A history of ‘Making Things’ in West Africa, 1920-1980: creating, meaning making and experience

This project studies artisans and craftspeople (goldsmiths, bakers, and carpenters) in Ghana and Nigeria, c. 1920-1980, and provides a new history of making things, by bringing together the history of science and knowledge with economic history.

This project makes a critical intervention as it illuminates the broader context and history of entrepreneurial activity and moves beyond a reductive focus on capital accumulation: it provides a new, and historically situated account of peoples engagement with technologies, and highlights the broad range of agency animating entrepreneurial activity.

Utilising archival documents, personal papers, oral history, digital humanities and workshops, it elucidates various modes of making, trajectories of craft specialisation, experiences of making and analyses gendered epistemologies of making.

The proposed project challenges Eurocentric notions of innovation and technology, brings to light West Africans individual and collective bodies of knowledge of how to engage with adverse colonial and post-colonial economic contexts, and thus helpfully complicates the ways in which African societies form part of growing scholarship on the global history of capitalism and science and knowledge.The project will be carried out in Nigeria, with a secondment in The Netherlands and a return phase in Austria.

The ER will learn from leading experts in the history of science and knowledge and economic history, and will acquire skills in oral history and digital humanities.

Encompassing publications, an international, interdisciplinary conference, workshops with research participants, inter-sectoral collaboration, teaching activities, continuous public engagement and podcasts, this project is designed to ensure a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge between the researcher, the host institution, and the partner institution, between European institutions, and to engage a wider public in both the partner and host country.