Disability and technology in Africa: introduction

Abstract

An elderly lady with a limp selects her longest walking stick to help her through the mud to her garden. Deaf people watch attentively as a pastor delivers a sermon in sign language. Refugees with disabilities sit on their sacks of rations at a food distribution centre. A woman describes the difficulty in getting used to her prosthesis after she lost her leg. Assistants help to push the heavily laden tricycles of polio survivors onto a ferry. A deaf taxi passenger shows her destination to the conductor on her smartphone. The abilities of impaired bodies are often enhanced – more or less successfully – by assistive technologies. Whether these include devices, like crutches, or whether they are less material, but no less consequential, systems for enabling ‘ the disabled ’ , technologies are meant to augment the functioning of bodies. Whether this happens, how, to what purposes and under what conditions are empirical questions. They are also analytical questions that require a framework for considering the relations between bodies, technologies, sociality and political economy. Addressing these questions is the task undertaken by the contributors to this special issue on disability and technology. 1 instrumen-tality consequences wheelchair sign at play. framework loosely