Road travel across Africa (Source Klaus Braun and Jacqueline Passon, Across the

The characteristics) of individual places or regions interacts with globalization to yield specific outcomes in the network society Different social groups and regions are differently positioned on the axis of globalization, with race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, and other variables of social domination (and their permutations) influencing people’s ability to negotiate the topographies of time-space compression. Africa as a whole—and sub-Saharan Africa, in particular—lags behind the rest of the world in nearly all the major indicators of the network society, with some even describing the continent’s tie to the global economy as one excorporation rather than incorporation we must note that not all African, or for that matter sub-Saharan African, countries have fallen out of the network society. The sheer size and complexity of the continent make any such generalization patently facile. Inter intranational variations abound on the continent, as one would expect of any part of the world. Similarly, it would be erroneous to paint an image of sub-Saharan Africans as though they are totally powerless in the network society, with no human agency of their own. As Foucault [77] taught four decades ago, power is indeed pervasive, because it hails from all around, and without resistance, defiance, and subversion, power becomes impotent. As several authors including Mensah have demonstrated, Africans have not only participated actively in globalization, but have mounted various resistance forms, when need be, to protect their individual and collective interest. Unfortunately, some aspects of this agency have been

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