territorial transformation. The “maintenance of impermanence” (36) points to the ways in which colonial governments approached the infrastructures necessary for car-based mobility. “Impermanence,” in this sense, reflects infrastructure of low durability and made with shoddy materials, which subsequently meant that – in the post-independence period – there was little, if any, basis for industrialization and the circulation of goods. Roads were constantly being built and rebuilt and depended on local labor for their maintenance. Here is where the stereotype of Africa as an inhospitable environment, characterized by difficult mobility, arises – added to which were cars, symbols of metropolitan technology, that were literally stuck in the mud. Hence, an important contradiction: in Tanzania, as in many places in Africa, walking was often faster than using a car.

In contrast to these stereotypes, making the car “legible” to Tanzanians meant creating an “African driving culture” (58) through the resignification of this “outsider” technology. In drawing a contrast from the government-run training program for drivers and mechanics, Grace examines Utingo, “the vernacular institution of driver training” (240), which could be held under a tree or in someone’s house. Moreover, as Grace documents, Utingo facilitated the intergenerational transmission of knowledge surrounding cars as well as the formation of car-based forms of masculinity. Here, the author presents a history of the automobile told through “shop-floor pedagogies” (98) and the memories of men and women who made a living either by driving, being passengers, or enjoying the goods that circulated in economies of “official” distribution. In this account, being a dereva (driver) was central to the figure of the modern, independent working man in Tanzania: “ascending to the status of dereva was a dream,” as an interviewee recounted to Grace (73). Chapter Two, “Overhaul,” goes deeper into this formation of gendered drivers and repair workers. In such a context, “becoming a man” took place in the spaces of garages, which resulted in the acquisition of highly desirable maintenance skills and even careers as car mechanics for some Tanzanians.

Tanzania’s socialist period (1967-86) gave rise to new “transport cultures” and ways of thinking about the automobile. Even though masculine identities continued to be premised on repairing a “broken world,” President Julius Nyerere’s government afforded the automobile a new but similarly symbolic status. In Chapter Three, “The People’s Car of Dar es Salaam,” we see the automobile as an object of criticism in the government’s search for the ideal of socialism. From the state’s perspective, individual modes of transport conflicted with socialist ideals and became a stand-in for criticism of colonial administrators, or the naizi, “[those] ‘nationalizers’ who took over government positions from colonial officials” (148). In contrast, public transportation demonstrates collective values ​​and the state’s capacity to build socialism, which were projected and materialized into infrastructures. In this era, as such, cars became associated with luxury, inequality or even corruption.

However, long queues to board busses and the aging public bus fleet, gave rise to a “vernacular system composed of privately owned vehicles known as thumni-thumni” (145). Official narratives condemned the use of private vehicles to transport people and, as a result, thumni-thumni were considered to be antithetical to Nyerere’s ujamaa version of socialism. Yet according to the thumni-thumni users themselves, these privately owned and maintained vehicles were not in competition with public busses, but rather constituted a complementary means of transport. Criticizing the public bus system, thus, took on an even broader meaning among everyday Tanzanians: “broken buses meant something more than broken technologies” (177) and demonstrated the state’s difficulty in providing the necessary infrastructure for a truly socialist form of mobility.

The politics of broken busses leads Grace to discuss the fuel that powered all these engines: oil. “Oily Ujamaa,” the title of Chapter Four, is dedicated to understanding the global contexts in which Tanzanian authorities went about finding the oil necessary for their national mobility projects. The author demonstrates how socialism was associated not only with social and material infrastructure but also with this almost unavoidable of commodities. According to the logic of ujamaa, tapping domestic energy sources – even if the country were not totally self-sufficient – was the preferred path to hydrocarbon freedom and independence. The 1973-74 OPEC embargo and the subsequent global oil crisis acted as a catalyst for these narratives of self-sufficiency. In this regard, Grace analyzes the “competing interpretations of the OPEC crisis,” (220) emphasizing the diverse local understandings of this destabilizing historical event. As such, Grace details how Tanzanian authorities sought to exchange commodities such as sisal fiber and coffee for oil and refined petroleum products on world markets.  

The final chapter, “Motorized Domesticities,” returns to a historical study of the economic crisis and austerity that took place during the period of decline for Tanzania’s ujamaa socialist experiment. In this chapter, the narrative arc is traced via the voices of the country’s truck drivers and their social relations. As Grace reveals, “steady access to diverse foods at low prices was the most common answer to my questions about the benefits of a driving career” (249). Being a truck driver, as a result, granted one access to a set of goods beyond those in official circulation, even in a context of scarcity. Yet the narratives of drivers that appear in this chapter reveal a profession permeated with risks, whether from the poorly maintained roads, alienating truck stops, or ever-present threat of contracting HIV – for mobility among drivers was frequently cited in early studies on AIDS as a probable cause for virus outbreaks.

In African Motors, work plays an essential role in the construction of national mobility narratives in Tanzania. In writing about the Tanzanian case, Grace denaturalizes the car and the multiple economies that surround it in order to think about the many ways that automobiles, technology, infrastructure, drivers, and passengers are entangled. Throughout the book, we see how the car was appropriated by colonial, post-independence, and socialist leaders in Tanzania. In this light, the text will interest not only African Studies scholars but also those readers eager to design more sustainable and equitable futures for our car-based societies of today.

References

Miller, Daniel. “Driven Societies.” In Car Cultures, edited by Daniel Miller, 1–33. New York: Berg, 2001.

Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 

Urry, John. “Inhabiting the Car.” Sociological Review 54 (2006): 17–31. 

Von Schnitzler, Antina. Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Author Biography

Guillermo Stefano Rosa Gómez earned his PhD in social anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PPGAS/UFRGS) in Brazil and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales in Argentina. He is currently conducting research on cars, money, and digital technologies in Buenos Aires. Guillermo would like to thank Professor Samuel Weeks for offering him editing-related encouragement during significant moments in his academic career “in English.”