Meddeb Hamza / European University Institute, Florence, Italy

Brokers and Bureaucrats. Second hand car traders and copper traffickers in Tunisia under and After Ben Ali’s Regime

Both second hand car traders and copper traffickers are figures of intermediation and integration of the Tunisian economy into the globalization. Standing at the crossroads of local and global dynamics, they are operating in the margins of the law to supply the local market with second hand cars or to allow access to wealth through illicit exportation of copper. Far from developing their activities against or outside the State, those brokers sought constantly to maintain arrangements with senior officials of the security services, the administration and especially with the “presidential family” of Ben Ali, which used to control the entire sectors of the illicit economy, in order to secure their traffics. The fall of the regime put an end to the arrangements that used to regulate the economy eliminating some of the traffickers and boosting the competition between old and new traders over resources. This contribution aims at exploring the social practices and trajectories of those Tunisian brokers as well as their capacity to adapt and to connect to state authority in a context of political change and uncertainty. Through an ethnography of their everyday actions and interactions with State officials in the port of Tunis, this contribution aims at exploring the participation of this “pariah capitalism” (M. Weber) to the Tunisian extraversion.

Khan Mohammad Guive / University of Lausanne, Switzerland

“Burkina émergent” made in China : Mass consumption and extraversion management

This paper aims to underline the role of mass consumption in the governance of extraversion in Burkina Faso (BF), through ethnographic materials collected in motorcycle sector (2010-13). Importation of motorcycles from China has increased in BF since 2000. They are much cheaper and replaced those previously imported from France and Japan. Initially, Chinese motorcycles were sold by well-established trading companies. The expanding market has then attracted a new generation of African transnational traders who become the major motorbike importers. The motorcycles industry was used to be a rent-seeking sector for Burkinabe elites. The government had taken measures against fraud and smuggling of the sector until 2008, which have however become inactive after 2011. Illustrating with profiles and trading strategies of these traders; the accumulation process of entrepreneurs developing business around motorcycles; and the evolution of management of this sector in relation to the political context, I argue that the BF government has developed some tolerance vis-à-vis these small traders – brokers – because they are crucial to provide access of motorcycles – which makes numerous lucrative activities possible to the popular class. The evolution of the government measures and the possibility of many traders participating in the once-privileged sector reflect not the change of extraversion management but rather the political role of mass consumption – a sign of development for Burkinabe

Richter Line / University of Copenhagen

Brokering in the borderlands: Malian men en route to Europe

Based on ethnographical fieldwork among Malian migrants along the migration route from Mali through Algeria, Morocco and onwards to Europe, this paper investigates the social positions that these migrants move in and through. I will zoom in on the Malian travel brokers in Algeria and Morocco, who acts as gatekeepers or, more fittingly, as gate creators for the young Malian men who try to move into the European Union to which they cannot gain legal entry.
The paper unfolds how young Malian men move in and out of social and political positions, while navigating in unstable terrains (cf. Vigh 2006). The paper’s argument is divided into three parts. Firstly, I will show how the distinction between the “migrant” and “broker” is elusive and shifting, which enables us to understand brokerage more as a strategy than as a position in the clandestine migration endeavors. Secondly I will argue that this type of brokerage is made possible by the specific political configurations of the migrant community that is permeated by an all-encompassing temporariness and “ad-hocness” of migrant-life. Thirdly I will argue that these political configurations are contingent upon the practices of the state authorities which create a certain space for the migrant communities that can be seen as “public secrets” (cf. Taussig 1999).

Haugen Heidi Østbø / University of Oslo

From pioneers to professionals: African brokers in a maturing Chinese market place

Brokers have played a key role in the short history of African trading communities in China. In the late 1990s, the first Africans to settle in the commercial hub of Guangzhou were Nigerians controlling the trade in used vehicles and spare parts with Chinese secondhand depots. At the time, deficient commercial infrastructure in mainland China compelled foreign merchants to source goods via Hong Kong. This changed as more Africans set up as agents. They made the market legible to itinerant traders and customers at home, offering accommodation, food, money transfer and storage, interpretation, logistics services, and contacts to wholesalers and factories. Brokers could initially charge commission both from Chinese producers and African customers. However, they experienced a double squeeze as the market matured: Clients became more familiar with Guangzhou’s trading economy and paid them less or cut them out completely. And the costs of being based in China mounted as immigration control tightened. Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2014, this presentation explores these changes. Some brokers have moved towards trading on their own by investing previous gains into a business. Others seek to control larger parts of the value chain by setting up production, warehouses, and wholesale outlets. Brokering is professionalized. Among those unable to compete, some have chosen to return to their home countries, while others remain in China hoping that their luck will turn.

Oduro-Frimpong Joseph / Ashesi University

Photoshop Politics in Ghana’s Fourth Republic

In contemporary Ghana’s political culture, one witnesses a ‘new’ form of ‘visual politics’ enacted via digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp. Within these spaces, members of the various political parties use photoshopped images to re-present and discuss serious national issues like corruption, cyberfraud and youth unemployment as well as perceptions. This form of political engagement not only visually documents key sociopolitical issues but also mobilize new political publics most of whom are not formally literate but very astute with digital media use. In this presentation, I examine this recent form of ‘digital political engagement’ within the complicated entanglement of popular media genres. One of my key arguments is that to fully grasp Ghanaian youth political engagement one has to move beyond the confines of formal institutional centers such political talk shows on radio and television.

Bouilly Emmanuelle / Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne

Material culture in women’s public performances in Senegal. Political and NGOs’ paraphernalia as a singular repertoire of action.

In 2006, in the surburbs of Dakar, 350 mothers mobilized themselves against the illegal emigration of their sons to Europe. Not only do they voice their grievances about this scourge, but they also publicly express concerns and make claims on broader issues such as women’s conditions of life, the economic crisis, or the failure of the State. They do not mobilize themselves as usually mentioned by social movement studies. Indeed, they organize, or take the opportunity of public rallies organized by politicians or NGOs, to express their dissent notably through material goods.

Based on an extensive ethnographical research collecting (images of) products (clothing, fabrics, leaflets, posters, banners, buses, chairs, kitchen utensils etc.), this paper will bring the analysis of material culture back in the studies of collective action in Africa. It will show how material culture embodies a singular repertoire of action used in both political and development fields, and represents daily forms of resistance and protest.

Chonka Peter / University of Edinburgh

Stonework, sesame seeds and the Suuq: discourses of ‘Somali’ economic nationalism in Harakat Al Shabaab Al Mujahideen’s online propaganda videos

In 2013/2014 media wings of Harakat Al Shabaab Al Mujahideen produced and disseminated online several documentary videos exploring aspects of Somali economic culture in the context of their wider Jihad waged against foreign occupiers and an ‘apostate’ Federal Government. These videos feature quintessentially ‘Somali’ occupations and narratives of economic self-determination as an alternative to aid dependence and the allegedly nefarious interference of external powers in Somalia. HSM’s media strategy has been analysed in relation to international patterns of Jihadist militancy, focusing, for example, on the role of propaganda in recruitment of fighters from the Diaspora, but much less attention has been given to the presentation of explicitly ‘nationalist’ themes towards Somali speaking audiences. This paper analyses the iconography of these videos and examines the relevance of ethno-nationalist discourses in the highly fragmented political reality of modern S!
omalia. I
f one accepts the popular wisdom that HSM has been characterised by a split between factions with a more internationalist Jihadi outlook and those with a more pragmatic ‘nationalist’ worldview, then the discourses of this latter group (as hinted at by the themes of these ‘protest’ videos) require further analysis not only for a clearer understanding of the internal dynamics of the HSM insurgency but also in regards to the wider role of Somali ethno-nationalism in ongoing processes of state rebuilding.

Worden Sarah / National Museum of Scotland

The Chitenje:Dress and Politics in Malawi

Multi-coloured printed cotton fabrics are a conspicuous and popular item of dress in Malawi. Although these textiles may be tailored into more or less structured garments worn by either sex, more typically they are worn by women as simple wrap-around unstructured body coverings known in Chichewa as a chitenje (plural, zitenje). So ubiquitous is the chitenje and blouse combination that it has been referred to as Malawian ‘traditional’ or ‘national dress’ [Henderson & Gilman 2004: 26]. Within the myriad of fashionable patterned cloth available in Malawi today is a category of cloth printed with designs produced with the aim of promotion, education and commemoration. This paper will present examples of cloth commissioned by different interest groups including political parties, religious organisations and NGOs to consider this type of cloth in the expression of identity in daily Malawian life. The power of dress as ‘an incisive political language capable of unifying, differentiating, challenging, contesting and dominating’ (Allman 2004:1) frames this investigation of such cloths. This paper recognises clothing and dress as additional and alternative to the written archive, as a dynamic category of material culture which documents social change through imagery and visual iconography. The paper will draw on recent initiatives to form museum collections of these ‘political cloths’ as part of the construction of an archive of the material culture of political discourse in Malawi.

Mweso Clement / National Archives of Malawi

Legacy of one party dictatorship: collective memory and contestation in Malawi 1994-2004

This paper examines contestations, deployments, uses and role of collective and historical memory in public discourse during and after the political transition in Malawi between 1994 and 2004. It does this by exploring how Malawian civil society and new political rulers invoked the same repertoires of collective memory of post-independence authoritarian dictatorship to very different ends. On the one hand, civil society actors invoked a shared memory of social and political repression during Kamuzu Banda’s thirty year dictatorship to contest democratic era moves by the new governing party to introduce anti-democratic constitutional amendments whilst, on the other hand, the new political rulers deployed the same collective memory to justify and morally legitimize their proposed constitutional changes to extend the terms of office. Drawing from theoretical debates in the field of memory studies mainly in the disciplines of politics and history to frame the argument, the pa!
per argue
s that as much as collective memory is a critical, composite and shifting shared discursive resource from which societies draw to narrate, negotiate and make political claims, it is also mobilized in multiple and contradictory ways, including by ruling classes and institutions that influence the public sphere. These multiple contestations on the meanings of collective memory are, the paper contends, crucial for entrenching a democratic citizenry in public discourse and political practice.

Murray Martin / Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and Department of African and Afroamerican Studies, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)

Safe House: Extended Security Networks in Contemporary Johannesburg

The bundling together of various mechanisms of security constitutes a new kind of logistics infrastructure in contemporary Johannesburg. The idealized “safe house” epitomizes the inevitable expansion logic of security paraphernalia. What was once a haphazard architecture of defense has swiftly given way to elaborate pro-active strategies designed to guard against the so-called “trio crimes”: armed robberies, house break-ins, and carjackings. The intersecting and overlapping relationships between private security and public policing has produced what can be called “extended security networks.” These extended security networks include round-the-clock public space policing where private security companies patrol neighborhoods (stopping and searching “suspicious characters”), armed response teams, and a withering array of mechanical devices designed to manage risk. In contemporary Johannesburg, up-to-date security technologies like CCTV and other electro-mechanical surveillance systems have become a ubiquitous kind of material infrastructure. These extended security networks have blended together and extended across space to become technologically standardized, multi-purpose utilities with close to universal coverage in upscale residential neighborhoods. Tracing the inevitable expansionary logic of security paraphernalia, including CCTV, motion detection systems, enables us to grasp the kind of “panic urbanism” that has gripped contemporary Johannesburg.

Lemanski Charlotte / University of Cambridge

Citizenship and the materiality of public infrastructure in Cape Town, South Africa

This paper unites recent theoretical interest in citizenship and materiality, to critically explore how the changing materiality of state infrastructure (in this case, housing) relates to citizenship identity and practice in South Africa. Contemporary interest in citizenship has brought renewed energy to debates exploring the processes through which citizens engage with and demonstrate their citizenship, ranging from Holston’s “insurgent” to Staeheli’s “ordinary”.  Concurrently, urban scholars increasingly recognise materiality (via public infrastructure) as the primary means through which citizens relate to the state, particularly in the global South context of limited infrastructure and services. However, the relationship between citizenship and materiality lacks critical depth, typically presumed to be inverse (i.e. protestors demanding their citizenship rights are those lacking material goods).  Consequently this paper explores and unpacks the conceptual relationship between citizenship and materiality as a framework for understanding how citizenship practices are embodied in the materiality of public infrastructure.  The empirical focus is on state-subsidised housing in contemporary Cape Town, analysing the long-term materiality of a state-subsidised house as a process of change (rather than a static provision), and exploring the ways in which this intersects with beneficiaries’ changing perceptions and experiences of citizenship (everyday and institutional).

Dubbeld Bernard / Stellenbosch University

An infrastructure for the future? Paradoxes of progressive politics in a South African village

In this paper, I will explore the effects of 20 years of a form of democracy in South Africa that has privileged infrastructure as a means to citizenship. Through an ethnographic account of a village in the KwaZulu-Natal province, I move beyond accounts that regard state practice and bureaucracy as ‘anti-political’ (Ferguson 1985, Scott 1998) and instead attempt to understand how on the one hand, building infrastructure became central to a conception of progressive politics, and on the other, how infrastructure alone was unable to secure the futures it promised. In the last part of the paper, I will move from this micro-scale to a greater one, where I will address imaginations of infrastructure and how these might shed light on some of the difficulties of contemporary ‘left’ governance in places where wage work is precarious.

Marcatelli Michela / Institution : International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Water infrastructure, citizenship and social hierarchy in eThekwini municipality, South Africa

Drawing on theories of materiality, biopolitical perspectives and narrative methods, this paper investigates how water and water infrastructure are co-constitutive of particular notions of citizenship and the (un)just society/state. In order to explore these issues, water narratives have been collected in eThekwini municipality, South Africa; a municipality that has been widely debated regarding water service delivery. It is both viewed as a pioneer — nationally and globally — in sustainable services provision, but has also been the target of severe criticism. Here, technological innovation is a significant feature of water services and the targeting of certain types of populations as appropriate for particular technological solutions is a central governing technique. By paying close attention to water users’ own accounts, the paper examines how these technologies not only shape people’s water use and access, but are also constitutive of their lifestyles and how they see themselves as citizens (or not) in a democratic South Africa. It explores tensions between the aim of South African water policy to transform society to a more just and equal one and how the water users themselves understand water service delivery. As such, the paper presents a methodological approach to how we can study ways in which subjects and citizens come into being through state and infrastructural relationships of power and how we can study and make sense of (new) social hierarchy that is produced.

Pesa Iva / Centre for Frugal Innovations in Africa, African Studies Centre Leiden

Water kiosks, settlement upgrading and (in)formality: Water, energy and housing in Kitwe, Zambia

In Kitwe, on the Zambian Copperbelt, planners of the city council make a distinction between formal and informal settlements. This distinction has a bearing on infrastructure provision (water, energy and housing) and issues of citizenship or belonging to the city. Houses in informal settlements risk demolition and suffer from erratic water supply. Although the council has started to push ‘settlement upgrading’, this is self-aided and only benefits more affluent residents. Informal settlements which are earmarked for upgrading are equipped with water kiosks and planned roads, but residents who do not have the resources to build better houses are forced to sell their plots and relocate to other informal settlements. Water kiosks, even if they are provided, are not much used as people prefer shallow wells or illegal tap connections.
Infrastructure provision on the Zambian Copperbelt challenges common ideas about technological progress, citizenship and state power. Prior to the privatisation of the mines in 1991 the mining companies and the Kitwe City Council used to provide services such as water, electricity and even housing, free of charge or at highly subsidised rates. After privatisation, infrastructure and housing was also privatised and instead of improving, service levels have in many cases deteriorated. How is infrastructure related to citizenship and state power? How does (in)formality influence infrastructure provision?

Damen Jos / African Studies Centre, Leiden

African studies: the role of researchers, editors and publishers in a rapidly changing era

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge was drafted in 2003. The Budapest Open Access Initiative had sprung up two years earlier, as a reaction on one of the new possibilities of the (e)distribution of scientific output. The following decade saw an increasing number of journals, higher subscription rates, a so-called “journal crisis” (for libraries and others) and a growing importance of impact factors. Is this decade different? Valorization seems to be the keyword, and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA 2013) stresses intrinsic quality. At the same time, the system of peer review is being debated. Are there any other options? Four journal models are discussed here: two open access, either funded by organizations or by contributors; two paid access, either by subscriptions or by organizations. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch: in the end someone will have to pay for the organizational-, website- & printing costs. This panel will discuss new ways of valorizing research in African Studies. It will look at the African context, and at new or supporting ways of publishing (repositories, blogs). The papers in the panel reflect the different position that each stakeholder takes. Researchers are interested in the best possibilities to publish their research findings; journal editors need to adapt to a new environment and publishers try to find solutions with changing publishing models.

Hiribarren Vincent / King’s College London

Blogging Academic Research: the case of Africa4

This paper will discuss the importance of blogs to disseminate the outcomes of research in African History. It will be based on the double experience of the author as a lecturer in a British university (King’s College London) and as the co-founder of Africa4, a blog hosted by Liberation, a French newspaper (http://libeafrica4.blogs.liberation.fr/). It will be argued that the different temporalities present in classical research outputs and blogs influence each other. For example, ideas developed in my recent monograph on the history of Borno (Nigeria) need to be summarised for Africa4. As Borno is the region where Boko Haram is based, most of my contributions are heavily influenced by very recent events. Conversely, the epilogue of my book was written with my blog in mind. Finally, this paper will assess how the question of ‘engagement’ with wider audiences remain central for historians of Africa who know that many of their ideas will never be read by Africans themselves. Writing for a blog remains a solution which goes beyond the simple question of research assessment exercise.

Odhiambo Tom / Department of Literature, University of Nairobi

Siundu Godwin / Department of Literature, University of Nairobi

What’s Cultural Studies? Reflections on Why Publishing in East Africa is so Difficult

This paper is a reflection on why publishing in East Africa is so difficult. The paper traces the intellectual and academic journeys we made as the editors of a newly launched journal – Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies. We wish to reflect on the kinds of intellectual questions we asked and were asked in relation to the initiative. What are/were the implications of suggesting a journal title that not only invites but demands intertextual and interdisciplinary engagement? What intellectual value would this new journal add to the existing systems of knowledge production and dissemination in East Africa? What intentions informed the suggested geographical reach of the journal? As we respond/ed to these questions we also engage/d significant debates on the politics of the relevance of research in the Humanities, especially Cultural Studies – in East Africa today; we deal, albeit briefly, with the difficulties of institutional funding for research and publishing; we also confront, again briefly, the much-discussed relationship between the global North and South in the production, dissemination and use of knowledge on Africa. We suggest that apart from challenges traceable to institutional and infrastructural handicaps, there are real attitudinal issues relating to what the idea of an academic ‘journal’ means to many academics in the region, specifically the notion that publications are mainly to meet institutional requirements for promotion, rather than anything else.

Cader Roshan / Wits University Press

African studies publishing in South Africa: a viewpoint from the South

The paper will consider the role of scholarly presses in South Africa in supporting the publication and dissemination of original research by South/African and Africanist scholars. I want to look at this within the context of whether the South African scholarly publishing sector is indeed supporting African studies in meaningful and effective ways; or if there is a continued bias towards the Global North publishing industry enabling the “West” to speak for Africa and if this is still so, what do publishers in South/Africa need to do to address this. As the commissioning editor at Wits University Press, I will focus specifically on my experience at Wits Press, the oldest scholarly publisher in South Africa. The challenge for South African scholarly presses is that the sector is small (collectively the sector publishes 50 book titles per annum) so reaching international audiences and library markets on an individual bases requires clever marketing and effective search optimization of its digital content. However, most publishers in South/Africa are highly constrained financially. Even though the digital age has made publishing more accessible in some ways, the mechanics of publishing to achieve maximum reach and high impact favours the bigger publishers or wealthier university presses and it is these publishers smaller university presses are competing against. Access to research and ensuring its widest possible dissemination is what drives both publisher and author.

Limb Peter / Michigan State University

Valuing Digital African Studies: Narrowing the Gap?

New modes of publishing African Studies accelerate research, creating digital repositories, but valuing outcomes is complex, contested. For tenure, refereed publications remain the Holy Grail. Fears of quality decline accompany a rise in self-publishing & inverse social media brevity. Valuing works requires reliable sources but permanency concerns remain: online news in Africa can disappear as evident with Ebola reporting-if you trust Google, in African languages some news never occurred! But new modes allow wider review, contesting of canon.20 years ago Africanists hoped open access credentialing was around the corner. This hasn’t eventuated but a measure of recognition is conceded as society goes online. Blogs/open access journals will not clinch jobs but let scholars leave an imprint. Graduate digital courses with blogs replacing essays & projects offered to libraries show a trend to capacitise a new generation of teachers, valorizing research. Librarian job descriptions insist on digital skills. Granting bodies privilege the digital. Publishers go online. African studies associations hold digital workshops. If output in core media maintain centrality in ranking/citation there is now a merging of forms. New books appear, some to acclaim, using digital sources, new knowledge discovery techniques emerge. There will remain a need to balance digital and print collected by libraries and refereed writing with more spontaneous communication but their boundary is likely to narrow.

Meagher Kate / London School of Economics (LSE)

Deciphering African Informal Economies: Comparative Perspectives on Inclusive Capitalism and Economic Transformation in Africa

This paper explores the potential of the informal economy to contribute to capitalist development in contemporary Africa. New models of market development variously referred to as inclusive business or inclusive capitalism call for greater inclusion of informal economies in development processes, raising questions about the nature of African informality and its actual transformative potential. This paper takes up the task of deciphering the institutional character and potential contribution of the informal economy to economic development in various parts of Africa. Adopting a comparative perspective that explores the differences among informal economies in different regions of the continent, this paper examines how distinctive pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial histories have shaped distinctive paths of informal economic organization in East, West and Southern Africa. This has laid a foundation for varied responses to economic reform and globalization, triggering differenti al responses in terms of the size, entrepreneurial capacity, and labour composition within African informal economies. The paper will conclude with reflection on the varied potential of African informal economies to contribute to capitalist development and economic transformation, focusing on the institutional resources and political-economic tensions that shape distinctive institutional trajectories of resilience, vulnerability and dysfunction in various parts of the continent.

Pont Cháfer María José / École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris

“It is not the amount of land”: smallholders in capitalism

A prerequisite for capitalism is the dispossession of smallholders and the formation of a landless class. The advance of capitalism in agriculture seemed to mean large farms using wage labor, mechanization and inputs for increasing productivity and extracting a surplus. Most of the attempts to develop plantations during the colonial period and the decades after the Independence failed. Yet, Africa has been able to engage in primary-commodity production with the world for more than a century without land dispossession; even, in most cases, smallholders have worked better than plantations. In the last decades, two processes are at work that seem at least contradictory: on one hand, international and domestic investors are buying large pieces of land for food and biofuel production in what is known as a land grabbing; on the other hand, transnational companies have abandoned plantations and have turned to contract farming – where the farmer owns land and labor and the company supplies inputs. Some scholars regard the latter as a new form of exploitation by capitalism. In my fieldwork on production and marketing of yam in Ghana, I have found that smallholders engage in complex arrangements in order to increase profits, linking urban and rural areas and resorting to hired labor. Is Africa a last frontier for capitalist agriculture and smallholders are resisting it? Or are they part of it and we need to develop theoretical frameworks for capitalism beyond that of the exploitation

Nystrand Malin / School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg

Social and moral rationales for business owners’ informal resource redistribution in Uganda

Redistribution of resources within social networks, in particular within the extended family, is a widespread practice in Uganda (as in many other parts of the world). In the ‘Kenya debate’, i.e. the debate in the 80s on the supposed lack of indigenous capitalists in East Africa, this social practice was primarily seen as an obstacle for business development. The rise in the 90s of the social capital and social network research traditions meant a shift in focus, and social relations, networks and norms that were seen as contributions to and indeed necessary for business development were lifted forward. Although this was a welcome shift in focus it did not necessarily contradict the earlier viewpoint that there are social relations and norms that hinder business development. Furthermore, the motives or rationales for business owners to keep redistributing resources in spite of the supposedly negative effect on the business enterprise have not been sufficiently explored. This paper explores the extent of Ugandan business owners’ redistribution of resources within social networks, the social and moral rationales for them engaging in this social practice and their views on whether this practice is compatible with business development. It is based on extensive empirical data gathering in Uganda, including interviews with business owners and a household survey of patterns of resource redistribution.

Leliveld Andre / African Studies Centre, Leiden

Frugal innovation as a manifestation of African capitalism

To what extent is ‘frugal innovation’, as a new global phenomenon, relevant to our understanding of capitalist development in Africa? Frugal innovation might be defined as the stripping and/or redesign of products, systems or services to make them affordable for low-income customers, without sacrificing user value. Frugal innovation involves polycentric innovation, value sensitive design and new business models, which – different from established forms of top-down technological innovations – might lead to other forms of capitalism and more inclusive development. Focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation, with reference to the work of Joseph Schumpeter, the different steps in the innovation value chain will be explored and the distinctiveness of frugal innovation will be highlighted, building on recent empirical examples from across Africa. By exploring, from a theoretical perspective, the process of innovation, broader conclusions about capitalism in Africa can be drawn and
debates of ‘African exceptionalism’ can be addressed.

Gardini Marco / University of Milano-Bicocca

Political activism of slaves’ descendants in post-colonial Madagascar: The Zoam movement

In the highlands of Madagascar slave trade contributed to the emergence of a social differentiation that classified the population in nobles, free people and slaves. This social categorisation survived the formal abolition of slavery and assumed new political meanings in the post-colonial political struggle. Despite being the most marginalized group of Malagasy society, slave descendants became important actors in the post-colonial political context. In order to avoid discrimination, many of them tried to hide their origins, while others found a way to overcome their conditions through political activism. In 1972 groups of young people of slave descent who lived in the poor peripheries of Antananarivo joined forces with impoverished migrants and with young students, composing a Marxist, anti-imperialist movement that played a crucial role in the defeat of the Tsiranana’s regime. This movement – known as Zoam (Zatovo Orin’Asa Malagasy, Young unemployed people of Madagascar) – denounced and translated in class terms the discriminations that slaves’ descendants (or migrants considered to be of slave descent even when they were not) coped with in their everyday life. Based on interviews to some of the former members of Zoam and on fieldwork carried out in the peripheries of Antananarivo, this paper will trace the history of the movement and will discuss the role it had in the renegotiation of the social and political position of slave descendants in Malagasy society.

Ballarin Marie Pierre / Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)

Héritages de l’esclavage et émergence de mobilisation socio-politique au Kenya

Les héritages de l’esclavage ont un impact profond sur la vie sociale, politique et économique des sociétés contemporaines en Afrique de l’est et le silence a longtemps dominé.
Au Kenya, cette question a perdu beaucoup de son pouvoir émotionnel et des groupes de descendants d’esclaves sont en mesure aujourd’hui d’évoquer l’histoire de leurs ancêtres et leurs propres ressentis interrogeant directement la société kenyane.
En prenant l’exemple de descendants d’esclaves sur la côte kenyane, cette présentation analysera en premier lieu la permanence des effets de ce statut dans le champs socio-économique. En second lieu, cette intervention s’intéressera au cas d’un groupe de descendants d’esclaves affranchis à Frere-Town à Mombasa, qui a créé récemment sa propre association. En se définissant lui-même en temps que “La communauté de Frere-Town”, les membres de cette association dénoncent la discrimination qu’ils estiment subir et réclament publiquement leur reconnaissance comme groupe ethnique spécifique au sein de la nation kenyane .
De fait, les gouvernements successifs post-coloniaux ont eu une attitude ambivalente à l’égard de la question de l’esclavage et de la traite et l’exemple des “Freretowniens” montre le manque de discussion ouverte et de débat public dans la société kenyane. Nous verrons ainsi de quelles façons s’élèvent les voix est-africaines aujourd’hui bien que ces formes de mobilisation soient de bien moindre ampleur qu’en Afrique de l’Ouest.

Becker Cynthia / Boston University

Timidria: Working to Change Symbols of Iklan Identity in Rural Niger

Low status continues to haunt the descendants of the enslaved in Niger, even though they may be several generations removed from slavery. The anti-slavery organization Timidria was founded in 1991 to enact anti-slavery legislation in Niger and to eradicate discrimination. The activities of Timidria, which includes meetings funded with international support, have trickled down and influenced rural communities to create a post-slavery identity for themselves in order to combat local forms of prejudice. This paper, based on interviews with rural iklan, populations formerly enslaved by noble Tuareg, documents the impact of Timidria and considers how Timidria has influenced them to express an identity removed from the history of slavery. It examines visual symbols adopted by rural iklan to consider how they have appropriated styles of dress associated with high-status (noble) Tuareg but made them their own. In northern Niger, Timidria has encouraged iklan to abandon the metal anklets that enslaved women once commonly wore, viewing them as a symbolic link to slavery. At the same time, the adoption of new styles of dress by iklan has opened up a market for Tuareg blacksmiths to create forms of jewelry not linked to an elite clientele. In sum, the activities of Timidira have inspired the disenfranchised to rethink social hierarchies in rural Niger.

Maimone Giuseppe / University of Catania

Identité Haratin et mobilisation populaire : Les nouvelles stratégies de lutte contre l’esclavage d’IRA Mauritanie

A partir du Janvier 2011, des mouvements sociaux mauritaniens se sont inspirés du monde arabe pour promouvoir de grandes manifestations et demander réformes démocratiques, sociales et économiques. En même temps, la lutte contre l’esclavage a trouvé un nouvel espace dans le pays. Le mouvement anti-esclavagiste IRA Mauritanie est descendu dans les rues contre l’esclavage en adoptant de nouvelles stratégies de combat. Les Haratins de Mauritanie, une communauté d’anciens esclaves et leurs descendants d’origine noire et arabisés entre temps, sont encore marginalisés et souffrent l’exclusion du pouvoir politique, de l’éducation et de la mobilité sociale. Selon IRA, les inégalités ont leur origine dans les jugements juridiques islamiques qui justifient l’esclavage pratiqué par les Arabes, donc l’obstacle à l’égalité est le « false islam » de l’école Maliqite qui s’oppose aux préceptes d’égalité de tous les Musulmans, présents dans le Coran. Des initiatives du leader d’IRA – comme l’incinération publique de six livres juridiques Maliqites et des manifestations très populaires – ont emphatisé la lutte contre l’esclavage d’IRA Mauritanie tant dans le monde Occidental qu’à l’intérieur du pays, en donnant au président d’IRA Biram Dah Abeid une grande popularité. Cette présentation analyse les nouvelles stratégies de lutte contre l’esclavage et la représentation de l’identité Haratine promues par IRA, grâce à des sources primaires, des articles de presse et des entretiens.

N’Diaye Sidi / Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique (ISSP), Paris

La cause des esclaves en Mauritanie : l’Initiative pour la Résurgence du mouvement Abolitionniste et la réaffirmation radicale d’une présence sociale et politique.

Les débats autour de l´esclavage en milieu maure se sont largement exacerbés ces dernières années, clivant de manière plus ou moins radicale une société qui, au-delà des dispositifs légaux jamais mis en œuvre, n’a jamais véritablement su affronter ses rigidités. La domination, relégation et marginalisation sociale dont la catégorie haratine (ancienne main d’œuvre servile des Maures) est toujours victime sont aujourd’hui dénoncées et combattues avec véhémence par une élite instruite et politisée, engagée dans une structure politico-associative, l’Initiative pour la Résurgence du mouvement Abolitionniste (IRA). Affirmant lutter contre l’esclavage des Haratins, pour leur autonomie économique et leur visibilité politique, IRA a su renouveler de manière radicale les modes de mobilisation et d’expression des doléances de la catégorie haratine. Cette communication se propose donc de rendre compte des manières nouvelles, pour la Mauritanie, par lesquelles IRA et son leader, Biram Dah, travaillent depuis quelques années à mobiliser de nombreuses franges de la population mauritanienne, organisations de droits humains et ONG internationales, autour de la cause des haratins.

Yengo Patrice / IMAF-EHESS, Université de Brazzaville

De la « fratrie » congolaise comme lieu du politique

La « fratrie » des écrivains congolais reconnue pour le rayonnement de ses membres, parmi les plus éminents des lettres francophones d’Afrique, n’a pas encore livré les secrets de son histoire dont l’origine remonte au groupe des « évolués » du journal Liaison, ni la spécificité de ses rapports avec le pouvoir politique qui l’a toujours ménagé, tous régimes confondus. Ces égards ne relèvent pas d’une quelconque bienveillance mais de la fascination qu’exerce l’écrit dans ce pays et de la “fratrie” comme opérateur du politique.
En effet, en faisant l’hypothèse de la « fratrie » comme lieu du politique, c’est-à-dire comme espace d’engagement avec ses convergences et ses dissensus, l’on parvient à éclairer les enjeux du pouvoir qui à la fois la nimbent et la structurent mais l’enserrent aussi dans des contradictions que signalent les positionnements individuels de chaque membre vis-à-vis du pouvoir. Face à la délégitimation postcoloniale de la politique, la « fratrie » apparaît comme un espace infra-étatique porteur des enjeux sociaux de délibération politique.

Peghini Julie / CEMTI, Université Paris 8

Thérésine Amélie / IRET, Université Paris 3

Du Rocado Zulu Théâtre de Sony Labou Tansi au Mantsina-sur-scène de Dieudonné Niangouna : de la pensée du théâtre comme arme de riposte à la résistance faite œuvre collective par l’acte théâtral

Retraçant le parcours singulier de l’homme de théâtre total qu’est Sony Labou Tansi, nous montrerons comment il pense l’art dramatique comme une arme de riposte. Sony ne cessera de déconstruire et de reconfigurer tous les héritages, soucieux d’un « cosmocide » à venir et toujours conscient que « notre combat n’est pas fini. ». Ainsi va le théâtre de Sony, chaos d’où émerge tous azimuts une immense « rage » poétique et un grand « rigolement » qui saute d’un fleuve ou d’une rencontre à l’autre : « Mais je reste fou de l’idée de défendre des compagnonnages et des choix d’aventures ».
Parce qu’il poursuit l’œuvre sonyenne ‒ « le théâtre doit boxer la situation » ‒, Dieudonné Niangouna revendique et accueille ce legs avec le souci de ne pas refaire les mêmes erreurs : celles qui ont conduit Sony dans les dernières années de sa vie à l’isolement politique, et après sa mort, à la dissolution de sa troupe sans que l’esprit de ce collectif ne trouve une relève. Avec sa bande de « mantsinistes », l’auteur, dramaturge, comédien et metteur en scène Dieudonné Niangouna crée à Brazzaville, implanté au sein du Cercle Sony Labou Tansi, un lieu de résistance active, qui, dans ses enjeux comme dans son format se réinvente constamment. Un festival où se raconte une relation autre aux arts vivants, orchestrée dans des écritures du combat et une polyphonie de propositions artistiques. Un espace de transmission qui crée ses propres modes de circulation et façonne une pensée critique.

Gahungu Céline / ITEM, Université Paris-Sorbonne

Sony Labou Tansi et Sylvain Bemba : 1974-1976

Lorsque Sony Labou Tansi rencontre Sylvain Bemba pour la première fois au cours de l’été 1974, le jeune écrivain est encore inconnu dans l’univers littéraire congolais. Certes, en 1973, des poèmes sélectionnés par Édouard Maunick sont publiés dans Le Panorama de la poésie française depuis 1945, et la pièce Conscience de tracteur reçoit le quatrième prix du Concours théâtral interafricain, mais l’auteur n’est guère satisfait. Il a beau multiplier les écrits, pratiquer tous les genres littéraires, les portes de l’édition tardent à s’ouvrir.
Au cours de ces années fondatrices où Sony Labou Tansi fabrique un univers et apprend le « boulot d’écrivain », les relations nouées avec Sylvain Bemba sont cruciales. Soucieux d’affûter sa plume, l’auteur en devenir sollicite les conseils de lecteurs avisés. Á José Pivin et Françoise Ligier s’adjoint Sylvain Bemba. Un détail, cependant, ne peut manquer de retenir l’attention de la critique. Alors que les deux hommes se rencontrent en 1974, les premières traces des corrections auxquelles Sylvain Bemba se livre sur les manuscrits de son ami n’apparaissent qu’en 1976 dans les marges de La Natte. L’admiration de Sony Labou Tansi à l’égard de son aîné, récemment libéré des geôles du pouvoir, se double d’une grande prudence politique. Entre 1974 et 1976 se tissent ainsi des rapports complexes qui, à la lumière des troubles ensanglantant alors la République populaire du Congo, permettent d’appréhender les enjeux d’un univers littéraire en gésine.

Leroux Pierre / doctorant à l’Université Paris III, Sorbonne-Nouvelle

Habiter le Congo. Textes fondateurs et fiction critique dans les œuvres de Tchicaya U Tam’si

« Je dirais que Sony habite le Congo, moi le Congo m’habite. »
Au sein de la “phratrie” des écrivains congolais, Tchicaya U Tam’si fait figure à la fois de père fondateur et de satellite. Il est un des premiers à atteindre une certaine notoriété par ses textes poétiques mais il a vécu la plus grande partie de sa vie à Paris, loin des remous de la politique congolaise des deux bords du fleuve. Dans ce contexte, la phrase placée ici en épigraphe a plus d’un sens. L’auteur questionne en effet son rapport au pays natal et il met en tension sa volonté d’identification et la distance critique facilitée par la distance géographique.
Cette double manière d’habiter le Congo se retrouve dans l’œuvre de Tchicaya et il semble hésiter entre une exploration d’un passé mythique, d’une unité rêvée, et l’analyse des failles et des perversions du Congo postcolonial. Entre le désir de trouver la source pure de l’inspiration dans la préface des Légendes africaines et l’injonction « chiez sur la terre qui vous a vu naître » une vingtaine d’années plus tard, c’est toute une réflexion sur le rapport au lieu qui se déploie.
En nous appuyant sur un corpus varié, nous essaierons de comprendre comment le Congo habite l’œuvre de Tchicaya et comment, en retour, le poète, romancier et dramaturge fait cohabiter son espoir et ses déceptions derrière le signifiant Congo.

Gerber Jean-David / Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland

An institutional analysis of the disruptive impact of large-scale land acquisitions on the governance of the local food system

Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLA) lead to the expansion of private forms of land tenure in countries where access to land was often governed by non-exclusive forms of land rights such as common or public property. In this paper, we argue that LSLA are more than a form of land privatization: LSLA are a (partial) appropriation of the food system. This change of perspective leads to a better understanding of the real impact of LSLA on the governance of the food system and consequently on food sovereignty and on women who are often most directly involved in the procuration and preparation of food. We argue that food systems share many attributes of common pool resources (CPR).
We analyze the changing governance structure of the local food system resulting from the development of LSLA through an institutional analysis of its core constitutive elements: production, processing, distribution and consumption. This raises interesting questions about the impacts of LSLA not only on individuals who produce, distribute and consume food, but also on local/regional decision-making processes concerning important public activities such as spatial development, infrastructure supply, land consolidation, etc. We claim that LSLA deeply modifies the balance of power among actors involved in the governance of the food system.
Relying on two case studies from Ghana and Peru, we discuss the hypothesis that the impact of LSLA on food sovereignty is twofold: first through the direct privatization of land and second through a reorganization of the governance of the food system.

Lanz Kristina / Institute of Social Anthropology, and Centre for Gender Studies, University of Bern, Switzerland

Inside a large-scale land acquisition: How gendered power asymmetries and resistance shape the implementation of a LSLA in Ghana’s Volta Region

Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLA’s) are not a new phenomenon in Ghana, since colonialism and before the country has been subject to several waves of large-scale land acquisitions, be it for cocoa, gold mining or more recently biofuels and agricultural export crops. These acquisitions take place in complex institutional settings marked by overlapping and often contradictory customary and state regulations.
Using data from a case study of a recent LSLA in Ghana’s Volta region, this paper will highlight how the entrance of an international agri-business (itself bound by various regulations from international funders) leads to power struggles between different “regulating authorities” (customary and state), as they try to (re)interpret the institutional setting in order to derive benefits from the investment. While these often non-place based traditional and state authorities have access to various sources of power (political, discursive, economic, violence and knowledge) and are thus able to strongly influence the implementation of LSLA, the various local land users are not passive and use a variety of gendered strategies to resist negative impacts and derive benefits from the investment.
I will thus argue that the actual implementation and impact of the investment on the ground, not only depends on the national, international and local rules and regulations and the way these are interpreted by investors, customary authorities and state authorities, but also on the various repertoires of resistance used by local land users, especially women to defend their own livelihoods and derive benefits from the investment.

Käser Fabian / Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern

Marfurt Franziska / Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern

Ethnography of a Land Grab and Gendered Coping Strategies in Northern Sierra Leone

Our ethnographic in-depth research on a Swiss-based bioenergy project in Sierra Leone generates well-documented data and provides insights into gendered access to land and wage employment.
In the area where the project is located, customary land tenure applies. Thereby, women are structurally discriminated since they are not entitled to own land. However, user rights grant women and non-landowning men access to land and associated resources. Following the investing development banks’ guidelines, the company considered the local customary law when implementing its project. Nevertheless, the company only consulted and compensated landowners although women and non-landowning men could previously benefit from acquired land as well. Moreover, the company’s policy to enhance employment possibilities for women is barely implemented, and only few local women are hired.
In order to cope with the transformed situation some women and non-landowning men continue to engage in subsistence farming on a reduced area of land. Others are involved in informal petty-trade or cooking food for the labourers whereby they subsidize the capitalist production of the company. In one village, women resisted additional land takes of the company. Acting within the framework of a specific power constellation on community level and simultaneously accommodating their claims within policy paradigms on transnational level, they were able to force a landowner to refuse leasing land to the company.

Schubiger Elisabeth / Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern

von Sury Anna / Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern

Growing Rice or Grabbing Swampy Lands? Gender Perspectives on the Dominion Farm Investment in West Kenya

In Kenya land is one of the most discussed subjects as agriculture builds the livelihood of 85% of the population. Large scale investments into land is a new phenomena in the Nyanza region in West Kenya as the arid climate and the low infrastructure did not seem attractive for investments for a long time. In 2003 an American investor leased an area covering 6’900 hectares of a swamp in order to grow rice based on the discourse to ensure the food security in the region.
The aim of the fieldwork was to understand the perception of the people affected by the project. The focus was on the various local interests and strategies (the horizontal level) and the identification of different actors and decision makers who implemented the project (the vertical level).
The analysis of the vertical level reveals that the implementation of the project was motivated by cultural and religious views of the investor and by political arguments. The implementation process is characterized by cultural insensitivity, which leads to various conflicts between the two different levels. On the horizontal level the project causes new conflicts over land, loss of resources such as grazing land and land for cultivation, which necessarily have changed the local livelihoods. This paper illustrates how gender relations are altered through the investment and how the company used narratives about gender relations to legitimise their project. However, the altered situation also generates opportunities to cope with the new environmental situation.

Bigler Christina / Centre for Gender Studies, University of Bern

Rwanda’s break-up to market oriented agriculture and its implication on gender

Good climate and topographical conditions make Rwanda’s agriculture sector a major player in the economic expansion and a key to sustainable development and improvement of small-scale farmers’ livelihoods. In recent years, non-traditional agricultural products, like fruit and vegetable have been introduced to the export market. The Rwandan government gives great attention to international and regional investors in commercial agricultural businesses, whilst establishing entrepreneur friendly conditions such as infrastructure, appropriate legislations and social policies. This transformation from subsistence oriented to market oriented agriculture production brings changes for women and men in small-scale framers household in rural Rwanda.
The main objective of this study is to examine if and under what conditions the market oriented agricultural industry leads to both increased asset building and individual well-being of women and men in rural households. An explanatory sequential-mixed-methods design will be used, and it will involve collection of quantitative results with in-depth qualitative data.
The first results indicate that constrains and opportunities from a market oriented agriculture production are not equal for women and men. The agriculture sector is highly gendered with women being overrepresented in low paid casual labour jobs and in primary production on farm level.

Baller Susann / University of Michigan (USA) / University of Basel (Switzerland)

Political Travels and the Representation of Future in West Africa around 1960

This paper focuses on official travels of African political leaders from former French West Africa during the late decolonisation period and early independence. This was a period of rapid change during which African future was envisioned, represented and negotiated in many ways. Official travels served political leaders as one stage on which different political projects and visions were represented, but also contested. This paper analyses the mobilising power of state visits for both consolidating visions for the future and contesting them. French Overseas Ministers and Presidents were eager to visit Africa and to invite African leaders to France in order to consolidate their power. But they were not always welcome. Moreover, African political leaders increasingly used the stage of travelling for their own goals, sometimes without the consent of French officials. The number of travels of African politicians in the late 1950s increased significantly. Travelling became an important tool in order to present one’s own country, to create and strengthen new diplomatic relations and to make political claims for the future. At the same time, plans for the future were still quite open. African federations, national autonomy and independence, but also Pan-Africanism were strongly debated. Based on archival documents and newspaper cuttings, this paper examines the ways in which visions of the future were expressed and represented and how they served as a mobilizing force.

Duff Sarah Emily / WISER, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

“Progress should ever be our watchword”: Mobilising for the Future in South African Sex Education Manuals

While scholars of gender and sexuality have paid attention to sex education manuals as a source for tracing shifting ideas about sex, desire, and marriage, these manuals also open up new ways of understanding the mobilisation of youth in the interests of the future and of modernity. During the 1920s and 1930s, public health departments, social hygiene organisations, and child welfare societies lobbied for the greater provision of sex education to South African children. Linked to an international movement—strongly influenced by eugenics—which connected sex education to the future physical and moral health of nations, South African educators were particularly interested in the preservation of the segregationist state through manuals which taught both that the only legitimate forms of sexual expression were in monogamous, heterosexual marriage, and also that interracial relationships were at the root of social collapse. South African manuals for white children described to readers a future of modern, white rule in South Africa on the same footing as the United States and Western Europe, and suggested that white youth were crucial to the success of the vision. As the author of Facts about Ourselves for Growing Boys and Girls (1934), published by the Red Cross and Johannesburg Public Health Department for white children, argued, ‘Progress should ever be our watchword.’ By following the life course described in the manuals, white youth were mobilised into becoming future citizens.

Hadera Hailu Aychegrew / BIGSAS, University of Bayreuth (Germany)

NGO Visions of Development in the Changing Contexts of Ethiopia: 1960s-2015

Since the early 1960s, many NGOs in Ethiopia, as in other parts of the Third World, have aspired for the alleviation of poverty. Others have envisaged a situation where communities are guaranteed the basic necessities and enjoy the full spectrum of human rights. These visions of development are not too distant from those of various forms of government in Ethiopa during this period, although official discourses on human rights are only a recent phenomenon. However, there have always been clear differences between governmental actors and NGOs on the one hand, and between different NGOs among themselves, on the other, with regard to their strategic preferences on how to achieve “development”. The paper traces visions as well as strategies of NGOs in their changing historical contexts, shaped by dominant actors such as the state. It investigates the divergence and convergence of visions between various actors over time as well as the strategic shifts resulting from changes in the context. In this regard clear differences were manifest between what is referred to as national and international NGOs. The study uses data generated from various oral and written primary and secondary sources collected by the contributor during two rounds of fieldwork in Ethiopia.

Lambertz Peter / CAS, University of Leipzig (Germany)

Cleanse the city ‘cos the future is now: Japanese style millennial movements in Kinshasa

On the basis of my PhD thesis, the paper presents the this-worldly millennialism of a number of Japanese and Christian new religious movements in contemporary Kinshasa. By encouraging organic farming and the collective cleaning of urban public space so as to make the future happen now, followers are encouraged to abandon and overcome the persistent Congo-pessimism that continues to be popular among Kinois today. To the difference of NGO based cleaning and sanitization efforts in the city, the spiritualization of labour has aesthetic consequences in that the bodies and the senses of practitioners are seen as architectures of change.
The history of African millennialisms is as diverse as it is transnationally inspired. While the perspective of a recent proliferation of transnational new religious movements in urban Africa is tempting, I argue that important continuities exist between seemingly exotic new religious movements and the longstanding messianic tradition of renewal as it is known from the Lower Congo and beyond.

Marcus Cressida / University of Oxford (UK)

Future tense, Present tensions: Imperial Nostalgia reconfigured for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church

The population explosion and rapid urbanisation in Ethiopia today are the drivers for the reconstruction of churches in an historic town. Gondar, northern Ethiopia, once the capital of the empire, is currently experiencing unprecedented growth. The expansion of the perimeters of the city, defined by the projection of urban growth by the municipality; means that there is an empty radius around the city by some thirty kilometers.
This expansion, though, was preempted, at the time of the end of communism, by the concerted populist movement, that funded and aided the reconstruction of the churches of the city. Gondar is famed for its number of churches. Now some defunct parishes are being reinstated, rebuilt, as the church moves outwards to establish parishes in peri-urban settings that are still low density in population. This forward looking approach, by a deeply conservative institution that marries innovation of denominationalism and urban forms of piety, with the reclamation of former royal churches. Coincidentally, the municipality began renaming neighborhoods, according to parish church patron saints. In a sense, the church is getting in there first, by planting churches before the population arrives, and electricity, houses and roads are built. Thus, co-optation by the means of nostalgia allows for a project of social and urban architecture, which though being in the hands of urban planning, is ushered in by a possessive blessing commanded by churchmen.

Becker Heike / University of the Western Cape

Public Art Intervention and the Right to the City in Cape Town

Recent studies of South African urban movements such as the shack dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo argue that they are mobilising for the ‘right to the city’, and that they are going beyond claims to ‘service delivery’ in advocating transformation of the city towards a new urban humanism. This point has been made particularly in Nigel Gibson’s (2011) work on the ‘Fanonian practices’ of movements of the urban poor for social transformation in contemporary South Africa. Gibson reads them through the connection of Fanon’s dialectic of liberation with the activists’ assumption of a Lefebvrian understanding of the right to the city as ‘a cry and a demand’. My paper argues that it is crucial to understand the role played by cultural initiatives in these struggles, and particularly the emergence of public art as a site of assertion of the right to the city. I explore how cultural initiatives in Cape Town interpret and engage an understanding of social justice and the right to the city, including both NGOs in the culture and development field, and subversive collective interventions, which engage with the right to the city in critical, often provocative forms of visual and performance art. Critical questions include, how the practices of these cultural initiatives articulate claims to the city, how they engage with both the city and the nation-state, and how their practices contest urban citizenship on grounds of class and residence regardless of nationality.

Martin Denis-Constant / Les Afriques dans le monde, Sciences po Bordeaux

Celebrating the Right to Urban Space in Cape Town

For more than a century and a half, the New Year has been celebrated in Cape Town (South Africa) with street parades and competitions of choirs and carnival troupes. Thousands of formerly classified coloureds revellers participate in these festivals born out of a street culture nurtured by material conditions prevailing in the neighbourhoods they used to inhabit before the 1970s. The streets were not only a meeting place but a space of creativity, the place of a vibrant denial of negative stereotypes imposed upon coloureds. The classification of these neighbourhoods as “white areas”, the ban on street processions implemented after 1976 undermined the social functions of the streets. They were met with symbolic struggles for the right to urban space that expressed, in addition to an implicit opposition to apartheid, the notion, widely spread among “coloureds”, that Cape Town, the “mother City” of South Africa, was “their” town and, consequently, that they were entitled to be full-fledged citizens.

Møldrup Wolff Stina / Aarhus University

Making Cities, Making Citizens

Within recent years, a new city-building business has made a storming entry on the African continent; the Satellite City. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s metropolis, several satellite city projects are currently on the drawing board. The Kigamboni New City project demands particular attention due to the sheer scale in terms of areal size and capital investment, as well as the fact that construction is to take place within an already densely inhabited urban area. Current residents of Kigamboni are therefore faced with eviction and resettlement if and when construction plans proceed. Through ethnographic research, I explore how residents in Kigamboni are articulating their rights and access to the city in light of uncertainty, as well as how claims to urban land are made through negotiations of indigeneity, various forms of land ownership and strategic engagement with local and central state actors. I argue that the imminent threat of resettlement has prompted the proliferation of contesting discourses of what constitutes ‘the good life’ for urban dwellers in Tanzania. While oppositional, these discourses draw lines to historic political and urban developments in Tanzania, as well as offer new perspectives on the state’s recent desire to make Dar es Salaam a ‘world city’ and the room for citizens’ participation in this transformation.

Prais Jinny / Columbia University

Defining and Performing Urban Citizenship in Colonial Accra, 1930-1940

This paper examines how African journalists living in Accra, Ghana during the interwar years sought to define and promote “urban citizenship” among the city’s newly educated men and women using the space of the local press. To do this, they launched popular-styled newspapers that idealized their own class aspirations as they defined and performed a type of urban citizenship that was a bricolage of global influences. Often articulated as the “New African,” the urban citizen embodied hope for the future of a self-governing West Africa within the British Empire. To be sure, discussions regarding African involvement in municipal politics played an important role in their newspapers, however, this paper focuses on the articulation and structure of the urban citizen (as endowed with both class and gendered dimensions) within newspaper accounts of leisure, in particular activities associated with Accra’s dance halls and nightclubs. It considers the possibilities for urban citizenship and its social, cultural, and political limitations during the late colonial period. It asks how the urban citizen, imagined by African journalists, challenged the colonial image of a tribal and rural African subject to present alternative subjectivities for West Africans to identify with and inhabit in their quests for a “New Africa.”

Justin Peter / African Studies Centre – Leiden

Decentralization, internal borders and conflict in South Sudan: evidences from Central Equatoria State

This article draws on extensive socio-anthropological fieldwork in Central Equatoria State, analysis of policy and historical documents, and the literature to understand relations between decentralization and conflicts in South Sudan. It does so by establishing the relations between decentralization and conflicts, and the roles of internal borders created as a result of implementation of decentralization policies on causing conflicts. Crucially, it links these relations to ethnicity, which is very relevant in the South Sudanese context; and shows how this can explain the rapid emergence of violent conflicts along ethnic lines in South Sudan during the interim period following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, and the period that followed. It further shows how the current structure of governance in South Sudan is reflective of governance strategies of the past; and how those conflicts are better understood as legacies of those interventions. We argue success or failure of decentralization projects will largely depend on the extent to which states are successfully or unsuccessfully divided to smaller geopolitical jurisdictions; and internal borders play crucial roles on this. We further argue that dependency on ethnicity as a criterion for decentralization risks failure of decentralization project in achieving its objectives. This article contributes to more informed theoretical discussions on the reasons for the failure of decentralisation.

Castryck Geert / University of Leipzig

Bordering the lake: Kigoma-Ujiji as a place of transition and transformation between spatial orders

Towards the end of the 19th century different spatial orders came together in the Lake Tanganyika region. The frontier character of the lake at the crossroads where resources, produce and skills met, got overshadowed by the westward moving frontier of an expanding global market under the guise of an Arab-led trade network, which was in turn overrun by European colonization and the drawing of territorial borders. Kigoma-Ujiji was both marginal and central to all of these spatial orders, combining the lakist fixed frontier, the moving Arab frontier as well as the fall-out of its demise, the colonial territorial borders, and the distinction between the urban area and its surroundings.

In this paper I present 20th-century Kigoma-Ujiji as a borderland grafted upon a quadruple spatial order. Out of possible empirical focuses on war and refugees, religion and spirituality, fishery and agriculture, town politics and factionalism, or music and sports, I here illustrate my point through family histories of migration and social mobility. In so doing I make sense of this urban area as a place of transition and transformation across spatial orders. Kigoma-Ujiji can hence be understood as a liminal town which is at the same time marginal and central to processes of global integration.

Browne Adrian / Durham University

Riverine rebels: the pre-colonial dynamics of northern Bunyoro’s borderlands

The ‘spatial turn’, and with it the well-established field of borderland studies, have arguably yet to take hold in the historiography of Uganda. In particular, historians have been slow to examine the diversity of Uganda’s pre-colonial borderland dynamics. My paper explores the history of the northern margins of Bunyoro, around Lake Albert and the ‘Somerset Nile’, before the demarcation of colonial administrative boundaries between this conquered kingdom and the districts of both northern Uganda and the Congo Free State’s Lado Enclave. I argue that these internal/external colonial boundaries, though not without precolonial precedent, belied the complex dynamics of this culturally and politically interstitial space; of a boundary that could at any one time have been defined in a variety of ways. Significantly, the new boundaries concealed the pre-colonial tendency of the Gungu and Palwo communities to evade, contest and collectively mobilise in opposition to the Nyoro state’s exactions by exploiting cross-border political, social and economic ties. The nineteenth-century Nyoro state, particularly under its final independent potentate, Kabalega, was in many ways shaped by this remote periphery. My paper examines the deep roots of what is today termed ‘cultural secessionism’ among the communities living atop Uganda’s largest oil fields.

Glovsky David / Michigan State University

Imagining the Frontiers: Migration and Empowerment in Early 20th Century Senegambia

When the 20th century began, borders existed (on maps) separating the French colony of Senegal, the British colony of Gambia and the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau, but these borders were essentially unenforceable. Because of the weak colonial presence on the periphery of these colonies, the border was a place where people could use their alternative conception of the borderlands to resist the growing encroachments of colonial states, and use their position as borderland residents to their advantage. They continued to maintain their pre-colonial grazing lands, farmed seasonally wherever it was most lucrative, and used their shared culture and language to create a space that was simultaneously unified but multinational. However, the colonial border still marked the limit of colonial jurisdiction, and by crossing it, borderland residents could take refuge from policies they saw as unfair.
Through migration, the people of southern Senegambia showed that despite colonial claims to sovereignty, power was still held locally, and that their conception of regional unity held primacy over new colonial borders. Colonial government could not control the migration of people living within their borders, and while colonial regimes enacted migratory policies in order to control local populations, their inability to enforce those policies meant that local people used the border as a conduit to increase opportunities and push back against the imposition of colonial states.

De Roo Bas / Ghent University

The blurred lines of legality. Customs and contraband in the Congolese M’Bomu region (1889-1908)

By focusing on customs and contraband in the M’Bomu basin, this paper aims to fill in the gaps in current research on smuggling and border control in the Congo Free State, which tends to oversimplify the role of the state: illicit trade is usually presented as an issue that the Free State attempted, but failed, to curb. Firstly, I examine to what extent the colonial state and its European agents, its African soldiers and its local African rulers were involved in trafficking. Secondly, the paper investigates whether Leopold’s administration was aware of smuggling and to what extent illicit commerce was tolerated. Finally, I try to explain why the Free State dealt with contraband as it did. I explore to what extent customs practices in the M’bomu borderland were based on a cost-benefit analysis (smuggling is often tolerated because states often think that the monitoring and taxing of cross-border trade is not cost-effective or even impossible) and to which degree the attitude towards contraband might be explained by the negotiation of colonial rule with local elites in borderlands who have important stakes in transborder trade.

Weeks John / SOAS

Copper, Capital Flight and Fraud in Zambia, 1970-2014

Clandestine and illegal capital drains sub-Saharan countries of resources, and in no country more so than Zambia. Through a variety of mechanisms that are detailed in this paper, the privatized coppery corporations extract billions from the country annually. The resource drain from Zambia is estimated over four decades using the Ndikumana and Boyce database. I compare the outflow from Zambia to thirty other sub-Saharan countries. The comparison reveals that countries with natural resource based exports tend to have relatively high levels of fraudulent capital flight, even compared to conflict affected countries. The paper estimates the macroeconomic impact of capital flight, then proposes measures to control it.

Klantschnig Gernot / University of York

The politics of fake medicines in West Africa: reconciling wealth and health?

This paper addresses the burgeoning interest in ‘fake medicines’ – fraudulent or sub-standard pharmaceutical drugs – in West Africa. International and local control agencies and experts have warned of a growing role for the region as a transit point, while also lamenting the prevalence of use of these potentially lethal substances, especially among the poor. Based on archival, government and media sources, as well as interviews with key officials and industry representatives, the paper reconstructs the political dynamics underlying recent claims about the threat of ‘fake medicines’ in Nigeria. The paper asks why these commodities have become a social, health and political problem in the last 20 years and why Nigeria has been singled out as a key focus for international policy responses. It focuses particularly on the work of the regulatory body NAFDAC, which has been hailed as a great success in Nigeria and beyond. By reconstructing the history of the trade and related claims about its dangers, the paper shows how the history of these substances can be traced back to the earliest trade in Western medicines in the region and that concerns about fraudulent drugs have been directly linked to broader crises of the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare in Nigeria, particularly since the onset of structural adjustment and trade liberalisation.

Mouan Liliane / Coventry University

The political economy of oil revenue transparency reforms in postwar Angola

Oil-rich sub-Saharan Africa has been the site of international experiments aimed at rooting corruption out of the region’s extractive sector. Attempts to make sense of governments’ responses to these institutional arrangements have emphasised their compliance or resistance to global standards such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Angola is somewhat unique, in that it has undertaken a series of ‘homegrown’ reforms independently. The aim of this paper is to critically reflect on the key features, drivers and main consequences of this reform agenda. Critics have claimed that these regulatory efforts have had anti-developmental effects, and regularly speak of a trend towards the legitimation of corruption in the Angolan oil industry. While there is indeed enough evidence to prove that these reforms have produced other types of opacity in the oil industry, the paper stresses, however, that one needs to go beyond both the operationalisation of revenue transparency and corruption scandals, to understand the reform process in this petro-state. Specifically, it shows how external actors’ interests and legitimacy shortfalls, domestic structural and political constraints, and even oil’s materiality, combined to shape not only the design, but also the implementation and effects of oil revenue transparency policies. In conclusion, the article warns against imported models for solving complex governance challenges such as resource-related corruption in Africa.

Never Babette / German Development Institute

Social norms, trust and control of power theft in Uganda: Does bulk metering work for MSEs?

Power theft is still rampant in many developing countries. Governments and utility providers tend to favour technical solutions, neglecting the socio-economic dimension. This article analyses the interaction between the socio-economic factors trust, informal social norms, awareness and electricity pricing effect and technical control measures in Uganda. After reforming its power sector, Uganda introduced two technical innovations: bulk metering for micro and small enterprises (MSE) and prepaid metering for households. The bulk metering system imposes a strong form of social control among MSEs. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 29 MSEs and 16 experts in Uganda, this article shows how well bulk metering works in practice. It finds that trust is key in the relations between electricity user and utility provider, between citizens and government overseeing the energy sector as well as within bulk metering groups of MSEs. The electricity price impacts MSEs’ ability to pay and to some extent also their willingness to pay. Finally, power theft used to be accepted as an informal social norm. Change is happening, but is currently undermined by corruption and patronage networks in the energy sector and the political system, impacting people’s attitude to compliance – regardless of the privatization of the electricity sector.

Wiegratz Jörg / University of Leeds

Anti-fraud initiatives in neoliberal Uganda: a political economy analysis

Decades into the neoliberal transformation, a number of African economies are characterised by significant levels of economic trickery and crime. Notably, some governments have recently undertaken a range of countermeasures in the name of fighting related practices and improving levels of transparency and propriety in their economies in order to boost consumer confidence, economic growth and development. The drivers, characteristics and repercussions of these anti-fraud measures deserve analytical attention. This paper therefore offers an analysis of selected anti-fraud initiatives in Uganda; special attention is given to respective political economy aspects.

Walls Michael / University College London

International Election Observation in Somaliland: Interactions Between Local and International Actors in a Context of Sovereign Non-Recognition

Somaliland’s lack of international recognition means that donor support for elections, including international and domestic election observation, employs indirect channels and is subject to a variety of sensitivities specific to that status. This creates uncertainty but also promotes engagement between international and local civil society actors in ways that are rarely possible with more formalised observations. International actors (donors and diplomatic community) are often conflicted: torn between a desire to support successful indigenous state-building efforts, while simultaneously loath to undermine the principles of sovereignty under which the Somali administration in Mogadishu is internationally recognised as holding the right to exercise sovereignty over all parts of ‘Somalia’, including Somaliland. Somaliland unilaterally declared independence in 1991 following a brutal conflict. Since then, they have established a viable system of governance in the context of a durable peace, while southern areas have experienced protracted conflict. The indirect avenues of international donors have permitted the development of relations between international and local civil society actors that depart from normal practice. In electoral observation these atypical arrangements have shifted the emphasis from the formal procedure of observation towards a more pragmatic local engagement and understanding, presenting both opportunities and challenges.

Mazembo Mavungo / University of Basel

Playing in the Hands of the Incumbent: Election Observation during the 2011 Electoral Process in the D. R. Congo

The 2011 legislative and presidential elections in the Congo were marred by grave irregularities to the point that the new political authorities that emerged from this flawed process have had to deal with a legitimacy crisis. There was however a great divergence in how observer missions pronounced on these elections. The paper specifically contrasts domestic, African and western observer mission reports and argues that these observer mission reports differ in significant ways in how they report about the nature of the irregularities, how they identify the actors or masterminds of the botched electoral process and how they pronounce on the overall legitimacy of the process. Our analysis shows that African observer mission reports were superficial while western mission reports were reserved and ambiguous. Only domestic observer mission reports seriously confronted the State sponsored nature of the electoral fraud and related repression and underlined the unacceptability of the results published by the national electoral commission. In contrast to this stance, western observer mission reports as well as African observer mission statements rather played in favour of the regime’s resolve to cling on political power. The paper highlights implications and lessons for improved practices for future election observation missions in Africa.

Beardsworth Nicole / University of Warwick

Observer Status: EISA’s Election Observation Mission and the 2015 Presidential by-election in Zambia

The Zambian election of 20 January 2015 was held following the death of President Michael Sata, which precipitated an unexpectedly tight electoral contest. With less than 90 days until the presidential by-election, donor agencies, diplomatic staff and observer missions were left under pressure to prepare for these highly unpredictable polls. While the role of election observer missions in African elections has become better understood over the previous two decades, the utility of regional NGO’s in observing elections in Africa has not yet received significant attention. Organisations such as the Johannesburg-based Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA) regularly mobilise observer missions across the continent; this small non-profit has operated in over 23 countries across the continent since 2003. These observer teams are modest, often comprising as few as 14 observers who can thus hope to offer a relatively limited snapshot of the dynamics leading up to Election Day. An expensive exercise funded predominantly by government agencies in Scandinavia, Switzerland and the UK, it is important to consider what this organisation and others of its size can reasonably be expected to achieve in such a complex and dynamic environment. This paper will reflect on the author’s experiences during the 2015 election observation mission and the broader implications of the work done by small regional NGOs in in election monitoring in Zambia and beyond.

Willis Justin / Durham

Uganda’s 1980 Election: the Rise of International Election Monitoring

Uganda’s 1980 general elections were a seminal moment in international election monitoring: they saw the the first deployment of a Commonwealth observer team to observe an election in Africa conducted by a sovereign state. The elections proved to be highly contentious, with multiple forms of electoral malpractice: but the Commonwealth Observer Group endorsed them. The elections reveal themes which have continued in the subsequent history of monitoring. International actors fetishize elections as a rule bound process with the capacity to legitimize political systems and promote stability; in Uganda, they did not necessarily expect elections to run smoothly, but believed that elections were a necessary feature of a legitimate state, Incumbent politicians engage in a particular kind of electoral extraversion through which positive evaluations of elections by international monitors create a façade of legitimacy for highly repressive regimes. And monitoring creates its own, chronic dilemma: having opted to support elections through a monitoring, observers face the difficult choice of either endorsing a poor election, or calling the result into question, with the associated threat of political instability. The 1980 elections established a pattern for managing this dilemma: the observers’ report detailed multiple irregularities (evoking an ideal of electoral norms as it did so) but concluded that the level of popular participation itself made this a ‘valid electoral exercise’.

Dufief Elise / Northwestern University

The Contradictory Purposes of Election Monitoring: Evidences from Ethiopia

This paper examines the construction of power relations in the international system, through the lens of international election monitoring and its politics. Focusing on the relationship between the European Union and Ethiopia, I argue that election monitoring reflects a complex hierarchy of power and serves contradicting purposes. In the hands of the monitors, it is an instrument of discipline, intended to monitor domestic behavior and enforce a standard of performance. The recipient of monitors, while accepting the general rule, finds interstices to manoeuvre within, playing with and against interests and agendas of external actors. Ultimately, the politics of election observing functions as an arena of struggle where power strategies are at stake. Power relations are eventually reversed when international actors are weakened, giving more space for the recipient country to pursue its own electoral strategies. I find that the very instrument which is meant to open political space in fact contributes to its closure when faced with ‘strong states’.I present here findings from multiple fieldworks carried in Ethiopia as well as in the headquarters of the European Union. Election monitoring in Ethiopia in 2005 and 2010 led to major diplomatic crisis and highlighted the politics at stake. In light of the 2015 elections in Ethiopia, I will present the strategies displayed by national actors to sustain a position of power despite the growing involvement of international monitors.

Iniguez de Heredia Marta / University of Cambridge

Coping in times of Peacebuilding: The Subversion of Authority and Political Order through Survival Strategies

Peacebuilding missions generate an extra layer of authority in the spaces where they operate. This authority places on target societies the obligation to obey and cope in return for restoring state authority and security. However, an analysis of popular classes’ coping strategies reveals that there is limited obedience and extensive resistance to these claims. In the conflict/post-conflict context of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, rural classes’ self-delivery of multiple services (electricity, health, education, refugee flows and security) enacts alternative forms of social and political organisation. Although these could signal accommodation to forms of dispossession and upwards redistribution of wealth and privilege, they create mechanisms for re-appropriation and political participation. This alternative organising shows important aspects about the way authority is exercised and contested during peacebuilding. While peacebuilders’ authority largely comes from the claim to know and be able to bring peace and security, survival strategies not only demonstrate that this is far from being achieved, but also, that popular classes have their own goals about participatory forms of distribution and decision-making. In this process, survival strategies not only resist a particular agenda or a modus operandi, they generate alternative forms of authority in the process, simultaneously subverting a context of marginalisation, coercion and extraction.

Grauvogel Julia / GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies

Wodrig Stefanie / GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies

Talking past each other: Regional and domestic resistance in the Burundian intervention scene

Peacebuilding attempts invoke a considerable amount of friction. In this paper we argue that these frictional encounters can be made visible by focusing on the articulations of resistance voiced by the different actors in the intervention scene, including national elites and interveners. Departing from the discussion of the regionally led facilitation in Burundi, we show that the respective national elites and African interveners referred to different scales in order to legitimise their resistance: the Great Lakes Peace Initiative for Burundi resisted sedimented continental practices as well as international attempts to impose their conceptions of peace, whereas the Burundian elites repeatedly rejected regionally sponsored ‘solutions’ with reference to the domestic situation. Drawing on interviews with and statements by diverse national and regional forces, we show how claims to resist were articulated with respect to different spatial reference points and thereby explore how regional and local actors talked past each other.

