Techrights

GNU/Linux Adoption in Africa, a Passageway Towards Freedom From Neo-Colonialism

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 05, 2023,

updated Dec 05, 2023

Digi(tal)-Colonialism and/or Techolonialism are a thing. Can Africa flee the trap?

THERE is some good (positive) news.

Some large nations in Africa show growing adoption of GNU/Linux (freedom, not ChomeoOS). Nigeria and South Africa are among those (over 5%).

But what about other nations?

What about smaller and barely known African republics?

statCounter probably does not get much data from them, except perhaps (just a big maybe) mobile devices, but still...

We're studied this data and made some charts.

Here are African nations estimated to have over 4% desktop/laptop share for GNU/Linux:

Some large nations there too. Africa has a much bigger population than Europe and North America. Its population also grows a lot faster.

Here are countries where GNU/Linux is said to have exceeded 2% on the desktop/laptop form factor:

Finally, over 1%:

African countries where GNU/Linux is said to have exceeded 4% on the desktop/laptop form factor

African countries where GNU/Linux is said to have exceeded 2% on the desktop/laptop form factor

African countries where GNU/Linux is said to have exceeded 1% on the desktop/laptop form factor

Maybe this merits further discussion.

We previously wrote a lot about pertinent African nations over at the sister site, taking note of the rapid growth of GNU/Linux in some of them.

The important thing to remember is, many Africans adopt subsidised mobile devices (usually Android) and to some of them a desktop or a laptop is either a luxury or something that's of limited use, e.g. due to networks or networking being tower-reliant.

Some places in Africa lack the infrastructure for cabled connections (e.g. copper/Ethernet) and fibre-optics aren't on the agenda yet.

Many of the "smart" phones and the towers are supplied by China as part of its "Debt and Braces" (intentional typo) program.

It would help Africa a lot if it adopted GNU/Linux, not just because of the animal's (gnu) connection to the continent but because sharing dismantles a system of colonialism (dependency and reliance). To quote a comment someone posted in Gemini yesterday:

those shiny things were a mere part of a bigger picture: native peoples lost their land and control to other land resources, were forced to work, were converted to other religion, had to obey laws brought by colonizers.

what you tell about uis to me sounds like a talk about shiny things when the important matter here is freedom, rights, laws, licenses.

to me proprietary software (sw which uses my cpu not for what i want but for what someone else wants) is like a poisoned food. even if libre software is not tasty i prefer it

but it is often much tastier than what corps have to offer

This was posted in response to very low-grade anti-Linux provocation. We're since then learned that the person who wrote it isn't just a Microsoft enthusiast but also a rude basher of GNU/Linux advocates - to the point of getting banned from some forums in Gemini! He just keeps changing names (at least 3 times already), so some people are unable to keep track. █