This collection explores repair as a vital and varied practice across postcolonial Africa, not only as a response to breakage, but as a way of making life hold amid shifting material, political, and historical conditions. Repair across Africa is the first edited collection to focus specifically on repair in African contexts, bringing together a diverse group of scholars and practitioners from anthropology, geography, musicology, architecture, history, and critical urban studies. Moving beyond a narrow understanding of repair as merely fixing broken things, this volume explores it as a relational practice that bridges past and present, and connects the material with the social, economic, and spiritual.
The essays investigate the role of repair in mitigating the wear and tear of time, addressing environmental disasters, engaging with colonial and postcolonial histories and their impact on urban transformation, and highlighting the artisanal skill and ingenuity behind these practices. The contributors illuminate how repair becomes a vital practice of resistance, care, and adaptation in a rapidly changing world, while also acknowledging the material and economic pressures that often make it necessary and sometimes hazardous.
By situating repair within broader critiques of late capitalism and colonialism, and through its multidisciplinary approach, this book opens new conversations in material culture, heritage, urban life, and historical politics. It is poised to become a key reference in African studies and beyond.
