A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Heralded as Africa's "Silicon Savannah"—a cradle of innovation—Nairobi has become a technology and innovation capital for Kenya and for the continent at large. With a national strategy that has prioritized digital technology for the last two decades, many Chinese digital champions, smaller startups, and investors have since chosen Nairobi as their African landing pad. Mapping the interface between Nairobi's innovation scene and China's digital presence there,
Silicon Elsewhere tells a unique story of ingenuity and adaptation, failure and speculation, and hopefulness and pragmatism. Andrea Pollio's ethnography draws on interviews with cautious venture capitalists, renegade entrepreneurs, dedicated bureaucrats, and ambitious data scientists to explore the competing meanings of contemporary techno-capital. Moving between leafy coworking spaces and the temperature-controlled rooms of brand-new data centers, Pollio locates Nairobi among the experimental capitals, not peripheries, of technological change in the early twenty-first century.
Andrea Pollio is Assistant Professor of Political and Economic Geography at the Department of Urban and Regional Studies of the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, and Research Associate at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
"In a simultaneously accessible and complex delivery, Andrea Pollio uses Nairobi, the 'Silicon Savannah,' as the location from which to think through how technological circuits shape both local and geopolitical presents. This is an unparalleled, empirically rich, multiscalar contribution to the archive of Nairobi and its techno-capital aspirations, by a powerful storyteller."—Wangui Kimari, American University Nairobi Abroad Program
"Written with grace and insight, this book tells the unique story of the rise of Nairobi as Africa's 'Silicon Savannah,' thanks to its Chinese connections. Pollio's immersive ethnography weaves together the material, social, and ideological threads of this momentous development—from cheap Chinese smartphones to the dense network of Chinese venture capital investors and the transplant of e-commerce business models from China to Africa. A bold and original contribution to the study of Global China, techno-capital, and the Global South."—Ching Kwan Lee, Professor of Sociology at University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The Specter of Global China and Forever Hong Kong
238 pp.6 x 9Illus: 10 figures, 1 map, 1 table
9780520413085$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jan 2026