Understanding cyberspace: an imperative for Africa!

Cyberspace as a concept has become an object of scientific study. Everyone has understood this, except Africa! Indeed, few official documents, academic studies, books or other publications by Africans about ICTs and digital matters begin by rigorously defining this concept. While elsewhere multidisciplinary research centres have been examining the question since the late 1990s, Africa indulges in a superficial and therefore incomplete approach.

This unthought is very probably one of the main factors explaining the limits of our digital transformation strategies on the continent, which, despite themselves, maintain our technological dependence on the major powers. Failing to understand cyberspace in all its complexity, failing to examine it through our own analytical frameworks, condemns us to ignore all the implications (strategic, political, economic, etc.) that flow from it. It is driven by this imperative that I propose, on the basis of existing studies, a first in-depth reading of cyberspace, without which it is not possible to conceive a coherent and operational African cyberstrategy.

The genesis of cyberspace: a historical timeline

As it is now customary to recall, the word "cyberspace" was used for the first time in a work entitled Neuromancer, a science-fiction literary work published in 1984 by William Gibson. To choose this name, Gibson drew inspiration from the concept of "cybernetics", said to have been initially coined by the French mathematician André-Marie Ampère [1834], but better known later through the work of the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, following the publication in 1948 of his book of the same title. However, in an article dedicated to this, we clearly showed that the term "cybernetics", whatever meaning one gives to the Greek word [kubernêsis, kubernêtikê] from which it derives, draws its etymological origin from Egypto-Nubian civilisation. Yes, the concept of cybernetics has an African etymology!

In his now-cult work, William Gibson (also the founder of the cyberpunk movement) defines cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily and legally by tens of millions of operators, in all countries, by children being taught mathematical concepts…". If this description of cyberspace seems more like a thought experiment than anything else, Gibson in the same book offers another that could be called more "premonitory". He evokes a three-dimensional space of "infinite complexity", electronically generated, which his characters enter by connecting via computer.

This is a mental representation of the data and information stored at the heart of the computer systems of all humanity, which would feed movements such as cyberpunk and which generations of internet users would appropriate. But above all, it would serve as a basis for the pioneers of the internet, who would draw inspiration from it to design and develop it originally as a space of freedom and openness, decentralised, self-managed, etc. This is reflected, for example, in the "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", a text published in 1996 by a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

But let us remember that at this stage cyberspace was science fiction, written by a novelist! During the 1990s, most countries undertook the massive installation of communications infrastructure in order to follow the American initiative, which had dominated the construction of networks from the Arpanet project in 1969 to the beginnings of the Internet from the 1990s. This led to the expansion of connectivity around the world, with the exponential impact we have seen on all our daily activities.

But outside small circles of science-fiction specialists or EFF members, the term cyberspace had thus temporarily fallen into oblivion for the rest of the world. People then spoke of new information and communication technologies (NICTs) to designate this network of technological infrastructure that enabled the exchange of ever-larger volumes of data, gradually creating the information society.

This expansion of the network gradually generated new risks and…