Foregrounding African women's ingenuity and labor, this pioneering case study shows how women in rural Mali have used technology to ensure food security through the colonial period, environmental crises, and postcolonial rule.

By advocating for an understanding of rural Malian women as engineers, Laura Ann Twagira rejects the persistent image of African women as subjects without technological knowledge or access and instead reveals a hidden history about gender, development, and improvisation. In so doing, she also significantly expands the scope of African science and technology studies.
Using the Office du Niger agricultural project as a case study, Twagira argues that women used modest technologies (such as a mortar and pestle or metal pots) and organized female labor to create, maintain, and reengineer a complex and highly adaptive food production system. While women often incorporated labor-saving technologies into their work routines, they did not view their own physical labor as the problem it is so often framed to be in development narratives. Rather, women's embodied techniques and knowledge were central to their ability to transform a development project centered on export production into an environmental resource that addressed local taste and consumption needs.

Common narratives about development in Africa miss the critical technological work of women. Twagira's study instead positions Malian women as rural engineers whose strategic planning and labor over the course of the twentieth century assured their food security.

About the Author
Laura Ann Twagira is an associate professor of history at Wesleyan University. She edited the "Africanizing Technology" special issue for the journal Technology and Culture and was a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

Reviews
"Through vivid stories of individual innovation and strategies of survival, Twagira offers a new perspective on twentieth-century biopolitics in Mali. Embodied Engineering adds important critical nuance to understandings of environmental crisis, cultural value, and gendered knowledge production in West Africa." -- Emily S. Burrill, author of States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali
"By focusing on gender ideology, food technologies, and development initiatives, Twagira encourages readers to consider the "lived material bodies" of women in twentieth-century rural Mali.... Summing up: Recommended." * Choice 59, no. 10 (June 2022) *
"A fantastic contribution to multiple fields of study, both within and beyond the academy. Twagira fulfills her stated objectives, particularly that of addressing the prevalent assumptions of African women as without access to technology and static in their work. Her research shows the immense agency and importance of Malian women in their capacity to cultivate embodied relationships with the natural world through the cultivation, collection, and cooking of food." -- Inigo Acosta * H-Sci-Med-Tech / H-Net Reviews *
Twagira draws on a rich corpus of archival documents, but it is her impressive use of folktales, oral histories, and conversations with Office du Niger residents that allows her to challenge the highly idealized narratives of the project presented in the colonial and postcolonial bureaucratic documents. * Technology and Culture *


Awards
Commended for Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize 2023 (United States). Short-listed for African Studies Association Best Book Prize 2022.



Book Information
ISBN 9780821424681
Author Laura Ann Twagira
Format Paperback
Page Count 344
Imprint Ohio University Press
Publisher Ohio University Press