How can notions of “the modern” acquire so much power – and such ambivalence in everyday language in many parts of Africa? What are the reasons for the rapid emergence of the notion of “modernity” –eclipsing its older and more robust sister “modernization” – as a central concept, be it a very diffuse one, in African studies in the 1990’s? What are the challenges and the dilemmas this concept poses for academic studies of the continent?
Clearly one of the reasons why this diffuse notion of “modernity” so easily eclipsed the older notion of “modernization” was the blatant failure of Western models of “development” presented as a unilineal road towards a “modern” way of life, also for Africa. The more recent vicissitudes on the continent hardly fit into the confident, but highly simplistic dichotomies (‘pattern variables”) deduced by American modernization sociologists from Weber. Present-day realities are very difficult to fit into such dichotomies: they hardly correspond to the Parsonian view of “the modern”, but neither do they fit into the opposite pole of these dichotomies, “the traditional”. Despite this, notions of “the modern” are omnipresent in the continent – so much so that it is impossible to ignore them in academic language. Notion of “the traditional” remain equally current, be it in discourses of the state’s cultural policies, in chiefs’ attempts to assert their relevance as brokers of development, in the sphere of arts or in the search for an African renaissance.
The aim of these two panels is to present a reader (in the IAI series “Readings on....) which we are preparing on these issues. Debates on “modernity” have become a crucial challenge for the future of the continent, especially since the blatant failure of self-confident Western notions of modernization (the development dream) on the continent. For academics, the main challenge has become how to understand developments which seem to escape classical views of what is supposed to be “modern”, but can neither be fitted into “tradition”: developments for which there seems to be no masterplan, no meta-narrative but that are none the less very much part of our world.
From 'Modernization' to 'Modernity': technologies of the modern in Africa
Narratives of 'modernization' and 'development' once placed Africa's low economic and political status within a compelling temporal frame that promised convergence with the "developed" West. Today, when many have lost faith in such narratives, and African economic convergence with the 'First World' is nowhere in sight, we are less likely to speak of 'modernization' than of 'modernity' in Africa. What is entailed in this shift, and what are the implications for thinking about Africa's position in a world of extreme socio-economic inequality?
In ongoing discussions concerning the nature of the African city architects, urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, demographers and others devote a lot of attention to the built form, and more generally to the city’s material infrastructure. Architecture has become a central issue in western discourses and reflections on how to plan, engineer, sanitize and transform the urban site and its public spaces. Mirroring that discourse architecture has also started to occupy an increasingly important place in our attempts to come to terms with the specificities of the African urbanscape and to imagine new urban paradigms for the African city of the future. Indeed, one can hardly underestimate the importance of the built form and of the material, physical infrastructure if one wants to understand the ways the urban space unfolds and designs itself. However, the city’s infrastructure is of a very specific kind. It is an infrastructure of paucity, defined by its absence as much as by its presence. Failing infrastructure and an economy of scarcity constantly delineate the limits of the possible, but also generate new social spaces. Where technologies remain silent or break down, these structures of lack and absence give birth to new spheres of social interaction and different coping strategies and regimes of knowledge and power. The city’s topographies of propinquity bring people into physical proximity with each other, generate new (trans)urban public spheres, or enable to maintain and carry forward existing social landscapes, networks and affiliations under changed circumstances.
However, and in spite of its importance, I will argue that in this specific urbanscape the built form is not what matters in the end. Its cultural status is rather modest. It is not the level at which Kinshasa imagines, invents, dreams about and authors itself. Rather, the city carries itself forward, tant bien que mal, through a whole range of much more invisible, immaterial infrastructures, moored in an urban imaginary (collectively shared but no less problematic for that). My paper will explore the various ways through which the city, often with great difficulty, continues to realize heterotopia, places of impossible possibilities, through which it can reinvent, or at least dream of the possibility of reinventing, a social body.
Western Kenyan, and in particular 'Luo', reflections about contemporary social life are marked by nostalgia and a wish to return * be it to a remote 'pre-modern' past or the more recent past modernity (of the 1960s-70s). Such nostalgia might be characteristic for the late capitalist age, but it is amplified, in western Kenya, by specific cultural practices and images, as well as by widespread death, presumably due to AIDS. Nostalgia has triggered
significant creativity in the field between 'the modern' and 'tradition', which this paper explores by looking at one genre: the work of the 'Luo rules', which are produced and circulated through books, the radio and the internet, and call for a restoration of Luo 'laws'. These calls for return are a source of lively public and private debates that link urban radio studios and rural kitchen huts. They often pose as traditionalist and anti-modern, and are certainly understood by their opponents, notably the adherents of some mainstream churches, as conservative or backward. Yet, one could argue that they constitute the specific
form of the modern that characterises much of Eastern Africa at the turn of the century: a constellation in which modern tropes of temporal and spatial separation are reified, but in which values, polarities and directions within these patterns are rearranged. This late modern imaginary, in which doubts proliferate about what is forward and backward, or one and the other, challenges taken-for-granted separations and orientations, and opens up a space to renegotiate the modern consensus.
This paper investigates the recent upsurge in the installation of Westerners as so-called development chiefs and queens in Ghana. It sets out to explore the local appropriation of the development discourse and the conceptual challenges this phenomenon posits to our notions of modernization and modernity.
