Debating Ideas aims to reflect the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books.
In Maker Fairs and in Maker Movement circles, bricolage is celebrated and encouraged for its ingenuity in repurposing readily available resources. Bricolage is seen as foundational to the DIY-inspired Maker Movement--a movement of Euro-American origins characterised by the proliferation of maker-spaces, Fab Labs and hacker-spaces and their 'maker communities'. Traces of a globalising Maker Movement can also be found in urban landscapes of the Global South but are often challenged by their socio-material conditions--in dire contrast to its Euro-American counterparts.
One such instance is Lomé, Togo where small maker-spaces (WoeLab and Ecotec Lab, to name a few) have made international waves through their practice of 'bricolage'. Heralded as forerunners of 'e-waste practices' and often featured in international news outlets as 'world leaders in e-waste management' or as 'innovators' who turn the 'world's junk' and 'toxic e-wastes' into robots and 3D printers (see for instance BBC and CNN), Lomé's makers hack and repurpose old materials, second-hand electronics and e-wastes dumped on West African shores.
Yet despite being celebrated for their innovative practices, Lomé's makers appear to distance themselves from bricolage and these e-waste media representations. When introducing themselves, they say: 'We are "makers" but not bricoleurs.' What is it about bricolage that Lomé's makers try to steer away from? How is bricolage in Lomé different from how it is constructed in the Euro-American Maker Movement that openly celebrates it? In my recent research article, I discuss how bricolage, as a concept and practice, is not as clear-cut as we'd like to think.
The problem with bricolage
Being foundational to the Euro-American Maker Movement, activities carried out within maker-spaces are often automatically identified as bricolage (Beltagui et al. 2021). In Francophone Maker Movement circles, the Maker Movement is often translated as 'le mouvement bricoleur', the maker-space as 'l'espace bricoleur', and the maker identity as 'l'identité bricoleur' (Cotnam-Kappel et al. 2020; Weber and Duplàa 2018). Within and outside of it, bricolage carries a strong distinction based on Lévi-Strauss's (1962) The Savage Mind. The bricoleur is seen as someone who 'makes do with whatever is at hand', as opposed to the engineer who carefully conceives of and reflects upon a given project prior to execution. Bricoleurs are known to 'scavenge' resources in order to 'make do' when optimal resources remain unavailable (see also Corsini et al. 2021).
This idea of 'making do' is precisely what Lomé's makers and young innovators challenge. Bricolage in West Africa, as in many parts of the Global South, is a situated, necessary 'survival' practice performed to access materials and services that would otherwise remain unavailable. In Lomé, electricity can be accessed through what is called 'araignée' (French for spider)--an ingenious and artisanal, but rather illegal way of connecting from overhead power lines. In my hometown Manila, we call this electrical 'jumpers'.
As Togolese STS philosopher Yaovi Akakpo (2021) argues, the Lévi-Straussian distinction between the bricoleur and the engineer is a result of colonial expansion and modernity. He considers the more artisanal forms of 'débrouillardise' (making do) given minimal resources as consequences of colonial expansion and economic liberalisation, whose extractive nature in favour of imperial powers has left certain parts of the world 'sous-développé' (underdeveloped). As the concept and practice of bricolage travelled and were translated in many parts of the African continent, often assuming other names such as Système D, la débrouillardise, hustling or Article 15, it is depicted as a form of 'African inventiveness' in the face of precarity, and is said to contribute to modernity through the innovations and personal initiatives made to access scarce resources (Akakpo 2021). Yet it remains as such: a practice of low or inferior quality, a means of 'making do', to transcend the limitations of resource-constrained environments.
When seen in this light, bricolage as 'African inventiveness' is merely romanticising the practice. What bricolage actually stresses is the underlying contradictions of infrastructure development in urban landscapes, and the unequal access to materials and infrastructures that have made bricolage a necessity. Lomé's makers attempt to break away from this predicament in order to assert their participation and contribution to modernity--a participation that is neither purely African nor purely Western (Wiredu 1984), but one that is cognisant of Lomé's makers being creative innovators living in a milieu that allows them to be cosmopolitan, and to engage in global modernity through their own capacities and understandings of it. As one maker-space founder says, 'We don't want our stories to be about e-waste any more, we can do more than that. They should stop sending us e-waste to see what we can do with them. We deserve new things.'
Through Lomé's makers' insistence on moving away from bricolage, we become privy to the agentive capacity of critical self-awareness and the possibility to co-produce critique by making central their words and lived experiences. Bricolage, like many situated knowledges, contain within themselves contradictions that need apprehending; and these contradictions are often voiced, expressed and practised as lived experiences beyond the theoretical projects of academic discourse. In deconstructing and decolonising foundational concepts, anti-bricolage is but one such example. It is an expression of a desired future where bricolage is no longer a necessity, where materials are readily available, and where the playing field for tech innovation is levelled because African makers also 'deserve new things'.
References
Akakpo, Y. (2021) Aménagement du territoire et sentiers d'économie en Afrique: fonction du bricolage technologique. Paris: L'Harmattan.
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Beltagui, A., A. Sesis and N. Stylos (2021) 'A bricolage perspective on democratising innovation: the case of 3D printing in makerspaces', Technological Forecasting and Social Change 163: 120453.
Corsini, L., V. Dammicco and J. Moultrie (2021) 'Frugal innovation in a crisis: the digital fabrication maker response to Covid-19', R&D Management 51: 195-210.
Cotnam-Kappel, M., M. S. Hagerman and E. Duplàa (2020) 'La formation bricoleur: un modèle informé par les expériences et voix du personnel enseignant', Revue des Sciences de l'Éducation 46 (1): 117-50.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962) The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Weber, J. and E. Duplàa (2018) 'Le movement bricoleur et la salle de classe', Canopé <https://www.reseau-canope.fr/agence-des-usages/le-mouvement-bricoleur-et-la-salle-de-classe.html> (accessed 8 June 2022).
Wiredu, K. (1984) 'How not to compare African thought with Western thought' in R. Wright (ed.), Philosophy and an African Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Janine Patricia Santos is a PhD researcher from the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, KU Leuven Belgium. She is part of the wider research project CityLabs - Inventing the Future, which looks at 'making' in/of cities and futures in four African cities: Accra, Nairobi, Cape Town and Lomé. Her research mainly focuses on STS, feminist new materialisms, tech practices and engagements of digital youth, and democratiSing and decolonizing new technologies