Newbery Katharina / University of St Andrews

Becoming a regional peacemaker with the authority to intervene: Ethiopia’s identity politics and peacemaking interventions in Somalia (post-1991)

The proposed paper will present an argument in favour of studying regional peacemaking interventions in Africa through a poststructuralist approach to the identity politics of intervening states. I will argue that exploring how African peacemakers assign meaning to themselves and others in forming and implementing their response to conflict is central to understanding how they establish the authority to intervene, and shape the political options for their engagement.
Drawing on the case of Ethiopia’s contested peacemaking interventions in the Somali civil war I will develop a theoretical framework to analyse how identities are constructed in the key Ethiopian, and ‘external’, foreign policy discourses that shape Ethiopian engagement in the conflict, and how notions of Ethiopia’s authority as a regional peacemaker are created and maintained through these political processes and practices. By examining how authority and hierarchies are (re)produced through dominant discourses, I argue that a poststructuralist theoretical framework also helps to understand how, and by whom, the political meaning and space for resistance to Ethiopian interventions in Somalia is negotiated. Finally, I will demonstrate that this theoretical approach allows me to analyse the role that relevant regional organisations – the IGAD and AU – and key external actors play in shaping, and legitimizing, the specific forms of authority that Ethiopia establishes as a regional peacemaker in the Horn of Africa.

Makauskaite Mante / Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen

Towards Understanding Normative Behaviour of the African Union: Responsibility to Protect and Pan-African Norms during Crises in Libya and Mali

The AU is often referred to as a toothless bulldog not only because of the lack of material capabilities, but also because of a blaming narrative for its assumed priority of regime security over human security. It is claimed that even though the AU has appropriate institutional setting, its normative commitments are not there. To be more precise, Article 4(h) of the AU’s Constitutive Act, which allows humanitarian intervention to a member state in grave circumstances and can be related to such leading international norms as human security and Responsibility to Protect (R2P), has never been invoked. However, these claims are often taken out of the context, without an attempt to understand why the AU behaves with and towards norms the way it does, and how this behavior could be understood.
Stressing the importance of contextualization and history, through the concept of normative behavior, this paper is an attempt to understand how historical and structural constrains affect construction of the AU’s normative behavior in the context of conflict resolution. The analytical distinction is made between the R2P and Pan-African norms of continental jurisdiction and solidarity, in order to question the dominant narrative, and the historical contestations around these norms are discussed. Ideas are then put to test in the cases of Libya and Mali and the AU’s normative behavior is analyzed from its stances on these crises.

Witt Antonia / Goethe University Frankfurt

Frictional encounters: international intervention and mediation in Madagascar

Political crises within African states are increasingly subject to African-led interventions. This paper conceptualizes these interventions as social space that is both constituting and constituted by authority. It therefore scrutinizes the SADC-led mediation that followed President Marc Ravalomanana’s ouster in March 2009. In this sense, the paper analyses the nature of SADC’s authority during its encounters in Madagascar as well as the multiple forms of resistance SADC was faced with. These resistances are in themselves claims to authority and thus reflect the conflictual and dynamic social space produced by intervention practices. Faced by three sources of resistance—from among its own member states, from competing interveners, as well as from various Malagasy actors—SADC turned into a “minimalized authority from afar”. This was characterised by a restricted recognition of the subjects and objects of the mediation, co-optation of political allies, an ad hoc and confrontational mode of engagement, physical absence and ambiguous responsibilities, and a strategy to de-politicize the initial conflict on the ground. The theoretical perspective offered here provides new conceptual avenues to think about the limits of peace interventions. Moreover, the analysis of practices of intervention—in contrast to policy strategies or declarations—points to the various agencies and authorities that turn interventions into an opportunity rather than a mere tool of (regional) governance.

Younge Gavin / University of Cape Town

Dead Monuments

In 2005, and after a nine-year long consultative process, ANC-aligned protagonists inaugurated a new museum commemorating the liberationist contributions of several activists associated with the Eastern Cape: Nelson Mandela, Raymond Mhlaba and Govan Mbeki among them. This museum, the Red Location Museum, is situated in Port Elizabeth’s oldest black township, New Brighton, and is recognized as a site of national struggle. In 2006, the museum received the Royal Institute of British Architect’s Lubetkin Prize, not only for its innovative design, but also for its political coherence.
Despite the prominence, both nationally and internationally, of this anti-apartheid institution, local residents have forced the closure of the entire museum complex. A community leader reportedly said, ‘why build a house for dead people when us, the living, do not have a roof over our heads?’
Fifteen months later, a monument to liberation from racist apartheid policies remains closed, under threat of extreme physical violence.
Why? This paper, built on first-hand interviews with The Aggrieved Residents’ Steering Committee and ANC Ward Councillors, offers this answer: the ANC’s former grassroots policies of boycott and ‘capture’ have solidified into an un-curated, sporadic, uncontrolled and unspecifiable revolt. It has a name—service delivery protest. Reportedly, these protests have increased during President Zuma’s administration.

Schmahmann Brenda / University of Johannesburg

A Thinking Stone and Two Pink Presidents: Negotiating Afrikaner Nationalist monuments at the University of the Free State

A dilemma confronting many public institutions in South Africa is what to do with monuments they possess that were commissioned in response to the influence of ideologies that are out of favour. In this paper I explore this question by examining how the University of the Free State has negotiated monuments on its campus that attest to the long-standing influence of Afrikaner nationalism on the institution – namely, prominently placed sculptures representing Marthinus Steyn, sixth president of the Orange Free State, and C.R. Swart, first president of the Republic of South Africa, as well as a memorial commemorating the centenary of the Great Trek. Rather than, for example, removing the three monuments, the university decided to commission additional works for campus which convey different messages to them. Key amongst these is Willem Boshoff’s Thinking Stone – a work that undermines the authority of the existent monuments by offering an alternative narrative about South African history, subverting tropes associated with Afrikaner nationalism and assuming a physical form which is accessible and promotes dialogue. The university has also welcomed discursive engagements with the monuments through their temporary adjustment. Such interventions include Plastic Histories in which Cigdem Aydemir, through shrink-wrapping and spraying pink the sculptures of Steyn and Swart, “queered” these monuments, prompting critical thought about the people they venerate and exclude.

Gurney Kim / African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town; Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design, University of Johannesburg

The Disappeared: Missing Artworks Task Force

This paper tracks recent contemporary South African artworks that have ‘disappeared’ from the public domain, and artistic strategies around the ephemeral, to suggest how dead monuments may become living memorials in a register different from their original intention. It will focus upon the potential of the ephemeral, transient and nomadic over the concrete, permanent and spectacular to speak to contemporary social imaginaries.
The author will draw upon a case study ‘New Imaginaries’, an ephemeral art project that explored public space in Johannesburg, to set conceptual ground. She will then offer recent artistic responses to public ‘disappearances': these range from a graffiti intervention that restored the names of Treason Triallists (including Nelson Mandela) from a Johannesburg memorial, which crime had eroded, to a sculpture of a former Zulu king that was removed in Durban and its animal counterparts rearranged into a village diorama, to an artist who gifted thieves the plinth upon which her sculpture should stand as a lesson in art appreciation. Sometimes, disappearance is a deliberate part of artistic practice: an invisible sculpture acts as cellphone jamming device in a gallery, or the Museum of Non Permanence comprises performances that cannot be archived. It may also comprise a spontaneous act of public defiance.
In short, this paper shows the monumental has a spectral dimension of mobile meaning that artists may leverage through ‘rituals of inversion’.

Ezeh Peter-Jazzy / University of Nigeria, Nsukka

Fear of Monuments, Cultural Hegemony and Loss of Collective Memory

I argue that monuments or memorials are vital in non-literate societies, or those to whom literacy is nascent, because they form part of the unwritten narratives that preserve public memory. Loss of a monument in a society with no or a nascent literacy, is the equivalent of burning down a library in societies with an established literary history. While there is evidence, both archaeological and via oral tradition, to show that this is the case with traditional societies in Nigeria, these repositories of public memory have come under attack from both extraneous mercantile and sectarian interests. Traffickers desecrate memorials and market any small or movable items in other countries. Similarly, charismatic preachers demonize these objects and instil fear in local communities. This results in a distortion of the cultural semantics of the sites and objects, and consequently the memory they embody. Between 2004 and 2012, I visited five sites in communities in south-eastern Nigeria where traditional sacred sites had been pillaged. I supplemented those observations with reports from witnesses from other sites. Sectarian hostility to these monuments was more intense, sustained, and extensive. In a number of cases, sectarian violation of these sites has led to violent clashes between traditionalist local groups and their antagonists. Destruction of monuments distorts group memory in communities with no or nascent literacy and, by extension, the story of our common humanity.

Apotsos Michelle / Williams College, USA

African Architecture in the Age of Terror

In March of 2012, the West African nation of Mali experienced a military coup that deposed then-president Amadou Toumani Toure and opened the door for a coalition of Tuareg Islamic militants known as Ansar Dine to seize control of the northern parts of the country. After imposing a highly conservative form of Islamic governance known as Shari ‘a law on the region, Ansar Dine proceeded to perpetrate numerous violent and devastating acts upon the architectural landscape in and around Timbuktu in the name of eradicating idolatrous Qadiri Sufi practices that had been dominant in the area since the fifteenth century.
Yet the specific nature of the sites selected for destruction and the performative, almost ritualistic, quality of the subsequent processes of erasure suggest that the acts of Ansar Dine were much more multifaceted than the mere establishment of an Islamic state. This paper will explore additional motivations behind Ansar Dine’s iconoclastic acts in Timbuktu that move beyond the community’s identity as a site of Sufi power and scholarship and address its increasingly dominant contemporary reality as a world heritage site and tourist attraction.
In doing so, it will consider the problematic relationships that this new career has created within the community, and reframe Ansar Dine’s targeted architectural assaults as a mode of creating traumatic statements aimed at addressing this present state of affairs.

Neajai Pailey Robtel / SOAS, University of London

Give Me Your Land or I’ll Shoot! How Conflict Has Configured and Reconfigured Liberian Citizenship

In this paper, I examine how four historical and contemporary conflict interfaces in Liberia and across transnational spaces have configured and reconfigured citizenship construction and practice. The paper unsettles theoretical debates around citizenship as territorially bounded or unbounded by highlighting a case study where the very idea of the nation-state—Liberia—remains violently contested. Employing the lived experiences of 202 Liberian respondents from five field sites—London, England; Washington, D.C.; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Accra, Ghana; and Monrovia, Liberia—the paper shows that conflict and civil war simultaneously ruptured and sealed state-citizen relations, thereby casting citizenship as a space of contestation. Here, I review some of the conflict literature, exploring how the manipulation of citizenship was a driver of Liberia’s civil wars and how it continues to be a driver of continued tensions amongst ‘homeland’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘returnee’ Liberians. I assert in this paper that a proposed dual citizenship bill was introduced in Liberia in 2008 in view of the recognition that some Liberians may have naturalised in other countries because they did not know when the intermittent armed conflicts would end. Conversely, however, I contend that the bill’s passage has been postponed because post-war governance challenges such as income inequality, land tenure, and transitional justice continuously pit transnational Liberians against those who are domestically rooted

Bedert Maarten / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Exploring the integrative potential of “landlord/stranger reciprocity” in post-war Liberia

This paper analyses the continuing importance of the “landlord/stranger reciprocity” idiom that is characteristic of the political culture in much of Liberia. The analytical distinction between landlords and strangers has since long been adopted from an outspoken emic use of these terms. Based on the principle of matrilateral exchange, landlords and strangers have been classified as wife-givers and wife-receivers or as uncles and nephews. These categories have been invoked to illustrate the importance of patron-client relations that make up social and political hierarchies within society.In this paper, I stress the aspect of reciprocity that is implied in the landlord-stranger idiom. Based on the description of funeral rites and settlement narratives among the Dan of north-eastern Liberia, I argue that, more than a way to stress difference, this idiom serves also as way through which belonging is articulated. Despite the civil war(s) that affected the region for years, the landlord/stranger idiom continues to be important in organizing social relations in the aftermath of the conflict. Rather than focusing on crisis and conceptual change, I argue for an approach that focuses on institutional continuities. Taking landlord/stranger reciprocity as an example, I explore how these structural idioms can be refined rather than refuted. The analysis of the ritual use of this idiom throughout this paper explores the integrative potential of the landlord/stranger reciprocity.

Glucksam Noga / School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London

On Time and Responsibility: The impact of presentism in the Liberian civil-war and its aftermath

Past visibility and historical justice have been important elements of the Liberian reconstruction process. It is not surprising that the TRC mandate never limited the temporal scope of the commission. Civil conflicts are often deeply entrenched in local historical narratives, and post-conflict accountability processes are designed to recognize the impact of the past, and to prevent its recurrence by battling impunity. However, an examination of discourses and norms in Liberia during and after the conflict suggests a strong and widespread sense of presentism; a schism from the past, but more importantly, also from the future. This paper is based on extensive mixed method analysis of contemporary and past discourses, which point to an evasive and passive interpretation of historicity, justice and responsibility. The analysis shows that even though the end of hostilities did not create a ‘year-zero’ like many post-conflict arrangements do, it was used to perfectly encapsulate the war period as an extra-temporal event, devoid of past and future, devoid of implications. The paper further examines the impact of time perceptions, historicity and presentism on the construction of norms of guilt and responsibility, through the analysis of the role of agency in historical narratives.

Utas Mats / Dept. Cultural Anthrop, Uppsala University

Generals For Good – Not So Bad? Ex-Commanders as Reintegration Brokers in Post-War Liberia

In the aftermath of civil wars there is a general belief that old command structures of former rebel movements are a serious threat to the newfound and fragile stability. Indeed there is enough evidence around pointing out how easily remobilized former military networks are. There is however a tendency of viewing this mobilization as the very logic of the networks themselves – as if their very raison d’être is to create eternal conflict. In any DDR process a lot of effort is placed on dismantling chains of command etc., of armed groups, clearly also the case in Liberia. Despite this, more than ten years after the end of the second Liberian war contacts between commanders and their former soldiers still prevail, yet most commonly for non-military reasons. It appears that what the DDR process chiefly managed to do was to drive the networks underground and out of sight of the international community. With a focus on former Mid-Level Commanders (MiLCs) we aim to show that former military networks may not solely be a threat to stability in a post-war country but could quite the contrary be viewed as an asset. We show how some of the ex-MiLCs, who have integrated well, not only provide avenues into the informal economy but into formal trade and even the state. By highlighting these very ambiguities of post-war livelihoods for ex-MiLCs we argue that national and international DDR and SSR programs needs to readdress their policy positions in an effort to strengthen durable peace.

Weah Aaron / Search for Common Ground

Emerging Pattern: Constructive and Destructive Memory in Postwar Liberia

Studies on transitional justice—in particular, violent memory—suggest there are two schools of thought. The first school considers violent memory as a burden and embraces collective amnesia as a strategy to escape from the trappings of the past because the act of remembering is traumatic and can bring back moments of horror; stirring up anguish and pain. The second school admits that remembering is painful; though it brings back grief and great deal of distress, remembering provides lessons on how to avoid repeat of the past. Thus, the second school contends that the act of remembering carries a preventative value.
While the urge to ignore violent memory maybe compelling, studies have shown that it is impossible to forget. In light of this context, there is a general assumption that anyone expose to this scale of violence (as in civil war, authoritarian rule or period of genocide) carries a violent memory. How individuals or group response to this memory, can either promote or pose a risk to peace and security after period of violent conflict. This paper is concerned about delayed reconciliation in Liberia and the dynamics of postwar memory. Patterns of memory will be assessed both at the national and sub national levels. Constructive memory patterns will be assessed in light of how it enhances postwar reconciliation while tendencies of destructive memory will be assess in view of risk pose to postwar reconciliation.

Nugent Paul / University of Edinburgh

Sites of Memory in the Senegambia and the Trans-Volta: Borders as Memonics

Although colonial maps tend not to be at the disposal of border communities, the pillars are readily found. People can often provide a narrative that accounts for their being there and tends to emphasize European agency. However, borders also aid thinking about larger histories in ways which ostensibly have little to do with the border per se.
In this paper, I compare how 2 cross-border festivals have become central to thinking about histories of social proximity. The first is associated with the Narang forest on the border between the Casamance and the Gambia. A Mauritanian marabout, Cheikh Mahfdoudz, established one of his bases at Darsilami in the early 20th century. Mahfoudz is central to an internal debate about jihad of the heart rather than by the sword. His tomb has become an annual focus for pilgrimage by Jolas from the two sides of the border. The second case is the Agbamevoza kente-weaving festival. It takes place each year in the Ghanaian town of Kpetoe and is intended to attract Agotimes from the two sides of the line. In this case, the border stands as a symbol of the diminished standing of the Agotimes within the trans-Volta. The festival is carefully choreographed to play up the military feats of the Agotimes in the past and to celebrate a shared culture today.
Actors in both settings embed their history within a physical landscape whose features were central to the construction of the border and simultaneously transcend and re-inscribe it.

Leonardi Cherry / University of Durham

“We Know the border”: Contested Memories of the South Sudan-Uganda Border in Kajokeji and Moyo

The border between Kajokeji County of South Sudan and Moyo and Yumbe Districts of Uganda has never been finally agreed or demarcated since its provisional (and inaccurate) delineation in 1914. It appears to represent a classic case of an artificial colonial boundary: despite acknowledging the close relations between the Kuku of Kajokeji and the Madi of Moyo, British colonial officials sought to make the border a tribal dividing line, but constantly struggled to prevent settlement and movement across it. These borderlands later became the site of repeated refugee migrations and rebel military camps, making cross-border relations a vital means of survival for their inhabitants. Yet however artificial its origin a century ago, this border has become a significant marker of both national and ethnic identities and a focus of local struggles over power and resources, the latest episode of which pitted Kuku and Madi in violent conflict against each other as South Sudanese and Ugandans.
This paper explores the contested histories of this border in local memories and in the archival record, to show the significance of local historical narratives in memorialising particular events to make this border meaningful and contested. The paper thus juxtaposes the limited interest of national governments in resolving the borderline with the ways in which local actors are now using memories of a shifting border to attempt to define fixed lines of territorial sovereignty and citizenship.

Shiweda Napandulwe / University of Namibia

Omhedi and Oihole in the Namibia-Zambia Borderland: Mandume ya Ndemufayo’s Cross-Border Sites of Memory

In post-war Angola, an impressive monument was built to honour the Kwanyama king Mandume ya Ndemufayo on his grave at Oihole in southern Angola. His grave has become a site of public and national mobilization as the official commemoration takes place annually on the 6th of February since 2002.
This paper traces the emergence, the development and the post-war commemorations, focusing on the revival of the Kwanyama kingship and the annual ‘Mandume Day’ commemoration across the border at Omhedi in northern Namibia, almost 89 years after it was abolished. The Kwanyama kingdom was one of the most important Ovambo kingdoms, cut in half by the colonial border between northern Namibia and southern Angola.
This paper examines the trans-border aspects of memory politics regarding king Mandume ya Ndemufayo in Angola and Namibia, and analyses the role of the ongoing cross-border commemorations in (re)establishing the link between the Ovakwanyama people living on both sides of the border.

Hennlich Andrew J. / Western Michigan University

Space Invaders on the Zimbabwe-South Africa Border: Border Crossing in Daniel Halter’s Heartland Exhibition

Daniel Halter’s 2013 exhibition Heartland examines the Zimbabwe-South Africa border. Heartland is comprised of woven paper images representing the border, the arrival of migrants, and the threat of border crossing and legal documents including: a South African passport, Constitution, and the Rhodesian Declaration of Independence.
Heartland constructs borders in tension between their natural structure and social functions, between exodus and emplacement. I build from the formal structures of Halter’s work, reading Heartland as a reflection on the 2008 South African migrancy crisis through Edward Casey’s reading of the border as undone by its lived functions. The representation of borders in Heartland becomes what Ranjana Khanna terms an unbelonging. Heartland, metaphorized through weaving’s material structures, the migrant’s bag, and springstone sculpture historicize the precarious conditions of living and social relations within South Africa for citizen and migrant. Khanna’s theorization of unbelonging undermines dwelling’s metaphorization; thinking the border through Derrida’s work on hospitality, unbelonging challenges ideas of identity, emplacement and identification. For Halter it undoes the boundary’s force seen in both international borders and the gated community.
Heartland thus documents the undoing of rights purportedly guaranteed in the documents Halter weaves in South Africa’s neo-liberal terrain.

Zimmerman Sarah / Western Washington University

Becoming Stateless in a Decolonizing World: Guinean Tirailleurs Sénégalais after the 1958 Referendum

This paper analyzes the ways in which Guinea’s sudden decolonization from France in 1958 led to the deterritorialization and denationalization of Guinean tirailleurs sénégalais. Often portrayed as a resounding victory of anti-colonialism, Guinea’s independence caught Guinean tirailleurs sénégalais serving the French military in Algeria by surprise. After the 1958 referendum, hundreds of Guineans opted to remain in the French colonial military while their home colony became an independent country. As a result, these Guinean colonial soldiers became stateless in the shifting geopolitical forces that redefined African countries’ citizens’ relationships with their former colonizing powers. Years after the end of French colonialism, these veteran tirailleurs sénégalais lacked official citizenship or nationality while they attempted long-term residence in France or other countries of former French West Africa. Their stateless partially resulted from Sekou Touré’s representation of Guinean veterans of the tirailleurs sénégalais as internal enemies in independent Guinea. This case study of Guinean veterans reveals how tirailleurs sénégalais interrupt many of the common narratives of decolonization by muddying national allegiances and legacies of colonialism in newly independent West Africa.

Fogarty Richard / SUNY-Albany

French culture de guerre in Africa? Consent, Coercion, and Recruitment during the Great War

In trying to make sense of the social and cultural experience of the Great War, historiographical debates in France have expended much energy assessing the nature of a culture de guerre during those years, and whether this culture was sustained by “consent” or “coercion.” But France did not merely consist of the European metropole at this time, nor was its war effort exclusively European. Large portions of Africa belonged to the French empire and so participated in the French war effort, notably by supplying large number of African men to serve as soldiers on the Western Front. How can we incorporate this colonial aspect into the history of France at war? Is a supposed culture de guerre a useful way of characterizing and interpreting African involvement in the war? When it comes to recruitment of Africans to serve in the French army, do terms like consent and coercion, cooperation and resistance have the same meaning, or any meaning at all in the colonial context? This paper will explore these questions, seeking to paint a complex and nuanced picture of Africans’ military service between 1914 and 1918, understanding them as participants in a dynamic process that included a whole range of motivations and experiences.

Ginio Ruth / Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Fighting for Equality: African Soldiers and Veterans of the French Army, 1944-1958

Debates around the recent struggle of African veterans to receive compensation for the freezing of their pensions upon independence have dictated much of the academic research on African soldiers who served in the French Army. They have pushed historians to focus on the soldiers’ participation in the two World Wars, on discrimination against them and on French ingratitude towards their sacrifices. On the other hand, little has been written about the soldiers’ and veterans’ successful fight for equality after World War II, which resulted in the equation of the pensions and of service conditions of African soldiers to those of metropolitan troops. In fact, in the context of decolonization, this achievement is much more surprising than the French decision to freeze the pensions in 1959. My paper will examine this fight for equality from three aspects: first, the soldiers’ revolts in the aftermath of WWII and their influence on the decision to radically improve soldiers’ service conditions; second, the discourse used by main veterans’ newspaper to protect their rights and improve their situation; finally, the case of the circle guards, most of whom were veterans, and their struggle to equate their rights to those of soldiers. By using these examples I will demonstrate that African soldiers and veterans were not always in the position of “victims” and often knew how to take advantage of the army’s desperate need for them to gain points in their struggle for equality.

Falisse Jean Benoît / Oxford University

Social Accountability and Relationship to Power in Burundi and South Kivu: Experiments in Health Centres

For decades now, community-elected committees and decentralisation have been popular policies for improving basic social services delivery in Africa. The case of health care is particularily emblematic; most countries have set up health committees made of elected citizens to oversee and co-manage health facilities but little is known of the consequences of this strategy. Mixed-methods experimental approaches can be used to understand the impact of such committees on services delivery.
A project for reinforcing health committees was randomly implemented in rural clinics of Burundi and the neighbouring province of South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Assessments show important differences between the two places; reinforcing the committees led to increased social accountability and remarkable improvements in health services provision in South Kivu but much less so in Burundi. The paper focuses on this difference and argues that a key element for the efficiency of citizens’ committees is ordinary people’s relationship to power. This relationship is more ‘horizontal’ in South Kivu, where power is openly contested and discussed, than in Burundi. At the root of this difference lie diverse experiences of war and violence, distinct histories of autocratic rule, and dissimilar types of settlements (villages versus houses scattered across the hills).

Ranjan Sanjiv / Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India

The blurred line of citizenship and ownership through the prism of Public Services; A comparative study of India and Africa

The concept of citizenship as entitles one the basic right of residing, purchasing property, marriage, right to work etc. Clearly it enshrines the concept of granting the citizens the system of free and just society for the citizens security & development. In the days of Greece, the system of “Citizenship” entitles one freedom from slavery to right to vote.
But the cynic of citizenship in the contemporary world has argued over the validity of citizenship on the merits of public services . The post colonial world and specifically India and Africa shares the juggernaut. Entitlement of public services is assured only to the citizens through BPL, PIO, OIC etc. The problem of NRI`s regarding Visa extension or for different public services seems a tough task. The ruling of Supreme court in Indian (2014) accepted Enunchs as 3rd gender citizens. But before they were not entitled to ration card, right to marry or vote. The questions on Bangladeshi migrants is another bone of contention between the parties whether to grant citizenship status so as to entitle them certain basic right to public services. Africa too is marred by corruption, illiteracy and health facilities which can be reformed(1980) by engaging citizens through the rights to public services to citizens. Africa need infrastructural as well as cooperative citizenships to boost Africa`s development.

Kinsey Bill / Ruzivo Trust, Harare, Zimbabwe

Local Identities and Community Mobilization to Ensure Healthy Futures for Africa’s Rural Children

For decades it was thought the key to improving nutrition in Africa lay in boosting food security. Despite interventions to improve food security, linear growth failure in childhood, or stunting, is the most prevalent form of undernutrition globally. Some 165 million children < 5 years of age are stunted, the majority Africans. Undernutrition underlies 45% of all child deaths among young children. Stunting more pervasively hinders the development potential and human capital of entire societies due to its long-term impact on cognitive function and adult economic productivity. Yet African states have failed to mobilize the resources and services to address child stunting effectively.

Anthropometric assessments of the well-being of rural children in a 30-year panel study in rural Zimbabwe show the nutritional status of children has declined annually, despite generally rising incomes and farm productivity. This paradox, in the administratively created communities that resulted from land reform 30 years ago, raises issues about why local identities and citizenship have not been more effective in providing services the state does not. The paper explores the relationship between worsening child nutrition and the social and environmental setting of rural Zimbabwean households. It questions the extent to which anything less than effective community mobilization—leading to sustained behavioral changes and creative adaptation–is likely to positively shape nutritional outcomes.

Razanakoto Pascal / Université d’Antananarivo

Public services, Citizenship and conflictuality about access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa

Les difficultés d’accès à l’électricité, et l’ampleur des mouvements citoyens de protestations autour de ce service public en ville soulèvent les enjeux problématiques du droit à la ville, et de la citoyenneté urbaine notamment en Afrique subsaharienne. Les conflictualités urbaines entre citoyens et Etat central d’une part, entre usagers consommateurs et entreprises publiques d’énergie d’autre part, se traduisent par des tensions sociales, et frustrations aboutissant au processus de mobilisations identitaires en ville.
A partir d’analyses d’enquêtes des acteurs de l’énergie, et des discours des mouvements citoyens dans quelques pays africains (Y’en A Marre au Sénégal, Wake up à Madagascar, The Citizens Voice en Afrique du Sud), cette contribution montre que les citadins et usagers de services publics en Afrique manifestent de plus en plus de capacités de réflexions et d’actions citoyennes dans la gestion des cités, et le contrôle de l’action publique, notamment ici dans le secteur de l’électricité. Cela d’autant plus que les canaux formels de demandes publiques (représentants civils élus, députés locaux, consultations publiques,…) sont de plus en plus inefficaces. De ces conflictualités émergent un processus d’affirmation de la citoyenneté urbaine, voire des formes de citoyenneté informelle.

Ayumbah Akallah Jethron / Technische Universitat Darmstadt

From Blind Spot to Blank Spot: Fragmentation, Ethnic Mobilization and Service Provision within Kibera Flexible Settlement in Nairobi, Kenya

Urbanization in Africa is as old as history. Many times the African city has been represented as a place of chaos where nothing works and everything goes; a place devoid of functional infrastructure be it security, transport, water and sanitation and environmental conservation. While this could be a preserve of pessimists, the city on the African map is a site of creativity, innovation, adaptability and socio-political mobilization. The African city is dichotomized into zones with its connectivity to basic infrastructure skewed towards advantaged groups. Some areas of the city continue to operate as blank spots from former colonial blind spots. Kibera in Nairobi is one of such blind spots on the African geo-political outlay. What makes Kibera unique and of interest is the Nubian question. Nubians, originally from Sudan, were used by the British colonial officers for pacification and conquest. They were then allowed to settle in Kibera but later disowned by the colonial state.
Applying an interpretive research design and presenting its findings descriptively, this paper is of the idea that the situation in Africa’s flexible areas deserves a need-based mobilization as an approach to claim for service provision.

Lake Milli / Arizona State University

Opportunity and (Dis)empowerment through Gender-Based Legal Aid in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Gender advocacy has long been at the forefront of efforts to end cycles of violence in areas of state fragility and weakness. DR Congo is no exception. Donors and NGOs have devoted considerable attention to empowering marginalized women by increasing their access to the legal system to resolve grievances. This article draws from interviews with 50 self-identified victims of gender violence in eastern DR Congo to argue that legal development aid has provided opportunities for self-identified victims of violence to exert new agency over the options available to them in the aftermath of violence, even though they frequently fail to use the legal system in the ways donors intended. Instead, many have adopted the language of legal accountability instrumentally to access critical social services such as prenatal care and antiretrovirals that were not otherwise available to them. I argue that although legal development programs have provided individuals with opportunities to exert increased agency over their actions in the aftermath of violence, the fact that some women have felt compelled to identify as victims of gender violence in search of legal remedy in order to access critical social services evidences a broader societal disempowerment in which the voices of vulnerable Congolese women have been excluded from conversations about their needs and priorities.

Steinitz Nina / Free University Berlin

Misguided Involvement in Kivu security: The Strategic Interaction of External and Local Security-Governance in the Police Reform Process

In spite of extensive external support for the Congolese security sector, security in the Kivus remains problematic. The police is still being perceived more as a factor of insecurity than as a security benefit. Despite citizen-oriented concepts like the „police de la proximité“, this contribution argues that the unwillingness to modify given power constellations inside the Kabila-government undermines the reform’s potential for real change, as can be seen in the new „loi organique de la PNC“ which is shaped by centralized decisionmaking, though being not more than old wine in new bottles. Security governance in the Kivus is also depending on a multitude of informal and transregional stakeholders or power-groups („axes“) which can hardly be embraced by statebuilding measures addressing rigid state institutions. Therefore, forms of „strategic interaction“ between actors of the police reform in the Kivus will be emphasized. The central argument is that the misuse of the „local ownership“-principle by external and local actors in the Congolese police reform represents a dilemma for the reform process which is relying almost exclusively on cooperation and communication with the political establishment, disregarding the importance of civil society participation. It is thereby possible to problematize the malleability of external measures by highlighting aspects of local ownership and political entanglements inside the police and government institutions.

Mertens Charlotte / University of Melbourne

Colonising Sexual Violence, Silencing the Local in eastern DRC

This paper elucidates how international actors have colonised sexual violence, designing interventions based on global rather than local campaigns, resulting in the ongoing failure to incorporate polyphonous views and experiences of Congolese communities who advocate for the multiple needs of local populations. Drawing on fieldwork in the provinces of North and South Kivu, I argue that interventions framed through sexual violence solely have a distorting effect on local communities, largely fail the victims of sexual violence and often obscure local attempts to address the issue. In this sense international institutions claim sexual violence as ‘their’ issue, prescribing and restricting the ways in which it can be understood and addressed. Establishing control over the political intelligibility of an issue is a process of colonising. The almost unilateral focus of humanitarian programs on sexual violence in eastern DRC has effectively closed down the discursive and political space for voicing and addressing other compelling community concerns. As a result many Congolese actors contest or reject the international interventions designed to help them. In this paper I will shed light on how local actors adapt to or contest externally led interventions on sexual violence. Particular attention will be paid to local actors who resist certain international interventions as well as to the resurgence of community-based grassroots organisations in the last years.

Kullenberg Janosch / Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS)

Playing the Protection Game: oalition and Collusion in the Kivus

After more than ten years of international interventions to protect civilians in the Kivus, their situation remains dire. Paradoxically, the UN gives primary responsibility to protect civilians to the Congolese state while assuming, at the same time, that this state is incompetent and passive on the matter. As a result, the role of Congolese stakeholders receives insufficient attention. This paper applies the concept of ‘Coupled Arenas’ to investigate how local administrators, politicians and NGOs contest and collude with the practices of protecting civilians in the Kivus, and how, in return, this interaction produces hybrid forms of governance. The analysis is based on the author’s ethnographic research in eastern DRC and interviews with national and international experts. The paper argues that Congolese stakeholders are widely underestimated in their skills and influence. They are found to contest protection interventions, but also to adapt and participate, skilfully exploiting protection discourses and legitimacy dilemmas of international interveners to extract resources, improve their bargaining position or pass on blame. These manoeuvres are facilitated by the characteristics of the ‘arena’ such as the proliferation of international organizations and their varying, sometimes conflicting, interpretations of the concept of protection. The local level analysis also contributes to a clearer picture of the intentions of the Kabila regime.

Bashwira Marie-Rose / Wageningen University

Local Discourses on the Involvement of Women in ASM in Eastern DRC: What has Changed since the Introduction of the Mining Reform Initiatives?

The (assumed) links between artisanal mining exploitation, sexual abuse and long-term violent conflict in Eastern DRC have given rise to the development of a wide range of initiatives “to clean up” the Congolese mining sector, including efforts to improve the position of women. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of local discourses about the involvement of women in mining and mining-related activities. The main goal is to assess if and how these discourses have changed after the introduction of the mining reform initiatives. In the first part of the paper, I discuss how and to what extent gender issues have been integrated in the mining reform initiatives. The second part of the paper will be dedicated to an overview of the different types of local-level narratives about the involvement of women in ASM. This will be done on the basis of transcripts of interviews with different actor groups in ASM, collected in the course of 10 months of fieldwork in eastern and south-eastern DRC in 2014. One of the main findings of the research is that, although civil servants are now aware of the legality of women’s activities in ASM, they still adopt an ambiguous attitude toward the latter’s presence in and around the mines.

Tarila Marclint Ebiede / University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium

Empowerment of Ex-Militants and Social Transformation of Power Relations in the Niger Delta: Evidence from two Communities

The study of the reintegration of ex-combatants has been debated by scholars focused on post-conflict peacebuilding. One key research findings in Sierra Leone suggests that there wasn’t significant difference in reintegration experiences between those who underwent Disarmament Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes and those who didn’t. Other studies that followed continue to conceptualise and research the reintegration process of ex-combatants as an outcome of DDR programmes, thus explaining the success or failure of reintegration within the programme structure of DDR. However, these arguments have not clearly established the conditions for the reintegration of ex-combatants. This is so because current research has downplayed the dynamics of protracted conflicts, while ‘overstating the utility and efficacy of DDR programmes’. This paper addresses this issue by focusing on the conflict dynamics and politics of peacebuilding in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Specifically, this paper will examine whether the conflict dynamics and politics of peacebuilding in the Niger Delta empowered ex-militants in the Niger Delta to become de facto state figures in rural communities. The paper will shed more light on how the politics of peacebuilding transforms power relations in the Niger Delta and the implications this process has for the reintegration of ex-combatants in particular, and the Nigerian state in general.

Fahey Daniel / University of California, Berkeley

Rebel Governance in Eastern Congo: The Case of the Allied Democratic Forces

During 2014, a military operation against the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) resulted in access to people and documents that provided unprecedented insight into the structure and function of this highly secretive armed group. Among the new understandings of ADF was that unlike most rebel groups in eastern DRC, ADF functioned like a state: it had an army that controlled territory; had its own symbols, financial system, courts, internal security apparatus, schools, and hospitals; and had external networks that supplied goods, money, and people to ADF’s camps. This article will draw upon the work of the UN Group of Experts and other sources to explain how and why ADF effectively acted as a state, including analysis of ADF’s external finance network and internal finance system; ADF’s system of internal security and social control; and the effects of the 2014 military operation on ADF’s structure and governance.

Wiegink Nikkie / Bonn International Center for Conversion / Utrecht University

“RENAMO that was us”: Rebel governance and Collaboration in Central Mozambique

During Mozambique’s sixteen year long war (1976-1992), the insurgent movement RENAMO occupied and controlled vast areas of rural territory and it is estimated that millions of people lived under some form of RENAMO rule. Based on life histories of ex-combatants and inhabitants of the district of Maringue, a former RENAMO headquarters, this contribution challenges depictions of RENAMO as “armed bandits” by analysing its localised attempt to establish some sort of authority and public service delivery. I particularly focus on the perceptions and practices of civilians living under RENAMO governance. I argue that these wartime alliances between civilians and RENAMO can best be understood by a notion of “collaboration” that is multifaceted and contextualised, (i.e. not only rational-choice), allowing for a mixture of loyalty, (patronage) expectations, profit-seeking and survival. I will situate civilians’ collaboration with (armed) authorities in a historic context of colonial and post-colonial rule and then analyse how civilians were in different ways and to different degrees partaking in RENAMO’s repressive and administrative structure. I will end with a short reflection on the consequences of these wartime collaborations for Maringue’s post-war political context and for RENAMO’s post-war political trajectory as an opposition party.

Ferrão Ana Raquel / GEA- Autónoma University of Madrid

Imagining Rebel Governance: Suffering and Loyalty in the UNITA Rebellion

Rebel governance is normally posited a substitute for coercion in the way rebel movements face the challenge of obtaining civilian compliance. This paper proposes to aproach it from a less common angle and that is how rebel governance is also important for building loyalty among its own combatants.
Based on fieldwork among former combatants, the paper explores this topic for the rebel movement UNITA during the Angolan civil war. During the Cold War, foreign journalists and academics contributed to internationally project the image of UNITA as a “state within a state”, much as the movement itself liked to be described. With the nineties, this image increasingly waned under a new dominant characterization of the rebellion as essentially oportunistic and predatory on the population. A fact underplayed in this image is the sometimes long-life loyalty combatants exhibited towards the movement. What relation can be drawn between loyalty and governance? And which of those images, if any, best describes the governance UNITA put in place? The paper suggests that, as it has been argued with regard to the state, of much importance was the imagining of the rebel governance by those fighting alongside UNITA. How it was imagined and how loyalty was generated from there cannot be fully understood though if not in strict relation to the state project. For answering these, the paper brings to the fore the topic of suffering through which combatants articulated their views on life under UNITA.

Marks Zoe / University of Edinburgh

Bureaucracy of Atrocity in Sierra Leone: The Untold Story of Rebels with Rubber Stamps

This paper breaks down distinctions of ‘combatant’ and ‘civilian’, and investigates governance as conceived by the rebel group itself. It uses the paradigmaticRevolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone (RUF) as its case study and draws on fieldwork conducted between 2008-2014. In addition to over 250 interviews with more than 150 ex-combatants, this research presents for the first time the written record of the RUF. With lengthy ‘cc’s, officious writing, hand-carved rubber stamps, and stolen stationery, they illustrate the lengths to which the RUF leadership went to legitimate in writing their ‘revolution’. Like the state it mimicked, there was a significant gap in the RUF between formal de jure institutions and procedures, and the informal de facto modes of power. The paper identifies three key theoretical implications of the untold story of rebel bureaucracy. It identifies the close connection between internal and external governance in rebellion, and the fluid boundary between combatant and civilian, vis-à-vis how they are engaged by armed organizations. It demonstrates how bureaucratic documentation of war-making serves to legitimate and quite literally rubber stamp the ‘banality of evil’. Finally, the gap between the ideal power structures and flows set up by RUF leadership, and the real modes and mechanisms of power, provides a guide to understanding violence in the Sierra Leone civil war and the failures of the state itself.

Lane Paul / Uppsala University

Migrations, Dissonance and Unsettled History: Bridging Disciplinary Divides and Integrating Material, Oral, Linguistic and Biological Data

A common feature of many of the indigenous oral traditions documented by the first generation of historians of pre-colonial Africa is the emphasis they place on the migration of different distinctly bounded ethnic groups, or ‘tribes’, from an idealised homeland. Early archaeological approaches to the use of oral and linguistic data on ‘tribal’ migration histories tried to use these literal guides to the likely location of settlements associated with different phases of an ethno-linguistic diaspora. Subsequently, for both methodological and theoretical reasons archaeologists became sceptical of ever identifying discrete ethnic groups from material evidence alone, and disengaged from interaction with their historian colleagues. This paper seeks to bridge this divide, through the development of an integrative approach to understanding migration histories, based on the concept of ‘un-settlement’. Using case material from eastern Africa that draws on a combination of archaeological, linguistic, historical and biological data sets, the notion of ‘un-settlement’ is explored from three perspectives. First, that history is as much about moving on as about settling down; secondly, dissonance between sources means this history is always ‘unsettled’ (i.e. unresolved);and finally, in its telling and in its enactment history can be unsettling, i.e. emotionally or psychologically disturbing, making its construction and reproduction a political act.

MacDonald Kevin C. / University College London – Institute of Archaeology

Interweaving Traditions in Segou: the case of Ton Masa

Since 2005, a multi-disciplinary team has worked on the pre-colonial past of the Segou region. Its research and publications have illustrated how oral historical, archival and archaeological narratives can be interwoven to form a fresh vision of Africa’s past. This communication will begin by briefly discussing the foundations and key results of ‘Projet Segou,’ an ‘historic geography’ of the Segou state (c. 1700-1861), as well as our current research in the same region concerning the epoch of imperial Mali. However, the focus of this presentation will be upon the mysterious Ton Masa – the first post Coulibaly Dynasty ruler of the Segou state. Ton Masa is a figure who has been largely edged out of contemporary griotic accounts, but yet is still vital in local historic traditions, rich in associated archaeological vestiges and tantalizingly touched upon in a single Arabic source. This case serves as a means to examine the tension and potentialities between the different his torical lines of evidence available to the historical anthropologist/ archaeologist and pre-colonial historian.

Bostoen Koen / Ghent University (UGent) – Université Libre de Bruxelles

Clist Bernard-Olivier / Ghent University (UGent)

Historical Archaeology of the Kongo Kingdom: New Insights from the Lower Congo Province (DRC)

The history of the Kongo Kingdom has been more thoroughly studied than that of any other polity or region in Central Africa, even if still very little is known about its origins and history before the arrival of Europeans in 1482. Thanks to its early contacts with Europe and the wealth of historical testimonies this yielded for the past 500 years, the Kongo represents an excellent test case for both historical archaeology and linguistics. Since 2012, the inter-university KongoKing project team is carrying out joint archaeological and historical linguistic research in order to better understand the origins of the Kongo Kingdom as well as to examine its unifying role in language and culture in the wider region. Archaeological research has concentrated so far on the Inkisi River basin in the eastern part of the Lower Congo Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This valley hosted several of the major centers of activity during the Kongo kingdom and the capitals of the three major northern and eastern provinces. Informed by a large and unique body of historical sources, large-scale excavations have been carried out on two sites in the East of the Lower Congo Province, each linked with one of the former provincial capitals of the Kongo kingdom, i.e. Kindoki (05°04’069 S; 15°01’403 E; for the Nsundi province) and Ngongo Mbata (05°47’081 S; 15°07’026 E; for the Mbata province). Both sites are particularly challenging from the point of historical archaeology.

Pennec Hervé / CNRS – IMAF-Aix

Ramos Manuel João / CEI – IUL Lisboa

“La colle ne prend pas toujours”
 entre l’archéologie, l’histoire et l’anthropologie à Gondar (Ethiopie)

On pourrait dire que l’anthropologie, l’histoire et l’archéologie seraient faites pour s’entendre, prêtes à se donner la main, pour donner une lecture intelligible sur un espace relativement localisé, comme, par exemple, celui de Azazo, un site près de Gondar (ancienne capitale du royaume chrétien éthiopien) tout cela, grâce à la dimension pluridisciplinaire.En fait, ce qui semble aller de soi à première vue demande réflexion, car l’apparente fluidité de la relation entre les champs disciplinaires et la priorité du débat intellectuel se trouvent trop souvent captifs non seulement des barrières discursives, conceptuelles et épistémologiques disciplinaires difficiles à transposer, étant donné qu’elles s’adressent à des publics somme toutes différents. Mais surtout, les contraintes extérieures à la recherche la conditionnent parfois de manière inadmissible, car elle est soumise à des pressions politiques, des points de vues et idéologies nationalistes, voire “ethnicistes” ainsi qu‘à des obligations financières et logistiques. Nous souhaitons présenter, à travers cette communication, les difficultés concrètes rencontrées à l’occasion de travaux menés conjointement, pour réfléchir sur les façons de les surmonter et voir plus clairement les enjeux avec lesquels on doit tenir compte pour la réalisation de programmes de travail interdisciplinaires, pour la production d’une connaissance intelligible et pour donner du sens pour les chercheurs des disciplines qui y sont impliqués.

Bosc-Tiessé Claire / CNRS – IMAF-Paris

What is the Past of Ethiopia? Or How Does History Meet (or Not) Archaeology (and The Reverse)

Excavé dans le rocher sous le niveau du sol, les tailles successives ayant remodelé les monuments et effacé les restes les plus anciens, le complexe rupestre de Lalibela présente un défi pour les archéologues comme pour les historiens confrontés, eux, à l’extrême rareté des textes. Les recherches pluridisciplinaires menées depuis 2005 ont tout d’abord permis de reconsidérer les différentes temporalités dont le site relève, et non pas seulement la fin du XIIe et le premiers tiers du XIIIe siècle, l’époque du souverain qui lui a donné son nom, mais aussi les contextes que l’archéologie et l’histoire retracent. Au-delà du constat que, si elles se croisent parfois, elles donnent surtout à voir des facettes différentes d’un monde complexe, leur confrontation interroge les questions posées, le choix des objets étudiés, les méthodes mises en œuvre comme leurs enjeux propres. S’il ne s’agit pas de nous interroger spécifiquement sur les résultats obtenus, les questions et les réponses que s’adressent tour à tour les deux disciplines permettent de revenir sur ce que nous donnons à lire des sociétés du passé.

Okunade Michael Adeyinka / Obafemi Awolowo University

Fajuyigbe Michael Olusegun /  Obafemi Awolowo University

Censorship of Public Art in Ibadan Metropolis

In recent times, attention has being given to aesthetics of the built environment in Nigeria, and public arts have been explored to enhance environmental aesthetics in the country. This paper examines the role of Art Censorship Board in Oyo State with respect to the commission, creation, installation, and maintenance of public arts at the major junctions and roundabouts in Ibadan metropolis. Data for the study comprises field work, and a critical analysis of the data will be carried out using ideological art criticism to assert that all arts support some particular political agenda, cultural structure, and class hierarchy. Findings show that most of the public arts—epic works in particular—are abused, wrongly cited, and of substandard quality, due to negligence on the part of the board and its inability to determine the concept and location of the works. It also reveals insensitivity and visual illiteracy on the part of the public. The paper concludes that cthe ensorship board should collaborate with other stakeholders, such as the Society of Nigerian Artists and the National Commission for Museum and Monuments, as regulating bodies to ensure an aesthetically pleasing environment.

M. Rufino Valente Rita / UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance

Stakeholder Tensions at Mindelact Festival, Cape Verde

Mindelact is a non-profit, non-governmental international theater festival, which happens yearly in Mindelo (Cabo Verde). The festival was founded in 1995, with a local scope; since 1997, however, the festival opened its stage to European, African, and South American artists as well. For Mindelact’s organizers, the longevity of the festival is due to the volunteer work of staff and artists (what the artistic director, João Branco, calls an “economy of affects”), along with the sponsorship of the Cabo Verdean Ministry of Culture, the Municipality of Mindelo, and local businesses. In this paper, I examine the involvement of the Cabo Verdean Ministry of Culture and international institutions in the organizing of Mindelact. I will zoom into two occasions from Mindelact 2013: the 1st Meeting of Performing Arts Curators, organized by Mindelact in partnership with the Ministry of Culture; and the closing night, which included the performance of a Macanese theater company, followed by a diplomatic ceremony involving Macanese, Chinese, and Cabo Verdean dignitaries. Based on these episodes, I will discuss how organizers grapple with the need to partner with governmental and international institutions to make their project feasible, vis a vis the urge of keeping an artistic autonomy. I also debate how those institutional partnerships impact the relations of power between the board members of Associação Mindelact, who are theater artists themselves, and their local theater community.

Ola Abayomi / Spelman College

Censorship & Sponsorship of Political Cartooning in Nigeria 1970-1990

This paper examines state censorship and sponsorship of editorial cartoonists in postcolonial Nigeria between 1970 and 1990. Due to the country’s checkered post-colonial history, newspaper artists worked in a complex field of patronage. They practiced within two broadly different types of government (democracy and dictatorship) and different types of media institution (privately-owned and government-owned). Unlike the Western syndication system whereby freelance publication artists are syndicated through a major, usually independent, organization, Nigerian newspapers primarily employ cartoonists in-house or contract them directly as freelancers. Nigerian newspapers are rarely free of intrusion from the government and their proprietors, who may be government beneficiaries, whether under the military or democratic, civilian rule. This paper focuses on the works of such prominent cartoonists of the period as Kenny Adamson, Tayo Fatunla, Bisi Ogunbadejo, Josy Ajiboye, dele jegede, and Boye Gbenro. These artists deployed cutting lines and freshly sharpened wits to transform editorial cartooning in Nigerian dailies, despite ina media landscape challenged by systemic censorship. This paper employs interviews, case studies, and analyses of cartoons to show the effects of censorship

Cohen Joshua Irwin / Columbia University

Revisiting Senghor’s “École de Dakar”: Transnational Dimensions to Senegalese Modern Art, 1960-1980

In 1960, Léopold Sédar Senghor—poet, statesman, and co-founder of the broadly pan-Africanist Negritude movement in Paris—became president of the Republic of Senegal.  As president, Senghor devoted considerable resources to culture and the arts, giving rise to a state-trained cadre of artists known as the “École de Dakar.”  To date, scholars have read the “École” as an outgrowth of Senghor’s Negritude philosophy retooled as nation-building ideology.  This paper, based on extensive research in Senegal, argues differently that the much-discussed national character of the École was in fact transnational in scope and ambition: Senegalese modernism combined European media with local and pan-African themes and aesthetics; influential figures at national art institutions received training in Europe; and Senghor’s culture ministries pursued international forums for Senegalese art.  Overall, Senghor sponsored visual modernism not so much to galvanize the Senegalese masses as to project an image of a fully modern Africa around the world.  Significantly, Senghor may have also conceived of the École to advance, through arts and culture, his longstanding yet ultimately thwarted political dream of an African federation (as opposed to “balkanized” nation-states mirroring colonial territories) existing within both a global diasporan community and a Franco-African coalition valuing black cultural contributions.

Hill Shannen / Arts Council of the African Studies Association

Wearing War, Silencing Soldiers: Art, the Body, and Recovered Histories in South Africa

Every war has its unknown soldiers, but the histories of some are recovered in visual form. This paper examines how two South African artists, Paul Emmanuel (b. 1969) and Colin Richards (1954-2012), used their bodies to bring light to histories of their nation’s part in wars in Mozambique and Angola that South Africa either denied or dismissed, effectively censoring their existence from the public. Emmanuel’s Lost Men Mozambique (2007) is one of five in a multinational project. Considered memorials, the installations challenge our understanding of such sanctified, state-sponsored sites since everything about them is temporary: Names of forgotten soldiers pressed into Emmanuel’s skin eventually fade, as do the silk and organza banners that record his performance and hang for fixed periods on battlefields. Mozambique censored its war records by sealing them, prompting the artist to emboss Unknown Soldier onto his skin. Further, officials required him to remove two banners it deemed offensive. Richards’s Angola 1976 and Invalid Cup Series (both 1997) are conceptual works that engage notions of truth, both realized through the artist’s body. Angola 1976 includes relics of South Africa’s involvement in that secretive war; Invalid Cup Series retraced Richards’s experience as a conscripted soldier and, in a quiet daily ritual, enacted the title of the work, for “invalid” means defective in the sense of infirm or helpless, but it also means erroneous or untrue.

Kohlhagen Dominik / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany

Everyday Land Conflicts in Burundi: Searching for Meaning

In Burundi, recent reform projects related to land have mainly focused on the registration of non-contested land rights. Outside the very specific context of returning refugees, very little attention is currently given to the resolution of already existing conflicts. Yet land conflicts account for more than 70 % of court cases and frequently remain unresolved. Most land disputes today do not occur between different ethnic or social groups, but between neighbors and members of the same family. Many of these conflicts tend to degenerate into violence at some point. As the proposed paper will show, the difficulty to resolve every-day land conflicts peacefully actually reveals a deep socio-cultural crisis. On basis of legal court records and ethnographic fieldwork, the paper shows the complexity of land conflicts in Burundi and relates them to an almost generalized lack of socially accepted rules regulating land tenure. Tracing the changes to the ancient system of land administration under the Burundian monarchy, the paper highlights the progressive de-structuring of traditional checks and balances and questions the socials effect of recurring moments of political crisis, conflict and violence. It identifies the erosion of the ancient systems of meanings, values and beliefs as a key factor for the absence of socially-binding norms. Without explicitly addressing this general crisis, current reform projects are very unlikely to defuse the highly problematic situation.

Hennings Anne / University of Muenster

Post-war Land Governance in Sierra Leone: What Implications for Conflict Transformation and Peace?

In the aftermath of war land governance and reforms are crucial to rebuild peace. However, these configuration processes are highly contested. Likewise, war-induced displacement and the recent phenomenon of large-scale land commercialization remain major obstacles for successful land tenure reforms. Against this backdrop, the paper focusses on exclusion mechanisms, decentralization efforts and conflict risks of post-war land governance in Sierra Leone. Ranking among the top ten target countries, I raise the question how recent post-conflict land governance developments have facilitated large-scale land acquisitions for mining, agriculture or green purposes. Promising in terms of reconstruction and economic prosperity, this recent large-scale land commodification and related tenure changes may, however, pose unpredictable risks to livelihoods and long-term peace prospects – due to (anew) displacement and the unjust distribution of negative externalities and benefits. In this regard, I also consider post-war state-society relations and the impact of land-related development projects accelerated by various donors. Looking at different territorialization processes, I refer to post-structuralist assemblage thinking which allows an alternative perspective on vulnerable post-conflict societies with regard to tenure shifts and reconciliation. Drawing on findings from Sierra Leone, my paper places special emphasis on the impact of post-war land governance on peacebuilding efforts.

Leegwater Margot / African Studies Center, Leiden University

Land Reform and its Pitfalls in Southeastern Rwanda

Since it came into power after the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government has attempted to change the agricultural sector drastically in order to make agriculture contribute to national development. Important elements of a 2005/2013 Land Law are official land registration, crop specialization and land consolidation. Although these reforms aim to increase tenure and food security and diminish land conflicts, the opposite is happening, as will be shown with data from fieldwork in south-east Rwanda.
Adding to land-related insecurity and tensions is the fact that many Hutu peasants feel mistreated because of a 1996 land-sharing agreement and a villagization policy that made them loose land to returned Tutsi refugees. After the 2010 land registration, these land arrangements have become permanent, land conflicts have aggravated and grudges concerning land sharing often underlie these conflicts. Because of the existing perception of many Rwandans that the government engenders inequality and perpetuates ethnic cleavages, ethnicity remains an important feature in social relations. Together with an increasing interference in land management by a dominant and centralized government it is questionable whether the government is perceived as legitimate by Hutu and Tutsi alike. The risk of renewed violence, of which land could be a cause, is again present and is aggravated by an increase in land scarcity, poverty, lack of off-farm possibilities, and mounting frustration, anger and fear.

Tra Goin Lou Tina Virginie / Université Alassane Ouattara

Resurgence of land conflict in post-crisis in Côte d’Ivoire

L’objectif de cet exposé est de comprendre l’effet de la crise militaro-politique (2002-2011) sur l’exacerbation actuelle des conflits fonciers dans le Nord-Ouest de la Côte d’Ivoire. En effet, malgré les efforts consentis par le gouvernement ivoirien en vue de réguler les conflits fonciers de façon durable, ceux-ci gagnent en intensité depuis la fin la crise militaro-politique, révélant ainsi la dimension stratégique de la propriété foncière. Dans la Sous-préfecture de Tienko en particulier, consécutivement à la période de crise, on assiste à une résurgence des conflits fonciers inter villages ivoiriens d’une part, due au dépassement des limites octroyées par le village hôte en collaboration avec les rebelles aux migrants venus du Mali. Et d’autre part, des conflits inter villages ivoiriens/Maliens sur la délimitation des zones concédées. On enregistre par ailleurs plusieurs revendications des terres cédées aux migrants maliens depuis le retour à la normalité. Egalement, on note un échec des instances traditionnelles locales (chefs de village, notables et chefs de famille) de gestion des conflits, ce qui révèle des logiques d’intérêts diverses et une faiblesse des instances coutumières de règlements de conflits.

Justin Peter / African Studies Centre, Leiden University

van Leeuwen Mathijs / African Studies Centre, Leiden University; Centre for International Conflict Analysis & Management, Radboud University Nijmegen

The Geo-Politics of Displacement-Related Land Disputes in Yei River County, South Sudan

This paper explores the politics of land reclamation after violent conflict in Yei River County in South Sudan, and shows how war-related displacement and return come to promote particular geopolitical projects around land governance. While displacement is commonly seen to result in reshuffles in landownership, which need be ‘reversed’ in post-conflict settings, this paper argues that in practice, displacement may come down to a drastic reorganization of the institutions governing land. This makes displacement highly political, and not easily reversible. To make this argument, the paper explores interactions between returning landowners and internally displaced persons in Yei River County. While the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement stipulates restitution of land occupied by others in the absence of the pre-war owners as well as compensation of those that have to leave, in practice, many people perceive injustices in the restitution process. Due to grievances of the past and fears that the displaced might settle permanently, the displaced are perceived as perpetrators of land grabbing. Those with good connections to the military are able to circumvent legislation and overpower land governing authorities, while those without such connections are at the losing end. The de facto result is a new institutional order surrounding land, which puts at sharp relationships between returnees and displaced from elsewhere and creates potential for (violent) conflict in the future.

Vorhölter Julia / University of Göttingen

Homosexuality, Pornography and other “Modern Threats”: Mobilizing Sexuality in Discourses on Social Change in Uganda

This paper analyzes recent measures adopted by the Museveni government to discipline and regulate the sexuality of Ugandan citizens. The much-debated “anti-homosexuality bill” is only one of such attempts. Further examples include legal measures, which are related to AIDS, defilement, prostitution and pornography. I argue that this recent proliferation of discourses and laws on sexuality must be seen in relation to broader socio-cultural changes and power struggles. Drawing on Foucault and based on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how a) sexuality is instrumentalized in various local and international power struggles, b) discourses on sexuality infiltrate various spheres of social life, and c) the sexual conduct of the population is taken as a target for intervention by local authorities, state officials and international actors. In contemporary Uganda, the interconnection between sexuality and power, individual and population, and related political strategies to produce and counter change becomes especially evident in the above-mentioned societal discourses on homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, youth sexuality, women’s sexuality and pornography. All these discourses link various local and national crises to the changed and ‘uncontrolled’ sexual behavior of the Ugandan population and thus imply that a tighter control of these ‘threatening’ forms of sexuality is necessary to re-establish social order and stability.

Fichtmüller Anna / LAM, Sciences Po Bordeaux

“For God and my Country”: Religious Lobby Groups in Uganda and their Role in Policy Making

By signing the “Kill the Gays” Bill in February 2014, President Museveni has been seen as standing up against Western donor domination, or making a turn towards the East, embracing China as a new partner. Yet, following events have drawn a rather blurred picture of these analyses, with the supreme court outlawing the law on procedural grounds. This paper suggests to read the series of events around the bill not as a clear stance against Western domination, but rather as a balancing act by the president between public opinion, the power of religious institutions and Western agendas. Today, the religious sphere in Uganda has well institutionalized lobby groups which have influenced a number of other bills as well, like the domestic violence bill or the Anti-Pornography Act. The main denominations unite nearly 100% of the population behind them and possess a big mobilization power. The paper is based on interviews conducted during a three month research in Uganda in 2014 with representatives of the principal religious umbrella organizations and politicians. After presenting these groups, this contribution puts the lobbying in the broader context of the connections between religion and politics in Uganda, through analyzing their mobilization power during the debate on the bill. In conclusion the paper highlights their role as shapers of the moral discourse of the country, while also showing their limits in an increasingly authoritative environment.

Okeregbe Anthony / University of Lagos

Beyond Homophobia and Tolerance: The Guardian’s Logic of Anti-homosexuality Mobilisation

In recent years, influential media organizations in sub-Saharan Africa have been very vociferous in their mobilisations against homosexuality and gay rights campaigns. One of such media organizations is The Guardian, an independent, elitist, influential Nigerian newspaper. In selected recent editorials reacting to homosexual unions and gay rights, The Guardian elected to be in the vanguard of the anti-homosexuality mobilisations based on political and cultural grounds, despite its libertarian and people-oriented policy. While it recognizes the intrinsic worth of individuals and their right to sexual preferences, it invokes the Harm Principle and the law of cultural preservation to advance a simple argument: that homosexual unions and gay rights campaign, as being spearheaded by the west, are a cultural imposition and a subtle economic and political blackmail to undermine the sovereignty of African nations; and as such is alien to African culture. Against the backdrop of proposals supporting homosexual relationships, this paper critically analyses the argument adduced by The Guardian against homosexuality. It argues that the strength of The Guardian’s anti-gay campaign lies in its deployment of moral arguments derived from western intellectual tradition to effect a powerful cultural mobilisation. This is a far cry from the banal religious sentimentalism and naïve bandwagonism that characterize popular anti-gay mobilisations.

Leith Rian / University of Stellenbosch

“Corrective rape” and Extreme or Violent Anti-Homosexual Behaviour in South Africa: Sponsored or Spontaneous?

2014 marked 20 years of democracy in South Africa, following the historic multiracial elections of 1994. In 1996, a new Constitution was adopted, remarkable and lauded internationally – among other progressive characteristics – for its Bill of Rights, which forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation. South Africa became one of the first countries around the world, and indeed the first (and as yet only) country in Africa, to legalise same-sex marriage with the enactment of the Civil Union Act on 30 November 2006. However, despite these progressive developments, acceptance and tolerance of homosexuality remains worryingly low among large sections of the South African population. This paper examines the incidence of anti-homosexuality behaviour in South Africa against the backdrop of a spike in hate crimes targeting the LGBTI community in recent years, especially in the socio-economically underdeveloped townships and the widespread incidence of so-called ‘corrective rape’. Through the examination of quantitive and qualitative data, the paper aims to evaluate the extent to which extreme and violent anti-homosexual behaviour is prevalent; such behaviour is organised and/or mobilised, or whether it is the spontaneous consequence of a broader social and cultural conservatism at odds with constitutional progressivism. Finally the paper aims to explain the contradiction between law and practice, and explore ways in which this troubling tendency can be effectively countered.

Cross Charlotte / University of Northampton

Anti-homosexuality Mobilisation in the “Christian Nation” of Zambia

This paper explores reactions to attempts to establish a lesbian, gay and transgender rights advocacy organisation in Zambia. In 1998 the Zambian newspaper The Post featured an interview with the first Zambian to identify himself as gay in the national print media. The article and subsequent plans to register a non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender Person’s Association (LEGATRA), with Norwegian funding, provoked a national debate. Familiar claims concerning the alien nature of homosexuality within African culture also stressed Zambia’s constitutionally enshrined status as a ‘Christian nation’, and the obligations this placed on leaders to uphold a biblical version of morality. Zambia’s position within the global economic order informed anxiety regarding the extent of Western donor influence on Zambian society, in both cultural and material terms, and critics sought to discredit LEGATRA’s founders by representing their motives as the pursuit of private profit through access to donor funding. The paper explores these reactions in the context of a broader crisis of social reproduction in the context of the HIV and AIDS pandemic and Zambia’s implementation of neoliberal economic policies.

Petit Gitty / African Studies Centre Leiden/University of Amsterdam

Objects of Healing and Sexuality in Urban Dodoma, Tanzania

This paper explores middle class men and women-in their late twenties and thirties–and their knowledge and use of objects (such as amulets) to cure and protect themselves from illnesses while they are entering the reproductive phase in their life-cycle. Whereas they have access to bio-medical knowledge, the aim is to find out if and how these young adults use and receive information about certain healing objects in their daily lives and explore how they negotiate the tension between traditional healing and modern medicine in relation to reproduction. The research takes place in Dodoma, the small but upcoming capital of Tanzania with an emergent middle class from different origins.
Following amongst others Spronk (2006) and Miller & Parrott (2009), this paper looks at the realities of young adults, through (the stories about) objects used for both healing and sexual purposes, but also looks at healing and sexuality in the middle class through the lens of the usage of such objects. This, in relation to the use and knowledge of stories of objects, is a new way of looking at the middle class and will combine medical anthropology and material culture.
An important concept in this paper is mobility. The middle income class is mobile in both a geographical and economic sense while there is also a mobility of these healing and protective objects. The assumption is that both the objects and the middle income class people are not only local, but that they cross several boundaries.

Valois Caroline / University of Edinburgh

Gaining Girl Power: Sexuality, Gender and Social Differentiation in Ugandan Pentecostalism

In recent years the rapid growth of Ugandan Pentecostalism, has worked to not only redefine the nation’s religious landscape but also the way individual converts publicly distinguish themselves. Of all the Pentecostal Churches in Kampala Miracle Centre proves the largest and most economically sound, and directly caters to more economically mobile women through its sub-ministry ‘Girl Power’. Begun by Pastor Jessica Kayanja, the wife of Miracle Centre’s founder, Jessica embodies Girl Power’s public vision of female sexuality, representing a near Platonic truth of what has become the Girl Power woman. This paper examines the case of Girl Power to understand how sexuality is discussed and reinvented within Ugandan Pentecostalism. As consumptive habits are encouraged the ladies of Girl Power are instructed to ‘dress for their men’, invest in beauty and fashion, and maintain a healthy diet. At Girl Power beauty, sexuality and femininity are paths to a fulfilled life, happy marriage, and the direct result of a healthy relationship with God. Following religious conversion women are encouraged to make their sexuality public, as an infusion of the Divine has rendered sexuality a sacred tool necessary for procuring a happy life. Encouraging a focus on the self, women are urged to investment in the physical, reconfiguring the juncture between the public and private, while rendering new consumptive habits and markers of social stratification among the women of Girl Power.

Sieveking Nadine / Centre for Area Studies, Universität Leipzig

Performing the emotional habitus of new urban middle classes –intimacy on stage in West African contemporary choreography

The success of contemporary art from Africa on international stages has provoked an ongoing debate about the power differentials shaping the relations between artists on the continent and donors in the global North. In how far contemporary artistic practice is also shaped by as well as contributing to social differentiation and new inequalities within African societies, by contrast, has not received much attention so far. Focusing on contemporary dance pieces by West African choreographers staging the intimacy of urban women’s life-worlds, my paper examines how these performances relate to the transformation and stratification processes of local societies. Following Illouz (2008), I interpret the way in which such works are publicly exposing aspects of gender relations and sexuality that usually remain hidden to the public as adoption of a ‘global emotional habitus’ (ibid.: 220). The latter marks a form of social distinction characteristic for new urban middle classes. It is based on a ‘therapeutic’ model of communication that helps to cope with the increasing complexity and normative uncertainty of modern lives, while questioning traditional hierarchies and ideals of masculinity. I argue that this habitus is part of the competences characterizing the professional community of contemporary choreographers who have ‘made it’ on international stages and reflects the values of a specific middle class cosmopolitanism brought forward in their work.

Neveu Kringelbach Hélène / University of Oxford

“Marrying out” for love: middle-class women’s narratives of polygyny and alternative marriage choices in Senegal

This contribution examines the ways in which youth experiences of living in polygynous households shape the life aspirations and marriage choices of middle-class, Muslim Senegalese women. In contrast to an enduring popular discourse according to which Senegalese women live happily with polygyny, this paper shows how some Senegalese women’s choice to marry European men is explicitly linked, in many cases, to family narratives and personal experiences of polygyny. In these narratives, women’s suffering and compromised educational trajectories are interpreted as consequences of polygyny.
Anthropological studies of polygyny in Africa have analyzed the institution from the perspective of a dominance of elder over junior men, as a domestic mode of production or through African ideals of sexuality and reproduction. Polygyny is thus examined as a coherent system, and people’s experiences are rarely taken into account. This paper departs from these analyses by looking at women’s experience and agency in the domain of sexuality, intimacy and family. I suggest that the women’s narratives serve to provide moral legitimacy to alternative marriage choices, and to act as mark of differentiation as educated, modern citizens. The paper draws on fieldwork in urban Senegal since 2002 and on interviews carried out with Senegalese women and their family members in Senegal, France and the UK since 2011.

Edoh Amah / M.I.T.

