Engaging Africa ethically
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash
In the seminal paper “Is it ethical to study Africa: Preliminary thoughts on scholarship and freedom,” Amina Mama (2005) discusses how African Studies has often been a terrain of ethical deliberation and how various African intellectual traditions have drawn on anti-colonialism, nationalism, and pan-Africanism to foreground a liberatory agenda. Amongst other things, Mama observes that Africa’s radical intellectuals have often pursued an anti-imperialist ethic while challenging disciplinary Eurocentrism.
This influential work on ethics in African intellectual history guided the inaugural Ethics Lab webinar, which sought to kickstart conversations about how knowledge from the African humanities could inform the ethical questions posed by new and emerging health technologies. Convened on March 30, 2023, the panellists included Amina Soulimani (Huma, University of Cape Town), Caesar Atuire (University of Ghana/Oxford), and Henri-Michel Yéré (University of Basel).
Inspired by Amina Mama’s provocation, the panellists considered what ethical engagement with Africa as a place, idea, object of study, source of knowledge and ideological commitment(s) could look like in discourses of technology and innovation. This entry captures some of the session’s key insights along with several critical questions raised by the panellists. In summary, these insights include an account of ethical engagement that probes relations of neo-colonial dependency, grounds ethics in African historical experiences and embraces decolonisation and pluriversality.
Probing neo-colonial dependency
Reflecting on her doctoral fieldwork researching AI health infrastructures in Morocco, Amina Soulimani probed the global imperial context that shapes and is shaped by science and technological innovation. She noted that software engineers developing artificial intelligence algorithms for health and other industries rarely engage with ethics beyond data security and anonymisation – and yet their implementation in a clinical setting like Morocco raised ethical and social issues that were not considered, such as their effect on hospital staff and patient wellbeing. This observation, far from just outlining the need for more multidisciplinary ethics conversations within engineering labs, is also a subtle argument for enlarging the circle of ethics beyond routine considerations of principlism.
In broadening the scope of ethics, Amina brought attention to the relationships of neo-colonial dependency shaping the development of biotechnologies and the building of health infrastructures across the African continent. Amongst other illustrations, this dependency manifests as “… the accumulation of large banks of data overseas about African subjects, which are later fed to algorithms and used to develop technology software that returns to the continent and is sold as commodities and subsequently presented as the primary reliable infrastructure for excellence and accuracy.” She concluded with the following provocative questions:
- what does ethical resistance mean in the context of African health when biotechnologies are interwoven in large networks characterised by opacity which constrains what we see and question?
- in what ways could a politics of solidarity support the framing of health technologies in ways that advance freedom and human dignity?
Can ethics be grounded in African historical experience?
In his “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” G.W.F. Hegel famously remarked, Henri recalled, that the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. History's tendency to repeat itself means that it often fails to be a basis for any kind of learning towards changing human action at a societal level.
Disagreeing with this proposition, Henri reflected on the 1947 Nuremberg Code, a landmark document in medical and research ethics that reinforces, amongst other things, the ethical principle of voluntary consent. The code and trial that birthed it are one of several key moments in the intellectual history of bioethics as a disciplinary field and represent an apparent attempt to learn from the Nazi atrocities in Germany and Europe. Its scope of application is universal, which, much like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a year later, was intended to hold everywhere at all times.
If it is indeed possible to learn from history, what is the extent to which one can learn from African historical experience? Henri asked. At the core of this question is the observation that scientific research in Africa often fails to originate from preoccupations tied to needs or epistemological questions emerging from African concerns.
Despite their competence, African scientists rarely take part in producing the kinds of questions that shape the direction and agenda of international research collaborations. What explains the ostensible impossibility for such questions to come out of Africa? Looking beyond the easy answer residing in the origins of funding for scientific research in Africa, Henri invites us to ask whether the production of scientific knowledge on the continent is connected to a sense of African history as we see, for example, in the work of Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop.
These reflections, he argues, foreground a vision of an African ethic concerned with cultivating a “capacity to exert epistemological autonomy in a way that is comfortable and that does not seek to affirm itself as confrontational, as a counterforce… but has the self-assurance of having internalised its own historical paradigms.” This culminated in two thought-provoking questions:
- who has the power to decide which event should carry enough historical credence to usher in a novel paradigm?
- what does it take to consider one’s own history as a site for thinking about the moral content of what it means to be human, and which elements of African history could serve as a base for this?
Being intellectually African: From apologia to commitmental engagement
Like Henri, Caesar considered the question of ethics in relation to the responsibilities of African intellectuals. His contribution wove together an account of these responsibilities that affirms Africa as a place of knowledge, in addition to foregrounding “commitmental engagement” and a pluriversal vision of ethics.
For him, ethical engagement with Africa requires affirming it as a place of knowledge, and this affirmation goes beyond the phase of apologia that has characterised some periods in African intellectual history. Apologia here refers to the practice of speaking in defence of and justifying the idea of Africa as a place of knowledge and often takes the form of counter-narratives directed at Western audiences. If, for example, Africa was said to lack history, philosophy, or literature, efforts of vindication emerge to contend otherwise.
Africa-centred intellectual projects would need to move beyond apologia in order to preclude extraversion. Coined by the late Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji to describe scientific dependency in Africa, extraversion defines and critiques an orientation and deference to external sources of authority. In this way, Caesar’s contribution echoes and exhorts the confidence underlying Henri’s notion of epistemological autonomy. It is a confidence that does not seek approval or recognition from the Western gaze.
This affirmation goes as far as asserting global citizenship for knowledge from Africa. This idea casts African intellectual production as a contribution to a global discourse of humanity to which it has unequivocal membership. Here, Caesar identifies African philosophical scholarship on "emergent personhood" and "relational ontology" as examples of rich bodies of thought emanating from the continent that could contribute solutions to global polycrises and inform thinking about the ethics of new and emerging technologies.
Affirming Africa as a place of knowledge also requires “commitmental engagement”, defined as “decolonial engagement with our own people.” This idea of commitment seeks to bridge the gap between African elites and African peoples because citizenship struggles by intellectuals on the African content are often more concerned with securing elite privilege than engaging and discharging their social responsibility to African communities. By making commitmental engagement a requirement of ethically engaging with the African continent, Caesar seemed to demand that a commitment to social justice be prioritised in projects of scholarship and freedom in Africa.
Ultimately, these themes were brought together to advance a mosaic vision of ethics that embraces pluriversality — a world in which many worlds fit, to echo the Zapatismo spirit. This ethic of pluriversality affirms the possibility of collaboration and sharing ethical goals, despite different worldviews.
Conclusion
In sum, Amina Soulimani, Caesar Atuire, and Henri-Michel Yéré offered profound insights into leveraging the African humanities (philosophy, history, anthropology in this instance) in the ethics of new and emerging technologies. Amina Soulimani’s examination of neo-colonial dependencies within AI health infrastructures exposed the intricate webs of power and exploitation woven into the fabric of technological innovation. Her poignant queries compel us to confront the ethical ramifications of opacity and solidarity in shaping the future hospital in Africa. In contrast to Hegelian scepticism, Henri-Michel Yéré’s exploration of grounding ethics in African historical experience confronts the constraints on endogeneity in African scientific research, urging us to reclaim agency and epistemological autonomy. Finally, Caesar Atuire’s call for a shift from apologia to commitmental engagement urges African intellectuals to transcend the confines of external validation by asserting global epistemic citizenship and prioritising social justice.