It's always good to be a writer, humanitarian advocate, a political analyst,
and as you might have known from high profile as you've been in Oxford because you've got two masters at Oxford, as one does.
And they moved out to do a J.D. from the Harvard Law School, and she's been in many awards and many fellowships.
But most importantly, she's very well known for her work. She writes a lot on African politics and society, a lot of international law and feminism,
and she published extensively from Al Jazeera to the Guardian BBC to be adequate.
I mean, maybe she's been banned. We're very, incredibly honoured to have Mandela with us today.
I'm not going to say anything about her role because I would be doing it for the own favourites.
So please give a warm in fact. Welcome to my job. Hi, everyone.
Yes. In Kenya, we we have a lot of these familiar things, so when I say, Mallika, what does that mean?
I mean, have you walking up Malka? Yeah, Mallika, you know, nobody will know.
So I'm just here to give you a couple. I'm really happy to be here.
I should begin by saying because I have been planning to come to the council forever.
But you know, how to visit dance schools and finally, all the planets aligned.
And we were able to put this together at a time when I have a new project power that I'm actually very excited about.
I'm excited about all of them. But you know, a book is my first of the book.
It's a very unusual, exciting, confusing and overwhelming.
You name it experience.
So I'm very, very happy and honoured to be able to do this here in a space that I've been wanting to be a part of for the longest time.
I think what Fox is doing is really incredible.
I wish there had been something similar when I was at Oxford, whereby our version of Fox was going to St. Anthony for the Afro-Pop.
But what we still do now.
You know, I want a lot of national revolutions were planted at the mall.
So, you know, there's a lot of things, a lot of really cool people find a lot of really interesting things that they're pursuing today.
I so don't believe them. That's the question environment.
What I'm going to do today is I'm going to very briefly so that we can just jump in into dialogue.
I'd like to read a section from the book because this book actually has very strong connexions to Oxford, but maybe not in the way that you think.
I, as as McKenna said, I was a student here in my embassy, African studies and messy forced migration,
and I had a very interesting experience that I capture in some of the pages here.
And I really want to read those pages because in many ways, I wrote this book for myself as a student,
myself as a Kenyan student in African studies in Europe,
and there was a lot of things that I would have wanted to hear as an undergrad, as my students.
My undergrad is also an African studies that I hope will provoke some thought and some conversation as we move forward.
So I'm going to read a little bit and then I'm going to speak very briefly from some of that I prepared.
And then we'll dive right in. Does that sound good? Yeah.
Minkoff, you know, I'm going to keep saying that because you have to check.
This is from page one. So no spoilers. By the end of my graduate degree in African studies in 2011, I had a gnawing frustration.
Despite the large volume of books and articles, I devoured about 10 specifically and Africa in general.
No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't see myself in any of the projects I was reading about the continent and communities I call home.
It sometimes felt as if Africans stopped moving after the end of the Cold War, and the only Virgin worth reading about was poor violence,
sickly, hungry and ultimately only exists within benevolence of international organisations and governments.
This is the think that's going to invite people that may very well have been a product of where I was studying,
yes, in my life and in my extensive travels on the continent.
I knew that this was a complete story in Ghana at the University of Kumasi or Kwame Nkrumah National University of Science and Technology.
I worked with a team setting up a project to allow more engineering students to travel to other African countries and exchange ideas in Sudan and walk
the streets with a really feminist activist who deliberately and the right
invited the eye of the morality police by occupying the city in bright light,
bright red lipstick, skinny jeans and a perfect high.
And in Kenya, I witness an idea born from a blog post quickly evolved into a pioneer into the pioneering crisis mapping out mission.
It's not that Africa has no problems, but I knew the different sides of our faces, even if none of the books on the reading list saw it.
People are doing more than just surviving. I left university to says that I needed to put some of my energy into helping Africa get hurt.
This book is borne out of my desire to bring something specific about contemporary Africa into the conversation.
Much of the work that has already been done a bit about the intersection between technology and politics in Africa
has been in a composite edited collections about Africa that don't permit the depth of the subject increasingly.
Moreover, existing studies that dominate the discourse and are grounded in technology.
For developmental was tend to be overly optimistic about the terrain simply because they ignore politics or the political agency of the seats.
Yet beyond the reductive conversation and mobile money in Kenya,
young Africans are embracing technology and digital platforms as places to have their opinions articulated and amplified,
as well as to speak directly to power in their respective societies.
