Stephan F. Miescher. A dam for Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022. 598 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $50. Paper. ISBN: 9780253059956.

Part of review forum on "A dam for Africa"The conventional wisdom about large-scale dam projects in Africa casts technocrats and elite state officials as the primary drivers of modernization projects, and attributes local communities with little power to halt the inexorable march of infrastructural modernity.A Dam for Africa provides a powerful intervention into this narrative by establishing how Ghana's largest hydroelectric dam project was forged in the friction-filled interactions between competing groups and shaped by multiple knowledge regimes.Stephan Miescher offers a magisterial and exhaustive biography of the Akosombo Dam project in late colonial and postcolonial Ghana, showing how the dam exceeded state forms of seeing and ordering nature to take on a life of its own.Through meticulous chronicling of Akosombo's unfolding, Miescher illustrates how material technologies, technopolitical processes, postcolonial ambitions, popular culture, and the river itself interacted to produce new physical and imagined spaces of the nation.Envisaged by Kwame Nkrumah, Akosombo's comprehensive plan entailed damming the river, generating power which would be channeled into households, illuminating the nation, and fully integrating the aluminum industry.Despite nationalist leaders' enthusiasm for Akosombo as a pathway to economic liberation and selffashioned modernity, the dam project was contested politically and became a site of mediation for Nkrumah's broader engagements with the capitalist West and communist Eastern bloc amidst his policy of nonalignment.A Dam for Africa is an expansive atlas of the technological things that animated the Ghanaian society in the 1950s to 1980s-from the private jet for which Nkrumah longed, and the television sets that marked privileged status among the Volta Aluminium Company (VALCO) workers, to the charcoal that continues to fuel chop-bar operators when the grid fails them.Miescher's book brilliantly exposes how a large-scale technological system is not only an assemblage of different interested parties, knowledge practices, and material objects, but also how it has been a living infrastructure, brought to life and near-death through the choreographies of everyday and spectacular encounters.Performed for various publics in mobile film exhibitions, early techno-optimistic dreams give way to the devastating disappointment in the face of capitalist-driven extractive economic forces and technological inertia.In government negotiations with Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation, for instance, locally mined bauxite was foregone for cheap alumina imported from Jamaica, and later the goal of