At five in the morning in Lagos, the terminal hums with the promise of order. Murtala Muhammed International Airport, recently equipped with biometric eGates financed through global partnerships, presents itself as a monument to efficiency. A digital billboard repeats Your face is your passport as travellers shuffle forward, faces scanned, retaken, and sometimes rejected. What is meant to be seamless feels intimate and exposed: movement converted into data, difference into risk. Airports have become postcolonial laboratories where digital surveillance and mobility collide to decide who belongs across the Black Atlantic (Huber, 2024).
A few months later, at Norman Manley International in Kingston, another machine blinks blue. A woman ahead of me fumbles with a new automated kiosk—part of Jamaica’s “Entry Innovations” programme designed to improve tourism throughput. Her fingerprint fails three times before an officer waves her aside, eyes tired from repetition. Behind us, a screen loops reggae instrumentals and a slogan about welcome, the contradiction quiet but sharp: in these biometric corridors, hospitality and suspicion share the same code (Migración Colombia, 2024).
Airports as Postcolonial Theatres of Belonging
Airports embody modernity with glass, speed, and supposed neutrality, yet as research in postcolonial aeromobilities shows, aviation in Africa and the Caribbean has long balanced aspiration against inequality (Huber, 2024). Infrastructure funded through colonial or neoliberal circuits reproduces dependency even as it symbolises sovereignty. The polished terminals of Lagos or Nairobi are national showcases where travellers move through inherited hierarchies of documentation, accent, and passport colour. Belonging is staged, but never distributed evenly. These spaces rehearse global order under the bright lights of efficiency.
At Lagos’s biometric gates, convenience depends on legibility. When the algorithm hesitates—because of lighting, skin tone, or a worn passport—the human behind the system re-emerges: the guard, the doubt, the sideways glance. Technology promises impartiality yet revives the colonial gesture of verification (Thompson, 2024). Mbembe’s (2019) idea that “bodies become borders” gains literal precision: travellers’ faces now authenticate their right to move. The frontier has migrated onto skin, digitising the rituals of inspection once carried out by hand.
“Airports are not neutral zones; they are mirrors where belonging is quietly measured in pixels.”
Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International pilots single-token systems linking identity, ticket, and movement (Papavasileiou et al., 2025). Glitches cause hours-long queues—delays absorbed mostly by passengers without lounge access or flexible schedules. Each malfunction maps onto class and history, and South Africa’s post-apartheid promise of equality rubs against the stratification embedded in biometric lanes. The airport becomes a moral X-ray of the nation, revealing whose time is protected and whose patience is expendable. Efficiency exposes hierarchy more than it erases it.
Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International markets itself as “East Africa’s Smart Hub,” its new eGates and AI-enhanced CCTV heralded as proof of digital leadership (IATA, 2024). Yet Mbembe’s (2019) “necropolitics” haunts the rhetoric: surveillance justified as safety can turn into slow violence, documenting movement as a potential threat. When efficiency becomes virtue, scrutiny becomes invisible, and the spectacle of modern security conceals the intimacy of control. Sovereignty in these terminals is both asserted and outsourced.
Gilroy’s (1993) Black Atlantic reframes airports as continuations of the oceanic routes once crossed under compulsion. Today’s corridors of glass and fibre optics inherit the sea’s double meaning—passage and peril. Each boarding call echoes older migrations, and each scan re-enacts an audit of existence. Airports thus materialise the unfinished business of colonial mobility, refined, digitised, and endlessly normalised. The choreography has changed, but the script persists.
Case Studies from Lagos to Kingston, Bogotá to Caracas
Case studies anchor abstraction in lived experience. In Lagos, the biometric expansion aims to align Nigeria with “world-class standards,” promising safety and speed (Migración Colombia, 2024). Yet international contractors own much of the software, and technical maintenance requires foreign consultants. The interface between local sovereignty and outsourced code reproduces what Eze (2023) calls “postcolonial infrastructures”: systems modern in form but colonial in logic. Every denied scan becomes a microcosm of geopolitical dependency, and progress is leased through licence agreements.
Kingston and Montego Bay’s automated border control kiosks tell a parallel story. Marketed as tools of hospitality, they also pre-sort visitors through risk algorithms shared with overseas partners (Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority, 2024). Caribbean nationals, long constrained by restrictive visa regimes, now encounter the same suspicion in digital form. Airport security discrimination, rebranded as “smart profiling,” shifts scrutiny from accent to dataset. Tourism and suspicion operate on the same server, revealing how development rhetoric disguises continuity.
