Repair across Africa is the first edited collection to focus specifically on repair in African contexts, bringing together a diverse group of scholars and practitioners from anthropology, geography, musicology, architecture, history, and critical urban studies. Moving beyond a narrow understanding of repair as merely fixing broken things, this volume explores it as a relational practice that bridges past and present, and connects the material with the social, economic, and spiritual.
The essays investigate the role of repair in mitigating the wear and tear of time, addressing environmental disasters, engaging with colonial and postcolonial histories and their impact on urban transformation, and highlighting the artisanal skill and ingenuity behind these practices. The contributors illuminate how repair becomes a vital practice of resistance, care, and adaptation in a rapidly changing world, while also acknowledging the material and economic pressures that often make it necessary and sometimes hazardous.
By situating repair within broader critiques of late capitalism and colonialism, and through its multidisciplinary approach, this book opens new conversations in material culture, heritage, urban life, and historical politics. It is poised to become a key reference in African studies and beyond.
Table of Contents
Introduction:
Living Repair: Mending and Material Care in Contemporary Africa
Charline Kopf, Wenzel Geissler, Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, Lotte Meinert
1. Kobeta Toles:
Re-pairing Mobility on Congo’s Inland Waterways
Peter Lambertz
2. Cobbling Together a Life of Repair:
Deciding How to Deal with Loss at a Burkina Faso Market
Sarah-Jane Phelan
3. A Car on the Street Named Desire:
The Significance of Material Breakdown and Repair for Brokering Change in South Africa
Evelien Storme
4. Pulled Lines and People’s Connections:
Infrastructural Extension as Layered Repair in Cape Town
Angela Storey
5. Below the Infrastructural Breakdown:
Electric Repair Work as Skilled Improvisation and Its Moral Entanglements
Kirsten Nielsen
6. Repairs Under Tension:
Negotiating Risks and Connectivity in Mobile Phone Repair in Bamako
Issa Fofana and Issa Togola
7. Turn of the Screw:
Unhinging Power Relations Through ‘Unauthorized Repair’ in Lomé’s Mobile Phone ‘Black Market’ Dékon
Janine Patricia Santos
8. Hacking to Repair?:
Smartphone Repair in the Kariakoo Market, Dar es Salaam
Christian Medaas
9. Timbila:
Tracing Mozambican history through a musical artefact, its repair and reinvention
Sara Morais and Gianira Ferrara
10. La Casa Verde:
Heritage, Colonialism, and (Un)Repairing in Equatorial Guinea
Alba Valenciano Mañé and Laida Memba Ikuga
11. Under Repair:
Undoing Colonial Fascist Legacies in Addis Ababa Through Critical Architectural Preservation
Emilio Distretti and Abel Assefa
12. In the Absence of Repair:
Architectural Métissage and Forced Labour in Colonial Congo
Simon De Nys-Ketels and Robby Fivez
13. Maxaquene Khovo Students House in Maputo:
On Social Repair and Material Decay
Silvia Balzan
14. Narratives of Mending, Repair and Transformation in West Africa:
Encountering Freedom Park Lagos
Ola Uduku
15. Repair and Relief:
’Building Back Better’ in Post-Cyclone Idai Malawi
Tanja Hendriks
16. The Time of Being in Between:
Mending, Repair, and Social Change in Turkana, Northern Kenya
Sam Derbyshire
17. Dogon Objects:
To Throw Away, to Repair ... or to Collect
Eric Jolly
18. Adobe Walls and Leaking Pasts:
Vital Ecologies of Mending and Repair in Niger
Adeline Masquelier
Afterword:
Breaking Down Repair
Brenda Chalfin
Notes on Contributors