Electricity

by

Damilola Adebayo

• LAST MODIFIED: 19 February 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0242

Introduction

Africa has the lowest electricity access rate in the world today. About six hundred million of its estimated 1.4 billion population (or 43 percent) are still waiting to experience reliable electricity supply, according to a recent estimate. Yet, unlike other forms of Western technological inventions, such as in communications (telegraph or the telephone) or rail transportation, historians have demonstrated that the infrastructure of large-scale electricity production made its way to Africa not long after it was developed in Europe and the United States. Electricity became a tool for modern life during the late 1870s through the work of scientists, notably Thomas Edison, who invented the incandescent bulb. By 1882, the mining city of Kimberly in South Africa had become the first African municipal area to have electric lights. Kimberly’s coal-fired central power station was also the second in the world (after Pearl Street Station, New York). Ethiopia reportedly had its first electricity generator, powered by diesel, as a gift from the German government to the emperor in the 1890s; while in Nigeria, electricity supply commenced in Lagos in 1898. In nearly all of Africa, the electrification timeline was intertwined with European colonialism. The main sites of electricity consumption during the years before the Second World War were the mines and cities where the European and African political and economic elite resided. As a result, the motives of colonial investments have been debated among scholars, and the main issues have ranged from economic exploitation to racial discrimination. The 1940s was the era of colonial development, and electricity began to gain increasing prominence in the industrial policy deliberations within the colonies. As African states approached independence, nationalists also imagined hydroelectric dams as indispensable for economic growth. Despite the optimism and grand strategies of the 1950s and 1960s, Africa’s electricity consumption per capita remains the lowest rate of any world region. African governments and international financial institutions have invested billions to increase supply capacity. However, allegations of public-sector corruption and mismanagement are prevalent. The national grid frequently collapses, load shedding is endemic, and millions of Africans often fall back on small generators. Global dialogues on climate change have also spurned an interest in exploring green alternatives, particularly solar energy, as the future of electrification in Africa.

General Overviews

Scholars have produced several important case studies on electrification, but syntheses at regional or continental scales are dated and focused on sub-Saharan Africa. Showers 2011 situates the evolution of power plants across Africa from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s within a global environmental history context. Coquery-Vidrovitch 2003 explores sources and methodological possibilities for researching electricity in the colonial and postcolonial Francophone and Anglophone regions. Marwah 2017 focuses on the postcolonial period and evaluates inequality in electricity access by sub-Saharan African households. Similarly, Trotter, et al. 2017 systematically reviews African electrification within the context of universal energy access. Khalema-Redeby, et al. 1998 analyzes vast data on selected southern African countries to reconstruct the history of their national grid and technical systems. International organizations, notably the World Bank, have also sponsored academic research on the funding requirement, capacity, and efficiency of African energy infrastructure—Eberhard, et al. 2011 and Blimpo and Cosgrove-Davies 2019 are examples in this regard. A few global history texts have devoted sections to understanding African electrification. Notably, Hausman, et al. 2008 introduced the concept of “enclave” electrification, which is useful for understanding the urban bias in African electricity narratives. Finally, some overviews of the African power sector have also been devoted to the study of state capture, corruption, and inefficiency, as seen in the works of Auriol and Blanc 2009 and African Business 2015.

• African Business. “Navigating Corruption in Africa’s Power Sector.” 18 June 2015.

  News article discusses political interference in the African electricity industry and what private-sector companies can do about it.

• Auriol, Emmanuelle, and Aymeric Blanc. “Capture and Corruption in Public Utilities: The Cases of Water and Electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Utilities Policy 17.2 (2009): 203–216.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.jup.2008.07.005

  Examines the impact of the privatization of electric utilities—and the corruption engendered by private-sector involvement—on the welfare of African consumers.

• Blimpo, Moussa P., and Malcolm Cosgrove-Davies. Electricity Access in Sub-Saharan Africa: Uptake, Reliability, and Complementary Factors for Economic Impact. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2019.

  DOI: 10.1596/978-1-4648-1361-0

  Commissioned by the World Bank, a comprehensive report on African electrification examining both demand-side constraints (including poverty) and supply-side constraints (such as public-sector mismanagement and poor infrastructure maintenance) that are responsible for low electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as what to do about them.

• Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. “Electricity Networks in Africa: A Comparative Study, Or How to Write Social History from Economic Sources.” In Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed. Edited by Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, 346–360. New York: University of Rochester Press, 2003.

  One of the first publications by a historian to review the state of electricity in Africa on a continental scale. Synthesizes historical publications on electricity in Africa from the 1970s to the early 2000s from a social history perspective.

• Eberhard, Anton, Orvika Rosnes, Maria Shkaratan, and Haakon Vennemo, eds. Africa’s Power Infrastructure: Investment, Integration, Efficiency. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2011.

  An edited volume published as an initiative of the World Bank, the African Union, and several other international development institutions. Examines the poor state of energy access by analyzing quantitative data collected between 2006 and 2008.

• Hausman, William J., Peter Hertner, and Mira Wilkins. Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511512131

  A global history text tangentially covering African electrification. Provides a practical conceptual framework, the idea of “enclave” electrification, for understanding the evolution of power supply in colonial African urban centers during the first half of the twentieth century.

• Khalema-Redeby, Lucy, Mariam Hailu, Mbewe Abel, and Ben Ramasedi. Planning and Management in the African Power Sector. London: Zed Books, 1998.

  Written within the context of African transition from military dictatorships to weak democratic rule during the 1990s, emphasizes that successful electricity reform programs in Africa depend, among other things, on political stability.

• Marwah, Hanaan. “Electricity Access Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1950–2000.” African Economic History 45.2 (2017): 113–144.

  DOI: 10.1353/aeh.2017.0008

  Reviews the features and socioeconomic consequences of uneven access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa using four case studies, namely Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Ghana.

• Showers, Kate B. “Electrifying Africa: An Environmental History with Policy Implications.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 93.3 (2011): 193–221.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0467.2011.00373.x

  An essential reading and comprehensive review of nearly all major electricity projects in Africa since the mid-nineteenth century.

• Trotter, Philipp A., Marcelle C. McManus, and Roy Maconachie. “Electricity Planning and Implementation in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 74 (2017): 1189–1209.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2017.03.001

  Evaluates over three hundred social-scientific qualitative and quantitative research papers on electricity planning in forty-nine sub-Saharan African countries.