Joshua Grace's African Motors offers a fascinating, wide-ranging historical account of automobility in what is now Tanzania. Grace's central thesis is that ‘African users put car, road, energy and society together’ differently than in the Fordist heartlands of the Global North (8). Scholarship on the history of private automobiles tends to argue that the car stands for standardization and consumerism; it is near synonymous with ‘midcentury forms of modernization … [that] represented the highest form of social and economic life’ (26). Grace demonstrates that in Tanzania, by contrast, the car was at the center of a ‘vernacular machinic complex’ characterized by repair, modification, caution, and an implicitly low-carbon footprint (8). This vernacular machinic complex in turn highlights local understandings of maendeleo (development) that have little to do with raw GDP growth, but are rather rooted in ‘a more extensive language about well-being’ (11). Drawing on its etymology (kwenda means to go), Grace contends that maendeleo may be less about material wealth per se and more about the ability to move, both socially and spatially, a claim that resonates with anthropological analyses of development in relation to African discourses on personhood and flourishing.Footnote ¹

Grace is an intrepid researcher, not only plumbing novel archives but also conducting extensive oral histories and even getting his hands dirty at local garages. The result is a welcome emphasis on the way automobility coevolved with local concepts and logics. We learn, for example, how colonial roads never managed to replace — but instead supplemented — the regional njia (foot paths and ‘bush tracks’) that allowed people to avoid colonial surveillance and taxation. On the subject of continuities, Grace also shows how early twentieth century German and later British colonial officials cruelly and hypocritically resorted to local modes of porterage, reminiscent of the slave trade they claimed to replace, when their cars inevitably broke down (45–50).

A related theme is that car work reflected vernacular traditions of masculine self-making through enskillment — that is, the acquisition of practical knowledge. The expertise of African tanibois (‘turnboys’) and drivers challenged the infantilizing racism of the colonial state that employed them. By the 1930s mechanics were setting up gereji bubu (unofficial or ‘mute’ garages) reminiscent of the viwandani (worksites) of the precolonial Swahili coast. Mafundi (mechanics, literally those with knowledge) gained technical mastery, built houses, raised families, and won honorifics through their learned labor. Drivers too built up their lives, undertaking long-distance journeys full of risk and possibility, both physical and spiritual. Grace is well attuned to the historical resonances of what Jane Guyer once called ‘self-realization’ through automobiles.Footnote ² In one particularly illuminating passage he details a lexicon that points back to a cultural history of ironworking; the car is a ‘tool of fire’ (chombo cha moto) whose operation involves firing (kuchoma), inserting (kuchomeka), and pulling (kuchomoa) (74). Both before and after colonial conquest and so-called modernity, the ability to effect material transformation has remained a classic source of social power in the region.

By independence in 1961, automobiles and society were getting put together in ways that reflected the challenges of postcolonial development. President Julius Nyerere's vision of a properly socialist urban mobility centered on a publicly run municipal bus system. As that system faltered in the 1970s, citizens argued that the mushrooming of private taxis and minibuses did not so much undermine public transport as supplement it amidst inauspicious conditions; Grace makes the case for seeing this as a kind of political repair, what, citing Steven Jackson, he calls a ‘broken world thinking’ more subtle and pragmatic than Cold War dichotomies of state and market (87).

Grace's commitment to the whole ‘machinic complex’ is expansive, and includes a detailed analysis — and complex, partial defense — of Tanzania's rural modernization. When Grace asserts that Nyerere had a ‘technologically minimalist approach to African socialism’ that was seemingly undercut by state construction of dams, roads, and pipes, I do wonder who he is arguing against (189). After all, simple peasant labor and centralized government infrastructure were always meant to complement each other in the rural modernization schemes of the era (indeed, no less an arch cold warrior than Robert MacNamara supported villagization on just this basis).Footnote ³ In any case, by the global energy crisis of 1973, Tanzania was positioned at the wrong end of a neocolonial world system; the party-state had to abandon the assumption of an ‘oily’ socialist economy and instead find more obviously minimalist ways to survive (185). Grace's account of the inner workings of oil barter in the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Corporation is an interesting and novel contribution to this history, though there is surely more to say about how the ‘self-reliance’ of government officials in the 1970s became a key ingredient of a new catch-as-catch-can capitalism in the 1980s.Footnote ⁴

Grace's conclusion offers a condensed but suggestive tour of the dramatically different auto world of the 1990s and 2000s: endless snaking foleni (jams), deadly car crashes, and misafara (quasi-militarized government convoys that stop all traffic for miles and hours). Three decades of cheap oil and liberalized imports (most recently of cheap motorcycle taxis from China) have ensured that urban Tanzania is utterly choked by private transport, while the endless construction projects of the Magufuli administration (2015–21) will only put more wheels on the road. And yet elements of the previous machinic complex remain, from the rough communalism of the minibus (predictably demonized by Western planners) to the general frustration that the rich travel in private, air-conditioned comfort while the poor commute cheek to jowl. Like other recent works, African Motors retrieves the histories of 1970s and 1980s — as well as the deeper histories of African ingenuity — and gives them a new salience.Footnote ⁵ As the planet confronts the limits of endless, petrol-dependent growth, African Motors shows us a different history of automobility, enriching our ability to think the car, development, and even modernity itself otherwise.