Technology is impacting normative ideas about the relationship between generations.
A lot of young people, especially to speak out of turn to find and amplify each other and in public spheres, are still routinely silenced.
The voices of women digital spaces that we've made possible for women to scream into the void.
These and other changes sit comfortably in the realm of democracy in quotes.
But that's a big word that needs to be in part to manage the expectation of simply providing
technology will address the structural issues that I can't respond to off the public sphere.
Power is complicated. The more people move into these spaces to raise their voices, the more power pushes back,
and it's necessary to understand the contours of this push back also. So that's kind of a couple of I think I might disagree a mission statements.
But if you know, I wrote it after I wrote the book, so it's fine.
I kind of knew where it was going, but essentially what I was trying to do was to tell my story to myself, as I said as an undergrad,
as a master's student, because we have these very narrow ideas about what is interesting, what is exciting, what is compelling about African society.
And I find it very hard to believe that my existence of existence, of people that I know,
people that I, I hung out with, people that I had watched, you know,
because I was an individual who speaks what I watched it grow was not interesting or compelling,
and you might be sitting there thinking, well, until nobody ever said that that was interesting or compelling.
And you would be wrong because I tried to write this for my master's programme and I was told these are middle class concerns,
which is weird because I am in the past and it is a concern.
But 10 years later, I look at how we have been using in Kenyan Twitter to monitor elections, to do parallel vote counts, to dispute official results.
I see young people in the Democratic Republic of Congo using Twitter and Facebook to document
political violence in the absence of international observation in some parts of the country.
I see people in Burkina Faso organising a revolution to end a 27 year regime, primarily talking to each other.
And then I'm not saying this is one thing that I emphasise in the book. Social media does not cause revolutions.
Digital spaces don't cause revolutions. People do.
People find spaces and use their agencies and use their individual respective agencies to bring these political changes about.
But there's something there about how technology is opening up space in societies that resist these expressions of agency, especially in women,
especially in young people in, you know, very age sort of way in societies where age is a big deal in communities that don't get paid attention to.
Like in Kenya, whereby if you read about Kenya, you would be excused for thinking that there will be two ethnic groups in Kenya.
Whenever I tell people that I can do is go, Oh, are you came along?
Are you Luo? No, they are, in fact, 44 ethnic groups in Kenya.
But because people are fascinated by elite level politics,
by the politics of how then the other 42 ethnic groups become spectators in their own political narratives.
And these are the kinds of stories that interest me as a feminist and feminist political theories.
The thing that the statement that always fascinates me is the personal is political, right?
It sounds like such a cliché. It's a feminist mantra, but I always ask myself, What does this situation?
What does this issue? What does this theory look like when your essential reference object is not a white man?
Is an African woman, is a young African, is a disabled African man,
is a Kenyan who is not Kikuyu or Luo, is a person from the DRC who is in the middle of an Ebola crisis.
He's trying to figure out how to vote is a person in Zimbabwe who doesn't have access to dollars,
is a person in Somalia who doesn't have the capacity to flee. These are the questions that interest me.
These are the things that intrigued me. And this is what some of the philosophy that's been guiding the production of my nine book work.
But also in this book, I basically looked at Kenyan politics and asked myself,
What does contemporary Kenyan politics look like when your central reference object is not
a map and you will see some of the stories that I've collected here kind of touch on that.
Now, I'm the first to admit that technology is a very fast and a very it's not a universal thing, especially in Kenya, right?
And I go into some detail in this book breaking down demographics,
breaking down who is abatement 79 percent of all tweets that are sent in Kenya sent in English, right?
The vast majority of people who are socially behind Nairobi with Mombasa different a distant second.
And there's two ways of interacting with this data,
and one is not the none of which see what you think people what people would want you to see, which is these are middle class concerns.
Rather, it's to look at the connexions between who is on these platforms to understand
who is on these platforms and how they're connected to the rest of the society. That's one way of doing it, and the other is to look for the outliers.
You know, when you talking about Chief Noor Mohammed, who is in Nakuru, who is using WhatsApp to organise public meetings in his location,
we were talking about people in Gaza who are using it to draw attention to political crises that don't make it into the national news.
We're talking about people in Wajir who are using Twitter to get to the National Commission on Human Rights to report,
you know, the possibility of mass graves right outside of the top.
Neither one of these approaches collapsed onto that truck that these are middle-class concerns.
What we're saying is, yes, let's acknowledge the limitations, but within those limitations.
