Centred on the shared theme of the encounter between Africa’s digital transformation and China’s globalizing techno-capital, Silicon Elsewhere and The Transsion Approach offer complementary lenses on how African localities accommodate, negotiate, and are in turn reshaped by Chinese techno-capital and its uneven effects. Both are ethnographic investigations: the former examines Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah” as a site of digital Global China, while the latter is based on multi-sited fieldwork – spanning Shenzhen, Ghana’s phone markets, and Ghanaian towns and villages – to trace the deepening presence of a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer and its developmental implications in Ghana.
Silicon Elsewhere traces different aspects of the interface between China’s growing digital forces and Kenya’s evolving tech landscape, viewing Nairobi’s “Silicon Savannah” as a key experimental site within China’s global digital expansion, where new trajectories of technological development are forged. Andrea Pollio argues that although large state-owned firms and contractors dominate accounts of China’s global reach, they reveal only part of the diverse forms that Chinese techno-capital takes. Across five chapters, the book provides a coherent account of how varieties of Chinese techno-capital and local actors negotiate and co-construct technological adaptation, ecosystem-building and techno-optimistic discourses.
Chapter one explains how Kenya’s development agenda has come to prioritize ICT and digital entrepreneurship. This lays the foundation for the subsequent analysis by illustrating how Nairobi became the “Silicon Savannah” and an attractive destination for both Chinese digital “champions” and smaller-scale entrepreneurial ventures.
Chapter two turns to the growing presence of Chinese smartphones in Kenya. As affordable Chinese phones displace many Western brands, Nairobi becomes fertile ground for datafied urban life. Yet this is not merely market penetration or the making of Nairobi as a frontier. It also involves “innovation from below.” Local and Chinese actors jointly shape this process through incremental upgrades, sales practices, repair work and app ecosystems, with local actors playing a pivotal role in tailoring technologies to Kenyan users’ needs.
Chapter three examines digital infrastructure shaped by colonial spatial inequalities and uneven development, producing a fragmented landscape in which marginalized areas remain underserved and effectively disconnected. In response, Chinese entrepreneurs adapt digital business models that partly resonate with, yet remain distinct from, China’s own recent development trajectory and local conditions. Combining technological bricolage with data-capture practices, these models help bridge infrastructural gaps and draw previously excluded groups into platform markets, thereby incorporating informal activities into a digital ecosystem.
Chapter four moves to the geopolitics of China’s push for technical standards, arguing that macro-level contests may appear distant in Nairobi. On the ground, what becomes tangible are not macro-geopolitical claims about shaping “Chinese standards” and displacing incumbent ones, with their implied stakes of power and discursive leverage, but rather the practical frictions of implementation, when standards prove cumbersome, inefficient or incompatible, and actors resort to workarounds, tweaks and occasional reconfigurations. Chinese and Kenyan actors collaborate and compete through speculative experiments that promise more democratic finance, while opening new corridors that, like older systems, remain entangled with enclosure and accumulation.
Chapter five traces entrepreneurial solidarity networks and venture-capital pipelines that facilitate and de-risk capital flows between China and Kenya. It shows how the “Silicon Savannah” becomes a space where both granular and collective efforts make ventures legible and investable. Pollio further highlights shared innovation frameworks and the ways in which Chinese techno-capital is differentiated and narrated as possessing qualities distinct from Western capital. Such networks carve out spaces of influence while sustaining both personal livelihoods and investment cycles.
While Silicon Elsewhere foregrounds multiple interfaces of China–Africa digital encounters, The Transsion Approach focuses tightly on one case: the operations of Transsion, often dubbed the “king of African mobile phones,” in Ghana. Miao Lu anchors her analysis in “technology translation” as it unfolds within Transsion’s business operations. The concept of translation draws on coloniality scholarship, where “colonial translation” names an asymmetrical, one-way mechanism that renders subaltern worlds legible on imperial terms and thereby reproduces colonial relations. Lu instead theorizes “double translation” as a two-way, contestatory practice through which subaltern actors are not only understood but also reshape the terms of understanding, rather than being absorbed through a one-directional transfer from periphery to centre (pp. 129–130).
