Anna Katharina Osterlow - Training “The African vanguard of the computer age”: early computing and visions of modernity and independence in Senegal and Nigeria, 1960-1990

Le séminaire So.Hist-Info, coordonné par Mathilde Fichen, Camille Paloque-Bergès et Adrien Tournier au laboratoire HT2S, et Léandre Bécard au COSTECH (UTC), vous convie à sa troisième séance de la saison 2025-2016

13 avril de 15h à 17h

Le séminaire se tiendra en hybride au Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, au 2 rue Conté, 75003 Paris, Un lien de connexion sera communiqué sur cette page avant l’évènement ainsi que le numéro de salle. Pour assister au séminaire, veuillez vous inscrire ici.

• Anna Katharina Osterlow (Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, Paris) : "Training “The African vanguard of the computer age”: early computing and visions of modernity and independence in Senegal and Nigeria, 1960-1990"

In March 1982 an ambitious, transnational group of teachers, scientists and computer experts
from Senegal, France and the United States launched the project “computers in education” at
the Ecole Normal Superieure in Dakar, Senegal to explore the usage of micro-computers in
teaching and learning. The exchanges within the transnational network of experts around this
project raised questions about the “Westernness” of technology, the appropriate ways to spread
computing knowledge adapted to Senegalese culture and the conditions of exporting computer
hardware from North to South. Similar questions were raised in a much earlier transnational
computer project in 1964 in Nigeria, where International Business Machines (IBM) established
the “African Education Centre”, in cooperation with the University of Ibadan, to train students
from different African countries on an IBM punch card computer. While evoking similar
questions on the universality of technology, and ideas about modernity related to computing
the project in Ibadan was announced as a symbol for the path that the African continent would
take. Taking into account the changing practices of computing over the years and the different
time contexts, from newly independent African states in the 60s to the Cold War dynamics in
the 80s, the research investigates the diverging visions about computing that were negotiated in
the two projects. In both projects, the exchanges between the transnational experts, their
different interests and at times tensions reveal the reciprocal and circulative character of the
spread of computing knowledge in African countries and globally. The research is based on
archival materials from archives in France, Senegal, Nigeria and the US.