What's interesting that's happening here, and I hope that that's what I've done with this book.
I wanted to. I'm not going to summarise the whole book to you because a spoilers.
And B, I love for you to buy it. What I'm what I am going to do is I'm going to give you the three things the three themes, the three ideas.
The three need philosophical roots, but kind of divided my research and my writing.
And I feel like I should preface this by saying this book has its origins in the 2007 general election in Kenya.
So it has been 10 years coming, but it also has its roots in my experience in Oxford so well for 12 years from 2007,
but I stopped writing in 2017, but this is 10 years since I was in Oxford.
Yes, I don't know every 10 years and also has its roots in my experience with African studies as a discipline.
And it also has three years of actually sitting down at my desk and seeing chapter one in all of those.
So these are multiple things sort of weaving in and out of each other.
And I think the thing that I got most out of the experience is, first of all,
the sheer volume of things that I don't know, which I think is a great thing to acknowledge as a recession.
If the trying to get a grasp, I let's just say this in presentations that this book is not going to teach you how to code.
If you're here to buy a book about coding, you're in the wrong presentation. Try down the hall.
I tried to understand technology. I tried to understand how the technological space works.
I was fascinated by the fact that people who work in tech have no idea what's happening in Africa.
They're just like, Oh, we should be all on the side of the phone. You see, the pictures of our tech in Africa was always on my side.
It's such a coincidence. And I was fascinated by people working in development who had this hyper optimistic perspective about technology,
but forgot that this technology is shaped both by the people who design it and the people who use it.
So in development, you have this thing I speak for you. Have you had those that acronym ICTY, the number four?
And then it's this. It's all the rage now in human rights and humanitarian and development organisations because of the underlying
belief that if you just give poor people more tech or if we introduce more tech into development work,
things will get better. And 90 percent of the time, they don't give you a good example.
Based on my own work, I used to work in Madagascar and we were training development in Madagascar, and we were trying to do what we call.
I was in Kenya round robin savings clubs. You know, those are everybody puts in ten point ten dollars every month and then at the end of month,
one person gets the one hundred and twenty bucks and is supposed to help you see,
these are pretty common, definitely in Africa, but certainly in other parts of the world.
And we were trying to digitise round robin Singh's club in Madagascar, so we got a huge grants and we put to people,
if you put this on your phone and you send it and send the money mobile money to, so try to console the digital fantastic big problem.
Madagascar has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world. Mobile money is text based system.
If you can't read,
how are you going to be able to interact with a text based system and these ideas of leapfrogging these ideas of powering through social,
cultural, political realities, they don't work. They're mixed race reports.
But if we don't stop and think about the societies in which we truly have this idea for interventions,
then we end up in the same problem that we have in Madagascar, which was nobody wanted to use the systems that we had built because it wasn't.
Not only with the delicious, the issue was also literacy in French because we were developing apps in English.
And people wanted to use apps and Malagasy. So we thought, let's translate them into French.
And if you think the literacy rate is, I think it's 35 percent in Malagasy, it was even lower in French.
These are the kind of things that I hope that I'm bringing up through this project is.
Don't be so single minded about either the politics or the tech,
but you don't see how the two things intersect and you don't see the people who make them and decide to go back to my three core ideas.
My first is what I just said agencies. This book is a conversation about tech in Africa that starts with Africans and not the tech.
I wanted to look, and this is also why I wanted to write about Kenya and not Africa, much to the dismay of my publisher.
I wanted to look, as I mentioned to politics outside the elite level.
I wanted to write about Kenyan politics, but I didn't want to write about Raila,
and I didn't want to write about American Netzer, and I didn't want to write about Thomson Silke.
Because seriously, how much more can we read about Raila and where Kenyatta and Kalonzo Musyoka?
And if you don't Kenyan politics, these names are going over your head. But if you do not get your publics, you know what I want about race.
We're so fixated with the elite level politics in Africa. We're so fixated with what power is doing that we forget the vast majority of Africans,
and therefore we don't give the vast majority of Africans the tools that they need to process the political circumstances.
And this is from a theoretical perspective as theorists.
Our job is to think about the world and to give people the tools that they need to process their world.
But how can we do that if we keep making people look at power and not at themselves?
This is also the reason why I have a chapter on feminism, because when you look at elite level politics in a patriarchal society,
you are looking at MIT and I have had firsthand experience with this on multiple levels of Kenya because another
one of the many jobs that I have had many jobs was in a non-profits where we used to produce every election year.