“The promise of frictionless travel sits uneasily alongside the choreography of suspicion.”
Bogotá’s El Dorado airport showcases national pride in its locally developed Biomig iris system (Migración Colombia, 2024). Citizens volunteer biometric templates in exchange for faster processing, yet Amnesty International (2024) warns that such data—shared through cooperation agreements—may circulate beyond Colombian oversight. Speed is seductive while sovereignty leaks through convenience, and when identification becomes automation, consent becomes residual. The queue shortens, but the archive expands.
In Caracas, Maiquetía International’s biometric apparatus intertwines with domestic politics. Reports of selective enforcement against dissidents show how surveillance mutates from migration control to social discipline (Thompson, 2024). Venezuela’s partnerships with foreign technicians illustrate digital colonialism under authoritarian governance. Here, the airport ceases to be a gateway and becomes a checkpoint in a larger network of control, where departures are monitored as closely as arrivals. The terminal walls remember more than take-offs.
Across these examples—from Lagos to Kingston, Johannesburg to Nairobi, Bogotá to Caracas—a pattern emerges. Biometric surveillance in Africa and the Caribbean is rarely home-grown; it arrives via development loans, security partnerships, and “capacity-building” projects (Eze, 2023). Governments seek modernity while corporations seek data, and between them stands the traveller, body translated into code. Mobility becomes a transaction of trust outsourced to machines. The future of movement is written in proprietary syntax.
Soundtracks and Images of Movement
To grasp how these systems feel, we turn to art. Music across the Black Atlantic has always transformed displacement into rhythm, from Fela Kuti’s afrobeat and Bob Marley’s reggae to contemporary amapiano and dancehall (Gilroy, 1993). Listening to these genres in transit is to inhabit continuity—movement as cultural memory. Sound carries what databases cannot: nuance, improvisation, refusal. It verifies belonging through resonance rather than recognition.
Reyna Tropical’s (2024) album Malegría mixes Latin and African diasporic textures into anthems of joy and mourning. Played through tinny airport earbuds, it becomes an unofficial soundtrack to Global South mobility, each beat insisting that we are still moving, still inventing selves no scanner can capture. Music, unlike biometrics, thrives on ambiguity. It makes legibility optional. The rhythm itself is a passport stamped in feeling.
Photography performs a similar function of witnessing. Images of travellers queuing beneath “Welcome Home” signs expose the irony of hospitality under surveillance. At the same time, documentary series such as Neo Matloga’s Departures juxtapose smiling billboards with the fatigue of airport workers. These pictures resist the invisibility imposed by design minimalism. Where the system seeks transparency, art restores opacity (Glissant, 1997). The lens becomes a tool for re-humanisation.
Cinema amplifies this critique. Latin American films such as Simón Mesa Soto’s Leidi or the Venezuelan short Flight PA203 use airports to meditate on waiting, bureaucracy, and hope. In these works, terminals are emotional climates where arrivals bring relief and departures rehearse loss. Passing through security becomes a metaphor for surviving classification, and each boarding gate doubles as a border of feeling. The cinematic gaze reveals what surveillance cameras refuse to see.
Through these artefacts, cultural production does more than document movement—it theorises it. The Black Atlantic imagination remains a counter-infrastructure to the digital border, where algorithms compress identities and art multiplies them. Rhythm diversifies what bureaucracy simplifies. In sound and image, the right to opacity survives the age of the scan (Glissant, 1997). Art keeps the border porous, if only for a song’s duration.
Theory in Transit: Fanon, Mbembe, Glissant and Wynter
Frantz Fanon wrote that colonial power was sustained not only through armies but through daily interrogations of legitimacy (Fanon, 1967). At every checkpoint—digital or human—his insight endures: identity still requires validation from systems that never imagined difference as equal. Each failed biometric scan becomes a small reenactment of what Fanon called “the zone of non-being.” Control persists through repetition rather than overt force, and the airport, bright and polite, remains one of colonialism’s most enduring classrooms. Behind the glass, the same old question echoes: who has the right to move?
Achille Mbembe’s (2019) concept of necropolitics helps decode the slow violence embedded in these infrastructures. To decide who can move, who must wait, and whose data is expendable is to exercise power over life itself. In biometric corridors, sovereignty operates through algorithmic delegation, as software calibrated elsewhere performs the sovereign gesture of granting or refusal. Mobility thus becomes a matter of code rather than citizenship. The gate recognises compliance, not humanity.
“The frontier has migrated onto skin.”
