323 DOI: 10.4324/9781003080855-18 Introduction In recent years, a booming scientifc and commercial interest in the digitalization of African societies can be observed. Scholars inquire into the possibilities of tech for development (among others ICT4, i.e. “Information and Communication Technologies for Development”, Pieterse, 2010; Graham et al., 2017) and try to understand how social media platforms are embedded in the unfolding of political and social lives (de Bruijn and Van Dijk, 2009; Helle-Valle and Storm-Mathisen, 2020). Yet, so far, most attention is devoted to the usage of tech devices produced outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, and little is published on local innovations by African tech entrepreneurs. 1 Social research on tech entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa is only timidly taking of (Avle, 2011; Pijnaker and Spronk, 2017; Poggiali, 2016; Taru, 2019). Similar studies are urgently needed in order to counter the stereotypical representation of Africa as a receiving continent of technology (see Mavhunga, 2017, p. 4). This chapter attempts to fll in this void by looking into the social worlds of technologists in Kinshasa, capital city of DR Congo and home to more than ten million inhabitants. I will focus on producers of tech products as intentional actors, who imagine futures, weigh possibilities, calculate risks, and act upon these. Geeks are cultural entrepreneurs, who “quickly seize novel opportunities to initiate new forms of generating income in the realm of cultural production”, even in moments of uncertainty, “when failure seems to be as likely an outcome of their activi- ties as does success” (Röschenthaler and Schulz, 2018). In his introduction to a special issue on new media entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa, with which tech entrepreneurs are intimately related, Grätz (2013, p. 6) argued that, despite the large body of scholarship on entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa, “research has hitherto not sufciently illuminated the particular combina- tion of economic strategies, innovation, and cultural creativity yet”. He proposes as a method “to follow actors across various sites and spaces” (Grätz, 2013, p. 9), which I will do quite literally. The main actors in Kinshasa’s tech space are called, and call themselves, ingénieurs. They all strive to become entrepreneurs, i.e. individuals “controlling both primary (material, techno- logical) and secondary resources (relations, information)” (Grätz, 2013, p. 4), and who can “also exchange and inter-convert all such sorts of capital” (Ibid.). The label of “ingénieur” suggests an expertise of electronic or mechanic equipment. The concept ingénieur is used for anyone either professionally working in (electronic) engineering or aspiring to become an engineer, 17 CODING THE CITY Mapping Eco-Systems and Zones of Opportunity in Kinshasa’s Emerging Tech Scene Katrien Pype