African motors [electronic resource] : technology, gender, and the history of development / Joshua Grace.

Durham : Duke University Press, 2021.

1 online resource

Access is available to the Yale community.

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

"African Motors shows how Tanzanians made cars an African technology throughout the 1900s. Anchored in hundreds of oral interviews with mechanics, passengers, and drivers, the book takes car culture apart by moving from the open road to the repair garage and from post-OPEC crisis oil trading to socialist urban transport. Joshua Grace demonstrates that automobiles, best known as symbols of western technological power and development, never stabilized as a tool of empire capable of conquering and displacing African modalities of movement or their built worlds. On the contrary, pre-car walking networks provided the social and technological frameworks for Africans to appropriate cars on their own terms. The heart of this argument comes from repair garages found at homes, along streets, and under trees where mechanics designed and made a variety of African vehicles and parts. African Motors is neither a top-down nor an outside-in history, but rather an African-centered story of development featuring myriad examples of everyday Africans forging both individual and collective cultures of social and technological well-being through movement, making, and repair"-- Provided by publisher.

e-Duke books scholarly collection 2021. OCLC KB.

Books / Online

English

January 03, 2023

Includes bibliographical references and index.

History.