Édouard Glissant’s (1997) “right to opacity” offers a radical refusal of this demand for transparency. Where the border insists on visibility, Glissant values the unknowable, the layered, the relational. To be opaque is not to hide but to exist beyond domination, yet digital borders, built on facial recognition and pattern detection, treat opacity as error. The algorithm reads refusal as fault. For Glissant, opacity is not inefficiency—it is freedom.
Sylvia Wynter (2020) extends this critique to the category of the human itself. She argues that Western modernity codified a narrow definition—“Man”—as the universal standard. Biometric design inherits this template, in which the “average face” encoded in datasets privileges lighter skin, certain features, and specific bodily assumptions. Error margins reveal ideology, and Wynter’s framework transforms technical bias into philosophical indictment. To fix the code, she reminds us, we must first redefine the human.
Together, these thinkers map the intellectual terrain of the Black Atlantic in the digital age. Fanon explains the psychology of scrutiny, Mbembe names its governance, Glissant articulates its aesthetic resistance, and Wynter exposes its ontological bias. Their frameworks travel easily across terminals because airports themselves are contemporary theatres of these debates. Postcolonial mobility is a theory in motion, and every queue is an archive of unfinished conversation.
Intersectional Itineraries: Feminist and Queer Readings
Looking at airports through a feminist lens reveals who bears the invisible labour of movement. Women and gender-diverse travellers often manage documents, childcare, and emotional logistics, absorbing the anxiety of potential refusal (UNESCO, 2025). For many African and Caribbean families, the matriarch is both organiser and moral compass. Biometric checkpoints reduce her to a data entry while depending on her organisational care. Automation erases empathy even as it depends on it, a paradox of modern travel rarely acknowledged.
Airport systems also encode gender expectations. Body scanners trained on binary norms flag “anomalies,” exposing trans and non-binary passengers to additional searches (Molnar, 2024). Invasions presented as routine safety checks echo the historical policing of bodies deemed improper. When combined with racialised suspicion, these technologies amplify vulnerability rather than security. Algorithmic coloniality meets cisnormativity at the conveyor belt, turning the scan into a site of cumulative harm.
Feminist scholarship reframes these encounters as questions of embodiment and autonomy. Latin American movements, especially the “green wave” for reproductive rights, link bodily self-determination with freedom of movement (Thompson, 2024). To cross borders safely is part of living without fear. Airport security discrimination, therefore, becomes a feminist issue rather than a technical glitch of aviation policy. Every biometric gate is a test of whose safety counts and whose doesn’t.
Queer travellers add another layer of complexity. Passports still enforce gender markers; tickets still demand “Mr” or “Ms.” When documentation lags behind lived identity, the airport becomes a theatre of exposure. Scholars like Mbembe (2019) remind us that the politics of visibility can both empower and endanger, and for queer migrants, recognition without safety is merely surveillance. The right to exist between categories remains unrecognised by code.
In practice, communities devise their own infrastructures of care. WhatsApp groups share which airlines are least intrusive, which routes minimise secondary screening, and which officers treat travellers with dignity. Such networks form a counter-cartography of solidarity, embodying Gilroy’s (1993) idea of the Black Atlantic as a living system of relation and improvisation. Solidarity, not software, keeps people moving. Mutual aid replaces the cold logic of automation with a warmer choreography of care.
Intersectional analysis restores agency to those most scrutinised. Feminist and queer travellers navigate machines that once promised liberation and now reproduce constraint. By naming their experiences, they transform airports into sites of testimony rather than trauma. The datafication of movement meets its limit in the human capacity to narrate, resist, and imagine otherwise. To tell one’s own story is to reclaim one’s trajectory and turn the scanner’s gaze outward.
Digital Colonialism and the Politics of Infrastructure
Digital colonialism describes the extraction of data, profit, and control from the Global South under the guise of innovation (Thompson, 2024). In aviation, this means that most biometric and border systems used in Africa and the Caribbean are designed, hosted, or maintained by firms based in Europe or North America. Governments purchase “turnkey” solutions whose code remains proprietary, effectively leasing sovereignty. Each scan sends information upward through invisible circuits of empire. Beneath the surface of innovation lies dependence.
Projects like IATA’s One ID frame these arrangements as global cooperation (IATA, 2024). But the asymmetry is clear: the South provides data and testing environments, while the North holds certification and profit. This reproduces what Eze (2023) calls “infrastructural subordination.” Technology becomes diplomacy by other means, and the border a trade route disguised as policy. The circulation of code mirrors older routes of extraction once marked by ships.
