Relationality or Hospitality in Twenty-First Century Research? Big Data, Internet of Things, and the Resilience of Coloniality on Africa

African development will remain intractable in a world where Africans are conceived as constituting disorganised data subject to the supposedly organising gaze of knowledgeable Others. African people are increasingly datafied dehumanised and denied self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-organisation and data sovereignty. Arguing for more attention to questions of data sovereignty, this paper notes that the Internet of Things and Big Data threaten the autonomy, privacy, data and national sovereignty of indigenous Africans. It is contended that decolonial scholars should unpack ethical implications of theorising indigenous people in terms of relational theories that assume absence of distinctions between humans and nonhumans. Deemed to be indistinct from nonhumans/animals, Africans would be inserted or implanted with remotely controlled intelligent tracking technological devices that mine data from their brains, bodies, homes, cities and so on. Key words: relationality, Big Data, Internet of Things, coloniality, research