Routine played an interesting role in this discussion, and there were milder forms throughout this fieldwork: on the one hand, the internet and computers are seen as spectacular emergences, the latest revolution from the North, as yet another historical rupture, this time ushering in information society and globalized economies – notions that present new challenges that the South must meet from a position of backwardness. At the same time, ICTs as dramatic disruption sit alongside ICTs as a new routinization. It is considered obvious that mundane and unthinking use of these techno-marvels must be routine in every Northerner’s life, as in that of the governmental and business elites in Ghana. Indeed, imaginations of what these routines might look like in London or New York, as well as experiences of everyday Northern technological life brought back from educational, business or government postings abroad, play a significant role in how people understand and frame these objects as they enter into their world. People like the education director make full use of this imagination of routine in order to align themselves – by way of education, class, urbanity, and so on – with perceived global transformation into a new kind of elite everyday life.
The notion of ICTs as routine in the North testified to the North’s continued superiority: we backward Southerners marvel at what the Northerners already take for granted; we have to learn what the Northerner can do without thinking. Official ICT discourse and practice in Ghana was strongly based in a top-down flow of work habits from North to local elite to general population. But those outside the elites take a similar view. There is a phrase in Twi – kwame obranyi – which can be loosely translated as ‘lucky or fortunate white guy’, and which – in popular culture – is specifically linked to technological differentials. Kwame is the name for someone who is born on a Sunday, and is therefore blessed; obranyi is a white person, but often applied to Indians and Japanese, in so far as they are seen to come from technologically more advanced places. It is a phrase used in everyday life, but also in popular culture – there was a hit song by that name a few years ago, and it stated the conventional meaning: the kwame obranyi is able to create and appropriate new technical wonders that can do real good for people, and both the creation and appropriation are part of their normal way of being; whereas here in Africa either we don’t have these things or we use them very badly, not for good.
Routine consumption of new technologies is treated both as demonstration of Northern or elite superiority, and as normative for the technology. The very aim of development policy is technology use that is mundane, unthinking, taken-for-granted, boring: that is the index of current Northern advancement and defines the goal of Ghanaian transformation. At the same time, this sense of routine (‘naturalized’, ‘black-boxed’) use is a form of denial of the existence or rationality of local routines, of the complex communicative assemblages that I found ethnographically.
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• Don Slater