On East Africa’s Digital Frontier

Byte by byte, digital technologies are having a dramatic impact on politics. But while their influence in Western political spaces has been heavily scrutinised, their role in East Africa is only beginning to become widely discussed. 

As Africa attracts greater foreign investment, countries in the Horn find themselves at the intersection of politics and technology. In Sudan, social media offered civilians a space to organise against and eventually oust the repressive regime of Omar al-Bashir. But in Kenya, politicians put big data to work. Long before the U.S. 2016 presidential election, the private data company Cambridge Analytica manipulated the Kenyan electoral discourse, operating with little accountability and stripping away the agency of ordinary people. 

Nanjala Nyabola, who recently authored Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya, joins Alan Boswell on The Horn this week. They discuss everything from digital colonialism and the exploitation of technology by state powers to the democratising potential of social media. 

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