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This paper is part of a broader investigation into the intersection of disability and technology in African societies. The paper will focus specifically on Nigerian cultures, exploring the social experience of disabled persons with respect to their use of available technologies in navigating a space within their respective cultures. The paper will first deal with the technologies available to disabled people in pre-colonial West Africa as suggested by archaeological and literary evidence, go on to analyse how changes in economic and cultural systems brought about by colonialism and the post-colonial state, shifted the roles and technologies available to disabled people. The paper argues that the African cyborg has been an inspiration for new technologies, and an agent of technological and social change. Simultaneously, increased connectivity has enabled indigenous technologists to more quickly share and develop ideas. It has also empowered new generations of technologists with the potential to radically improve disabled access to areas of public life. The paper concludes that as a focus of metaphysical anxieties, the cyborg has evolved to something approximating the New African, someone who can defy boundaries to achieve an act worthy of herself and the her community – an agent of revolution and social change rather than a passive recipient of imposed technologies.
Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2014, Vol. 1 No. 1
