The way in which politics in Africa has been working, cannot be understood without systematically and adequately inquiring into the socially conditioned representations of the people about politics, the fundamental and instrumental political values they hold, and the evaluative-affective attitudes they take towards politics. The panel proposes a debate among people who have been researching and reflecting along these lines
As their limited power of explanation and prediction has become more and more evident, institution centred analyses of politics in Africa have been loosing ground to analyses centred on social actors. However, the latter have often left out the “subjective dimension”, i.e. the way in which people think and feel about politics. As a consequence, the logics underlying patterns (and pattern change) observed on the behavioural level has frequently not been adequately understood. Also, efforts to include social thinking on politics have, almost as a rule, been undertaken in the realm of African studies without the knowledge of analytical tools developed, and applied in other parts of the world, by social sciences such as political science, sociology and social psychology. An interdisciplinary team project on “The reconstitution of politics in Lusophone Africa”, under way at the Lisbon centre of African studies since 1998, has led some of its researchers to concentrate on this dimension, putting to systematic use methodological approaches heretofore neglected in the study of Africa. This effort has benefited from the exchange with the Bordeaux and Barcelona centres of African studies, and from the debates at the 2002 AEGIS conference on “Changing Patterns of Politics in Africa”. At the panel, three Lisbon researchers propose to present papers on political values, evaluation of political systems, and attitudes towards political participation among different (urban and rural) populations in Angola and Mozambique - looking very much forward to the participation of, and debate with, colleagues from other centres who have carried out similar research on other African countries.
This paper will explore the values, political attitudes and activism of African teachers and students in the late colonial period in former French West Africa. Their radical nationalist politics placed them in a position of opposition to both French colonial rule and the main African political leaders in the colony, who favoured a negotiated approach to independence that would maintain close links with France. There was however an inherent tension in their political stance, insofar as it was radically anti-French yet did not question the French cultural and political values with which they had become imbued by their French education. It will be suggested that an understanding of these unresolved tensions adds a useful new dimension to our understanding of the political tensions and conflicts in parts of French-speaking black Africa today.
The past thirty years in Burkina Faso have been tremendously affected by numerous political changes, and the political history of the country has been especially affected by Sankara’s revolution. Today’s youth has not only been the direct witnesses of different political systems and their discrepancies but they also happened to be actors of the institution of democracy – explaining villagers why and how to vote. Their present pessimist vision of a citizenship they feel excluded from will probably be shaping the political landscape of the next decade.
This paper presents a concept in which the state is understood as a societal institution. That means that the state affects every day life and is constituted not only by formal elements, but also by the images people have of it. Using experiences from East African statehood, understood in this way, shall be described from an every day life perspective.
For over a decade the population of Kinshasa has been reacting to the political, economic and urban crisis of the country by creating new identities and adopting new social representations of power. In this process, Pentecostal reverends and renowned musicians have emerged as new reference groups entrusted with the role of social healers and guides, while the reference role of the politicians - seen as figures of social and economic success - has been loosing importance
This paper attempts to assess the affective and cognitive aspects of the political attitudes of Cameroonians from French and English speaking areas, during the colonial period. A mixture of influences including colonial administration and theories, gave birth to radically different, even though sometimes similar, ways to consider politics and colonization
The paper uses empirical data from a squatter settlement in South Africa to examine attitudes towards politics and representation. It argues that an understanding of political power as being grounded in access to and distribution of resources was transposed from the informal politics of the settlement to the newly created local government structures, and that the way in which political power was experienced must be analysed as a dialogue between different ideas about politics and representation.
This paper inquires into the way in which Nigerians construe politics in their social representations, with special attention to the limitations of, and potential for, participatory attitudes towards democracy.
Drawing on field research in Tete/Mozambique, this paper details out the way in which the social actors in that town perceive the relations between society and state as they have developed in Mozambique over time: during “effective occupation” by the Portuguese (until 1974/75), during the post-colonial socialist experience (until 1992-94) and under the present multiparty system.
On the basis of numerous group interviews, the author analyses the patterns of political values held by the key population segment under research, their cognitions and evaluations of the political regime established in the country since the early 90s, and the attitudes they are taking (or prepared to take) with regard to the political situation as they see and feel it.
I examine a set of four inter-linked ‘principles’ that structure political action and sentiment at the local level: the equivalence of persons, respect, jealousy, and suffering. These principles form a resilient and powerful structure that is significantly different from the bureaucratic/democratic concepts of (political & juridical) equality, (hierarchical) distinction, organisational discipline, and personal achievement that ideally structure political action in the ‘modern’ bureaucratic national state.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Burundians at home and in exile, this paper argues that politics is perceived ambiguously in popular imagination: one the one hand, it is seen to corrupt those involved; on the other hand “pure politics” is seen to be untainted by moral corruption. The popular critique of politics and politicians is that they are not political enough, having lost sight of political ideology and only seeing money and power. Methodologically, the paper argues that such paradoxes and ambiguities in people’s perceptions of politics may be fruitfully explored and analysed through rumours and conspiracy theories.