Dressing the body, picturing luxury: Dutch Wax cloth advertising campaigns and imagining “The New Africa”

This paper discusses the conception and production of an advertising campaign for Dutch Wax cloth (“wax hollandais”)—a variety of the textile colloquially known as “African print” or “pagne.” Designed and manufactured in Holland for West and Central African markets since the late 19th century, Dutch Wax cloth has long been integrated in processes of social reproduction in these regions. In Togo, for instance, the cloth is regarded as part of Togolese cultural heritage, and is historically worn and gifted to celebrate births, weddings, funerals, and other important occasions.

As part of efforts to rebrand itself from a fabric manufacturer for Africa to a global luxury brand, the Dutch Wax cloth manufacturer, Vlisco, started launching four collections annually in 2006, each with a coordinated print, television, and web-based advertising campaign. The glamorous images feature black female models showcasing elaborate fashion looks cut from Dutch Wax cloth, in poses reminiscent of couture campaigns. This paper examines one such advertising campaign, analyzing its images and how they are brought into being. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork tracing a collection of Dutch Wax cloth from design to advertising to selling and using–from Holland to Togo–the paper considers the mise-en-scène of dress and the body in Vlisco’s imaging and imagining of luxury for Africa.

Prowse Martin Philip / University of Copenhagen

Agribusiness and accumulation: How does cotton contract farming influence peasant differentiation in Mara Region, Tanzania?

Large agribusiness firms frequently outsource production to peasants on customary land through contract farming. By this way outgrowers can increase the reliability of supply quantity (and, on occasion, quality). More importantly, outsourcing off-loads production risk onto peasants. On a broader note, where access to land is highly politicised, contract farming can overcome land constraints. This paper focuses on cotton contract farming and peasant resistance in Mara Region, Tanzania. The cotton sector in Tanzania experiences severe difficulties due to very high default rates on inputs (mainly seed and pesticides) provided by ginneries. The focus of this paper is on the composition and patterns of accumulation within the Farmer Business Groups (FBGs) the cotton
ginneries work with. Firstly, the paper describes the basic characteristics of eight FBGs surveyed in November/December 2014. Secondly, through utilising survey data on how inputs provided by the data were diverted to favoured members of the FBGs, the paper compares the characteristics of the ‘elite’ members of FBGs to the remaining members. We discuss if this contract farming scheme is increasing differentiation within smallholder communities and increasing community-level inequality. We also discuss if the contract farming scheme is changing labour market dynamics for poorer households. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of agribusiness penetration of rural regions in sub-Saharan Africa.

Som I Joseph Désiré / Institut de Recherches sur le Maghreb Contemporain(IRMC), Tunisia

Des mobilisations paysannes vers la révolution tunisienne : histoire d’un apprentissage des savoir-faire protestataires.

Notre communication vise à mettre en lumière les modes de résistance des petits paysans tunisiens qui constituent une part importante de la main d’œuvre salarié des grandes exploitations agricoles en Tunisie d’une part, et la manière dont leurs mobilisations collectives, qui précèdent la première phase du processus révolutionnaire (décembre 2010-14 janvier 2011), servent de lieux d’apprentissage et de diffusion des savoir-faire protestataires d’autre part.
Effet, suite à l’adoption, au milieu des années 1980, des programmes d’ajustement structurel, la Tunisie connaît d’importants changements dans ses politiques agricoles. Un grand nombre de petits exploitants décident de s’endetter auprès de banques pour agrandir leur exploitation afin de la rendre rentable, en même temps que d’autres membres de leur famille dont parfois eux-mêmes complètent les revenus du ménage par un travail salarié saisonnier ou permanent. Incapable de rembourser leurs prêts, de plus en plus de petits exploitants sont expropriés par les banques qui revendent les terres ainsi acquises aux grandes exploitations. C’est alors que s’organise une résistance par la mise en route de différentes mobilisations collectives entre 2008-2010. Les répertoires d’action sont essentiellement protestataires : occupation des terres agricoles, manifestations de rues, saccages des bâtiments administratifs.

Borrell Thomas / CREG, Université Grenoble Alpes

Abe Gaëlle Michèle / Université Yaoundé 2

Between mobilisations of trade unions, claims of NGOs, Fairtrade labellisation and large social protests : analysing recent improvements in cameroonian banana agro-industry working conditions

Au Cameroun, l’exportation de bananes a connu une forte croissance depuis les années 90, parallèlement à une restructuration importante. La filière, désormais concentrée sur une entreprise publique et une société présentée comme le premier employeur privé du pays, génère fréquemment des controverses liées aux droits humains. En réponse, la société privée communique sur sa politique volontariste et publie depuis 2011 un rapport annuel de Responsabilité Sociale des Entreprises (RSE) sur ses démarches dont certaines reposent sur des cahiers des charges, au niveau environnemental mais désormais aussi social (Fair Trade, depuis 2013).
Cette communication, après avoir rappelé la faiblesse des protections réglementaires, cherchera à caractériser les déterminants de l’évolution récente des conditions de travail dans l’entreprise privée. L’analyse descriptive reposera sur une enquête quantitative réalisée en 2013, comparée aux données disponibles sur la même entreprise en 2003 et sur l’entreprise publique en 2012 et 2014. La discussion, en s’intéressant aux pratiques syndicales, aux déclarations patronales, aux publications des ONG et des médias et à la conflictualité avec la population locale, montrera que les améliorations constatées peuvent être analysées comme une stratégie de réponse managériale et de relégitimation face à la médiatisation croissante de la critique sociale et à la menace directe sur les investissements de l’entreprise lors d’émeutes populaires en 2008.

Vadot Guillaume / Université Paris 1

La plantation industrielle comme espace social conflictuel, de la tension quotidienne aux mobilisations collectives. Réflexion autour de deux exemples camerounais.

La présente communication vise à rendre compte de deux terrains de recherche sur les plantations industrielles Sosucam (canne à sucre) et Hévécam (hévéa), au Cameroun, et à tenter une caractérisation de l’espace social particulier qu’elles constituent. La plantation a de longue date constitué un objet de discussions théoriques, sur son rôle dans le développement ou la dépendance des pays du Sud, le rapport à l’agriculture familiale, ou encore le laboratoire qu’elle constitue sur le plan des identités, des formes de pouvoir ou encore d’autorité. La vague d’investissements dans l’agro-industrie sur le continent africain depuis le milieu des années 2000 permet aujourd’hui de rouvrir cette discussion à partir de données renouvelées.
Sur la base d’une enquête ethnographique et d’entretiens qualitatifs notamment avec la main d’oeuvre qui forme ces concentrations salariées, l’attention se focalisera sur la façon dont les antagonismes sociaux liés à la production en plantation configurent un espace social traversé par un fort niveau de conflictualité et de fortes tensions. Pour cela, nous explorerons aussi bien la vie sociale quotidienne, à travers l’habitat, les déplacements, les stratégies économiques des ménages, que les épisodes de crise que nous avons pu documenter, grèves ou émeutes de ces dernières années.

Orji Nkwachukwu / Institute for Development Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria & Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Research Fellow GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies Hamburg, Germany

Role of Faith-Based Organizations in Delivering Aid to People Affected by Conflict: A Study of the Experience of Communities in Jos, Nigeria

This paper examines the ways in which faith-based organizations (FBOs) implement humanitarian assistance for internally displaced people in Jos, a city in north-central Nigeria that has become a hotbed of sectarian violence over the last fifteen years. The case study of Jos is particularly pertinent because it contributes to our understanding of the governance mechanisms of non-state humanitarian assistance and how FBOs negotiate the provision of humanitarian services to conflict-affected communities where they are also protagonists in the conflict. The paper explores two methods of faith based aid – the faith-centred approach, which is particularistic, providing support first or solely, to the FBO’s faith community, and universalistic approach which considers all members of the community who require aid in aid-giving. The paper argues based on the Jos case that the adoption of these approaches is determined by the structure of FBOs’ relief operations, sources of funding, and nature of services on offer. The paper argues that while the universalistic approach is preferred by liberal scholars, donors and development practitioners, the faith-centred approach possesses some advantages that should be considered. In conclusion, the paper notes that although most FBOs in Jos adopt a faith-centred approach to aid giving, the structures of inter-faith partnership in aid-giving are beginning to emerge.

Iwuamadi kelechi / Institute for Development Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka

The Politics of Internally Displace Persons in the North-Eastern Nigeria: A Prognosis Analysis of Boko Haram Insurgency, 2007 – 2014

The spread of Boko Haram insurgency in the north-eastern Nigeria has been linked to ethnic, religious and political dimensions. When it started, Boko Haram was almost seen as entirely ethnically homogenous being led and sustained by Kanuri youths. Later, there were strong indicatiosn that it has succeeded in recruiting a reasonable number of people from other ethnic groups into its fold. Another school of thought said it has to do with Islamic youth however, what is more worrisome here is that their victims are more Muslims than any other religion. There other perception that it is politically driven particularly by the oppositions to the government at the central level. The irony here also is that the sub-national level particularly in the northeast is more affected that the national or central level. What is clear from the rise of Boko Haram is that the counter insurgency measures of the government, the political class, and the non-state actors like religious and ethnic leaders, has failed in quelling the rebellion. This perhaps has resulted to the daily increase in the number of internally displaced persons within the region. It is therefore against this backdrop that the paper seeks to examine if there are there ethno-religious and political dimensions of insurgency and activities of Boko Haram as it affects the management of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the North East geopolitical zone of Nigeria?

Ugwuanyi Onyeka Romanus / Institute for Development Studies, University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus

Aid Without Strings? An Examination of Faith Based Organisations Assistance to Selected Internally Displaced Persons Camps in Nigeria

Internally displaced persons are people displaced by wars, erosion, conflicts or boundary disputes. Different organizations and agencies always show interest to come to the aid of the displaced persons for aids.. The rescue group ranges from governmental, nongovernmental and faith-based organizations, which includes Christian and Muslim groups. Certain issues are yet not clear about the strategies employed by these organizations in their aid mission considering the heterogeneous nature of the IDPs, UN guiding principles and the mission of the faith based organizations. Is the Aid without string? The researcher made use of information gathered from respondents comprising Muslim men/women IDP’s and Christian men/women IDP’s of both native and non-natives of the region of conflict. Data was analyzed using the UN guidelines as a bench mark.
This work investigated and discusses the strategies of FBOs, its sharing formula which mostly was according to the attendant or pressing needs of the IDPS not faith.
The paper is justified against the background of few empirical studies of IDP’s in Nigeria specifically within purview of the United Nations guiding principles on internal displacement.
Recommendations for better responses to the distribution and management of IDP’s needs were also given for the use of relevant governmental, non –governmental and faith based organizations.

Lalbahadur Aditi / South African Institute of African Affairs

The regional and continental dimensions of dispute resolution stemming from border dispute between Malawi and Tanzania

Malawi and Tanzania have peacefully disagreed over the demarcation of their riparian border since both countries achieved independence in the 1960s. This peace was threatened when in 2012 when discoveries of oil reserves in the northern extremities of the lake revived interest in resolving the issue. According to the global norm of subsidiarity, resolution of the issue ought to have been referred to the SADC Tribunal. However at the time, the body was placed under a moratorium pending a regional review of its mandate, rendering the ICJ the next most appropriate court. However, a prevailing commitment to regionalism by both parties has resulted in some innovative thinking on how to go about adjudicating the issue in the absence of the Tribunal. While the Forum for Former African Heads of State and Government (a non-SADC entity) has been the principal mediating body, the involvement of AU Border Programme (an arm of the PSC) has added a continental dimension to the resolution of the dispute. The focus of this paper is the emergence of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms brought about by this unique situation. The central hypothesis is that the case study illustrates that an African commitment to forging indigenous solutions to African problems embodied in the Renaissance, reflects a normative shift towards greater responsibility for peace and security. It will also provide pragmatic synergies between the AU and RECs on dispute resolution.

Emmanuel Nikolas / Centre for Resolution of International Conflict, Dept. of PoliticalScience, University of Copenhagen

What are the options? Adding incentive strategies to manage African crisis

This study examines the potential offered by soft power options to manage intrastate conflict in Africa. It asks if peace and security efforts embarked on by the AU in 2002 can be complemented with by what is referred to here as an incentives approach (Rothchild and Emmanuel, 2010). Applications of hard power alone are not feasible solutions in many cases. That said, a variety of non-coercive and coercive incentives exist that can be deployed to help third parties deal with crises. Such incentive strategies aim to prevent and de-escalate conflict by encouraging political bargaining. The clear objective of these approaches is to shift the behaviour of targeted actors away from violent conflict and towards more peaceful interactions. Indeed, a good deal of unexplored opportunities exist in using incentives and soft power options to manage conflict. This research has very practical objectives which are three fold. First, it is important to further the discussion concerning how African organizations and states (while working with extra-continental actors) can help prevent / de-escalate conflicts and protect vulnerable peoples before the emergence of wide-spread violence. This will be done by producing a typology of the available incentive strategies. Finally, an incentives approach to conflict management and its emphasis on non-military strategies is an important part of the desire of many to have inexpensive and nonintrusive foreign policy tools to confront these situations.

Mandrup Thomas / Royal Danish Defence College

The EASF – Real regional integration in East Africa

The EASF was by the end of 2014 deployed fully operational, one year ahead of that deadline set out by the AU. However, what does fully operational mean and entail? The East African region is characterized by heterogeneous units and by being conflict ridden. Historically the region has been plagued by both the overlay of the Cold war actors resulting in rivalry and intrastate wars, e.g. the conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia in the 1970’s. The end of the Cold war left a security void, and the fragility, and in some instances collapse, of the state structures resulted in new state formations and new conflicts. However, conflicts and security challenges in East Africa are due to amongst other things porous borders, fragile states and bad governance, regional in nature, and cannot be solved by the individual states alone. Regional institutions have been in a weak position dealing with these challenges, and attempts have been to strengthen the capacity of these regional institutions. This paper investigates the attempts setting up often competing regional security institutions in the Greater Horn of Africa, and asks if fragile states are capable of creating strong security institutions and effectively handling regional peace and security challenges? Will the EASF within this context be able to be function as an effective tool in regional conflict prevention and management.

Revillon Jeremy / Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Amour (UPPA), Les Afrique dans le monde (LAM)

Comparative analysis of the regional brigades of the African Standby Force

The African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) should enter in a new phase in 2015 with the declaration of implementation of the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crisis (ACIRC) and the African Standby Force (ASF). Having been delayed several times since the beginning of the process in 2002, the procedure has speeded up in 2014. A common exercise was run on the continental level in November which should lead to the establishment of the ACIRC’s full capacity during the summit of the African Union in January 2015. The ASF should be ready at latest in 2015 with the last common exercise (Amani Africa 2) planned for spring.
Two regions have already declared the full capacity of their standby forces at the end of 2014: the Force Multinationale d’Afrique Centrale (FOMAC) has certified its emergency deployment capability during an exercise conducted in October in Congo-Brazzaville. The East African Standby Force (EASF) has also declared itself fully operational in November. These announcements, even if they mark a symbolic and important step, should not mask a contrasted reality: difficulties which have been identified long ago remain, notably the dependence on external funding arrangements, for the standby forces as well as for the forces deployed in operation. In the coming years external supports will remain essential to consolidate African capacities, especially regarding to the problem that no state has yet the ability to stand as a strong African military power.

Döring Katharina / Centre for Area Studies, University of Leipzig

Rapid military deployment beyond ASF

The African Standby Force (ASF) is envisioned as a multidimensional force comprising military, police and civilian elements to provide an appropriate tool for various conflict situations. The ASF also includes a Rapid Deployment Capability (RDC). Reaching the full operational capacity was planned for 2010, but is now delayed until the end of 2015. The African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crisis (ACIRC) is an interim measure for rapid military action. It was conceived after the inability of the AU to swiftly deploy troops to Mali in 2012.
Both the ASF and the ACIRC interface with the same political and administrative institutions, such as the AU Commission, the Specialised Technical Committee on Defense, Security and Safety (STCDSS) or the Peace and Security Department (PSD).
In this way they present an interesting case to examine how the AU accommodates different developments within the same policy domain. How are these distinct military tools related to one another? Which effect do they have on each others implementation (or prior conceptualisation)? The proposed paper will investigate how AU organs deal with these different initiatives. The question of “coordination and harmonisation” will be addressed on the basis of qualitative research at the AU archive.

Pedro Joana / Independent

Megaprojects as the new actors of spatial planning in Mozambique

Mozambique achieved an impressive average of 7.2% economic growth during the last decade, which positioned the country as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. This growth is due to various factors, one of them being the investment in megaprojects in the country. Parallel to the economic growth the urban population has grown tenfold in the last decade. To cope with this, significant activity in housing and urban development has been initiated. While traditional approaches to planning have always been led by the public sector and have included the public provision of infrastructure, in the last decade, new urban development and infrastructure provisions have become less a matter of state planning and have been far more dominated by private-sector interests. The regions of Tete and Palma are two of these examples. In Tete the discovery of one of the largest reserves of coal has led to a process of mass resettlement, performed primarily by the mining operators in the region. In Palma the oil&gas companies are preparing the resettlement of hundreds of people to enable the development of the base of the liquified natural gas operations for the fast evolving offshore Mozambique natural gas industry. Although in partnership with the state, these megaprojects have become the new basis for spatial planning of the regions. This article aims to understand the impacts of this phenomenon, through the case studies of the Tete and Palma region.

Meth Paula / Department of Town Planning, University of Sheffield

Charlton Sarah / School of Architecture and Planning, Wits University

Men’s experiences of state sponsored housing in South Africa: emerging issues and key questions

In South African cities, millions have lived in informal housing for decades. Men in these contexts liken their situation to animals, revealing the hardships of squatting (Meth, 2009). Yet significant material changes are now occurring in these cities through the state-directed provision of 3 million formal houses to poor beneficiaries. This intervention is significantly reshaping residents’ daily lives (Charlton, 2013), their economic prospects and their sense of self. In turn, residents are re-working the housing to better suit needs. The state programme is innovative in its targeting of beneficiaries with dependants, where over half are women (Pieterse, 2014), suggesting patterns of ownership are likely to impact on men, their household power, control over resources and access to employment. This is occurring alongside the continued significance of the home for many men’s sense of authority and identity. Indications are that men’s experience of this housing intervention is diverse, complex and likely to illuminate wider social issues and structures, illustrating the connections between material urban change and social processes. This paper considers research by Paula Meth and Sarah Charlton on social outcomes of housing interventions for men in the cities of Durban and Johannesburg respectively, focusing on emerging issues as well as key questions for future research.

Nielsen Morten / Aarhus University

Twinned-out urbanism: redoubling the urban landscapes in Maputo

Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this paper explores recent processes of urban gestation where new infrastructural configurations seem to develop though the internal twinning of the existing city. Across sub-Saharan Africa, the spatial layout of urban environments are being reshaped through the construction of entirely new ‘parallel cities’ designed as fully functional habitational units separated from the existing built environment. Taking Maputo, Mozambique’s worn-out capital, as an apt example of this recent process, in this paper I chart how infrastructural potentialities associated with recently projected parallel cities affect the configuration and dynamics of already existing urban spaces. Given the lack of human and financial resources, the Maputo Municipality has de facto surrendered entire sections of inner city neighborhoods to foreign entrepreneurial developers seeking to profit on the increasingly lucrative real-estate market. Hence, as I will claim in this paper, these recent and relatively inconspicuous processes of urban take-over crystallize (and are rendered possible through) a peculiar ‘twinning’ of the conspicuous infrastructures of emerging parallel cities. As a paradoxical kind of urban ‘fetus-in-fetu’, as it were, the twinned-out symmetrical relation is constituted through the enveloping of the city’s overall layout and aesthetics by its more recent and potentially detrimental anti-twin. The city as parasiting on its double.

Stacey Paul / University of Copenhagen

In a state of slum: governance in an informal urban settlement in Ghana

Old Fadama in Accra, is a vast informal settlement that appears to be outside of government control. However, this does not mean that they are not governed. In fact, while statutory institutions are virtually absent in the daily governance of the 80.000 odd population of Old Fadama, alternative public authorities are emerging, which strive to provide the area with services, security, justice and property. Through a fine-grained analysis of relations of recognition and the everyday governance we show how the local population both forms their own political institutions and connects to government institutions through intermediaries. Through processes of negotiation and actors interpretations of interactions, a convoluted relationship of dependence develops between government, intermediaries, and slum residents which defies the logic of formal state law: government delivers some services that are popularly interpreted as acknowledgment of right of residency. And in turn, residents organize and develop their own practical institutions of governance without which administration could not deliver these very services. In this way, people establish rights by reverting to informal arrangements, but they do not enjoy the exclusive right of defining or exercising the rights they may enjoy. This shows that the emerging non-statutory governance of services, justice, property and citizenship, come to define, shape, and underpin, what it is that constitute ideas of state, law, and rights.

Stasik Michael / University of Bayreuth

Klaeger Gabriel / Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Hawking in times of infrastructural renewal: technology and technique in Ghana’s changing roadside spaces

Many of the cities and towns in Ghana are currently experiencing important material and infrastructural changes. Mainly driven by state agencies, urban planners and engineers, these changes contribute to the (at least partial) renewal of specific urban landscapes, or spaces, and are frequently encountered by local (non-state) actors through various, yet not always successful forms of adaptation and creativity. Drawing on the combined cases of a newly constructed transport terminal and an important bypass along one of Ghana’s main arterial roads, our paper examines how itinerant roadside entrepreneurs (commonly called ‘hawkers’ in Ghanaian English) adapt – or fail to adapt – to reconfigured infrastructures whose material and legal setup is devised for debarring hawkers from operations. In so doing, we focus on two roles space takes on in practices of ordering: (1) as a form of (spatial) governance reified through the spatio-technological assemblages of newly configured roadside architectures; and (2) as a form of ‘entrepreneurial resource’ created and exploited by local users through spatially-honed ‘body techniques’ (Mauss 1973). Ultimately, this focus leads us to address the conditions, limits, and spaces of local creativity which emerge in contexts of contemporary urban change.

Tshepo Moloi Tshepo / University of the Witwatersrand

The role of “Freelance” underground Operatives: A case of Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, 1985-1990

The advent of democracy in South Africa stimulated a great deal of interest among scholars to record the history of the liberation struggle in South Africa. Much has been written on the role of the ANC and its military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), including underground activities and operatives. However, very little has been presented about the role played by the ANC’s ‘freelance’ operatives in the underground work in the struggle for liberation. The latter were operatives who had no connection with formal (or legal) structures operating internally. My recent research on political activism in the Eastern Transvaal (today’s Mpumalanga province), especially the lowveld region, offers a rich but yet undocumented history of the ‘freelance’ operatives. Drawing from oral interviews with former ‘freelance’ operatives, I will demonstrate that, because ‘freelance’ operatives were not prominent political activists they did not raise any suspicions. This enabled them to become effective underground operatives, and in the process their work helped to revive political activism in the lowveld region which had been temporarily paralysed after the signing of the Nkomati Accord.

Philip Bonner Phil / University of the Witwatersrand

The Role of Underground Structures and Operatives in Political Resistance

Much has been written over the past decade about the role of uMkonto we Sizwe (MK) in the liberation of South Africa. Remarkably, though, next to nothing has been presented on MK and other forms of resistance in the then Eastern Transvaal, today’s Mpumalanga, despite its centrality as a staging post and route from Mozambique. This paper attempts to fill some of those gaps, primarily through a large body of interviews which have been conducted with participants.
It identifies 1982-84 as a key phase in this process whose interconnections have never been fully explored. It plots the rise of the Loyovno Youth Movement in the Eastern Transvaal’s lowveld, the impact of the efforts to incorporate KaNgwane into Swaziland, which witnessed the birth of mass resistance in the Eastern Transvaal, and the individuals and impulses underlying the growth of the UDF in this region. It identifies the role of key individuals in this process, notably Matthews Phosa, Mr Malaza (an ANC sympathiser in the Nelspruit security process) and Given Caves, who played a central role in the formation of the UDF. It will attempt, among other things, to identify the disjunctures between three fields of resistance – MK, the ANC underground and the above ground organisations. It concludes with an analysis of the effects of the Nkomati Accord of 1984 on all of the issues discussed above.

Sekibakiba Lekgoathi Sekibakiba / University of the Witwatersrand

The ANC’s Underground Radio and the Liberation Struggle in South Africa, 1960s-1980s

The ANC’s Radio Freedom was established as an underground radio inside South Africa shortly after the turn to the armed struggle. The history of clandestine broadcasting inside the country and how this radio was listened to at home while operating from exile remains woefully under-researched and is crying out for scholarly attention. Using a combination of documentary sources and audio footage, plus oral accounts or memories of the struggle veterans, this paper examines the establishment of Radio Freedom inside the country during the early 1960. It probes the rebirth of this radio in exile and its broadcasting into South Africa; its unlawful but popular reception among political activists; the culture(s) developed around listening to the station involving a great deal of secrecy; and the role of the station in mobilizing resistance and shaping political activities inside the country in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper advances arguments about how radio broadcasting became a strategic priority for the ANC and its allies in the aftermath of state repression and the appeal of the station among political activists despite its illegality inside the country. This station was arguably one of the major sources of information on the ANC, shaping political education and understanding of the developments and influencing political activities inside the country.

Barry Gilder Barry / Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA)

From the Outside Looking In: Building an Underground from Exile

The paper will examine the challenges of creating, maintaining, managing and coordinating anti-apartheid underground structures in South Africa from exile, based on the author’s experience as a member of the ANC’s regional political military committee in Botswana in the latter half of the 1980s.

It will assess the successes and failures in building an underground as well as the role these underground structures may have played in the final defeat of apartheid.

The paper will also address the seemingly recent trend among some historians of the South African liberation struggle to downplay the role of the African National Congress in the final overthrow of apartheid.

George Gona George / University of Nairobi

Kenya’s Underground Movement: Cell Activity and Recruitment in the 1970s and 1980s

Kenya’s Underground Movement of the 1970s and 1980s has traditionally been associated with student politics and radical left-leaning lecturers at public universities. Additionally, there has been the presumption that universities were largely the bastions of anti-establishment operatives and that lecture halls were the recruiting grounds for such “covert” activities. However, recent research I have undertaken on the Underground Movement points to a more complex organization with structured mechanisms than is portrayed in earlier works on the subject. This emerging evidence necessitates a more in-depth study of this under-researched area. My discourse will explore the structured mechanisms of the movement, specifically the concept of multiple cell activities, as well as the movement’s recruitment and community engagement strategies. A significant new area of interest will be to unravel the Kenyan Asian’s involvement in this arena, an issue hitherto little researched and discussed.

Berre Nina / The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway

Monuments and Ruins in mid 20th century Africa: Remnants of Nordic Aid

The liberation of Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia in the 1960s coincided with the founding of state development aid in the Nordic countries, where there was widespread belief that the social democratic model could be exported, translated, and used for nation-building, modernization and welfare in Africa. During a few intense years in the 60s and 70s, Nordic architects contributed to the rapid process of modernization in this part of Africa. This paper will discuss the decay and renewal of two building cases in Kenya, designed by a less known Norwegian Architect. Karl Henrik Nøstvik was among the first group of experts sent to Kenya in 1965 as part of the aid package, two years after Kenya’s independence. Nøstvik was commissioned by Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, to design the country’s first government building, now Kenyatta International Conference Centre. It was immediately absorbed as a national icon of independence, progress and modernity, and is still viewed as an important architectural masterpiece in Nairobi. In 1977 Nøstvik was commissioned to design a fish factory and freezing plant in Kalakol near Lake Turkana, in the northern desert part of Kenya. The factory has never been in use as initially planned and stands today as a symbol of failed foreign aid policies. Nevertheless, the architectural structure, a monumental ruin alternatively used by the citizens of Kalokol, gives ambivalent signals of good intentions, decay and a persistent optimism for the future.

De Raedt Kim / University of Gent

The era of development. Architectures of education in the image of (whose?) progress and modernization

The 1960s and 70s was the era par excellence of anticipation in Africa. While charismatic new leaders envisaged the future of their countries in terms of progress and ‘catching up’, existing as well as newly created development aid bodies approached the continent with their own conceptions and interpretations of modernization, and their promises of welfare and growth. Backed by a heavy bureaucracy, an army of specialists and experts, and a huge load of cash, they financed large scale infrastructure and building projects embodying these promises. All this unfolded against the background of the Cold War, rising African nationalism, and increasing economic globalization.
In my contribution to this session, I would like to take a birds eye perspective on some of the tendencies that characterized this era of building for development, concentrating specifically on the architecture of education. I propose to address three specific themes in a panoramic yet meticulous analysis : the policies and approaches developed by the various organizations as well as the operational framework that allows to implement them ; the architect-experts and consultants recruited to translate policies and visions into design guidelines and/or actual building projects ; the nature of the architecture that resulted from the two former.

Smith Constance / University College London (UCL)

Homes for the Future: Material Pasts and Urban Regeneration in Nairobi

Kaloleni is a public housing estate in the Eastlands area of Nairobi. Built as a garden suburb for African families, by the 1950s it was home to Nairobi’s emergent middle classes and was subsequently an important site of nationalist politics. With bungalows arranged around a central village green, the estate was leafy and orderly. The architecture was intended to discipline colonial bodies, producing a model urban community. Yet elderly residents today remember a time of opportunity and anticipation of a brighter future.
But from the 1970s Kaloleni was gradually neglected: new residential opportunities meant many inhabitants moved elsewhere, whilst the estate’s fabric decayed as the council abandoned its maintenance duties. Today, neat paths have crumbled to dust, roofs have fallen in, rubbish piles up. Meanwhile, amid an official rhetoric of ‘Vision 2030’ and the reinvention of Nairobi as a ‘world-class metropolis’, Kaloleni is slated for demolition and redevelopment. Vision 2030 anticipates the future city as glossy, modern, prosperous: a sharp contradiction to residents’ fears of eviction and displacement.
This paper explores how, as they negotiate this precarious future, residents are turning towards the past. Etched with personal and political histories, Kaloleni’s materiality generates new practices of history-making, as residents try to disrupt official visions of the future by deploying alternative narratives of ownership, tenancy rights and national heritage.

Prince Ruth / University of Oslo

Anticipating progress: medical modernisms in Kenya, 1968 and 2014

In 1968 a new hospital was built in the city of Kisumu in Kenya. It was designed by Russian architects and funded by the USSR. The hospital was to be Kenya’s largest. It was to serve the new nation, a citizenry whose intimate experience of racial exclusion under British colonialism made them eager for a new kind of medical modernity. For the Kenyan bureaucrats involved in its planning, the hospital – an imposing three story, modernist structure -promised to be the most “up-to-date” in East Africa.
Drawing on Kenyan archives, this paper attends to the hopes and dreams of progress that surrounded the project, situated as it was amidst cold-war-mediated anticipations of solidarity and inclusion. The letters, meeting minutes and reports exchanged between the medical services, urban planning, housing, and lands departments trace out the lines of a new nation that sought to provision the public. I follow this paper trail, and place of the hospital as a central symbol of progress.
Still known by its nickname, ‘Russia’, today the solid modernist building continues to offer public medical care. After decades of resource drain, however, only those who cannot afford the exclusive private hospitals catering to the city’s growing middle class use it. I bring the anticipations of modernity that saturated the planning of ‘Russia’ in 1968 in dialogue with the very different expectations and longings for medical progress that the new private hospitals engender in the city today.

Osayimwese Itohan / Brown University

Tropical Architecture in the Service of Tropical Agriculture: the International Institute for Tropical Architecture, Foreign Aid, and Nationalism in Post-Independence Nigeria

This paper considers the role of architecture in the vision for the International Institute for Tropical Architecture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria. The Institute was founded in 1967 with the philanthropic goal of improving the quantity and quality of food production in developing countries. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations collaborated with the government of the newly-independent state of Nigeria to create what was described as one of the most modern facilities to support this forward-looking mission—architecture and urban design were seen as crucial to the project’s success. Despite its romanticized projections, however, IITA was also a tool in a new American approach to foreign policy that emphasized technical assistance to potential new American markets and spheres of influence in the developing world. Meanwhile, Nigeria, itself in the midst of the difficult and at times violent task of defining its sovereign, modern identity, saw IITA as a means to its own ends. This paper asks how these tensions coexisted between the Americanist and internationalist agendas of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the nationalist goals of the former British colony and its variegated constituencies. It looks at intersections between the systems-building strategies dominant in agricultural research, politics and economics, and architectural and urban design.

Prais Jinny / Columbia University

Between Empire and the World: The West African Students’ Union and the Question of Imperial Reform, 1925-1950

The West African Students’ Union (W.A.S.U.), established by West African student in London in 1925, developed a political program (that was largely cultural) to gain political independence for a united West Africa within a British Commonwealth. Their political efforts sought to establish a West African identity and culture that mixed various African and worldly influences to form a “New Africa” and new African citizen. The New Africa was urban, cosmopolitan and modern. This paper examines the W.A.S.U.’s political project for independence within a reformed British Empire between 1925 and 1950. It considers the Union’s position on imperial reform and its engagement with the colonial office and global student movements. In particular, it considers the Union’s reaction the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936 and the failure of the League of Nations and the British Empire to intervene. It looks at how this event changed their perspective on imperial reform and Africa’s future within an international arena.

Serva Pereira Matheus / UNICAMP

Colonialism and “batuques” in Southern Mozambique (1890-1940)

A report produced by a Portuguese expedition in southern Mozambique in 1891, presents some “Kaffirs songs” Warriors of Malasche settlement with big fear. In 1906 and 1907, were organized huge “batuques” in the city of Lourenço Marques, the capital of colonial Mozambique, to celebrate the visit of European illustrious figures. But, now, the natives don’t appear as a historical active figure. Their songs and dances are used here to demonstrate the ability of Portuguese domination in Africa. However, even with the apparent transformation of “batuques” of a weapon of intimidation in an official celebration of domination, the native practitioners did not act passively in this process. In addition to the many examples of “batuques” in Lourenço Marques between 1900-1930, despite his ban, Mozambican workers in Johannesburg, in 1928, protested through its “native dance”, complained of their daily lives as workers exploited in mines and openly criticized the Portuguese policy in the region. This presentation will analyze the transformation of the relation of the Portuguese colonial power with cultural practices generally designated as “batuque”. At the same time, will seek to shed light on possible interpretations that practitioners gave to the processo of transformation of “batuques”.

Roiron Virginie / IEP (Strasbourg)

Fostering Commonwealth links in a non-member state: the challenges of Commonwealth professional associations in Zimbabwe

Though Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth in 2003, contacts have continued mainly through the agency of the various associations gravitating around the Commonwealth. In this perspective Commonwealth-wide professional associations have been key in upholding the link between the Zimbabwean people and the Commonwealth. In Zimbabwe, professional associations have worked on the ground with local professionals but have also provided updates to the Commonwealth international organisation on the situation. They have thus been instrumental in helping the Commonwealth to re-engage with Zimbabwe and upholding Commonwealth standards.
Nevertheless, they have faced serious limits. First their impact on the ground is limited to the space they are allowed by the state, though they act as actors for development in the longer run. Second professional associations uphold Commonwealth standards through advocacy in their field of their competence, and not by directly engaging with the local political power as the Foundation now seems to favour. As Zimbabwe rejected the Commonwealth association, this new strategy might undermine their work.
This paper proposes to explore the stakes and limits of the work and influence of Commonwealth professional associations in Zimbabwe. Such reflexion on professional associations in a former member state will also raise questions about the actual place of the informal Commonwealth in the Commonwealth’s international policy, compared to the inter-state dimension.

Herpolsheimer Jens / University of Leipzig

(Re-)Defining Lusophone Cooperation: The Role of Non-State Actors in the CPLP

The Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP) is often considered to be a flawed intergovernmental organization with very limited resources, little political relevance, and negligible cooperation results. As such, it is mainly perceived as a project of Portuguese and Brazilian elites, pursuing their self-interest in former Portuguese colonial territories, especially in Africa. However, what is commonly overlooked are the wide array of cooperative activities, producing tangible results, and the diversity of actors involved, including different state and non-state actors. These all contribute to the creation of a lusophone space of cooperation. This space is neither fixed nor does it always coincide with national CPLP territories. Various actors try to shape and re-shape it according to their respective needs. In this regard, it is helpful to draw on insights from the debate on New Regionalisms (NRs). These emphasize the socially constructed (and contested) character of regions and take into account the interplay of state and non-state actors. Moreover, regionalisms are analyzed as responses to challenges posed by contemporary globalization processes. From that perspective, the paper seeks to explore the role of non-state actors in general, and professional organizations in particular, in the (re-)definition of lusophone cooperation in and around the CPLP. It is argued that these actors to a significant degree influence conception and outcome of CPLP cooperation.

Tomas Serna / DDCC

Acting in Guinea Bissau for peace in Casamance

This paper reflects about the dialogue events recently held under the auspices of the Guinea Bissau authorities that included combatants from the two MFDC Mouvement of Forces Democratiques de Casamance armed wings present in the Southern front. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2014 in locations close to the Guinea Bissau border. Open ended interview questions on concrete expectations and wishes with combatants where held in dialogue events while supporting the Guinean mediation services provider DDCC, Djemberem di cumpo combersa. Additional research was conducted in press, media reports and through interviews with major stakeholders involved in dialogue events in Guinea Bissau for peace in Casamance. Based on these observations the paper enlightens about the failure of dialogue initiatives for humanitarian demining and the failure on the try to strengthen the combatant’s capacities for negotiation for peace in the Southern front. It presents the different
initiatives of dialogue and negotiation recently held in Guinea Bissau involving facilitators like the US Embassy in Dakar, Robert Sagna, the GRPC, the Cardinal Sarr and Imam Fansou Bodian of Bignona and the Guinean authorities. Finally it proposes some insights about the reasons of these failures and the existing openings to disentangle the current impasse.

Ndiaye El Hadji Malick / Seattle University

La libération du discours comme praxis auto-instituante dans la gestion des conflits en Afrique : l’exemple casamançais

Dans L’institution imaginaire de la société, Castoriadis signale la tension dans tout corps social entre « l’histoire faite et de l’histoire se faisant ». Prise dans une acception politique ou culturelle, la nation apparaît comme une donnée « hétéronomique ». Les transformations politiques ou les métamorphoses identitaires se heurtent à des normes radicalement figées agissant comme la « clôture des significations imaginaires sociales » (Castoriadis). Le conflit casamançais correspond à la difficile articulation de deux logiques fortes de rationalisation du corps social institué. Celle non négociable de souveraineté nationale sénégalaise soutenue par l’Etat, et une logique identitaire qui cristallise le rêve autonomiste. L’Etat autant que le mouvement indépendantiste représentent donc des institutions qui dans leur rapport de force ont longtemps ignoré l’expression d’une volonté populaire. De nombreux accords ont émaillé la longue et douloureuse crise casamançaise, sans faire émerger les conditions d’une paix durable et définitive. Les avancées récentes, obtenues par le jeu des médiations sociales et l’implication de la société civile laissent entrevoir l’impact des populations la résolution du conflit. À travers l’exemple casamançais, Nous proposons d’évaluer leur influence dans la construction de la paix en Afrique, ainsi que les véritables enjeux du dialogue social. Nous questionnerons les notions de « démocratie participative » et « d’autonomie sociale » en Afrique.

Deets Mark / Cornell University

Playing the Nation: Soccer and Separatism in the Casamance, 1945-2012

The papers focuses on the ways Casamancais corroborated, contested, or ignored the assertion of the Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance (MFDC) that “The Stadium”–as a place of identity formation and performance–was a space for imagining the Casamance through soccer (and perhaps wrestling) with an identity inherently “other” to Senegal. I will show that even though the MFDC tried to use The Stadium for subversion of state assertions of Senegalese national identity, the Casamancais people simultaneously thought of themselves in various ways–but often as Casamancais AND Senegalese. This simultaneous multiplicity of national imaginings cooled the passions of separatism in the Casamance. I assert that it also transformed “The Stadium” into “the stadium,” or even “a stadium”–where space and place operated simultaneously in different ways in the minds of various Casamancais. I refer to spaces like this with multiple, simultaneous, open-ended national imaginings as “space-places,” building on work by Henri LeFebvre, Doreen Massey, and Susann Baller. I use this term to show the multiple ways space can be “mapped” onto a space-place dialectic.

Manga Jean Baptiste Valter / EHESS/IMAf

La paix viendrait-elle de la forêt initiatique ? Initiations royales et pacification de l’espace à Oussouye (Casamance)

Le conflit séparatiste casamançais qui a éclaté en 1982 est généralement considéré comme un conflit de basse intensité si l’on raisonne en termes de victimes et relativement à d’autres conflits. Pourtant sa longueur (32 ans) et sa complexité laisse des traces très profondes dans l’organisation sociale. En effet, en marge des grandes « actions », comme les stratégies mises en place par les belligérants, les accords de cessez-le feu, l’intervention dans le temps d’une grande diversité d’acteurs et de médiateurs, se joue aussi, à des niveaux souvent plus modestes, d’autres négociations des rapports de force induits pas le conflit.
En partant d’enquêtes de terrain menées à Oussouye entre 2009 et 2014 dans le cadre d’un projet de thèse, ma communication s’intéresserait au rôle que pourraient jouer les initiations dans la recherche de solutions au conflit casamançais. Je m’appuierais essentiellement sur les enquêtes menées à Oussouye lors de l’initiation royale de 2011 appelée Ewaŋ. Le roi d’Oussouye avait obtenu du gouvernement sénégalais que les combattants du MFDC concernés par l’initiation puissent y prendre part, sans être inquiétés par les services de l’Etat. Ce qui fût le cas.
La question serait donc de savoir en quoi et comment les initiations royales peuvent être une première étape de pacification au sein d’un royaume assez fortement impliqué dans le conflit et marqués par ses conséquences. Ce peut être une étape vers une pacification plus large.

Rudolf Markus / BICC

Stability in insecurity – The political economy of a protracted conflict

This paper argues that analysing forced migration from a systemic perspective makes it possible to better interlink different factors that have been nourishing the conflict. Examining the situation of the displaced population in the Casamance conflict shows how individuals managed to establish livelihoods in a volatile environment. Such analysis reveals how the armed conflict has been instrumental to the different parties to the conflict throughout the years in controlling natural resources in the region. A low-level war economy based on illegal logging, cashew nuts, illegal cannabis growing, and smuggling has been benefiting both sides to the conflict and undermined any sense of urgency to end it. A market of peace on the contrary nurtures the conflict because it ensures considerable benefits for all parties to the conflict and involved mediators. The violent conflict in Casamance has also to be contextualized within transnational issues. Historical ties as well as regional politics
have been facilitating a high level of mobility. Livelihoods transcend borders. If finally appears critical to address land tenure and property rights in the Casamance context. Any peace-building initiative will have to deal with this issue because it is a factor that is nurturing the conflict. Land tenure and property rights are at the heart of the conflict and would be instrumental in guaranteeing livelihood opportunities.

Hepburn Sacha / University of Oxford

“There was no Life that Side”: Gender, Generation, and Migrant Domestic Workers in post-Colonial Zambia

This paper will explore the histories of women and female children who migrated to Lusaka to engage in paid domestic labour from the 1960s to the present. In the Zambian literature the figure of the worker and the labour migrant has largely been constructed as masculine, strong, and engaged in formal, highly visible employment practices such as mining and agricultural labour. Much remains to be done to highlight the multiplicity of labour and migration practices that individual workers have engaged in historically. The intersection of gender and generation in shaping experiences of labour and migration has been particularly overlooked.
This paper will examine the intersections of gender and generation in shaping experiences of labour migration and working conditions within the urban home. The paper will first examine various ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that drew increasing numbers of women and girls from rural areas to Lusaka to engage in domestic work. The paper will then turn to the living and working arrangements women and girls faced in the city. Such arrangements have often involved complex intersections of kinship and labour relations, with young people exchanging domestic work for their membership within the urban household. The paper will relate women and children’s migratory and labour practices to family and individual survival strategies and broader processes of post-colonial class consolidation and economic decline.

Segniagbeto Kodjo / Université de Lomé

Le travail domestique des jeunes filles ouatchi migrantes à Lomé : quelles évolutions depuis la fin des années 1950 ?

Un nombre de plus en plus croissant de recherches aboutit aujourd’hui au constat selon lequel le travail domestique des enfants, notamment des filles, dans les villes africaines n’est un phénomène ni marginal ni nouveau. Il apparaît par ailleurs que le travail domestique est souvent le fait de jeunes filles migrantes issues de régions où certaines ethnies s’avèrent plus que d’autres pourvoyeuses de cette main-d’œuvre féminine. Mais les approches historiques et les données quantitatives demeurent rares.
Dans le cadre du Togo, et plus particulièrement de sa capitale Lomé, une première analyse des données du recensement urbain de 1958-59 (récemment rendues accessibles), complétée par des entretiens menés en 2012-13 auprès de femmes âgées ayant vécu cette situation de domesticité vers la fin des années 1950 a montré que les jeunes filles ouatchi originaires du Sud-est du Togo s’avèrent particulièrement touchées par le phénomène.
La présente communication se propose de documenter les évolutions survenues dans la problématique du travail domestique des filles ouatchi à Lomé depuis la fin de l’époque coloniale à ce jour. Pour ce faire, elle s’appuie sur une analyse complémentaire des données censitaires de 1958-59 et des entretiens ci-dessus évoqués, qui sera articulée avec les résultats issus d’une récente recherche doctorale, combinant une enquête quantitative et des entretiens menés auprès de jeunes filles ouatchi migrantes à Lomé.

Buscaglia Ilaria / Centre for Gender Studies, University of Rwanda

“My boss fears me”: Patterns of Dependency and Agency among Domestic Workers and their Bosses in Kigali

In November 2014 a disturbing video, showing a maid beating, kicking and stamping on her boss’ one year old baby in Uganda, went viral on youtube, provoking outraged reactions among the East African users of the web. This event fueled an already on-going public debate in Rwanda about the intrinsic risks associated with the relying on nannies and house-helpers by urban elite families. Very few voices tried to provide a deep analysis of the possible structural causes of such acts, mostly ironed out as absurd, evil or the result of individual mental sickness.
My paper would like to provide an anthropological insight on the contemporary power relationships between domestic workers and their bosses, drawing upon the results of my on-going research in Nyamirambo, the most populated area of Kigali. The proposed approach is based on the assumption that such minute domestic interactions disclose a powerful intimate insight into contexts of strong social domination and inequality (Hansen 1989, 1992; Cock 1980). The strong dependency and subordination of the abakozi, most of whom had left the countryside wishing to increase personal autonomy from the rural network of dependency, should not however prevent the researcher to explore the niches of agency at their disposal. The personalized relationship involved makes domestic work a powerful site of negotiation (Qayum, Ray 2003; Shireen 2009) and calls for the need of reconsidering (not romanticizing) existing patterns of agency.

Deslaurier Christine / IRD-Institut des mondes africains (IMAf)

« Boys » in Bujumbura (Burundi), or How to Domesticate Politics

La figure du « boy » dans la ville de Bujumbura, omniprésente jusqu’à nos jours et familière à tous ses habitants depuis la naissance coloniale de la ville au début du 20e siècle, n’a guère suscité la curiosité des chercheurs. De récents travaux ont abordé la question de la domesticité au Burundi, mais sous l’angle de la protection infantile et juvénile (le travail des fillettes et les abus à leur encontre étant soulignés), ou sous celui des avancées du droit du travail, international ou national. Pourtant le « mushumba » comme on disait autrefois, le « boy » des élites coloniales, nationales et expatriées, ou le « travailleur de maison » comme il se fait appeler aujourd’hui, occupent une place à part dans l’histoire sociale et politique de Bujumbura. En tant qu’hommes, plus nombreux dans les cuisines de la capitale que les femmes, ces « garçons » (parfois plus âgés que leur « patron ») sont impliqués de longue date dans des dispositifs économiques différents et engagés dans des relations personnelles plus variées. Intermédiaires entre collines et ville, rusticité et civilités, langues africaines et européennes, mais aussi entre manants et puissants, ou militaires et rebelles, ils incarnent des rapports de domination dont les paradoxes ont éclaté au grand jour pendant la guerre civile débutée en 1993. Des ressources de la dépendance aux promesses de l’émancipation, leur sociohistoire « marginale » épouse le rythme d’une politisation accrue des Burundais depuis un siècle.

Bourel Etienne / EVS-CREA

La perception de l’environnement pour les travailleurs forestiers gabonais. Quelle place pour la forêt ? Quelle place pour la technique ?

Cette communication discutera les relations que les travailleurs forestiers gabonais entretiennent avec leur environnement, au cours de leur vie quotidienne dans les camps forestiers et pendant les phases de travail. Elle sera basée sur des recherches ethnographiques menées depuis 2009, principalement dans le cadre d’une thèse d’anthropologie (en voie d’achèvement). L’accent sera mis, d’une part, sur les multiples dimensions du vivant en forêt tropicale (rendant inopérante une approche strictement matérialiste et comptable du travail forestier) et, d’autre part, sur l’aspect politique des outils que les travailleurs utilisent au quotidien. En effet, l’exploitation industrielle de la forêt gabonaise date de l’époque coloniale et dépend d’une appréhension économique de l’environnement, le ramenant à une « mine à ciel ouvert ». Toutefois, ce modèle est réducteur pour l’ensemble des acteurs de la foresterie, et particulièrement pour les travailleurs forestiers. Pratiquants ou non une religion monothéiste, initiés ou non à culte magico-thérapeutique, rares sont ceux qui considèrent les forêts où ils travaillent comme uniquement peuplées d’animaux. La compréhension des moments de travail suppose donc la prise en compte d’un ensemble de manifestations potentielles d’entités et de rapports de force qui jalonnent la vie quotidienne.

Papaioannou Kostadis / Utrecht and Wageningen University

Climate Shocks and Conflict: Evidence from colonial Nigeria

While optimism about Sub-Saharan Africa’s recent economic performance is widespread, episodes of tragic violence across the continent still abound, most recently in coastal Kenya, northern Nigeria, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Mali. Conflict often surfaces in ecologically vulnerable rural areas which are highly dependent on rain-fed agriculture, have limited access to markets and trade, and are noted for the absence or fragile presence of the state.
This paper offers a historical micro-level analysis of the impact of climatic shocks on the incidence of conflict in colonial Nigeria (1912–1945). Primary historical sources on court cases, prisoners and homicides are used to construct an index of socio-political conflict and measure climatic shocks through deviations from long-term rainfall patterns in a nonlinear (U-shaped) relation, capturing both drought and excessive rainfall. We find a robust and significant relationship between rainfall deviations and conflict intensity, which tends to be stronger in agro-ecological zones that are least resilient to climagainst the whims of nature. Additional historical information on food shortages, crop-price spikes and outbreaks of violence is used to explore the climate–conflict connection in greater detail.

Arzel Lancelot / CHSP, Science-po Paris

White Gold of the 19th Century. Colonial Powers, Local Resistances and Ivory Hunts in the Congo Free State

Au XIXe siècle, le bassin du Congo connaît son « or blanc » avec d’intenses circuits commerciaux générés par les chasses à l’ivoire. Déjà convoité par les Afro-Arabes au mitan de ce siècle, l’ivoire devient l’enjeu d’une course à l’appropriation alors que la demande internationale ne fait que croître. A partir de témoignages de chasseurs comme de sources plus officielles, cette communication cherche à mettre en lumière les conséquences politiques et environnementales de ces nombreuses chasses à l’ivoire dans l’organisation coloniale du jeune Etat indépendant du Congo. La mise en place – contestée – d’un monopole par cet Etat colonial reconfigure, en effet, les liens commerciaux préétablis entre les différents groupes sociopolitiques et impose des résistances, plus ou moins ouvertes, contre cette dépossession. A partir d’exemples (Uélé, Enclave du Lado), nous verrons que ce commerce de l’ivoire devient un enjeu dans la domination
des Européens, autant sur les populations congolaises que sur le contrôle de l’environnement – aboutissant, notamment, à des tentatives de domestication des éléphants. Mais ce monopole est aussi contesté au sein de la communauté coloniale par les « chasseurs blancs », braconniers volontaires. Du point de vue animal, enfin, une dernière réflexion pourra être menée sur l’adaptation des éléphants à ces ponctions croissantes – jusqu’à faire l’hypothèse de « résistances animales » en terrain colonial avant l’ère de la préservation et de la conservation ?

Beeckmans Luce / Ghent University

Building and contesting post-war housing schemes in Dakar.

The promotion of African emancipation was thus accompanied by a strong ‘social engineering’. Yet, Africans were no passive victims of development schemes. In this paper we will take a close look at the housing schemes of the SICAP in Dakar between 1951 and 1960. Notwithstanding the significant housing shortages in Dakar, archival records show that a substantial amount of the SICAP houses remained vacant after completion. As a consequence, most houses proved too small and little adjusted to the extended African family, which is well reflected in the many alterations the SICAP houses underwent right from their completion until today. Moreover, the SICAP housing schemes, and in particular their segregationist and elitist underground, caused strong African opposition. Many Africans opposed to the more than 80.000 forced evictions, known in the colonial jargon as ‘déguerpissements’, that were caused by the implementation of the schemes. The result was a fierce battle over land between the government and the inhabitants of Dakar. In particular the Lebou-population demanded adequate compensation for its land in case of expropriation, even if they did not possess any official land title, with equal rewards for Africans and Europeans. Due various forms of active and passive protest of the inhabitants the implementation of the SICAP housing schemes regularly came to a standstill and the government often found itself in ‘a complete impasse’.

Thompson Drew / Bard College

Ricardo Rangel: Photography, the City, and Narratives of Struggle

Ricardo Rangel is one of Mozambique’s most famous press-photographers, and his professional career as photographer, newspaper editor, and archivists spans periods of colonialism, independence, and war in Mozambique. Rangel began his career as a laboratory attendant in a commercial studio only to go on to work as a press-photographer and editor for colonial-era newspapers. At independence, the state charged Rangel with educating a new generation of press photographers, first as a newspaper editor and then as the director of Mozambique’s photography school. Central to his professional trajectory and political life was the act of taking, printing, and exhibiting images of Mozambique’s capital city first known as Lourenço Marques and today referred to as Maputo. Within the archive, Maputo as a photographic backdrop goes from a developing and racially-divided colonial capital to one of decaying buildings and overcrowded with populations displaced by war. Since his death, Rangel’s life, images, and technical practice have been used to contest, re-write, and even support the struggle narrative articulated by FRELIMO, the governing power. This paper uses Rangel’s body of photographic work and practice as revealed through oral histories and visual analysis to consider the aesthetic as a historical framework. In so doing, this paper explores the representational politics associated with the struggle narrative that emerges around and filters through Rangel’s photos of Maputo.

Gastrow Claudia / University of the Witwatersrand

The Political Aesthetics Infrastructure of of Rights in Luanda, Angola

Within African Urban studies, the question of infrastructure and its failures, promises and hopes has risen to the fore. New infrastructure projects have caused some to suggest that Africa’s cities are experiencing renewal, while others argue that these are merely a surface phenomena that cannot resolve deeper structural and political issues. At the same time the question of infrastructure has been expanded, with the body, social relations, and informality all being areas that have come to be more broadly understood as forms of urban infrastructure that can hold the city together. This paper looks at Luanda, Angola to examine the politics of infrastructure. Tracking residents experiences of the failure of infrastructure and their adaptations to this, I argue that infrastructure neither resolves problems nor is the source of anger in any direct way. Rather through studying the history and present of the aesthetics of infrastructure – the sensual experiences of it and the historically formed judgements that follow from this – its political salience can be understood.

Vanin Fabio / Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Contemporary Aesthetic Rights in Maputo and Luanda

Maputo and Luanda represent in different ways two paradigmatic cases with respect to the question of “rights to the city” where various aesthetics can reveal both unequal urban development processes, emerging practices and expressions of resistance against them. Until few years ago, Maputo was a self-regulated city that despite poverty and the lack of governance was “incredibly safe” (Forjaz, 2006). In that context the use of painting, murals and goods disposals were revealing a city in which informal practices were able to guarantee a certain (fragile) equilibrium. Today urban transformations go hand in hand with aesthetic changes: what is the destiny of that urban reality and how can we interpret those signs? On the opposite coast, Luanda is undergoing rapid changes with significant contradictions related to spatial and class differences where new developments, the diffuse militarisation and control of space clash with the needs of civil society. The issues of publicness, center vs periphery, social security and balance, emerge strongly in the local debate on the role of art, cultural events and heritage. This paper seeks to highlight problems and opportunities related to the realm of aesthetic in contemporary Maputo and Luanda in light to their common and different colonial and post-independence history.

Agbiboa Daniel / University of Oxford

“This is Lagos”: Popular Imagination OF The Everyday Life in Africa’s Largest Metropolis

The everyday life has been described as the most self-evident, yet the most puzzling of ideas. This paper aims to piece together an integrated understanding of the everyday life grounded in the routine and lived experiences of informal road transport operators in urban Lagos, Africa’s largest city and one of the world’s fastest growing metropolis. My goal is to elevate the lived experiences of informal transport operators to the status of a critical concept in order to advance a theory of everyday life in an African metropolis. The paper draws extensively on six-months ethnographic fieldwork (July–December 2014) undertaken in the densely populated city of Lagos as part of a doctoral research. To gain insights into transport operators’ representation of the everyday life in Lagos, I focused analytic attention on the popular semiology and everyday vehicular language of the city (mainly ‘Yoruba’ and ‘Pidgin’), with particular attention to the slogans which are so prominent and ubiquitous on the bodies and windscreens of danfos (minibuses), okadas (commercial motorcycles) and Keke Napeps (tricycles). I then explained these vehicle slogans using the transport operator’s religious, social, cultural, economic and political worldview. In particular, vehicle slogans were interpreted in the light of my own cumulative observation as an ‘outsider within’, as well as my active participation as a danfo conductor in Oshodi – the key transport node in Lagos.

Masquelier Adeline / Tulane University

Writing on the Wall: Ma(r)king the Place of Youth in Niger

Much has been written on imagination as an expression of subaltern consciousness through which people everywhere give shape to their future. What happens when underemployed young men anxious to get on with their lives reclaim their cities so as to bring their dull present in line with their imagined futures? In urban Niger members of fadas (conversations groups) meet daily in the street to drink tea, play cards, and talk. They etch the names of their fadas on the walls against which they sit, a trend that has radically reconfigured the look of cityscapes throughout the country but particularly in Niamey. These “writings on the wall” range from barely visible inscriptions to elaborately designed images; some feature childish scribbles, aggressive tagging, and awkward self-portraits while others are more sophisticated creations, painted by professional artists. Through a focus on the politics of aesthetics, I explore how young Nigerien men seize space and mark these locales with the visible signs of their presence, transforming anonymous spaces into places of cultural production and sites of political practice, which they inhabit and make their own. Through their choices of acronyms, geographical referents, cultural emblems, and political symbolism, young men use the power of images to express their engagement with the world. I therefore read these aesthetic projects as part of a wider effort on the part of young Nigeriens to understand their place in the world.

Barreau-Tran Léa / LAM/Sciences Po Bordeaux

Muambeiras d’Angola : l’impact de la mobilité des femmes sur les normes de genre

Ébranlée par vingt sept ans de guerre civile, l’Angola connaît aujourd’hui une croissance économique fulgurante grâce à ses ressources pétrolières. En marge de cette économie de rente, les petits entrepreneurs angolais réinventent la globalisation par « le bas » en intensifiant le commerce informel avec les pays émergents. Un nombre grandissant d’études s’intéressent aux impacts de la circulation des biens, des personnes et des idées sur les rapports Sud-Sud. Cependant, trop rares sont celles qui questionnent cette mobilité sous l’angle des rapports de genre.
En effet, à Luanda, les marchés de l’habillement sont alimentés exclusivement par les femmes qui se fournissent directement au Brésil, en Chine, en Thaïlande ou à Dubaï. Nommées « Muambeiras » par les douanes, ces commerçantes à la valise bouleversent les représentations du rôle des femmes sur le marché du travail et l’organisation de la famille. Cette mobilité internationale des femmes participe-t-elle à une renégociation des normes genre établies en altérant la représentation de soi par l’incorporation de certaines valeurs? Ou, au contraire, le voyage est-il une contrainte pour ces femmes, qui doivent concilier leurs obligations traditionnelles au sein de la famille aux exigences du marché global ?
Afin de répondre à ces questions, nous comparerons la circulation des idées sur les normes de genre en fonction des destinations du commerce international grâce à notre enquête multisites entre Luanda, São Paulo et Canton.

Galitzine-Loumpet Alexandra / ANR EsCA, FMSH

L’Asie dans la cité. Inscription des représentations de circulation de la Chine et de l’Inde dans la ville de Yaoundé.

L’ampleur des circulations des personnes et des idées se révèle a posteriori, des initiatives isolées croissantes devenant progressivement visibles dans le paysage urbain sous diverses formes – tout à coup la nouveauté s’affiche et s’impose marchandises exposées, objets d’identification culturelle, écritures, publicités construisant et orientant les représentations de circulations nouvelles, sinon alternatives. L’ouverture des possibles nourrit à son tour nombre les imaginaires, et créé de nouvelles oppostunités. Cette communication voudrait revenir sur les inscriptions urbaines de circulation de personnes et de biens avec l’Asie à Yaoundé, et leurs transformations sur une dizaine d’années.

Zaugg Roberto / Sciences Po Paris

Le crachoir chinois du roi: marchandises globales, cultures courtoises et vaudou dans le Bénin précolonial (XVIIe-XIXe siècle)

Du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, les royaumes situés dans l’actuel Bénin méridional (Allada, Hueda, Dahomey, Porto Novo) furent parmi les acteurs les plus importants de la traite transatlantique. A travers les échanges entretenus avec les compagnies négrières (néerlandaises, anglaises, françaises, brandebourgeoises, brésiliennes…) une multiplicité de marchandises américaines, européennes et asiatiques (tabac, pipes, tissus, porcelaines…) pénétra sur les marchés de l’aire adja-fon. Des nouvelles pratiques sociales ainsi qu’une culture matérielle de plus en plus ‘mondialisée’ s’affirmèrent. En même temps, les pratiques et les significations culturelles associées avec ces marchandises furent souvent transformées par des processus d’appropriation et d’adaptation. Etant des lieux de négociations diplomatico-commerciales et, à la fois, des espaces marqués par une formalisation cérémonielle prononcée, les cours royales jouèrent un rôle centr al: non seulement dans l’introduction et redistribution des marchandises, mais aussi par rapport à leur ré-sémantisation. En croisant des sources écrites européennes avec des artefacts sculpturaux et des sources visuelles, ainsi qu’avec des données issues de travaux archéologiques et ethnologiques, cette contribution offrira une analyse micro-historique concernant l’intégration d’objets et de pratiques exogènes dans le cadre des cultures courtoises de l’aire adja-fon ainsi que le rôle joué, dans ce processus, par la culture religieuse du vaudou.

Mueller Felix / Centre for Area Studies, Leipzig University

Renegotiating the state: Ghanaian and Ethiopian officials’ and intellectuals’ encounters with Asia

African policy makers and intellectuals looking for domestically adaptable development strategies have increasingly paid attention to Asia’s rise. In this process, a social technology commonly referred to as developmental state has become an influential source of inspiration. The transnational journey of this state model can be grasped most adequately if it is understood as processes of cultural transfers. Based on field work in Addis Ababa (2013) and the Greater Accra Region (2014), this paper examines how Ghanaian and Ethiopian politicians and intellectuals have interpreted Asia’s success. The paper particularly investigates how personal visits to Asian countries have influenced negotiations of policy choices and expectations towards the state in Ghana and Ethiopia. Special attention is being paid to the Ghanaian case. In both cases, the transfer of ideas is actively supported by the role model governments. Ghanaian civil servants are invited to Malaysian economic planning centers; Ethiopian officials and NGO leaders learn about Saemaul Undong in South Korea. In both Ghana and Ethiopia, increased exchange with Asian actors has resulted in the renegotiation and reordering of the state. Common practices are being contested, new expectations are being formulated. Furthermore, due to the prominence of Asian models, which are perceived as comparably new, more established (neo)liberal and socialist development orthodoxies are increasingly challenged in this process.

Martin Bernhard / independent researcher

Travelling models of the agricultural labour organisation

Since the 1930s, young northern Togolese men have had the habit of working for a period of several years in the cocoa fields in southern Ghana. This migration has become an integral part of the respective local societies in the areas of origin, so that it is possible to speak of cultures of migration. In southern Ghana the migrants learned about the practice of wage labour in agriculture, a practise completely unknown in their home villages. In the 1980s, young men and women in Northern Togo began to demand small amounts of cash for some of their work assignments in other villagers’ fields in addition to the “traditional” payment in meat and sorghum beer. Today, the farmers have to pay money in about half of all deployments of non-family labour. This practice is labeled as “by day”. On the one hand, this introduction of paid fieldwork is attributable to the advanced monetarisation of Northern Togolese local societies. On the other hand, it has been the result of profound conflicts between young and old men, in which the former felt increasingly exploited by the latter and demanded compensation. Finally, it should be noted that although the idea of paid work in the fields migrated from Southern Ghana to Northern Togo, a fundamental change in the meaning ensued. It did not lead to the introduction of a wage-worker system, but to the transformation of an existing form of collective field work, the basic rules of which remained, but cash payments became an added component.

Prabhu Anjali / Wellesley College, USA

Resistance in African Cinema, or Révolution du langage cinématographique

To state that African films recuperate dominant cinematic techniques to Africanize film itself posits something of an “African” worldview and, at the same time, shifts the emphasis of our evaluative gestures from content to form. This, then, is the premise of my argument. The ambition of African films – at least of a particular repertoire of African films – is indeed to universalize that worldview in a counter revolutionary act that gives a nod to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the revolutionary. That act is “counter” or contrary to the discontinuous wave of colonialism and the particular form of capitalism it boosted, both of which revolutionized African life and social structures. It is first and foremost aesthetic in its language; it is also intellectual in its pursuit while utopian in its futuristic projection of what the “social” might be. African filmmakers working through the 80’s and 90’s inherited a generation of spectators in Africa who were familiar with not just Hollywood cinema but also Egyptian melodrama and Indian cinema, where the schism between commercial and art films did not have the sharp, mutually exclusive language that has pervaded (the study of) African film. This presentation isolates and examines specific techniques that operate a particular interpellation of today’s spectators of African film in order to explore the larger ambitions of contemporary African cinema.

Ricci Daniela / Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, France

Forms of Resistance in the Contemporary African Films / Forms of Resistance in the Contemporary African Films

Parmi les plus jeunes au monde, les cinémas d’Afrique et de ses diasporas témoignent aujourd’hui d’une grande vitalité et variété, non seulement de thématiques, mais également de genres, de styles et de formes.
Bien que de façon différente de l’engagement politique des pionniers, moins dans un mouvement collectif que dans une démarche individuelle, les cinéastes contemporains apportent un regard multifocal et politique sur les enjeux, les complexités et les évolutions des sociétés actuelles.
Dans cette communication j’analyserai comment l’engagement sociopolitique des films diasporiques “d’auteurs” passe à travers une recherche esthétique. A l’aide de séquences choisies – d’oeuvres telles L’Afrance, (A. Gomis, 2001), Juju Factory, (B. Bakupa-Kanyida, 2007), Teza, (H. Gerima, 2008), Va pensiero, storie ambulanti, (D. Yimer, 2013) – je veux montrer à quel point à l’heure actuelle le combat se joue sur le terrain de la représentation.
Ces récits filmiques, que je définis “accentués” au sens de Hamid Naficy (Naficy 2001) ou “mineurs” au sens de Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze, 1985), par des esthétiques composites mais sobres et des styles inédits et novateurs, offrent un contrepoids iconique et narratif à la représentation dominante. J’analyserai comment, mêlant individuel et collectif, privé et politique, ils deviennent des actes de résistance.

Onookome Okome / University of Alberta, Canada

Popular Transnational Nollywood

Nollywood film production is essentially artisanal and has remained largely local, with the predominant cinematic gaze of its cultural product, the Nollywood film, consciously transnational. A careful reading the Nollywood film text also shows that this film promotes the desires of its director as the apostle of the transnational ideal, blending local desire with transnational aspirations. I wish to argue that this desire comes from the fact that Nollywood directors are deeply cosmopolitan. I was deeply reminded of this cinematic desire at the Nollywood Rising Conference (2005), which was called to work out ways of bringing actors and directors from Nollywood to Hollywood. Lancelot Emasuen, one of the key directors in Nollywood, was upfront about what he expects from Hollywood. He wants enduring collaborations between the two industries. My contribution tracks the complex notion of what I read as “popular transnational” transactions in the Nollywood film and its connection to the local aspiration of its audience. I argue that even though this regional cinema does not fall within the political partisanship of the so-called “postcolonial African cinema,” there are moments in the “collective utterance” that it proposes for its audience that can be read as political or subversive.

Niang Sada / University of Victoria, Canada

Generic intrusions in African cinemas

Generic intrusions in African cinemas
Critical approaches on African cinema which appeared in the first decade of the 21st century have instituted “une ère du soupçon”(Sarraute, 1956) that is both disruptive and beneficial to the field. It is disruptive because it purports the death of the liberationist narrative, beneficial because, through a radical questioning, new critical inroads are being ploughed. In particular the question of cinematic genres and of the popular in African cinema are becoming front and center in the present critical discourse. Key among these new directions in African film analysis are the publications of Murphy (2000), Gbanou (2002) Garritano (2003), Harrow (2007) Oscherwitz (2008), Niang (2008), (Naudillon, 2009), Adesokan (2011), Tcheuyap (2011), Onookome & Newell (2013). In all these publications, the popular and genre based filmmaking are built into distinctive features of a new wave of filmmaking on the continent.
This paper argues that genre and the popular were present in African cinema from the very beginning. The pronouncements of the “fathers” of African cinema notwithstanding, the gangster, the western, the animation genre and artifacts of various western film schools have permeated nationalist African cinema at its margins.

Stein Howard / University of Michigan

Cunningham Sam / University of Michigan

Formalization and Land Grabbing in East Africa: Facilitation or Protection?