This paper seeks to chronicle the failures of the promises of development through the story of a drinking water well that never was. It chronicles the vicissitudes of a failed development project and its linkage to competing theories of development and health, and to local politics, in rural Sierra Leone. Contrary to what might be expected, rural folks in the affected communities had rational explanations for the failed project, whereas the educated, urban Sierra Leonean leaders of the projects invoked esoteric rationales to explain this event during a series of development initiatives preceding the civil war of the 1990s. Ultimately, the proliferation of development interventions during the humanitarian regime that characterized the civil war and post-civil war period created a neoliberal market for development initiatives that made many projects dependent on the ability of individual communities to "write the grant proposal," their duration ephemeral, and the expectation of local material and know-how contributions substantial. Additionally, the embeddedness of these projects in longterm maintenance agreements with considerable political and social baggage made the possibility of an eventual success in achieving the much sought-after well quite literally a "poisoned chalice," given the very real possibility that a poorly looked-after well might eventually yield contaminated waters, instead of providing relief from water-borne diseases.
New Figures of Success – unexpected trajectories of the modern
Feymenor Cameroonian swindlers who drive fancy cars, wear expensive clothes or hand out money to the poor in the slums of New Bell and Madagascar in Douala and Yaoundé, are undoubtedly the epitome of “occult economies” or fantastic ways of accruing wealth from nothing, yielding incomes without production and value without effort. Through the practice of feymania which includes deception and different sorts of traffics, these young people who for the most part come from the underprivileged, have succeeded in accumulating unimaginable fortunes in little time, to such an extent that the youths in this country are now viewed them as role models, and the ruling class as a threat to their dominant position or the established order. However, even though feymen have become dominant figures of success, prosperity, better life and power, and that many Cameroonians view their extraordinary promotion as the hope to get out poverty and misery, still the enigmatic and mysterious origins of their wealth arouse alarming rumors that are generally expressed through the metaphor of sorcery and occult-related practices.
In this paper, which is based on ethnographic research in Cameroon, we seek to decode the ambivalent perception of these nouveaux riches. More explicitly, we want to understand why their extraordinary success is generally associated with what is popularly known in this country as moukoagne money (fortune obtained by occult means), and why at the same time these feymen attract more and more urban youngsters. In the first section of this presentation, we will try to gain more insight into witchcraft rumors that are generally leveled at these people. The second section of the paper will examine the feymen’s bid, not only to legitimize their wealth, but also position themselves as leaders of their community.
As in other parts of Africa and the world, many people living in the Chad Basin have recourse to unregulated economic activities and even theft in order to make a living. Commentary and analysis of such activities tends to become trapped in a stark opposition. On the one hand, smugglers and road bandits evade state regulatory authority and thus are said to be a problem for economic development, since they deprive the state of important revenues. Often depicted as part of a residual economic realm, they are also often condemned for their failure to adhere to modern, capitalist logics that necessitate a rational-legal bureaucracy and predictable economic behavior. On the other hand, as part of the so-called informal economy, unregulated economic networks are sometimes presented as nascent capitalism, being manifestations of capitalist behavior freed from the bonds of state interventions and state clientelist networks. This paper offers an in-depth look at the lives and practices of the actors of unregulated commerce in order to dispel both of the above stated views. As the actors themselves explain, their work takes place in an ambivalent space, being both outside the purview of state interventions (eg. Transgressing the law) and yet essential to the very reproduction of the state (eg. as a source of new rents). Likewise, while these actors aspire to what they call 'modern life,' as a form of success, the definition of such a life is not overdetermined; its referents are multiform (eg. both 'the West' and 'Islam').
Since the 1990s alternative perspectives have challenged earlier notions of the informal sector whereby traditional activities, the backbone of this sector were expected to change to modern activities as countries advance in their developments. The formal 'modern' sector was expected to eclipse the informal 'traditional' sector over time. Contrary to this view, there seem to be a peaceful co-existence between the formal and informal sectors at all levels. My paper focuses on female entrepreneurs involved in cross-border trade in the Mamfe area- in the interior of S.W.Cameroon, very close to the Nigerian border. It views women's relations with the government and more specifically the paradox of smuggling being both developmental and non- developmental. The paper also introduces the Formal-Informal Sector Combine (FISC) Approach that offers some insights into present trends of development in the African continent both at the urban and rural setting.
In Ghana’s new public sphere with its many competing versions of modernity, charismatic preachers are the public figures that are most successful in attracting large numbers of people to a powerful image of modernity. This paper unravels the success of this charismatic project of modernity, characterised by the entanglement of modern media technologies and spiritual power. Bringing together religion, national politics, business, entertainment, and miracles, charismatic preachers at the same time create themselves as the embodiment of this version of modernity, carefully managing their public image and charisma and styling their body, voice, and performance. The result is a formation of the modern that defies any classical Western notion, but offers instead a powerful combination of cosmopolitanism and African identity, spiritual power and rational choice, individual self-development and communal identification.
The paper discusses the relation of economic success and group formation processes concerning young gold miners in Northern Benin. I aim at pointing to miner's economic strategies, moralities as well as their social relations and emphasize their conspicuous consumption practices and distinctive cultural codes, proposing to connect their particular livelihoods and male lifestyles as interrelated spheres of exchange. Young gold miners demonstrate a remarkable economic flexibility to ensure success, as well as a particular semantic creativity in appropriating their volatile economic situation and rejecting their negative image.