African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development

African Motors is a welcome and compelling contribution to the growing field of southern mobilities research. The book aims to shed new light on the full “machinic complex” of automobility in the context of colonial and postcolonial Tanzania. As such, the book attempts to uncover the “myriad technological systems and sources of labor, knowledge, and energy that allow a driver to produce movement by stepping on a gas pedal”(p. 8). The book is based on impressively wide-ranging and in-depth historical research covering the period from the 1860s to the 2010s, albeit most expansively covering the post-independence years.