Joshua Grace’s African Motors is one of very few book-length publications on the history of automobility in Africa today. While transportation in Africa, broadly defined, has attracted the attention of economic historians and historians of technology, the automobile subset began to yield consistent monograph outputs (with reference to Anglophone Africa) only from 2016, when Jennifer Hart’s Ghana on the Go was published.
Grace’s intellectual interest in African automobility came from an experience in a Tanzanian mechanic shop. His car had developed a serious fault, and the scope of repairs proposed by the Tanzanian mechanic was far more extensive than what would have been possible at many North American shops. Grace notes that the car would have been written off as scrap in the USA. Yet the repair process seemed routine in Dar es Salaam garages.
That encounter (and other vignettes, notably a remodelled sports car anecdote involving Frank Taylor, another research subject) became the foundation for the arguments and themes explored in the book. Grace investigates the ‘long, often intimate relationship’ between Africans and motor vehicles, arguing that automobiles (including the acts of owning, driving, maintaining, repairing and, most importantly, redesigning them) ‘provide sites, institutions, bodies, and ideas for locating systems and cultures of mechanical expertise in Tanzania’s past’ (pp. 11–12). In a monograph spanning 150 years (from the 1860s to the 2010s), Grace spins together participant observation as a mechanic apprentice, oral histories and archival sources to tell ‘motors’ stories from the formal and informal sectors. These are stories of vernacular knowledge production, technological masculinity and economic constraints involving African vehicle owners, private drivers, urban transporters, mechanics, passengers, and people whose livelihoods depended on the fuel, oil and spare parts economy and other infrastructure developed around the car (for instance, roads).
The book’s main themes are discussed in five chronological and thematic chapters. In the first two chapters, the author reviews the history of mobility in Tanzania, from head porterage to the wheel. Grace goes beyond charting the history of the colonial-era introduction of cars; he also explores the skillsets of African mechanics, including their ability to remodel or repurpose car parts and combine components from different brands to make their hybrid models, and the vernacular masculine automobile cultures that emerged in Tanzanian garages. In these chapters, readers experience the car as a product with no fixed boundaries in the manufacturer’s design process. Grace’s thorough analysis of African ingenuity and deep knowledge of vehicles helps to counter the narrative of informality pervasive in African science and technology studies discourses.
Chapter 3 reveals that the daring extent of car repairs in the postcolonial period resulted from Tanzanian society’s political and economic structure. Under President Julius Nyerere, postcolonial Tanzania adopted the Ujamaa (African socialist) development philosophy in which state planners promoted alternative perspectives on citizenship while simultaneously investing in urban infrastructure, including public transit systems. Here, Grace introduces the concept of ‘technological citizenship’ in which he juxtaposes the process of automobile repairs in Tanzanian garages with Nyerere’s attempt at remoulding the state around socialist ideals.
Chapter 4 redirects the story of technological citizenship from cars and their drivers to petroleum pipelines and products, and their consequences for economic development in Tanzania before, during and after the OPEC-led oil boom (roughly from the 1960s to the mid-1980s). A focus on petroleum – the very thing that makes cars move – enables Grace to examine the fault lines in the Ujamaa model of agricultural development in rural Tanzania. The Ujamaa model was meant to promote local technological ‘self-reliance’ in villages through small tools. Yet the growing reliance on petroleum-driven machines and the impact of rising oil prices during the 1970s ultimately sounded the death knell for Tanzania’s alternative economic freedom experiment.
In the fifth chapter, Grace analyses the socio-economic world that automobiles created in Tanzania. The author examines cars as tools that not only make movement possible, but also facilitate social mobility and moderate access to the spoils of socialist development. Cars and the roads they travelled also became the conduit for redefining ideas about home and family (‘motorized domesticities’, p. 239) and evaluating ideas of masculinity, valour and cowardice. They also drove skills and expertise, especially within the context of bad road conditions and a general disregard for rules, accidents and other travel risks. The author addresses these and other themes, including relationships and community connections through long-distance travel and how automobility inspired and undermined modernization.
Overall, Joshua Grace’s African Motors is a dense, multidisciplinary book that opens new vistas in the history of transportation, gender, modernity, and the political and economic history of Tanzania. African ideas of sustainability are one theme that I wish the book would have analysed in more detail. Grace briefly engages with this theme, arguing that environmental sustainability was not a priority in the evolution of the Tanzanian automobile culture. However, there are opportunities to probe socio-economic aspects of sustainability (perhaps in another project) by using the extensive car repair and remodelling processes to interrogate the topics of waste, scraps, recycling and second-hand product importation in the Tanzanian/African technological imagination. Despite this minor concern, African Motors is undoubtedly a product of erudite scholarship. The writing is lucid, the narratives are nuanced, and the plot will be easy to follow by specialists, students and general readers alike. Beyond Tanzania, African Motors will remain an essential text for years to come for scholars of technology, gender, urban and rural studies, (auto-)mobility and Third World socialism.
