Short Abstract

This panel invites contributions that creatively expand our understanding of the social, political, and moral worlds of numbers in African history and society.

Long Abstract

Numbers and measurement play a foundational role in state and scientific institutions. In the 19th century, European imperialists unleashed an "avalanche of printed numbers” (Hacking 1982) in Europe and across the African continent, enumerating things, people, and places and, in the process, creating categories on which bureaucratic states and institutions made decisions. Statistical and mechanical thinking, framed as objective and therefore moral, emerged as central to the managerial state (Porter 1995). Yet numbers are also social: they can make things real, have unintended consequences, and can be contested. More recently, neoliberal states have produced, and in turn rely on, the “autonomous self-governing citizen” (Von Schnitzler 2013), who tracks their own consumption of public utilities and data through meters and other forms of counting. These, however, are not the only histories of measurement and counting that matter. Acts of counting and measuring range from the intimate counting of litanies on prayer beads and rosaries to the tracking of menstrual and lunar cycles; from the counting of knots tied on protective anklets to the conveyance of distance measured in words. From Liberated Africans reduced to numbers in colonial ledgers to the weaponization of colonial labor statistics by African revolutionaries, counting, measuring, and enumeration have shaped African history, politics, and power. This panel invites contributions that creatively expand our understanding of the social, political, and moral worlds of numbers in African history and society.

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