We would produce a book about the previous election, about the.
So you have the Kenyans of the election period, but there's really only one year between the cycle when we're not in election mode.
The previous election or the next election, which is the third year when you're like, Oh, let's do a project.
And one thing I noticed is you have 12 chapters written by men about men,
and then you have the gender chapter written by a woman who would go and look at one one well-known woman, Martha Karua.
And I googled whether I did this exercise for the 2015 election and I saw what was coming down the pipeline for 2017.
And I said to my team, We are women, do women not do politics and power?
This is part of the reason why it was so important for me to have both a feminist
thread that runs throughout the book based on my own political ideology.
But to have a specific chocolate looks at what feminism is outside the elite level politics.
Fundamental question for me what does politics look like when your central reference object is not a man?
The second theme that I wanted to grapple with throughout this project was change one of
the sometimes it died on the cutting room floor is Kenya's first digital decade 2007 2017.
2007, Iran, 2006 2007 is when you really start to see the mass take up of a lot of these digital technologies in Kenya.
Safaricom's 2006 Embassy 2006 story.
Twitter is also, I think, 2006 blogging starts to really take off in the context.
And what I argue in this book is digital technologies are mass communication,
as a mass communication device really starts to take off because of the 2017 selection violence.
Why? Because of the censorship that was happening in mainstream media and the state control of mainstream media.
So I do go into some detail about those media dynamics.
I think when you do analysis of Kenya, it can feel like you're a hamster on a wheel.
Why am I having the same conversations that I was having in 2007 2017?
Why am I still talking about race? Why am I still talking about [INAUDIBLE] answer?
Why am I still talking about people who have been in office since nineteen?
Eighty two eighty three? Right? I really wanted to drill down on a specific area to try and move past those presumptions.
So change is a big part of what I try to talk about here.
Some of the people who have read the book have told me it also changed me in many ways because in the beginning there's a lot of optimism.
And I wrote the last chapter just after the 2017 election, and it's a little bit less optimistic than the stuff at the beginning, it writes.
It brings together what has changed, takes time.
Maybe even if I think that if you don't, and this is again another reason why I didn't want to do an African book.
If you don't get into the readers of each society, if you don't permit yourself and time and space,
I fix the time period I fix the society so that I can really get into the weeds of what
I thought was happening to try and understand what was changing and what happened,
and the nature of the general to push back against the erasure of these key moments.
Because if you slip into Kenya, the January of the election, of the July of the election, as election observers are wont to do,
you miss out on the fact that I'll give you a great example with women in politics, everybody always MDI and all of these.
I should be mentioning your love.
These big grass keeping organisations who have descended on African countries three weeks, three months before the election.
And then they say, we're going to train women in capacity, build women into going to elections.
And I had one woman say to me, I'm just so tired of being capacity.
I can remember, you know, because I've been to every single conceivable world in politics workshop.
I can't be trained anymore. So if all of this is happening, why aren't there more women in politics?
Well, if you get into the weeds of Kenyan politics, you would realise that most women are intimidated, beaten, bribed,
cheated their certificates stolen during the nomination phase, which happens about four months before the election.
So you thinking about the election and thinking about how women,
if they only knew how to make posters for the election campaign, could who even if this the point, right?
And this is one of the reasons why I wanted to really get into the weeds of this thing to stop myself
from giving just a superficial treatment and unpack some of the unseen elements of what was happening.
You might look at Kenyan media, for example, and think they're so bad at their jobs.
What's wrong with these people? Why aren't they more theory? Why being more critical?
Why didn't they report the correct results when they knew they had the correct election results?
And if you swooped in in 2017, even in January 2017, you would miss the fact that in December 2015,
the Jubilee administration passed a Media Law Media Act that said that any media house that shared information that
was not verified by the ABC would be subject to a fine of five million shillings fifty thousand U.S. dollars.
But anybody media outlet that was found culpable of telling the story that wasn't the official sanctioned election story was opening itself up to
crazy to crippling violence that when we had this power sharing in and the media did a three media houses did to go on air with what was happening.
Twitter. I'm speaking this is kind of like inside us, but you don't even details at this point if you don't have them yet.
That every day the warm air, they were being fired by the media watchdog because they had been telling a story that hadn't been officially solved.
So this is why this change theme was really important to me.
I didn't want to just swoop into the 2017 election and begin making summary observations that were not grounded in some measure of integrity.
