Arrive Alive: Road Safety in Kenya and South Africa

Lamont, Mark and Lee, Rebekah. 2015. Arrive Alive: Road Safety in Kenya and South Africa. Technology and Culture, 56(2), pp. 464-488. ISSN 0040-165X [Article]

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Abstract or Description

This article is among the first historical considerations of road safety in Africa. It argues that race and class, as colonial dualisms, analytically frame two defining moments in the development of African automobility and its infrastructure—“Africanization” in the first decade of Kenya’s political independence from Britain, 1963–75, and democratization in postapartheid South Africa. We argue that recent road safety interventions in both countries exemplify an “epidemiological turn” influenced by public health constructions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. African states’ framing of road safety in behaviorist terms has obscured larger debates around redressing the historical legacies of racialized access to roads and the technopolitics of African automobility. Civic involvement in road safety initiatives has tended to be limited, although the specter of road carnage has entered into the public imagination, largely through the death of high profile Africans. However, some African road users continue to pursue alternative, and often culturally embedded, strategies to mitigate the dangers posed by life “on the road.” [End Page 464]

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2015.0063

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Anthropology
History

Dates:

DateEvent
21 May 2015Published
26 June 2014Accepted

Item ID:

11776

Date Deposited:

22 Jun 2015 12:58

Last Modified:

12 Jun 2021 00:47

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/11776

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