Lezing 'Toward a history of civil aviation in East Africa: connections, communities, and perhaps even a comparison'

In this paper I use the history of African civil aviation as a vehicle to look at the continent's postcolonial economic, social and political history. To do so, I use the concept of 'aeromobility', split between 'aeromobility and the reconfiguration of space' and 'aeromobility and the reconfiguration of modernity', and the concept of 'commercial speed', which allow us to combine explorations of the technical development, material production and consumption of aviation with explorations of the imaginaries, expectations, politics, access and status ascribed to aviation. I will here apply these concepts to a brief and general history of civil aviation in Africa, based in a scattered and incomplete literature on the subject. At present, the continent's aviation history remains to be written.