Two developments in Africa have generated an extensive literature. The first focuses on investment and land grabbing and the second on the formalization of rural property rights. Less has been written on the impact of formalization on land grabbing and land grabbing on formalization. Recently, formalization has been put forward to protect the rights of pastoralists and farmers. Leaders in Tanzania have argued that it will free up land for investors that is unused by villages and generate new jobs and improved livelihoods through contract farming while minimizing land grabbing through greater transparency. Others argue that formalization is being promoted to facilitate land grabbing with state imposed boundaries facilitating land grabbing by evicting villagers off land formerly under village control. Proponents assume that securing individual property rights will allow villagers to determine how to best use or dispose of their property. However, this implied notion of voluntarism can deny the hegemonic forces that can be embedded in markets. Unequal power dynamics in market transactions can transform formalization from a protective force to a means of dispossession. Former commonly-held land in places like Kenya has been individualized, easing the sale and leasing of land to investors at the expense of pastoralists. The paper will draw on five year project on titling in Tanzania to analyze the political economy of formalization and land grabbing in African countries.

Engström Linda / Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala

Seeing like a transnational state – investigating the relevance of Scott to explain the failure of large scale agricultural investment in Tanzania

This paper seeks to situate contemporary large scale agricultural development in the debate on the relevance of James Scott’s analysis of failure. The question posed is whether the ‘simplified seeing’ behind failed schemes during the 20th Century described in Scott’s book Seeing Like a State (1998) is applicable to explain the failure and struggle of contemporary large scale agricultural investment in Tanzania. By developing a coherent framework of the simplified ‘way of seeing’ described by Scott, the paper shows that there are striking similarities with the contemporary narrative on large scale agricultural investment. Using the simplification framework, this paper goes on to discuss the more complex governance situation of contemporary large scale agriculture, engaging in more recent literature and critique against Scott’s claim to be relevant also in times of neoliberal capitalism. The paper argues that various actors converge with the state on similar patterns of ‘simplified seeing’, but that these actors have differing underlying motives. Based on empirical data from two large scale agricultural investments in Tanzania as well as interviews with Tanzanian state officials, two investors, one international development institution and one bilateral donor, the paper discusses possible developments of Scott to fit the empirical realities of contemporary LSAI.

Beyene Atakilte / Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala

Large-scale land acquisitions: a comparative analysis of governance systems between Ethiopia and Tanzania

Tanzania and Ethiopia are transferring extensive territorial resources to different actors including their own corporates, other sovereign states, and foreign and domestic private investors. Agricultural policies of both countries emphasize the need for external investment, modernization of the agricultural sector and the utilization of rural resources to achieve economic development. Much of this policy orientation, however, leans towards promoting export-oriented, large-scale and commercial agricultural systems. Large tracks of land and water basins have been transferred to domestic and foreign companies over the past few years. Recent studies on the current large-scale land and water acquisitions from both countries suggest that governance structures of, access to and control over natural resources are critical aspects of the transfers. This is despite the fact that both countries exhibit marked differences in their historical and contextual conditions of governance systems of their natural resources. While Tanzania has been appreciated for promoting and institutionalizing village and local levels of natural resources management and governance systems, Ethiopia on the other hand stands out as a country where the State plays dominant role in governance systems of natural resources. This paper aims to explore why, despite the marked differences in governance systems, some of the large-scale land and water acquisitions face similar challenges when implemented.

Kamski Benedikt / Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institute (University of Freiburg) & Dept. of Political Science & Int. Relations (Addis Ababa University)

The ‘Water-Mechanism’ of Agricultural Investments: Evidences from Ethiopia’s lower Omo Valley

The purpose of this contribution is to demonstrate the utility of a hydro-centered approach to analysing the regional externalities of large-scale land based investments for agriculture. We apply a multi-layered cause-effect analysis of social, political and environmental factors and particularly focus on the specific conditional variables of land investments for agriculture. Using the example of the Omo Kuraz Sugar Development Project in Ethiopia we posit that water resources are directly affected to different degrees in terms of water quality, reduced water availability and access to water sources. These hydro-externalities are referred to as water mechanism with varying temporal extent and geographical scope. Furthermore, indirect negative repercussions that can be linked to a set of conditional variables of land acquisition are debated. Three main sets of actions can be distinguished as: actions of endorsement that foster conflicting situations referred to as (–C), conflict preventing actions (+C) and actions that are not fully or not yet determinable (nC). We argue that key issues such as access restrictions, settlement policies, migration movements and agro-ecological interplays such as land use change and agricultural practices are key determinants that generate new conflict dynamics. The presentation draws on findings from extended field research conducted in Ethiopia’s lower Omo valley, the Turkana Region and the Ilemi Triangle in 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Rutten Marcel / African Studies Centre Leiden

The Land-Water Nexus in semi-arid Kenya – water depletion as a result of land tenure changes

Water is a basic need and an important catalyst for accelerating economic development in semi-arid areas. With only two out of three people having access to improved water supplies, Africa has the lowest coverage of any region of the world. More so, beyond the focus of public attention, an unseen emergency is continuing to unfold due to competition over water, in particular in rural areas, because of a deepening globalisation of agricultural production, changes in land tenure and population growth. In the semi arid Kajiado region in southern Kenya water is depleted foremost as a result of newly introduced agricultural practices supplying cutflowers to western markets. The paper will elaborate the process of land tenure adaptations started in the late 1960s on instigation of FAO/World Bank under the Kenya Livestock Development Programme. From the mid-1980s the group ranches created started a process of subdivision into individual holdings making it a commodity available under a willing seller-willing buyer regime since then. The economic and environmental effects of these developments and the options to stop the destruction will be discussed in detail.

Greani Nora / LABEX CAP, IIAC Musée du quai Branly-HiCSA

Esthétique socialiste en république populaire du Congo, la figure de l’homme nouveau

L’apparition d’une esthétique socialiste en République populaire du Congo au début des années soixante se réalise en décalage avec une large part du reste du monde. Près de trente ans séparent ses prémices des consignes jdanoviennes qui consacrent le Réalisme socialiste en URSS en 1934. La circulation internationale de l’imagerie de propagande, la confrontation directe avec l’art élaboré dans les pays “frères”, la diffusion des “attributs” socialistes cubains, sont autant d’éléments d’influence extérieure à l’origine d’une esthétique originale, proprement congolaise. Dans le cadre de cette intervention, nous proposons d’étudier les différents emprunts, rejets et réappropriations des canons esthétiques révolutionnaires des pays du bloc socialiste. Nous analyserons plus particulièrement l’introduction de l’Homme nouveau dans le vocabulaire visuel congolais. Sous la forme d’un prolétaire vigoureux (ouvrier ou paysan collectivisé), l’homme nouveau agit comme une métaphore de la société issue de la Révolution, politiquement, économiquement, socialement, culturellement et sexuellement émancipée. L’art socialiste congolais ne s’est pas lassé d’en proposer plusieurs illustrations, ainsi que sa version féminine. Quelles visions du monde étaient proposées par les artistes au travers de la figure de l’homme et de la femme nouveaux ? Quels enseignements géopolitiques peut-on en tirer ?

Effiboley Emery Patrick / University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

L’Etat béninois révolutionnaire et son action culturelle : une politique inachevée

Les politiques culturelles africaines et plus particulièrement celles mises en œuvre par les Etats à l’époque où plusieurs d’entre eux avaient adopté une orientation marxiste ont jusqu’à présent peu retenu l’attention des chercheurs en sciences sociales.
La présente communication ambitionne de jeter les jalons d’une étude des actions de l’Etat béninois visant à réglementer, encourager et diffuser les productions artistiques et les biens patrimoniaux durant les années 1970-80. Tout d’abord, il s’agira d’évoquer les circonstances d’émergence au Bénin de la politique culturelle à l’époque marxiste ainsi que les principaux outils réglementaires mis en place. Ensuite, quelques réalisations majeures de la période seront présentées pour appréhender l’esprit dans lequel les ‘’acteurs’’ de cette période ont gouverné le pays ainsi que les résultats obtenus. L’exposé se terminera par une mise en lumière des leçons à tirer et des perspectives de recherches à engager à la fois sur cette thématique que sur cette période de l’histoire récente du Bénin.

Gnonhouevi David Emmanuel / Université d’Abomey-Calavi

L’art socialiste et l’idéologie communiste au Bénin : le cas de Philippe Abayi

La République du Bénin à l’instar de plusieurs pays dans le monde a expérimenté le communisme et adopta en 1974 le marxisme-léninisme. Plusieurs réformes ont été introduites : nationalisation de tous les secteurs de l’économie, réforme du système éducatif, mise en place de coopératives agricoles et de nouvelles structures d’administration locale (comités révolutionnaires locaux), interdiction des activités politiques et syndicales, lancement d’une violente campagne d’éradication des « forces féodales » (chefferies et religions traditionnelles). Certains artistes adhèrent à cette idéologie et on constate que l’art va servir à sa propagande. Le régime de Mathieu Kérékou en profita. Un artiste en particulier s’est illustré dans ce domaine, Philippe ABAYI dont les œuvres seront l’objet de la présente étude. Il s’agira de voir à travers ses œuvres l’influence de la période révolutionnaire et de voir en quoi il a réellement participé à cette propagande.

Tchibozo Romuald / Université d’Abomey Calavi

L’art contemporain d’Afrique dans l’ex-République Démocratique Allemande : entre influence idéologique et légitimation

La présence de l’art contemporain d’Afrique en ex-RDA après la deuxième guerre mondiale est-elle une légitimation de cette production ou une propagande politique ? Telle est la question qu’on est tenté de se poser à la vue de l’évolution des relations d’abord, culturelles et ensuite, artistiques que ce pays a entretenues avec certains pays africains. La mise en œuvre de la politique extérieure du jeune Etat, issu de la partition de l’Allemagne au lendemain de la deuxième guerre mondiale, a obligé les autorités à développer différentes stratégies pour se faire reconnaître et assumer leur existence internationale. La plupart des pays d’Afrique au Sud du Sahara, encore en lutte pour leur indépendance ont trouvé en ce nouvel Etat, un partenaire de poids pour équilibrer les relations hégémoniques que les puissances colonisatrices entretenaient avec eux. Les normes d’appréciation de l’art contemporain n’étant pas, en ces lieux, les mêmes qu’en occident, sommes nous en situation de parler de légitimation, de récupération politique ou d’influence idéologique ? Que signifie la présence de l’art contemporain d’Afrique dans ce pays ? Telles sont les questions qui vont nous occuper au cours de cette communication.

Makukula Dominicus / FU-Berlin

Arts and socialist politics in Tanzania: what is Ujamaa Art?

This paper was intended to explore and describe the supposedly “Ujamaa art” in Tanzania. For decades some art curators and writers asserts that Tanzanian socialist government has influenced the birth and development of an art style which was a result of Nyerere’s 1960s Ujamaa policies. As this view has contradicted a full appreciation of 1960s art practices in Tanzania as a creative process and linked it to the then socialist politics, the main objective of this simple research was to bring into the light the reliable information to support or refute the assumption that there is an art by the name of “Ujamaa” which is a result of 1960s socialist government policy or rather commission in Tanzania.
The researcher employed library research, interviews, art criticism and documentary review methods in the process of data collection. The library research involved review of literatures on Ujamaa politics and art in Tanzania in the 1960s, while the interviews were conducted on two prominent Tanzanian art professors and one politician who worked as an “Ujamaa” propagandist in the Nyerere’s socialist government. The researcher also analysed the contents of 9 major artworks produced between the year 1967 and 1985 when Ujamaa policy was strong. Finally the researcher reviewed the messages in the documentary film by CCTV titled “Faces of Africa: Mwalimu Julius Nyerere” in which a prominent Tanzanian art collector and promoter speaks about Nyerere’s influences on art development in Tanzania.
The research results showed that unlike Russia, Cuba, East Germany, North Korea, China, Senegal and Ghana the socialist government in Tanzania is not recorded anywhere to have declared a state aesthetic on the type of art to be produced and commissioned by its institutions. That Ujamaa policy did not show anywhere it was in favour of any particular kind of art. Otherwise the researcher found that in an incident there was a politician whom out of curiosity, happened to name one of Makondes’ carving style the name “Ujamaa” for what it depicted before his eyes. Moreover, it was clearly seen that there was nothing like “Ujamaa art” as a collective name for state funded art but a Tanzanian art based on traditional life experiences and unity messages, rich of cultural synthesis and high freedoms of artistic expressions.

Taylor Ty-Juana / University of California, Los Angeles

Singing My Past, My Present, and My Future: Music and Memory among Street Children in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

After nearly two years of observation and research, I have come to find that street children are resilient, using their situation to forge a society for survival on their own. In the case of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, these children, usually ranging from 6- 18 years of age, traverse urban spaces creating their own unique culture, composed of a structural hierarchy, a unique language, music and dance, games, and occupations.
I thereby propose a paper, which investigates the music culture of street children in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The paper will examine how these mobile communities of children may promote diversity and counter the culture of divisiveness, which many of these children were born into. Through an examination of the cultural product of music in street children’s culture, the lens of helplessness is altered, offering a vantage, which realizes the resilience of their communities. Through observation, I have found that often times these children evoke their past, celebrate their presence, and create their future through music and dance.

Champy Muriel / LESC, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

“The Income of Bakoro”: Conquering Financial Autonomy On The Streets of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Despite the strong attention street children have aroused for more than three decades, academics still seem to hesitate between a normative perspective which considers the street as not being suited for children —who should therefore, both for moral and safety issues, immediately be retrieved from this dangerous environment— and a certain fascination for the creativity of these young individuals surviving in the face of adversity. Careful to avoid both the pitiful attitude my interlocutors rejected and the denial of their sufferings, I have chosen to ground my ethnography on the study of the “bakoromen” (a nouchi word the young Burkinabe sleeping on the streets use to call themselves) of Ouagadougou. Using their language prevented me from the biases of the category “street children” created by the development programs, offered an insight into street culture and enabled me to apprehend all “bakoroman”, whether they are ten years of age or forty-five. Listening to their words and following their practices, I also decided to focus on their active participation to the urban economy. Through begging, small activities in the informal sector, pickpocketing, robberies and drug dealing my six years of research showed that, despite its hardships, life on the streets offers a certain financial autonomy, and can thus participate in the recovery of their self-esteem and, eventually, to the respect of their families. As such, it both facilitates and endangers their pathway to resilience.

Kebe Fatou / LARTES (Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Transformations Economiques et Sociales)/IFAN Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar

Street Children and Youth in Dakar: Remarks on Family Ruptures and Reintegration

La problématique de l’enfance est un enjeu majeur en Afrique et au Sénégal en particulier. Le phénomène de société que constituent les enfants des rues est abordé différemment par les chercheurs. L’analyse de la situation familiale des enfants en rupture permet de soulever un ensemble de questions jusque là en suspens ou encore peu approfondies en ce qui concerne la problématique de la situation familiale des enfants avant la rupture familiale.
Cette recherche vise à renforcer les capacités de compréhension et d’analyse du phénomène par tous les acteurs concernés : Etat, pouvoirs publics, associations gestionnaires de services, Partenaires du développement, afin de pouvoir mieux penser, ou repenser, les Interventions, en termes de programmation d’actions et d’activités adaptées.
Cette recherche a privilégié la forme du témoignage à celle de l’analyse théorique. Elle interroge essentiellement la relation familiale des enfants et jeunes de la rue. Dans le cadre de cette recherche, les raisons ont, toutefois, été surtout explorées pour mieux mesurer les conséquences sur la relation familiale elle-même. Est-il possible de rompre la rupture ?
Cette recherche contribue à l’appréhension de la complexité du retour en famille, mais également de mieux mesurer les effets de la rupture dans le champ, communément nommé, de la réinsertion des enfants et jeunes de la rue.

Ngalle Denis Ndode / University of Antwerp

Street Children in Cameroon: Can They Hope for A Better Future?

There is a growing concern in the Cameroon that street children are helpless as their everyday life is characterised with poverty and exclusion from the society. The government has been working hard to get them out of the street and ameliorate their condition of life (Danpullo (2008:151-157). These children are also struggling in their own little way to make a better future for themselves, but their efforts are ruined by poorly focused government policy. Based on a review of recent research, the paper examines the measures been taken to rehabilitate street children in Cameroon, their own efforts to build a better future and the challenges they encounter.
The findings show that the efforts street children in Cameroon are doing to ensure their own survival in life cannot be underscored. The challenges they face are as a result of poorly designed policy and the stagnant economic situation that continue to push many into the circle of poverty. The paper suggests that what these children need is just a mere push to the efforts they are already making. The government should work together with parents and the community to rehabilitate street children, provide them better education, and job opportunities.

Di Napoli Pastore Marina / Federal University of Sao Carlos

The Culture of Playing as a Space of Resistance and Child Ownership

Studies involving the participation of children and their way of life have grown steadily. Childhood researches seek to understand the ways of being a child through the everyday and specific contexts of cultures to which they belong, seeking not universal childhood as normative. African children, in turn, are set forth as out of place, for not following standards and regulations imposed by European and North American childhoods. In order to change this paradigm, this article is to bring to the discussion the child be in a community located on the outskirts of a city of Mozambique, southern Africa. Narratives analyses were performed from an ethnographic work lasting five months in Matola, Mozambique to describe and discuss the relationships and dynamics of children’s socialization.
Mozambican children have tasks and responsibilities guided the social division of labor. Among its activities, be they domestic, community or school, there is space for play. The fun and laughter permeate the imagination and children’s worlds, producing ways of being, living and acting in the world. The play appears in this narrative as critical to develop and construction of knowledge and expertise aggregates the cultural and social values, and the accountabilities and relationships that children establish between peers and adults. Considerations: deconstructing the ways childhoods are imposed and provide breaks in its universalization are the challenges encountered

Degorce Alice / IMAF, IRD

Resisting together to (re-) integrate: an association women in Ouagadougou

Les migrants burkinabè de retour de Côte d’Ivoire au moment de la guerre civile du début des années 2000 ont souvent connu des problèmes d’intégration. Surnoms aux consonances péjoratives, stigmatisation de leurs façons de parler ou de s’habiller, ou encore reproches ciblant un présupposé manque de participation au développement du pays sont autant d’éléments qui ont rendu ces retours au Burkina Faso difficiles. Beaucoup sont par ailleurs rentrés dans un état de grande précarité. Cette communication porte sur une association de femmes rapatriées à Ouagadougou. Alors que de nombreux migrants sont repartis dès que la situation l’a permis, il s’agit d’interroger les stratégies mises en place par les actrices de cette association pour s’insérer malgré tout dans la capitale burkinabè et opérer de la sorte une forme de résistance à un contexte social peu favorable à leur installation. Plus de dix ans après leur retour, ces femmes ont en effet su créer les conditions nécessaires à leur insertion dans une ville en plein changement et dans un contexte économique et social qui reste fragile, en mettant tour à tour au premier plan et selon les situations leur identité de migrantes, religieuse ou de genre.

Zack Tanya / The School of Architecture and Planning, University of Witwatersrand

Managing entry and stay in “Jeppe” – 4000 kilometres from home

Since the late 1990s, thousands of Ethiopian political asylum seekers and economic migrants have moved to Johannesburg. Many find their way as traders and shop assistants in the inner city of Johannesburg in an area colloquially known as ‘Jeppe’ (Zack, 2014). While some research has documented the spatial and economic nature of this trading community, little exploration has been undertaken into the social strategies that Ethiopian migrants employ to navigate their entry and their stay in the ethnic entrepreneurial cluster they occupy. How Ethiopian economic migrants to Johannesburg manage their connections ‘here’ and ‘there’ offers important insights into these strategies. And the particular barriers to entry that individuals have to manage within this entrepreneurial community in inner city Johannesburg are at once economic and social. Through interviews with Ethiopian migrant entrepreneurs in inner city Johannesburg this narrative non-fiction paper will focus on the experience of ten individuals who are navigating their entry and stay in the host society while managing their connectedness to their source community. The work is based on interviews conducted during 2014 and 2015. It explores disconnection and connection, social institutions and social capital in a work dominated environment, managing life events in absentia, social freedoms and constraints in the host society.

Bonfiglio Ayla / UNU-MERIT, Maastricht Graduate School for Governance

Student migrant, refugee or both? Exploring refugee agency and mobility through tertiary education

This research seeks to move beyond characterizations of displacement as spontaneous and lacking agency by understanding how tertiary education shapes forced migration processes in Kenya and Uganda. Using Kunz’ (1973) framework on refugee movements and a comparative qualitative research design, this study will ask: 1) What are the displacement patterns (i.e., the stages, routes, and timing of movement) of refugees who become tertiary level students? 2) What are refugees’ norms, aspirations, and routine practices surrounding tertiary education and how have they evolved over the course of refugees’ displacement, and 3) How have the dimensions of refugee agency related to tertiary education shaped and been shaped by refugees’ displacement patterns? While an innovative lens to analyze agency, examining refugee tertiary education is crucial for furthering the refugee development field, given its positive implications for integration and reintegration and the protracted nature of most refugee situations.

Costantini Osvaldo / Sapienza-University of Rome

“My work is mesawati, a sacrifice made to help my brother to come here… Now it is his turn”. Familiar and individual strategies among Eritrean refugees in Europe.

Eritrean migration is a wide migration phenomenon in this time. UNHCR estimates that about 300.000 Eritrean refugees have been recognized in the world in the last 15 years, an impressive number for a country with a population of 4-5 million of habitants.
They are leaving the country because of the living conditions under Afewerki’s regime that forces every citizen between age 18 and 40 (50 for men) to endure endless military training, in a country where all freedom have been suppressed in the name of the defense of the home country. Their migration could be defined as “forced migration”, but this label does not reflect the reality at all: firstly, they elaborate a “desire of elsewhere” based on an image of western life widely spread in all diasporic contexts; Secondly, their decision to migrate often does not come suddenly, but it is the outcome of a process and/or of a family strategy. These strategies, created to entry and stay in European countries, encounter various barriers that are built to limit the entrance of migrants.
Through the strategies acted by an Eritrean refugee in Rome, I would like to show how individuals, families and groups, organize themselves to realize their migratory projects. I will focus on the way how they use their family network to avoid the obligation to claim asylum in Italy and how they try to reach northern-European countries that are considered to be a better place to live than Italy.

Setrana Mary Boatemaa / University of Ghana

Transnational Political Participation of Ghanaians in the Netherlands: a Contribution to Ghana’s Democratic Governance

This paper examines the impact of transnational political practice of immigrants on the democratic governance of the home country. Using mainly questionnaires, information was solicited from fifty Ghanaian immigrants in the Netherlands. Findings show that Ghanaian political party branches in the Diaspora support their counterparts financially in Ghana during internal elections and national electoral campaigns. Political party branches in the Diaspora educate and inform Ghanaian immigrants about the day to day governance of their home country through radio and Television programmes. These immigrants are also offered the opportunity to share their opinions through those programmes. Others also take part in deciding on the leadership of the political party. However, immigrants’ transnational political practice, are seldom rewarded by the political environment in Ghana. Therefore, the paper suggest that the Representation of the People Amendment Law (ROPAL) should be implemented to allow Ghanaian immigrants exercise their full right by voting in national elections abroad.

Fendler Ute / University of Bayreuth

Resisting images : Early Mozambican films between cinema vérité and poetry

The film “Deixem-me subir ao menos as palmeiras” (1972) was realized by José Barbosa in particular difficult circumstances in 1972 and was censored for its critique of the colonial system. It is particularly interesting how this film uses poetry and symbolically loaded cinematographic language to convey a political message that was – at the same time – transmitted in a style close to the cinema vérité. As Jacques Rancière has underlined the existence of two ways of resistance, namely the topic of a film and disturbing images, it will be of interest how this censored film brings into being images that disturb by questioning the system that is inserted in the visuality that captures, encloses and transmits the revolutionary moment of the picture. In the first Mozambican feature film, “O vento sopra do norte” (1987) by José Cardoso, one can find a certain continuity in motives and tropes. The parallels in the cinematographic language in spite of the lapse of time allows to discern the aesthetic impact of re-occurring images or the change in the construction of meaning via visual encoded “messages” that might carry the “resisting potential”. In analogy to Peter Burke’s “mythogenes” as a set of characteristics that is at the basis of the construction of a myth, we will analyze the “mythogenes” or the “imagogenes” of “Deixem-me ao menos subir as palmeiras” the pictures of which turn into a myth of resistance.

Vieira Sílvia / CIAC-University of Algarve

Cinema as a political weapon in Mozambique

A história do cinema em Moçambique está intimamente ligada às transformações políticas, económicas, sociais e culturais operadas depois da independência do país a 25 de Junho de 1975. Uma das primeiras medidas tomadas pelo primeiro presidente da República Popular de Moçambique, Samora Machel, foi criar o Serviço Nacional de Cinema (SNC), renomeado em 1976 de Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC). Podemos afirmar que, desde o nascimento do país, os seus líderes perceberam que o cinema seria o meio de comunicação ideal para promover a unificação do país e divulgar os valores socialistas da FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique).
Os objetivos desta apresentação são analisar e contextualizar aqueles que constituíram uma verdadeira arma política e uma poderosa forma de unificação e estruturação do país em torno de um ideal comum – os jornais cinematográficos moçambicanos – Kuxa Kanema.

Laranjeiro Catarina / CES, University of Coimbra

Confronting vague ideas with clear images: Ghosts and Memories in the Liberation War in Guinea-Bissau

My proposal aims to analyze the image representation of the liberation war in Guinea-Bissau (1963-1974) from its ghosts and absences. The hypothesis I intend to develop is about the visual representation of the liberation war as a place of imagination and reinvention of a nation, and how these images can define belongings and exclusions, causing power struggles over its historical legacy. Therefore, using image archive, I will try to evoke discursive practices for analyzing how visual representations that were or were not produced in the liberation struggle period, question the (re) construction of narratives about the history of Guinea-Bissau during the colonial and post-colonial context. The cinema as an object of study emerges due to its political importance, once image was a privileged instrument of denunciation and a key political script in finding arenas for the emancipation of the Guinean people, who aimed following the words of the historical leader Amilcar Cabral, restore to the people their own culture. Thus, the relevance of an epistemological proposal to create a “visual archive of the liberation struggle”, underlying my doctoral project underway, is to to create a new “place of memory” (Nora, 1988), as a useful tool for the analysis of the mechanisms and processes of emancipation triggered by the liberation movement and the countries which in the context of the Cold War supported militarily and economically the anticolonial cause.

Oliveira Jusciele / University of Algarve

Tavares Mirian / University of Algarve

Flora Gomes: partidas e retornos de um cineasta autoral em trânsito na contemporaneidade

O presente resumo ocupa-se das representações construídas pelo cineasta Flora Gomes para a África e para a Guiné-Bissau, com foco nas questões nacionais demandadas na contemporaneidade, e transformadas em matéria da indústria cultural do cinema, que extrapola as fronteiras guineenses seja através da temática de trânsitos físicos e culturais, seja pela política de agenciamento das instâncias de produção cinematográfica, bem como através das estratégias de mise-en-scene, modo de construção narrativa e algumas recorrências temáticas, a fim de destacar traços formais, estilísticos e de conteúdo que possam corroborar uma preocupação consciente ou não deste cineasta africano com o chamado “cinema de autor”.

Balona de Oliveira Ana / University of Lisbon, CEC / New University of Lisbon, IHA / University of London, Courtauld

Cities and Faces, Boxes and Water: Histories and Memories of Decolonization and Beyond in the Work of Kiluanji Kia Henda and Délio Jasse

Establishing connections not only between cinema and other forms of moving image in contemporary artistic practice, but also between film and video and other artistic media where the movements and passages of images might be said to occur by means other than those of the cinematic proper, thereby exploring other possible meanings of ‘resistances in movement’ and ‘resistance of images’, this presentation will discuss the video Afecto de Betão (Concrete Affection) (2014) by Kiluanji Kia Henda, and the ‘moving’ images, immersed in pigmented water, of the photographic installation Ausência Permanente (Permanent Absence) (2014) by Délio Jasse. Both Kia Henda and Jasse, the former, in a personal and poetic adaptation of R. Kapuscinski’s Another Day of Life (1975), the latter, by means of photographic ‘montages’ of several layers of archival and non-archival images and stamps, examine not only histories and memories of Portuguese colonialism and decolonization in Angola, but also the post-Cold War, post-civil war, post-Marxist contemporary moment, which is leaving its imprint on the landscape, not only urban and architectural, in Luanda and other cities, but also natural. How do the formal, material and conceptual qualities of these artistic moving images and of their ‘moving’ conditions of production, display and reception allow them to become resistant, justly in-‘appropriate’ spaces and sites in the present for the entangled histories and memories passing in and through them?

Rommel Carl / SOAS, University of London

Darlings of the revolution? Emergent masculinities, success and contingency in the political mobilisation of Cairo’s revolutionary Ultras

Ultras Ahlawy (UA), the Cairean football team al-Ahly’s largest supporter group, actively participated in Egypt’s revolutionary struggle in 2011. In February 2012, 72 UA members were killed in a stadium massacre in Port Said, an event widely understood as the security forces’ revenge for UA’s revolutionary politics.
The ethnography in this paper hones in on a period after Port Said, when UA launched a campaign that called for ‘justice for the martyrs’ and a progressive and revolutionary Egyptian football. I show how UA quickly gathered unprecedented momentum and support, and how several demands were met. This was a result of UA embodying a particular ‘emergent masculinity’ of discipline and purposeful action that was well in sync with the revolutionary, socio-political atmosphere. I also illustrate how UA got immune to previously wide-spread accusations of ‘thuggery’ and ‘fanaticism’. The paper thus exemplifies how subjectivities at particular historical junctures can avoid powerful machineries of scrutiny, othering and securitisation. The period of offensive mobilisation was however short-lived. Soon, UA’s revolutionary-respectable masculinity began to be questioned. I argue that this development was a result of a combination of factors: while the group’s strategies and actions did matter, some factors were outside UA’s control. The chapter thus also highlights the contingency and precariousness of mobilisations that rely on positively coded emergent masculinities.

Ranta Eija Maria / Development Studies, University of Helsinki

Political Patronage, Ethnic Networks and the Politics of Development: The Case of Youth Political Participation in the 2013 Kenyan Elections

It is commonly claimed that the organization of free elections is a prerequisite towards liberal democracy. In the name of ‘development’, many international aid agencies put considerable amounts of resources into democracy promotion, electoral support, and, for instance, youth political mobilization and leadership promotion. Through the examination of youth political participation in the 2013 Kenyan elections, the article examines relationships between aid actions and the complexity of real-life politics of youth. Drawing on experiences of politically active young men and women, it shows that despite major improvements in numerical terms, youth political participation is still permeated by an overwhelming influence of political patronage and ethnic networks, whose mastering is often at the hands of elder male figures. To a large extent, their radical political activism is attempted to be tamed and co-opted. Theoretically, the article argues that there is an unsolved discrepancy between the logics of aid discourses and practices and the logics of national and local political systems in each specific empirical context. Due to colonial legacies and postcolonial dependency relations, state formation processes tend to diverge from Western-promoted normative ideals in many parts of the Global South. Subsequently, the politics of development appears to, simultaneously, maintain the status quo and support alternative political voices; to depoliticize and politicize.

Balcha Gebremariam Eyob / University of Manchester

Urban Youth Mobilization under “Democratic” Developmentalism in Ethiopia

The central thesis of the paper is that, the dominant feature in the urban youth mobilization in present day Ethiopia exhibits an instrumentalist nature whereby socio-economic rights of youth are promoted at the expense of their civic-political rights. This can be the result of the historical relations between the post-revolution regimes in Ethiopia and the youth which is heavily influenced by the polarized political culture. Most importantly, however, the ideological orientations of the incumbent regime and the subsequent political, legal and policy frameworks have immense role in shaping state-youth relations in the 21st century Ethiopia. In studying the urban-youth mobilization in today’s Ethiopia, the paper critically examines both the democratic and developmental endeavours of the EPRDF led regime. The paper builds on the argument that consolidation of democracy is an essential requirement for the transformative elements of development to be institutionalized without threateni ng the political and economic interests of the elites. The Ethiopian case presents a scenario where instrumentalist youth mobilization is used as a justification to showcase the procedural democratic nature of the regime. The inculcation of instrumentalist state-youth relation is equally influenced by both the ideological, legal and political beliefs of the ruling elite and by the developmentalist policies.

Gaibazzi Paolo / ZMO – Zentrum Moderner Orient

Contingency: a category for studying youth and progress in Africa

This paper reflects on contingency as a meaningful analytical category for the study of the youth-progress nexus in Africa. As a meta-group projected towards the future and invested with the renewal of generations, youth are often a privileged site for imagining and executing particular visions of societal and political progress. The paper is not interested, however, in whether African youth are or can be a bearer of specific normative ideas of progress (e.g. democracy), but in the epistemological premises in the study of such ideas and the youth that embrace them. In particular, although progress is often thought of telos and order-driven ideology, the paper shows how it can be viewed as a mode for grappling with the very contingency of present circumstances and of future-oriented trajectories in which ideas and actors of progress emerge. This reckoning with, and taming of, contingency in its various manifestations will be shown to be an important element for understanding youths’ sentiments and meanings as bearers of progress across a number of social and historical contexts.

Borszik Anne-Kristin / Bayreuth University

Organized responses to crime: evidence from semi-urban Guinea-Bissau

This paper suggests a specific variety of the assumed nexus between organized crime and “vacant states”. By drawing on fieldwork data from a semi-urban setting in Guinea-Bissau, it argues that from citizens’ perspectives it is rather the organized responses to crimes (committed by individuals) than the phenomenon of organized crime that worries them with regard to the national legal system of this ‘weak state’.
Organized responses to crime concern local dispute settlers’ frequent practice of communicating and cooperating with one another and often benefitting (materially) from the joint settlement of cases. Expressions like e ta banbun utru (“they support each other for the pursuit of their interests”) and e ta kolabora (“they collaborate [for obtaining material benefits]”) illustrate such forms of organized responses to crimes.
Since – as many Bissau-Guineans agree – “there is no justice” (djustisa ka ten na Guiné) in their country and because impunity prevails, aggrieved parties frequently cope with dispute settlers’ organized responses to crimes by activating supporters from outside the legal realm.
The paper will relate these two phenomena, discussed on the basis of a specific legal case, to general debates on organized crime, statehood, coping strategies and legal pluralism in legal sociology and beyond.

Bøås Morten / NUPI

Organisation without organisations – criminality, coping and resistance in the Sahel periphery

Drawing upon ongoing fieldwork in the Mali-Sahel region, this paper will show that there is no such thing as an ʻungoverned spaceʼ and that the crime-terrorʼ nexus simply does not exist in any form that makes it possible to depict it as a fixed entity. Rather, the logic of the relationship between criminality, coping and resistance in the Sahel periphery is one of ʻships that pass in the nightʼ, where different competing ʻbig menʼ aspire for the role of nodal points in different networks of informal governance: some mainly profit-driven, others combine income-generating strategies with social and political objectives (secular and religious), whereas yet others simply aim to cope (and hopefully thrive in the distant future). As the very constellation of these networks constantly is changing this is therefore acts and behaviour that is organised, but without any form of formal or permanent organisation attached to it. This makes it possible to combine various strategies of criminality, coping and resistance without necessarily loosing sight of neither immediate nor long-term objectives. The outcome is a narrative-driven space of co-existence, collusion and conflict in which the leaping together of different actors’ interests, ideas and actions only will lead to confusion and misguided policies and not analytical clarity.

Boutellis Arthur / MINUSMA & International Peace Institute (IPI)

Should and how could MINUSMA deal with Organized Crime in Mali?

By the time MINUSMA deployed to Mali in July 2014, transnational organized crime (TOC) had long been part of the reality of armed groups but also of the State apparatus. The issue gained considerable visibility through a number of publications and events on TOC and Mali throughout 2014, describing the problem but providing little actionable recommendations on what the UN could and should – or not – do about it. Similarly, Member States have increasingly recognized terrorism and TOC as both a direct threat to peacekeepers and a strategic threat to the implementation of the mandate but have so far given little guidance and means to UN missions for dealing with such threats and implementing effective stabilization mandates. This paper analyzes how new information collection and analysis tools within MINUSMA have led to a better understanding of the TOC issue, particularly in relation to armed groups, and its implications on the mediation process in particular. This however did not translate into new approaches in part due to the short-term terrorist threat to peacekeepers taking precedent (in the revision of the mission concept). The paper concludes on the need for UN multidimensional stabilization missions in contexts such as Mali, to develop mission-wide crosscutting stabilization strategies that factor in the TOC issue, including in its sub-regional dimensions, in collaboration with UN regional offices and agencies and Panel of Experts.

Raineri Luca / Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa)

Mali: criminal(ized) economies and insurgent identities. A spatial analysis

Based on fieldwork conducted in Sahel in late 2014, the paper focuses on the changing dynamics of armed insurgencies, illicit economies and identity claims in Mali.
A first descriptive part attempts to shed lights on trafficking routes of key products and their relevant actors in the region. It aims to complement the existing literature that researched into similar phenomena either before (Brachet et al. 2011, UNODC 2008) or during (Lacher 2012, Shaw and Tinti 2014) the conflict with an up-to-date overview of the current hybrid (Boege et al. 2009) context. Taking into account the geographical dimension recommended in the study of organized crime (Bayart 2004, Snyder and Duran-Martinez 2009), the evidence collected will be displayed through a specific cartographic apparatus.
The second, analytical part assesses to what extent (if any) the war has changed the dynamics, rules and actors of criminal economies in Mali. It shows how blurred appears in this case the dichotomy between profit-seeking and rent-seeking behaviours (Berdal and Malone 2000). The validity of the crime-terror continuum theory (Makarenko 2004) will equally be questioned.
Building on the concepts of connectivity (Scheele 2012) and informal patronage networks (Utas 2012), the concluding, explanatory part suggests a reformulation of Reno’s categorization of African insurgencies (2011), and explores the relationship between identity claims, criminal(ized) economies and resistance.

Strazzari Francesco / NUPI

The making of a hybrid security order: dynamics of (para)militarization in the Sahara-Sahel region

This paper explores evolving regional security dynamics in the Sahel-Sahara region, delving into the way in which extra-legal flows of human beings and commodities have been upscaled, coming to be represented as a security threat, or even a key facilitator for terrorism, in a desert or semi-desert region where borders have historically been little more than lines in the sand. Far from assuming an ontological divide between (challenged) law enforcement agents and (increasingly powerful) insidious outlaws, the paper takes stock of the growing availability of weapons, evolving mechanisms of protection and extraction, new modes of border control, and mutually reinforcing phenomena of para-militarization and externally-assisted militarization. In conclusion, a number of reflections are presented regarding the way in which ongoing dynamics are related to broader regional and European security.

Rich Dorman Sara / School of Social and Political Science University of Edinburgh

We have not made anybody homeless’: Urban development, citizenship, and the Zimbabwean state

In May and June 2005, thousands of Zimbabweans were brutally displaced from urban areas. But ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ was not simply an unpredictable ‘tsunami,’ rather it reflected long-held prejudices and assumptions about city life and urban residents in Zimbabwe. The regulation and control of urban areas was an integral part of the construction of Zimbabwean citizenship because it created areas which were not homes, and political institutions upon which people could not make claims. To see Murambatsvina as simply a politically expedient move against ‘trouble-makers’ is to miss the deep resonance of the political rhetoric, and the ways it was embedded in the state. The clearances revealed a long-standing set of policies designed to regulate and control urban life, forming part of a broader crisis of the post-colonial developmental state, generated not just by the internalisation of the Rhodesian, modernist world-view, but its imbrication with the local understandings and political imperatives.

Leiria Viegas Silvia / Faculty of Archictecture, University of Lisbon

Luanda, (un-)Predictable City? governance and urban and housing transformation: paradigms of intervention and resistances in the new millennium

The research approaches the current production of housing space in Luanda, in a scenario of peace, autocratic and neo-liberal, in regards to the process of that space production administrated by government and social agent entities, in need, that are resistant to public intervention.
Following the scientific and structural thoughts of Lefebvre, Harvey, Castells, Foucault, Wallerstein and Sousa Santos, the investigation seeks to identify the motivation, tools, and socio-spatial impacts within these two differentiated modes of the production of habitable space.
The historical context of Luanda and its reflection on the actual promotion of public housing, including present-day tools and two paradigmatic examples of marketable promotion (city of Kilamba) and re-housing (project of Panguila), guide the contours of spatial production of the public sector.
The reflection on the resistance to politics and public housing practices, through the analysis of forced evictions (musseque Iraq-Bagdad), of militant resistance to the mentioned practices (association SOS Habitat) and resettlement and reallocation in distinct temporal contexts (neighborhoods 27 de Março and Alto do Liro, Lobito), looks to recognize the transformation of the habitable space by groups with limited resources.
The research concludes that, when the political decision-makers integrate the messages from the resistance, the impacts of the practices of housing and urban governance contribute to the “right to the city”.

Geuder Jacob / Centre for African Studies Basel

Portraying the Right to the City – Representations of urban protests in YouTube-Videos

Few months before May 1968 in Paris, Henri Lefebvre wrote his essay “The Right to the City”. Since then neo-liberal politics have tightened their grip on urban spaces and investments in urban assets have become spots for global financial speculations. Thus it comes at no surprise, that many of today’s political resistances are not only staged in urban environments such as Tahir or Taksim Square, but denounce the “Right to the City” as “cry and demand”. At the same time, since two decades technological innovations like Computers, Smartphones and the Internet exert profound impacts on urban spaces, on everyday-life as well as political forms of organization.
My research project “Images of Movements” sets in here: What does the increasing overlap of urban and digital spaces mean for struggles over the Right to the City? The claim is that audiovisual representations that are made public online, deeply influence today’s repertoires and organization of protests. YouTube as the biggest worldwide supplier of online videos plays a crucial role in the representation of protests. The paper will present the findings of a first step of analysis of this research project: How does YouTube function as a dispositif for the presentation of videos of protests that claim the Right to the City? By explaining the dispositif of YouTube it should be made clear, what after all may stay (in)visible and attention is being produced.

Fournet-Guérin Catherine / Université de Reims

The “Wake up Madagascar” Action Group: international media Action or claiming a Right to the City? On the Various Scales of collective Mobilisation

The “Wake up Madagascar” Action Group: international media Action or claiming a Right to the City? On the Various Scales of collective Mobilisation

Chauvin Maïlys / LAM-IEP-Bordeaux

Des citadinités empêchées aux citadinités de la reconquête en situation de retour d’exil à Zanzibar

Le tournant des indépendances en Afrique s’est fréquemment traduit par une rupture en terme de pratiques et d’accès à la ville pour les citadins d’Afrique dans le cadre de la mise en place de régime autoritaire. A Zanzibar, la révolution puis la mise en place de la République Populaire de Zanzibar et de la République Unie de Tanzanie se traduisent, en quelques années, par le surgissement d’une violence inédite privant les habitants de leurs vies citadines et la capitale de son rôle de pivot international. Assassinats et disparitions, viols, démolition et confiscation des logements, rationnements conduisent de nombreux citadins à s’enfuir à l’étranger. Aujourd’hui, on assiste au retour d’une partie des membres de la diaspora post-révolutionnnaire zanzibarie dont les routes, les rythmes et les objets invitent à interroger une dialectique encore peu traitée aujourd’hui, celle des citadinités empêchées mais en reconquête dans le cadre des retours d’exil. Cette proposition suggère d’élargir le débat sur le droit à la ville à l’analyse du rôle des nouvelles pratiques que ces citadins « absents » en cours de ré-appropriation des lieux développent aux côtés de ceux qui sont restés, dans la recomposition des pratiques, des mémoires et des discours citadins et nationalistes. Cette « (re)-prise » de la ville passerait par une ré-appropriation des lieux de sociabilités, par une remise en circulation des mémoires citadines de la violence contestant le paysage mémoriel institutionnalisé.

Dumbe Yunus / Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

A View from the Inside: Muslim Modernists’ Critique of Salafi Reforms, 1969-1989

This paper analyses Salafi reforms from the perspective of Western educated elites who served in the leadership of the Islamic Research and Reformation Centre (IRRC). Inspired by religious orthodoxy, the IRRC’s platform attracted disgruntled Tijaniyya Muslims. The diverse nature of the IRRC enabled it to propose far-reaching and competing interpretations to Islamic reform. Based on archival data and in-depth interviews, the study argues that while Western educated elements promoted reforms by engaging the secular Ghanaian space; the Ulama, on the other hand, pursued reforms that focused on the eradication of perceived religious unorthodoxy. Furthermore, while the masses favoured the competing reforms of the Ulama; modernists subjected it to scathing criticism which is in contrast to the prevailing scholarship on Salafi-Sufi polemics. The study concludes that the different approaches to reform were a reflection of the influences of Islamic and Western education on adherents.

Langewiesche Katrin / Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien, University of Mainz, Germany

Between Adaptation and Resistance: Practices of Ahmadiyya Missionaries in West Africa

The focus of my research are the Ahmadiyya, an religious movement inspired by the ideas of Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, and their non-governmental organization Humanity First in three West African countries (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Benin). The Ahmadi missionaries found themselves faced by different, religious, political and legal systems, market forces, technology developments, and new forms of cosmopolitanism that required response and adaptation. Neither in the schools of the Ahmadiyya movement nor in the health care centers and development projects of Humanity First religion is explicitly addressed. However, the motivation for founding, funding and supporting them through one’s own work is motivated by the ideas of Ghulam Ahmad which envisioned to combine scientific knowledge, sustainable social development and religious values.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork and the first results of work-in progress, this paper opens perspectives on the modes of adaptation, resistance and mobilization of Ahmadi missionaries in West Africa; it looks at the ways in which the movement’s vision of a modern society, is materializing in the dialectic of coping with the cultural, political and economic circumstances of their contexts and an extremely formalized normative system.

Higazi Adam / Cambridge University

Mobilisation into and against Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria

This paper draws on the author’s anthropological research in north-east Nigeria (in parts of Borno, Bauchi, and Gombe States) and the Jos Plateau in central Nigeria, to analyse the dynamics and escalation of the Boko Haram insurgency, which in 2014 was one of the most deadly in the world. In analysing mobilisation into and against Boko Haram, the paper begins by outlining the doctrinal foundations of the sect’s jihadi ideology and its breaking away from – and subsequent violence against – Salafi groups in northern Nigeria. It then looks at patterns of recruitment, the focus and types of attacks, and the Nigerian state’s responses. The emergence and impacts of resistance from vigilante groups and other forms of resistance is then considered. The paper also touches on the political economy of the insurgency, including the contrasting allegations and discourses about suspected Boko Haram sponsors and funding. The paper asks why the Nigerian state and international actors did not
prevent the deepening of the crisis, which has displaced more than one million people, claimed many thousands of lives, and enabled Boko Haram to gain territorial control over significant parts of north-east Nigeria.

Ibrahim Murtala / Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany

If you cannot beat them, join them: NASFAT and the Challenges of Pentecostals in Nigeria

This paper is a result of an ethnographic study of NASFAT (Nasrullahi Fathi) which is one of the largest Islamic religious movements that emerged in the mega city of Lagos in last decade. The paper has looked into the struggle of NASFAT to adapt and succeed in an environment that is heavily dominated by Pentecostal Christianity which attract and fascinate large number of Muslim youths. NASFAT deploy strategies of imitating some Pentecostal practices, organizational structures and even initiate Islamic Sunday worship service in order to become appealing to the increasing number of modern educated young Muslims and middle class professionals. The logic which NASFAT employed to negotiate and legitimize imitating Pentecostal practices is based on the idea that if we do not do it ‘this way’ our youths will go to the Pentecostal churches. The paper has argued that the strategy of copying competitor’s seemingly attractive practices has helped NASFAT adapt and grow in a highly competitive Ni
gerian religious market place. The paper highlighted different area of Muslims and Christians encounter in Nigeria that is not based on usual narrative of conflicts but one that is based on mutual influence and imitation. Moreover, the paper also argued that NASFAT is a Muslim group whose agenda is not Islamic reform but presenting new face of Islam as modern progessive religion.

Sounaye Abdoulaye / Zentrum Moderner Orient

Apard Elodie / IFRA, Ibadan – Nigeria

Resisting and Adapting to Islamic Reform in Niamey, Niger

This paper discusses some of the modes of adaptation and resistance to the Izala reform in Niamey, Niger. It draws from extensive ethnographic work undertaken among youth in several neighborhoods of Niamey. It examines cultural forms, practices as well as discourses that sought to respond to the Izala reform and in many ways mitigate its impact.
The literature on the development of the Izala reform has extensively shown how the movement has emerged, mobilized and spread across Niger. Additionally, several analysts have described the transformative impact of the Izala on political configurations and social interactions in Niamey. However, little has been written on the modes and forms of resistance and adaptation to the Izala reform. This paper seeks to initiate a conversation on the Izala reform in context, focusing on the ways in which cultural forms, religious discourses and social logics have been mobilized to respond to Izala.

Osei Anja / University of Konstanz

Elite integration and political representation in Ghana and Togo

There can be no doubt that elites are important actors in political processes. There is, however, surprisingly little systematic engagement with African elites. Taking the unsatisfying state of research as a starting point, the paper that is proposed here systematically compares elite structures in Ghana and Togo. Two dimensions are in the focus: the social composition of elites and their patterns of interaction (horizontal integration) and the relationship between elites and the wider population (vertical integration or representation). The empirical evidence is based on a unique data set on the social background, attitudes, and intra-elite interaction patterns of Members of Parliament (MPs) in each of the countries. Data collection took place in 2013 and 2014 in cooperation with local partners. Based on this data, the paper will explore if and how elites in Ghana and Togo differ in their social characteristics and attitudes. Using social network analysis the paper will also analyze the structure of intra-elite interactions. It will be shown that Members of Parliament in Ghana form a dense and strongly interconnected network that bridges ethnic and party cleavages. In Togo there is much more suspicion between government and opposition, and much less cooperation. Togolese elites tend to form a concerted power structure in which many people hold simultaneous positions in the political, military, and civil sectors.

Jones Will / University of Oxford

The Animators: Explaining the Political Mobilisation of Diasporas in Africa

This paper seeks to understand the circumstances under which diasporic political mobilisation takes place through a comparison of two African diasporas: Zimbabweans since 2000, and Rwandans since 1994. It argues that a key (usually omitted) part of the explanation is the role of elite outsiders who pump resources and energy into mobilising diasporic communities in particular ways: animators. Based on extensive multi-sited fieldwork carried out over two years in South Africa, Botswana, Uganda, the UK, Belgium, and France with funding from the Leverhulme Trust, we trace the recent historical evolution of these transnational communities. It shows how, far from being static or permanent, diasporas are inherently political entities that have dynamic “lifecycles”; they are born, they live, they die, and they even have afterlives. Their existence and the forms they take are historically and politically contingent. Crucially, these lifecycles, and the durability of the diaapora, are determined not by the inherent qualities of the diaspora but by the role of elite “animators”, who make resources available to the diaspora.

Oppong Nelson / Oxford Department of International Development

Oil and the Politics of Institutional Choice: missing voices in Ghana’s public interest and accountability committee

On September 16, 2011, Ghana launched a thirteen-member Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) to ensure transparency and accountability in the management and use of petroleum revenue and investments in the country. This Committee has been presented as a home-grown, robust and non-partisan instrument for “good governance” that compliments various global and domestic efforts at ensuring oversight and accountability over the new oil industry. In contrast to various initiatives, especially the Ghana Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (GHEITI), PIAC is anchored on enforceable legislation, i.e., Section 51 of the Petroleum Revenue Management Act of 2011. In addition, the Committee is composed of representatives and nominees of various non-state organisations that have been statutorily designated by the PRMA. In spite of the enthusiasm with the PIAC, the evidence of its role as a citizen-led accountability platform and as instrument of institutional transformation has been less convincing. Early signals also point to the fact that PIAC has so far operated without the requisite buy-in from the domestic political elite and exists essentially as a “toothless” and “façade” oversight body. This presentation offers a deeper analysis of PIAC, first, as a platform for citizens’ accountability and, second, an >instrument of institutional transformation in Ghana’s nascent petroleum industry.

Gobbers Erik / Department of Political Science, Free University of Brussels

Elites, Ethnic Mobilization and Multi-Party Democracy in the Katanga province, the Democratic Republic of Congo: the Role of Urban Ethnic Associations

This paper focuses on interactions between regional elites and their ethnic community in a context of multi-party democracy in the D. R. Congo.
The colonial industry in Katanga caused migration from rural areas toward the cities, where ethnic associations were founded to organize mutual aid among migrants from the same region and to safeguard the common cultural patrimony. Since the restart of the democratization process ethnic associations seem to prioritize politics over socio-cultural engagement, and elites use them to achieve political goals. In the context of a weak state, leaders of ethnic associations deem it indispensable to be represented as an ethnic group in governments and public bodies: elites holding responsible positions are supposed to comply with the moral obligation to support their ethnic community. Elections offer new opportunities as it is assumed that elected elites will use their political influence to create jobs for their ethnic group or to bring infrastructure to their region of origin.
Our field research in Katanga shows that in a premature multiparty system politicians try to use ethnic associations as mobilization instruments to gain ethnic votes, and reveals different strategies applied by these organizations to influence the outcome of elections. The paper also argues that citizens can use their votes independently to punish politicians of their ethnic group for not delivering on promises about defending the community’s interests.

Amo Kae / EHESS – IMAF

Sufi Scholars and ICTs in Senegal

Since the late 1980s, new types of Sufi leaders and educated young disciples have emerged throughout Senegal. This paper focuses on the various uses of Internet and media by this new generation of Muslim scholars to influence the Senegalese religious and political life. Muslim communities in Senegal have maintained close ties both with the State authorities and the population. A phenomenon referred to as the brotherhood-based Republic (Bayart). So-called marabouts of youth such as Mustapha Sy and Modou Kara Mbacké became popular in the 1990s among the youth who were opposing the traditional collusion between religious leaders and politicians. Media-literate and involved in politics, this new batch of Muslims now challenge the Establishment all the more so since they can navigate through different spheres and values. Two major trends emerge from this observation. On the one hand, ICT has become an essential tool for urban Muslim actors trying to promote their spirituality and political opinion through their TV channels, websites but also utilizing local and international media not to forget social networks to mobilize a specific group of people. On the other hand, it is interesting to notice a certain individualization and rationalization of each believer using their knowledge and relative freedom to seek, choose, use, neglect or share information. Based on case studies, this paper analyses the impact of ICT against a backdrop of religious and political struggles in Senegal.

Zayani Mohamed / Georgetown University, SFS-Q

Media, Youth and Contestation: The Case of North Africa

This paper deals with digital contestation in the context of North Africa. Taking Tunisia—the birthplace of the Arab uprisings—as a case study, it explores the relationship between youth activism, digital resistance and political change. It argues that the Internet provided a distinctive space for contestation, which enabled many young users to enact a gradual silent entry into the world of politics. Yet political socialization is enacted not within the institutional world of formal politics but within the context of everyday life. Using James Scott’s theory of the resistance, this paper explore how digitally connected youth in North Africa contested their reality. By providing a historically grounded analysis of the evolution of digital contestation, this paper attempts to understand how power relations are renegotiated and reconfigured within an authoritarian context. Based on ethnographic work, the paper examines not only how voices of contention reshaped power relations, but also what happens to these voices after the uprisings, as the country attempted to build a democratic system where secular and religious voices contend for power. Taking heed of the mutations and adaptations the voices of contestation have undergone since the revolution, the paper argues that the most effective forms of contention are the ones that learned to adapt to the new reality of the Middle East and North Africa region and sought to combine cyber activism with real life activism.

Bezabeh Samson / African Studies Centre, Leiden

From Radio to Facebook Islam: Protest and Repression in Ethiopia Since the 1950s

Ethiopia, a country that has long tradition of Orthodox Christianity has a considerable Muslim population. Long regarded as second class citizens the Muslims of Ethiopia have historically been marginalized in the politics of the Ethiopian state. However, since the 1950s the political involvement of Muslims in the affairs of the Ethiopian state has grown in importance and in this the Middle East and its dynamics have played key roles. This paper tries to document in a comparative manner the role of the Middle East in the political activites of Ethiopian Muslims since the 1950s. It does so by taking both old and new media in to account. From the radio stations in the 1950s through which Ethiopian Muslims listened to pan-Arab ideology to Facebook in the 21st century where they have organized protests akin to the recent Arab uprisings, media have played a key role in the mobilization of the Muslim community and airing their grievances. Despite its relevance, researchers have largely ign red the role media have played while noting the ongoing protest. This paper tries to fill this gap by showing how media have long been a weapon of Muslim youth in Ethiopia.

Pontzen Benedikt / Freie Universität Berlin

“Caring for the People”: Zuria FM, A Muslim Radio Station in Asante, Ghana

In 2002, ZuriaFM went live as the first and only Muslim radio station in Asante. It quickly established itself as the most popular station among the local Muslims, as it is the only one with programs in the languages of the Islamic community, asserting Islamic moral standards, and discussing questions of interest to the Muslim community, thereby contributing to the “Islamic sphere” (Launay et al. 1999) of its listeners. Aiming at a Muslim audience in a mainly Christian context, ZuriaFM faces several challenges. It is constantly short of cash and has to generate revenues from those who go on air over its waves. The demand for airtime is quite high as upcoming or established Muslim scholars wish to spread their tenets and to establish themselves as religious authorities. By providing airtime for different scholars, ZuriaFM has grown into a forum for ongoing debates fueled by the divergent contributions of these preachers. The local Muslims tune in to learn about their religion and the different tenets of their scholars, pursuing the aired debates in their conversations. Therefore, ZuriaFM is partaking in the ongoing “discursive tradition” (Asad 1986) of Islam in Asante. In my paper, I portray this station and its founder, depict its program and the challenges it faces. I also summarize a prominent case where the station’s program has sparked ardent discussions in the community to depict how it has an impact on ongoing debates and on the local conception of religious authority.

Freire Francisco / CRIA / FCSH-NOVA

Weapons of the Weak and the Strong: High-Tech Preaching and Activism in Mauritania

Mauritania’s peripheral geography and the incipient sedentary character of most of its population notwithstanding, the western Saharan region (and Mauritania in particular) can be included in the worldwide use of broad-spectrum media technologies by Islamic actors. As elsewhere, the adoption of such communication tools confirms the emergence of new readings and new agents associated with Islamic traditions. This paper will explore some recent debates associated with the region’s social hierarchy among the arabophone population. Different agents, from different social groups (all of them holding a tributary status), have publicly questioned this historically established pattern, making use of diverse media technologies in order to spread their messages and, in many cases, calling for a revolutionary revision of “traditional” – and still pervasive – social roles in the western Sahara. The activists associated with these movements have critiqued some notable Muslim scholars and numerous traditionally consecrated written sources defining Islamic practice in Mauritania. This presentation explores this particular context where innovative media technologies are being used as a reformist tool, both for Islamic expression, as well as for social change.

Khamala Charles / Kabarak University

Protesting Unequal Resource Distribution: Protecting Positive Ethnicity, Preventing Hate-Speech

Rwandan genocide was attributable to primordial ethnic hate in search of group identity. To regulate incitement to violence, some scholars thus advocate “peace journalism.” Hence conflict journalists are required to be development specialists. By criminalizing “genocide denial” such repressive post-conflict media policy further suppresses genuine political debate. Conversely, this paper argues that media freedom during Kenyan electoral contests should be left to the journalist’s discretion to inform. Voters exploit positive ethnicity to acquire voter information at lowest cost. Electoral freedom also enables citizens to hold officials accountable. However groups which are denied access to governmental resources opt to either “exit” the state or resort to violence.
Evidence from Kenya’s 2007 electoral conflicts, suggests that hate speech incited ethnic violence. This paper compares article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights with Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights and Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights to determine the balance of tolerating offensive, shocking or disturbing expression against the state or groups. The argument is that pluralism demands a media policy which facilitates democracy. To prevent economic discrimination, media policy should promote public broadcasters rather than silence private owners.

Njagi Joan / Society for International Development

New Political Dispensation Challenged by Old Political Cultures

The Kenyan Constitution promulgated in August 2010 is considered one of the most progressive in Africa. Public participation as a function of inclusive, accountable and transparent governance is made explicit by the Kenyan Constitution, which provides the public with easy access to courts to receive and respond to complaints, the right to form associations and to assemble, demonstrate, picket and petition public authorities. The Constitution further provides the right to recall legislators and the right to protect the provisions of the Constitution through referendum. This paper documents the experiences of two non-state actors in taking up opportunities presented by the Constitution to engage in public affairs. The paper compares the experiences; successes and challenges of two non-state actors, one at national level and the other at county level; both participating in formulating and contesting laws. It demonstrates the challenges of a progressive Constitution in the face of a
retrogressive political environment.

Odhiambo Samuel / Law Society of Kenya

Towards responsible free speech: A Comparative evaluation of pertinent emerging legislation and jurisprudence in Africa

Each of the five East African Constitutions among other rights provides expressly for the freedom of speech, or of opinion as the Rwandese and Burundian Constitutions term it. While the interdependence of these rights and freedoms is for granted, there is a discernable overarching importance of the freedom of speech as a protector and enhancer of these other rights and freedoms. The fine tunings of what should be acceptable free speech that is liberating in its enjoyment, conscientious in its application and sensitive to other’s rights in its effect has proven to be delicate. State interests, sometimes legitimate, but other times bordering on oppressive, make issues of free speech no easier.
As East Africa, and indeed Africa grapples with the same conundrum that (in varying degrees) currently bedevils other jurisdictions like Russia, China, France, Syria, North Korea and even America, it becomes necessary to herein attempt an exposition and a rationalization of the situation in the socio-legal atmosphere around this freedom, the freedom of speech. While at this Africa just might get the time consider whether to be more regimented in its approach to freedom of speech or whether to let go of the brakes and declare for itself “Je suis Charlie”.

Sambuli Nanjira / iHub Research Nairobi

Free Speech and Hate Speech in Kenya: Monitoring Efforts And Legislative Dynamics

Discussions on freedom of speech and expression in Kenya go hand in hand with those on hate speech given the country’s history of violence incited by hateful rhetoric in the political sphere. The advent of social media has diversified and democratized communication channels, providing an avenue to exercise freedom of expression, but also to disseminate hate speech. The latter dynamic has in particular framed the conversation on social media use in Kenya, within mainstream media and government circles. Legislative processes in the recent past are indicative of the government’s intolerance to dissent and criticism, and currently, freedom of expression, as guaranteed under the Constitution of Kenya 2010 is under threat of curtailment.
Through the Umati Project, an online hate speech monitoring effort, insights into what fuels online hate speech, the shortcomings and legal precedent on hate speech prosecution, as well as efforts to protect freedom of expression by citizens, civil society and the opposition have been observed. One key finding from online monitoring efforts is that, while difficult to establish a causal link between online speech and offline violence, the former offers a key window of insight into offline conversations, convictions and perceptions held.
This paper proposes an exploration into the speech dynamics in Kenya through monitoring, legislative and awareness-raising perspectives.

Dimitrova Svetlana / RIAM-FMSH Paris

Post-Communist and post-Colonial Societies under the Projectors of Paradigms

Les sociétés postcommunistes en Europe de l’Est et les sociétés postcoloniales en Afrique, tout comme les sociétés postdictatoriales en Amérique latine, ont été analysées en termes de transition. Le terme transition a été largement utilisé, afin de désigner un régime politique instable « en voie de démocratisation » avec trois phases – ouverture, percée, consolidation . A des étapes différentes de leurs histoires, des pays de divers contextes devaient se désendetter par rapport à l’histoire globale et accomplir leur « démocratisation ».
Le caractère finaliste de la transitologie assigne a priori un aboutissement obligatoire. Pour la path dependence, il s’agissait de nuancer les « passages à la démocratie » en cherchant le passé des « sentiers » dans un contexte historique précis. Le changement, même fondamental, n’est pas un passage d’un ordre à l’autre mais se traduit par des réaménagements selon des intrications complexes entre ordre existant et nouvel ordre (involution versus rupture révolutionnaire ou évolution).
Nombre de critiques des deux paradigmes – la transitologie et la path dependence – ont proposé d’autres approches ; les plus convaincantes insistent sur le terrain concret comme point de départ. Mais ces tentatives ont-elles toutes réussi à abandonner le modèle démocratique d’évaluation en toile de fond et par conséquent, la rhétorique de « crise », de « problème », de « paradoxe », d’« échec », etc., de la voie de transition ?

Szántó Diana / PTE (University of Pécs)

The Rise and Decline of Project Society

The paper develops a strange parallel between the evolution of the political environment in two countries that few would imagine fit to be incorporated in the same analytical framework for comparative purposes: Hungary and Sierra Leone. The parallel highlights the changing faces of a particular form of the developmental state, in which NGOs play a major role, where civil society is vested with an intrinsic democratic value and where welfare redistribution is increasingly substituted by short term projects. This is Project Society. For nearly 25 years Project Society was blooming. Democracy seemed to be deeply embedded in the political culture, growth was on acceptable levels in Hungary and it hit record levels in Sierra Leone by 2012. Ernest Bai Koroma, President of Sierra Leone started his second term in 2012. Victor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary formed government for the third time in 2014. Something was changing. These regimes did not need civil society as much as before. Some NGOs, both foreign and local, were perceived as a threat and got attacked by the power, both here and there. In the midst of still growing poverty, authoritarianism was sneaking back to politics. Project society failed to defend the very values to which it owed its existence. Possible causes underlying this failure might be a changing global power-balance, but also the incapacity, or rather the unwillingness of project society to address economic inequalities.

Korhonen Juho / Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

Converging Post-Socialisms? – Peripheries of the Second World in Comparison

In this mainly theoretical preparation for a larger comparative project I explore statehood in peripheral post-socialist states with the cases of Tanzania and the post-Soviet south in the framework of the fall of the so-called Second World. While many states of the Second World were successful to one degree or another in realigning and redefining themselves, many, especially whose statehood fully rested on the socialist alternative, have failed. I attempt to understand this statehood from the perspective of the contradictions and problems that it today encounters. I approach the phenomenon of peripheral post-socialist state-building from the perspectives of the meaning of statehood and the collision of global knowledge cultures with local historical ones. I argue that a peculiar case of in-betweenness has arisen, defined by the undermined image of their statehood, neither aligning with or contesting the current world-system. I call this the post-periphery, where the prefix means tha
t, as consequence of the collapse of that Second World, this periphery is no longer perceivable as the proto form of a more advanced core and has lost legitimation for imagining and defining the future of their statehood. However, in discussing this post-socialist predicament I do not propose a categorical model but rather aim for a Weberian ideal type description to better understand the convergence of some post-socialist states and yet the divergence of the ex-Second World as a whole.

Virtanen Pekka / University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Pacted Transition to Democracy: Mozambique in the Light of post-Communist Europe

A third wave of democratization, which begun in the mid-1970s from Southern Europe and moved on to Latin America, penetrated communist Europe in the late 1980s. Comparative analyses of the first phase indicated that a democratic outcome was most likely when contending parties were relatively equal and elites made a pact to navigate the transition process. However, some researchers (e.g. McFaul) have argued that the transition process has actually been quite different in the post-communist countries, and should be called the ‘fourth wave of democracy & dictatorship’. In particular pacted transitions between equals have led to protracted and often violent confrontations resulting in competitive authoritarianism.
Democratisation reached Africa in the 1990s, but assessments of the progress there have been pessimistic as the process has in most cases stopped at the level of electoral democracy. In Mozambique the transition from state-socialist to liberal-democratic system in the 1990s was based on a pact between Frelimo and Renamo – following the model of the negotiations for independence between Frelimo and Portugal’s MFA in 1974. While the 1992 peace agreement created the formal conditions for democracy, the regime is closer to competitive authoritarianism. The paper analyses the process in Mozambique in the light of Portuguese state-corporatist tradition and the experience of post-communist Europe

Šváblová Alžběta / BIGSAS, University of Bayreuth

Dealing with the Violent Past: Liberia and the Czech Republic in a Comparative Perspective

Liberian civil war left the country destroyed and its population traumatized by an unprecedent scope of violence and atrocities. There were efforts supported by the international community to deal with the past through the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2005, and indirectly through the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Both initiatives brought rather ambiguous results. Nowadays, the perceived lack of accountability and a prevailing culture of impunity have a serious impact on the legitimity of the state.
The Czechoslovak communist regime‘s record of violence and repressions, starting with the “show trials” in the 1950s, was followed by persecution of dissidents and other groups. After the revolution in 1989, national reconciliation, rather than radical decomunization was the order of the day. After investigations, resulting in singular trials, the focus of the initiatives moved rather to the historic reconstruction of a regime’s record.
Although different at the first sight, both cases have a number of features worth comparing. The proposed paper will analyze the similarities and differences in general strategies of dealing with the violent past on the macro-level and their results. Consequently, it will focus on the implications of the latter on the political culture in both countries.

Simon David / Royal Holloway, Univ of London, UK and Chalmers Univ of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

Introduction – Bridging the Linguistic and Cultural Divisions in African Social Science

Introduction to Panel Discussion by Chair.

Esson James / Loughborough University of Technology, UK

From Loughborough to Douala via Accra and Paris: Critical Development Geographies of/in Anglo-Francophone Africa

This paper draws on doctoral and postdoctoral experience working in Cameroon, France, Ghana and the UK to critically examine and think through the theoretical and methodologically tribulations that arise when conducting research that cuts across Anglo-Francophone contexts, both within and beyond Africa. In relation to contemporary debates in development geography, the paper speaks to recent work on the migration-development nexus, and the relationship between mobility and livelihoods in urban settings. Based on the author’s experiences and in terms of the research topics mentioned above, it is argued the Anglo-Francophone divide is more malleable theoretically than methodologically

Yapi-Diahou Alphonse / Université de Paris 8, France

Décentralisation et développement : un mariage par consentement ou de raison ?

La décentralisation est sans doute l’une des évolutions gestionnaires les plus marquantes et les plus partagées sur tous les continents depuis les quarante dernières années. Le développement, lui, relève d’une perspective de tous les temps, une visée universellement objectivée. En son nom, les sociétés dans l’extrême diversité de leurs composantes se font inventives, imaginatives dans le seul but de mobiliser ressources et territoires, susciter les formes d’organisations les plus diverses… Je formule l’hypothèse que la décentralisation est probablement une de ces « inventions » sociales, de ces innovations caractérisée par une tendance à la généralisation ! Le contexte mondial de sa propagation, soit la veille du triomphe du néolibéralisme, suffirait à légitimer l’hypothèse ci-dessus ; alors que le développement richement adjectivé (durable, solidaire, etc.) traverse tous les temps, tous les lieux….
Ma proposition a pour objet de tenter le rapport du développement à la décentralisation, et de discuter les lectures et représentation du développement d’une part, et celle de la décentralisation d’autre part. Je vais engager cette discussion selon une approche diachronique, imposant du coup le passage à une approche épistémique du développement et de la décentralisation. La chronique des mots et l’analyse de leurs charges respectives au plan théorique et conceptuel, mais aussi méthodologique sera un exercice inévitable.

Lesourd Michel / Université de Rouen, France

L’Afrique lusophone en questions. Des approches géographiques critiques renouvelées / Luso-African on the move. New Geographical critical analysis of development

Angola, Cabo Verde, Guiné Bissau, Moçambique, São Tomé e Principe sont les produits d’une décolonisation tardive (1975), sanglante, douloureuse. Instrumentalisés par la guerre froide, engagés dans un modèle de développement résolument socialiste, puis dans une ouverture libérale et, progressivement plus démocratique, ces pays sont désormais confrontés à une mondialisation à laquelle ils répondent de manière très inégale. Les recherches menées depuis trente ans par les rares chercheurs de ces pays comme par ceux des pays du « Nord » en géographie du développement s’inscrivent principalement dans les nouveaux paradigmes thématiques des sciences sociales du début du XXIè siècle, qui se déclinent en termes: -d’environnement/développement durable; -de mondialisation néolibérale; -de développement local et de démocratie citoyenne; -de mobilités transnationales renouvelées; -de risques et de pauvreté et des stratégies à mener pour y remédier. Cette « nouvelle géographie du développement » semble vouloir installer durablement, en s’éloignant des approches idéologiques post-coloniales, les recherches lusophones dans des préoccupations plus contemporaines et planétaires.

Ninot Olivier / CNRS

Critical reflections

Synthesis and summary of Discussion Panel

Vasile Iolanda / Centro de Estudos Sociais

Decolonizing History: Regional Coalitions in Southern Africa (1961-1990)

Most of the readings of the nationalist struggles in Southern Africa place the participant states and their regional interests outside of history, or completely dependent or coordinated by Western interests and needs. Nevertheless, a broader look at the matter show a web of regional networks that not discard western interests, but ally against it in a constant and joint effort.
This paper seeks to look at the Mulungusi Club, Front Line States and the Constelation of Southern African States, problematizing their position as common front line states and economic unions against colonialism and apartheid. The genealogy of their formation, starting with smaller groupings, proves the transnational character of these networks mobilization in their struggle against colonialism, racism, as well as their political activism. Our lines of inquiry will follow the central Southern African agenda as stated by the Lusaka Manifesto and look the plural character of their members and their mobility guided by a series of, at certain points, conflicting views and interests.
This further look on the externalization of the national strategies, on the destabilization processes and the two angled position of the liberation movements in Southern Africa could considerably decentralize the discussion from either a South African or Portuguese perspective, bring it to a more common ground for all its actors.

Skinner Kate / University of Birmingham

Education, Citizenship and the ‘sacred trust': School-Teacher Activism in Rural British Togoland

Seminal English-language studies of decolonisation highlighted the struggle of anti-colonial African nationalist movements to harness parochial rural voters to radical agendas that were conceived in the towns. This approach implied that grassroots activists mobilised instrumentalist logics amongst rural voters, promising that, if successful, a mass nationalist party could resolve the many local disputes which had arisen from the implementation of indirect rule, and secure resources for local development. This instrumentalist interpretation of rural affiliation to mass nationalist parties has been set against other studies which emphasise the role of missionary Christianity and indirect rule in stimulating new forms of identity and contributing to the rise of alternative ethno-nationalist (as opposed to territorial nationalist) projects. My research focuses on a cohort of rural political activists who were trained in missionary or church schools in the Ewe-speaking areas of the United Nations trust territory of British Togoland. I argue that, in spite of their exposure to German Protestant ideals of the Ewe as a volk, these individuals did not take up what John Peel calls ‘the cultural work’ of ‘ethnogenesis’. Instead, from their small villages, they deployed their literary skills in the construction of a transnational activist network, arguing at the United Nations for a new multi-ethnic nation-state, and initiating local debate on alternative forms of citizenship.

Sena Martins Bruno / Centro de Estudos Sociais

Liberation Wars in the Context of Southern Africa

One of the dominating images of Southern Africa is that of violent conflicts marking the scene since the independencies from colonial rule. The recent discovery of secret documents attesting the alliance between apartheid South Africa, racist Rhodesia and colonial-fascist Portugal forces a reappraisal of many of the conflicts that have been interpreted as civil unrest – including civil wars – affecting Southern Africa. The roots for much of this violence should be seen through a particular moment in time: the constitution and signing of a white alliance in Southern Africa, code-named Alcora Exercise. Indeed, the political project at the core of the Alcora aimed at perpetuating the minority regimes in the region. Following this line of analysis, this alliance can be interpreted as an imperial reaction to the nationalist wave that crossed Africa in the 1960s. It was signed between high representatives from those white minority-ruled states to keep control of the southern part of the continent, thus constituting a competing political project to African liberation movements. A critical approach to the (re)construction of national memories is then crucial to understand the roots of present day social and political crisis in Southern Africa, as well as to recognise how important confidential documentation – such as the still little-known Alcora Exercise – was central for the maintenance of a white hegemony in this region until the very end of the 20th century.

Kaiser Daniel / Goethe University Frankfurt

Transnational Mobilization of Anticolonial Resistance in Mozambique

Informal transnational networks played a major role in almost all African liberation struggles, most of the times established around universities in the “metropole(s)” and spanning not only the “third” world. By focusing on the case of Frelimo in Mozambique, I analyze how transnational social spaces of activism evolved around an international community of liberation fighters and assess their importance for the formation, evolution and strategic direction of the “national” liberation movement. Drawing on theories from social movement studies, I will trace the process of socialization of Frelimo’s ruling elite in transnational networks and the impact it had on the movement’s resource mobilization. The analysis shows how a certain habitus and various sorts of capital gained as assimilados in the colonial society enabled them to get access to the transnational field in the first place. Their socialization in transnational networks later enabled them to mobilize support by various international actors ranging from (communist) states and international organizations to non-state actors (liberation movements, religious groups, the Ford Foundation, student solidarity movements etc.). Eventually, transnational socialization and mobilization brought them into contested leading positions inside the movement. The paper is based on archival research in Maputo, Berlin and Lisbon, as well as biographical material and interviews with former Frelimo leaders and combatants.

Konieczna Anna / Sciences Po Paris

La France, l’ANC et les solidarités transnationales (1960-74)

L’objectif de cette communication serait de présenter l’histoire du premier mouvement anti-apartheid français, c’est-à-dire des organisations engagées dans la lutte contre le régime sud-africain avant 1974, l’année qui était jusqu’alors considérée dans l’historiographie comme le point de départ des activités anti-apartheid en France. Dès les années 1950, la lutte anti-apartheid est menée en France par trois types d’organisations : a) de conscience noire (p.ex Présence africaine, FEANF) ; b) de la défense des droits de l’homme et c) religieuses. En outre, on voit naître une plateforme de coordination, telle que le Comité de liaison contre l’apartheid, créé en 1963. Au delà d’une liste des organisations, il s’agirait d’étudier les connexions entre les réseaux impériaux français et britanniques, et ceci à deux niveaux d’analyse. Sur le plan pratique, cette communication démontrerait l’influence des conférences pan-africaines sur
les organisations françaises et le rôle joué par le MAA britannique et l’ANC dans la création du Comité de liaison français. Sur le plan discursif, elle analyserait l’appropriation de l’argumentation anti-coloniale par le mouvement sud-africain. En présentant l’apartheid comme l’émanation du colonialisme et l’Afrique du Sud comme partie de l’« alliance impie », d’un « empire austral », réunissant la Rhodésie et les colonies portugaises, l’ANC a pu ainsi mobiliser les intellectuels et les activistes français dévoués à la cause anti-coloniale.

Banégas Richard / CERI, Sciences Po

28-29-30 octobre 2014. Les derniers jours du régime de Blaise Compaoré, entre manifestations, émeutes, attentismes et violences. Comment penser ensemble les expressions de la colère ?

Les trois derniers jours du régime de Blaise Compaoré ont donné lieu, notamment dans les principales villes du Burkina Faso, à un spectre extrêmement hétérogènes de mobilisations collectives et d’actions individuelles avec, le 28 octobre, la plus grande manifestation jamais organisée à Ouagadougou depuis celle du 3 janvier 1966, le 29 octobre des marches contre la vie chère suivies dans certaines villes secondaires et, le 30 octobre, une journée d’actions plus violentes et plus éparpillées, marquée par le saccage de maisons de dignitaires, le vol dans différents commerces et la prise de l’Assemblée nationale par la force. Notre intervention vise à interroger l’articulation entre ces différentes expressions individuelles ou collectives de la colère, qu’une approche trop rigide des répertoires d’action collective amène parfois à traiter de manière séparée voire alternative, comme si la marche, la casse, le vol ou l’attentisme étaient nécessairement le fait d’acteurs ou de situations fondamentalement différents. Nous nous appuierons pour cela sur des entretiens menés en mars 2015 avec différents protagonistes de la colère – sinon de la contestation –, tout en mobilisant des données collectées dans le cadre de terrain plus anciens.

Brisset-Foucault Florence / IMAF, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne

Debate and Punish: the 2009 Protests in Uganda

This study is based on the idea that a micro-approach allows to understand the localised, multiple and nuanced character of protests, why they happen in particular a way in a particular place, how different demands, conflicts, conceptions of the self, authority and justice are entangled, and interrogate the links between them and the wider context. It focuses on two days of anger (10 and 11 Sept. 2009, commonly called the “Buganda riots”, as they started when people interpreted that the Kingdom of Buganda was under threat by the government. It aims to offer a thick description of the forms, targets of action and the geography of anger and repression in Kampala, Masaka as well as on main roads and in trading centers around the region and investigate their historicity. The main source of conflict and violence in 2009 was the fight between protesters and the government forces and the harsh repression carried by the latter. However 2009 was originally a strike, and had a fundamental internal dimension, contributing to the contentious imagination of Buganda as a community. People were also protesting against those Baganda whom they thought were not loyal enough to the King. Road blocks were a central tool within this disciplining apparatus: they carry a complex local history, can be compared to similar phenomena in history, and allow taking into account a neglected aspect of “riots”, despite the etymology of the word: the deliberative aspect of violent protests.

Dakhli Leyla / Centre Marc Bloch

La journée du 14 janvier 2011 à Tunis

La journée qui a fait chuter le président Ben Ali en Tunisie il y a plus de 4 ans est aujourd’hui devenue un lieu de mémoire (contesté) pour la révolution tunisienne et insérée dans un récit révolutionnaire dont elle est l’acmé et l’aboutissement. Elle apparaît aujourd’hui comme « le moment de la victoire ». Alors que le soulèvement de Sidi Bouzid a fait l’objet d’analyses et d’études, ce moment là semble faire consensus et relever d’une forme de joie partagée. Or, cette journée aurait dû être une journée de mobilisation syndicale traditionnelle. Elle a pourtant été marquée par une colère qui a fait émerger le slogan « Dégage » devenu un symbole de la révolution tunisienne. Le cortège classique a été « investi par la colère » et l’on peut en faire une étude fine. La « journée » commence alors avec le discours de Ben Ali le 13 au soir et la mobilisation de proche en proche qui la suit. On voit alors des manifestants « non-traditionnels » rejoindre le mouvement par indignation, avec le sentiment souvent évoqué d’aller faire acte de présence symbolique, par égards pour les morts des jours précédents dans le pays. La montée de la colère s’effectue par agrégation, déplacements progressifs et l’on peut faire l’hypothèse que la convergence des luttes qui s’effectue s’opère littéralement dans l’espace de la manifestation. Il s’agit de comprendre comment se transforme la nature même de la journée et par quels acteurs sont pris en charge les différents moments de la mobilisation.

Lott Gaia / University of Florence

Ikiza 1972

The paper aims to describe the controversial (not yet completely clarified) development of the 1972 hutu uprising in Burundi. The 1972 Burundian events can be considered as a privileged lens to understand the deep root of the Burundian ethnic/social conflict – that will give rise to the civil war of the nineties – as well as its regional and international implications. The anger and violence of those days on one hand reflect the contradictions of Burundian society, its internal dynamics and international connections. They represent the first (and unique until 1993) concrete national-scale attempt of the hutu majority to re-gain a political space. On the other hand, the anger and violence of those days have represented the most important mortgage for the peace of the country in the following years. The state repression that followed the uprising has been described as the first genocide in the African continent after the gaining of independence. It has heavily affected the followin g 30 years of Burundian history, depriving the country of a hutu elite and influencing collective imaginaries and narratives. Analysing concretely and in detail the development of those days of violence (the “ikiza”, “catastrophe” in Kirundi), object of conflicting memories in the country that still influence the interpretation of the present, is strategic in this sense. The sources for this analysis are international reports, witness testimonies and western diplomatic correspondence of the period.

Gavelle Julien / CASOA

De la colère au lynchage : les différents instants de la violence populaire au Mali

2 mois après le coup d’Etat de mars 2012, à l’appel d’organisations pro-putschistes, une foule portée par des slogans nationalistes et souverainistes exige la démission du président par intérim, désigné auparavant lors d’une médiation panafricaine, et dont le mandat arrive à échéance. La marche se prolonge par une agitation émeutière et aboutit au lynchage du président, gravement blessé. Rumeurs et une enquête non aboutie alimentent les soupçons d’une déstabilisation ou d’une tentative d’assassinat fomentée dans le climat concurrentiel d’un pouvoir trifide, relayée par des positions nationalistes. L’ambivalence entre identité des acteurs et mobiles socio-politiques d’un côté, anomie et perceptions (néo)tardiennes de l’autre- informe communément l’approche du lynchage. Je compare les témoignages recueillis et des vidéos de cet événement avec une documentation sur des lynchages à Bamako, et analyse des moments de ces violences et leur narration. Si les deux formes n’ont pas le même statut–la violence du lynchage dans les quartiers est l’objet de la mobilisation tandis qu’elle en est l’issue actualisée et/ou « involontaire » dans les manifestations-, toutes deux convoquent des relations complémentaires ou concurrentes entre actants. Aux creux de ces phases s’amorcent des formes discursives de légitimité, ou leur impossibilité. J’envisage l’historicité de ces violences et leur rapport dans les constructions d’une mémoire locale commune, au delà de leur réduction à l’anomie.

Ratele Kopano / University of South Africa

Queering African Traditions, Liberating Masculinities

Although the idea of men’s gender and sexuality as changeable cultural constructions is fundamental within critical masculinity studies, the relation of cultural tradition to African men’s gender and sexual practices retains fuzziness. Two consequences follow on this nebulousness, some of which are observable in researchers’ approaches and interpretations, while others are evident in accounts of tradition by research subjects. First, traditions tend to be treated as if they are wholly inherited, what ‘others’ and basically closed. And second, whereas masculinities positioned as modern are readily seen as constructed, masculinity characterised as ‘traditional’ are conceived as a kind of given. In this paper I am interested in further probing constructions of masculinities which mobilise tradition. The two main objectives are to show that traditions, characterised by power, are always contested; and that all men and women are always in negotiation – which sometimes takes the form of an overt opposition – with their traditions, a negotiation whose intent may be to maintain, undermine, augment or amend tradition, and whose effect is thus to construct or remake ourselves and the tradition with which they are in conversation. Given its profeminist approach, the goal with this work is to generate possibilities of opening up or queering African traditions in order to liberate masculinities.

Oinas Elina / University of Helsinki

Appropriation, Appreciation, Positionally and Ownership in Feminist Activism

2014 witnessed an unprecedented global media visibility of issues of race, perhaps mainly due to Ferguson, but also Mandela’s death and the 20th celebration of the end of apartheid in South Africa. At the same time, feminist politics connected to issues of race and inequality became selling in mainstream media and pop-culture, as icons like Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and Emma Watson declared and commercialized their feminisms. In response, in feminist blogosphere an articulation of a divide between white and black feminisms that share little in solidarity, has taken place. For a scholar on African feminisms the debate is both new and familiar, comprising, for example, of a struggle against an appropriation of African/black women’s politics, bodies and cultural expressions, a refusal of a patronizing appreciation of black feminisms by white feminists in power, and a strategic essentializing that is seen as inevitable. The explicit articulation of radically unsettling differences and non-solidarity within feminisms is both timely and surprising. Both the academic and activist debates seem to be informed by the post-structural and post-colonial theoretical legacies that challenge stand-point and identity politics, so the paper asks how the arguments go beyond legitimating an assigning of feminisms to mere subject positions that are racially marked. The paper examines the way difference, positionality and contextuality is argued for, and solidarity is problematized in selected texts.

Rasing Thera / University of Africa/Cavendish University

‘We enjoy having sex': Sexual Right and Pleasure among Adolescent Girls in Zambia

This paper examines sex and sexuality in current Zambia, and focuses on the experiences of young adolescent women (aged 15 to 25) in urban and rural settings. It is based on interviews with adolescent girls and boys and adult women and men.
Sexuality is important, since it concerns all adults and adolescents in their private lives. Sexuality is a fundamental issue, expressing sexual appetite, desire, and love. Through sex, gender roles are expressed and confirmed. This is for instance taught in female initiation rites, in which young women are taught about the importance of sex, both as a pleasure and for procreation. But also outside these rites young girls are encouraged to experiment with sexuality.
Sexual norms have been influenced by both Christianity and Western NGOs. Moreover, since the 1985 UN declaration that certain traditional practices are ‘harmful’, referring to practices that deal with (female) sexuality, measures to imprint Western norms have been increased.
The paper discusses how adolescent and adult women deal with these contradicting and confusing messages about ‘Western/modern’ and ‘traditional/harmful’ ideas concerning sex. The paper shows that Western norms have only slightly affected individuals’ sexual behavior, showing the resilience of traditional norms in which sex is considered a pleasure.

Miguel Francisco / Universidade de Brasília

Lobo Andréa / Universidade de Brasília

Same-sex marriage in Cabo Verde: Demanding for Conjugality and Cosmopolitanism

In our fieldworks in Cabo Verde, we used to hear most of gays and travestes saying that they do not have sex with other gays or travestes, but with “men”. In this former Portuguese colony, the genders are profoundly segregated and the gender roles have ideologically been conformed by the existence of “men” and “women” so as “men” and “gays”. Also, in this country, heterosexual relationships were builded up a bit different from the Western model, marked by the call for recognition of the State in the form of legal marriage; the monogamous ideal; and the cohabitation of the lovers. In Cabo Verde are remarkable the relations “ter com”, that even generating ties and offspring, do not imply neither in cohabitation of the parents nor a formalization to the State. In this complex scenario, we try to understand what the local LGBT population want by requiring the State the legalization of homosexual marriage in standards that do not hold with the reality of forms of Cape Verdean traditional conjugalities nor with the reality of homosexual relations in the country. If people in Cabo Verde rarely marry legally and gays do not date gays, what’s the point of legalizing gay marriage? We argument that the native demand for same-sex marriage is not only a demand for building a homoaffective culture and the rights that flows from it, but also an attempt to insert themselves in a contemporary cosmopolitan debate, that would make them different from the rest of the “backward” continent.

Gilbert Veronique / University of Edinburgh

Polygamy and Lingerie: Senegalese Women’s Art of Seduction, Pleasure and Power

In Senegal, the Wolof concept of mokk pooj describes the art of pleasing and winning over a man through culinary skills, good manners, submission, and sexual prowess. Although men are sometimes said to be mokk pooj, it is mostly a feminine quality, a social expectation and moral obligation imposed on but also reinforced by women. The attitude and qualities mokk pooj compels (docility, endurance, deference and modesty) and its relationship with food are equated with femininity and what it means to be a ‘good woman’ which, in a patriarchal and polygamous context where religious beliefs and strict gender norms are highly valued, can easily be analysed in terms of gendered structures of violence that confine women in a passive, subordinate position. However, based on 14 months of fieldwork in Dakar, I suggest that mokk pooj can also be examined as an empowering, stimulating force for Senegalese women, who have developed an artistic and creative material and moral culture of seduction and sexuality. In fact, mokk pooj is also synonym with sexual desire, creativity, and pleasure. A varied assemblage of bethio (lingerie), bine-bine or fer (beads belts), thiouraye (incense), aphrodisiacs, and maraboutage (witchcraft) is used by women to feel beautiful and sexy, and to heighten their and their partner’s sexual satisfaction. The privacy of their bedroom becomes a physical and emotional space of negotiation between husband and wife where Senegalese women assert their power and agency.

Siegenthaler Fiona / University of Basel

African Artists in Times of Political Turmoil and Global Attention: Introduction

This paper offers an introduction to the panel topic and the papers presented.

Eickhof Ilka / Netherlandish-Flemish Institute Cairo / University of Amsterdam

European Cultural Institutions in Cairo: “With Good Intentions Only”. On Power Structures, Artistic Funding and Matters of Representation

In Egypt, local funding for artistic and cultural production is scarce. Egyptian artists and cultural producers depend on various funding lines offered mostly by European cultural institutions, as the manifold logos on flyers and invitations reveal. With the beginning of the uprising, those cultural institutions’ interests in “revolutionary art” rose significantly, as did their respective budgets, mainly provided by their particular foreign office. In my presentation, I will concentrate on the power structure of ‘givers’ (the European institutions) and ‘receivers’ (the Egyptian artists/actor), while unfolding the various positions and agencies inherent within. Using the German Goethe Institute in Cairo as an example, I will address several inseparable discussions: 1. Development politics, the myth of the gift and moral authority, 2. Representation, neoliberalism and the global market, and 3. Cultural politics. Leading questions are: (How) Do artists and critics discuss the institutions’ influence within the artist community? (How) Are notions of (cultural) representation and coloniality addressed by either side? What is the (regulative) effect that European foreign politics, a global art market and neoliberal self-promotion might have on the creative result (commodification of “revolutionary art”), and how is it being discussed? By attempting to offer answers to the questions outlined, my presentation takes a closer look at the recent interest in Egyptian “revolutionary art”.

Sharp Sarah / Howard University

Art as Power; Art as Convenience; Art as Aggressor; art as Mediator: The Artistic Force in the Work of Huda Lutfi and Amal Kenawy

The gap in discourse is the separation of politic and art, which when bridged has potential to “construct modes of analysis that will inform pedagogy, enhance interpretation, and facilitate theory building in political” and cultural studies (Negash 2004: 187). This paper examines aesthetical, historical, cultural representations from Mubarak’s Egypt through the art of Huda Lutfi and Amal Kenawy, and their belief in artistic imagination, production and display, which foresaw and post-ceded Egypt’s 2011 political transformation. Kenawy and Lutfi’s artworks deconstruct and reconstruct anxiety, astuteness, rebellion and change, and their work explicates how the oversight of art has impoverished social and political discourse and restricted a critical discourse (Negash 2004). Kenawy and Lutfi present transformation through visual exchange, exhibition and communication in the local, regional, and global arts. In the global interface, Kenawy and Lutfi relinquish a measure of so! vereignty and assume identity characteristics that are ascribed to specific social and political paradigms that function in unique temporal realities. This paper engages perceptions of hegemony and sovereignty in artistic practices through inquiry into the artworks of Huda Lutfi and Amal Keanwy from the mid-1990s until now.

Von Veh Karen / Universtiy of Johannesburg

Christian Iconography as a Vehicle for Political Commentary in South African Art

I consider the effects of regime change in South Africa through a discussion of art works that employ Christian iconography as allegory to comment on social and political realities. Christian iconography permeates western culture and was introduced widely in Africa through missionary endeavours during colonisation. The meanings carried by Christian images are thus accessible and understood by large numbers of people. Religious works made during the apartheid era by Azaria Mbatha, Ronald Harrison and Charles Nkosi are discussed in terms of their political implications as they adapt the Christian message to support a political agenda while appearing overtly religious in content, thereby attempting to avoid censure. I compare these examples with works made during and after the dismantling of apartheid, which are more critical of both religious constructs and contemporary politics and could be termed ‘transgressive’. Apartheid ended with the first democratic elections in 1994 but the difficulties of transition continue to affect South African society and the after-effects of apartheid politics are still apparent in the content and trajectory of South African art. In this paper I investigate the ways in which artist’s use of religious iconography for political commentary has altered and become more aggressive, due to the loosening of censorship and state controls in the ‘new’ post-apartheid South Africa.

de Bruijn Mirjam / Leiden University

Lalaye Didier / Artist, N’djaména

The Chadian Protest Music Scene in the Wake of the Impossible ‘Chadian spring’

The advancement of communication technology in Chad is still lagging behind to the rest of the world, but nevertheless it has gained a momentum. Is it a coincidence that since the interior of Chad is connected we have seen the engaged music scene appearing in Chad, Ndjaména? ICT development went together with the digitalization of music production, but are they related, and if so how?
Until a decade ago one could say that protest music scene was semi-absent in Tchad, and not known internationally, in contrast to other countries like Cameroon and Senegal. Some rare artists like El Hadj Ahmat Pecos did sing protest songs, but had no international exposure. It is not unlikely that this is related to the Chadian regime, who will certainly not allow the protest music on the national channels. It has been and still is one of the most oppressive regimes in central Africa, despite the promise of democracy and openness with the coup d’Etat in 1990 instigated by Idriss Déby who holds power since then. Freedom of speech was certainly not the rule in Chad. Since 2009 research demonstrated a gradual liberation of speech (Djimet 2013), but recent developments around the appearance of jihadist movements and more open protest have given the Chadian regime another boost to control the population.

Lambert Leopold / Independent/Funambulist

Politics of Iconoclasm

This presentation proposes a non-moralizing reading of the various acts of architectural iconoclasm to favor an acute understanding of the link the iconoclast and the icon. An architecture/sculpture’s destructor develops a similar relationship to what (s)he destroys than its creator. The text presented will attempt to examine several examples: the destruction of Timbuktu’s mausoleums by Ansar Dine, the swarms (described by Rimbaud) of the 1871 Paris Commune ceremonially demolishing the Vendome Column, the beheading of the statue of Impress Josephine in Fort de France, as well as other “positive holes” of iconoclasm.

Thierry Raphaël / LAM / Sciences Po Bordeaux

L’édition africaine, espace de déconstruction littéraire

Les années 80 constituent un tournant pour la production littéraire africaine. En Afrique, l’édition subit une crise. D’une édition attractive, on passe à un «non-lieu littéraire» où il y a beaucoup à reconstruire. Voici l’émergence du concept de «famine de livre» en Afrique. Au Nord, la même période est le creuset d’un renouveau : des éditeurs prennent leur essor, annonçant l’internationalisation littéraire africaine à venir. Celle de la World Alliance, du «Tout-Monde» littéraire…
On se demandera alors si cette construction littéraire, pourvoyeuse de grandes œuvres et de consécrations diverses, ne bénéficie pas du bouleversement des économies littéraires en Afrique. D’une construction, on passe alors à l’idée d’une déconstruction.
Il est ainsi intéressant de porter un regard sur les «ailleurs» de cette littérature africaine de plus en plus mondialisée, mais polarisée au Nord. Au sein de ces «ailleurs», des dynamiques se développent. Elles favorisent production et rapatriement littéraires. Surtout, elles contredisent la violence d’un don sans retour (contre-don) et celle d’une extraversion littéraire sans alternative. Mais doit-on y voir là une économie du livre contestataire de modèles imposés, volontairement marginale, ou plutôt une édition «tout-court» et surtout mal connue ?
Cette communication proposera d’analyser une certaine forme de violence en prenant en compte la relation entre le don de livre vers l’Afrique et la monopolisation littéraire de l’édition du Nord.

Cantalupo Charles / Penn State University

Violence, Bordering on Epic, in the – Colonial, Pre and/or Post – Eritrean Literary Space

“Violence, Bordering on Epic, in the – Colonial, Pre and/or Post – Eritrean Literary Space” considers a variety of major literary works from Eritrea, beginning with its oldest – inscribed on an ancient stele – and continuing through traditional oral poetry, contemporary poetry, and prose from its twentieth-century war of independence until now. Their depiction of the violence against a place and a nation as if it did not and could not exist forms a kind of incomplete yet unending and spontaneously forming epic if not in form at least in spirit.

Shringarpure Bhakti / University of Connecticut

Crisis as Refuge: Women Flanêurs in Destroyed Cities

The chaotic city has often been represented as a refuge in Third World women’s literature due to its ability to offer anonymity, independence and quite often, a collapse of existing religious or patriarchal paradigms. This paper will look at women as flanêurs in cities destroyed by wars. Authors include Assia Djebar, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Chimamanda Adichie, Buchi Emecheta and Nadifa Mohamed.

Lavigne Delville Philippe / IRD

Gbaguidi Noël / Chaire Unesco/FADES/Université d’Abomey Calavi

Un retour du refoulé ? La réinvention de la reconnaissance des droits fonciers coutumiers au Bénin au début des années 1990

Expérimentés au Bénin au début des années 1990, les Plans Fonciers Ruraux (PFR) sont présentés par leurs promoteurs comme une alternative à l’informalité des droits fonciers paysans et à l’immatriculation foncière d’origine coloniale, répondant aux enjeux contemporains, dans une logique de « paradigme d’adaptation ». En fait, ils sont très proches de la logique du décret de 1955 portant réorganisation foncière et domaniale en AOF sur la reconnaissance des droits fonciers. Au Bénin même, une démarche de cadastrage de la palmeraie avait été proposée en 1956, à partir de principes très proches des PFR. Typiques d’un colonialisme tardif cherchant à refonder le pacte colonial, ces mesures n’ont pas guère eu de concrétisations.
L’histoire des PFR prend ainsi une autre perspective : le « paradigme d’adaptation » n’est plus une invention récente contre un monopole de l’immatriculation, mais un principe cohérent avec un pouvoir qui cherche à se construire une base sociale sur une logique plus inclusive ; la démarche PFR des années 1990 est en partie une réinvention, en partie une réémergence non explicitée des propositions du début des années 1950.
A partir d’entretiens avec les fondateurs des PFR et d’une analyse croisée des démarches PFR et des propositions de l’étude de 1956, cette communication discutera l’oubli et la réinvention des politiques de reconnaissance des droits fonciers paysans au Bénin, et les traces des réflexions de 1956 dans les PFR actuels.

Venot Jean-Philippe / GRED-IRD

Wanvoeke Jonas / Université de Wageningen (Pays-Bas)

Irrigation in the Sahel: Memory failure and material traces

Irrigation development in the Sahel has long been a major development objective, with a clear renewed interest since the late 2000s when agriculture came back on the international development agenda. This contribution investigates two approaches to irrigation that have a central role in national policies and international development aid in West Africa: small reservoirs and drip irrigation. In technical terms, these approaches to irrigation are different. Small reservoirs are large infrastructures to be collectively managed and leave a lasting material imprint in rural landscapes. Drip irrigation systems consist in a network of plastic pipes covering a few hundred meters; they can be easily moved and once they fall in disuse, they physically vanish from fields to sometimes be found in homestead for different unintended uses. Beyond material idiosyncrasies, what is striking in both cases is the failure, or even refusal, to build a collective memory around irrigation. Development projects, and associated research agendas, follow the same principles than several decades ago. This absence of collective memory is linked to the fact that aid agencies and national governments revolve in a world of their own, disconnected from that of farmers, and are little accountable to the latter. Farmers however have built their own memory: they integrated this absence of institutional recollection as a characteristic of development practice, and use it to their own ends to “draw projects in”.

Brolin Therese / Unit of Human Geography, Department of Economy and Society, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Development results without memory? The results agenda and Swedish development cooperation with Uganda

In the last decade the demand for results has increased within the international development cooperation, leading to a stronger interest for documenting the outcomes of aid projects to improve the development effectiveness. Although the, so called, results agenda is welcomed by many actors, it has been criticized for being donor driven and for focusing on accountability, rather than on learning. It is, for instance, argued that results should be attributed to the donor’s development objectives, rather than the recipient’s and that reporting development failures is discouraged, as this could lead to cuts in funding. The results agenda could thus have an impact on the memory of aid projects; on what is documented, and what is not. Sweden, with a reputation of emphasizing the recipient countries objectives in its development cooperation, was one of the first donors to adhere to the agenda. With examples from Swedish development relations with Uganda, this paper explores how the results agenda is influencing the documentation of aid projects and the relations between development actors. For this purpose interviews have been conducted with stakeholders in Uganda and Sweden, and a review has been made of Swedish policy documents. Primary findings indicate that the requirements to report results in relation to Swedish objectives have increased, but also that Ugandan actors consider this an opportunity to demonstrate achievements made in relation to a donor’s expectations.

Marriott Sarah / Durham University

“We are crying for cotton”: Recalling colonial development in South Sudan

This paper will analyse contemporary memories of the Zande Scheme, a late colonial development initiative based on cotton growing and manufacturing in what is now Western Equatoria State in South Sudan. There is a striking dissonance between attitudes towards the scheme recorded by an anthropologist at the time of its heyday in the 1950s and the way in which experiences of the scheme are recalled and retold today. Using oral histories and observations collected over nine months of fieldwork in the region this paper will explore the ways in which visible and invisible remnants of the scheme shape the way in which it is talked about today, as well as subsequent events and outside influences. It will be suggested that nostalgia contained within current memories of the scheme can be read as political commentary on the workings, failings and absence of contemporary development in the State today. It will also demonstrate how the public memory of the scheme is used politically by both national and state governments. Finally, it will be argued that interpretations of current development programs are shaped by the memory of prior development, long after their demise or abandonment, with ramifications for their acceptance and uptake.

Shearer Samuel / Duke University

Win-Win Water: Making Hydraulic Futures in Kigali, Rwanda

In Kigali, Rwanda subterranean water technologies structure peoples’ daily lives and are a source of productive energy, political commentary, and competing visions of future space-times. In this paper, I examine the complex triad of mechanical, physical, and social infrastructures that make up Kigali’s hydraulic present and plans for its future. I argue that most Kigali residents access their water in spite of, not because of, the city’s hydraulic system, investing their own physical and imaginative energy to complete the municipal water grid. My purpose in exploring the “embedded strangeness” (Star 1999) of Kigali’s municipal water system is not to simply track the unequal distribution of this resource throughout the city. Rather than discovering a new form of insurgent or quotidian citizenship, I suggest that practices designed by Kigali residents to circumvent the city’s water shortage in the present are being anticipated as future resources of capital accumulation by municipal and international institutions. In examining these issues, I hope to contribute to a small but emergent body of literature in urban anthropology on hydraulic systems while linking science and technology studies influenced scholarship with Marxian perspectives on bodily labor and time.

Neves Alves Susana / University College London

Decentralised interventions: building water institutions from the bottom-up? Water governance in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau

In 2006, the responsibility for the management of the water network of the city of Bafatá – second city of Guinea-Bissau – was granted to a local association. At the outset, this shift followed mainstream international policies. It entailed a change in the role of the state from provider to regulator accompanied by a de-investment in the sector, the adoption of cost-recovery principles and it was associated to an effort to promote user’s participation in infrastructure’s management. In this way, this shift might have contributed to the fragmentation of urban infrastructures and might have had profound impacts on notions of access to urban services and, consequently, urban citizenship.
On the other hand, a more nuanced analysis of the evolution of both infrastructures and institutions in the city unveils alternative narratives that do not completely replace the first one, but at least complement it. This paper draws on investigations of the routines and perceptions, namely understandings of the value of water, of water users in Bafatá to discuss how these have evolved in the past few years and the implications to notions of urban citizenship. Moreover, looking at the development of water institutions in Bafatá, this paper argues that narratives of fragmentation should be re-contextualised and framed within the local specificities of institutions and their histories. In this way, decentralised solutions, such as that of Bafatá, can emerge as also transformative possibilities.

Wamuchiru Elizabeth Kanini / TU Darmstadt

Beyond the networked city: the role of citizenship and grassroots agency in water and sanitation infrastructure provision in Chamazi settlement, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

This paper situates the role of active citizenship and grassroots agency in instigating changes in urban governance and transforming urban planning and infrastructure development processes at the local level. Using the case of the Chamazi water and sanitation project, the paper examines the role of community participation in provision of water and sanitation infrastructure in the peri-urban areas of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Employing active community participation, the Chamazi project features non-conventional models of water and sanitation infrastructure provision, design, technology, and innovative financing options, all tailor-made to meet the practical needs of the local community, who reside beyond the municipal water mains. The Chamazi case demonstrates an emerging form of infrastructure governance that seeks to enhance social justice and improve quality of life of formerly marginalised communities through principles of innovation and inclusiveness. The aim is to interrogate the efficacy of bottom-linked project design and situate the Chamazi model within the broader debates on citizenship and low-income water and sanitation infrastructure policies in Tanzania and the wider global South.

K’Akumu Owiti / University of Nairobi

Rich trust and no water for the urban poor: the case of Water Services Trust Fund in Kenya

Water Services Trust Fund (WSTF) is one of the reform institutions in the water sector formed by a trusts deed under the Water Act of 2002. The objective of the fund is to help finance water provision in areas of Kenya that are without adequate water services (Republic of Kenya, 2002). According to the Act, the activities of the fund are financed by an “exchequer.” Additional financing comes from donor institutions interested in the improvement of water services such as the Danish International Development Agency (Danida), German Development Agency (GTZ) and the German Development Bank (KfW), the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida), European Union (EU), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the African Development Bank (AfDB). The fund has four main programs for water financing: Community Project Cycle (CPC) for rural water and sanitation projects, Urban Project Cycle (UPC) for urban and sanitation projects, Water Resources Users Association Development Cycle (WDC) for water resource projects and Output Based Aid (OBA) a micro-credit window within the World Bank and facilitated through K-Rep Bank). The UPC is intended for funding water and sanitation in the low-income urban areas. It has three main programs.

Ogunnaike Odunayo Peter / University of Ibadan

Challenges of water supply in colonial Ijebu

One of those social responsibilities that the Nigerian Colonial Government in its hey days deemed necessary was water supply. In doing this, several difficulties were faced by the Colonial Government. These challenges arose especially as the colonial personnel expected the scheme to be provided by internal efforts. This attitude not only laid the foundation for a poor water supply scheme in the area of study, it also contributed in the erratic supplies of water in Nigeria today. This paper attempts a historical analysis of the situation by using the then Ijebu Province of the old Western Region as a point of reference. The place of the Ijebu traditional political institutions in this affair is also examined. The paper concludes that both the colonial officials and the people of the area of study contributed in their own ways to the poor condition of water supply in Ijebuland.

Slater Rachel / ODI

What does it mean to be post-crisis? Reflections from research in eight conflict-affected countries

Despite recognition that crises are often protracted and that countries frequently slide back into conflict following the cessation of violence or the signing of peace agreements, donor programming and modalities for delivering aid often reflect a stark dichotomy between crisis and post-crisis, or conflict and post-conflict.  This paper uses data from the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium’s baseline surveys and qualitative work in DRC, Uganda, Sierra Leone and South Sudan to challenge the assumption of a clear distinction between conflict and post-conflict.  It does so in two ways: first, by showing how, during conflict, many of the threats to people’s wellbeing and livelihoods are not related to conflict and yet donors (and researchers too) tend to use a conflict lens to develop policies and design programmes and employ particular modus operandi in conflict settings; and second, by demonstrating how the legacies of conflict – especially in relation to people’s capacity to improve or recover their livelihoods – rarely tally with the speed at which development actors seek to move forward.

Buerge Michael / University of Konstanz

Sierra Leone in crisis: discerning and fighting the causes for individual and communal suffering

At least since the end of the 1980s, Sierra Leone apparently stumbles from one crisis into another. The civil war in the 1990s, the outcome of a ‘crisis of youth’ or ‘of the (patrimonial) state’, was followed by crises in national politics, global food prices and transnational drug smuggling urging or allowing various (inter)national actors to intervene. Today, the country faces the biggest crisis since the end of the war. Ebola, an invisible enemy, threatens the safety and security of the population, urging again for exceptional measures to get hold of it. Against this backdrop, in my presentation I focus on how ordinary people navigate or govern their everyday precarious condition. Although seldom using the term ‘crisis’, people perceive their lives as being afflicted by various ‘illnesses’ and continuous suffering. Suffering and sickness of the individual are intertwined with those of the mutually and intersubjectively produced social body. This presentation aims at portraying practices in which people diagnose the causes for affliction and prescribe remedy. People, I argue, locate the causes for individual and general sufferings of the community among the immediate social actors, fellow citizens and their jealous ‘bad hearts’. Healing of the social body and one’s destiny is tried through isolation of the cause, that is, social marginalisation of the culprits/scapegoats, and if possible their correction and submissive reintegration.

Dantzler Camille / Howard University

Trending Imaginaries:  Rumors and Dissent in Post-Genocide Constructions of Rwanda

The objective of this research paper is to analyze how rumors, defined as ” A currently circulating story or report of uncertain or doubtful truth” become a site of contested space in the political authority over Rwanda’s national identity, spearheaded by the Government of Rwanda (GOR). The management of this identity is contingent upon the assemblage of contradictory assertions of democratization, liberalism, and policy-making, which simultaneously has required a foreclosure on freedoms of speech, media, and political exercise to the majority of Rwandans in the country. By presenting an interrogation of the interplay of ‘sites’ of construction on the local, national, and international level, we are able to capture the tensions that arise both within and outside of the country in relation to the progression of the state. This work provides the complexities of a ‘post-genocide era’ and spaces that expose the material realities of constructing a ‘new’ Rwanda as mediated by various actors. The analysis of media sources of rumors regarding Democratic Republic of the Congo-Rwanda relations and the subsequent UN Security Council M23 report, the viral spread of Paul Kagame’s death January 10, 2014,  and the nature of aid sources and policy-making provide agential space for exposing the mounting exclusions of Rwandan citizentry today.

Pritchard Nicola / University of Glasgow

Domestic Water Access in Tanzania; Policy, Praxis and the Normalisation of Crisis

Water access in Dar es Salaam has existed with a myriad of problems for some time. The city’s water system has been unable to keep up with rapid urban growth, and several pockets of the city have been forced to come up with their own means of water access. Recent policy changes have formalised community provision as a legitimised means of water access, disregarding the inability of communities to procure, organise and maintain a local water system. Nationwide, water policy continues to be updated and new initiatives are put in place, serving as an example of a “parallax movement” (Zizek, 2006) in which new layers are added to policy with no real change materialising. The vital narrative missing, however, is that an absence of water, a vital resource for life and right, is an example of crisis. The coping mechanisms employed by Tanzanians are still not enough to meet their needs and as new policy ideas are discussed at the macro-level, the debilitating reality at the grassroots is seldom acknowledged or discussed with any sense of urgency. Additionally, the state continues to pass the responsibility of water provision to international and local organisations, exacerbating pressure on an increasingly saturated sector that must compete for resources and is in crisis itself. This paper aims to address how the concept of crisis mediates through several aspects of the water sector in Tanzania, serving as a permanent backdrop that has masqueraded as normality for those involved.

Mahe Anne-Laure / University of Montreal

Thriving on chaos : violent conflict as a factor of authoritarian resiliency in Sudan.

The existence of violent conflict in nondemocratic settings is often interpreted as a sign of the coming downfall of the regime. Recent scholarship on authoritarian resiliency reinforces this point by depicting violence as an ineffective strategy for authoritarian leaders in the long run (Saideman and Zahar, 2008). But how then do we explain the survival of authoritarian regimes plagued by conflict, such as al-Bashir’s Sudan? This paper argues that in order to answer that question, the prevalence of violence needs to be interpreted as creating a context of opportunities for the regime, and not only as a crisis it needs to deal with.
As such, the paper builds upon both the literature on authoritarianism resiliency that emphasizes the importance of clientelism and cooptation (Brownlee 2007, Gandhi 2009) and anthropological approaches of conflict highlighting the importance of micro-level dynamics (Kalyvas 2006; Wood 2008). It argues that armed conflicts can actually further authoritarianism through a mechanism of commodification of violence. This process is demonstrated with a case study of the sudanese regime, where it is shown how violence in itself has been turned into a good to be exchanged in a clientelistic relationship.
In the end, the paper makes a case for the necessity to theoretically distinguish the concept of instability from the ones of durability and resiliency so as to explain the survival of authoritarianism in contexts that are often hastily deemed chaotic.

Woldeamanuel Mintesnot / California State University Northridge

Sustainable Path to African Urban Development: The Case of the Transportation Sector

Sustainable transportation is essential to healthy urban development and quality of life in the fast growing cities of the 21st century. For fast growing African nations, in particular, it is of the utmost importance to invest in sustainable transportation systems to avoid the consequences of an automobile dominated lifestyle; which many cities in the Western countries are now coping with. The current general trend in African countries is a positive relationship between an expanding economy and increasing automobile travel. Cities in Africa are experiencing unprecedented population growth and rural-to-urban land conversion; outpacing much of the developed world. This has brought opportunities to African cities in the form of economic growth, however, is also exacerbating health, equity and environmental problems. So, failing to pursue drive-alternative modes of transportation will likely magnify these detrimental outcomes of rapid urban development in Africa. With this promising growth and development, the important question is how cities in Africa implement sustainable practices in their transportation planning in order to avoid the socio-environmental consequences of getting to autocentric culture. There are several transportation projects in various cities in Africa thus, this research explores the significance of these projects not only in terms of tackling the ever increasing urban transportation demand but also in reducing the socio-environmental impacts of driving.

Kyomugisha Florence / California State University, Northridge

Integrating Malaria Prevention in Sustainable Environmental and Development Programs

The World Health Organization documented “about 198 million cases of malaria in 2013 and an estimated 584 000 deaths” from malaria. Young children and pregnant women are at the highest risk of malaria morbidity and mortality. Africa south of the Sahara experiences the highest risk of malaria, and accounts for 90 percent of malaria deaths worldwide. Malaria control and eradication programs have been successful in many countries including those in northern Africa, but not in the region south of the Sahara. Drug resistant malaria, climate and environmental changes and inadequate control and prevention programs are some of the factors that have created the malaria situation in Africa south of the Sahara. The global community has done a lot in an effort to control malaria. This paper will further explore what needs to be done to control or reduce the risk of malaria in this region. This will include a discussion of the enhancement of health systems and malaria control and prevention programs that are integrated in sustainable environment and development; and strategies for providing human and financial resources to combat malaria in communities. The paper will also discuss the blanket distribution of insecticide treated nets (ITNs), one of the programs for combating malaria in poor and rural communities of Africa

Shubin Carol / California State University, Northridge

Sustainable Academics

“Brain drain” is a problem that many African nations struggle to resolve. As African countries move towards good governance which promotes its own institutions, it is essential that Africa’s most valuable resource – people – do not leave. Nevertheless, many Africans migrate to Europe and the U.S. for higher education. And, many do not return to reinvest the skills and knowledge that they have gained abroad. Scholars agree that the brain drain is both a cause and effect of thwarted economies in Africa, and it threatens the sustainability of academia as well. However, scholars do not agree on the methods for addressing the brain drain. Some argue mobility must be fully halted. Others argue a certain amount of mobility is necessary to the development of skilled labor in today’s world; thus, the solution does not lie in stopping out-migration. This paper contributes to this debate by exploring current educational projects such as MOOCs and joint summer workshops that encourage African students to remain in Africa while undertaking a portion of their undergraduate and graduate studies. Specifically, I discuss current efforts to develop such programs in the fields of mathematics and statistical analysis of “big data,” through partnerships between higher education institutions in Tanzania, Kenya, and the U.S. I hope to show how international partnerships contribute to slowing down the pace of the brain drain while contributing to the sustainability of academia in Africa.

Scheld Suzanne / California State University, Northridge

The Cultural Dimensions of Open Green Space in Dakar, Senegal

Dakar, the capital of Senegal, is often celebrated for being a well-organized, touristic , and aesthetically pleasing city. Arguably, open green spaces in the city contribute significantly to this reputation. Postcards of Dakar between the 1920s and 1950s feature green plazas and small neighborhood parks as noteworthy places in the city. Today, in contrast, to this former image of the city, few neighborhoods have green spaces and the large plazas are not so well manicured. What happened to the green spaces of Dakar? Sustainability is often conceived as pertaining to the protection, distribution, and renewability of environmental resources. Social and cultural resources, however, also require protection and favorable conditions for their continuity. Open green urban spaces are sites where social, cultural, and environmental resources are fortified and distributed. The sustainability of green spaces is critical to the vitality of urban life. This paper explores the current status of open green space in Dakar, and explains how urbanization, privatization, and local communities’ appropriation of these space has changed the use, meaning, and cultural significance of these spaces within the city.

Seign-goura Yorbana / University of Neuchatel in Switzerland

L’industrie extractive et le management responsable: une experience tchadienne

Ce travail est une analyse de la gouvernance des politiques socio-environnementales des multinationales pétrolières au Tchad. L’analyse des performances socio-environnementales est faite à l’aune des concepts de la responsabilité sociale des entreprises, du management responsable, de l’innovation responsable et de diverses théories : la malédiction des ressources naturelles, les parties prenantes, les théories néo-institutionnelles sur la base d’une recherche sociologique de terrain. Nous avons comparé l’implémentation des politiques de trois multinationales pétrolières dans leurs zones d’activité extractive au Tchad. Il ressort en effet que depuis 2000, le nombre des multinationales va grandissant dans ce pays dit fragile. Or, l’industrie pétrolière présente des risques environnementaux, économiques, sociaux voire politiques à l’origine du vocable de « la malédiction des ressources naturelles ». Ainsi, Mehlum et al (2003) explique ce dernier phénomène par la mauvaise qualité des institutions (faiblesses) dans les pays riches en ressources naturelles. Alors que ces situations mettent en cause la question de la durabilité socio-environnementale au Tchad, les stratégies des divers acteurs et leurs discours est de promouvoir le développement durable. Cette étude saisit les contradictions et les logiques des différents acteurs par l’analyse des politiques des multinationales, discours, et de leur compréhension de la notion de la durabilité.

Korbéogo Gabin / GRIL-University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Competing Rules of Water Use in Vegetables Production in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)

Water is a scarce productive resource whose accessibility and management determine productivity and quality of products of urban agriculture in Ouagadougou. Regarded as a common-pool resource, water is a source of many stakes, cooperation and conflict relationships between urban strategic groups. In the configuration of urban agriculture, civil servants, producers and consumers do interact in order to produce and influence legitimate standards of water and vegetables quality and flows; it is a sort of interplay between official statecraft and grassroots’ abilities.
However, water resource governance is not autonomous; it is intimately embedded in land tenure, material and symbolic medium of water flows that irrigate vegetables. Thus, changes of urban land practices – marked by application of State law, competition and commodification – induce development of norms and technologies of water use in urban agriculture in Ouagadougou. The competing strategies of water control should therefore be analyzed in the light of socio-economic, political, cultural and technological processes that irrigate perceptions and practices of actors and strategic groups of vegetables production in Ouagadougou.

Nchanji Eileen Bogweh / Georg-August Göttingen University

Land access networks in Urban Agriculture in Tamale, Northern Ghana

In Tamale, as many West African cities, vegetable cultivation generates income and secures food supply. However, scarce resources mean urban vegetable farmers contest strategic assets, particularly land. In Tamale, urbanization has accelerated land sales. Here, traditional rulers, as land custodians, allocate plots to buyers. This paper uses actor network theory to describe how different actor groups mobilise resources around urban agriculture. A network is conceptualised as a configuration of heterogeneous actors, negotiating with various socio-political institutions to advantage their activities. Farmers negotiate land access with chiefs, peers, private landowners and the government. They use non-governmental organizations as intermediaries in their land struggles. These organizations petition the state and paramount chief for formalization of urban agriculture and curtailment of the powers of chiefs to sell ‘green zone’ land. Chiefs have also enrolled land buyers into networks to enable sales. They use private surveyors to draw site plans and enlist support from paramount chiefs. Would-be landowners who feel cheated out of land they bought construct networks around the legal system. They have enrolled lawyers to secure lands, get compensated by fraudulent chiefs and stop them from reselling land already sold. Actors in Tamale have thus built and maintained technical, political and legal networks through contestations within their ever changing socio-political environment.

Bellwood-Howard Imogen / Georg-August Universität Göttingen

Urban farmers and marketers mobilise identities to manipulate market access

In Tamale, Northern Ghana, vegetable marketers and farmers are entangled in kin and neighbourhood networks. This shapes access to resources, including markets. Such relationships mean that trade occurs not in open marketplaces but arenas characterised by liaisons, opportunities, barriers and cartels. Many farmers establish long-term agreements with specific wholesalers to guarantee year-round trade and credit opportunities. Simultaneously, others constantly reconfigure allegiances, in order to accessing multiple outlets and more lucrative deals. In another profit enhancing strategy, some farmers retail directly to consumers, particularly in peak season. The vegetable farmers’ union has unsuccessfully attempted to organise collective retailing. The union is the most formal expression of alliances within farmer and marketer networks. Members of both trades may mobilise collective identities based on occupation, kinship or gender to negotiate transactions. However, competition between peers may also be exploited by their customers or suppliers. Within all these situations, actors mobilise the physical and ecological properties of the vegetables and the environment to facilitate or block price negotiations. Farmers and marketers thus simultaneously manipulate social and natural elements to advantage their economic activity. Through this, their common aim of optimising profit and reducing risk reinforces the role of their social context in coping with ecological variability.

Loehde Barbara / Georg-August University of Göttingen

Mobilization of formal organizations and personal social networks in the urban cattle production sector, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Beef and dairy cattle husbandry, one of the most promising production sectors of Burkina Faso and commonly associated with a rural activity, has become an increasingly attractive enterprise for the urban population. Despite several hurdles inherent to the urban environment, the diverse cattle farming systems in the capital city Ouagadougou continuously adjust to and profit from to urban setting that offers opportunities for socio-political (gender and labor aspects), technical and policy change.
Beef and dairy farmers are commonly organized in cooperatives of different size and scale. The proliferation of livestock cooperatives in Ouagadougou is a response to the state’s inclination to support organized collectives rather than individuals. Farmer leaders also stress the need to organize in collectives to effectively lobby for the recognition of the livestock sector as an essential contribution to the national economy and to assert farmers’ interests and claims to farming space in the dense urban setting.
Yet case studies reveal the importance of individual innovative strategies and mobilization of social networks external to the formal organization of cooperatives. In the process of competition and cooperation in acquiring highly desired farming inputs, farmers mobilize their personal social networks to gain access to subsidized feedstuff, labor, land and non-material resources such as information and knowledge through which they continuously develop their enterprises.

Saunders Chris / University of Cape Town

Transnational connections and mobilization in liberation struggles: the Namibian case / Conexões Transnacionais e mobilização nas lutas de libertação: o caso Namibiano

During the liberation struggles in southern Africa the liberation movements not surprisingly focused on their own particular struggles and saw those struggles in nationalist terms. Too much of the subsequent historiography has continued in this vein, seeing particular struggles in relative isolation from others and not tracing the transnational and other regional connections that were so important in mobilising support for these struggles. A start has been made to break away from the limitations of the existing historiography, in, say, the biographies presented by Colin Leys and Susan Brown in Histories of Namibia, and most recently in a section of an issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies. While the JSAS articles throw valuable light on particular transnational connections involving the Namibian liberation struggle, they do not see the wider picture. This paper will therefore attempt to analyse the connections between the Namibian liberation movements SWAPO and SWANU and others, most notably the MPLA, UNITA and the ANC, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, to show how important those connections were in mobilising support; why SWAPO was so much more successful than SWANU in this regard; and why the connections were not greater than they were, given the common struggle against the apartheid regime.

Tornimbeni Corrado / University of Bologna

Nationalism and Internationalism in the Liberation Struggle in Mozambique. FRELIMO’s regional and international fronts and the political solidarity in Italy / Nacionalismo e Internacionalismo na Luta de Libertação em Moçambique: as frentes regional e inte

In the early 1960s, Frelimo was ‘taken by hand’ by the ANC and other nationalist organisations of Southern Africa in Algeri and other political milieus in the African continent. Afterwards, however, the visibility that reached at international level led it to a preeminent position among its allies in the region. The Frelimo’s leadership that consolidated in the early 1970s probably derived its main strength from its international status: it is in the international context that this leadership found crucial resources to put into effect its modernist vision, and the political networks developed within the context of the Cold War played a major role in securing power to Frelimo after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal.
This study addresses the Italian solidarity networks supporting the liberation struggle in Mozambique, which gained a prominent role in Europe by the early 1970s. Three main aspects emerge from this investigation: first, the differences between some features of the nationalist struggle in the ‘internal front’ and the paradigms through which it was presented and understood in the ‘international front’; second, the exceptional ability of FRELIMO leaders to ‘internationalise’ its internal priorities; third, the peculiar amalgam of political and civil subjects that grouped together behind FRELIMO’s cause and that didn’t fell in necessarily with the schemes of the Cold War.

Fonseca Helder Adegar / University of Evora

Liberation Movements Training Camps in Southern Africa as Nationalists and Transnational spaces (1961-1974). / Os Campos de Treino dos Movimentos de Libertação na África Austral como espaços «nacionalistas» e «transnacionais» (1961-1974)

No início dos anos 1970s, os países africanos independentes que contornavam a «África Branca» acolhiam um rede de campos de refugiados e guerrilhas onde milhares de pessoas partilhavam uma experiência comum de exílio e luta. Adicionalmente, as redes de colaboração entre os Movimentos de Libertação presentes e as iniciativas pan-africanistas proporcionaram condições para que refugiados e guerrilheiros com diferentes origens coloniais partilhassem o exílio em alguns campos de acolhimento comuns.
Apesar da importância destes campos tanto na reunião, recrutamento, mobilização e organização da luta armada contra as autoridades coloniais assim como na construção das identidades nacionais e das solidariedades regionais, este tema atraiu ainda pouca atenção quer dos cientistas sociais quer dos historiadores.
Revisitando as abordagens qualitativas da historiografia dedicada ao assunto e procurando expandir a compreensão da magnitude destas experiências comuns, a ambição desta comunicação é a de inquirir sobre o caracter «nacional» ou «transnacional» dos campos de treino da Africa Austral como espaços sociais/comunitários.

Larmer Miles / University of Oxford

Kennes Erik / RMCA, Tervuren

The Katangese ‘Tigres’ in the Angolan independence war, 1974 – 1976 / Os “Tigres” Catangueses na Guerra da Independência de Angola, 1974-1976

During the three-sided conflict for control of Angola that took place following the Portuguese coup of 1974, a significant but largely unrecorded role was played by the Katangese ‘Tigres’. The former rank-and-file troops of the Katangese secessionist state, who had since 1967 fought with the Portuguese colonial army in its war against Angolan nationalists, sided in 1974 with the Marxist MPLA in its ultimately successful efforts to win control of Angola and gain recognition as its legitimate government. This paper documents the political basis of the Katangese forces’ alliance with the MPLA and the role they played – alongside MPLA forces and Cuban troops – in the conflicts of this period. It is argued that understanding the military and political role played by and the underlying motivation of these Katangese groups sheds new light on the un-national liberation of Angola and contributes to a growing understanding of the role of non-state armed forces in a range of conflicts in central and southern Africa hitherto characterised as largely ‘national’ in character, as well as parallels between colonial and post-colonial regimes.

Lissoni Arianna / University of the Witwatersrand

Caring for the Nation: Welfare and the Making of Political Subjects in the ANC in Exile in Tanzania

During the three decades after its banning in 1960, the external structures of the ANC expanded on a scale which is unprecedented in the history of any other exiled liberation movement. While political and military work remained the main focus of the ANC in exile given its status of liberation movement, its bureaucratic and administrative machinery was also responsible for the welfare, both material and social, of its members –this involved housing, feeding, clothing, educating and providing medical care for several thousands of people. This paper examines how the welfare of ANC exiles based in Morogoro, Tanzania (where the majority of its members were students at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College, Somafco, and Dakawa), was administered in the period from the late 1970s to liberation. It will argue that the provision of welfare was an important way in which the ANC performed the role of family and functioned in loco parentis. The institutional practices that were developed in exile to care for the needs of ANC members to improve new and ever changing conditions of communal living and belonging and the close social, cultural and political bonds that were formed in the process were integral to the making of political subjectivities and to the imagining of a national community whose legacies continue to live in the present.

Shubin Vladimir / Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy od Sciences

Uncle Alf

This paper is devoted to Alfred Nzo, or “Uncle Alf” as he was affectionally called by the fellow members of the African National Congress, especially by its youth. Although for over twenty years he was the ANC Secretary-General that is its “Second-in-Command” after President Oliver Tambo, his role has not been adequately appreciated in the “new South Africa”. This is also true about his activities as the first post-apartheid Minister of Foreign Affairs.
To a large extent such a situation was created by subjective factors, including features of his character like modesty and humility on one hand, and unfair criticism of his actions on the other hand.
However the true history of the ANC, especially “in exile” or rather in the years of underground and armed struggle cannot be written without a proper assessment of the role of its Secretary- General.
The paper will be based on the author’s memory of meetings with “Uncle Alf” during the three decades (1969 – 1999), discussions with Nzo’s South African and Soviet friends and the ANC and Soviet archival documents.

Brown Julian / University of the Witwatersrand

Everyday Life against Political Subjectivities of Crisis in South Africa

Approximately two decades after the end of the apartheid political order, South Africa is once again the site of regular popular protests. Many of those protests have occurred in sites of severe material disadvantage, and have been described as ‘service delivery protests’ – a description that implicitly characterises these protests as emerging from moments of social and material crisis. In doing so, the notion of ‘service delivery protests’ removes the experiences of everyday life from considerations of political subjectivity and replaces them with the experiences of a temporary (and resolvable) crisis. By a sleight of hand, this removes contemporary subjectivity from the realm of political radicalism, and moves it into the realm of bureaucratic management.
The effect of this is to strip contemporary political subjectivities of their radical content.
In this paper, I propose to return to the work of Henri Lefebvre on everyday life and read it against his theorisation of ‘the event’ as developed in response to the May 68 student uprisings. This approach to everyday life offers alternatives both to the potential quiescence of de Certeau’s (and other’s) approach to the routinisation of everyday experiences, and to the imposed desubjectification of crisis management responses. By examining recent protests on the outskirts of Johannesburg, between about 2008 and 2014, I will show how everyday life feeds into political subjectivities, and forms the basis for a radical politics.

Rueedi Franziska / University of the Witwatersrand

Politics, Affect and the Everyday: Subjectivity in Political Biographies of the 1980s

The last few years have seen a proliferation of biographies of ‘big men’ and their contribution to the liberation struggle in South Africa. Celebrating the lives of current and former leaders of the African National Congress in particular, their involvement in formal political structures has been at the centre of analysis. This emphasis on organised formal politics reflects a triumphalist struggle narrative that has emerged since the first democratic elections in 1994. The subjective experiences, perceptions and aspirations of less prominent activists have attracted less attention. Furthermore, the linearity of conventional biographic narratives obscures the contradictions and complexities of individuals’ lives.
Based on archival sources and life history interviews, this paper analyses the formation of political subjectivities during the final decade of the struggle against apartheid. Focussing on the Vaal Triangle and KwaThema, the paper pays particular attention to the relation between politics and subjective experiences of the everyday in shaping a sense of the self, community and the nation. It also analyses the extent to which affect and relationships impacted on the formation of political subjectivities during this period by situating individual lives within broader networks of family, friendship and other social relations.

Cooper-Knock Sarah Jane / University of Edinburgh

“I am not a Police Person”: Politics, Police Legitimacy and the Everyday State in Durban

In the rich literature on social movements in post-apartheid South Africa, many have explored the degree to which particular social movements cooperate with the state or adopt a more antagonistic stance (Ballard et al 2005, Beinart and Dawson 2010, Pithouse and Desai 2004, Robins 2010). Some break this picture down further, exploring the degree to which movements are able to cultivate or capitalise upon unique relationships with specific state actors or departments (Bell 2014, Mbali 2013). Such accounts remind us that the state is, in reality, a collection of individuals and institutions that are often heterogeneous and fragmented, if not in active conflict with each other (Abrams 1988, Mitchell 1991). Their work has helped us to gain a more nuanced understanding of South Africa’s political landscape and the nature of statehood and citizenship within it. What is less prevalent in the literature on popular politics, are studies of individuals and the diverse relationships they hold with state actors and institutions as they traverse between social movements and ‘societies in movement’ in the midst of everyday life (Zibechi 2012). Here, I look at the relationship informal settlement residents had with the state police – ‘the state on the streets’ (Hinton 2006) – exploring people’s decision to utilise the SAPS and the degree to which their decisions were influenced by the everyday politics of living in shacks, and their membership of a local shack dwellers’ social movement.

Freund Bill / University of Kwa-Zulu/Natal, Durban, South Africa

Trade Unions: Context and Impact in Modern African History

This paper will consider three phases in the history of African trade unions. The first would be the organisational antecedents of trade unions. Second will be unions structured along the lines of the formations in industrial societies. In the conjuncture of the years just after World War II, big territory-wide union-led strikes exploded in many colonies (Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Tanganyika, the Rhodesias, French West Africa), not to speak of South Africa.
After independence, the militancy of unions worked against the ambitions of new governments which no longer favoured insurgency and were hostile to an autonomous modern civil society. Typically unions were reorganised as bureaucratic structures responsible to the state, leaders were bought off or persecuted and growing economic problems undermined initial attempts by the state to reward wage workers.
In fact, this relatively quiescent phase was succeeded by a third phase, linked to grassroots movements calling for political democracy and the end to dictatorships or one-party rule in many countries. Trade unionism was critical in bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa. This new second phase has continued all the way to the Arab Spring in very recent years.

Engels Bettina / Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Rise and decline of a semi-authoritarian state: Dynamic political structures and trade union activities during the “era Blaise Compaoré” in Burkina Faso

In this paper, I argue that trade union claims and actions on the one hand and political structures on the other, impact on one another. Political structures are the openness of political institutions, the existence of political allies, and the government’s repressive capacity, among others. Political structures are dynamic; they are created, contested, shifted, de- and reconstructed through the interaction of oppositional actors (such as trade unions) and authorities. The case of Burkina Faso’s trade unions is analysed, focusing on the period from the late 1980s until today. Four historical phases are identified. It is demonstrated that which claims the trade unions raised and how these claims were framed depends on the specific political structures, whereby alliances with other social movement organisations (notably the human rights movement and the student movement) play a decisive role. At the same time, the respective protests created new opportunities for contentious collective action, thus paving the way for the next phase.
Evidence for the case study derives from thirty-five semi-standardised interviews conducted in 2011-2012 with activists from trade unions and other organisations and representatives from government institutions. In addition, documents from international organisations and NGOs, leaflets and journals from trade unions, human rights groups, and student and youth organisations, and press reports from the period of 2008-2014 were analysed.

Houeland Camilla / Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric) Norwegian University of Life Sciences

Popular protest against fuel subsidy removal Nigerian trade unions as (challenged) protector of a social contract

The January 2012 protests against the removal of the fuel subsidies was probably the largest mobilisation in Nigerian history. The trade unions again proved instrumental in resisting the state, through mobilisation, strike action and social dialogue. This article explores the Nigerian unions’ relationship to both the state and Nigerian citizens through their role as protectors of cheap fuel. First, the article challenges theories of African state-society relations claiming that that there are no social contract between state and citizens, and that concept of civil society is hardly relevant in a neo-patrimonial state, such as the Nigerian. I argue that the subsidy constitutes a form of social contract. Second, I argue that the trade unions have established themselves as protectors of cheap fuel, through successively and successfully leading popular mobilisation against the subsidy removal since 1988. Thus, unions have constituted themselves as the protectors of the social contract and as the mediator between state and citizens. However, during 2012 protests, both new social movements and revitalised political opposition challenged unions’ position as protector and mediator through questioning representation and participation: They tried to capture the unions’ position as protectors.

Roy Alexis / Institut d’Etude du Developpement Econmique et Social (IEDES), Université Paris 1

Peasants against Wage-earners ? Trade Unions responses to privatization of the cotton sector in Mali

En 2001, la Banque Mondiale impose au Mali la privatisation du fleuron de son économie, la Compagnie Malienne pour le Développement des Textiles (CMDT), qui encadre la culture du coton. A travers l’analyse de ce processus de privatisation, des tensions qu’il a générées et des décalages existant entre les responsables syndicaux et les attentes de ceux qu’ils représentent, nous examinerons les effets différenciés des libéralisations politique et économique sur les paysans et les salariés. Alors que cette privatisation suscitait une large opposition, tant chez les producteurs de coton que chez les salariés, leurs syndicats ont adopté des positions contrastées.
Les relations entre les paysans et l’encadrement de la CMDT sont marquées par un certain antagonisme, mais cela ne suffit pas à expliquer les divergences observées face à la privatisation de la filière. Bien qu’officiellement opposés à cette réforme, une partie des responsables syndicaux représentant les paysans ont adopté une posture qu’ils présentaient comme « pragmatique », cherchant à tirer le meilleur parti d’un processus qu’ils considéraient comme inéluctable. Le syndicat des salariés s’est quant à lui montré plus combatif, les salariés étant généralement les grands perdants des privatisations. Toutefois, si le clivage entre paysans et salariés, et entre leurs représentants syndicaux, est bien réel, on peut observer d’autres tensions en leur sein, permettant de nuancer cette opposition.

