Big tech and the IoT extract data from Indigenous African People, denying autonomy and allowing increased surveillance

Relational Big Data transformations, reconfiguring research in the twenty-first century, efface African data sovereignty, national sovereignty, epistemological sovereignty and DNA/gene sovereignty in ways that are reminiscent of the colonial epoch. Put differently, Big Data and the Internet of Things are open and relational in the sense of conjoining or linking various human and nonhuman objects, and datasets – relational theorists presuppose that entities are not important in themselves, since for them what matters most are the relational data between the entities and not the entities themselves (Crellin 2016; Kitchin 2014; Marton et al. 2013). In other words, as much as colonialists denied African autonomy and sovereignty, while using the same binary logic to distinguish themselves from the purported African Other, contemporary theories on data relationality/relational ontologies similarly deny autonomy and sovereignty to Africans who are depicted as indistinct from nonhumans from whom data can be extracted without the necessity of consent and privacy. Theorised in terms of relationality rather than hospitality, African people are ambiguated, they are denied autonomy and sovereignty and then deemed to be indistinct and indiscernible from nonhuman animals. Effacing various forms of indigenous sovereignties, contemporary data relationality theories deny indigenous human essence, identity and autonomy – relational theories presume the absence of distinctions between the human and nonhuman, ethical and unethical, inside and outside, consent and dissent, the colonial and decolonial. Emphasising connections, relations and networks between otherwise distinct objects and subjects, data relationality defies distinctions/binaries/dichotomies (Ahn 2019; Latour 2005; Wildman 2006) in ways that generate ambiguities, uncertainties and hence ignorance. On the other hand, we argue, hospitality assumes the existence of distinctions between insiders and outsiders, assumes the existence of distinctions between humans and nonhumans (but does not necessarily assume an acrimonious relationship between them), and recognises the existence of African human essence, identity, autonomy and sovereignty. Thus, relational data assumptions of openness, borderlessness and unboundedness legitimise the contemporary implantations or insertions of smart electronic chips and intelligent nanobots (microscopic autonomous robots) into the bodies and brains of indigenous African people, who become subject to remote control and mind manipulation via the Internet of Things (an emergent tapestry of internet that connects various environmental objects and subjects imbued with sentience) and Big Data (huge volumes of data transmitted at high velocity from objects and subjects connected in the Internet of Things). The contemporary era is marked by the growth of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, which are unevenly centred in North America and China. Marked by the logics of economic and data extraction, Big Data has parallels with colonialism. Similar to colonialism, which placed Africans at the bottom of the world system, contemporary data colonialism places Africans at the “bottom of the data pyramid” in Arora’s (2016) sense. For this reason, while South Africa and Morocco have introduced biometric identification systems and machine to machine solutions, there are concerns that chipification and digitalisation of citizens’ identities intensifies surveillance systems and the attendant dictatorships by those who control the data notwithstanding its avowed relationality (Ndubuaku and Okereafor 2015; Breckenridge 2005; Duncan 2014). While relationality denies human essence and distinctions between humans and nonhumans, it is important to note that since the precolonial era, Africans were guided by tenets of Chivanhu/Ubuntu (from southern African languages including Shona, Nguni and Xhosa), which spell out African humanistic philosophies, including ethics and morality. In terms of Chivanhu/Ubuntu, human beings are expected to distinguish themselves from animals and nature by hunhu/unhu (although the Shona spellings are different, the meanings are the same) encompassing humanistic ethics, self-respect, accountability for one’s behaviour, civility, good manners, prudence, reverence of human nature, integrity, good behaviour, moral uprightness, humanness, respect for human life, respect for human dignity, etiquette, hospitality, autonomy, ownership and control of resources, and so on – these aspects should also apply in research that appreciates the hospitality of the Other (Hapanyengwi-Chemhuru and Makuvaza 2017; Pearce 1990). Although some scholars have argued that Africans are animists without making distinctions between humans and animals (Burnett and waKang’ethe 1994: 156), other scholars have correctly argued that Africans are not animists, do not worship nature or even ancestors but have the notion of God/Supreme Being (Bullock 1927; Nhemachena 2017; Tempels 1959; Gelfand 1959). Put in other words, the key question for Africans is not whether or not technological objects/nature has vitality or agency or is an actor, but that human beings are defined in terms of hunhu/unhu rather than simply in terms of vitality as some contemporary relational theorists would have it. In short, human beings in Africa are defined in terms of hunhu/unhu and not simply in terms of vitality/agency. The point here is that colonial scholarship has suffered from what is called the “crisis in representation” and there have been critical debates, for instance, as to whether anthropology, as a colonial discipline, accurately represented the colonised peoples, who are still deemed to be indistinct from nonhuman technological artefacts, in relational data systems. Of course, some colonial scholarship depicted Africans in ways that suited colonial racist ideologies and that portrayed Africans as beasts, as four legged, as one eyed monsters, and so on (Magubane 2007; Nhemachena 2017; Fanon 1963). Even Hegel, arrogantly, and in a racist way, described Africans as children of the forest, as wild and at the level of nature, as lacking morals, as people without history and as inconsequential in world history and therefore as fit for enslavement in the matrix of racial relations of the world (Adegbindin 2015; Terada 2019; Andindilile 2016). Because Africans were dehumanised and deanthroposised, as it were, during colonialism within which they were depicted and treated as indistinct from machines and animals, emancipation for them does not lie in postanthropocentrism or posthumanism but in humanisation wherein hunhu/unhu, rather than mere vitality or entanglements, would be central in matters of data collection. In other words, African humanism is traceable not necessarily to the European Enlightenment but to precolonial African Chivanhu/Ubuntu. Put differently, the Enlightenment humanised Europeans some of whom became colonialists who dehumanised African people whom they subjected to [data] colonialism.