African Truck Toys

Kevin Kelly (Co-founder of Wired, author and technologist extraordinaire) blogged about african truck toys, which show the ingenuity of using local materials to make something useful, fun and yes…very cool.

ugandawiretoy The image is from Kevin Kelly’s site, it is of a wire toy made by a child in Uganda.
These are the types of toys the Afrigadget authors and african blogosphere members played with when they were children. I would like to request that if you have pictures showing toys such as these, if you would kindly comment or use our contact page to send us images,so we can showcase more of African ingenuity. You can also tag your images in flickr with afrigadget and we’ll be sure to see them.

Author: Juliana Rotich

African, Kenyan, Blogger. I am fascinated by solar energy tech, and the empowering, leapfrogging nature of technology for Africa.

15 thoughts on “African Truck Toys”

  1. You know, I used to make those as a kid too. It was feverish activity in and around Nairobi with all of us kids when the Safari Rally was going on.

    There were some extremely talented car makers too – mine ended up being a little rickety compared to the truly talented builders.

  2. This post really spoke to the boy in me:-) At Omidyar.net Lars Hasselblad Torres is working on a project to make comic book instructions for making useful stuff out of trash. I started collecting links to possible crafts at a workspace there http://www.omidyar.net/group/peacetiles/ws/dumpcrafts/ The other thing is started tagging links somewhat related at de.licio.us with dumpcraft. If anyone feels so inclined to add that tag I’ll be sure to see them.

  3. memories…

    i remember the way as kids we used to go to petrol stations and collect old cans of oil – to lubricate the axles so that the cars would run more smoothly.

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