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Through document analysis and interviews, this paper examines the patent narratives of Transsion, a Chinese company dominating Africa's smartphone market and a leading innovator in facial recognition technologies (FRTs) optimized for darker skin tones. We identify two major narratives concerning Transsion's FRT patenting practice. First is 'empowerment', through which Transsion argues that there are 'blind spots' in conventional AI technologies and presents its AI camera as a remedy and an empowerment tool for dark-skinned users by 'seeing' their beauty. Second is the 'warfare' narrative, which is shaped by the heightening market competition and accelerating patent races among Chinese phone makers. As the battle for tech supremacy intensifies in Africa, Transsion expresses a strong sense of crisis and considers its FRT patents as 'weapons of competition' in preparation for a future smartphone warfare in Africa. This study makes two contributions. Empirically, through analyzing patents, we examine a relatively less-known Chinese tech company that has tremendous impact in the Global South. Theoretically, we interrogate the possibility of algorithmic empowerment against racist AI and technological independence through patents, although developing AI as weaponry, in the China-Africa context, also hampers the politics of decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid proliferation of the mobile phone in Africa has often been celebrated in deterministic ways that blindly eschew the stark and intricate realities associated with the challenges of the 'digital divide'. Equally, very little attention has been paid to the sophisticated ways in which citizens (in association with mobile phone operators and manufacturers) negotiate their way around these challenges. Against this backdrop, this essay draws on interviews conducted between 2008 and 2016 to explore the experiences of African journalists in their deployment of the mobile phone as a journalistic and everyday communication platform. It specifically examines the localised challenges faced and the strategies employed to circumnavigate them. The findings show that, to remain connected, journalists as both professionals and citizens, generally deploy tactics hinged on their individual and collective agency as well as the creative innovations of mobile phone operators and manufacturers. Collectively, these strategies, as the paper argues, present an opportunity to reimagine the notion of the 'digital divide' as a multifaceted, inherently contextual experience embedded in the interplay between social actors, their immediate context of 'practice' and the wider social milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines spatial imaginaries and their ability to circumscribe and legitimate economic practices mediated by digital technologies, specifically, the practices of digital entrepreneurship. The question is whether alternative imaginaries and typologies of digital entrepreneurship can be included in how we view digital entrepreneurship order to stimulate new practices and imagined futures. Our case studies of digital entrepreneurs in a number of African cities illustrate that popular and academic spatial imaginaries and discourses, for example those that cast the digital economy as borderless and accessible, do not correspond with the experience of many African entrepreneurs. Furthermore, enacting the metaphoric identities that coincide with these imaginaries and their discourses is a skillset that determines which (and how) actors can participate. They reflect the inherent coloniality of the digital, capitalist discourse. The tendency in the digital economy is to regard the entrepreneur persona, as realistic and global, rather than performative and particular to the Euro-American context in which these personas have originated. Our interviews of 186 digital entrepreneurs demonstrate that digital imaginaries and metaphors cannot be neutral and apolitical. In order to be inclusive, they should evoke a sense of multiplicity, heterogeneity and contingency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is the largest foreign information and communications technology (ICT) investor in Africa, and Chinese telecommunication companies including Huawei, CloudWalk, and Transsion have brought a range of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to Africa, from face recognition to smart cities. Existing analysis of China's AI impact in Africa, however, habitually falls into a Cold War-style narrative of 'authoritarianism' against the backdrop of 'liberal democracy.' This article calls for going beyond the oversimplified paradigm and proposes to examine the new phenomenon through a more sophisticated and critical lens. First, I show how (English language) media's investigations and academia's analysis of China's AI policy and its global impact (particularly in Africa) usually concentrate on a deep concern about the exportation of authoritarianism from Beijing. The article then demonstrates that the 'authoritarianism vs liberal democracy' model is problematic, if not outdated, and particularly insufficient to capture the multi-layered and overlapping realities of authoritarian and democratic moves by states around the world and the distinguishing properties of AI technologies. Based on a critical appraisal of the notions of surveillance capitalism and data colonialism and the recent empirical evidence from Africa in the third and fourth sections, I propose that these two concepts are more productive analytical frameworks for understanding what is going on in Africa related to the presence of China's AI, as well as for updating and moving forward the debates about whether China is colonizing Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have already identified and discussed some of the most urgent problems in content moderation in the Global North, fewer scholars have paid attention to content regulation in the Global South, and notably Africa. In the absence of content moderation by Western tech giants themselves, African countries appear to have shifted their focus towards state-centric approaches to regulating content. We argue that those approaches are largely informed by a regime's motivation to repress media freedom as well as institutional constraints on the executive. We use structural topic modelling on a corpus of news articles worldwide (N = 7′787) mentioning hate speech and fake news in 47 African countries to estimate the salience of discussions of legal and technological approaches to content regulation. We find that, in particular, discussions of technological strategies are more salient in regimes with little respect for media freedom and fewer legislative constraints. Overall, our findings suggest that the state is the dominant actor in shaping content regulation across African countries and point to the need for a better understanding of how regime-specific characteristics shape regulatory decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions if, and how the Internet is being used as a tool of democratization in emergent democracies. Focusing on the Angolan and Mozambican cases, it examines the media's influence in democratization and the potential of the Internet. Some preliminary conclusions from media analysis and interviews show that, in spite of limited access, the Internet, through information websites, online newspapers, blogs, etc., is strengthening civil society in different situations: disseminating the other media contents, stimulating the presence of different actors in the public sphere and the creation of new independent media, promoting participation and discussion, and influencing journalists, who use the Internet to look for new approaches and opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the current situation of ICTs in Africa and assesses the degree of proliferation of new technologies around the continent. Particular attention is paid to exploring the problem of the digital divide and specifying the key factors that impede the spread of ICT progress on the continent. There are several realistic ways in which African nations may benefit from ICT, including immediate and tangible results in medicine, education and economic development. The authors set forth a number of recommendations on bridging the infrastructure and knowledge gap. They also evaluate the efficiency of regional initiatives and international assistance programmes to Africa for enhancing the ICT sector and study the phenomenon of cultural imperialism in this respect. In conclusion, the authors speculate on the future of ICT in Africa and on the continent's ability to bridge the development gap with the help of new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]