About the Project

The project “A History of ‘Making Things’ in West Africa, 1920-1980: Creating, Meaning Making, and Experience” studies artisans and craftspeople in Accra and Lagos. It turns to productive processes and entrepreneurial labour with a focus on meaning making, creating and the socio-cultural importance of ‘making things’. Aims of the project are, firstly, to elucidate West African historical epistemologies and experiences of "making things" both under colonial rule and after; and, secondly, to contribute to writing entrepreneurial activities back into social, cultural, and political histories of West Africa. Turning to entrepreneurial labour, the project seeks to move beyond a reductive focus on capital accumulation: studying "making" allow for a historically situated account of people’s engagement with technologies, which transcends the bifurcation of the ‘imported’ and the ‘local’. Moreover, such an approach to productive processes seeks to give insight into the broad range of agency animating entrepreneurial activity.

Focusing on bakers and goldsmiths, the project aims to highlight various modes of making and trajectories of craft specialization and to make gendered epistemologies of making more visible. The project seeks to challenge challenge Eurocentric notions of innovation and technology, and to highlight West Africans’ individual and collective bodies of knowledge of how to engage with adverse colonial and post-colonial economic contexts. In doing so, it contributes to complicating the ways in which African societies form part of growing scholarship on the global history of capitalism and science and knowledge.