Demonstrating critically reflexive ICT4D project conduct in rural South Africa

ABSTRACT The problem with many ICT4D projects designed for African developmental contexts is that there is a tendency towards deterministic assumptions, in that arguments and implementation guidelines are often presented a-contextually. The reality of the author’s lived experience, however, was that ICT4D practices in the African context imply cross-cultural working and worldview collisions. Simply adopting Western values and advice wholesale without adequate reflection, may lead to a design-reality gap, oppressive ICT transfer, and ultimately failure. Understanding cultural context and local development realities may present challenges, because it is interwoven with the assumptions and prejudices of those identifying and representing context from the outside. While there are attempts at addressing these issues, more nuanced examples adequately sensitized to ethical reasoning, insider knowledge, and power dynamics in cross-cultural working, are needed. This paper reflects on how a critical ethnography informed and transformed ICT4D project practices for the developmental realities of a traditional Zulu community in South Africa. Confessional narratives, representing both method and phenomena, are used as case analogies for outsider researchers and practitioners to draw on, firstly; to self-reflect on their own false consciousness and misguided assumptions, and secondly; to make sense of the typical abstractness of ICT4D project guidance and principles.