Solar Possibilities: Electric Pastoralism and the Role of Experimentation in Encouraging Innovation from Tanzania

• In Event: STS & Africa - II: Innovation and Mobilities

Abstract

Solar energy development in Tanzania is steeped in discourses of Western technological transfer whereby the devices themselves are lauded as central innovating agents--the “doers”—that are solutions to local poverty. In this paper, drawing from ethnographic work on Tanzania’s solar landscape, including 50 unstructured interviews with Maasai pastoralists, city-dwellers of Arusha, Tanzania, and representatives from foreign solar companies, I show how Tanzanians reconfigure incoming solar energy devices through locally-generated knowledges, philosophies, and technologies in calculated efforts to chart their own futures. Using a sociotechnical imaginaries approach, I analyze interviews, historical literature and other relevant documents to understand if, how, and why the imaginaries of an ideal life, powered by solar energy, have solidified differently in the imaginations of different members of contemporary Tanzanian society. Falling outside tropes of resistance and enslavement, I underscore how Maasai pastoralists are central innovating agents in a shifting socioeconomic landscape who engineer and inscribe their own meanings onto solar power. The Maasai repurpose solar technologies as tools of negotiation between modern development initiatives prioritized by the national government and foreign solar companies that seek to extinguish pastoral livelihoods and concentrate economic productivity into legible forms and their own desires to remain anchored to elastic ancestral traditions grounded in the special relationship between herders and livestock. I then discuss other instances of Tanzanian innovation—battery charging, electronics repair and solar entrepreneurship—to suggest that mutual vulnerability and experimentation constitute a productive direction for technological collaborations between Tanzanians and others committed to innovation from Tanzania.

Author

• Turner Adornetto, Ohio State University