Roads and automobility on the African continent are commonly encountered with a rather ambivalent stance, both by Africans and Africanist scholars. This ambivalence emerges from what Adeline Masquelier describes as the ‘profoundly contradictory nature of roads as objects of both fascination and terror’ (Reference Masquelier2002: 381). In her widely received article on ‘road mythographies’ surrounding Niger's Route 1, Masquelier draws a vivid picture of the ‘contradictory aspects of the road as a space of both fear and desire’ (ibid.: 831). She highlights, in particular, how roadside residents perceive automotive travel as ‘a process fraught with risky and contradictory possibilities’ (ibid.: 832). A ‘pioneering study in the ethnography of roads’ (Campbell Reference Campbell2012: 498), Masquelier's account of people's profound ambivalence towards roads, mobility and transport in post-colonial Niger has been a source of inspiration for a range of scholars who have explored in a similar vein the intricate entanglement of people with (auto)mobility, space and modernity, both in Africa and elsewhere (see, for example, Khan Reference Khan2006; Klaeger Reference Klaeger, Gewald, Luning and van Walraven2009; Dalakoglou Reference Dalakoglou2010; Hart Reference Hart2011). Five articles in this volume press ahead with the analytic theme of the ambivalence of roads. Through their historic analyses and ethnographic observations, the assembled case studies from Senegal, Ghana, Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania give a strong sense of how the perils and possibilities of roads, roadsides, traffic and transport have been and continue to be embraced in the everyday lives of colonial and post-colonial subjects.

This focus on road-related practices, experiences and discourses in Africa echoes the recent concern of many scholars with (auto)mobility and movement that has been driven in great part by the so-called ‘mobility turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (see, for example, Urry Reference Urry2007; Canzler et al. Reference Canzler, Kaufmann and Kesselring2008; Vannini Reference Vannini2010; Cresswell and Merriman Reference Cresswell and Merriman2011). This interest has brought forth a series of collaborative publication projects that are worth mentioning. The most influential is the volume edited by Featherstone et al. on Automobilities (Reference Featherstone, Thrift and Urry2005), assembling the perspectives of sociologists and human geographers on mostly European and North American cultures of mobility. It was preceded by Miller's ethnographically rich collection on Car Cultures (Reference Miller2001) in various parts of the world and by the anthropological volume on the social impact of roads in South-East Asia, entitled On the Road (Colombijn Reference Colombijn2002). The most recent collaborative works are presented by Vannini (Reference Vannini2009), Snead et al. (Reference Snead, Erickson and Darling2009), Cresswell and Merriman (Reference Cresswell and Merriman2011), and Vergunst and Árnason (Reference Vergunst and Árnason2012), who approach roads, routes and other pathways as well as various modes of (not necessarily automotive) mobility from a range of disciplinary perspectives, again for the most part in North Atlantic contexts. The latest venture is this series is the special issue of Mobilities (Reference Dalakoglou and Harvey2012, Vol. 7, No. 4) dedicated to the theme of ‘Roads and Anthropology’. As the guest editors note in their introduction (Dalakoglou and Harvey Reference Dalakoglou and Harvey2012: 460), the ethnographic studies take advantage of the possibilities that roads offer for the exploration of current and locally specific ‘socio-cultural conditions’. Moreover, and anticipating the path taken by the present collection on African roads, these studies raise thematic concerns that speak ‘to a more general sense of promise and uncertainty associated with the idiom and materiality of (auto)mobility’ (ibid., emphasis added).

One major contribution by Africanist scholars to this emerging series of collaborative works is Speed of Change (Gewald et al. Reference Gewald, Luning and van Walraven2009), a volume assembling historical and anthropological case studies on various phenomena related to motor vehicles in colonial and post-colonial Africa.Footnote ¹ Prior to that, and despite the recognition of Africa as a highly mobile continent (de Bruijn et al. Reference de Bruijn, van Dijk and Foeken2001; Hahn and Klute Reference Hahn and Klute2007), writings about roads, transport and automobility in African contexts appear to have been rather scattered, unsystematic, and sometimes mere by-products of fieldwork on other topics.Footnote ² However, in recent years, the growing scholarly awareness of the crucial role that these road-related phenomena play for the continent's socio-cultural, political and economic realities, in both past and present, has triggered a number of (individual and collaborative) research projects focused on roads and transport.Footnote ³ Partially represented in this collection, they set out to draw a lively, multifaceted and at times disturbing picture of what it entails to live, work and struggle with – and on – roads in Africa.

The most disturbing feature of African roads is perhaps their seemingly pathological capacity to cause injury and death to both travelling and roadside-dwelling publics, a condition explored in Mark Lamont's contribution to this volume.Footnote ⁴ Focusing on Kenya's post-colonial experience of road death and injury, Lamont assesses not only road safety, but also infrastructural governance and the increasing value of speed since the country's independence. These have led to what he calls a ‘dangerous infrastructural overload’ (see also Árnason et al. Reference Árnason, Hafsteinsson and Grétarsdóttir2007). In this context, Lamont argues for a ‘sacrificial logic’ attached both to individual and to the great overall number of traffic accidents and road deaths in Kenya, such as when the ‘carnage’ is perceived as a blood price for the cost of the nation's development. His analysis of the secular sacrifice thus diverges from but refers to the spiritual dimension of rituals and blood sacrifice that is implied in other road contexts, such as the cleansing ritual on a Ghanaian road section described in Gabriel Klaeger's contribution (see also Masquelier Reference Masquelier2002; Sanders Reference Sanders2008; Klaeger Reference Klaeger, Gewald, Luning and van Walraven2009; Lee Reference Lee2012).

