Creole technology

In the vast workshop districts of Ghana, known as ‘magazines’, motor vehicles from the industrialised world have for decades been adapted and refitted for rugged African conditions. They can be maintained indefinitely in this new state, using only simple parts, a sophisticated improvisation that Edgerton calls ‘creolisation’. ‘At dusk,’ he writes, ‘bright intermittent light from welding illuminates streets all over the world, issuing from maintenance workshops which might also make simple equipment.’

From “A Place for Hype”, Edward Tenner’s review in the London Review of Books 10 May 2007 of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton