Studying how people fix broken objects, infrastructures and bodies reveals the social relations, obligations and improvisations that sustain a society more clearly than studying production or consumption does. Breakdown exposes dependencies that function invisibly when things work.
In many African settings repair is not a discrete event that restores an object to a prior state but a continuous practice of keeping things provisionally working. The mended object carries the visible traces of its repairs and remains in an open-ended condition of being tended rather than finished.
Across the cases, objects and infrastructures built elsewhere are kept in use far past their intended lifespans through local skill, substitute parts and improvisation. This sustained repair work is a response to scarcity and to goods designed without their African afterlives in mind.
The anthology treats repair as a single analytic that covers mending material things, healing bodies and restoring damaged social and political relationships. Framing these together shows that the skills, ethics and labour of fixing move across these domains rather than being confined to workshops.