The same logic of ‘suffer to gain’ (Hart Reference Hart2011), a logic that Lamont sees in the wounds and suffering that are inflicted by infrastructure and possibly compensated by (unequally distributed) gain, is at the core of Caroline Melly's contribution. In her ethnographic description of everyday road experiences in contemporary Dakar, Melly highlights a further prominent constraint of roads in Africa, namely their often dilapidated state and, in urban settings, their dislocated or even arrested vehicular traffic. Both are regularly parts of the side-effects of large-scale infrastructural construction projects all over Africa that, ironically, foster the neglect and disturbance of existing streets and roads. Residents and road users deal with terrible roads in varying ways. In Addis Ababa, for instance, the ‘Bole road’, one of the capital's main arteries, was partially flooded after damage to water pipes during the still-ongoing renovation works, and is therefore renamed ‘Bole river’.Footnote ⁵ Dakar's residents, Melly shows, engage in vivid discourses about the hardships and disruptions imposed on their lives, businesses, commuting activities and bodies by the state's zealous road construction projects. Yet, whilst clashing with the then President Abdoulaye Wade's vision of building a truly modern, ‘global’ capital city, the lived hardships in what Melly calls the ‘unruly present’ are also seen to combine failures with promises: present inconveniences and disruptions are simply the (often unjust) price that needs to be paid for the nation's alluring future.

Lamont's and Melly's contributions show, along with others (Harvey Reference Harvey, Krohn-Hansen and Nustad2005; Khan Reference Khan2006; Dalakoglou Reference Dalakoglou2010; Hart Reference Hart2011), that phenomena such as road safety and road construction are lenses disclosing the workings, discourses and visions of the state. Likewise, in his contribution, Joshua Grace maps the histories of the colonial and post-colonial state by exploring not only the history of roads, but also the life histories of two drivers in Tanganyika and Tanzania, respectively. He demonstrates how, in the light of colonial ideology regarding Africans as racially incompatible with European cultures of technology and mobility, the first African driver in Tanganyika emerged both as a vehicle lover and a hero of the road. The other case is a woman who enjoyed a long career as a reputable driver in post-colonial Tanzania, thus defying the prevalent culture of technology and (masculine) mobility, and transgressing ideologies of gender and social health.

An important aspect of Grace's historical assessment is the alternative view that is offered on commercial driving in Africa, often perceived and described as a practice imbued with risks, various dangers and immorality (for example, Mutongi Reference Mutongi2006; wa Mungai and Samper Reference wa Mungai and Samper2006; van der Geest Reference van der Geest, Gewald, Luning and van Walraven2009). Yet the author points to the possibilities and opportunities of transport work, thus echoing Masquelier's (Reference Masquelier2002: 836) claim about roads often being cast ‘as pathways to wealth and status for those who know how to use them’. Such road users may be drivers and travellers, but they include residents who use the spaces afforded by streets, roads and roadsides for their entrepreneurial activities, most notably for hawking and trading.Footnote ⁶ The commercial roadside institution that Kurt Beck describes in his article is the truck stop found along the Forty Days Road in Sudan, a road that connects the country's capital with Darfur. Focusing on truck stops maintained by shop and coffee house keepers in communities along the unpaved sections of the road, Beck particularly stresses their capacity to operate as social infrastructure: they safely channel the interactions between transitory travellers and the roadside community. Truck stops – as havens for those coming from the road, and from often exhausting road trips – turn out to be spaces of a particular, yet never unconditional type of hospitality. While these spaces accommodate passing travellers into their comforting fold, they also exercise social control by containing strangers, thus shielding the community beyond the truck stop from the gaze and potentially dangerous influence of the road traveller.

Several contributions in this volume hint at the ways in which African roadside residents perceive the road, including its vehicular traffic, as a source of danger and risk, both physical and spiritual, but also of income, entertainment and power. Klaeger's article demonstrates how this ambivalent stance is prevalent alongside the Accra–Kumasi road in southern Ghana. In communities traversed by the country's main artery, road space intersects varyingly with the everyday life of dwellers, forming what Pandya (Reference Pandya and Colombijn2002: 811) calls a ‘roadside lifestyle’. These dwellers engage not only in mundane practices like walking, hanging-out or gossiping, but also in more exceptional, at times staged activities, such as when performing rituals or setting up roadblocks. Klaeger argues that these spatial practices regularly emerge from, but are in some cases also meant to provoke dwellers’ interactions and encounters with passing traffic and travellers.

One element of ambivalence at the heart of the encounters described by Klaeger is people's experience and judgement of speed, in particular fast speed, or ‘overspeeding’, with its potential to scare and harm as well as to thrill and impress. Yet the ethnography also reveals the positive value of slow speed and, more radically, of vehicular standstill for roadside residents and their particular agendas. This value is definitely not shared by those who get stuck in chronic bottlenecks provoked by slow construction works, as Melly describes for Dakar. Indeed, Lamont's contribution discloses how road safety issues in Kenya are not only perceived in ‘contradiction-laden values of speed’, but also – and maybe more dangerously – in ‘variable speeds’. Such ‘differing paces’ are widely found on the continent in the simultaneous claims for both patience and acceleration, in contexts of roads and beyond (see, for example, Klaeger Reference Klaeger2012b). What remains most prominent, and notorious, is nevertheless excessive speed, partially as a result of the urgency in transport, trade and turnover. It is this ‘need for speed’ (Carrier Reference Carrier2005) that contributes, in a crucial manner, to the dual positions of perils and possibilities and thus to the profound ambivalence inherent in, and attributed to, African roads.