Sophie Toupin
Sophie Toupin is a researcher, activist, and feminist hacker based in Montreal, Canada. Her work explores the linkages between technology and activism through ethnographic studies and projects. She co-founded a feminist mobile hacklab in Montreal: Femhack and is involved in creating a feminist server managed by a feminist tech collective.
Presenting
Anti-Colonial Hacking: The Case Study of An Autonomous Encrypted Communication Network Developed During the Struggle Against Apartheid in South Africa
In the 1980s, freedom fighters and hackers from South Africa built an autonomous encrypted communication network that allowed activists infiltrated on the ground in South Africa to communicate with the senior leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) based in Lusaka, Zambia via London. The encrypted communication network was set up as part of Operation Vula to attempt to launch a people's war and ultimately liberate a people's from apartheid. The ingenuousness of the encrypted communication system is such that it used an assemblage of technologies including computers, algorithms, tape recorders, acoustic modem couplers, the international telephone system, among others to adapt to the difficult context and condition on the ground whether it was the ubiquitous surveillance by the police state, the lack of infrastructure or the lack of electricity. This hidden chapter of history sheds light on one of the most exciting, but untold story of what I call anti-colonial hacking.
This story is significant for multiple reasons. By shedding light to this hidden history, my presentation will help enlarge the goals, aspirations and political nature of the assemblage of transnational technological and communication networks. It will also allow to give credit to a continent of the world, Africa that is often eclipsed from the limelight of technological "innovation" and hackerdom. Moreover, it will create solidarities between movements with different situated knowledge, positionalities and contexts without suppressing the significant and important history of each of them. The desire to craft an autonomous and non-commercial encrypted infrastructure to bring about liberation to a people is reminiscent of the work of today's tech activists. This history fits in the history of tech activism and should be recognized as such to open up the possibilities of thinking about the use of crypto and the assemblage of variant forms of technologies for liberation struggles.
