Anna Katharina Osterlow - Training “The African vanguard of the computer age”: early computing and visions of modernity and independence in Senegal and Nigeria, 1963-1984

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 sixième séance de la saison 2025-2016

13 avril de 15h à 17h

Le séminaire se tiendra en hybride à l'UTC-Paris 62 boulevard Sébastopol – 75003 Paris (Salle Danielle Quarante [IMI/IMI-QUARAN]). 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/CERI, Paris) : Training “The African vanguard of the computer age”: early computing and visions of modernity and independence in Senegal and Nigeria, 1963-1984

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 Normale Supérieure 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 the Global North to the Global South. Similar questions were raised in a much earlier 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 modernity and computing, this project brought forward Nigerian aspirations of linking computing with the efforts of nation-building and decolonisation, and it was announced as a symbol for the path that the African continent would take. Considering the changing practices of computing over the years, my research investigates the entanglements between French and US American state and private actors with African academics, functionaries, teachers, and computer scientists, from the 1960s to the late 1980s, in their ambitions to spread computing. Thereby, my research intends to shed light on the “silence” surrounding African computing history and its embeddedness in the global dynamics of decolonisation and the Cold War. My research is based on archival materials from archives in France, Senegal, Nigeria, and the US.