How is urban Africa changing in a more and more technologically sinocentric world? To answer this question, SURGE is a research project on the transformations driven by private Chinese technocapital in East Africa. Specifically, SURGE studies the operations of Chinese tech entrepreneurs and investors in Nairobi (Kenya), a city that has emerged both as one of Africa's innovation hubs, and as a key site of Global China's digital footprint.
Following the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation’s Beijing Action Plan (2019-2021), Africa became officially part of the “Belt and Road” initiative, the vast infrastructural platform designed to revive China’s centrality in global trade routes. According to this plan, East-African cities and ports are poised to become crucial nodes connecting Western China to Europe, through the ‘blue’ corridor of the new maritime silk road. This builds on almost two decades of infrastructural loans by Chinese state agencies such as Chexim, and Chinese construction enterprises having become the most important contractors in the continent.
In this context, most academic research on Kenya-China relationships has rightly focused on major government-driven investments, given the high stakes and incredible visibility of these projects, ranging from the recently inaugurated Nairobi expressway (2022) to the Standard-gauge railway that now connects Kenya’s capital to the port city of Mombasa (2017). Much less attention has been paid to the ways in which Nairobi, and Kenya more broadly, have become experimental testbeds for Chinese technology companies and digital entrepreneurs seeking to expand into African markets. From innovation in financial technologies such as cross-border payments, to last-mile logistics platforms, from low-cost internet provision to e-commerce, Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah now hosts a very unique, high-tech fragment of what sociologist C.K. Lee has called “Global China”.
My study, an ethnography of Chinese technocapitalism and its encounter with Nairobi’s existing digital innovation landscape, aims to demystify simplistic anxieties about China’s presence in Africa and beyond, while providing a fine-grained, grounded reflection on the multifarious ways in which cities become the foil of technopolitical and geopolitical shifts.
The research project is hosted at the African Centre for Cities of the University of Cape Town, and at the Department of Urban and Regional Studies and Planning of the Polytechnic of Turin.