Fremigacci Jean / IMAF

Les fondements socio-culturels de la crise de Madagascar

En un demi-siècle d’indépendance, Madagascar a usé trois républiques et la quatrième est mal partie.Pour rendre compte d’une telle récurrence des crises de gouvernance, il faut dépasser le niveau de la conjoncture, politique ou économique, et dégager la contradiction entre un modèle politique importé et les valeurs religieuses qui imprègnent tous les aspects de la vie du pays. La référence à Dieu et aux ancêtres a déterminé un contrat social qui privilégie le groupe de solidarité concrète et une idéologie de la parenté, et qui laisse ainsi peu de place au libre choix individuel. Cette base culturelle a constitué un terrain propice à des pouvoirs aux formes historiquement changeantes, mais toujours oligarchiques et prédateurs. Le fossé entre eux et le peuple les rend en réalité assez faibles et impuissants, mais ils peuvent tirer parti de la manipulation des valeurs traditionnelles et des blocages d’une société civile morcelée en “sociétés géographiques” de dimensions restreintes menacées par le tribalisme et l’ethnisme. La crise aiguë survient quand l’oligarchie du moment perd sa cohésion, se déchire et crée les conditions pour qu’un mouvement populaire balaie le pouvoir en place. Mais Madagascar n’a pas grand-chose à attendre d’un simple changement de l’équipe au pouvoir et ne sortira de sa crise structurelle qu’à la suite d’un changement social et culturel qui ne peut se situer que dans le temps long.

Lavrard-Meyer Cécile / Sciences-Po

Politique politicienne et crises malgache : l’enjeu des ego

Cette contribution se propose d’analyser les déterminants individuels, au sommet de l’Etat, des crises politiques malgaches depuis l’indépendance. Elle passera en revue les responsabilités des dirigeants dans les différentes crises politiques depuis 1972 (crise de 1972, de 1975, de 1991, de 1996, de 2002 et de 2009), en s’appuyant sur les archives ouvertes pour les périodes les plus anciennes ainsi que sur des témoignages inédits d’anciens chefs d’Etat malgaches pour la période la plus récente. Elle mettra en évidence le rôle des ego, des ambitions personnelles et des rivalités ethniques et de castes dans les crises politiques qui ont secoué Madagascar depuis son indépendance.

Razafindrabe Tsiory, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée

Etat de droit et état d’exception à Madagascar : Analyse politico-constitutionnelle des crises

Il s’agira  d’analyser la pratique de l’état d’exception, à travers l’histoire constitutionnelle de Madagascar depuis l’indépendance.
Ainsi, il convient de contextualiser les concepts fondamentaux, comme l’ « Etat de droit », la « Constitution » ou encore l’ « état d’exception », tel qu’ils trouvent leur application à Madagascar. On constatera que l’état d’exception, à Madagascar, est toujours proclamé à la suite d’un différend à caractère politique visant la conquête du pouvoir. Cette analyse confirmera l’existence d’un caractère indéniablement politique du droit constitutionnel dans ses interprétations et ses applications. On observera également que la majorité de la population se trouve écartée du jeu-politico-constitutionnel.
Au fil des constitutions successives, et des nombreuses révisions constitutionnelles, on a pu constater un renforcement de l’institution présidentielle, notamment par l’élargissement de leurs « pouvoirs de crise ». Une typologie sur l’usage (modéré ou débridé) des dispositions exceptionnelles peut alors être avancée.

Rakotomanana Faly / Institut national de la statistique (INSTAT)

Crises politiques à Madagascar : La majorité rurale a-t-elle subi la loi de la minorité urbaine ?

Depuis son indépendance, Madagascar a connu des crises périodiques qui ont fait chuté les régimes en place : en 1972, en 1991, en 2001 et en 2009. Les revendications initiales, même si elles étaient différentes d’une crise à l’autre tournaient autour de la question de gouvernance et concernaient l’ensemble de la population aussi bien en milieu rural qu’en milieu urbain. Le point commun de toutes ces crises était que les manifestations populaires se sont déroulées essentiellement en milieu urbain et en particulier dans la capitale. Les explications souvent évoquées sont principalement la forte concentration des faiseurs d’opinions en milieu urbain, le niveau d’éducation relativement élevé des urbains et le niveau d’accès aux informations. L’extension des mouvements au niveau de la population rurale était de faible ampleur, alors qu’en termes de nombre de voix, elle représente 80% de l’ensemble de la population. Les ruraux ont-ils épousé les revendications exprimées publiquement par les urbains ? Existe-t-il des décalages de point de vue entre la population rurale et la population urbaine en matière de gouvernance ou de gestion des affaires publiques ? Cette étude tente de faire une analyse comparative des évolutions des opinions des citoyens urbains et ruraux sur les différents aspects de la gouvernance à Madagascar entre 2005 et 2012. Elle se base sur des résultats empiriques issus de la série d’enquêtes « Afrobaromètre » réalisées à Madagascar en 2005, 2008 et 2012.

Wachsberger Jean-Michel / UMR DIAL

Razafindrakoto Mireille & RoubaudFrançois / UMR DIAL, IRD, Université Paris-Dauphine

Madagascar. L’île mystérieuse

Les théories classiques et récentes du développement sont impuissantes à expliquer la contre-performance économique malgache sur longue période. Cet article propose une relecture de l’histoire en mobilisant le cadre d’analyse de l’économie politique. Nos analyses pointent qu’en dépit de facteurs de blocage profonds, Madagascar a fait montre d’une capacité de transformation d’une modernité inattendue : transitions économique (avec l’arrivée d’une classe d’entrepreneurs nouveaux) et politique (avec les alternances démocratiques) ; mise en place d’institutions caractéristiques des sociétés « modernes » ; contrôle de la violence ; expression des aspirations économiques et citoyennes de la population. Trois entraves structurelles s’opposent en revanche au développement du pays : la fragmentation de la société, l’atomisation de la population et l’atrophie des corps intermédiaires favorisent une forte concentration du pouvoir aux mains d’une poignée d’élites qui n’est pas contrainte à avoir une vision de long terme et à prendre en compte les intérêts de la majorité ; la population reste tiraillée entre des revendications citoyennes de type démocratique et méritocratique et des valeurs traditionnelles qui imposent le respect de hiérarchies réelles et symboliques héritées du passé ; enfin, les politiques promues par les bailleurs de fonds, si elles ont pu avoir des effets positifs, ont également eu un impact négatif majeur sur la capacité de l’Etat à réguler la société.

Jentzsch Corinna / Leiden University

The Diffusion of Militias in Civil Wars: Peasant Resistance to Wartime Violence in Post-Independence Mozambique

Civil war, violence and insecurity often give rise to new wartime forms of order and security. This paper focuses on a particular type of such order in civil wars: the formation of peasant militias to resist wartime violence. In particular, I analyze the formation and diffusion of peasant militias during the post-independence war in Mozambique (1976-1992). The “Naparama,” as the militia was known, was created by a traditional healer, recruited within a short amount of time a large number of followers and successfully drove back the rebel group Renamo. I seek to explain why, given that much of the population faced violence and insecurity during the war, militias formed in some districts, but not in others. Based on a comparison of Naparama militias in two adjacent districts, I argue that militias successfully spread to those districts in which militia mobilization was based on ideas and practices that resonated with local communities and in which the emerging militia engaged in successful cooperation with the local state and security apparatus. The analysis draws on empirical evidence from oral histories and archival research during a year of fieldwork in Zambézia and Nampula provinces in Mozambique. The findings have implications for theories of political order and governance during and beyond civil wars.

Pendle Naomi / London School of Economics and Political Science

The “Niggers” of the Bentiu (South Sudan): Constructing public authority and avoiding co-option by the state in a context of violence, uncertainty and state plurality

Youth gangs, referring to themselves as “Niggers”, have emerged in urban centres across South Sudan. The latest reconstruction of the “Niggers” is taking form in the Bentiu UN Protection of Civilian site (POC). After the eruption of violence in the Western Nuer in late 2013, many people fled to the POC. At the start of 2015, over 40,000 people continue to live in this new, enclosed urban centre. While the South Sudanese landscape often appears to be a vacuum of state governance, the landscape is even less clear in the POC; there is a plurality of state-like actors that include the government, the SPLA-IO and the incomprehensible foreign force of the UN peacekeepers. In this environment of uncertainty, ambiguity and violence, the “Niggers” are part of the emerging twilight institutions that have authority over life in the POC. The “Niggers” in the POC are often associated with criminality, yet they are also still incorporated in Nuer social idioms of collective responsibility. The current warring parties of South Sudan have constructed parts of their forces from local, twilight institutions, previously described in criminal terms, such as the White Armies and the Dut ku Beny. This paper will consider how the “Niggers” are negotiating their public authority in the Bentiu POC, as well as discuss how they are attempting to avoid co-option into the warring parties. This paper is based on ongoing ethnographic research in the Bentiu POC and amongst the Western Nuer.

Otiso Wycliffe / LAM-UPPA

Community Policing and Vigilantism in Kenya: Emergence of Nonviolent and Inclusive Non-State Policing

The study analyzes the changing nature of policing strategies as undertaken by vigilante groups, such as Sungusungu and community policing initiatives in south western Kenya. It examines the shift in mobilization of society’s involvement in self-help policing of order, through inclusive, non-violent and democratic approaches. The changing nature of policing in Kisii County in the south western part of Kenya points to emergence of inclusive, nonviolent approaches to community policing shaped by local mobilization. Maintenance of order by non-state groups in Kisii county has been associated with violence and crime, but in 2010, a new constitutional order was adopted laying a framework for new governance structures and consolidation of democracy. Later that year, the Prohibition of Organized Crime Act was enacted banning activities of armed groups implicated in crime and violence. Sungusungu’s participation in the 2013 general elections signal a shift where youth groups known for employing intimidation in mediating political differences abandon their patronage networks and instrumentalization of violence and instead opted for direct non-violent participation in elections. The case of Kisii County thus exemplifies how local conceptions and applications of democratic ideals has positive impact on the policing environment.

Day Christopher / College of Charleston

Warlords Rule : The Central African Republic

Schrippa Pino / Università di Roma

What is left of collaboration between biomedicine and traditional medicine

After Alma Ata, the projects which aimed to a collaboration between biomedicine and the traditional medicines have spread in all African continent. Such a process has involved states and transnational institutions as well. Many projects were financed by WHO and WB and carried out by NGOs, Universities and, in some ways, by the states. These projects have often encountered many difficulties in their realization.
Starting from my fieldwork in Ghana and from a critical review of some experiences carried out in Ghana in the 1990’s, I would like to discuss the results achieved.
After many years from the end of these projects, what is left in the social arena? Have these projects chanced the perspectives of the social actors?
The aim is to demonstrate that most of the limits of the projects depended on a narrow idea of traditional medicine. These projects have focused too much on the technical and operational aspects, leaving out fundamental dimensions that link traditional medicines to the society as a whole. To be effective, such interventions should take into account a broader context, and therefore cannot neglect to analyze therapeutic practices as complex wholes, as well as the dynamics exchange and syncretism, and even more by the relations of power and resistance within the field of therapies.

Ngalamulume Kalala / Bryn Mawr College (Pennsylvania, USA)

Therapeutic Itinerary in Saint-Louis-du-Senegal between Indigenous and Western Medicine: Past and Present

This paper examines the choices made by some residents of Saint-Louis in their search for therapy. It addresses one of the questions that have puzzled the French health officers and Western-trained African physicians and led them to conclude that the urban poor were resisting Western Medicine. Drawing on the evidence collected in the French and Senegalese national archives and from ethnographic investigation, the paper argues that, far from being irrational, the urban poor’s response to Western medicine made sense in the context of their worldview.

Sekhejane Palesa / Human Sciences Research Council (RSA)

Political Governance as a Crucial Anchor for Developmental Health Goals

Debilitated human conditions in Africa are mainly attributed to diseases as a result of multiple aspects such as poverty and lack of basic social services like accessible health care system. Therefore, in order for Africa to protect its human capital and deliver health services as human right, health system is a pillar that ought to be recognized and pursued earnestly. Health system is a sum of total institutions, organizations and resources, whose primary function is to improve health through responsiveness and financial fairness. Effective health systems do not only contribute to human development, but also contribute to economic development and growth, hence health system must be viewed as a rudimentary “life support” system. The deficiency in the capacity of mechanisms that could be utilized to hinder the pandemics through technical expertise, resources, mobilization, political and financial support suggest that Africa needs tailor-made solutions. Problem: African health care system(s) are not designed to support the immediate continental problems, thus require innovative intra-solutions. Study propounds that political and civil governance have a potential to promote and orchestrate desired health goals in the continent.

Fulane Gefra / CEI-ISCTE-IUL

Health care seeking and medical pluralism: narratives of women co-infected with HIV/AIDS and cervical cancer in southern Mozambique

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are coming up strongly in the African region and it is estimated that they will victimize twice as much as communicable diseases (CDs) disease by 2030 (WHO, 2014). In contexts like Mozambique, the rising of ‘new’ NCDs generates synergies with ‘old’ CDs, causing threaten to vulnerable population while affecting the global health and the global economy. However, the National Health Service of Mozambique has its focus at controlling CDs and is still far from prepared for the recent emergence of NCDs through the deficiency and fragmentation control programmes. Furthermore, the existing literature about co-infections tends to be centred at CDs interactions, such as HIV/AIDS+TB, and little attention is given to the connection between CDs and NCDs.
Since it has been demonstrated that HIV leads to the risk of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (Ouattara et al, 2009; Denny et al, 2012; Teixeira, 2012), it is unacceptable that in Mozambique – where 18.4% of women live with HIV/AIDS (MOH, 2008) and 72% of screened women lost their lives due to CC (Jornal Notícias, June 14, 2014) – reliable data on the incidence and management of HIV/AIDS+CC patients’ body are scarce. It is also not acceptable that in a society of medical pluralism (Honwana, 2002), there are no socio-anthropological studies that illustrate the patients’ life.

Baldursdottir Sigridur / University of Iceland

The Exclusion of Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) in Guinea-Bissau: Effects and Consequences

Traditional birth attendants (TBAs) have been important providers of maternal health care. From the 1970s until the 1990s the WHO promoted training of TBAs as a strategy to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality. However, by the late 1990s the work of TBAs became debated and international policy started to promote skilled birth attendance, excluding TBAs. Thus, births assisted by TBAs are not included in MDG statistics. In Guinea-Bissau TBAs became part of the community health programme launched in 1977. Their role was to assist women in their communities with birth, prenatal consultations and refer women at risk to health facilities. This changed in 2010 with a new community health policy which excludes TBAs.
This paper explores the role of TBAs in Guinea-Bissau and the effect of the new policy based on theories of global governance. The data is based on 20 months of anthropological fieldwork between 2009 and 2012. The study shows how international health policy has affected the policy of Guinea-Bissau. The exclusion of TBAs was controversial as the majority of women still give birth at home with the assistance of relatives, older women or TBAs. The motives for giving birth at home are various, including geographical accessibility to health facilities, customs and user fees. This paper argues through empirical examples for the importance of taking local contexts and barriers to maternal health care into consideration when contemplating to exclude TBAs from birth attendance.

Drew Allison / University of York

Voix autobiographique d’une militante algérienne : l’expérience de Lucette Hadj Ali

Décédée à l’âge de 94 ans, Lucette Hadj Ali incarne une riche expérience du combat contre le colonialisme et en faveur de l’émancipation humaine. Née à Oran en 1920, elle est issue d’une famille européenne. Vivant dans un « cocon », elle découvre progressivement les réalités coloniales. Après avoir enseigné, elle entre à l’AFP où Henri Alleg est traducteur. Elle s’engage. A partir de 1943, elle est journaliste à l’hebdomadaire du Parti Communiste Algérien (PCA), Liberté, puis au mensuel Femmes d’Algérie de l’Union des femmes d’Algérie avant de participer à la “grande aventure d’Alger Républicain”. Pendant la guerre d’Algérie, elle milite dans la clandestinité avec la dissolution du PCA en 1955. Elle devient la campagne de Bachir Hadj Ali, poète-militant et figure du PCA. Après l’indépendance, elle subit une nouvelle épreuve quand ce dernier est arrêté et torturé en novembre 1965. Elle quitte l’Algérie dans les années 1990 à la suite de menaces de mort. Notre communication propose une étude critique de son autobiographie , construction identitaire et politique et source d’une trajectoire individuelle, d’une génération et d’une période.

Grassin Paul / CESSP – Université Paris 1

« Fearless Fighter » de Vera Chirwa : autobiographie et construction identitaire de « la » femme militante africaine au Malawi

Rompant avec l’idée que l’autobiographie serait un témoignage authentique où la confusion entre auteur et personnage principal serait gage de sincérité et de véracité historique, cette communication entend explorer les mécanismes de construction du récit autobiographique et les multiples interactions qui conduisent à son élaboration. L’ « auto »biographie de Vera Chirwa – militante malawienne ayant connu la lutte pour l’indépendance puis contre la dictature postcoloniale – écrite par l’Institut Danois pour les Droits Humains à partir d’entretiens, offre un support unique pour éclairer les usages politiques et militants de l’écriture de soi.
Un travail d’exégèse s’intéressera à montrer comment l’enchâssement de l’histoire politique nationale malawienne dans un récit intime contribue à la production d’un modèle identitaire archétypal de « la femme africaine militante ». L’objectif est de faire de Vera Chriwa une véritable allégorie féminine de l’ « insoumission à la tyrannie » et de sa vie un long combat pour la liberté dont la cohérence et la pureté sont renforcés par leur incessante confrontation aux irrégularités et inconstances biographiques. En outre, la réalisation d’entretiens avec les différents parties ayant contribué à l’élaboration de l’ouvrage visera à éclairer la dimension stratégique de l’écriture de soi (et de l’écriture de l’ « autre » en ce qui concerne les commanditaires) dans une logique militante et à révéler les enjeux d’interprétation qu’ils illustrent.

Panata Sara / IMAF – Université Paris 1

A Women’s Movement through a Collective Autobiography : from Life History to Political Struggle in Nigeria

Le domaine politique étant formellement destiné aux hommes, les organisations féminines nigérianes des années 1950 se réclamaient à l’unisson comme « apolitique » et uniquement tournées vers l’action sociale. Le seul mouvement féminin affirmant ouvertement son engagement partisan était le Women Movement of Nigeria, qui paya son action en étant censuré par les journaux. La présidente de ce mouvement, Mrs Elizabeth Adekogbe, a donc pris le parti éminemment politique de retracer dans un cahier inédit de cinquante pages l’activité du mouvement. Intitulée Life History of the Women Movement et retrouvée en février 2014 dans les archives privées de cette militante, cette source retrace la vie de l’organisation vue de l’intérieur de 1952 à 1958.
Il s’agira d’abord de saisir la particularité d’un récit de vie collectif mais en même temps personnel car c’est à la fois l’autobiographie d’une femme et de son mouvement. On s’interrogera sur l’utilisation de ce cahier comme outil de lutte politique à travers des processus sélectifs de narration. Lu au regard de la presse et des témoignages oraux, il révèle toute sa portée militante faisant émerger ces femmes à la fois comme des victimes et des actrices pleinement concernées et engagées dans les dynamiques politiques des années 1950. On questionnera également la dimension genrée propre aux modalités d’expression de ces femmes en les confrontant aux modes d’engagement des autres partis politiques majoritairement masculins.

Monciaud Didier / GREMAMO – Université Paris 7

Politique de la mémoire et mémoire de la politique à travers les mémoires d’Injy Aflatoun : trajectoire individuelle, identités, idéologie et engagements dans l’Égypte contemporaine

L’histoire des luttes pour les droits des femmes en Égypte est riche d’engagements, de contributions et de mobilisations. Dans les années 1940, de nombreuses jeunes égyptiennes rejoignent le mouvement communiste alors en plein essor dans un pays sous domination britannique. Injî Aflâtûn, jeune éduquée passionnée de peinture, s’engage et s’investit pour les droits des femmes en Égypte, action qui s’articule, non sans tensions, aux luttes anticolonialistes et d’émancipation.
Son autobiographie publiée de manière posthume repose sur des entretiens réalisés dans les années 1980. Elle traite de son enfance jusqu’a sa sortie des prisons nassériennes au début des années 1960. L’autobiographie, auto-narration d’une trajectoire personnelle et politique, peut fournir une stimulante source sur l’acteur-auteur, ses racines sociales et culturelles, ses expériences, et plus largement sur la période et sa génération. Elle comporte aussi une série de problèmes méthodologiques. II s’agira ainsi de questionner l’identité que le sujet cherche à accréditer, rejeter « l’illusion biographique » et la construction d’un sens unitaire de vie. Nous aborderons aussi les rapports entre 1’héritage historique de l’auteur et son credo politique au moment de la production de cette autobiographie.

Tiplady Higgs Eleanor / SOAS University of London

Christianity in the Kenyan women’s movement: An (auto)biography of Mwajuma Alice Abok and the Young Women’s Christan Association in Kenya

This paper offers a brief discussion of the tensions and continuities between institutional and individual (auto)biography, and attends to some of the oft-neglected links between women’s movements and Christianities. It does so by reading/constructing an (auto)biographical account of Mwajuma Alice Abok, a former leader of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Kenya. Kenya YWCA is the oldest formalised women’s organisation in Kenya, with a focus on addressing gendered issues of social justice and welfare.
Mwajuma Alice Abok’s activism has been enacted firmly within the YWCA and the wider institutional framework of transnational Christian women’s organising. The (auto)biography under construction/discussion here is formed of material published in Abok’s monograph Winds of Hope (2004), and narrated during an interview conducted in Nairobi in 2012. In these accounts, Abok describes her leadership of Kenya YWCA, a story that is interwoven with a broader narrative telling the history of the organiation and the women’s movement in Kenya more broadly. Therefore, in line with the panel’s concern with the ‘political’ writing of the self, this paper considers the central role of a Christian identity and faith in Abok’s (auto)biographical narrative. The autobiography of another former Kenya YWCA leader emerges as a source of memory and knowlegde for the construction of Kenya YWCA’s institutional identity and Abok’s (auto)biographical narrative.

Lydon Ghislaine / University of California (UCLA)

Commercial and Legal History of Muslim Sub-Saharan Africa from a Paper Economy perspective

This talk provides an overview of the history of papermaking from an Afro-centric perspective. It reviews both the production of writing paper and its various uses, from an economic history angle, paying particular attention to the transformative effect of the spread of the use of paperwork in the commercial and legal history of Muslim societies

Regourd Anne / CNRS, Paris; ERC “Islam in the Horn of Africa”, Copenhagen

Reading between the lines: seeing trade through papers

Based on a careful study of paper production and codicology, and drawing on the example of the paper trade in Eastern Africa and across the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, the talk discusses how the study of paper can contribute, from a methodological standpoint, to a better understanding of the history of trade routes, as well as that of local histories.

Dewière Rémi / Institut des mondes africains (IMAf), Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne

Travelling papers: the diplomatic uses of paper in central Sahel (15th-19th c.)

In the Islamic world, the study of paper has been mainly devoted to the manuscript culture (Humbert, 2002). However, the uses of paper were also rooted in administrative practices (Dekkiche, 2011). In particular, diplomatic actors had an important use of paper in the whole Dār al-Islām. Some chancelleries developped a highly developped system of norms regarding the production of diplomatic letters, like the Mamluks of Egypt. In this process, paper was involved in the creation and the carreer of the diplomatic documents (Morelle, 2009). The origin of the paper, its size and the page layout were chosen according to the recipient of the letter. It also ensured its authenticity and expressed the sultan’s power.
The aim of this paper is to shed a light on these practices on the southern shores of the Sahara. During the long history of the Borno Sultanate, in present-day Nigeria, the sources show some strong evidences that the paper was commonly used for interregional and regional diplomacy. From the al-Qalqašandī letter (1391) to the Shehu’s letters (XIXth c.), the diplomatic letters were travelling papers, imported from the northern shores of the Sahara, shaped to embody the Sultan’s power (Reinfandt, forthcoming) and sent backwards to foreign courts in Njimi, Fez, Tripoli, Istanbul or Cairo. Therefore, I propose to look after the uses of paper in the diplomatic practices of the Borno sultanate from the end of the middle ages up to the colonial period in Central Sahel.

Beaujard Philippe / CNRS, Paris

The Arabic-Malagasy manuscripts of Southeast Madagascar

Muslims who arrived at the end of the 15th century on the East coast of Madagascar brought with them books written in Arabic, the script being adapted to the Malagasy language. The possession and the knowledge of these books, of magic contents, founded the power of the aristocracy in the Antemoro kingdom. The contents reflect a Muslim inheritance, but also South Asian and Southeast Asian influences. Moreover, most of the sorabe show a synthesis of a « Muslim » and of a Malagasy knowledge.

Meyine Mohamedou Mohameden / Université de Nouakchott 

Corpus maure : Littératures orales et écrites en milieu nomade

Cette communication s’appuie sur un riche ensemble oral de poésies sahariennes pour dévoiler la culture manuscrite du Sahara de l’Ouest. Il se penche sur la relation entre l’acte de mémoriser et celui d’écrire pour montrer que l’absence de papier parmi les nomades lettrés du Sahara explique partiellement le développement d’une société de mémoire.

Eulenberger Immo / Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Shifting spatial arrangements of power and the masks of authoritarianism in a Northeast African cross-border region

The Ateker-speaking, traditionally (agro-)pastoralist common borderlands of South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda have long been remote to the centres of power of their respective governments, to their interests and ambitions, and consequently to their penetration efforts, a fact indigenous communities have cherished, intentionally furthered and protected. Especially civil wars and new projects of resource extraction, like the Lower Omo agro-industry project (Ethiopia), the military occupation of Karamoja (Uganda), the discovery of vast oil and water reserves in Turkana (Kenya), or South Sudan’s new war, have altered the socio-spatial landscape in which indigenous communities had preserved high degrees of autonomy, not least thanks to their remarkable military strength. In this paper, based on studies commencing in 2008 and including three years of fieldwork, I examine comparatively the historical dynamics of shifting arrangements between pastoralists and modern actors, the manifestations and functionality of authoritarianism in the region, the patterns of cooperation, conflict and avoidance and the logics of their changing manifestation in space.

Villanucci Alessia / University of Messina

Community mobilisation and the shaping of space and time in rural Tigray (Ethiopia)

The Ethiopian government is implementing a process of development and “modernization”, aiming to reach the status of a middle-income country by 2025. Community participation is central to this strategy and is obtained by means of mobilisation practices inspired by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front revolutionary experience during the struggle against the Derg.
The paper is based on an ethnographic research conducted in a rural district of Tigray, focused on health strategies such as the Health Extension Programme and the Women Development Army. It reflects on the process of construction of hegemony enacted by the party-state apparatus, and on its relation with the categories of space and time. At a local level, people’s mobilisation is related to the use of coercion methods, as well as to the construction of consensus. The last appears to be gained through the evocation of the memories of the liberation struggle and through the production of narratives of future progress and wellbeing. At the same time, authority is spatialized through the creation of “model” households, villages and districts. This practice reinforces hierarchies of power and values, as well as inequalities in the distribution of resources.
In order to avoid a view of state-citizens relations as a mere result of top-down interactions, the paper will show how social actors manipulate developmental discourses and resources through micro-local “strategies of extraversion” (Bayart 1999) and power networks.

Debout Lise / Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

City materiality and non-mobilisation in the construction of a political space in Egypt

L’Égypte de Mubarak a donné lieu à de nombreux travaux issus de la science politique mettant en avant le caractère autoritaire de ce régime. Celle de Sissi, bien que de fait encore moins explorée et moins connue, ne semble pas moins repressive et autoritaire, de même que les outils de sa coercition et de son contrôle ne semblent guère être différents. Cependant une approche par les territoires permet de nuancer la puissance de ces dispositifs et en partie de mettre en avant des processus de territorialisation par la mobilisation multiforme d’individus au niveau local et en dehors des voies traditionnelles de la contestation. De même, dans d’autres contextes et sous d’autres latitudes, certains travaux mettent en avant que les populations marginalisées ou sujettes à l’autoritarisme, développement un espace politique particulier en dehors des cadres politiques traditionnels (démocratie représentative, activisme, urbanisme participatif, etc.), dans lesquels ils affirment des demandes territoriales.

Cette présentation fait l’hypothèse que la matérialité de la production urbaine, permet tout autant une lecture de cet espace politique, qu’elle autorise son existence. Elle envisage la matérialité de la ville et des dispositifs comme un accès direct au politique pour les populations, urbaines en l’occurence mais pas seulement, et contribue à dessiner un espace de liberté et des contours inédits aux ressorts politiques de l’action collective ou individuelle.

Chevrillon-Guibert Raphaelle / UMR 201 / IMAF

Le gouvernement de l’or au Soudan : remodelage des pratiques et contrôle du secteur

Dans ma communication je me propose de revenir sur certaines des recompositions actuelles du secteur minier aurifère soudanais impulsées par le régime de Khartoum qui souhaite faire de cette économie la remplaçante de celle pétrolière quasiment disparue depuis l’Indépendance du Sud-Soudan. Plus spécifiquement, je souhaite m’intéresser dans mon intervention à l’institution du Ministère des Mines en charge du secteur comme illustration d’un mode d’exercice autoritaire du pouvoir. Il s’agira d’appréhender à travers l’analyse de cette institution la façon dont s’organisent les relations de pouvoir en son sein et celles qu’elles contribuent à façonner par son action. Plus spécialement, c’est l’élaboration différenciée de ces relations qui m’intéressera c’est-à-dire la manière dont elles s’élaborent de façon asymétrique dans le secteur selon les régions d’origine des acteurs concernés mais aussi les territoires où le précieux m inerai est exploité. Je m’intéresserai non seulement au remodelage des pratiques tel qu’entrepris par l’institution à travers l’élaboration d’un nouveau code des mines et des mesures de modernisation du secteur artisanal aurifère, mais également aux jeux de pouvoirs au sein de l’institution entre gouvernants et gouvernés. J’étudierai ces jeux en étudiant une activité particulière de l’institution : l’attribution des licences d’exploration ou d’exploitation.

Ginisty Karine / PRODIG, Université Paris 1

Des enclaves autoritaires à Maputo : aux marges du pouvoir dans l’espace du FRELIMO

Cette contribution se propose d’explorer la dimension spatiale de la notion d’enclave autoritaire proposée par le sociologue chilien Garreton et reprise en France par Olivier Dabène pour décrire des réseaux d’acteurs qui opposent une résistance à un changement de régime qui leur apparaît défavorable. A L’instar de nombreux pays d’Afrique subsaharienne, les liens entre décentralisation et démocratisation demeurent ténus au Mozambique. Malgré l’avènement de nouvelles échelles de pouvoir publiques à partir de 1997, sanctionnées par des processus électoraux, l’analyse des pratiques politiques locales met en lumière la permanence la confusion des fonctions publiques et partidaires, le verrouillage du débat public, ainsi que la permanence du personnel politique local. Ces marqueurs attestent du maintien de pratiques qui visent à assurer un encadrement étroit de la population, et plus précisément la reproduction de processus sociaux visant à incorporer
dans le champ du politique ce qui relève de la quotidienneté. Dans cette communication, je m’intéresserai donc à l’interpénétration des pratiques quotidiennes du politique aux processus de construction de l’espace vécu des citadins pour comprendre la dimension spatiale de l’autoritarisme en ville. Cet angle d’approche me conduira à discuter de l’enclave autoritaire comme le produit de la marginalisation politique des cadres du FRELIMO.

Goodfellow Tom / University of Sheffield

Who captures whom? State, party and the “transport mafia” in Uganda

This paper uses a case study of Uganda’s informal public transport sector to explore questions of state-society relations and the ‘elite capture’ of organisations. Public transport can be an extremely profitable sector and is strategically important in maintaining territorial domination and control over key means of political mobilisation. In exploring the trajectory of the Uganda Taxi Operators and Drivers Association over almost three decades, the paper reveals the complexities of organisational power in a context of partial democratisation, and provides scope for reflecting on some of the limitations of existing theoretical approaches that treat interest group organisations as distinct from the state, or posit collusive relations between firms and government in terms of the ‘capture’ of one organisation or group by another. Instead, the paper argues that the ‘capturing’ of rents and control within the urban public transport sector was much more dynamic. It argues that there was a complex ‘double bind’ between the informal transport organisation and government politicians, which problematises conventional ways of thinking about state-society relations in Africa. It also considers the Ugandan experience in comparative light, showing how different it has been from that of many other African states, revealing limitations in attempts to generalise about African socio-economic phenomena that might look similar on the surface.

Philipps Joschka / Centre for African Studies Basel, University of Basel

The economic politics of the now: riots in Conakry, Kampala, and London

This paper analyses three cases of riots in Africa and Europe that share significant similarities: their intertwining of politics and economics (e.g. in instances of looting), the informal nature of participating groups, as well as the political elites’ reactions to the public disorder. Three theoretical interpretations of these phenomena are to be assessed: first, do riots in London (or Paris or Ferguson) signify that Euro-America is indeed evolving toward Africa in terms of the insecurities and instabilities caused by neoliberalism—as the Comaroffs (2012: 48) assert? Or do riots always unfold in similar situational and macro-sociological patterns (Collins 2008; Tilly 2003)? Alternatively, don’t riots mean entirely different things in their respective geographical-historical contexts, as Africanist political sociology has stressed for a long time (see Chabal and Daloz 2006; on protests and riots see Branch and Mampilly 2015)? Based on fieldwork in Guinea (2009-12), Uganda (2012-14) and referring to empirical research on the 2011 England riots, I assess these different heuristic lenses to carve out their respective merits and shortcomings for cross-continental analysis. The paper thereby reiterates the panel’s interest in clarifying how African and non-African units of analysis relate to one another and what we can learn from African cases about revolts and riots in general.

Van Bekkum Dirck H.J / Moira CTT

First and Second Nations: Reframing State-Society Categories by Analyzing Nasjaro’s Vicissitudes as Member of a Transnational African-Maroon family-community

This paper reframes state-society conceptions from an anthropological-systemic angle. It is also dedicated to Nasjaro who was one of 500 young men in a research sample of my clinical fieldwork in the Dutch nation-state. Being raised in an Afro-Surinam-Maroon extended ‘indigenous peoples ’ family, who migrated to the Netherlands when he was three, his skin-color wasn’t the only ‘out of place’ feature in Dutch national contexts. From 13 to 21 Nasjaro was incarcerated in juvenile state-institutions and became an exemplary case in my anthropological-systemic analysis in how individual (male) agency and dominant-dependent positions of aboriginal Dutch (regional) and migrant minorities could be compared in multicultural nation-state contexts (Van Bekkum 1994; 1995; 2010). Introducing First Nations (indigenous peoples) and Second Nations (nation-states) concepts, dramatic ‘coming of age vicissitudes’ of Nasjaro could be researched, analyzed and described in a more parsimonious and reflexive manner (Van Bekkum 2014). This twin concept was constructed by combining conceptions of Michel Foucault’s ‘nation-state’s disciplining power’ (1979; 1982), of James Scott’s ‘art of not being governed’ (2009) and of Krishan Kumar’s ‘nation-states as multicultural experiments’ (2010). Reframing of state-society relations offers an makes Nasjaro’s confrontations intelligible by mapping the incompatibilities of both human ‘cybernetic’ systems (Bateson 1972; Juarrero 1999; Deacon 2011; Weber 2013).

Lar Jimam T. / University of Bayreuth

The State, Society and “Global” Conceptions of Vigilantism: Insights from Central Nigeria

Amongst Africanist scholars, the conceptual notion of ‘vigilantism’ has been widely invoked to refer to actions taken to control behaviour deemed to be ‘deviant’, outside the purview of the official justice system (Abrahams 1987, 1998). More recently, our understanding of this phenomenon as it manifest in varied African contexts has been further broadened with the very important argument that vigilante groups can change their rationale from filling a gap and responding to a quest for order by the society to acting as agents of state power and legitimating the authority of the state (Kirsch and Gratz 2010). While vigilantism has had a contemporary manifestation in countries of the northern hemisphere, the aforementioned conceptual analyses are not readily offered as explanations. In this paper, relying on methodological and contextual insights from my study of vigilante groups in central Nigeria, I make a case for understanding global vigilantism as processes of statecraft beyond a state-centric notion. I argue that while each cross-continental and country context may present unique dynamics, the notion of vigilantism as a manifestation of state-craft from below is a phenomenon that can be generalised beyond African cases. I seek to go beyond an understanding of my ethnographic context; the ambition is to draw comparative value in the focus of questions and conclusions we draw in our understanding of social phenomenon.

Tjirera Ellison / University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

In Search of Social Meaning: Exploring “Herero Mall” (Windhoek/Namibia) as a Post-Apartheid Space

The post-apartheid city represents an important reflector of rapid urbanisation and ongoing migration processes of southern African societies in transition. Urban space as a mixture of complex interrelations and social interactions provides a prism through which post-independence arrangements of social cohesion, race relations, and ethnic and class conflicts are illuminated. These new arrangements reflect continual negotiation of social spaces by the urban dwellers. Despite the evidence, there is a dearth of studies focusing on locating the meaning of social spaces in post-apartheid urban Namibia. Employing ethnography as a methodological choice, participant observation combined with in-depth interviews, I seek to locate the social meaning of the so-called “Herero Mall” in the heart of Katutura, the black township of Windhoek, the capital city of Namibia. The name ‘Herero Mall’ points to the ethnic origin of this social space developing over the past decade. Providing an important means of economic survival, ‘Herero Mall’ is a solace to the urban poor. Most traders if not all are unable to join formal employment because of their low level of education. ‘Herero Mall’ exists against the backdrop of high unemployment in the city where enormous wealth rubs shoulders with abject poverty. Subjected to history and with reference to power symbols within its milieu, ‘Herero Mall’ attracts symbolic capital in the Bourdieuvian sense.

Marks Monique / Durban University of Technology, South Africa

The possibilities of co-production in a local development context: The case of Kenneth Gardens housing estate in Durban, South Africa

In 2010 the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Durban University of Technology initiated a community engagement project in Durban’s largest low income housing estate, Kenneth Gardens. The project is run in partnership with Kenneth Gardens residents, mostly represented at that time by the Residents’ Committee and 2 NPOs in the estate run by residents. The municipal Housing Department was consulted and in the early phases gave their verbal and written support. In many ways this project reflects the ideas of co-production of knowledge and services between the state, civil society and urban citizens. What has transpired since then is that local government has proven more of an obstacle than a facilitator. In particular, the municipality’s unwillingness to act decisively in regard to the obstructive actions of a local political councillor has had detrimental consequences. Importantly this has not derailed the project and residents continue to partner with both staff and students to deliver value services and developmental outcomes. This does however raise questions for thinking about co-production where it is hoped that citizen involvement leads to improved livelihoods and delivery. In this paper we unpack the problematic role that local politics and government can play in development processes. Included in this analysis is a critical discussion of what it means to do engagement work without the support of state officials within the South African context.

Bloemertz Lena / University of Basel, Switzerland

Werner Wolfgang / Polytechnic of Namibia

Urbanization of the peripheries and the development of the land market in communal areas. Transformations in North Central Namibia

The towns in North Central Namibia registered an impressive growth in terms of population and housing, but also in terms of trade activities and traffic in the last 20 years. Villages like Eenhana, Uutapi or Oshikuku became urban centers with all urban facilities. Urban development took place along the main roads and new settlements were established where there were none before. This rapid transformation goes hand in hand with profound changes in the local economy, the political relationships and the social hierarchy. This paper presents exploratory findings of a study conducted in June 2014 with students of the Universities of Basel, Fribourg and the Polytechnic of Namibia. It will focus on the issues of the creeping land market and its meaning in terms of social exclusion and differentiation, shifts of power relationships and the changing role of the peripheries in the urban-rural relationships.

Peyroux Elisabeth / Prodig, CNRS, France

Social contestation, urban violence and “civic” conflicts in South African cities

Urban conflicts and struggles and social mobilization processes have been firmly entrenched in the critical urban studies agenda. The exploration of violent “civic conflicts” appears particularly relevant and crucial in South Africa as the post-apartheid period is witnessing unprecedented levels of violence of social protests in urban, peri-urban and semi-rural localities of several provinces in relation to basic service delivery, housing evictions and perceived government dysfunction. Based on a preliminary assessment of the literature as part of a newly-developed collaborative research project in Cape Town the presentation suggests that issues of urban violence and social conflicts need to be understand in a broader, interdisciplinary perspective, in particular by drawing insights from sociology, political science and Peace & Conflict Studies. The hypothesis is that this interdisciplinary perspective introduces a new way of thinking the relationships between violence and conflicts and on how they are mediated by political and social processes in South African cities. In this perspective violence and social conflicts are understood as ways of negotiating, lobbying, making claims and demands more visible in a post-conflict context. It interrogates how this new perspective might challenge not only current policy and programmes in the field of violence prevention but also urban politics in general.

Weidmann Laura / University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Negotiating boundaries. Authority struggles between state territory and customary spaces

The Namibian national territory comprises two different, spatially divided land governance systems, each building on contrasting political paradigms: customary administered and state governed areas. The formalisation of customary land rights by the state is an enactment both of decentralization policy and postcolonial claims. However, while this formalisation process aims to provide legal and administrative means to preserve the dual legal system, it simultaneously exposes the paradigmatic and spatial boundaries between the two. The process triggers conflicts because of the spatial and legal overlaps of land governance systems, as each position argues with reference to a certain interpretation of the spatial past (Lund 2013).
In border areas between newly declared, commodified town lands and their surrounding communal areas, the confrontation between the different legal-spatial authorities takes a peculiarly salient nature. Traditional authorities are confronted not only with the spatial intrusion of new authorities, but the very foundation of their legitimacy is threatened by the presence of the new state’s political paradigm. Aiming for continued legitimization, the traditional authorities must position themselves – in discourse and action – vis-à-vis the state’s institutional and spatial intrusions into communal land. Thus, Namibia’s present land governance serves to explore how spatial and paradigmatic borders are interlinked and enacted in the quest for political power.

Debos Marielle / Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense

Behind stability: Governing the inter‐war in Chad

In this paper, I aim to analyze what happens in the times and spaces in which war seems to be suspended. I focus on the case of Chad, a country which has become a key ally of France and the western powers within the framework of the “war on terror” and which is now viewed as an “island of stability” despite its long history of armed rebellions.
I argue that we need to study what is happening in times and spaces that are no longer at war, but in which violence has become a matter of routine and war has granted death a central place. In this respect, the notion of inter‐war is a key to grasping the crucial processes that straddle the boundaries of war and peace. More specifically, I want to show that the violence of the inter‐war cannot be reduced to the pursuit of the imaginaires of war, or of a habitus of war, that obstinately continue to hold sway. This violence, rather, is the product of a specific mode of government and a specific economy. Clientelism, state illegal practices and predation (as a result of impunity granted to local state officials) are a form of continuation of the war. Beyond the case of Chad, the article interrogates insidious forms of violence hidden by apparent stability.

Kouamé Yao Séverin / Université Alassane Ouattara de Bouaké

Rhétorique victimaire et fabrique de légitimité autour de l’accès au service public de l’eau en contexte de rébellion armée en Côte d’ivoire

A partir de septembre 2002, les insurgés en rébellion contre le pouvoir de Laurent Gbagbo ont configuré dans le septentrion ivoirien un espace fortement défavorisé en termes de délivrance de service public car déserté par la quasi totalité des services publics. Les ouvrages de production/distribution livrés au pillage et à l’abandon, de nombreuses villes seront soumises au rationnement de leur consommation d’eau ou même à une interruption pure et simple de la fourniture sur des périodes plus ou moins longues. Pour la rébellion armée et une large frange de la population, cette situation sera interprétée comme relevant de l’acte de guerre. Ainsi, toute une rhétorique victimaire sera développée et diffusée par le canal de mouvements protestataires civils encadrés ou par les média pour présenter le pouvoir d’Abidjan sous des traits génocidaires. L’objet de la présente contribution est d’une part de montrer l’ingénierie mobilisée pour composer, communiquer et structurer l’appropriation de cette rhétorique victimaire. D’autre part, elle montre comment le service public et son délitement en situation de conflit peuvent aider à fabriquer la légitimité d’une des parties belligérantes, notamment ceux qui n’a pas la responsabilité directe et le contrôle de l’appareil d’État.

Belaid Mehdi / Université Paris 1

War and Postcolonial State Reproduction : The maï‐maï Combatants in the DRC and the State Reinforcement Process

« La guerre fait l’Etat et l’Etat fait la guerre ». Bien que le principe établi par Charles Tilly puisse s’appliquer au cas de la RD Congo, les dynamiques à l’oeuvre dans le processus de renforcement de cet Etat à travers la guerre semblent quelque peu différentes de celles qu’il a mises en évidence en ce qui concerne la construction de l’Etat en Europe occidentale. Si les guerres successives ont incontestablement raffermi le sentiment nationaliste des Congolais, le renforcement de l’autorité de l’Etat au Congo ne procède pas de la capacité de ce dernier à lever et à légitimer l’impôt. De même, l’argument relatif à la restauration effective des modes informels d’exercice du pouvoir déjà en vigueur sous Mobutu, ne suffit pas à rendre compte du processus de renforcement de l’autorité étatique. La tendance à l’affermissement de l’autorité de l’Etat à la faveur de la guerre est notamment liée au fait que la guerre a généré une forme de dépendance des membres de groupes armés vis‐à‐vis de l’Etat. A partir du cas des combattants maï‐maï de l’est de la RDC, cette contribution entend montrer, que de par les conduites sociales des combattants, leurs conceptions de l’autorité et de la légitimité, les référents culturels et idéologiques qu’ils mobilisent pour légitimer leur lutte, ainsi que la manière dont ils se positionnent vis‐à‐vis de l’Etat, l’action des groupes armés participe du mouvement de réaffirmation de la souveraineté, de l’autorité et de la légitimité de l’Etat.

De Vries Lotje / GIGA Institute of African Affairs

A peaceful rear base for war and state making in Sudan and South Sudan: The case of Raja County

Raja County, in the far northwest of South Sudan, hosts a range of international military actors, operating in a variety of conflicts. This borderland with Sudan especially hosts Darfuri rebels, in addition to US Special Forces looking for Joseph Kony and a Kenyan battalion of UNMISS peacekeepers. As a consequence, this peaceful area suffers the indirect consequences of conflict hotspots elsewhere. Based on fieldwork under the ‘SFB700 program on Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood’, this paper proposes to explore the impact of these external interests in this margin. The government of South Sudan mobilizes the Darfuri rebels in their fight against the forces under command of the former vice‐president. In return, the ToraBora—which is how the Darfuri are called —receive support from the SPLA, and are allowed to use Raja County as a rear base for their fight against the Sudanese government.
This paper focuses on the modalities of social life in Raja town in the context of their presence. It argues, first, that the regional dynamics greatly condition the way people perceive local and national government. And second, that paradoxically, the peripheral character of the area allows it to take center stage in regional dynamics. The town facilitates war and state making in the two countries. Yet, locally, peace and stability is maintained through a rather strong and legitimate, however peripheral, local government and an imposed omertà surrounding the ToraBora’s presence.

Jansen Bram / Sociology of Development and Change group, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

The humanitarian protectorate of South Sudan: considering the role of international aid in the transition from war to peace and back to war again

In December 2013 South Sudan relapsed into civil war, after a peace agreement in 2005 and independence 2011 has allowed for a period of fragile peace. The government and the ‘aid community’ had sought to capitalize on the peace dividend that had emerged after decades of war, which roughly followed a pattern consolidated during the war years in which public service delivery was relegated to aid actors, depoliticized as humanitarian aid and post‐conflict reconstruction. After the escalation at the end of 2013, commentators argued that the aid community had allowed this escalation, hereby imagining a substantial role for aid actors in the protection of peace and the functioning of the state. This follows the idea that war, peace and intervention produced a state in which the aid community was accorded, and accorded itself, a place and influence in the governance of the new country. However, in the context of South Sudan, it is problematic to discern the aid community and the state. Rather, they are part of an institutional multiplicity in which both are fragmented, complex, interlinked and multi‐layered organisations. In this paper I question and analyse the role of aid and the aid community in the production and negotiation of the state in South Sudan during the transition from war to peace and back to war again. The paper is based on a total of 8 months of ethnographic field work during several fieldtrips to South Sudan between February 2011 and December 2013.

Bach Jean-Nicolas / LAM – Sciences Po Bordeaux

Historicizing political cleavages in contemporary Ethiopia: A view from opposition parties

After having ousted the military Derg regime in 1991, the EPRDF implemented a multiparty democracy (1995 Constitution). They thus adopted the international liberal norms by organizing elections and political representation. In this ethnofederal regime, representation is twofold: a upper House represents the “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples” of Ethiopia, and the lower House, in a more classical way, represents political parties, be they “ethnic-based” or “multinational”.
Another determining alignment is ideological. It opposes the “democratic revolutionary” regime (whose elites were sometimes part of the leftist Ethiopians Student Movement in the 1960s-1970s) to a large part of opposition parties defining themselves as “liberal” (AEUP, Blue Party, UDJ). A third group has emerged, defining itself “social-democrat”.
These parties have been echoing very dissimilar historiographical discourses about what Ethiopia history “is”: rewriting Ethiopian History (EPRDF), versus nostalgia of Imperial Ethiopia (AEUP, Blue Party). Beyond these opposing views, these parties have abandoned any leftist jargon. The ruling party itself has recently adopted a “Democratic Developmental State” programme, while many former leftist opponents declare: “It is 21st century, we have to be liberal”.
The paper aims at analyzing these categories, why and how they are used by opposition parties. Based one five month fieldwork (2014-2015), the paper thus contextualizes this “end of leftist parties”.

Josse-Durand Chloé / LAM, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux

Ending Marginalization thanks to Teleologies and Narratives of grievances : the controversial use of Koitalel Samoei’s legacy in Kenya

Since the return of pluralism in Kenya, a group called Koitalel Samoei Foundation has been actively mobilizing Koitalel Samoei’s legacy, a Nandi paramount chief who fought against the colonial invasion of the Nandi escarpment from 1896 to 1905, as the pillar of the future development of the Nandi community. A Memorandum was sent to State House in 2002, listing material compensations from the Kenyan government and financial compensations from the British government for the killing of their leader and the imprisonment of his people. During the electoral campaigns of 2007 and 2013, Koitalel Samoei’s legacy became an essential asset for those who sought a political seat locally and for national politicians. Nevertheless, Gabrielle Lynch, in her book “I Say to you. Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya ”, explains that “narratives of communal grievances” are strong among the Nandi and could be related to the rapid turn-over of their Members of Parliament during the President Moi era (1973-2002). The reactivation of figures from the past is a contemporary product of these longlasting claims for ending political marginalization and for readdressing historical injustices stemming from colonial times. This paper will focus on the narratives of the past and the teleological discourses that led to the iconization of Koitalel Samoei, while analyzing the agenda of the actors involved in the current political and economic claims made in the name of the Nandi community.

Martins Vasco / CEI, ISCTE-IUL (Lisbon)

The legacy of social norms in popular and political opposition in Huambo

This presentation attempts to enunciate and explore historical identities gathered and learned in UNITA ‘liberated areas’ during the Angolan civil war by revealing the anxieties of people who lived, worked and studied there and have now been experiencing different realities. Their experiences under UNITA’s administration shaped an identity, which translated into social norms and behaviours alongside elements of ethnic custom, which stands out and is different from people who remained under government administration. Some of these people associate societal changes to the loss of important values, which were present and nurtured in UNITA areas. From criminal activities, unrestrained consumption of alcohol, prostitution, lack of respect for the elderly, for traditional authorities and tradition in general, to problems with education, clothing and language use, all of these elements are manifested in different fashion by these two very broad segments of the Angolan population in th e areas around the city of Huambo, although among this subjectivity a pattern exists. For its part, UNITA in Huambo also adopts some of these issues in order to create opposition to the government. These themes are present at least in regional politics and represent an historical legacy of articulating language that not only promotes these values but also demands the government to pay attention to particular topics. This is one of the realms where one can find gaps in social norms in Angola.

Mihatsch Mortiz / Future University of Egypt

Constructed histories, reconstructing politics: Political parties and their narratives in the Egyptian parliamentary elections under Sissi

Considering the increasingly constrained political space, parties will have only limited possibilities for manoeuvring at the up-coming Egyptian parliamentary elections, scheduled for spring 2015, to distinguish themselves from their competitors. As the Egyptian activist-blogger Mahmoud Salem also known as Sandmonkey commented laconically: “Our next parliamentary elections will have political factions competing on who supports our President more.” Nevertheless political differences which are currently obfuscated by the securitisation of the political discourse continue to exist under the surface and will influence future political developments. The paper looks at the ways parties are naming, referencing, contextualising and connecting different events and figures to construct their own versions of history. Was January 25 a “revolution” or a “conspiracy”? Are June 30 and January 25 one or two revolutions? Do parties reference June 30, the day of the mass uprising, or July 3rd, the day when Sissi stepped in? How do parties speak about the Egyptian presidents; Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak, Morsi and Sissi? If the presidents, or their names are used as signifiers for certain politics which should be emulated or avoided, what politics are those? Finally, how are all these aspects combined into more or less coherent histories? The paper attempts to resurface and illuminate the broader political differences through the lens of these constructed histories.

Pearce Justin / University of Cambridge

Mozambique: Past and present claims, civil and uncivil politics

Twenty years after the Rome peace accords, electoral politics in Mozambique remains dominated by Frelimo and Renamo, the two belligerents during the war. At various times in those two decades, Renamo’s share of the vote has increased and then dropped back, while other contenders, notably the MDM, have made some gains in national politics with a discourse that emphasises contemporary needs over the antagonisms of the past. The most recent election served to reinstate Renamo as the country’s main opposition party after years of dwindling support, a result that can only be understood in the context of Renamo’s unexpected return to localised violence in the two years preceding the election. This paper examines the persistence and the instrumentalisation of wartime antagonisms in Mozambican politics, both in the articulation of political claims and in the possibilities of organisation, and how these relate to more immediate demands of the electorate against a backdrop of change in Mozambican political economy.

Southall Roger / University of the Witwatersrand

Class, Social Mobility and Education in the ANC’s South Africa

Education is intimately related to social class. In Weberian terms, ‘life chances’ are heavily dependent upon the quality and level of education that individuals receive, and the qualifications that they obtain. Elites use wealth and influence to gain access for their children to privileged schools and high ranking universities, not only because of the status these confer, but because they generally offer a ‘better’ education than is available in less well-endowed segments of the educational system. In this paper, the author will explore how the transformations in the educational system initiated by the African National Congress have facilitated the expansion and upward social mobility of the black middle class. It will argue that although the formerly ‘white’ educational (both public and private) has now been opened up to blacks, enabling rapid upward mobility (particularly in urban areas), there are strong continuities in the manner in which advantaged schools provide the foundations for class privilege in South African society.

Melber Henning / Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

Kromrey Daniela / University of Konstanz

Namibia: The Changing of the Guard

This paper traces the personal continuities and modifications within the ranks of the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO of Namibia) under its hegemonic political rule since Independence in 1990 by exploring the composition of the Cabinet ever since then. The hypothesis is that the “struggle credentials” have remained an important if not decisive factor for the access to influential political offices in government and shaped to a large extent the formation of the political will inside the party. But the dominant first generation of Swapo Party activists is gradually phased out and replaced for simply biological reasons, despite features of a gerontocracy existing. It is hence of interest to see which qualifications have possibly contributed to the next generation of political leaders emerging. We thereby seek to explore by which means and through which mechanisms individual political careers as well as the overwhelming recognition of the party through the electorate is influenced and characterized. This will be an empirically based case study contributing to an ongoing but so far rather abstract debate on the role and function of liberation movements as governments in the post-settler-colonial Southern African region.

Sumich Jason / Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin

Housing Policy and the Limits of Democratization in Maputo, Mozambique

In this presentation I explore the limits of democratization through an examination of government housing policy in the city centre of Maputo, Mozambique from independence in 1975 to the present. I argue that housing policy has long been a central element in state efforts of urban social engineering and symbolic of such efforts’ many failures. Such policies from the distribution of the flats of the former colonialists in the city centre after independence to the mass give away of the housing stock to encourage the growth of a middle class and a real estate market following the abandonment of socialism in 1989 provide a window to the contradictions of the dominant system of the time. In the following we shall discuss the unspoken assumptions concerning the nature of the population that underlay official policy and the ways in which people accommodated, challenged or circumvented these policies. By doing so, I hope to shed light on the unexpected consequences of housing policy on urban life, from the elitism of socialism to the exclusion of multiparty capitalism in Mozambique and Africa more generally.

Booysen Susan / University of the Witwatersrand

The African National Congress in perpetual liberation mode: Reincarnating, reinventing and replacing liberation

Twenty years into democracy Africa’s oldest liberation party, the African National Congress (ANC), remains firmly in control of South African politics. Despite decline there is no evidence of imminent collapse. Drawing on the author’s recent research, the paper explores the ANC’s repertoire to bolster its post-liberation power. The paper reviews six such lines of mobilisation. First, the ANC continuously reinvents the liberation struggle. All current actions are presented as furthering this long-term ANC quest. Second, the ANC expands its ‘Good story’ of delivery. It fosters indelible ANC liberation project ownership. Third, while the ANC maintains links with existing capital, it builds alliances with emerging business classes. The links become strategic sources of reciprocal party funding. Fourth, the ANC is often the sole disseminator of opportunities, controlling public positions, resources and agendas. This creates a base of post-liberation transactional affiliation with the ANC. Fifth, weak as the ANC may often appear opposition parties remain more vulnerable than the liberation party. Finally, the ANC builds community networks through street committees and establishes direct interfaces with sympathisers, unmediated by public institutions and mass media. Through these six main strategies the ANC leaves little to chance in prolonging its hold on political power, even if it is confined by the constitution and rules of multiparty democracy.

Moore David / University of Johannesburg

Democratic Zig-Zags in Zimbabwe and Beyond: towards the next stage?

Zimbabwe’s entrance onto the multi-party democratic road in 1999 was around a decade after the post-Cold War romance with liberal democracy in Africa began (again). The mid-2013 election marked this road’s dead-end in Zimbabwe. This has occurred simultaneously with disenchantment with liberal democracy across all Africa: twenty-five years of democracy promotion by exporters and advocacy and action by ‘importers’ has met an impasse. This paper will compare and contrast Zimbabwean democrats’ recent history of attempting to create political space with those of other African attempts with the intent of putting forth some propositions for the next ‘stage’ (to borrow, with variations in mind, some of the verbiage of the ‘national democratic revolution’).

Dwyer Maggie / Univeristy of Edinburgh

Mutinies in Burkina Faso: Mirroring and Perpetuating Instability

In Burkina Faso in 2011, mass military mutinies followed widespread civilian protests, indicating a crisis of confidence for President Compaoré. While Compaoré weathered the 2011 storm, the uprising was a precursor to the events that brought an end to his twenty-seven year rule in 2014. A detailed look at the mutinies will show that the junior soldiers’ actions symbolized severe tensions within the military. Although the mutineers never united with the demonstrators, their grievances mirrored those of the civilians. This overlap between civilian and military demands is part of a complex history between the two sectors. The unique civilian-military relationship can be seen in the way popular culture has engaged the issue of mutinies through mediums such as a play, movie, and music video.
This presentation is based on field research in Burkina Faso, which included interviews with military personnel, government officials, journalists, and civil society leaders. It will highlight the internal military dynamics that contributed to the uprisings in 2011. The presentation will also put the revolts into a historic context and show that the actions were part of a series of mutinies, which have been occurring since the late 1990s. The case of mutinies in Burkina Faso is valuable in providing a more nuanced view of the role junior soldiers within wider society in Africa as well as ways that unrest in civilian society affects the military.

Glasman Joel / Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

« N’atteint pas la taille requise » What does it take to be a good cop?

Lunch break in front of the Maison des Anciens Combattants. A couple of NCOs discuss the performance of a colleague, considering his strengths and weaknesses. The sergeant receives praise for his discipline, his experience and his good understanding of security matters. But a particular point attracts severe criticism and risks to counterbalance all aforementioned qualities: did the sergeant reach the minimum height for recruitment? The sergeant had served for two decades in the army in spite of being shorter than the required 1,70m. But even at the moment of his retirement, his size is still a matter of discussion, calling his whole career in question. Soldiers and policemen frequently judge the careers of their comrades-in-arms. In these discussions, they mix official (school level, writing skills, size, physical features, etc.) and informal criteria (ethnicity, attitudes, relations, etc.) to compare professional capabilities. Thus, they are continually enacting the hierarchies of their profession through the prism of individual cases, taking positions towards particular persons as well as towards their institution. Questioning the service of a colleague because he does not meet minimum height makes a statement both about this colleague and about the institution which hired him anyway. This paper, drawing on empirical material from Togo, argues for a historical understanding of professional qualifications in security forces.

Hills Alice / Durham University

Inequality of opportunity: Police-military relations in the 2010s

The relationship between police and military forces in Africa has not received the attention it deserves, and too many analyses are based on inaccurate premises. Specifically, it is frequently claimed that contemporary security developments are blurring the boundaries between the two forces. In fact, the distinction remains strong. Not only are police accorded secondary status, but also most are unable or unwilling to take on the high profile political role pursued by many militaries. Regardless of rhetoric, regime and resources, senior officers rarely build power bases comparable to those of the military, and while police manage elections they rarely play a prominent or overt role in coups or business. In other words, police accommodate political change; they perpetuate rather than create political order, and functional and political boundaries remain in place. The implications of this for a sub-field of police-military relations are assessed.

Kagoro Jude / Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) University of Bremen

Police Practices in Uganda: Between Ordering, Regime Security and Professionalization

Based ethnographic observations coupled with interviews with police officers and a wide range of citizens, the proposed paper will discuss police practices in Uganda. The paper will argue that the police in Uganda seem to function between regime security, ordering and professionalization constellation. In the last decade or so, the force appears to have on one hand developed closer ideological ties with the incumbent regime and also involved in political policing while on the other professionalising and improving its capacity to order society. The incumbent regime, the National Resistance Movement, has deployed military generals to head the police and consequently the force has adopted military models or violence-centric means of problem solving especially in the course of handling political demonstrations. On the other hand however, the same force is professionalising by attracting highly educated personnel, acquiring modernized equipment, attracting substantial state funding and implementing an effective command and control structure. Above all, citizens report cases at police stations in large numbers and seem to have increased confidence in the force. Certainly, the paper will make a scholarly contribution to the on-going debate on policing and police practices in Africa and beyond.

Asamoah Agyekum Humphrey / University of Copenhagen

On sticks and peps: the everyday practices of officer- man relations in the Ghana Armed Forces

The everydayness of being a soldier anywhere is shaped by relations of hierarchy, i.e. rank and seniority. Peps on officers’ shoulders mark their position in the military hierarchy. The background of the peps also indicates unit cohesion and identity. The soldiers’ internalized positioning vis-à-vis the rank and unit displayed in the peps is reflected in the etiquette of paying compliments and responding with the adequate unit salutation. In the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF), the peps symbolize the Presidential commission which the officer has received upon graduating from the Ghana Military Academy. Thus symbolically, disobeying orders by an officer is disobeying the orders of the President himself. While peps are solely indicative, particular ranks and positions come with the privilege of carrying command sticks or canes of various uses. For example, at the weekly Master Parade, the Regimental Sergeant Major will appear with his Pace stick tacked under his left armpit to amplify hi s authority. While it is primarily ceremonial on this occasion, it is also used to demarcate the parade’s parameters prior to the event. This paper zooms in on everyday practices and material objects of the GAF as sources of identity and norm formation. The symbolic expression of authority in these objects and practices and their recognition by the parties involved generate and reproduce on a daily basis the normative ground of officer- men relations.

Bussotti Luca / International Studies Center ISCTE (Lisbon)

The representation of Africa and African migrants in Italian contemporary music

This paper aims at studying how Italian pop music approached Africa and African migrants since the end of the Second World War up date. This representation changed dramatically, especially starting from the Eighties, when African immigration in Italy became a relevant social phenomenon. The question the article wishes to analyze is to understand if and how these new representations and tendencies in Italian popular music have been helped Italian society in accepting and promoting the rights and the identities of this new Italian people. The research has been carried out through an analysis of a great sample of Italian popular songs having as their subject Africa or African migrants. So, it has been emphasized the words instead the music of the selected songs.

Forchu Ijeoma / University of Nigeria

African Hip Hop Music: A Tool for Collective Mobilization

African youth, like their counterparts all over the world expend a lot of time listening to music. This is because there is an increased demand for mood regulation at this age and music which fulfills this function comes in handy as it is readily and easily available. Hip hop music is generally their favourite.
Hip hop music is one of the most globally practiced genres of all time. It developed in the Bronx, New York city, from the hip hop culture of the African and Jamaican Americans. This culture manifested itself through rap music, (a highly rhythmical style of speaking-singing delivery of poetry over a strong rhythmical instrumental accompaniment), break-dancing and graffiti art. It is also associated with characteristic dress codes. This paper proposes that mobilization could be carried out using aspects of hip hop music such as the musical structure, dance, paraphernalia, and the song text. It examines the potentials and the relevance of these musical aspects in mobilization of youths for contestation, revolt and revolution in the contemporary African societies, for critical political, social, economic and environmental issues, for social transformation in sub Saharan African societies. It asserts that the use of hip hop music would be successful only through the promotion of hip hop music with wholesome musical contents, and the social engineering of hip hop musicians to maintain high standard of morality in their music.

Sendra Estrella / SOAS, University of London

Badji Mariama / GERM, Université Gaston Berger

Journal Télévisé Rappé: a local creative response from the youth to the narrative of the media conglomerate rooted in the context of Senegal

In a context where hip-hop artists are still fighting for the professionalisation and maturity of their career, Senegalese rappers Keyti and Xuman found Journal Télévisé Rappé in 2013, a news broadcasting programme where presenters and correspondents rap the news stories. This combination of a history of hip-hop and the opportunities of new technologies constitutes a key example of the vibrant creativity but also of the social commitment of youth in Senegal. The transmedia format, disseminated across multiple platforms (radio, TV and the internet) has not only prompt a space for young audiences to critically think of the news that concern them, but also, it has led to a new “citizen-artist journalism” with in-depth commentaries on political, social and economical issues, that challenges the boundaries between art, activism and journalism. Far from aiming at persuading audiences, Journal Télévisé Rappé has forged a re-appropriation of the information that leads to a socio- political mobilisation of the Senegalese population.

Pardue Derek / Aarhus University

Blackness and Sound Design in the Diaspora

In 2006 DJ Erry-G created the sonic theater piece “From Percussion to the Turntable” (Dos Tambores aos Toca-discos) and since then has developed it into part of his livelihood as a professional member of the dynamic hip hop scene in São Paulo, Brazil. Upon first glance, Tambores is a straightforward performance tracing the history of “black music” through the diaspora popularized by a local entrepreneurial DJ. This is true but misses the theoretical and methodological dimensions of Erry-G’s quest to convey a sense of history and space through sound design.
This talk tells the story of sound production as it relates to individual and collective notions of blackness and professionalism. In particular, I focus on the connections between Erry-G’s changing personal views on race and music and his shifting approaches to the cultural marketplace. The ultimate goal of Erry-G and the other Tambores performers is to make São Paulo more black in the physical occupation of clubs, cultural centers, public transportation spots, state education centers and other performance spaces, as well as virtually more black through web radio and a range of social media platforms. While the marketing of “black” plays a role in a selection of Tambores performances, it is not, in general, a case of sound design for the primary goal of consumerism. Rather, Erry-G attempts to produce blackness as an alternative Afrocentrism based in groove that thrives on unexpected exchanges and encounters.

Stefani Silvia / Università degli Studi di Genova

Hip-hop culture of resistance in popular suburbs of Praia

In the last years, the Cape-Verdean islands have been protagonists of a constant economic growth that has not improved general life conditions, but it has enhanced the socio-economic inequality. These deep contrasts are stronger in urban reality, in particular in the capital city of Praia. The ethnographic research I carried on during 2014 analyses the situation of young people living in popular suburbs, which are the most badly affected by unemployment and lack of opportunities. In response to marginalization, these young people adopt and perform alternative identities and life-styles in contrast with the dominant system, through the appropriation of tools and symbols of the hip-hop transnational culture. This phenomenon concerns both urban gangs called “thug” from the rapper Tupac’s expression, arisen since 2000 in poor suburbs, and movements of social activists currently developing in the same zones. Both types of street organizations use artistic expressions of hip-hop, as rap and graffiti, with functions of resistance and politic claim against hegemonic society. Another aspect of this issue is linked to gender: the almost completely masculine belonging of the members of these groups and the gender performances they act support the consideration of them as “protest masculinities”, that are, according to Connell’s definition, groups that re-vindicate the superiority descending from masculine gender as a reaction against a general context of marginalization.

Brettle Alison / King’s College London

Reintegration and the Role of “Small” Big Men in Rwanda

This paper examines the role Big Men play in the reintegration of ex-combatants in Rwanda. It focuses on the reintegration trajectories of ex-combatants from the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and explores how former mid-level commanders (ex-MiLCs) act as brokers between rank and file ex-combatants and the Rwandan state. Research on ‘bigmanity’ has tended to focus on areas where the state is ‘weak’; little has been written on how the Big Man concept manifests itself in an environment where the state is pervasive and ‘strong’. Based on surveys with over 50 ex-FDLR combatants, this paper attempts to shed light on this under-researched aspect of the Big Man.
It explores how ex-MiLCs negotiate the economic and social landscape of Rwanda by becoming ‘small’ Big Men. Firstly, it argues that ex-MiLCs utilise their conflict-based networks to negotiate new economic positions, particularly with regards to ex-combatant cooperatives where residual patronage structures endure and are employed to economic effect. Secondly, it posits that ex-MiLCs are important social intermediaries during the liminal process of demobilisation, providing ex-combatants with a link between their ‘combatant’ pasts and their ‘civilian’ futures. Finally, it argues that far from being de-stabilisers, ex-MiLCs provide a vital role in the reintegration of their former soldiers, a role that is affirmed by the state.

Pietilä Tuulikki / Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki

Big-manship in South African recording industry

Since the country’s democratic transition in 1994, the South African recording industry has undergone significant changes, among them an expansion in the independent label scene. Many of the independent labels are owned by whites and an increasing number by blacks as well. Even while the structure of the industry is changing, certain historical continuities can be found, in particular in the role of what can be called patrons or big men in certain nodes of the industry. This presentation investigates past and present manifestations and repercussions of big-manship in South African recording industry. Theoretically the presentation draws from and contributes to the literature on both patronage and big men (in Africa and Melanesia). The work is based on interviews and other research material collected by the author among the recording industry participants in South Africa over a number of years.

