Paper short abstract:

This paper asks what road deaths reveal about the political, social, and spiritual meanings of risk and mobility in Africa, and how have these meanings emerged from and shaped cultural transformation throughout the 20th century.

Paper long abstract:

The most recent WHO report on global road safety states that the number of road deaths is "unacceptably high, with an estimated 1.35 million people dying each year" (2018). The African continent has the worst rate of road traffic deaths in the world at 26.6 deaths per 100,000 people. While these are present-day statistics, road deaths in Africa have played a transformative role in shaping conceptions of mobility, technology, and dying across the continent. In their seminal article, Vaughan and Lee argued that addressing the changing nature of "violent death and its meanings [in Africa]…would have to include the as yet unwritten histories of…road accidents…alongside criminal and political violence" (2008). What do these deaths reveal about the political, social, and spiritual meanings of risk and mobility in Africa, and how have these meanings emerged from and shaped cultural transformation over the course of the twentieth century? This paper will connect historical/anthropological meditations on death and dying with mobility studies' frames of analysis. In particular, the paper will explore the changing cultural and political significance of death brought about by technology-enhanced movement in Africa where the likelihood of dying through automobility is nearly three times that of Europe. The paper will also challenge Urry and Sheller's largely secular approach to the embodiment and emotional geography of automobility by foregrounding African spiritual practices and landcapes of death and dying. Particular attention will be paid to how death through automobility has reconfigured or reinforced material and spiritual power relations.