Cover Essay: Seeing Technical Labor.

This essay argues that visual analysis can fundamentally reshape histories of communications technology in Africa. Using photographs from archival and digital collections, it examines how maintenance and repair sustained Nigeria's telegraph network and how images make visible forms of labor, expertise, and technical practice that textual archives often obscure. Rather than treating photographs as illustrations of infrastructure, the essay reads them as historical evidence that reveals the material and social conditions under which telegraph systems operated. Scenes of workshops, linemen, storms, and repair crews expose unstable infrastructures maintained through African technical labor, improvisation, and embodied knowledge. At the same time, the images illuminate the uneven visibility of colonial expertise, since African workers frequently appeared collectively rather than as named individuals. By foregrounding maintenance and repair, the essay contributes to emerging histories of infrastructure, materiality, and technology-in-use while demonstrating the value of visual sources for reconstructing African histories of technology.