Olu Oguibe, 'Forsaken Geographies: Cyberspace and the New World 'Other' [1]
In: Annotations 3: Frequencies: Investigations into culture, history and technology. Edited by Melanie Keen. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998, pp. 18-29.
While on a conference trip in Mexico in 1993, I witnessed an incident which, though it was not entirely new to my experience and background in West Africa, nevertheless reminded me of the deep paradox of our existence and perceptions of progress and triumph at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the lobby of a three-star hotel in the heart of Guadalajara, birthplace of the Mexican nation, a child, scantily attired and hastily painted in the colours of an indigenous performer (having perhaps done the make-up himself), made gestures towards staff and visitors. He was six at most, possibly five, and he was there because he was not in school. He was there because he could not be in school.
The boy made gestures, but he did not speak, which is not to say that he could not speak. Evidently he could only gesticulate to the audience in that hotel lobby because he did not have their language. Our language. Someone offered him money, which he rejected, and at this point he was driven from the lobby by a member of staff. As he fled, the fellow turned to us and explained what the little, painted boy wanted all along: drinking water.
I begin with this story because it is about communication, or the failure of communication. It is also about location and privilege. It is about power and its proclivity for insensitivity. It is about priorities, also. It is about our propensity to misunderstand, and in the process demean those who through the unfortunate circumstance of their location and background, cannot lay claim to the same privileges of language and disposition as ourselves; we consign all others outside those worlds to absence. In our piety, some of us offered the little boy money. Yet he had two very fundamental needs more crucial than money: namely, water, and the ability to communicate this most basic need to others. Among us, both conferees and tourists, there were probably dollars in the thousands, state-of-the-art digital equipment, expensive clothing, innumerable degrees and diplomas, millions of miles in travel and adventure, a good deal of enlightenment, and wide knowledge of the arts and letters. There was good will too, and charitable disposition. Yet, despite this bounty, two things which none of us was disposed to provide for a little, gesturing child: water and understanding.
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Cyberculture in a deprived world
I dwell on the boy in Guadalajara because his case resonates for me, as an African and an outsider in the West, because it has relevance for the African condition in the cyber age.
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Like Mexico in Latin America, the leading country in information technology in Africa is South Africa. Not only does the 'new nation' of South Africa boast a history of participation in digital networking longer than most, it is today at the forefront of the more advanced forms of this technology. These include an admirable number of network communities, appreciable presence on the improved interfaces of the World Wide Web, as well as a string of transfer protocol servers. Its virtual communities are part of the global network of cybercommunities.
[...]
Like Mexico, South Africa is not a complete outsider to cyberspace. Yet South Africa's digital revolution is the preserve of the hubs of industry, commerce, and education, and these constitute a minuscule, albeit powerful, sector of the country. For the rest of its population - the millions who have only just emerged from a century of segregationist disadvantage for those who wait still for the promises of a new, liberal democracy to be fulfilled - the allures and discourses of cyberspace are non-existent. For those millions the question is not whether the computer is favoured or disdained. The fact is that it does not exist, and the reality within which their daily lives are defined and spent, has no room whatsoever for a digital nirvana. Their worry is not the inconsequence of nature and the body; their most elemental worry is for the survival of nature and the sustenance of the body.
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In a country with a history of repression, cyberspace verges on reinserting the culture of insensitivity while further dislodging the disadvantaged from the scaffolds of power. Electronic mail and the web browser, with all their unarguably positive potentials, nevertheless become veritable tools for the construction and fortification of another world, outside the borders of which everything else is inevitably consigned to erasure and absence. In connective South Africa the majority of the population fits most perfectly into that category of the inconsequential revealingly known in cyberspeak as 'PONA.' They are, indeed, a People Of No Account.
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For these countries and their citizens, deprivation is an almost unshifting reality, and within the matrix of reality, the assertion that 'computers are with us', and that the world is on the brink of a great cybergasmic explosion, is a fallacy. It does not reflect the world as we know it. In the end, cyberculture is a dependent phenomenon, reliant on the relative mitigation, if not absence, of deprivation. The accessibility and relevance of cyberspace are dependent on the ability to transcend the constraints of basic subsistence; and the privilege to take certain fundamental dispositions for granted. Within the geographies mentioned above, however, as within those of rural Mexico and India, as well as the American inner city and rural outback, deprivation is an unmitigated presence that forecloses access to entry points of cyberspace. These are territories where reality persists, the localities of the 'Other' of our new world. These are the geographies forsaken in the jargon of cyberist discourse.