Cette proposition d’atelier envisage de prendre pour objets d’études le militantisme dans les groupes politiques (associations, partis politiques, groupes de pression) en Afrique subsaharienne. Au lieu d’ aborder ces groupes sous les angles, certes incontournables, de leur « fonction » ou de l’ethnicisation qu’ils véhiculent dans la vie politique, nous entendons nous intéresser à l’apport individuel de ceux qui prennent parti, qui s’engagent, donnent de leur temps et leurs idées à ce type de structures.
This panel proposal considers studying activism as an entry-point to a better understanding of political groups (associations, interest groups or political parties) in Africa. Focusing on individual actors who give their time, their ideas and sometimes their life to a group could help shifting attention from the usual analysis of their functions, their implicit dangerous ethnic nature and their inefficiency.
Cette proposition d’atelier envisage de prendre pour objets d’études le militantisme dans les groupes politiques (associations, partis politiques, groupes de pression) en Afrique subsaharienne. Au lieu d’aborder ces groupes sous les angles, certes incontournables, de leur « fonction » ou de l’ethnicisation qu’ils véhiculent dans la vie politique, nous entendons nous intéresser à l’apport individuel de ceux qui prennent parti, qui s’engagent, donnent de leur temps et de leurs idées à ce type de structures. Nous souhaitons nous inspirer des analyses sociologiques en termes de « courtiers » ou « d’entrepreneurs politiques », qui foisonnement dans la littérature africaniste, tout en élargissant cette perspective afin de prendre en compte, notamment, les analyses en termes de trajectoires et de carrières du activisme. Celles-ci favorisent la connaissance intime des acteurs individuels, de leurs motivations, des rétributions attendues, et permettent d’appréhender les groupes « de l’intérieur ».
Cette perspective nous permettra, sur un plan méthodologique, de fournir des analyses internes et locales des groupes étudiés. Elle permettra également d’aborder des questions pudiquement écartées, comme celle du lien entre « rareté matérielle » et engagement politique ; ou laissées de côté, comme la construction des thèmes de l’engagement, de leur enracinement, de leur manipulation et de leur résonance dans les sociétés étudiées.
This panel proposal considers studying activism as an entry-point to a better understanding of political groups (associations, interest groups or political parties) in Africa. Focusing on individual actors who give their time, their ideas and sometimes their life to a group could help shifting attention from the usual analysis of their functions, their implicit dangerous ethnic nature and their inefficiency. This sociological approach of activism in Africa could be based on concepts such as “political entrepreneurs” or “development brokers”. It would also work with concepts such as trajectories and careers of activism used by the sociology of collective action. These approaches would give an insider’s point of view of a political group.
The papers would contribute to collect local and accurate pieces of knowledge about political groups and their activists. It would help developing biographical data and ethnographic studies of political groups. The papers could raise delicate questions such as the link between poverty and political activism. They could also focus on understudied themes such as the construction of political cause in Africa.
In the Cameroon Grassfields, from the pre-colonial period to now, male and female secret societies take a very important part in politics. Some of them work inside the fon’s palace, others work among people to maintain social order. This second type of secret societies has political power in a broad meaning. This is what 1992’s takumbang phenomenon shows us. Takumbang is the female secret society in Mankon’s fondom, in the Anglophone part of the Cameroonian Grassfields. Traditionally, not only does takumbang work inside the court, but also in general to defend any woman from any offence against women as a whole. Until 1992 takumbang was just a social control strategy used by women to defend themselves from a macho chauvinist society. Of course it could have a political meaning in a broad sense, as I said. But during the Bamenda riot, in October 1992, for the first time takumbang acted using traditional way to obtain results in the official political field. Takumbang defended the opposition party’s candidate at the first presidential multiparty elections, Fru Ndi; he gained 86.3 % of the votes in the North West Province, and 51.6 % in the South West Province, but did not win. Since the SDF foundation, in 1990, takumbang women supported it strongly. Women chose their own political party, the Social Democratic Front (SDF) and its candidate, Fru Ndi: not only did they vote for him, but also organized a picket under his house, facing the military cordon surrounding it, in order to protect their own representative. Through takumbang, Grassfield women can exercise a strong influence on the Cameroonian political life; takumbang became a political strategy to guarantee civil rights for all the population, while advocating women rights.
In recent years, many cities in South Africa has become arenas of confrontation on very important political issues, the main actors in the debate being the local communities, organised in more or less structured movements. Thus, local government in South Africa has slowly become a terrain of contestation where different sectors of society claim their rights or oppose those government policies that they perceive affect negatively their lives. Though the restructuring process can not be in itself considered the cause of social uprising, it has certainly offered a fertile terrain for many organisations and groups rooted in the community. For this reason, it is the starting point of our analysis.
This paper, in particular, looks closely at the Johannesburg’s case and the struggle for electricty started by Soweto residents early in 1999. The restructuring of municipal services envisaged by the iGoli 2002 plan adopted by the city council has been contested, but the criticism has been addressed also against the policies adopted at the national level. The Soweto experience is certainly peculiar, but not isolated, and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) and the APF are certainly among the more interesting experiences of the new South African activism: This work aims, specifically, at a closer analysis of the movement, of its actions, its leaders and its base, though some more general reflections on the emerging social movements, on their contribution in the political debate and, eventually, on their capacity of playing an active role in policy-making processes are expressed.
Based on fieldworks in Kenya and Cameroon, the aim of this paper is to observe the link between local activism and the shaping and re-shaping of a so-called universal cause. Its main assumption is that local conditions of activisms play a great role in transforming and imposing a legitimate discourse of protest. The paper will be divided as follow: after a brief recount of opposition possibilities in postcolonial contexts, I will observe mechanisms of conversion to HR defence at the turn of the nineties by individuals who had already been committed into political action and by newcomers in politics. The next section will stress on the “affinities” of HR activists with the cause they have chosen to advocate for. This proximity, in terms of moral views or personal and professional experiences, may be qualified according to differences of interpretation due to generational gaps or national contexts. The fourth part will be devoted to the complex relationships between “generations of activists”, in order to explain historical and social roots as well as historical changes of HR discourses and actions.
This paper explores the emergence and evolution of two Ijaw Nationalist organisations; the Ijaw National Congress (INC) and the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC), that came to prominence in the 1990s ostensibly to defend the rights of Nigeria's Ijaw population, living predominantly in the oil producing Niger Delta region. It is based on a series of extensive interviews carried out with key protagonists in both organisations which also involved an extensive review of their literature, and prior to that, encounters through the International NGO world with members of these organisations, then as spokespersons for local environmental NGOs. Its purpose is to go beyond the rhetoric of self determination and nationhood with which these organisations are most associated, to relate the actions of their founding fathers to the evolution of Nigeria's political class, it's obsession with securing a greater share of the 'national cake' (federally distributed oil revenues), a political culture of p
ersistent authoritarianism, and ever declining distributive capacity of the Nigerian state. It argues that the creation of the Ijaw National Congress in 1991 represented an attempt by once powerful Ijaw elites to recapture lost glory in the face of their ever declining access to federally distributed revenues. The IYC which emerged a decade later in 1998/9, represented an attempt by a younger batch of educated men and women eager to usurp the position occupied by their now discredited political forebears. Both organisations attempt to capture and contain what was emerging throughout the Delta; a disparate though increasingly widespread series of anti oil company protests by unemployed and impoverished men and women eager to force oil companies to act with greater social responsibility and put something back in to communities which their oil production and exploration activities had often left environmentally and economically devastated. The paper suggests that moments of so- called ethnic resurgence often represent intense competition within the group over the meaning of moral worth between different social classes and generations. Further it argues that so-called ethnic struggles are in effect purely political ones over how power is fought over, shared and denied.