Disability and technology in Africa: Introduction

Abstract

An elderly lady with a limp selects her longest walking stick to help her through the mud to her garden. Deaf people watch attentively as a pastor delivers a sermon in sign language. Refugees with disabilities sit on their sacks of rations at a food distribution centre. A woman describes the difficulty in getting used to her prosthesis after she lost her leg. Assistants help to push the heavily laden tricycles of polio survivors onto a ferry. A deaf taxi passenger shows her destination to the conductor on her smartphone. The abilities of impaired bodies are often enhanced – more or less successfully – by assistive technologies. Whether these include devices, like crutches, or whether they are less material, but no less consequential, systems for enabling ‘the disabled’, technologies are meant to augment the functioning of bodies. Whether this happens, how, to what purposes and under what conditions are empirical questions. They are also analytical questions that require a framework for considering the relations between bodies, technologies, sociality and political economy. Addressing these questions is the task undertaken by the contributors to this special issue on disability and technology.