Short Abstract

This panel invites interdisciplinary contributions on the socio-history of statistics in post/colonial Africa, connecting historical and contemporary perspectives on how welfare and social protection are imagined, classified, and governed through numbers.

Long Abstract

Whether rooted in the colonial desire for population control – and the associated experimentalisation of the African continent in the form of what Tilley termed a “living laboratory” – or in the materially connected reconfiguration of population data (eco)systems around the techno-promises of big data and AI, African statistical systems have always formed part and parcel of a shared global history of quantification. This panel joins interdisciplinary perspectives on the socio-history of social and demographic statistics in Africa, contesting the biased view of African statistical systems as other, lacking, or deficient. Instead, we cast our gaze through a prism that “diffracts” (Haraway 1992) the multiple and layered material and immaterial genealogies and affordances that connect statistical and welfare systems in Africa. Contributions to the panel discuss quantification as a technology of care and control, that carries deeply political assumptions of how welfare and social protection are imagined, classified, and governed in historically-situated, techno-political contexts. We invite contributions from history, anthropology, the sociology of quantification, and STS that discuss the quantification of welfare in a broad sense (including data practices in e.g. labor, health, education, poverty, or vital statistics), in historical and contemporary contexts, and put forward by local, national, regional or international actors. Together, we ask what are the continuities and ruptures in past and present statistical and welfare systems in Africa, their specific enumeration practices, organizational, (techno-)political, infrastructural conditions? Papers in this panel position African statistical expertise center-stage, showing that they are central to understanding global histories of quantification.

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