By foregrounding the process of translation, Lu highlights the intermediaries central to Transsion’s emplacement in Ghana: “translators” who gather and interpret local knowledge of demand and market shifts, enable customization, and embed products in local contexts. They include product and user researchers, marketers, dealers and distributors, and repair technicians. Building on these translation processes and actors, Lu elaborates on Transsion’s “deep ploughing” approach, which helps secure prosperity in a market neglected by its global competitors.
“Deep ploughing” is manifested through three interlinked trajectories: design, distribution, and repair. In design (chapter three), designers work with marketers and analysts to translate localized demands into product features such as multi-SIM capability, long-lasting batteries and AI camera tuning for darker skin, materialized in devices tailored to African markets. In distribution (chapter four), marketers and retailers translate rural market specificities, such as segmented temporalities of sale, into campaign strategies, persuading sub-agents and consumers by turning design features into “unique selling points.” In doing so, they help shift perceptions of Chinese-made phones from low-quality counterfeits to affordable, context-fitting devices, while also mediating broader imaginaries at the intersection of Chinese technology and Black experiences and identities. In repair (chapter five), Transsion builds an infrastructure that combines company and co-built service centres, partnerships with repair shops, and a wide network of collection points embedded in sales channels. This infrastructure is shaped by pragmatic compromises among accessibility, affordability, inclusiveness and controllability. Translators, predominantly repair technicians, are recruited and trained by the firm, translating semi-skilled labour into standardized repair capacity and feeding data and practical knowledge back into organizational learning.
Ultimately, Lu argues that Transsion’s successful embedding in Ghana depends on sustained collaboration with translators and labour-intensive work across these three trajectories. This model runs counter to the capital-intensive “blitz-scaling” approach associated with Silicon Valley big techs, which prioritizes rapid growth and scaling in high value-added, urban-centric contexts. By contrast, Transsion’s translation-driven strategy is oriented towards lower-end markets oriented towards lower-income and rural consumers, segmented, and often less profitable. In Lu’s reading, this case foregrounds the prioritization of local knowledge and the provincialization of Western knowledge, suggesting that Transsion’s business practices can partially, though unevenly, mitigate structural inequalities.
Together, these two books advance complementary theoretical interventions that challenge prevailing narratives of China–Africa interactions.
First, both books move beyond reductive accounts of Chinese digital neocolonialism in Africa, often framed around data dispossession and technological dependency. Pollio bluntly argues that such accounts “lump disparate things and practices together in the same black box” (p. 12). Neither book fully dismisses neocolonial readings, as certain practices may sustain them. For example, Pollio mentions logistics platforms that exploit boda boda riders living at the edge of survival. Both authors mention the patenting of innovations inspired by African customers as a means of securing competitive advantage. Nonetheless, both books challenge narratives that render African actors mere pawns. Instead, they foreground how diverse local actors, entrepreneurs, retailers and technicians, among others, collaborate with Chinese capital, technologies and expertise to co-produce digital ecosystems.
Second, both works critically reflect on African sites as frontiers shaped by intertwined logics of experimentation and extraction. While Lu is less explicit than Pollio in articulating this critique, both show how sites from the “Silicon Savannah” to Ghanaian rural markets function as experimental terrains where innovations are cultivated and tested, even as value capture remains uneven. These theoretical interventions, together with the ethnographic richness of the China–Africa encounters they document, should spur further research on China–Africa relations and the rise of Global China.
Building on these two books, several lines of further inquiry emerge. For example, inspired by Pollio’s analysis, future researchers might examine how persistent Silicon Valley norms interact with African agency and diverse forms of Chinese techno-capital. Additionally, researchers might explore how African tech hubs navigate geopolitical tensions and opportunities generated by competing national projects.
The two volumes are also pedagogically valuable. For instance, they offer transparent reflections on positionality, fieldwork techniques and the navigation of researchers’ advantages and constraints. Thus, these books provide compelling models for students interested in conducting in-depth, ethnographically oriented field research, especially in terms of building relationships with interlocutors, learning to become embedded in and read unfamiliar environments, and developing analytically rigorous interpretations grounded in thick description drawn from interviews, conversations, messaging exchanges, and observations.