Nyangulu Deborah / University of Muenster

Mapping a Big-man Aesthetics in Contemporary African Fiction

The figure of the big-man is ubiquitous in contemporary African narrative fiction published from the early post-independence period to the present. This paper combines political theory and methods of literary criticism to highlight the often-complex and varied ways through which literary representations assert and subvert identities of big-men. This paper demonstrates that central to the portrayal of big-men in fiction is the narrative technique of characterization which is deployed to negotiate big-manship. Ultimately, the paper argues that approaching the concept of big-man through the lens of narrative fiction opens up new ways of rethinking big-manship as a social construct which is shaped and reshaped by particular socio-political conditions, class structures, gender formations and power relations that alter with the passage of time.

Hoffmann Leena / Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, CEPS/INSTEAD

Big-Man Politics and Legitimacy Production in Africa

Through an examination of big man politics in Africa, this paper interrogates the frequently imprecise and contentious process of legitimacy production in the political sphere. In her 1998 study of big men in northern Ghana, Carola Lentz, demonstrated how the meaning of political legitimacy varies between social settings, cultures and time periods and is constantly being renegotiated and re-established. She argued that political legitimacy cannot be seen as merely the result of electoral outcomes or as a construct of formal politico-administrative structures. It is rather a complex process that involves a range of relations and resources as well as a multiplicity of actors who intervene by constituting a regulating or facilitating mechanism for political ambitions. Africa’s big men are important actors in this process and have attracted the analytical interest of contemporary African studies because of their central role in shaping political outcomes within otherwise democratic contexts. Utilising Lentz’s argument of convertibility and complementarity, this paper will discuss the different strategies of legitimating political power and influence in Nigeria and how big men adopt and combine a range of social, cultural and historical repertoires to convey specific political meanings and achieve political status.

Hess-Nielsen Ane Cecilie / Independent Researcher

Diversity, Unity and Renaissance: visual politics and the cult of Meles Zenawi

This paper explores personalised rule and elite self-representation in Ethiopia. In the authoritarian developmental state propaganda, political images and visual culture play a significant role in the construction of collective norms and in the production of ‘past, present and future’. My research was conducted in 2012, three months after the death of Ethiopia’s long-time Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. On major billboards throughout the country the late Prime Minister was hailed as Ethiopia’s ‘great and visionary leader’ and as the “Architect of the Renaissance” and during 2012 national days and festivals all commemorated his memory. In efforts of mobilization his leadership and large scale infrastructure projects were linked to narratives about ‘African Renaissance’ and ‘Africa Rising’. But what is the function of a leader cult and how does it work in a state where the production of counter narratives can be considered a criminal act against the ruling elite? My paper contributes to a better understanding of authoritarianism and big man power exploring how a leader cult has a strategic political function and how it works as a mechanism of control. In doing so, the presentation also relates to mobilisation techniques of previous regimes; the socialist Derg and Emperor Haile Selassie. This political analysis is a mix of propaganda, culture and history. It is a visual presentation that will focus on selected political posters, banners and billboards.

Schneider Jürg / Centre for African Studies, University of Basel

Bearing Witness. The contestatory and contested virtues of mission photography

Christian missionary activity was by definition contestatory since it was basically a struggle for superiority and victory over traditional local belief systems. In this struggle mission societies extensively “called upon [photography] to witness” their work and success of conversion in two ways. Firstly, by the fact that every photograph, on a quite general level, bears witness to an event in the past and that to look at a photograph means to witness. Secondly, because photography offered the possibility “to perform radical contestatory work that opened up and claimed a fundamentally new signifying space” (Shawn Michelle Smith, 2004). Could we thus, by referring to the etymology of the Latin verb “contestari – call upon to witness” put forward the argument that mission photographs are by definition contestatory photographs? This is more than just etymological gimmickry. To the contrary, this kind of arguing provides the opportunity to deal with questions what actually contestatory photographs are, what constitutes their contestatory quality and under what circumstances they might lose those qualities.
Such questions will be addressed by looking at two mission photographs from 19th century Nigeria.
Initially, meant by the Church Mission Society “to translate in order to appropriate” (Bal, 2002: 72) the images subsequently, between 1878 and 1910, appeared in various, and other than missionary, contexts and media.

Sohier Estelle / Université de Genève

A Postcolonial Description of Egypt. Fred Boissonnas’ Égypte, a Photographic Monument for an Independent Egyptian Nation (1928-1932)

Si l’histoire des photographes voyageurs européens en Égypte au 19ème siècle et au début du 20ème siècle est bien connue, on ne dispose que de peu d’informations sur l’utilisation de la photographie par les Égyptiens eux-mêmes à la même période. Cette communication a pour but de présenter un pan du patrimoine photographique égyptien exceptionnel, mais méconnu, conservé à la Société de géographie du Caire et à la Bibliothèque de Genève, en s’interrogeant sur le message, le statut et le rôle de ces documents produits dans un contexte postcolonial, à l’issue du protectorat britannique.
En 1929, le roi Fouad commandita à un photographe suisse, Fred Boissonnas, un ouvrage monumental sur l’Egypte. Des milliers de photographies furent alors réalisées au cours d’une vaste campagne dans le pays, et une partie des documents fut publiée en 1932 dans un ouvrage luxueux financé grâce à une souscription lancée auprès des élites égyptiennes.
Ces documents participaient à la production d’une nouvelle vision officielle du pays, en s’inscrivant dans une lutte de représentation pour la définition d’une identité nationale, dans le contexte de l’indépendance politique. Comment cette commande permettait-elle de contester la vision du pays imposée par les Européens depuis la campagne d’Egypte ? Dans quelle mesure la photographie était-elle l’expression d’une réappropriation d’un patrimoine visuel créé par les étrangers, et un outil pour redéfinir un imaginaire géographique exogène ?

Rajaonarison Helihanta / Université d’Antananarivo, Département d’histoire

Avril 1947, des Européens manifestent contre l’administration coloniale à Antananarivo

Les 29 et 30 mars 1947, des révoltes malgaches éclatent dans plusieurs endroits de l’île face à l’injustice coloniale. Les causes immédiates de ces réactions violentes sont principalement les conditions des travailleurs malgaches dans les concessions où ont eu lieu ces jours-là incendies et saccages pour signifier une amertume nourrie par une forte soif d’indépendance et de liberté. Alors victimes de ces actes d’insurrection, les propriétaires, presque exclusivement européens, se tournent vers le pouvoir central qui, censé les protéger, les a « oubliés » dans leurs tourments. Des photographies aujourd’hui conservées à l’Agence nationale Taratra font voir des groupes de Vazaha (Occidentaux) à l’air grave rassemblés devant les grilles de la Résidence générale. Venus de toutes parts de l’île, ils sont là pour interpeler le régime accusé de faiblesse. Ils se mobilisent pour signifier leurs inquiétudes et leurs revendications. Cette manifestation publique, mouvement rare de la part d’Européens de la colonie, est encore peu évoquée. Or capturée par les objectifs des techniciens de l’agence photographique de l’époque, cette scène de contestation de Français (dans la majorité) contre le gouvernement général à Madagascar constitue une série de documents encore peu connus de 1947 à Madagascar. Pour quelles motivations une agence photographique officielle immortalise-t-elle des scènes peu glorifiantes pour le régime ? Quels intérêts pour les historiens de la période ?

Nur Goni Marian / CRAL, EHESS

L’album « Somalis » du prince Bonaparte (1890) : trajectoires d’images

Proche de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris fondée en 1859 par l’anatomiste Paul Broca (1824-1880), le prince Roland Bonaparte (1858-1924) est à l’origine d’une ample production de photographies de « différents groupes ethniques qui se trouvent à la surface du globe » (Les habitants de Suriname, 1884, p. VI) que d’habiles entrepreneurs recrutèrent pour les exhiber en Europe. Parmi les “Buschmen”, “Hottentots”, “Dahoméens”, “Paï Pi Bri” etc. qui passèrent devant son objectif (putatif) à Paris, figure aussi un groupe de Somalis dont témoigne aujourd’hui un album conservé dans les collections de la Société de géographie à la BNF, les négatifs correspondants sur plaque de verre étant conservés au Musée du Quai Branly. Si la production d’images de ces hommes, femmes et enfants répondait aux enjeux spécifiques à leur époque (scientifiques mais aussi liés au nouvel ordre mondial qui se met alors en place entre pays colonisateurs et pays colonisés), il n’en va pas autrement aujourd’hui pour la réception de leurs doubles dématérialisés. Débarrassés de leur carcan idéologique mais insérés dans de nouveaux enjeux et narrations, ils entament aujourd’hui sur la toile une nouvelle vie grâce aux activités connectées d’une génération de Somalis de la diaspora, dont les appropriations viennent en quelque sorte contester le cadre dans lequel elles furent initialement produites. Cette communication tentera ainsi d’en éclaircir les trajectoires historique et contemporaine.

Hickerson Katie Joan / University of Pennsylvania

The Textual Lives of Omdurman’s Dead: Photography, Colonial Conquest, and Imperial Reckoning

On 2 September 1898, British and Egyptian forces defeated the Mahdist army north of Omdurman, putting the last nail in the coffin of the Mahdist State (1885-1898). Over 11,000 Mahdists lost their lives in the five-hour battle on Karari field. Amid dust swirls and as it settled, journalists and military photographers captured images of the dead and dying Mahdists in a panorama of suffering. These photographs laid the foundation for photographic practices that continued in the post-colonial era; images from the civil wars between North and South attest to the enduring legacy of photographs of the dead animating political life. This paper examines the multivalent meanings and textual lives of the Mahdist dead. By textual lives, I mean their generative potential as meaning-makers that allows them to be read as historic sources. I do this in three sections: first, I look at these photographs as depictions of the battlefield and as well as constructions of the conflict’s meaning-through framing, staging, and captions; second, I ask what people made of these images at the time and see how they were used for particular ends during the colonial period; third, I examine the meanings of their digital manifestations and distribution today on Sudanese Facebook pages and British museum websites, where dialogue, discourse, and memory are enacted through online forums, creating and re-creating meaning from the Mahdist dead.

Gueye Abdoulaye / Université d’Ottawa 

“We will be there for you”: The State and Forms of the Collaboration between African Academic Expatriates in North America with their Peers in African Universities

This paper examines the collaboration between Africans teaching in North American universities and academics based in the African continent. For many decades, a Marxist theory dominated this literature. It disparaged the expatriation of highly educated Africans arguing that it dooms Africa’s prospect of development. In the 1990s, a new theory labeled « diaspora option » emerged. Contrary to its Marxist counterpart, this theory posits that the presence of an African diaspora could become a chance for Africa, if this diaspora mobilizes in the interest of the continent. Although fertile, this theory still remains mostly ungrounded and needs to be tested empirically.
This paper intends to do so. It results from a four-year research project carried out in Canada, US, Nigeria, South Africa, Niger and Ghana. I conducted over 150 interviews with African academics in North America as well as with their peers and university administrators in the aforementioned African countries. The paper addresses decisive questions: What ideological factors and professional criteria draw expatriate academics to specific universities or colleagues? To what extent nationality, research interest, existence of local institutional support for research excellence determine expatriated academics’ relations with colleagues and academic institutions in Africa?

Thaver Beverley / University of the Western Cape Education Faculty 

Locating the Academic Profession in the South African Democratic Transformation Narrative

In South Africa, 20 years into a new political order, higher education institutions are under pressure to deepen the conditions necessary for the consolidation of democracy. In light of this there is overall pressure at the systems and institutional levels to effect change in ways that reflect the demographic and knowledge diversity of South African society. The tension tends to be acute at the level of the shape of the academic workforce. In this respect, there is mounting pressure publicly, from academics at certain institutions advancing the case for the “need to appoint black professors” as part of the overall transformation project in the country. This demographic statement along the lines of ‘race’ coupled with several race-related incidents at institutional levels, suggest a deep-seated transformation convulsion. On reflection therefore, how far down the line has changed been effected at the systems’ level by the state and how have institutions responded to the social mandate? Where are academics, as ‘carriers of meaning’ located in this democratic process? This paper reflects firstly, on the quantitative shape of the academic workforce at the systems’ level (in terms of state power) over a period of two decades, identifying any potential shifts. Secondly, the paper will reflect on what these mean for the knowledge project in higher education institutions in South Africa, mindful of its place at the continental (African) and global levels.

Pokam Hilaire de Prince / Université de Dschang

Mobilité transnationale des enseignants-chercheurs camerounais depuis les années 1990: le cas des enseignants-chercheurs de l’Université de Dshang et de Yaoundé II

En 1993, le Cameroun engage la réforme de son système d’enseignement supérieur. Outre la transformation morphologique du système, cette réforme recommande l’ouverture de l’université sur son environnement local, national et international, à travers des partenariats. C’est dans ce cadre que s’inscrit la mobilité des étudiants et des enseignants-chercheurs des différentes universités camerounaises. Ces derniers développent alors et très souvent sans concertation au départ avec les gestionnaires de leurs institutions, en fonction de leurs compétences individuelles et de leurs propres réseaux, un certain nombre de pratiques qui favorisent leur circulation. Notre préoccupation dans le cadre de cette communication, consiste à déterminer à travers une étude comparée de l’Université de Dschang et de Yaoundé II, non seulement les profils et les modalités de circulation des enseignants-chercheurs de ces deux institutions universitaires, mais aussi et surtout leurs destinations ainsi que les enjeux et les effets de leurs réseaux d’action sur les configurations du jeu construites entre enseignants-chercheurs d’une part, le pays d’origine et les pays d’accueil d’autre part.

Kitti Hinnougnon Nathaniel / Université d’Abomey-Calavi

Les Nouvelles Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication et la circulation des enseignants-chercheurs en Afrique

Instituée en Afrique à la création des universités au lendemain des indépendances, la circulation des enseignants-chercheurs par le biais de la coopération universitaire avait pour but de suppléer au manque d’enseignants-chercheurs et à leur formation. Ainsi, les accords de coopération Nord-Sud et Sud-Sud ont permis la mobilité des enseignants pour leur formation. L’apparition et le développement des nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication y ont introduit une nouvelle dynamique. La circulation et la formation des enseignants échappent aux structures formelles étatiques. Initialement conçu pour la formation des enseignants et des étudiants, la coopération universitaire virtuelle devient un canal d’immigration et d’émigration. Comment les NTIC contribuent-t-elles à la circulation des enseignants –chercheurs en Afrique ? Quelles en sont les qualités et l’influence dans les recherches scientifiques ? Quels sont leurs effets dans l’immigration et l’émigration des enseignants?
Cette communication a pour objectif d’analyser l’impact de l’internet dans la circulation des enseignants-chercheurs en Afrique et ses conséquences en termes l’immigration et l’émigration des enseignants.

Ayong Ahmed Khalid / University of Bayreuth

Islamic Erudition in Northern Cameroon Between the Jauleru and the Madrasa

The development of Northern Cameroon as a major center of Islamic religious scholarship can be traced back from the jihad led by the Fulani cleric Uthman Dan Fodio in the 19th century. As the base of the scholarly tradition and the foremost institution of advanced Islamic learning, the jauleru (vestibule) of the modibbo (Muslim scholar) produced an uncountable number of locally well-trained scholars, who faithfully transmitted to many generations a unique methodology of acquiring Islamic knowledge. The standard and exemplary scholar shaped by the jauleru was a faqih (jurist) a lughawi (linguist) a Sufi (mystic) and a zahid (ascetic) mostly associated with the Tijaniyya Sufi order. However, from the 1970s onwards, Middle-Eastern returnee ulama established madrasas as a way of democratizing and popularizing the diffusion of Islamic knowledge in the society. Islamic religious knowledge production therefore witnessed a shift of paradigm from a normative traditionalist approach to a more puritanical, rationalist and pragmatic approach to knowledge resulting for a struggle for scholarly and spiritual authority. Drawing from a socio-historical and ethnographic inquiry, this paper explores challenging general assumptions about modernity and social change.

Laheij Christian / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Speaking the Truth: Shifting Modalities of Islamic Education and Muslim Politics in Northern Mozambique

The past decade has seen a reconfiguration of Islamic education in northern Mozambique. Whereas regional dynamics of Islamic knowledge transmission have historically been characterised by personalised teacher-student bonds, madrasa education is becoming increasingly standardised and professionalised. This professionalisation is funded by Islamic NGOs from the Middle East and by private donors. It comes against the backdrop of a rapidly growing Islamic reform movement which seeks to bring local understandings of Islam in line with globally-oriented Salafi-inspired interpretations. This paper discusses the political implications of these shifts. It argues that the reconfiguration of madrasa education contributes to the emergence of novel forms of mutuality and public engagement which are premised on explicit concerns with the pronunciation of truth. These forms collide with existing modes of relating to authorities, and lead to confrontations between Islamic reformists and authority figures, of both religious and state types. Several of such confrontations are analysed in this paper, including a successful campaign by the northern Muslim community to overturn an initiative by the Mozambican government to ban the wearing of veils to school. The analysis shows that while attitudes fostered by changes in Islamic education produce individual dilemmas and social tensions, they also enable Muslims to influence the political class in ways that have not been seen before in Mozambique.

Sene Mame Fatou / LAM, Sciences Po Bordeaux

Entre enjeux nationaux et réalités locales : le daara Mame Diarra théâtre de la constante négociation entre État et acteurs religieux

L’éducation arabo-islamique a été développée en dehors du circuit étatique, par des acteurs privés religieux, notamment les confréries. Notre contribution portera sur le daara Mame Diarra Bousso de Porokhane afin d’illustrer les dynamiques de négociations permanentes entre un acteur traditionnel de l’éducation arabo-islamique (la confrérie mouride) et l’Etat qui fait preuve d’un intérêt grandissant pour ce secteur depuis les années 2000. Cet internat, réservé aux jeunes filles, se propose de former des musulmanes à l’image de la marraine du daara. L’établissement est né de l’initiative du défunt khalife mais bénéficie du soutien de l’État. Cependant, ce dernier a constamment affaire aux autorités religieuses locales par qui passe toute décision allant de la logistique au contenu des enseignements. L’implication de l’État dans la création de cet institut situé dans la deuxième localité la plus importante du mouridisme, sur le plan symbolique, montre que derrière le discours sur la visée éducative de la modernisation des daaras, se tapit une forte dimension politique et que les politiques éducatives ne sont pas unilatérales. Grâce au daara Mame Diarra, l’Etat peut afficher un taux de scolarisation des jeunes filles dans un foyer religieux de 89,9% tandis que la confrérie mouride bénéficie d’un soutien financier tout en affichant sa capacité d’adaptation aux renouvellements face à l’émergence de nouveaux types d’entrepreneurs religieux.

Sommer von Würden Julie / Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen

Islamic and educational knowledge in Zanzibarian schools

This paper deals with the educational knowledge in schools in Zanzibar, a predominantly Muslim setting. The paper discuss the presence and transformation of religious and cultural forms of knowledge: How Islam and culture become educational forms of knowledge, or “educationalized”, in secular schools and in Islamic schools in Zanzibar Town. The paper focus on the (legitimate) meaning and social classifications in classrooms connected to micro-knowledge politics and micro-identity politics. As in many other parts of Africa, educating and institutionalizing children and young people in Zanzibar has become a state strategy aiming at social welfare. There is however a need for more critical scholarly attention concerning the content of schools. Schooling in Zanzibar must be understood in the light of complex transnational relations, forms of government e.g. Omani Arabic rule, British colonial times, postcolonial socialist/Marxist-inspired governments, more liberally oriented regimes as well as internal disputes related to class, land, race and ethnicity issues. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the (formal and informal) pedagogical practices in schools that affect and in the same time are affected by people’s lives more broadly.

Newman Anneke / University of Sussex

Embracing the Qur’an, contesting reformist ideology: Reactions to girls’ Islamic education in a Senegalese village

In Senegal overall, Islamic education is very diverse. The oldest type is the Qur’anic school embedded within a Sufi understanding of Islam, teaching only boys memorisation of the Qur’an. There are also Qur’anic schools for girls, Arabo-Islamic and Franco-Arab schools using Western pedagogies and teaching secular subjects, and schools reflecting ‘Salafi’ interpretations of Islam critical of Sufism. However, this paper concerns a village in northern Senegal where Sufi clerics have opposed any alternative to the classical male-dominated Qur’anic school, fiercely resisting ‘reformist’ challenges to their pedagogy or interpretation of Islam. This paper therefore documents community reactions to a surprising development: the creation in 2009 of the first Qur’anic school for girls in the village by a female graduate of an Arabo-Islamic school in Dakar, of Salafi orientation. First, I analyse clerics’ responses, arguing that their permissiveness reflects growing support for women’s Islamic education, while judging that the school does not threaten their reputation. Second, I look at other women’s reactions. They engage by sending their daughters to memorise the Qur’an, but meanwhile contest the teacher’s anti-Sufi ideologies through socialisation. This provides a novel gendered angle on Islamic education dynamics by illuminating the struggles between women – rather than men – of different Islamic affiliations, and complexity of female Muslim subjectivity in contemporary Senegal.

Provini Olivier / LAM/Université de Pau et des pays de l’Amour

Analysing transnational policymaking through the theoretical lens of state building in Tanzania. A comparative study of higher education and land policies

Since the 1970s Tanzania has attracted particular attention from the international donor community. In fact, Tanzania has been the biggest recipient of development assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa (Edwards, 2014 : 52-53). Numerous authors and development experts have dealt with this empirical evidence and have shaped Tanzania as a donor darling (Coulson, 1982 ; Bigsten&Anders, 2001 ; Harrison et al., 2009 ; Hodler&Dreher, 2013 ; Edwards, 2014 ; Lofchie, 2014). However, these research studies lack an analysis of the impact of this specific political economy on the policy-process. Making a comparative analysis of two policy fields (higher education and land policies), the aim of this paper is to grasp the effects of the transnational networks of actors (international organisations, Nordic donors, American foundations, private investors) on policy-making. Our assumption is that the synergy between political economy and the policy-making process can only be analysed through the theoretical lens of state building. Authors argue that the state actors are generally bypassed in the making of higher education (privatization of public universities) and land (land grabbing) policies. However, our empirical results show that policies are negotiated by a variety of public and non-public stakeholders and shaped through its historical path. In a context of transnational policy-making, we thus observe a two-way relationship between politics and policies that will be discussed in our paper.

Bergamaschi Isaline / Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Columbia

Mali’s transnational government since 2012: Transformations and Agency

What does it mean, for an aid-dependent country, to receive and host a United Nations´ peace-keeping mission? This presentation analyses the transformations of international intervention in Mali since the crisis that burst in March 2012 and its effects on national agency, State policy and sovereignty.
The crisis has generated interesting debates about international intervention and the State and a crisis of the aid regime within the Bamako-based donor community in 2012 and 2013. This has created a competition, culture shock and division of labour between different categories of international actors – mostly development workers and humanitarian staff. I argue that there is no “merging” between logics, actors and practices of security and development (as argued by Mark Duffield, 2001).
In this new context, the Malian government’s sovereign room to manoeuvre is tight but real. The stakes and modalities of the government’s agency in dealing with external actors and protecting sovereign interests are changing. The UN intervention has generated new claims of sovereignty amongst public officials while the State apparatus was also going through a “learning curve” in their relationships with the UN. The government’s agency will be analysed from three different case-studies: the use of the “terrorism” label, references to the colonial past to justify – and later criticize – the French military operation, and finally the resistance to OECD attempts to classify Mali as a “fragile state”.

Alpes Jill / VU Amsterdam

Transnational migration control and sending states: the unifying force of ‘fraud’ at the airport of Douala, Cameroon

This paper approaches transnational policy making by proposing a case study of dynamics in the sector of migration control. The European Union has over the last ten year increased efforts to externalize migration control. With its carrier sanctions, for example, the European Union has begun to bypass the work of police officers in sending states. Development funds for police trainings and civil registry reforms, too, have transformed the agenda of the Cameroonian state and its agents. Yet, transnational policy making transforms governance structures and stateness globally. This paper analyses the emerging interactions and negotiations between private and public actors, both French and Cameroonian, engaged in border controls. The article is based on three months of ethnographic observations at the international airport of Douala, Cameroon, and respectively discusses interactions at the control posts of the private security company SICASS, at the Cameroonian police post and during
the patrols of the French liaison officer. The paper argues that fraud has been constructed as a unifying force amongst private, public, domestic and international actors engaged in migration control. By putting the burden for illegality on travelers, fraud glosses over conflicts of interest between different actors. By multiplying actors at the airport, transnational migration control has created semi-autonomous spaces in which Weberian principles of sovereignty no longer operate as expected.

Di Matteo Francesca / Centre Norbert Elias, EHESS, Marseille

The impact of transnational networks on agenda setting and policy formulation of the National Land Policy in Kenya

The 2009 Kenya National Land Policy (NLP) along with the 2010 Constitution have been reached through a crisis recovery process. The 2007 Presidential election engulfed the country in civil conflict; donors took this political crisis quite seriously exerting pressure on Kenyan political leaders in order to get them committed to the process of governance restructuring. Furthermore, the NLP reflects the international paradigm providing for securing land rights through the formalization of customary tenures. In fact, one of its original aspects is the acknowledgement of legal pluralism by devolving powers to local authorities. This aspect is however controversial because of the strong influence since colonialism of policy narratives promoting land titling. In the light of this institutional legacy, I question how this policy, which differs fundamentally from the previous ones, has been adopted? To which extent has the Kenyan public authority been affected by the confrontational dynamic with international actors? Have national authorities ultimately been bypassed by international actors? Or rather, transnational networks have eventually been exploited by Kenyan authorities to legitimize the state action in a post-crisis context? I propose to analyze the actors’ interactions, strategic alliances and conflicts characterizing these processes of policy-making hence aiming at showing how public action is shaped in Kenya and how through these processes state-formation is preforming.

Bini Elisabetta / University of Trieste

Collective Mobilisations in Africa: Contestation, Resistance, Revolt

As recent events in Libya, Algeria and Nigeria have shown, oil workers play (and have played) a crucial role in shaping international oil politics, by blocking or rederecting the flow of oil, and organizing through trade unions. Yet, scholars have often overlooked their importance, focusing instead on diplomatic relations and high politics, or on the economic strategies carried out by single oil firms. Through an analysis of government sources, corporate and trade union records, newspapers, memoirs, photographs, and interviews, this paper analyzes the ways in which U.S. oil companies transformed Libya’s economy and society between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the rise of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in 1969, as the country became one of the main oil producers in North Africa and the Middle East. It examines the forms of exploitation and resistance that were carried out in American oil fields and the role oil workers had in challenging U.S. labor policies by organizing trade unions, promoting strikes, and sabotaging pipelines. This paper argues that oil workers in Libya challenged the politics of informal empire pursued by U.S. oil companies and shaped the emergence of oil nationalism. They resisted the forms of segregation and discrimination introduced in oil camps and company towns, by demanding the right to redefine labor relations through trade unions, and establishing ties with other trade unions in Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria. In the early 1960s, a concerted effort led by the Libyan government, conservative Libyan trade unions, the U.S. administration and the main American trade union, the AFL-CIO, marginalized them. Nevertheless, during the Six Day War of 1967, oil workers constituted one of the main forces behind Libya’s attempt to promote oil nationalism, by placing an embargo on oil exports. By doing so, they set the stage for the emergence of Qaddafi’s regime in 1969.

Monjour Melina / Paris IV – Sorbonne

Les intérêts pétroliers français en Libye dans les années 1960

La France a toujours entretenu un lien privilégié avec la Libye. Ancienne colonie italienne, elle passe sous contrôle français et anglais en 1943. L’armée française occupe la province désertique du Fezzan, un territoire stratégique par sa proximité avec la Tunisie, l’Algérie et le Tchad, qui fait la jonction entre l’Afrique noire et les rives de la Méditerranée. Cependant, lorsque la Libye accède à son indépendance en 1951, la monarchie Senoussi est plutôt acquise aux intérêts anglo-saxons.
Entre 1954 et 1956 les premières découvertes françaises en Algérie provoquent une «fièvre saharienne ». Les compagnies pétrolières, y compris la Compagnie Française des Pétroles, se ruent alors sur les réserves libyennes. Quelques mois après, la crise de Suez achève de propulser davantage le pétrole libyen, plus proche de l’Europe. La première loi pétrolière de 1955, qui apparaît assez tardivement en Libye au regard de certains pays du Moyen-Orient, est largement favorable aux Majors, en particulier aux compagnies anglo-saxonnes. Néanmoins la CFP figure parmi les premières sociétés qui se voient octroyer des concessions pétrolières en 1955-56, de surcroît dans des zones jugées prometteuses.
La compagnie française se concentre dès 1958 sur sa concession fezzanaise n°49. En 1960, c’est surtout dans le nord-ouest de la Tripolitaine, à proximité de la frontière tunisienne, qu’elle est le plus active. Passés les premiers temps de l’exploration, les résultats se montrent décevants, les gisements sont disséminés sur le territoire et éloignés de la côte. C’est le bassin de Syrte qui va se montrer, contre toute attente, la zone la plus riche.
La CFP, qui avait tout misé sur la Tripolitaine et le Fezzan, s’aperçoit, entre 1960 et 1965 du manque de rentabilité des gisements découverts. Elle espère donc obtenir des nouvelles concessions, lorsque le gouvernement libyen décide de redistribuer son domaine minier en 1966. Cette fois, elle n’obtiendra rien, malgré des offres avantageuses, proposées de façon conjointe avec la société allemande DEA. La CPTL se tourne alors vers Esso. Pour rentabiliser ses gisements de l’ouest libyen, elle offre à la major américaine une part de 50% de ses trois concessions, en échange du financement d’un pipeline. Cette nouvelle tentative de s’inscrire parmi les compagnies productrices en Libye va s’avérer un échec. À la fin de 1970, la CPTL dresse un bilan de son expérience libyenne. Elle a trouvé du pétrole mais il n’est pas commercialisable. L’augmentation des loyers de ses périmètres ainsi que l’instabilité politique pèsent aussi beaucoup dans la balance. À la fin de l’année, elle décide donc de restituer toutes ses concessions. La CFP, surnommée par ses concurrentes « Can’t Find Petroleum » se montre peu chanceuse. Cependant, dès l’arrivée au pouvoir de Kadhafi, un véritable rapprochement va s’opérer entre les deux pays. Après des premières phases d’exploration décevantes, la CFP espère ainsi bénéficier des ressources pétrolières libyennes.

Brault Julien / Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies​ – Geneva

French Oil Policy and the Algerian War

Algerian oil played a key role in the transition of French economic policy from an import-substituting and planned protectionism back to a more liberalized trade and economy. This role was not truly linked to sudden flows of Alfgerian oil, which was actually quite expensive to refine. The point is that, considered as French, Algerian oil institutionally escaped the metropolitan oil import quota system. It thus provided French oil actors with a live and controlable open-economy test without having to take the risk of definitively disintegrating the complex institutions of protectionism. Indeed, the problem with ending the quota system, and the entire catching-up economy underlying it, wasn’t the stage of French development and industrialization, which had pretty much caught up at the time, but the quickly shifting rent inbalances inside the development system, inbalances between pressure groups, companies, and geographical spaces, which risked creating economic and political chaos in case of liberalization.

Cantoni Roberto / LATTS – IFRIS

Musso Marta / University of Cambridge

“Our oil won’t feed our slavery”. Battles around oil and pipelines in wartime Algeria

Between 1954 and 1962, Algeria was the scene of an independence war that mainly opposed the French military to groups of guerrilla fighters. From 1956 on, massive French geological and geophysical campaigns materialised in a series of major oil and gas discoveries in Algeria.
Such discoveries were deemed fundamental for France’s energy autonomy, in that they would allow the country to achieve independence from Anglo-American oil companies. However, these resources had still to be channeled to Europe, and that was all but a trivial procedure in a war-ravaged country attempting to achieve independence.
Thus the Algerian National Liberation Front enacted a strategy focussed on impeding that oil and gas from Algerian fields could reach France. They did this mostly by trying to prevent the construction of pipelines themselves, or attempting to sabotage the pipelines. The French responded either by constituting considerable military protection set-ups around the oilfields, or by considering alternative layouts for their pipelines, so as to minimise the amount of Algerian territory that pipelines would cross.
Although most sabotage attempts eventually failed, these costly military measures proved that the exploitation of the Saharan hydrocarbon resources would not be economically viable without peace. In line with Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, this paper aims to analyse the value of pipelines as active subjects of politics in the case of a contested territory.

Sarah Adjel / Université Paris 1 IMAF / IRMC

L’influence des réseaux diplomatiques Algériens : entre puissance politique et indépendance énergétique (1956-1978)

En se plaçant dans une perspective historique, l’étude de la sécurisation des approvisionnements énergétiques en provenance du Maghreb a pour toile de fond la reconfiguration de la diplomatie classique. La volonté croissante d’autonomie des pays producteurs, le recours aux règles du commerce international, et la nécessite de sécurisation des approvisionnements génèrent l’émergence de méthodes plus élaborées dont fait partie la « diplomatie du pipeline ». Très tôt, avant même son indépendance et pour se démarquer de la tutelle de l’ancienne puissance coloniale, l’Algérie cherche un nouvel environnement diplomatique et économique rompant avec l’exclusivité du partenaire français. Dès 1962, la Sonatrach, entreprise Nationale Algérienne, s’appuyant sur les réseaux issus de l’internationalisation de la Guerre d’Algérie, renforce son partenariat avec les firmes pétro-gazières étrangères, comme en Italie ou encore aux Etats-Unis.
Cette étude s’intéresse aux nouveaux acteurs, étatiques ou non-étatiques, et aux réseaux économiques établis par Algérie post-coloniale en vue d’affirmer son indépendance politique. Aussi, cet ensemble de méthodes para-diplomatiques permet aux pays consommateurs de ne jamais souffrir de pénurie de pétrole, en dehors de périodes très limitées, telles que les périodes de guerre ou de choc pétrolier.

Musch Tilman / Universität Bayreuth

Au sujet du néocolonialisme et des résistances enracinées

Introduction au panel. Réflexions théoriques autour du néocolonialisme et des résistances enracinées.

Bekoin Tanoh Raphael / Université Alassane Ouattara de Bouaké

Survival of african medicinal practices, a form of resistance to the imported modern medicine: the case of Côte d’Ivoire

Resistance to modernity and its values has taken many forms in the development of Africa. Sometimes it could be violent for religious and political reasons. But sometimes, this resistance has taken silent forms. This is the case of African medicinal practices. Being undermined by the so-called western medicine, introduced by European during colonization, african traditional medicine was often undervalued. Holders of this medicine were marginalized and treated as fetish and charlatans. All these qualifications were intended to devalue it to the detriment of another, more reliable, medicine.Yet, in spite of this marginalization of traditional medical practices in the villages and especially in african cities considered the Mecca of modernity with major hospital infrastructures, african medicine is becoming more and more as a credible alternative. This form of resistance is related to the results of traditional medicinal practices well tested before colonization. As Ki-Zerbo points out, african society is in a state of chronic invention, it therefore seeks to assert itself on all levels. To better illustrate this form of African resistance, the study will be based on the specific case of Côte d’ Ivoire.

Banhoro Yacouba / Université de Ouagadougou

Élection présidentielle 2015 au Burkina Faso. De l’impasse à l’insurrection populaire d’octobre 2014

Les 30 et 31 octobre 2014, une manifestation insurrectionnelle mettait fin au régime de Blaise Compaoré au pouvoir depuis 27 ans, face à son désir de ne pas quitter le pouvoir au terme de son mandat en 2015 comme le prévoient les termes de l’article 37 de la constitution.
Ces deux jours qui ébranlèrent le régime sont la continuation d’une résistance sociale qui remonte à l’assassinat de Norbert Zongo. En un rien de temps, la carte des manifestations couvre tout le territoire dévoilant ainsi la démocratie de façade du régime. Ainsi est né le mouvement trop c’est trop qui s’est poursuivi sous d’autres formes pour aboutir aux événements des 30 et 31 Octobre.
Ce qui en cours au Burkina Faso, à travers ces manifestations d’opposition, de résistance et d’insubordination qui se nourrit des mouvements de contestation au niveau mondial, c’est bien la recherche d’une forme d’organisation autonome et efficace. L’analyse d’un tel fait social est d’abord une posture et ensuite l’élaboration d’outils de perception et d’analyse des phénomènes de contestation dans un contexte où des couches longtemps opprimées, marginalisées s’éveillent à l’expression publique.
Comment et pourquoi en est –on arrivé là ? Quels sont les outils et les moyens d’actions de ces nouveaux acteurs? Cette communication se propose d’analyser les processus d’entrée en scène des différentes couches sociales et leurs modalités d’expression jusqu’à la chute du pouvoir de Blaise Compaoré.

Materna Georg / Universität Bayreuth

Tourism Resistance: Senegal’s depreciation of the pleasure periphery

Tourism is promoted as a key industry for development. In Senegal, it was the World Bank that supported the beginning of mass tourism in the 1970s. Today, it figures as the second biggest export sector and employs roughly 100.000 people. Nonetheless, many Senegalese have a negative stance on tourism. Next to critiques of neo-colonialism, there are more locally rooted inconveniences. Marked by Islam, the Senegalese population disregards hotels as places of adultery. Tourist restaurants, where alcohol is being sold, are avoided. The architecture and historical persons of World heritage sites like Gorée or Saint-Louis remain non-incorporated into the local souvenir market. The tourist-vendor interaction is another case in point. Many souvenir vendors use the encounter with potential clients, besides the act of vending (jaay), to introduce themselves and ask for help in problems of quotidian life (ñaan) or praise the other as a good person in order to get financial offerings (woyaan).
Especially young vendors explain that the “rich” tourists need to share their “fortune” with them, “il faut me faire travailler”. The vendors’ demands often become a probe into generosity, compassion and morality in general. For the vendors, I argue, this is a way of coping with the various asymmetries of the tourist encounter. My paper will first sketch the population’s perspective on tourism and then provide ethnographic evidence for “rooted resistance” to the pleasure periphery.

Ihedru Okey / Arizona State University

African Mining Protests: Local Rebellions, Neocolonial Contestations and Prospects for Social Peace

Africa’s mining jurisdictions have seen a wave of protests in the past two decades, from Sierra Leone to Ghana; Tanzania to Mozambique & DR-Congo, and most infamously Marikana & other mobilizations in South Africa. On the surface, these protests may be about local grievances or development issues. Taken together, they represent revolts against neoliberal development agenda & against postcolonial state elite as agents of neocolonialism. This paper explores the complexity of these developments alongside longer-term histories of uprising, stand-taking and engagement on the continent. It analyzes novel strategies and social trajectories of actors involved in these contestations and the responses they elicit from mining companies and the state elite. African mining protests represent emerging trends in which local collective action, subversion and activism, increasingly intersect with global social, generational and gender causes, providing platforms for human rights associations, advocacy groups and other cause-driven organizations seeking to position themselves as watchdogs of state action and global capital without much benefit to local causes. Prospects for “social license” that would enhance sustainable mining and symbiotic relations between local & foreign NGOs are explored. The paper is based on the experiences of Ghana and Sierra Leone (West); Tanzania and DR-Congo (East/Central), and Mozambique and South Africa from 1990-2014.

Diphoorn Tessa / University of Amsterdam

Unraveling the private of the security assemblage in Nairobi

In this paper, we explore how private security companies operate within the larger security assemblage of Nairobi, Kenya. Nairobi is regarded as a hotspot of urban insecurity, where high crime rates and recurrent terrorist attacks largely impact the daily lives of its citizens. As many consider the state police to be inefficient in tackling these security issues, citizens are increasingly entrusting private security companies to provide residential and commercial security. In this paper, we will focus on the security performances enacted by private security companies and present a two-fold analysis. On the one hand, we argue that the growth of private security raises pertinent questions about citizenship and belonging as it consolidates particular social divisions. This process reveals tensions in the relationship between citizens and the nation-state and its apparatuses, such as the state police. Yet on the other hand, we also show that the security performances enacted by private security companies are embedded within the larger security assemblage through recurrent interaction with other policing bodies. Private security companies thus habitually negotiate for legitimation and authority with, through and by the state, thereby resulting in hybrid forms of political sovereignty. We thus argue that the role of private security companies in policing the streets of Nairobi must be analyzed in relation to other actors within a security assemblage framework.

Habyarimana Jean-Bosco / University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Electoral Violence Prevention in Multi-Ethnic Countries: The Role of Middle-range Leaders in the 2013 Elections in Kenya

Electoral violence has become a type of political violence that is gaining momentum in the literature of democratization and state building in Africa, especially in ‘conflict-prone countries’, raising interests on how to prevent it. Indeed, electoral violence is a subset of political violence that poses threat to state security due to its recurrent trend and potential for devastating destruction of efforts for national transformation. This research seeks to relate the 2013 peaceful elections in Kenya to electoral violence prevention in multi-ethnic countries. Specifically, the study intends to determine the role of intermediary level leaders in the avoidance of violence during the 2013 elections, and how this informs the prevention of electoral violence in Kenya. The study is built upon the assumption that mid-level leaders such as civil society organizations, the media, and community/traditional/administrative leaders are among politically relevant groups who have agency in national politics of Kenya. It therefore aims at exploring this agency in the context of the 2013 peaceful elections in Kenya, for the purpose of contributing to the literature on electoral violence prevention.

Tapscott Rebecca / The Fletcher School

The State Has Long Hands: Community Security Groups and Arbitrary Governance in Acholiland

This paper examines community security initiatives (CSIs) as providers of (in)security in Northern Uganda where state control is believed to be weak or absent after a two-decades long conflict. I combine four months of ethnographic research on CSIs with a regressions analysis of a 1,887-household survey in the same region to explore (1) Where do CSIs arise and why? (2) What types of CSIs exist? (e.g. who joins them, what they do, and what symbols they adopt), and (3) What determines these differences? I explore “institutionalized arbitrariness”, comprised of: (1) how the central government can leverage the recent history of conflict to justify defining and intervening against perceived security threats, and (2) how the population’s hope for peace renders such responses legitimate, even when they appear arbitrary and unfair. I examine how the central state shapes the local legal and political environment, while also engaging directly with local security issues.Unlike other types of boundary institutions, the regulation and control of the public use of violence is essential to their purpose. This study puts into relief what is (not) understood as legitimate use of violence and what this says about the nature of the state-society relationship.

Sefa-Nyarko Clement / University of Ghana

Gender and Perceptions of Personal Security in Ghana

Peace and security are sine qua non for development. They are not synonymous with political stability, as personal security is compromised through crime, persecution and public disorder. Perceptions of personal security determine people’s participation in social, economic and political activities. Ghana is a typical politically stable country that has deficits in personal security. In 2013, Ghana ranked 7th in the overall Ibrahim Index of African Governance, scoring 70.8% on Safety and Rule of Law, but 52.5% on personal safety. Personal insecurity occurs when a person’s productive and dignified life patterns are interfered by the fear and occurrence of violence and crime. None of the explanations offered in Ghana has considered gender as important determinant of personal (in)security. Men and women perceive crime, violence and threats differently based on their socialization, and deeper studies into these perceptions is crucial to policy in the face of persistent gender inequality, and in spite of changing global trends. This is the gap this study hopes to fill, and would define personal security as one of the cardinal determinants of Human Security. The source of data for this study is the Ghana Living Standards Survey (2012-2013), which has questionnaire on Governance, Peace and Security. Six questions on perceptions of safety would be scored to create an index for perception of security, and gender would be the main independent variable.

Okafor-Yarwood Ifesinachi / African Leadership Centre, King’s College London

Understanding Maritime Security in the Gulf of Guinea from the Human Security nexus

With the rise in attacks and attempted attacks on marine-based critical infrastructure, maritime security is increasingly becoming a topic of interest in the international community, as well as in the African subcontinent. It follows that the concept has almost always being conceptualized from the traditional security nexus, where security of the territories (in this case, maritime domain) is paramount. This is accentuated by the claim that African government continue to reel in a period of “optional sea blindness” (Vrēy, 2013). Whereby a lot of emphasis is given to inland security, while paying less attention to ensuring that threat to and from the sea is abridged.
Further, despite all attempts, albeit militarized to securitize the sea, respective government in African littoral states (particularly the Gulf of Guinea) have failed to ameliorate the situation. This is especially because maritime threats such as piracy/armed robbery at sea, human/drug trafficking and illegal fishing is prevalent in the region. Given this impasse, this paper proposes to explore the idea of securitizing the maritime domain from another angle, i.e. the human security.
This is pertinent, particularly since threats to the maritime domain are increasingly non traditional, as well as having severe socio-economic and environmental consequences on communities in Africa, as shown with the Somalia example.

Hammett Dan / University of Sheffield

Visual negotiations of constrained soveriegnty and nation-hood

States utilize a range of everyday objects to transmit ideals of nation- and state-hood. Quotidian objects such as currency and postage stamps have provided a visual means through which to portray to domestic and international audiences the values, ideologies, aspirations and ideals of the state. For newly established or newly independent states, the political importance of these practices is heightened as they can provide a material visual embodiment of the state’s founding ideology. However, in situations where (sub)state entities have independence imposed upon them, rather than sought and claimed, the role and content of the expressions of nationhood expressed through these objects can be complicated by experiences of constrained sovereignty. This paper explores how South Africa’s creation of the independent Bantustans resulted in the complex expression of nationalism through postage stamp iconography. The resultant narratives are identified as drawing upon territoriality,
nation-hood, political authority, and international citizenship in efforts to claim sovereignty that served to reinscribe and reinforce factors contributing to the Bantustans’ experiences of constrained sovereignty.

Jude Murison / University of Edinburgh

Ubumwe, Umurimo, Gukunda Igihugu: Images of statehood and the Rwandan nation

This paper examines the narrative of Rwanda represented on its postage stamps since Independence. Through an analysis of the iconography of Rwandan postage stamps, three common themes emerge: cultural and national unity, achieving development and the legacy of the colonial past. This paper examines how these themes are represented visually, and the significance of iconography for portraying images of nation and statehood both internally to replicate the Rwandan motto of Ubumwe, Umurimo, Gukunda Igihugu (Unity, Work, Patriotism) and to the rest of the world.

Keavne Michael / Santa Clara University

Nation-building, multi-culturalism, and civil conflict in Africa: An analysis of imagery on postage stamps

Postage stamps may be valid indicators of the efforts by a regime to develop a shared national identity. The images valorized by stamps are widely disseminated, and may reinforce feelings of inclusion and exclusion. While a number of researchers have investigated the imagery of stamps from particular countries, to date no cross-country, quantitative analysis of the imagery on postage stamps in sub-Saharan Africa seems to have been conducted. Quantitative analysis should enable discernment of alternative patterns and styles of nation-building. Moreover, if the images on stamps are important, the strategies adopted by regimes for representing national identity on stamps should be correlated with other efforts to manipulate collective sentiments of nationalism. Causal analysis- that messages emanating from regimes actually cause people to act differently than they would otherwise- is a possibility opened up by this quantifiable measure of messages. This paper confines analysis to the imagery on regular stamps of independent African nations. There are clear differences between states and within states over time. The patterns are correlated with a variety of outcomes, such as the incidence of conflict.

Ole Frahm / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Seeing is believing!? Making and propagating an idea of the nation in South Sudan

Since the CPA in 2005 South Sudan has pursued parallel processes of building a state structure and a national community. While theories of peacebuilding assume interdependence between statebuilding and nationbuilding in post-conflict settings, South Sudan shows that both can diverge substantially. The construction of modern state institutions has been guided by Western governments and donors; the construction of a national identity to supersede the focus on the enemy other (‘Khartoum’, ‘the Arabs’) however arose from an elite consensus.
The two pillars of official state nationalism are the idea of unity-in-diversity and the commemoration of martyrs from the long ‘war of liberation’. Whereas a stanza in the national anthem is devoted to all martyrs, the main monument in the heart of Juba is a giant statue of the late SPLA leader John Garang. Since commemorations stress the role of SPLA martyrs and ignore rival militias let alone civilians, this form of national identity is more divisive than unifying. Unity-in-diversity has also not won traction as politics of belonging and ethnic exclusivism have been on the rise; exacerbated by ongoing ethnic atrocities. While it may be unrealistic to expect a widely accepted idea of the nation to take root in only a few years official state nationalism has so far not succeeded in winning many adherents.

Adamczyk Christiane / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale (Germany)

Citizenship at the margins of the state: Considering the case of Rwanda

Many depictions of present-day Rwanda emphasize how the current government has dealt with (re-)building the state after the disruption, crises and trauma brought about by civil war and the genocide of 1994. A powerful official discourse on Rwandan citizenship and interventions aiming at the comprehensive implementation of the messages and policies of the government have been central to this process. Based on field research in the region, my contribution will discuss how the workings of the Rwandan state and the discourse on citizenship are experienced by people located at the margins of society. Once referred to as Twa – a label now banned from discourse – they are officially categorized as the ‘historically marginalized’, an expression invented to capture their status of being at the fringes of society. Reports of local and international organizations stress the discrimination against the ‘historically marginalized’, their precarious status and limited access to resources and rights. Perceived as insufficiently integrated into the new, post-genocide Rwanda, they have become subject to various interventions of the state that focused on health care and housing but also served as context for civic education. This presentation seeks to show that examining the interventions targeting people at the margins of the state helps to highlight central aspects of the discourses, ideologies and practices shaping the state-building project in present-day Rwanda.

Mbatia Teresa / University of Nairobi

Calas, Bernard / LAM, Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Owuor Sam / University of Nairobi

Contradictions of Public Participation in the co-management of Karura Urban Forest Reserve: The Eco-gentrification of Urban Green Spaces in Nairobi

This paper discusses the various social-political perspectives that have influenced the production and construction of Karura Urban Forest Reserve in Nairobi, Kenya. Though a new policy has allowed new structures and actors in the co-management, and contributed to rehabilitating the urban forest into a ‘nice’ place, it is only a few privileged groups in society who are benefiting from the Urban Forest Reserve. The surrounding poor urban communities that depend on urban forest for daily necessities are pushed out, in what has been described by Sarah Dooling as ‘eco-gentrification’. Thus, in the process of making Karura Urban forest reserve into a ‘safe, secure, serene’ place, the new civil society actors only reflect the interests, priorities and values of the upper and middle class consumers, and exclude the requirements of the poor urban communities living in the area. This has resulted in the perpetuation of socio-spatial and socio-economic inequality, the exact opposite outcome of what the new policy change intended. Thus, instead of a public space, the new actors and structures have produced what Lefebvre described as ‘appropriated’ and ‘dominated’ spaces

Solhjell Randi / London School of Economics

Roads of Contestation: Governing the urban public spheres in Bukavu, DRC

Public roads in many ways represent a part of state-building, state performance and connectivity to the world. However, roads also represent spaces of contestation. In this paper, I will look at the different actors involved in governing the roads and thus also taxation, manifestation and livelihood seen through the multiple sites of public authority figures in the urban center of Bukavu, eastern DR Congo. Rather than a ‘lack of state’ or ‘a weak state’, the roads in Bukavu represent a strong-hold of the state. At the same time, citizens at different levels navigate their ways in managing both oppressions and opportunities. Based on extensive field research, this paper develops a theoretical approach to study roads in order to understand empirical statehood and governance in contested urban spaces.

Vasconcelos Joana / African Studies, CEI-IUL (ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon) Social and Cultural Anthropology, IARA (KUL, Leuven)

Young citizens, old problems: engaging with the State despite (and because of) its shortcomings

Guinea-Bissau has been marked by a turbulent thread of political and military events, especially since the civil war of 1998-99, responsible for the deterioration of the people’s living conditions and prospects. Nevertheless, Bissau-Guineans are not prone to engage in collective protests, revolts or riots. Is this a sign of State’s irrelevance (Bordonaro, 2009)? The capital, Bissau, is the epicentre of the political and military instability, the main area where the State is considered to be present and also the main pole of attraction for young people looking for jobs, education and emigration opportunities. I argue in this paper that, from the point of view of a social margin – youngsters living in a peripheral neighbourhood of the capital – there are expectations and clear ideas about what should be the role of the State. Out of this awareness, young people resort to different means to contest the current State performance and claim a reinforced State presence as service provider and resource manager (e.g. through public diagnosis and ‘trials’ of its performance, building an infrastructure of soft contestation in the public realm through artistic interventions and radio programmes; or also through the setting up of associations as State interlocutors and claimers of services and infrastructures). Based on fieldwork conducted in a peripheral neighborhood in Bissau for around two years, I also reflect on the ambivalent results of some of these initiatives.

Demarest Leila / University of Leuven (KU Leuven)

“Riot politics” in Senegal: praxis, strategic performance, and opposition dynamics

International media commonly depict riots in (Sub-Saharan) Africa as spontaneous and violent outbursts responding to socio-economic distress (e.g. high food prices) – a narrative often characterized by images of rock-throwing youths and burning tyres. Many researchers as well, especially in quantitative conflict studies, see African riots as primarily caused by economic factors. This paper, however, will emphasize the detailed organization and planning behind so-called spontaneous riots, the social -and often political- networks involved with violent protests, and the underlying political motivations of the main actors involved. Inspired by the works of Paul Brass and others on “riot systems” in India, this paper takes the view that in the case of Africa as well, ideas about random collective violence are severely biased and often mistaken. Based on field interviews with members of political parties, youth movements and civil society organisations in Dakar, Senegal, I demonstrate how ‘spontaneous’ protests and riots during former-president Wade’s second term, and especially in the run-up to the presidential elections of 2012 are intrinsically embedded in opposition politics. Moreover, riot practices are strategically directed towards (international) media and while the image of ‘Senegal on the verge of political instability’ was consciously created at the beginning of 2012, “violent” actions themselves were performed within a restrictive normative framework.

Horakova Hana / Metropolitan University Prague

Xenophobic violence, identity politics and new nationalism in South Africa

In May 2008 xenophobic violence spread all over South Africa which resulted in the death toll of more than 60 Africans, mainly from Somalia, Mozambique or Zimbabwe.
The aim of this paper is to analyse recent outbreaks of violence in the cultural and political context of South African society. I attempt to examine their substance and causes, and their effects on South African society and their capability of nation-building and sustaining democracy. What are the factors that explain the use of violence against African refugees and immigrants in the new South Africa?
Existing accounts of these events emerge in terms of economic crisis, political transition, relative deprivation, or as remnants of apartheid. Yet, these individual explanations cannot offer the entire picture; it is important to understand xenophobic violence as a political discourse. Given the current shift of South African nationalistic discourse from the-all inclusive into the exclusivist form, I argue that xenophobia is a product of a nationalist discourse in postapartheid South Africa based on the politics of belonging and the construction of citizenship. New racially inflected African nationalism, driven by populism and nativism, instrumental in the new political cleavage between South Africans as “deserving citizens” and Makwerekwere as “undeserving outsiders” have far-reaching effects on a fragile postapartheid democracy.
The paper draws on scholarly literature and on my recurring study visits to SA.

Tabernero Carlos / Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Imagining the territory; confronting the reality. The fight for the control of the natural resources as source or consequence of the struggle between Angola and the secessionist movement in Cabinda

The secessionism, as a source of struggle between different imaginaries of the territory and its borders, is a political question that reappears constantly in different parts of the planet. But then and now, while the world looks to Scotland, Catalonia or Quebec, the secessionism in Africa has been mostly forgotten.
However, there are various places in the continent where struggles occur between the post-colonial states and the movements that fight for the independence of a part of the territory. This is the case of Cabinda, the 18th province of Angola, where the struggles between imaginaries, discourses and ways to construct the reality of the territory of the exclave and its borders appears with the independence of Angola in 1975 and continue nowadays. Since then, a fight started up between the government of Angola, the secessionist movements of Cabinda and, lesser extent, the pan-congolese imaginary defenders. But there are material questions in the middle, like the extraction and the distribution of the oil revenues from the Cabinda ocean waters.
This paper will examine, with the example of Cabinda, if the fight for the control of the natural resources is the source of the conflicts between post-colonial states and secessionist movements, leaving the discourses as mere acts of justification. Or, on the other hand, if different imaginaries of the territory and its borders are behind the struggle, and the control of the natural resources is only a mean to win that fight.

Dang Armand / CESSP-CRPS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Luttes sociales et politiques africaines : militantisme et mobilisation « hors-sol » en France.

Une étude du paysage des luttes politiques africaines ne saurait nier la part qui revient aux mobilisations « hors-sol », celles qui émergent en dehors du continent mais y demeurent ancrées. De quoi est donc faite cette « action collective » ? Qui sont ces « entrepreneurs de causes »? Quelles sont les « ressources symboliques » mobilisables et mobilisées? Et comment s’articulent-elles aux revendications sur le continent ? Cette série de questions résume les préoccupations qui sont les nôtres. Nous nous proposons ainsi de rendre compte des dynamiques de formation de groupes qui réunissent des acteurs se réclamant de l’Afrique, en y apportant une analyse des référents symboliques mobilisés dans la production discursive. L’hypothèse principale étant que ces mobilisations agissent comme une “caisse de résonance” des discours protestataires dans des contextes répressifs. La promotion d’une cause comme celle des « biens mal acquis » par les chefs d’Etats africains en France qui se donne à voir depuis le début des années 2000, sert de cadre à l’analyse. Une attention particulière sera portée ici aux acteurs et à leurs stratégies contestataires, notamment dans l’invocation d’un âge d’or africain. L’invocation du néologisme « françafrique », de figures historiques de la résistance, mais aussi les références aux scandales politiques contemporains liés à la prédation des ressources sont autant d’éléments qui participent de la création d’un “cadre d’injustice”.

Ndengue Rose / CESSMA, université Paris 7

Femmes et lutte politique au Cameroun oriental: un imaginaire aux frontières de la domesticité et de l’émancipation (1945-1960).

Les 15 années précédant l’indépendance du Cameroun oriental, voient émerger sur la scène publique des voix féminines portant des revendications socio-économiques et politiques. Jusqu’alors, seuls des acteurs masculins (administration française ou autochtones) s’y exprimaient. Comme dans beaucoup de territoire sous domination coloniale, la fin de la Seconde guerre mondiale marque un regain des idées nationalistes au Cameroun, et partant, une polarisation du débat public autour du conflit opposant le projet colonial le projet nationaliste quant à l’avenir du territoire. C’est dans ce contexte que les premières élites féminines camerounaises vont se mobiliser pour faire entendre leurs voix, en tant que porte-parole des préoccupations féminines. L’ambivalence de leurs revendications articulant un imaginaire domestique et conservateur (mise en avant de la notion du devoir d’épouse et de mère) à une perspective émancipatrice (revendication d’indépendance ou de l’égalité des droits politiques avec les hommes), constitue une stratégie de mobilisation qui permet de rendre compte de leur position sociale ambiguë : à la fois alliées, et adversaires des acteurs masculins (administrateurs et autochtones) de la sphère publique.

Nken Njeng Philippe / IMAF, EHESS

La lutte pour le sens, le sens de la lutte et l’articulation de la résistance en situation coloniale : le cas de Rudolf Douala Manga Bell au Cameroun.

En 1910, l’Allemagne, qui assume le protectorat du Cameroun, décide d’exproprier les Dualas d’une partie de leur territoire. Ce faisant, elle suscite une vive opposition chez ces-derniers, menée par le chef supérieur Douala Manga Bell. Le conflit qui s’amorce se déroule autant sur le plan symbolique que matériel. En effet, il engage des représentations antagonistes de la colonisation, les Allemands mobilisant la figure du nègre intrinsèquement dépourvu de souveraineté, Manga Bell (ré)activant le souvenir du désir de modernisation qui aurait conduit ses ancêtres à conclure un traité de protectorat avec les Allemands. Ensuite, Manga Bell radicalise son opposition en donnant un sens nouveau à la lutte : il élabore un répertoire national inédit, qui englobe toutes les sociétés du Cameroun géographique, que des processus pluriels conduiraient vers la constitution d’une communauté politique plus large et étatisée. Enfin, l’imagination politique déployée par Manga Bell est comme un palimpseste qui révèle, en creux de la contestation officielle, des questions problématiques occultées au moment de la lutte : la collaboration de Manga Bell à l’établissement de la colonisation allemande et l’ascension connue par son lignage à la faveur de celle-ci ; l’affirmation d’une hégémonie douala sur les autres populations africaines ; le déficit de cohésion chronique dont pâtit la société douala, au moment même où le mythe unitaire prend sa substance.

Mintoogue Yves / CESSP-CRPS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

L’imagination de la nation et ses grammaires symboliques dans le discours nationaliste au Cameroun.

Les discours des mouvements africains de libération nationale, on l’a souvent dit, s’étaient largement inspirés des idées européennes des Lumières. Ce qu’on sait moins, c’est que la cause de l’indépendance ainsi que le contenu de la modernité politique dont ces mouvements nationalistes se voulaient porteurs agrégeaient souvent différentes valeurs/utopie issues de mémoires historiques et de pratiques culturelles concurrentes, entre ressources de la «modernité coloniale» et de l’extraversion, d’une part, et régimes de savoirs et systèmes de signifiants propres aux sociétés locales, d’autre part.
Cette communication s’intéresse à l’exemple de l’Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), le mouvement nationaliste qui articula la revendication d’indépendance dans ce territoire à partir de 1948. Elle se propose d’examiner les références intellectuelles et mémorielles, mais aussi les images et les signes mobilisés par l’UPC dans son entreprise d’élaboration d’un récit national et de développement d’une « culture nationale ». Un récit qui liait l’émergence d’une «culture nationale» camerounaise non pas au moment colonial en soi mais à une somme d’expériences et d’héritages cumulés dans la longue durée et qui devait rester ouverte à l’intégration de nouveaux apports perçus comme des «biens communs de toute l’humanité». Dans cette nouvelle narration de soi, l’indépendance marquait le début de l’ère qui devait voir la nation se réaliser, ainsi que les valeurs de liberté et de justice.

Benga Ndiouga / Department of History, University Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal

Yen a marre! Youth Mobilizations, Engagements and Citizenship in Contemporary Senegal

The analysis of the process of governance in Africa is dominated by a conception which does not give enough visibility to the dynamics of appropriation and domestication, to the permanent recreation of the public space by the practices of ordinary people (subaltern resistances). The experiences and the experimentations of the everyday life (possibilities of becoming) offer unfinished geographies, going against the reducing imaginary of the politicians and the bureaucrats. In Senegal and particularly in Dakar, the protest movement is carried by young people, inscribing their presence in the political and social space. The claim to justice and recognition on the one hand, and the desire to moralize the political field on the other one, have found their field of expression and legitimacy in the street demonstrations, in 2011 and 2012, to oppose themselves to the authoritarian excesses of the President Abdoulaye Wade. The Y’en a marre movement reflects the production of new imaginaries of engaged citizenship and responsibility. It articulates the slogan of the “New Type of Senegalese” (NTS), around a variety of technics of mobilization, such as the urban cultures (graffiti, rap), the barricades or the call to vote on the elections’ day. First, I analyze the reconfiguration process of youth mobilizations and second, I explain the new link of youth to citizenship in Senegal. This imaginary citizenship served as inspiration in neighboring countries (Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea).

Zelenova Daria / Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences

From “Quiet Encroachments” to Collective Mobilizations: Everyday Struggles for the Right to the City in Contemporary South Africa

South African cities are known to be the most unequal and simultaneously most rebelling in the world. While urban protests waged in townships often fall under the alarmist discourse and stigmatization of a ghetto based violence lacking organizational potential and positive agenda, struggles waged by poor urban communities demonstrate high potential of self-organization and community based solidarity. Using the ethnography collected between 2009 and 2014 in the course of my PhD research I examine and compare self-organization practices and mobilization tactics of the three urban grassroots initiatives (Orange farm electricity crisis committee based in Johannesburg, Symphony way pavement dwellers based in one of the TRA’s in Cape Town and a popular shack dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo). The stories of everyday resistance told by the actors unfold in different urban environments: informal settlements, townships and transit relocation areas and touch upon the issues of commercialization and commodification of urban land and space, failures of the urban governance and social services provision.
Simultaneously they demonstrate positive examples of the direct democracy and autonomy in action. The paper focuses on grassroots initiatives with their daily practices of anti-eviction struggles and self-organization and analyzes how urban dwellers reconceptualize and reconstruct the notions of the right to the city and citizenship in contemporary South Africa

Choplin Armelle / Universitê Paris-Est

Ciavolella Riccardo / Universitê Paris-Est

Urban Subaltern (de)mobilisation: from Depoliticized Protests to Political Change

Focusing on residents’ reactions to slum clearance and displacement in an African city (Nouakchott-Mauritania), this paper seeks to interpret the meaning of urban protests. Analyzing the political agency of “urban subaltern” groups, their discourses and their “everyday forms of resistance” (Scott) to contest power and authority, we observe contradictory dynamics. In one hand, urban dwellers do not claim citizenship neither a “right to the city” in a lefebvrian perspective. The resistance seems to be depoliticized, individual and limited to local-level. But, on the other hand, these embryonic urban protests could be considered as a harbinger of broader political mobilisation and yearnings for a more inclusive citizenship. This paper seeks to explore and confront these two opposite theses about politics – the quiet encroachment paradigm (Bayat) vis-à-vis the post-political thought (Swyngedouw). This contradiction calls for deeper reflection on the concrete possibilities for the protests of slum-dwellers to become a structured political movement. Are they able to change the urban reality in which they live and the exclusive citizenship regime? Following a Gramscian perspective (which plays with the overlapping between cittadinità and cittadinanza), we wonder if and how the African postcolonial city could be the place to transform local protests into political change and be the place for new forms of citizenship and emancipation (Ciavolella, Choplin)?

Mosselson Aidan / University College London

“It’s not a Place I Like but I Can Live with It”: Urban Regeneration, Affordable Housing and the Right to the City in Inner-city Johannesburg

This paper narrates the experiences of tenants living in social and state-subsidised private-sector housing developments in inner-city Johannesburg, demonstrating that these developments give rise to diverse and contradictory experiences of urban life. Residents who’ve accessed renovated housing are able to enjoy the benefits of urban centrality in ways they previously could not, gaining enhanced rights to the city and forms of urban citizenship. At the same time, their spatial and political imaginations are restricted and confined by the conditions of necessity under which they live, shaping their expectations and reflecting their marginal position within the city. However, despite this marginal position residents also shape the area in a variety of ways, through their ordinary, everyday practices producing new forms of urbanity, sociality and belonging. These signal the ways in which the inner-city is transforming to reflect a different type of social and urban order, more reflective of the post-apartheid context. Yet, as areas of the inner-city improve and come to flourish, the differences between these areas and the peripheral townships and informal settlements are exacerbated, increasing the spatial nequalities and fragmentation of Johannesburg. In these ways, the housing being provided is producing contradictory and complex consequences, experiences and identities within the inner-city and across the wider metropolitan region.

Schramm Sophie / TU Darmstadt, Spatial and Infrastructure Planning

People’s Room for Manoeuvre in a Fragmented City: State Housing in Kibera, Nairobi

In Kenya, the direct provision of housing by the state is limited to slum upgrading and housing for state employees. In Nairobi, the Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme (KENSUP) aims to reconstruct Kibera, one of the largest slums of Nairobi, with multi-story housing. The stated goal is to house the current dwellers of Kibera. However, Kibera is a melting pot of vested interests of central and local state-actors, urban dwellers and quasi-legal landlords. Its iron and mud shacks are representative for the drastic socio-spatial fragmentations of Nairobi. Seen by the struggles around landownership as well as broader housing market dynamics, gentrification is an apparently inevitable outcome of the project. My paper addresses the struggle for access to and living conditions in the “decanting site”, to date the only inhabited housing estate of the project. I aim to highlight people’s potential to shape events within the KENSUP project, to make use of the permanent uncertainty the project brings about and thus to expand the minimal room for manoeuvre, it leaves for those living in, aiming, or refusing to move to, the housing estate. The KENSUP brings elemental changes to Kibera’s built space, economic possibilities and social relations. It expresses some of the vested interests of actors and puts others at play – thus it reflects broader African urban governance issues. This makes it an insightful platform for the examination of state-society interactions in an African city.

Melo Vanessa / Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon, Urban Planning and Design Research Centre.

Top-down Low-Cost Housing Supply, Bottom-up Responses and Territorial Impacts in Maputo

In Mozambique, housing policies and programmes were never institutionally and explicitly consolidated as such, but main guidelines were established to address housing shortage that affects especially low-income populations. Self-help housing was most defended in the first years of independence, in a context of limited resources and under a centralised and socialist Frelimo. Yet, with the joint opening to the market economy and process of political decentralization, since the mid 1980s, low-cost housing supply became more evident in Maputo, though mainly associated with relocations in sequel of urban renewal and road infra-structure interventions or natural calamities, involving not only central and local governments, but also other agents. The areas where low-cost housing has been supplied are not extensive in this city, but have a significant role in its development. On the one hand, they promote the occupation of surrounding areas and infrastructure upgrading. On the other hand, they evidence different levels of housing improvements undertaken by the residents, according the processes that generated them, their initial characteristics and the beneficiaries response to the houses provided. By the analysis of some paradigmatic areas of low-cost housing supply, the paper aims to explore variations between these processes and their territorial impacts, as a contribution to the understanding of bottom-up urban processes trigged by this kind of top-down housing interventions.

Erwin Kira / Durban University of Technology, South Africa

Voices of Resilience: A Living History of the Kenneth Gardens Municipal Housing Estate in Durban South Africa

South African cities have a dwindling number of state subsidised rental units inherited from the apartheid regime. This paper brings together 3 years’ worth of oral histories collected in Kenneth Gardens, the city of Durban’s largest such housing estate. These oral histories illustrate how a space that was once reserved for poor and working class white families has transformed into a diverse and entangled community. Kenneth Gardens is located next to a middle-class suburban area and as such does not suffer the spatial inequalities or lack of amenities associated with many low-cost house projects in South Africa. It does however suffer from issues associated with low-income housing projects globally, such as unemployment, substance abuse and domestic violence. The oral histories unsurprisingly indicate socio-economic hardships; including racial, class and gendered tensions; but importantly also stories of caring, resilience and partnerships that cut across these expected divides in unexpected ways. The research is contextualised within the politics of state housing in South Africa, as well as within theoretical frameworks of fluid social identity formation. In conclusion the paper critically examines what these insights suggest for thinking about how the design and governance of state housing shape livelihoods and citizenship practices, as well as how these practices transform housing projects into spaces of contestation, community and neighbourliness.