In Lagos, Nairobi, Bogotá, and Kingston, officials celebrate biometrics as progress, yet citizens rarely see audits of how their information circulates (Amnesty International, 2024). The opacity of data governance contrasts sharply with the forced transparency demanded of travellers. When glitches occur, accountability dissolves into subcontractors and offshore servers. Colonial hierarchies have gone digital but remain hierarchies nonetheless. Efficiency, again, becomes a moral alibi.
“Digital borders are the new shipping lanes: routes of extraction disguised as routes of progress.”
Digital colonialism also shapes aesthetics. Airports mimic each other: glass, steel, neutral tones, universal signage. This homogeneity erases local identity while signalling compliance with international standards (UNESCO, 2025). Even art commissions in terminals are curated to project “global modernity,” seldom challenging the politics of mobility itself. The result is what Glissant (1997) would call the triumph of transparency over relation, an architecture of obedience disguised as openness.
Resistance emerges through counter-infrastructures. Community-run data cooperatives, privacy campaigns, and digital rights movements in Nairobi, Bogotá, and Port of Spain demand that technological adoption serve social justice rather than surveillance. These initiatives echo Wynter’s (2020) insistence that redefining the human is a prerequisite to any decolonial future. To build humane technology, one must first expand who counts as human. Software follows philosophy, not the other way around.
Towards Decolonial Mobility
Imagining decolonial mobility means designing systems in which dignity is the default. Transparency, accountability, and community oversight should be embedded as rigorously as encryption. Airports must disclose what data they collect, how long it is stored, and with whom it is shared (Amnesty International, 2024). Independent audits—conducted by civil society, not vendors—should precede any expansion of biometric infrastructure. Consent must become more than a box ticked under fluorescent light.
Legal reform is equally urgent. International agreements on data protection lag far behind the speed of aviation technology. Scholars argue for a right to travel without data surrender, akin to existing rights to privacy and due process (Thompson, 2024). Implementing such principles requires new treaties among nations of the Global South, transforming postcolonial solidarity into technical policy. Mobility justice begins with regional cooperation.
“Between the scanner’s cold light and the warmth of a goodbye, we carry both history and possibility.”
Cultural workers contribute by reframing imagination. Artists from Lagos, Kingston, and Caracas transform airport imagery into critique and hope.
Documentary photographers in South Africa have produced series that juxtapose smiling billboards with the fatigue of airport workers, revealing the gap between marketed hospitality and lived reality. Art, as Glissant (1997) reminds us, builds relations where politics builds barriers. The decolonial future may begin in a gallery as easily as in a government hall.
Policy, art, and theory converge on one demand: slow down. Speed has been aviation’s god for a century, yet justice often requires delay—the pause to explain, to translate, to reconsider. Slowness could itself be a decolonial practice, restoring care to movement. The Black Atlantic has always thrived on rhythm, not rush, and to move well is better than to move fast. Patience, in this sense, becomes political.
Between the scanner’s cold light and the warmth of a goodbye, travellers continue to rewrite the script of belonging. Each boarding pass bears the residue of Fanon’s defiance, Mbembe’s critique, Glissant’s opacity, and Wynter’s re-humanisation. Airports may be laboratories of identity, but experiments can fail, and subjects can resist. From passports to pixels, the Black Atlantic still moves—imperfectly, collectively, irrepressibly. Its destination, finally, is dignity.
References:
Amnesty International. (2024). The Digital Border: Migration, Technology and Inequality. London: Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org
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Eze, C. (2023). Postcolonial Infrastructures and Everyday Mobility in Africa. University of Lagos Press.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952)
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso.
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Huber, M. (2024). “Higher up, further”: Approaching air transport in postcolonial Africa. Journal of Transport History, 45(1), 22–45.
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Papavasileiou, E. F., et al. (2025). eGates in airports: A systematic literature review and future research agenda. Journal of Airport Management and Operations, 9(2), 65–90.
Reuters. (2025, October 24). US expands facial recognition at borders to track non-citizens. Reuters World News. https://www.reuters.com/world
Thompson, K. (2024). Digital colonialism and border infrastructures in the Global South. Global Studies Quarterly, 4(2), 114–129. https://doi.org/10.1093/gsq/gqae023
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Wynter, S. (2020). On Being Human as Praxis (K. McKittrick, Ed.). Duke University Press.
Rock & Art Magazine. (2025). Facial recognition at borders and the racialised traveller. Rock & Art UK. https://www.rockandart.org
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