The project “A history of ‘Making Things’ in West Africa, 1920-1980: creating, meaning making, and experience” studies artisans and craftspeople in Accra and Lagos. It turns to productive processes with a focus on meaning making and creating. This project, firstly, seeks to elucidate West African historical epistemologies and experiences of ‘making things’ under colonial rule and after, and, secondly, to write entrepreneurial activities back into social, cultural and political histories of West Africa. Turning to entrepreneurial activity, it moves beyond a reductive frame of capital accumulation: studying ‘making’ provides a historically situated account of people’s engagement with technologies, which moves beyond the bifurcation between the imported and the local, and highlights the broad range of agency animating entrepreneurial activity.

Furthermore, focussing on bakers and goldsmiths demonstrates various modes of making and trajectories of craft specialisation and thus also allows to elucidate gendered epistemologies of making. The project seeks to challenge Eurocentric notions of innovation and technology, and to highlight West Africans’ individual and collective bodies of knowledge of how to engage with adverse colonial and post-colonial economic contexts, and thus to complicate the ways in which African societies form part of growing scholarship on the global history of capitalism and science and knowledge.