Memories and Motherhood in the Rhythms of Ugandan Computing

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in the computing communities of Ugandan universities, we advance a feminist and decolonial critique of the dominant chronopolitics of globalizing technologies. Our analysis starts with participants recounting their childhood memories of growing up in rural poverty under the shadow of rebellion wars. We show how the future promises of computing make sense in reference to this past. The same chronopolitics of pitching the past against the future is used by the global computing and donor development industry, and Uganda’s governing regime, which disguises the symbolic and physical violence of the evacuated present. In coping with the precarities of the present, we show how female computing researchers build enduring “near futures” through work that corresponds to the historical and symbolic role of Ugandan women in the domestic realm. And yet the chronopolitics of global computing syncopates with that of “near futures.” Women’s communal roles are written into computing and computing is made possible and doable in Uganda through the gendered logics of care practised in the present. The paper thus contributes to an expanding literature on computing in Africa, by providing a temporal analysis that recognizes women’s roles in more substantive ways.