But at the same time, in some measure of depth and the final theme is connexion.
As I said, one of the things that struck me when I was talking to the tech guys was the fact that really,
in Silicon Valley, Africa does not exist outside we, shahidi and M-Pesa.
It doesn't give you an example.
Yesterday, the New York Times had an article about an actual election interference on social media, and they said in their headline,
the Russians perfected the technique in 2016, and now it's being rolled out in Brazil and Bangladesh.
Whatever afterwards. Now, if you know anything about Kenyan politics, you know that that's just not where the story begins.
Cambridge Analytica, the bane of our political existence, has been active in Kenya since 2013.
They were active in Nigeria in 2016. I want to say, tell me, what does the Nigerian election 2000?
50. They were asking the 2015 Nigerian election. They were active in South Africa as well.
Right. They manipulate the same tactics that were used in the United States.
General election in the Brexit vote were pioneered in Africa, were tested even in India.
All of the social media interference that we're freaking out about was tested in Africa with no oversight because in Kenya,
for example, we don't have a data protection law. We don't have a data privacy law.
At the time, we didn't have a cyber security law. We had very lax laws of data collection and individuals.
They ran a survey 2013. 47000 respondents gauged what Kenyans responded to and produced a strategy for the Jubilee administration that basically,
when you think about Kenya's experience with the ICC, it was two British PR firms, one of which was Cambridge Analytica, then developed that.
So this stuff doesn't start in 2016, so we can press it.
But the idea that African politics is an insular thing that happens is driven by different motivations.
You know, primordial tensions, wahaha, and that all of this other stuff that happens in the rest of the world is somehow qualitatively different.
I found that very heartening to believe and to accept.
And so there's a lot of stuff in this book that people who work in African politics, African studies,
what do you really need to spend six pages talking about the development of social media?
Do you really need this number of pages talking about tech platforms and Alexander Nix and Cambridge Analytica?
Why can't you just talk about Raila and who can answer?
For me, there was the idea of connexion.
We have to stop cheating African issues as if they are unmoored and they're just floating on the ocean of knowledge separately from everybody else.
We are in this world. We are part of this world, and what happens in Africa matters to the rest of the world and not in the way that you know it is.
We are waiting for the rest of the world to save us. But in a sense of what I said before about agency,
there are people actively making decisions that will have ramifications not just for African people, but for the rest of the world.
To me, the most salient example of this right now is what's happening to elections in the world.
Everything that you're freaking out about, about elections, about foreign interference in elections,
about the fact that money is shaping electoral outcomes in a very alarming way.
All of this stuff is things that we've been worrying about for the better part of the last twenty five years.
The fact that people can buy elections in DRC, that the third candidate could be announced as the winner and people will accept it
because they privilege the stability of the DRC over the economic stability of the DRC,
over the well-being of the people of the Congo. That's not new.
That didn't start in 2017. This is something for us as Kenyans, for example, that we've been struggling with since 2007.
And if we don't start making. These Connexions, it's not just about you, you being the West surviving more, you know, preserving yourselves.
It's about the fact that we're not building holistic philosophies, theories,
viewpoints, practises about what kind of war we want to live in moving forward.
And I'm always fascinated by the idea of future proofing or, you know, of the future reflecting some kind of universal human.
I don't know thing, right? I hate this idea, this underlying idea that we are not connected and we are Africans.
And so that's what I was writing about. That's one of the things that I was racing against.
So there's a lot of references to things that you might not expect to find in the book about an African country.
But as I say in one of the chapters, this is about how an unexpected place was using platforms.
Text that was designed was not designed with them in mind to determine their own political agency.
I'm going to leave.
You actually had nothing else with them down here, but I'm going to leave you with, I guess, tie you back to what I said in the beginning.
I wrote this book for myself as a person sitting in a seminar room in Oxford and
not seeing herself represented in any of the literature that she was encountering. I've tried to read a book that is accessible.
I've tried to avoid overly technical language.
I strongly believe that if you can't explain what your research is doing to someone in plain language, then you don't know what you're doing.
And so I try to avoid jargon. I try to.
I think I'm funny, but I am not objective.
I try to throw some jokes in there. And I hope that even if you are not a specialist in African politics, especially in African history,
especially in Kenyan politics, Kenyan history and technology, whatever.
But this is a book that will help you think, more curiously, more interestingly, more inclusively about this strange little country that I call home.
Thank you.