Digital Sovereignty in Postcolonial Africa: The Spread of Chinese Surveillance Tools and the Leasing of African Sovereignty

Bulelani Jili

To date, the governments of sixteen African countries have embraced Huawei digital surveillance technology in their everyday operations. This technology is imported from China and is mostly installed as part of the company’s smart city projects on the continent. Smart cities are conceived as computational models of urban design that seek to leverage surveillance technologies as a way to resolve traditional development challenges in the Global South (Amin 2016; Watson 2015). Chinese officials began promoting the “Digital Silk Road” initiative in 2015 across the Global South, including Africa, as an adjunct to the Belt and Road project. The initiative aims to expand Chinese corporate engagement globally by promoting internet connectivity, digital economies, and artificial intelligence. Chinese surveillance technology is justified as a way to deliver on the promises of digital development by strengthening state capacity and securing the national terrain for investment and growth. Facial recognition tools, with their ability to mass identify and compare individuals, have become a key AI tool through which African politicians and planners design and prognosticate about the future of their countries (Tonkinwise 2016). Yet this surveillance technology and investments also evoke trepidations among citizens, and outside observers, over the possible suspension of civil liberties in the name of development and national security. This, in turn, points to new questions being raised about the entanglement of digital development and governance in Africa. To what extent do these digital surveillance systems enable novel ways of market governance and techniques of sovereign control? How do these systems impact the experience of political subjects, and do they exacerbate, if at all, existing inequalities? How do they contribute to and transform arrangements of power? What, more generally, are the deeper, often hidden costs of Chinese investments and the adoption of surveillance technologies—particularly under the promises of digital development? 

The heightened scholarly attention being paid to Africa-China relations is chiefly inspired by the growing trade, investment, and aid between Beijing and African governments (Alden 2005; Benabdallah 2019; Li 2016; Zeleza 2014). There are many threads to this scholarship, but, in journalistic and policy circles, most discussions are given to whether digital exports to Africa inevitably carry with them Chinese normative commitments, intelligence interests, and authoritarian governance practices (Biryabarema 2019; Parkison, Bariyo and Chin 2019; Mozur, Kessel, and Chan 2019). As trenchantly argued by Feldstein (2019), countries across the globe are utilizing Chinese-sourced AI surveillance technologies. This impetus and mass adoption is exacerbating democratic norms and practices on a worldwide scale. Attention to Africa reveals that the continent has received some of the largest ICT loans from China globally to support the adoption of surveillance technologies. Such observations are contingent upon examinations of the ICT loans, African-based Chinese training programs, and Beijing’s foreign policy (Nantulya 2023; Taylor and Zajontz 2020). For one thing, this line of inquiry presumes that there is a concerted effort between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and private firms to promote Chinese authoritarianism and economic interests in the Global South. It also suggests that African countries and stakeholders are obsequious recipients. It is vital to recognize African agency in these novel developments in order to avoid reducing the continent to a mere stage upon which exogenous powers act. Conversely, overemphasizing African agency without acknowledging the broader structural conditions risks romanticizing or misrepresenting local actors. But recent studies of China’s involvement in African mineral extraction, manufacturing, information and communications technology (ICT), and agriculture give little evidence that it is invested in any particular model of governance or development (Brautigam 2011; Gagliardone 2019; Mohan and Lampert 2013). In fact, this literature indicates that it is domestic African politics that shape Chinese aid and investments. More broadly, however, scholarly attention to the consequences of new digital infrastructure investments—from both advocates and critics—remains scant.

Critically, the research conducted to date on digital surveillance in Africa focuses largely on the wide distribution of Chinese technology, drawing attention to the fact that regime type is a poor predictor of the purchase and use of that technology (Greitens 2020; Hicks 2024). Much less attention has been given to questions about how they actually work, why they are in great local demand, and how they change, or do not change, state capacities. My project offers a wider epistemic frame that enables a more acute account of how grounded African political and economic features help drive the adoption of Chinese AI-powered technology.

While the broader literature’s focus on exogenous actors in Africa provides valuable insight into Chinese diplomatic ambitions and corporate activities, it often fails to fully contextualize China’s local initiatives within a neoliberal framework of global capitalism. This posture mystifies China. It renders its actions more exceptional than they are. Thus, I argue, the existing literature overlooks a crucial paradox: while enhanced digital surveillance may be desired by African leaders as a way to buttress state power—due to its policing and managerial capacities—it may also actually undermine state sovereignty. Note, in the latter regard, that digital surveillance tools are embedded within processes that result in the privatization of the state; the outsourcing of state functions to Chinese tech giants, like Huawei, has transformed government, in part, into a holding company in the business of franchising out many operations, including police services, and hence much of its sovereignty. Ironically, these digital surveillance measures aimed by recipients at improving governance are also inspiring distrust among citizens, which poses an additional challenge to state sovereignty. Such outsourcing is all done within the context of a supposedly weak African state that seeks to ameliorate its inefficiencies. The changing nature of the connection between digital surveillance tools and state sovereignty—and the paradox at its core—is, therefore, a central object of study in Digital Sovereignty. 

To investigate this paradox and to interrogate the broader implications of Chinese surveillance technologies, my work focuses on the case of Kenya, with particular attention to its capital, Nairobi. Nairobi presents a critical site of analysis because it has received substantial financial and technical support from the Chinese government and corporations in the development of its surveillance apparatus and wider digital infrastructure (Business Daily 2012; CLA 2023). The city’s emergent digital surveillance ecosystem — comprising high-definition cameras, infrared cameras, dome cameras, facial recognition cameras, interconnected tracking devices, proprietary software, and cloud-based storage solutions — is largely underpinned by Huawei-led initiatives that purport to enhance public safety and strengthen state capacity within an ostensibly open society. Proponents within the state and corporate partners cast digital interventions as a fix for entrenched state inefficiencies and governance challenges. Crucially, even when these surveillance systems fail to achieve their stated objectives — such as reducing crime or fostering secure environments for development — these failures are rarely interpreted as evidence of technological inadequacy. Rather than failure being seen as an illustration of the incapacity of technology, it is involved as an opportunity for renewed commitment to more of it. This dynamic illustrates how technology is mobilized not merely as a solution, but as a modality of statecraft— one in which failure is persistently reimagined not as evidence of the limitations of technological fixes, but as a necessary stage in the still incomplete process of the ongoing reinvention of the postcolonial state.

My work offers an interdisciplinary discussion of the complex effects of AI technologies on life, as well as the broader socio-political implications of the growing commitment to digital development in Africa. Contrary to prevailing assumptions among development practitioners on the continent and their international corporate partners, I hypothesize that these AI-powered surveillance systems do not constitute frictionless, neutral tools for delivering socially equitable policing, development, or efficient governance. Instead, they tend to reinforce consumer-oriented, corporate-friendly logics and exacerbate existing historical and structural dependencies. In turn, the surveillance system often falls short of fulfilling its stated promise — namely, enhancing security, streamlining governance, enabling civic participation, and fostering conducive environments for economic takeoff. In examining these hypotheses, this project shows how these digital technologies are discursively and euphemistically represented to local populations —emphasizing functionality, rationality, and development — versus how they can be seen to operate in practice. I explore the tangible effects of these emerging technologies on local African environments, institutions, development, and social relations. Critically, my work focuses our attention on the implications of the paradoxical effect of these systems on postcolonial sovereignty.