Kruchinsky Vladislav / Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences

The Great Keinplatz Experiment: (Permanent) Temporarity as a Housing Strategy in Contemporary South Africa

While South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RPD) rightfully occupies its space among the most researched mass housing projects in the world, the distribution of the academic attention seems to be rather uneven when it comes to its internal logic and practical developments. This paper critically examines a phenomenon of Temporary Relocation Areas (TRA’s)—zones established over the last decade by various South African municipalities in order to accommodate people in desperate need for housing until RDP units become available and reflects upon its impact on everyday lives of the marginalised communities targeted by this development. Significantly, some TRA’s were created as an attempt to deal with particular outbreaks of the citizen’s direct action campaigning for the right to the city; establishment of these zones was justified employing alarmist discourses effectively equaling squatting to an urban emergency. Using the ethnography collected during several field research sessions in the Delft Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area in Cape Town, we would like to discuss whether such ‘No-places’, with their ‘temporarity’ surpassing all the official estimates and the very infrastructural limitations set in the blueprints, can be in fact considered a (semi-)official housing sub-policy of South African state.

Chiekou Baldé El hadji / CARTE, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar

De la mobilisation autour de l’identité servile à la politisation de la marginalisation sociale: Peeral Fajjiri au fuuta Toro et autres exemples Sénégalais

L’objectif de cette présentation est d’examiner et d’analyser les enjeux sociopolitiques de l’héritage de l’esclavage dans la société haalpular du Fuuta Toro (Nord-Sénégal) et celle du fuuladu (Sud-Sénégal), également habité en majorité par des peuls. En effet, longtemps victimes de marginalisation sociale, les descendants d’esclaves mobilisés autour de leur identité commencent à mettre en place des stratégies de lutte contre la discrimination. Ainsi depuis 2003 est crée au Fuuta Toro la Fédération Peeral Fajjiri mobilisant les descendants d’esclaves (maccube) autour de l’identité servile ou maccukagu. A travers cette mobilisation, les maccube du Fuuta Toro revendiquent une identité qui malgré son assignation sociale péjorative est valorisée. Une association similaire n’existe pas au fuuladu mais les jiiyabe profitent souvent des campagnes électorales pour valoriser et utiliser le discours identitaire. Cette réutilisation des statuts sociaux est induite par les enjeux de la décentralisation et de l’ouverture démocratique. La marginalisation sociale devient ainsi un instrument identitaire de mobilisation politique. Cette manifestation de l’héritage de l’esclavage dans ces deux régions nous permettra de saisir les stratégies mises en place par les descendants d’esclaves (maccube et jiiyabe) pour lutter contre les différentes formes de discriminations sociopolitiques.

Meckelburg Alexander / Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies, University of Hamburg

Preliminary notes on regional citizenship and marginalization in western Ethiopia

The territorial incorporation of western Ethiopia, since the late 19th century, has left a legacy of marginalization influencing the way people perceive their place in society and their status as citizens of Ethiopia. Structural imbalances between highland and lowland regions have led to various forms of national conflict between centre and periphery. Historical perceptions and the memory of exploitation and slavery can become tools for regional group mobilization and political opposition. Meanwhile, recent political amendments have opened new ways for political decentralization and integration of previously marginalized groups. These amendments, referred to as “ethnic federalism”, have opened new ways of cooperation for minorities. Despite this, they also challenge regional majority-minority relations as well as the established equilibrium of power between formerly marginalized groups. These changes have led to new conflicts on the regional level. This presentation will look at the changes and continuities of state encroachment in the western Ethiopian regions, across several ethnic groups, and compare the different perceptions of local people, actors, and stakeholders, and look at various forms of resistance and mobilization, from open violence to ‘mimicry’. The paper concludes that instead of challenging national citizenship there are dilemmas of regional integration which need to be taken into consideration in order to understand current feelings of marginalization.

Schnitzler Marie / LAM, University of Liege

The fight for people with disabilities’ rights in South Africa, from apartheid to nowadays

The issue of disability, which appeared in Britain in the 1970’s, took a particular shape in South Africa due to the particular segregationist legislation of the country. Through an empirical fieldwork in a township of Cape Town, this presentation explores the evolution of the struggle for the rights of the people with disabilities in the city. It is believed that the study of the people with disabilities as a marginalized group helps to understand the current challenges of the South African state dealing with its apartheid legacy. In the first part, a historical analysis will underline how this fight has firstly been interwoven with the bigger struggle against the white male able-bodied supremacy. It will be shown how this context of resistance and mobilization against the apartheid government as well as a growing international concern around disability provided opportunities to put the disability issue at the South African agenda. The second part of the lecture will discuss the evolution of the disability sector after 1994. The rise of democracy has allowed various progresses, as the recognition of the disability issue by the Constitution. However, these victories are bitter as the majority of the people with disabilities living in the townships are still struggling with high level of violence, social isolation, and unemployment in their daily lives. The loss of faith of these people in the associations supposed to represent their interests will finally be discussed.

Scaglioni Marta / Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Universität Bayreuth

Between exclusion and inclusion: the Ghbonton renegotiation of traditional roles in contemporary Tunisia

In post-revolutionary Tunisia some across-North-Africa myths have collapsed and made way for a renewed sentiment of aversion and discrimination against minorities. Former dictator Ben Ali, like other Arab leaders promoting the modernization, secularization and westernization of their countries, propagated an embellished image of Tunisia based on stability and peace. Yet, discrimination based on skin color targeted Black Tunisians, unmasking the bitter reality of dark-skinned citizens still bearing the legacy of slavery. Tunisians still use the Arabic terms wassif or abid, semantically connected to slavery, to refer to Blacks. This paper analyzes racial stigmatization in terms of geographical marginalization and social segregation at the lowest ladders of society, and the quest for recognition of the Black communities through a renewed political discourse. The Ghbonton, an ethnic group living in the Southern Governorate of Medenine, embody this exclusion. Their region, at the border with Libya, has always been a transit and exchange area, but this community has started only recently to negotiate its social position. Traditionally involved in the preparation of weddings, including a musical performance with devotional and mystic tones called Tayfa, their recent political activism interacted with the renegotiation of these traditional roles, since the execution of this accompaniment to the ceremonies perpetrates, in their eyes, a form of servile attitude towards the Whites.

Zehnle Stephanie / Kassel University

Traders in Leopard Skins: The Modernization of Poro Secret Societies around 1900

In the late nineteenth century the British Colonial government criminalized the secret societies of Sierra Leone. In 1905 individuals were still sentenced to death for “Leopard Murder”, a term referring to the colonial discourses on human-animal transformation and ritual cannibalism among secret societies. Although being oppressed, the so-called Poro societies expanded by a fast process of modernization. Traditionally they were Mande institutions for secluded education and initiation of boys in order to turn them into farmers, husbands, and fathers. Due to the slave trade, relocation of freed slaves, and naval trade, Sierra Leone was marked by extreme ethnic diversity. The secret societies adapted to this situation and in some respects they were even turned from a youth initiation network into a trans-ethnic merchant guild. It remained a network for the control of knowledge transfers by the help of ritualized meetings and oaths. But the nature of this knowledge shifted from the socio-agricultural sphere to the mysteries of trade business. Even coastal trade dynasties, like the Caulker family, had to give in and join the Poro. At the same time intermediary traders lost their gatekeeper role, because merchant factories directly communicated with branches and employees in the so-called “hinterland”. This demonstrates the flexibility of a social institution that has had been considered conservative and anti-modern.

Beuvier Franck / Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain (IIAC)

Résister à l’air du temps. Qu’est-ce qui fait courir l’institution confrérique bamiléké (Cameroun) ?

Bon gré mal gré, les confréries de notables bamiléké vivent avec leur temps. Lieux d’autorité, sièges de l’administration politique et religieuse des chefferies, rendus manifestes au travers de leurs cycles cérémoniels, du déploiement codifié de paraphernalia, les confréries connaîtront des fortunes diverses pendant la période coloniale et au lendemain de l’Indépendance, dans le cadre de la construction de l’État. Sur la scène politique et culturelle, leur sort sera – et reste – lié à celui de la coutume, à son statut, à son contrôle, à ses usages et à ses qualifications successives. Rétrospectivement, on est frappé de leur endurance face aux aléas et aux pressions venus de l’extérieur. Le socle de l’institution confrérique en effet n’a quasiment jamais bougé. D’une remarquable stabilité dans la longue durée. Je voudrais insister dans le cadre de cette communication sur ce qui relève de la permanence en la matière, sur ce qui fait institution ici, sur les conditions religieuses et rituelles qui autorisent une telle résistance à l’épreuve du temps.

Anderson Samuel / Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard

The Public Life of Poro in Sierra Leone

“The Public Life of Poro in Sierra Leone” applies an analysis of publicity to Sierra Leone’s Poro initiatory society. The laws of secrecy enshrouding Poro appear to exempt it from public discourse and to protect its autocratic grip on its constituents from open debate. However, Poro’s secret, private, and public activities are mutually constitutive, not mutually exclusive. Poro instantiates a radically different alignment of publicity and privacy, challenging those globalized ideals—currently promulgated across Sierra Leone by NGOs and government bodies—that align public scrutiny with personal autonomy.
This paper focuses on a series of politically-charged funerary ceremonies conducted by the Poro of Kailahun Town in eastern Sierra Leone. A variety of political parties made dramatic claims to public space through their sponsorship and presence at these events, reshaping the political terrain of an opposition party stronghold. Meanwhile, other performances allowed Poro to steer the terms of participation in the 2012 elections by way of veiled threats against candidates and voters. Through spectacle, Poro’s restrictive power of discretion constitutes a public arena for the rehearsal of social action, proscribes participants’ responsibilities, and dramatizes participation’s inherent risks. In spite of its limitations, Poro offers a space for debate and communal transformation, but one in which social change is recognized as carrying the threat of extraordinary violence.

Carbonnel Laure / IMAf, LESC, UPOND

Des gens de savoirs dans les sociétés secrètes : le cas des bouffons (korodugaw) au Mali

Au Mali, nombre de sociétés secrètes ont parmi leurs membres des bouffons (korodugaw ou koredugaw en bambara). Affiliés aux « gens de savoirs » ainsi qu’aux animateurs festifs, les bouffons interviennent également dans les cérémonies publiques qu’elles soient cultuelles, politiques ou culturelles. Mes observations de terrain (entre 2006 et 2010), ont porté sur ces cérémonies publiques néanmoins un membre âgé de la société du Korè a été convié par les bouffons que je connaissais pour participer à un entretien. Or, le vieil homme refusa de parler devant moi de bouffonnerie arguant qu’il ne pouvait transmettre ses secrets, un refus qui engagea les bouffons dans une négociation pendant plus de trente minutes. Je pensais au départ que ces réticences étaient le fait de l’intégration des bouffons aux sociétés initiatiques; puis, la suite de la discussion montra que les tenaient davantage à des problématiques transversales aux communautés de gens de
savoirs au Mali.
Je propose dans cette communication d’analyser les différents enjeux qui ont émergés de cette négociation. Mise en perspective avec mes observations sur les pratiques des bouffons, des chasseurs et des marabouts, je traiterai plus particulièrement de l’organisation de ces communautés : l’intégration des membres, la circulation des savoirs, les rapports entre singularités et collectivités, leurs positionnement dans un islam dominant et leurs réponses face aux changements.

King Nathaniel / Independent Researcher

Marginality for Sale: How ‘Small’ Secret Societies Deal With Freetown’s Political ‘Big Men’

Secret societies are increasingly becoming fields on which urban and rural actors contend for scarce social resources in Freetown. “Old” and “new” secret societies and the perceivably powerful and less-powerful harness and use those resources. Memberships of one of Sierra Leone’s new and perceivably powerless secret societies, called Odelays, are transforming into complex sources to fabricate political power and attendant capital.
The paper discusses how members of these sodalities, who are mainly Freetown’s youth, appropriate secret societies to include and exclude state authority. The general public tends to see members of these organizations as rejects of the broader society. Yet their members draw power from their powerlessness and negotiate with the state and political power holders these memberships.
Power tends to be seen as an exertion of force of the stronger on the weaker. But the paper argues, with examples from fieldwork that many young people in Freetown distil centrality in the discourses and mobilizations of power through secret society memberships – right from the heart of socio-economic marginality.
The paper looks at specific cases of how these secret societies are exploited by politicians, and how members of the former, using the exoteric-esoteric mix in potent combinations, also exploit politicians and the state. Power and powerlessness are thus mutually reinforcing and borders-breaking.

Nascimento Augusto / Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical

Political contexts, social (dis)organization and indiscipline in football in São Tomé and Príncipe

O ponto de partida desta comunicação são os casos de indisciplina no futebol são-tomense, mais frequentes do que se suporia à luz das alusões à pacífica e cordata idiossincrasia dos são-tomenses. Por algum tempo os campos de futebol pareceram ser os únicos cenários onde era possível constatar-se fenómenos da indisciplina socialmente disseminada. Nesta comunicação, analisam-se os equívocos relacionados com a indisciplina nos campos de futebol, cujos significados políticos e sociais em São Tomé e Príncipe variaram do colonialismo até ao tempo presente. Sem uma intencionalidade política precisa, a indisciplina dentro e ao redor dos campos de futebol teve uma dimensão política no sentido em que foi expressão de um mal-estar social? Ou, numa sociedade actualmente em acelerada mutação, mais do que uma forma difusa de protesto social, a indisciplina no futebol reflecte, sobretudo, a desorganização da própria actividade futebolística a que se parece querer pôr cobro desde há alguns anos?

Melo Victor / Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Bittencourt Marcelo / Universidade Federal Fluminense

In the Luanda streets: motorsport in Angola (1957-1965)

Desde o século XIX, o esporte paulatinamente se consolidou em Angola. No decorrer da primeira metade do século XX, foi mobilizado como mecanismo de distinção por parte de colonos, estratégia de busca de reconhecimento por uma elite nativa, bem como forma de resistência, ressignificação e até mesmo preparação para a luta anticolonial por angolanos de diferentes estratos sociais. De toda forma, tornou-se uma manifestação importante no cotidiano da colônia. Nos anos 1950, uma nova modalidade começou a melhor se delinear em Luanda: o automobilismo. Entre 1957 e 1965, foi disputado o Grande Prêmio de Angola, contando com corredores de vários países e províncias de Portugal. Na década de 1960, muitas competições de automóveis foram com frequência disputadas em outras cidades angolanas. Nesse momento, crescera muito o número de colonos, apesar do desencadear da luta de libertação nacional, em 1961. Da mesma forma, a vida econômica e social ganhara novo dinamismo. Este estudo objetiva discutir a conformação do automobilismo em Angola, centrando o debate na Luanda dos anos de 1957-1965, buscando entender a articulação da modalidade com o cenário político, econômico e cultural provincial. Para alcance do objetivo, fizemos uso de jornais publicados no período em tela. Espera-se dar mais um passo para compreender a peculiaridade da prática esportiva em cenários coloniais, bem como lançar uma nova luz sobre tal realidade a partir de uma importante e valorizada manifestação cultural.

Bancel Nicolas / Faculté des Sciences sociales et politiques, Université de Lausanne

Riot Thomas / Faculté des Sciences sociales et politiques, Université de Lausanne

Le scoutisme confessionnel comme ressource de mobilisation politique : les cas du Rwanda et de l’Afrique occidentale française au tournant des indépendances (1945-1962)

Entre 1945 et 1962, les anciens territoires coloniaux de l’Afrique occidentale française (AOF), comme ceux du Rwanda ou du Burundi, sont entrés dans une phase de transformations politiques rapides, marquées par la naissance ou l’action plus vigoureuse de partis politiques autonomistes ou indépendantistes – ce qui est bien connu – mais aussi par de fortes mobilisations de la jeunesse africaine scolarisée engagée dans les transformations sociales, culturelles et politiques des différentes zones – ce qui l’est moins.
Les deux mouvements de jeunesse catholiques (scoutisme catholique en AOF, mouvement xaveri au Rwanda) que nous nous proposons d’étudier sont intimement liés au développement de la scolarisation, dans le primaire, le secondaire et le supérieur. On constate, en AOF comme au Rwanda, que les scolarisés ont représenté la grande majorité des participants à ces mouvements. Des mouvements étudiants africains ont également été liés à ces mouvements, fournissant l’essentiel de l’encadrement.
Grâce à une comparaison entre le Rwanda et l’ancienne AOF, nous voudrions montrer que cette « association » de mouvements étudiants aux organisations de jeunesses catholiques a été, dans un cas, un moteur de la décolonisation (Rwanda), dans l’autre un mouvement politiquement conservateur qui n’a pas participé à la décolonisation. Le corpus empirique que nous mobilisons se compose d’entretiens, d’archives administratives et missionnaires, de correspondances et d’archives privées.

Bosslet Juliana / SOAS, University of London

Running the defence ragged: football field as a significant place in the development of class relations (Luanda, 1961-1974)

O tema do trabalho vem sendo negligenciado pelos historiadores há décadas. A emergência da história cultural trouxe à tona novos temas talvez mais sedutores, muitos dos quais ligados ao esporte e ao lazer. A presente proposta tem como objetivo voltar ao tema do trabalho em diálogo com as novas perspectivas abertas pela história cultural. Se o tema das relações de trabalho e movimentos trabalhistas deixou de atrair a atenção dos historiadores de um modo geral, isso é ainda mais verdadeiro para o caso dos territórios ultramarinos portugueses. A existência de um regime autoritário na metrópole e a repressão a movimentos trabalhistas trouxeram consigo uma suposta inexistência de uniões compostas por trabalhadores. Em Angola,até 1975, existia o SNECIPA – Sindicato dos Empregados do Comércio e Indústria– que, no entanto, não contava com a adesão de número significativo de trabalhadores negros. Com a aparente inexistência de uma união sindical representativa em Angola, historiadores do trabalho em África tenderam a se concentrar em outros territórios do continente. Argumento aqui que as relações sociais de trabalho estavam a ser construídas de outras maneiras, através de outras instituições, tais quais as organizações desportivas. O objetivo é lançar luz sobre como uma classe trabalhadora estava em formação em Luanda através de uma análise focada nos times de futebol suburbanos e nos que participavam do campeonato de futebol corporativo na capital de Angola entre 1961 e 1975.

Afonso Aline / Centro de Estudos Internacionais – ISCTE/IUL

Carvalho Clara / Centro de Estudos Internacionais – ISCTE/IUL

Brincadera sabi: Mandjuandadi groups as a space for leisure and mutual aid in the health sector

O texto tem como objectivo compreender como as actividades lúdicas recobrem práticas de sobrevivência e entreajuda nos grupos de Mandjuandadi na Guiné-Bissau. As mulheres constituem o cerne dos grupos de Mandjuandadi, grupos inspirados nas associações rurais que adoptam os princípios da unidade de género, divisão etária e o princípio da interajuda. Os grupos são formados sobretudo para actividades lúdicas, como um espaço de convívio e diversão. O artigo procura analisar estes grupos, em relação das práticas associativas, com o empowerment das mulheres na esfera social, económica e com o financiamento para o sector de saúde. Foram utilizados como instrumentos de investigação, nas regiões centro e Sul da Guiné-Bissau, o levantamento de dados, a observação directa e entrevistas semi-estruturadas.

Lenoble-Bart Annie / LAM, Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Quelques repères sur l’évolution de la liberté de la presse en Afrique.

Avec la christianisation et la colonisation du continent a été introduite la presse. C’est dire que la liberté u journalisme a connu, dès le départ, des limites certaines. Pourtant, comme ailleurs, ceux qui voulaient s’exprimer ont su jouer des contraintes et de pratiquer une certaine liberté de parole, non sans risques. les indépendances ont fait naître des rêves de liberté, vite contredits par des législations répressives. Le verrouillage des media (anciens et nouveaux) plus ou moins prononcé selon les Etats et les époques, s’est fait sous différentes formes dont certaines ont eu une existence for t longue (exemple des télévisions d’Etat). A travers des études de cas, nous essaierons de donner quelques illustrations de l’évolution de la liberté de la presse dans différents pays africains.

Wolf Tom / IPSOS-Kenya

Leashing a Lion?: Containing the “Threat of Violence” from Voter-Intention Surveys in Kenya’s 2013 General Elections.

Following the widespread violence triggered by the announcement of the results of Kenya’s 2007 election, many Kenyans – and others- feared this could again occur in the subsequent (March 2013) election. As such, various measures were put in place to prevent it.
Among the alleged causes of that violence were the ‘false expectations’ of victory raised by pre-election voter-intention surveys, which had all showed Raila Odinga defeating Mwai Kibaki. As the 2013 election approached, similar polls, while revealing a tightening of the race between Odinga’s CORD coalition and Uluru Kenyatta’s Jubilee, all showed that a second round, run-off contest was inevitable, since neither of the main candidates appeared likely to attain the required 50%+1.
Well before the election, however, anti-Odinga forces had been railing against such surveys, blaming them for the violence following the previous election, while calling for legislation that would limit if not eliminate the threat to stability that they purportedly constituted.
This paper aims to explain the origin of such fears, ad to consider the measures/tactics employed to address them in the context of increasingly tense pre-election period. In doing so, it issues relevant to current, post-election atmosphere, in which civic space has come under increasingly pressure, space that inevitably impedes upon such survey firms and the media through which their work is disseminated.

Khagoitsa Michelle Mercy / Universität Hamburg

“Enemies within?” Media politicization, controversial press laws and press freedom in Kenya

Freedom of the press and its role in democratic functioning in Kenya are often threatened by politically motivated legislations. Since the transition to multiparty democracy in 1992, Kenya has witnessed gradual growth of media and emerging debates on its role in democratization. Government responses to independent media coverage and reports on politically sensitive matters shape emerging resistance to critical journalism. This phenomenon was more prominent after the enactment two controversial media laws in 2013 that critics considered a serious blow to freedom of the press. The politically motivated media legislation infringe on press freedom desired in the emerging kenyan multiparty democracy. this paper seeks to critically analyse the two media laws and assess their impact on independent journalism in Kenya. This paper pays special attention to how political control by the state and media ownership shape media legislation and affect press freedom in the new multiparty democracy in Kenya.

Muntunutwiwe Jean-Salathiel / Université du Burundi

La loi sur la presse au Burundi post-conflit: entre ouverture politique et fermeture des possibles.

Piton Florent / CESSMA – Université Paris Diderot Paris 7

Les modalités de la mobilisation politique au nord du Rwanda ( préfecture de Ruhengeri, commune de Nkuli ) entre les années 1920 et 1994.

Il s’agira d’analyser les modalités de la mobilisation politique au nord du Rwanda ( préfecture de Ruhengeri, commune de Nkuli ) entre les années 1920 et le génocide perpétré contre les Tutsi en 1994 et de montrer notamment comment la formalisation de la compétition politique s’articule moins au référent ethnique – pourtant quasi-exclusivement mis en avant depuis les années 1960 – qu’aux appartenances régionales et lignagères, elles-mêmes étroitement liées aux recompositions du nationalisme rwandais et de la propriété foncière.

Lima Stéphanie / Lisst-Cieu, Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, Université Champollion

Géographie historique des identités locales au Mali

Il s’agira de dresser une géographie historique des identités locales au Mali à la veille des crises récentes et de montrer comment les institutions de gouvernement locales et la décentralisation ont nourri ou pas les identités dans le sud du pays.

Deverin Yveline / CESSMA et Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès

La construction de l’ennemi / la haine de l’autre en Afrique sub-saharienne, approche géopolitique (XXème, – XXIème siècle)

Déconstruire ce qui est couramment considéré comme allant de soi (« la haine “ancestrale” entre hutu et tutsi », par exemple [JP Chrétien, JL Amselle, D. Franche]) nous a conduite à réfléchir sur le processus de construction de la haine de l’autre. C’est cela que nous avons a pu voir naître et grandir en Côte d’ivoire où les conditions de développement d’un conflit intérieur étaient par ailleurs très éloignées des conditions rwandaises.
Cette réflexion a trouvé un écho inattendu avec deux ouvrages sortis en 2011, Pierre Conesa “La fabrication de l’ennemi” et 2014 “Construire l’ennemi” de Umberto Eco qui développent des argumentations théoriques qui permettent d’élargir le questionnement pour comprendre / interpréter les mobilisations identitaires collectives à des fins politiques en Afrique sub-saharienne.

Beucher Benoit / Université Libre de Bruxelles

Identité mossi et construction nationale en Haute-Volta puis au Burkina Faso au XXème siècle

Esquisse d’une histoire de l’identité mossi au XXème siècle dans son complexe rapport à la construction nationale voltaïque puis burkinabe. L’étude des processus de construction et de formation identitaires pris sur la longue durée dans l’actuel Burkina portera plus précisément sur l’imagination de la communauté nationale dans ce pays et les modes d’articulation entre les auto-identifications et les assignations identitaires officielles (celles de l’Etat).

Pauthier Céline / CESSMA-Université Paris Diderot Paris 7

« Les dessous du ‟Dadis Showˮ : une analyse du nationalisme guinéen dans les discours du Capitaine Dadis Camara (2008-2009) ».

A la mort du Président Lansana Conté en 2008, après 24 ans de règne, une junte militaire menée par le Capitaine Dadis Camara prit le pouvoir en Guinée. Le Comité National pour la Démocratie et le Développement (CNDD) promit une transition vers la démocratie. Mais de décembre 2008 à décembre 2009, la Guinée vécut au rythme du « Dadis Show », émissions télévisées retransmises par la Radiotélévision Guinéenne (RTG), qui recueillaient un franc succès en Guinée et à l’extérieur du pays, les morceaux choisis circulant sur internet. L’homme fort du pays s’y livrait à des discours et déclarations jugées exubérantes mais qui pouvaient aussi être perçues comme des exutoires à la profonde crise que traversait le pays depuis plusieurs années. Dans cette communication, je propose d’analyser les ressorts identitaires de ces discours, en mettant notamment en lumière ses filiations avec le nationalisme guinéen né dans les années 1950.

Taylor Linnet / University of Amsterdam

Big (Mobile) Data and African Mobilities

This presentation focuses on the ethical and methodological problems with tracking human mobility using data from mobile phones. I provide an overview of the state of the art in this area of research, then set out a new analytical framework for such data sources that focuses on three pressing issues: first, the risks involved in such research with relation to data subjects in areas of limited statehood; second, issues of interpretation and disciplinary bias; and third, ethical problems of data protection and privacy. Using the case study of a data science challenge involving African mobile phone data, I show how human mobility is becoming legible in new, more detailed ways, and that this carries with it the dual risk of rendering certain groups invisible and of misinterpreting what is visible. Thus this emerging ability to track movement in real time offers both the possibility of improved responses to conflict and forced migration, but also unprecedented power to surveil and control unwanted population movement.

Scharrer Tabea / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Biometric Bureaucracy, the War on Terror and the New Citizenship and Immigration Act — Kenya and its Somali inhabitants

While the recent change of the Kenyan citizenship law might open new spaces for socio-political involvement for its Somali inhabitants, other developments like the on-going suspicion of Somali people as potential terrorists or the move towards biometric bureaucracy potentially reduces this space again. The presentation will discuss these developments in the light of questions of surveillance and securitization. It is based on empirical research with Somali migrants in Kenyan urban settings.
Already during colonial times Somali residents in the limits of the Kenyan territory were treated with suspicion. They had to carry special movement passes and were required to seek permission for travelling inside the Kenyan territory. This situation continued after the independence of Kenya and after short period of relaxation became even worse at the beginning of the 1990s when many refugees from Somalia came to Kenya. Subsequently anti-Somali sentiments grew, linked to feelings that Somalians acquire Kenyan citizenship illegally. In recent years the fear of terrorism has also fed into this animosity. In this context calls for registration and surveillance have become frequent. Registration is however not always discussed as constraint but also as a chance to be recognized. The presentation will show the at times contradictory developments towards securitization and biometric bureaucracy in Kenya and discuss the opening & closing spaces of possibility for its Somali inhabitants.

Frowd Philippe M. / University of Sheffield

Biometrics and postcolonial security practices in West Africa

Observing a rapid proliferation of forms of digital biometric identification in West Africa, this paper argues that these have become a crucial mode of ensuring border control in the region. This perspective draws on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal and Mauritania to make three main arguments. First, the paper argues that the adoption of biometrics in the global south relies on an ideal of the secure border promulgated by security experts and publications from organizations such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as well as emulated by local security professionals. Second, the paper argues that the installation of these technologies (in airports and beyond) is seen as central to state capacity. This reinforcement of capacity, pursued as a response to weak identification and border control institutions, at once facilitates the legibility of border crossing populations (through risk analysis at borders) and the production of irregularity (through the use of ID for deportation). Thirdly, the paper posits that resistance to biometrics is at once social and technical. In Mauritania, citizen groups resist discriminatory biometric enrolment while in Senegal the incompatibility of different algorithms highlights how the stubbornness of technology can undermine aspirations to friction-free border management.

Sureau Timm / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

How (Rumors of ) Internet Controls Support and Threaten Statehood

Bruzzone Anna / University of Warwick

Regional extraversion and state formation: Jubbaland in transnational perspective

Originally conceived as a buffer zone intended to open up a new front in the war against al-Shabaab and stabilise the Kenya-Somalia border, Jubbaland has become the locus of a war of attrition and a hotspot of the federalisation process in Somalia. This paper will discuss the dynamics of state formation in Jubbaland since the capture of Kismayo from al-Shabaab by Kenyan troops and their Somali allies in September 2012. The main focus will lie on the interplay of internal and external factors – local power struggles, commercial flows, regional players and Western policies – in shaping the political process in Jubbaland. Drawing on first hand research, this paper will argue that the formation of a regional state in the Somalia-Kenya borderland has contributed to the reconfiguration of political space at local, national and regional levels.

Bellander Magnus / University of Oxford

Making sense of alignments in Somalia

Much has been said about the role of external actors in Somalia’s political crisis, especially in recent years, when the regional and global character of Somalia’s crisis has become increasingly evident. This paper looks at some of the ways in which outside involvement has shaped the political landscape in Somalia in this period. It looks at how external involvement has impacted on the balance of power and thereby contributed to new alliances and realignments among competing interest groups, not only in the national political game, but also on the local and regional levels, where political entrepreneurs have linked up with external actors in order to gain the upper hand in their local power-struggles. It is argued that this interaction between local politics and external interests is far from unique to the current era – it is only more obvious – and needs to be seen from the viewpoint of the external actor looking for local proxies as well as from the viewpoint of the local political entrepreneur actively seeking external muscle.

Pijovic Nikola / Australian National University

Al-Shabaab: from governance structure to governance spoiler… and back again

Although not many are keen to admit it, the infamous Somali Jihadi movement Al-Shabaab could have, for a few years at the least, been considered a serious and relatively effective governance structure in much of South Somalia. However, since the reinvigorated AMISOM campaign to oust Al-Shabaab from major strongholds dating back to roughly September 2012, the group has been losing ground and territory, and some of its ability to operate as a governance structure. Hence, whilst it is still in control of vast swathes of territory in south Somalia (although not many town strongholds), some have argued that the next chapter in Al-Shabaab’s evolution is to become a regional spoiler, dedicated to disabling the Somali Federal Government from governing effectively, while at the same striking regional AMISOM partners such as Kenya in order to erode public and political support for prolonged intervention in Somalia. This paper firstly establishes why Al-Shabaab could have been, and still in the future could be considered a governance structure within Somalia, and secondly examines events in the last year which have given rise to the evolution of Al-Shabaab from governance structure to spoiler. It then analyses several options for Al-Shabaab’s possible trajectory in the future, as dependant on the success or failure of the Somali Federal Government, and regional AMISOM contributing partners in governing the country.

Yusuf Zakaria / University of Mogadishu

Salafism in Somalia

Salafism in Somalia had to cope with violence for most of its duration, whether this violence was exercised against its supporters or whether violence was seen as a way for some Salafi trends to survive the supremacy of armed groups and the military interven­tion of external players. Its existence was possible only because its supporters found ways to escape, enforce, or neutralize violence using social mechanisms that eventu­ally had strong impact on their own understanding of Islam. In particular, it has proven to be a resilient ideology despite the failure of its political expressions in the 1990s or the growth of a Jihadi movement opposed by regional states and western allies.

Fagite Damilola / Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

From Colonialism to Post-Colonialism: Historicizing the Nature and Development of the Nigerian Healthcare System

The Nigerian healthcare sector can be said to have witnessed tremendous transformation from the traditional health care system that predominated various Nigerian communities and ethnic groups in the pre-colonial period till date. The advent of Christian missionaries in Nigeria can be said to have marked the beginning of ‘modern’ healthcare system in Nigeria which served as an alternative to the existing indigenous systems of healthcare. This ‘modern’ healthcare system developed in the wake of British colonization of Nigeria and transformed to what it is today. The main thesis of this paper is to historicize the nature and paths of development in the healthcare system of Nigeria since amalgamation. The study also examines policies initiated by the colonial and post-colonial governments to improve the quality of healthcare delivery system, as well as government intervention programmes during the outbreak of diseases such as malaria, small pox, and influenza especially during the colonial period. This study will further investigate the developmental stage of the Nigerian healthcare system on the eve and after independence, and its contribution to national development

Zumthurm Tizian / University of Bern

Contradictions of Ethics and Aesthetics in Medical Practices at Albert Schweitzer’s Hospital in Lambarene, Gabon, 1913-65

The PhD-Thesis, on which this contribution is based, is part of a bigger ongoing research project and focuses on medical practices. This includes a variety of questions on power and the organisation of daily routines, on the arrival of innovations and the development of expertise, on questions of cultural adaptations and compliance by patients and staff alike, on the role of middle figures, and on the problem of the African patients’ view.
This paper explores the contradiction between Schweitzer’s famous ethics Reverence for Life (after which every living being has the same value) and the practical and discursive realities in and around the hospital: it was a segregated space and Schweitzer was accused of a paternalistic, or even racist, management philosophy. Still, the hospital achieved local and global fame and admiration. Public discourse was largely controlled by Schweitzer himself by highlighting his ethics and civilising mission. In this sense, aesthetics seem to have been important to Schweitzer: he was a careful and skilful narrator and writer and an enthusiast of Bach. However, he also was a deeply practical, if somewhat conservative, person, which is shown in his architectural preferences and in the ways medicine was practised in the hospital. Nevertheless, it has been suggested that Schweitzer was not so much interested in curing Africans, but in “making his life an argument”, as he put it himself, which can be seen as both, an ethical and aesthetic act.

Mohamed Deika / University of Toronto

Colonial Health Services and International Humanitarian Medicine in British Somaliland

My paper traces the proliferation of British imperial health programs with the separate but intertwined evolution of international health and humanitarian activities in the increasingly termed “underdeveloped world.” Specifically, I will discuss the development of colonial public health services in British Somaliland and how Britain responded to international humanitarian organizations, namely the Red Cross and Save the Children Fund, which adopted new global agendas in the late-colonial period.
In essence, I seek to answer a simple question fairly undocumented in the literature on colonial medicine in Africa: why was there a sudden shift in the colonies from little to several forms of colonial health services beginning in the 1930s? Indeed, Britain (like other imperial powers) demonstrated an urgency to maintain their empire in the face of decolonization and a devastated post-war economy. Still, the public health changes in the colonies were not directly affiliated with empire; rather, they were a product of a changing international scene. My research challenges historians of imperial medicine in Africa to greater account for the role of transnational actors and the interplay between decolonization and the emergence of global humanitarianism and development.

Mulemi Benson / Catholic University of Eastern Africa

“Standing in the gap”: Cancer treatment uncertainty and religious coping in a Kenyan hospital

Cancer care and treatment advances in developed countries have not yet materialized in low income countries. The fact that not all cancers can be treated in spite of recent improvements in oncology even in developed countries contributes to disillusion and uncertainty about management of the disease. Drawing on twelve months hospital ethnography, this paper examines the relationship between Christian religious discourse and biomedical treatment of cancer in a large public hospital in the Kenya. Hospital staff, patients and informal care givers cling to religious coping as a way of bridging the gap between unabated agony and hope or trust in oncology as a techno-medical quest with the potential of extending life and alleviating suffering in Africa. The paper uses the case of management of cancer in the Kenyan clinical setting to contribute to the debate on uncertainty, intuition, trust and biomedical limitations in cancer care. Cancer creates uncertainty about the power of bio-medicine to cure, heal and sustainably restore well-being and points to ever increasing global healthcare inequalities. The lived experience of cancer management often contradicts trust in medical construction of successful therapy. Religious ideas and discourse are thus intuitive initiatives that patients, their relatives and professional carers draw on to re-shape the meaning of their experience of cancer management, and resilience during biomedical treatment.

Diener Tara Dosumu / University of Michigan

Weapons of the Ward: Performing Knowledge, Practicing Authority in a West African Hospital

This paper considers state power as it is articulated through the actions of one group of civil employees: nurses working at a government hospital. Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, has long been a locus of state power. From gathering demographic data, to physically surveilling subjects, administering vaccines as part of global health campaigns, monitoring disease rates, and distributing and promoting contraceptives, nurses at Princess Christian have been actively engaged in performing colonial and post-colonial state power while reaping the benefits of guaranteed work and retirement income. They have also become adept at resisting, undermining, and transforming that power, as ties to the state are cross-cut by other factors such as professional status and rank, gender, and age.
The ability to effectively mobilize affinities and negotiate the web of competing alliances impacts access to resources of all kinds within the hospital, raising many ethical dilemmas. Nurses are gatekeepers guarding and supervising the distribution of state-provisioned resources. This paper argues that in this intensely plural clinical context, with an institutional memory spanning generations, their insider knowledge – that which can only be gained through practical experience within this state-administered hospital – can become the most valuable currency of all: a power whose legitimacy is rooted beyond the boundaries of state control.

Mandé Issiaka / Département Science Politique, Uqam, Cirdis

Jackson Willy / Laboratoire Cessma, Université Paris Diderot

Frontières, migrations et citoyenneté : regards africains, biais scientifiques?

Cette communication propose d’appréhender la relation dialectique qui se noue autour de la nationalité, de la citoyenneté et de l’identité dans les États ouest-africains. Ce qui est en cause c’est la gestion par les États d’accueil des phénomènes migratoires avec l’œillère de la souveraineté. Le droit qui en découle se transforme en une machine à exclure et à produire des inégalités. Il convient de relever la confusion entretenue dans la littérature entre la nationalité, et la citoyenneté. Alors même que des recherches récentes démontrent la constitution des communautés transnationales depuis la fin de la décennie 1990. Le rapport à l’espace des migrants est le défi qui se pose aux États-nations ouest-africains par exemple dans leur prérogative de réguler les territoires issus des découpages hérités des anciennes puissances coloniales et confirmés par le principe de l’intangibilité des frontières. En effet, l’État-nation en Afrique résulte de la construction de l’État, constitution d’une nation et choix politique commun, qui assure l’adéquation entre l’État et la nation dans un système accepté par l’ensemble. L’histoire de l’État-nation est celle d’une relation dialectique entre exclusion et intégration, entre rejet et acceptation de l’Autre. Tout laisse penser que les frontières de l’Afrique posent plus de problèmes « par ce qu’elles regroupent que par ce qu’elles recoupent ».

Breines Markus / University of Sussex, UK

Urban-urban Migration – in Africa?

Urban-urban migration is a common form of movement in Ethiopia. Academic attention has, however, mainly been given to Ethiopia as a producer of refugees, resettlement schemes and, more recently, migration to the Middle East. This is part of a wider trend of research on migration in Africa: Eritreans, Ethiopians and Somali fleeing the Horn of Africa, Africans from various nations trying to enter Europe, rural-urban movements and other forms of migration associated with war, poverty and deprivation. But to what extent do such explorations reflect the variety of migration in the continent? Not sufficiently, I propose. The less dramatic and more mundane forms of migration have largely been neglected. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Ethiopian towns and cities, as well as on journeys between these cities, this paper examines how urban-urban migration has become a means for the middle class to fulfil their aspirations. I contrast urban-urban migration among the middle class with pre
vailing representations of migration as inherently related to hardship to generate a more nuanced way of seeing contemporary migration in Ethiopia and Africa.

Gary-Tounkara Daouda / CNRS, LAM / Sciences Po Bordeaux

A Reappraisal of the Expulsion of “undocumented” Immigrants from Nigeria in 1983

In recent years and in silence, the Nigerian state expels more and more immigrants from Niger, Mali, Chad and Cameroon. These foreigners, migrant workers or small traders face the strengthening of migration control and blind government’s fight against Boko Haram.
Despite its political instability, Nigeria remains a major country of immigration in West Africa. In this article, I analyze the expulsion of aliens “undocumented” in 1983, officially three million people. I argue that the expulsion was due to the economic crisis but also a nationalist revenge against Ghana and a political calculation of President Shagari. This last thought exclude foreigners from the national labor market and weaken the supposed electoral base of his opponents.

Charumbira Ruramisai / University of Texas at Austin

Once Upon a Time: Southern Africa as Land of Opportunity for European Immigrants and Migrants.

Germany boasts two magnificent museums dedicated to emigration in Hamburg and Bremerhaven. Between 1850 and 1960 about sixty million emigrants left parts of Europe in search of safety and/or better opportunities around the world. Most of them landed in North America, but many chose British Southern Africa – especially after the diamond and gold rushes of the mid-nineteenth century. This paper is a study of European immigrants in search of better opportunities and upward socio-economic mobility that their native Europe could/did not at the time. The study significantly departs from the important historiography on colonialism which has dominated the study of Europeans in (Southern) Africa in order to examine the lives of those that arrived as poor immigrants but quickly turned into settlers, intent on “civilizing” the Africans. By centering Africa as a land of opportunity that many poor Europeans were attracted to in the past, this paper argues that Africa has been at the center
of migration and immigration theory and practice – including remittances sent to Europe by immigrants. The key questions the paper asks are: a) How, when, and why did immigrants in search of opportunity and better lives for themselves become eager instruments of the British Empire?; b) How can this history inform forgetful and often hostile discourses about Africa’s “boat people” in Europe today?

El Qadim Nora / Université de Namur

L’Afrique du Nord dans les études africaines des migrations

Cette communication s’interroge sur le rôle joué par l’Afrique du Nord dans les études sur les migrations et dans les études africaines des migrations. En effet, cet espace est souvent décrit comme un espace liminal, entre Sahara et Méditerranée, entre Afrique et Europe. Les analyses des migrations en Afrique du Nord ont largement reproduit ce type de représentations, par exemple en utilisant la notion de « migration de transit ». Celle-ci est symptomatique de représentations qui font des pays européens le but ultime de tout parcours migratoire, autrement dit d’un fort eurocentrisme des études sur les migrations dans cette région. Cet eurocentrisme transparaît également dans l’intérêt des études européennes pour les politiques migratoires dans cette région.
Le cas de l’Afrique du Nord est intéressant car ce sont les études de terrain dans cette région, inspirées de la géographie ou de l’ethnographie, ont permis de remettre en cause l’eurocentrisme des analyses existantes, par exemple en questionnant la notion de transit et en soulignant plutôt la diversité des parcours des migrants et de leurs projets, ou encore en s’intéressant à la notion d’aventure. De même, l’étude des politiques migratoires des pays nord africains, en s’inspirant des études postcoloniales et subalternes en histoire et en Relations internationales, permet de questionner les notions d’externalisation ou de gouvernance externe, tout en s’interrogeant sur les définitions variables de l’espace nord africain.

Santanera Giovanna / Università di Milano Bicocca & EHESS

Douala on Air: the Shimmering Image of the City in the Local Movie Production

Douala (Cameroon) hosts a thriving production of low-budget movies, aired by the local private television channels. These movies are generally seen as sort of “mirrors” of the city by their authors and viewers. Taking this local interpretation as a point of departure, this paper will investigate the shimmering image of Douala on screen, focusing on those recent movies that “don’t seem to be made in Cameroon”, according to their authors’ words. In particular, I will analyze the careful selection of the parts of the urban landscape to show, the explicit quotation of foreign movies, and the radical transformation of the acting style. While this was previously connected to the local tradition of popular theater and bouffonnerie, nowadays it incorporates face expressions, body gestures and voice tones of the foreign actors seen on cable televisions. I will conclude that these aesthetic devices are not only strategies to win over an international audience. They also visualize (and shape) the multiplicity of space-time dimensions typical of the urban experience of Douala, where people continuously move and image to move to an elsewhere (such as the invisible world of witchcraft, Europe or the home-village).Furthermore, they open new possibilities of living and conceptualizing the city that concretize what Douala could be in the future.As such, these movies are mirrors that reflect (upon) Douala although (or because) they “don’t seem to be made in Cameroon”.

Nomaduma Masilela / Columbia University

Set Setal’s Imaginaire

Meaning ‘be clean, make clean’ in Wolof, set setal was an urban movement led by the disenfranchised youth of Dakar to physically and metaphorically ‘cleanse’ Senegal of its many social and political ills. Between the years 1988 to 1991 youths of the neighborhoods organized community street cleanings and painted a cornucopia of murals and sculptures that served as visual loudspeakers for socio-political messages, histories, and mythologies. This paper will examine set setal’s engagement with urban Dakar space through a formal analysis of set setal murals, roundabouts, central squares, and statues, and by examining the ways in which they reconfigured the city space to better reflect the needs of those who used it. While set setal reflects effective Lefebvrian appropriation, it was the stories that artists actively spun about their individual works which helped construct the urban ‘imaginaire‘ of Dakar, which, in turn, reconfigured the city residents sense of self to better reflect the emerging city. These stories were shared within intimately within communities, and continued to be spun and expanded during interviews conducted. Using a combination of documentary photographs of set setal objects and interviews with set setal artists and cultural agents, this paper works to examine the ways that artists manipulate the narratives surrounding these objects; this reflects an understanding of the malleability of the the discourse surrounding art objects, and by association, the city.

Lanquetin Jean-Christophe / Collectif ScU2

Duconseille François / Collectif ScU2

Shifting Representations through Artistic Practices in Urban Contexts

Urban scénos are a process of drawing artistic practices in a city. They open a space and a time to artists from multiple horizons during a collective residency, in a specific urban environment, they live and work on site, in immersion. The fact of being there is an essential element of the project. Through that the dynamic of processes and experiences becomes possible.The key entry is the « horizontal city », the dynamics produced by inhabitants: daily practices, body – « body politics », « the deal », translations, theatricality, performativity, the game, the spectral, the informal. We will question how Urban Scenes participate alongside African artists in the collective dynamics to a transformation of the image and the challenges of certain neighborhoods and how its inhabitants perceive themselves. We are both witnesses and accomplices of these micro-mutations processes that fit into these urban spaces and the collective memory of the inhabitants. How do these artists position themselves in the field of contestations, resistances, revolts ; how do they play with the boundaries, the impossibilities ? What kind of collective actions, ways of transgression, forms of militantism they develop, how do they approach gender issues ? Wouldn’t they be occupying unprecedented spaces, discover singular forms, evoking for instance, the ‘non movements’, as Asef Bayat describe them, these ‘discrete’ forms of occupation of commons spaces.

Mokgotho Nare / University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Moiloa Molemo / Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA)

Corner Loving: Imagining a New Language for Black Love

It is difficult to speak about love, specifically romantic love, as an intellectual concept worthy of rigorous and critical engagement. This is largely due to a lack of suitable ways of speaking about love that might bring to the fore new or more nuanced understandings of our contemporary moment. In addition to introducing much needed narratives of black people in love to the current hegemony of hypersexuality, promiscuity and lovelessness associated with the black body – Corner loving – an exhibition by Johannesburg-based artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK, sought to effect shifts in ways of speaking about the concept of love. Collaborative and interdisciplinary, the project brought together a group of people engaging similar ideas, texts from archives as well as by contemporary writers, drawings and a lecture series. This article considers MADEYOULOOK’s ongoing interest in interdisciplinarity as a generative tool for knowledge production and its uncertainties about the ability
of singular strategies to fully express the multiple dimensions around such a complex subject. Corner loving exists as an intersection of texts and modes of working to develop a kind of Creole lexicon in order to articulate a new imaginary of black love.

Pesa Sello / Ntsoana Contemporary Dance theatre

Ouamba Andreya / Association 1er Temps

A City Looking for its Own Audience: Artists in Conversation

Through the observation of people, their rituals and activities and passers by in the city; through observing a specific area, walking the same area and mapping it in order to create relationships with people and participate in the activities it is possible to understand the subtleties of a city. Shifts occur and owners of the city abandon it – new members move in to the center and the old members who are pushed to the outskirts forge integration and multiculturalism . We witness the failure of multiculturalism. As an immigrant, is it possible to keep your identity in a foreign country? Post colonial cities have led to a redefinition of a city itself and the city has become wrestling platform for the old and the new. Contemporary society and traditional society are waging a battle with religion as a mediator of the two to create new forms. A changing city is finding new symbolism and meaning. Artistic practice plays a great role in bring to the fore the ongoing challenges faced in today’s shifting demographics as it creates a microcosm for observation. With our practice as artists and choreographers, based respectively in Dakar and Johannesburg, we would like to reflect on how our work engages with the complexities of a contemporary southern city, our approaches in relation to a context How our work enters in dialog and in confrontation with multiple representations of the city, participates of their emergence, or escapes, stays elusive.

Madeira-Santos Catarina / IMAF-EHESS

Pawnship in Angola: a long term approach (XVIIth-XXth centuries) /La mise en gage en Angola. Une analyse dans la longue durée (XVIIe-XXe siècles)

This paper discusses practices of and transformations in pawnship within African societies of Angola during the longue durée. Our approach will focus on the impact of the Atlantic slave trade and of the installation of a colonial system (especially the Regime do Idígenato) on this African servile status. Therefore, interfaces between different regimes of slavery, servitude and labor will be specially underlined. Case studies, in turn, will permit to illustrate these issues and, at the same time, highlight the role of time, space and gender variables in shaping a wide range of situations.
Cette communication interroge les pratiques de la mise en gage (penhor) et leurs transformations, dans les sociétés africaines qui ont été en contact, plus au moins direct, avec la colonie de l’Angola, entre le XVIIème et le XXème siècle. Il s’agit d’évaluer l’impact de la traite atlantique et de l’instauration d’un système colonial officiel (notamment le Regime do Indigenato) sur ce statut servile africain, aussi bien que de repérer les porosités entre différents régimes d’esclavage, de servitude et de travail. Les études de cas permettront d’illustrer ces processus et d’apprécier le rôle des variables temps, espace et genre, dans la configuration d’un large éventail de situations.

Sapede Thiago / EHESS

«Church slaves» (muleke) in the Kingdom of Kongo (XVIIIth century)/Les « esclaves de l’église » (muleke) au Kongo du XVIIIe siècle

This paper focuses on the muleke (also called “church slaves”) in the 18th century Kingdom of Kongo. The word nkele (sing. muleke) was used by the missionaries to describe servile church assistants of African origin who occupied the lowest level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This term in Kikongo originally designates a child (or a young person), as well as dependents in a general sense. A considerable number of sources and scholars have described the muleke simply as “slaves. But a deeper analysis enables us to uncover a more complex status of muleke. This contribution discuss the particulars of this type of slavery and explores its relations with political power and Catholicism.
On s’intéresse aux muleke (sing. nleke), dits « esclaves de l’église », au Royaume du Kongo au XVIIIe siècle. Le terme nleke désigne en kikongo un enfant (ou jeune), et d’une manière générale les dépendants. Il fut employé par des missionnaires pour décrire les assistants d’origine africaine de statut servile occupant la base de la hiérarchie ecclésiastique. Une partie considérable des sources et de l’historiographie les caractérise en tant qu’ «esclaves » ou « serfs », soumis aux missionnaires européens. Mais une analyse critique permet d’y repérer un statut plus complexe. Cette enquête discute les spécificités de ce type d’esclavage et ses rapports avec le pouvoir politique et le catholicisme.

Curto José C. / York University

Libertos, Labor and Colonial Expansion: Angola, c. 1854-1875/Libertos, Trabalho, e Expansão Colonial: Angola, c. 1854-1875

Between 1854 and 1875, over 60,500 individuals saw their status in colonial Angola transformed from slave to that of liberto (liberated slave). Imposed by a metropolitan government under international pressure to end the export slave trade from and slavery in Angola, this transition created a large pool of servile laborers at the disposal of the colonial state for deployment in various expansionist schemes. Our contribution analyses the making, exploitation, and resistance of this large servile labor force in the attempt to create a “new” Brazil in colonial Angola.
Entre 1854 e 1875, mais de 60.500 pessoas viram o seu estatuto em Angola colonial transformado de escravo para liberto. Imposta por um governo metropolitano sob pressão internacional para acabar com o comércio da exportação de escravos e a escravidão propriamente dita em Angola, esta transição criou um grande numero de trabalhadores servis à disposição do estado colonial para serem utilizados em vários esquemas expansionistas. Nossa contribuição analisa a criação, exploração e resistência deste grande força de trabalho servil na tentativa de criar um “novo” Brasil em Angola colonial.

Sebillote Marie / EHESS

Villages of Liberty in Angola (XIXth century)/Villages de liberté en Angola (XIXème)

The arrival and settlement of Spiritan catholic missionaries in Angola around 1870 was followed by the recruitment of children to be raised in the missions’ schools. This way missionaries intended to create « liberty villages », composed only of catholic families having gone to these schools. The recruitment of girls was based on the missionaries’ use of a local practice: matrimonial compensation, a kind of exchange that can be simplified with the mirror image of a dowry. Catholic missionaries in the area of Landâna in Angola used this system, as evidenced by the marriage contracts written by these missionaries in 1888 that I will present in this paper.
L’arrivée et l’installation des missionnaires spiritains catholiques en Angola dans les années 1870 s’accompagnent du recrutement d’enfants pour peupler les écoles construites dans les missions. Le but, à terme, est de créer des « villages de liberté », villages peuplés de familles catholiques ayant été éduquées dans ces écoles. Le recrutement se fonde, en ce qui concerne les filles, sur l’utilisation d’une pratique locale: la compensation matrimoniale. Les missionnaires catholiques dans la région de Landâna en Angola ont repris ce système de compensation matrimoniale à leur compte, comme le montrent des contrats de mariage écrits par ces missionnaires en 1888, étudiés dans cette communication.

Myers Garth / Trinity College

African Ideas of the Urban

Many cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are growing rapidly. Some patterns and processes of urbanization are familiar – they follow conventional expectations of urban theory, where industrialization and agglomeration have multiplier effects which draw rural population and growth adds to growth. But urbanization in the region appears to upend the rules in other cities which grow rapidly in population and area without formal economic growth. Rather than continuing to see African cities through colonialist theoretical lenses as cities that don’t work or aren’t right, scholars of African urban studies have begun to argue that new ideas of the urban are emerging in Africa of relevance to global urban studies worldwide. This essay explores concepts which emerge in the works of these African urbanists about African cities, in terms of their relevance to cities of the global North, and specifically cities of the US northeast. I use this reverse comparative device to suggest that city learning is a two-way street, and there is no a priori justification for that learning to only flow from the global North to cities of Africa. Such a rethinking of the direction of flow of ideas ought to form a crucial potential basis for decolonizing knowledge about cities in Africa.

MacGonagle Elizabeth / University of Kansas

Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism on Mozambique Island

Ilha de Mozambique, a maritime crossroads that became the capital of Portugal’s Indian Ocean empire, is a small island where memories of foreign encounters and histories of enslavement loom large. This paper examines legacies of the Portuguese colonial encounter within island spaces connected to the history of slavery and indentured labor. The imprint of colonial knowledge is both powerfully present and also quietly hidden. A history of violence and suffering looms behind the tall walls of the sixteenth-century Portuguese fortress and in a recent garden of memory created on the site of a former slave market. Mozambicans live amidst old Portuguese churches, colonial buildings, and statues of men like de Vasco de Gama and Luís Camões. How do these vestiges prompt visions of a romantic colonial narrative that overshadow a horrific history of violence and enslavement? Might the recent re-installment of something as symbolic as a statue of Vasco de Gama (removed after independence) signal a reckoning with a past that was perhaps too painful to examine and interrogate around the time of independence? Has a decolonization of historical knowledge occurred in Mozambique to unsettle the imprint of colonial power? Insights from tour guides and other local residents enhance arguments in this paper about how historians deal with ghosts of the past at profound sites of meaning where stories of colonization and liberation disrupt standard forms of knowledge shaped in the West.

Foley Ellen / Clark University

Disciplining Subjects: Sex Workers and Development Knowledge in Dakar, Senegal

This paper explores the ways in which public health and development frameworks—each with its own particular colonial genealogy—produce knowledge about sex worker subjects in Senegal. This population, and surveillance of it, is of key significance to Senegal’s successful HIV/AIDS prevention strategies. Yet in order to maintain this success, the state must create a docile population of known subjects upon whom it can intervene. In this paper I present my analysis of how socio-medical approaches to prostitution in Senegal produce both opportunities and dilemmas for decolonizing knowledge production. I examine the biopolitics of the state system for registering and tracking sex workers, and then I explore how Dakar-based sex workers manage their social, legal, and economic marginality. While registering as a legal sex worker affords women access to development resources and a degree of economic stability, it also means embracing new social roles and often internalizing and reproducing the stigma associated with prostitution. What might decolonizing knowledge production about sex, gender, and prostitution look like in this setting, and does anthropologically-informed ethnography have the tools to do so?

Baptista João Afonso / University of Hamburg

Eco(il)logical Knowledge: Sensorial Reasoning and the Role of Representations in Angola

In my presentation, I analyze what counts as legitimate ecological knowledge in Angola. In particular, I discuss the relations people have with the forests and how the character of such relations is central in the production and institutional validation of forest knowledge in the country. Drawing on four years of intermittent ethnographic fieldwork with local forest dwellers in rural Angola, I address the challenge of placing sensing as constitutive of reason. This, in turn, calls for a shift in the dominant epistemological thought and North Atlantic modern tendency to overprize only the disembodied, calculable, and representable. Concretely, by contrasting situated corporeal ways of knowing with universalized disembodied knowledge from development, scientific, and political fields, I hope to contribute for the task of “decolonizing disciplinary knowledge” in Africa. Finally, I intend to expose the underlined and concrete tactics of geographical appropriation and local residents’ marginalization that are inherent in the expansion of technoscientific ecological knowledge in Angola.

Mercer Claire / London School of Economics

Building Suburbia? The Middle Class and Urban-Rural Relations in Dar es Salaam

This paper examines the social life of the new suburbs emerging on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Despite the interest in the form and nature of ‘global suburbs’, African suburbs have received little attention to date. This is perhaps because the notion of ‘the suburb’ jars with the established social scientific lenses through which African cities are analysed, such as the slum and the peri-urban fringe. These categories seem far from the Anglo-American model of the suburb that came to dominate in the mid-20th century, which characterised the suburb as a uniform low-density residential space where the car-dependent, conservative middle classes congregated.
Drawing on interviews with suburban house-builders in Dar es Salaam, the paper considers the ways in which these new suburbs are both the same as the putative Anglo-American suburban ‘model’ – low-density residential spaces on the edge of the city – but also different in significant ways. These are not copies of suburban forms from elsewhere. Architecturally they are dominated by the suburban bungalow, but here they are built with different materials and architectural features. Socially the new suburbs are dominated by the middle classes, but there are also pockets of mixed housing and other communities who also live there. Dissimilarities arise from the specificities of African cities, which include the dynamics of urban-rural migration, the propensity to self-build, and pervasive informality and inequality.

Grant Richard / University of Miami

The Global Transformation of Materials and the Emergence of Informal ‘Urban Mining’ in Accra, Ghana

The narrative on global shipments of used electronic devices to Africa is incomplete. Overwhelmingly, the literature focuses on end-of-life device dumping, and health and environmental hazards for local populations. Based on fieldwork in Accra, Ghana with e-waste processors, scrap recyclers and exporters, local industries and the Ghana Customs, Excise and Preventive Service officials as well as analyzing customs trade data, we document e-waste processing and the extraction, sorting and segregation of metals and the amalgamation of various content for local industries as well as export. We uncover the development of informal urban mining of valuable metals from used electronics, a phenomenon that call into question conventional spatial oppositions of city-mine, consumption-production, and waste and resource. Urban mining is an important heuristic concept for understanding Accra’s circuitry within global political economy, and this conceptualization can be deployed in policy context
s to create conditions for improving the livelihoods of informal e-waste workers in Ghana and elsewhere.

Lopes dos Santos Kauê / University of Sao Paulo

A globalização e o mapa do lixo eletrônico na África

O fluxo de lixo eletrônico dos países desenvolvidos para os países subdesenvolvidos tem se tornado cada vez mais intenso nos últimos anos. Mesmo com os esforços internacionais para conter esse fluxo – Convenção da Basiléia (1989), Bamako (1991) e Estocolmo (2001) – o lixo continua a chegar em cidades africanas etiquetados como “material de segunda mão”, com o suposto objetivo de integrar as populações de baixa renda às tecnologias informacionais. O presente artigo pretende fazer um mapeamento global desses fluxos de lixo eletrônico, levando em consideração os portos de onde partem, as rotas e os portos onde chegam e a localização dos lixões dentro das cidades africanas em questão. Além disso, buscaremos analisar o destino e as transformações pelas quais essa material passa nas economias urbanas desse continente.

Urselli Raffaele / Università degli studi di Napoli ‘L’Orinetale’

Waste in Africa: Landfills, Traffics and Second Hand Trade

The phenomenon of international trafficking of waste (not only electronic but also dangerous and special) is nowdays one of the most glaring and materially tangible contradictions of capitalism. High disposal costs and growing environmental demands determine the need, mainly for the Western world, to export the waste in the global South to contain the economic and environmental costs. Over the African continent, since the eighties, this traffic has intensified in a so violent manner to necessitate arrangements and agreements to limit the cross-border movement. However, the category of ‘waste’ has been manipulated in such a way as to transform the garbage in ‘development aid'; the second hand goods have become so constitutive of the african material cultures. In this paper I analyze the extraordinary dynamism that today lives the waste sector in the african continent through a case study on Dakar landfill. While the population and exploitation of landfills in the major African
cities spread almost entirely through the subaltern plots of the informal sector, on the other hand this ‘economy of waste’ contributes to the insertion of the continent into the international system through the raw materials trade (mainly India, China, Korea, Pakistan, Brazil) and the production of new spaces for capitalism.

Kochore Hassan / National Museums of Kenya

The Road to Kenya: The Visions of a Nation and Landscape of Development and Modernity in Northern Kenya

A fundamental change is taking place in the economic and political geography of Kenya. The Northern territory, previously excluded from national development, has been thrust into the center of national development planning. The Vision 2030 economic blueprint and the related discourses about developing the North has become a tool for the Kenyan state to think about and shape the future. In essence, the region has become a site of discussion of development and change and as such an important ‘imaginary landscape’. This paper takes the case study of the under-construction Isiolo-Moyale road (a key project of Vision 2030) as a lens through which to understand how these projects are being perceived and contested on the ground in Northern Kenya. The paper will explore ways through which the residents of Marsabit are making sense and locating themselves within this changing physical and political landscape. I argue that the road in many ways maps out the people’s experience of the post-colony onto the landscape, constructing it as a site of memory, a space for the articulation of history and change.

Elliott Hannah / University of Copenhagen

Plots and Progress: The Coming of Town and an Economy of Anticipation at the Gateway to Kenya’s ‘New Frontier’

In spite of its geographical positioning at the centre of Kenya, Isiolo has historically been imagined as a border town to a land beyond, the beginning and end of a ‘Kenya B’. But in recent years Isiolo has been rebranded as the gateway to a ‘new frontier’ through which northern Kenya is reimagined as a place of economic possibility and potential to be ‘opened up’ through the government’s ‘Vision 2030’ blueprint. While few of the planned development projects have yet manifested in Isiolo, expectations of them are altering the landscape around the edges of the town as the price of land rises and areas that were formerly settled and grazed in customary ways are being subdivided and fenced as plots. This paper examines the everyday manifestations of Vision 2030 plans, focusing on plots and an economy of anticipation that is captured within them. Framing national ‘new frontier’ discourses as a continuation of the north’s historical relationship with a ‘Kenya proper’ rather than a break with the past, it seeks to show how particular ideas of development, progress and the future that development plans (re)evoke are permeating and reconfiguring in everyday life in Isiolo. While plots hold the potential for ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’, the morality of the money they produce is contested, rendering them capable of generating inverse forms of development as residents risk ‘displacement by money’ and exclusion from the city of the future.

Buffavand Lucie / Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

‘The Land Does not Like Them’: Contesting Government’s Land Grab in Cosmological Terms in Bodi, South-West Ethiopia

The lower Omo River Valley in South-West Ethiopia is being radically transformed as the state implements a sugar-cane plantation of huge proportions. This paper explores the ways the Bodi, a group of agro-pastoralists impacted by the scheme, turn to their cosmology in order to comprehend the changes which threaten their livelihood and to perpetuate a sense of their legitimate belonging to the land. For the governmental elite, the land along the banks of the Omo is ‘empty’; they deem industrialized agriculture as the only proper way to extract resources from the region. The Bodi people, who have settled according to the government’s plan to cultivate their own crop in irrigated fields, have experienced a feeling of alienation: the state-designed fields are not a place for living, only a place of work. The Bodi have rituals related to cattle herding and cultivation; they propitiate the ‘owners’ of the land, the mythical creatures that insure prosperity or provoke disasters. For the Bodi, the careless approach of the government has upset the owners of the land. They see the consequences of this in the social sphere: conflicts between the locals and migrant workers or military escalate. This paper examines the Bodi’s discursive references to the ‘owners’ of the land and to the belief that the latter will ultimately restore the situation in their favour as forms of empowerment.

Greiner Clemens / University of Cologne

Mueller-Mahn Detlef / University of Bonn

Future-making between conservation, intensification and contestation: land-use change, fragmentation and conflict in East Pokot, Kenya

Land-use and livelihood patterns in Eastern African drylands have changed tremendously in recent decades. Ethnographic data from East Pokot in Kenya’s Baringo area illustrate these changes and point to relevant drivers. First, population growth, sedentarization and the spread of rain-fed crop cultivation, have led to increasing shortages of arable land and to processes of land-use intensification. Second, the implementation of wildlife conservation projects. Thirdly, increasing violent conflicts with neighboring pastoralists over territorial boundaries and access to natural resources, fuelled by successful oil-prospecting missions, rumours of unexplored mineral deposits and a range of proposed geothermal power plants. These processes – conservation, intensification and increasing contestation of borderlands – have led to a profound fragmentation and contraction of the former commons and to a rapid demise of customary tenure arrangements. While Pokot society only begins to develop more consistent relations to bounded territories, conflicts around access to and control over land have intensified dramatically. The paper examines the changes in East Pokot in relation to Appadurai´s theoretical reflections on “practices of future-making”, in order to discuss how practices of imagination, aspiration and anticipation of “nature” influence the reconfiguration of landscapes in Africa.

Cormack Zoe / The Open University

Culture as resistance: ‘bio-cultural’ activism in northern Kenya

From oil exploration, new cities and the planned LAPSSET corridor that will dissect pastoral grazing lands, extensive transformations of the landscape are anticipated in northern Kenya. Amidst the uncertainty of this development boom, spaces are being forged from which to contest the far-reaching implications of these developments on pastoralist communities.
Much anxiety about the future trajectory of the region centres on the loss of traditional livelihoods and the loss of pastoralist heritage. In this context heritage is emerging as one lever of resistance and negotiating change. In particular, international and civil society actors in northern Kenya are increasingly deploying the idea that the environment and natural heritage is at least partially mediated through culture. This paper will discuss the use of ‘bio-cultural protocols’ that are currently being developed in Isiolo County. These are instruments that are intended to enshrine the legal basis for customary land tenure and pastoralism as a cultural right and sustainable environmental practice. Attempts to promote ‘bio-cultural’ heritage show how heritage more broadly is becoming a salient category through which to negotiate and contest shifting imaginaries of nature.

Marijnen Esther / Institute for European Studies, Free University Brussels

Militarisation of nature conservation, daily practices and symbolic violence: the case of conflict in the Virunga National Park, DR Congo

This paper examines how the militarisation of nature conservation practices influence the interaction between guards of protected areas and their neighbouring communities in conflict-affected areas. The paper is based on an in-depth analysis of the creation of a ‘new security service’ to protect the Virunga National Park in north-Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The current management of the park is increasingly reinforcing the boundaries of the park and expulses people living ‘illegally’ in the park. The expulsions are executed by mixed-brigades of guards of the park and soldiers of the Congolese army. They also conduct joint patrols. It is argued in the paper that the current militarisation is causing increasingly open confrontations between population and the park guards. However, these conflicts are not ‘new’ but were rather latent before. Analysing the violent interactions between the guards and population through Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, parallels are drawn between the way the park was created and managed under Belgium colonial rule and how the current management of the park enforces its authority over the territory of the park by applying militarised strategies. In the existing literature on the Virunga National Park the destructive impact of armed conflict upon the environment and wildlife is often emphasised, however, in this paper the emphasis lies on the dialectical relation between the Virunga National Park and conflict.

Schroeder Richard / Rutgers University

Remote Control: Conservation Surveillance and Technologies of Power

Power is increasingly being deployed by well-placed conservation actors over species and spaces of concern through sophisticated – in many cases modified military – technologies which seek to manage, govern, and produce knowledge about habitats and the bodies of non-human subjects; for example, see the use of conservation drones, camera traps, real-time monitoring, satellite based remote sensing platforms, microphones/bioacoustic sensors, critter cams, radar applications, subcutaneous internal monitoring, and dna forensic sampling. Additionally, computers running state-of-the-art programs, complicated algorithms, and ecological models, are increasingly being called upon in conservation for predictive purposes, in effect distancing researcher from subject as the latter are made virtual objects of management. In my presentation, I will review technologies being deployed at the frontiers of conservation, and I will discuss the meaning of these changes for how researchers relate to non-human species. I will analyze how and where power is expressed through these new techniques, and consider potential consequences of such modes of governance for both humans and non-humans.

Connor Teresa / University of Fort Hare

Conserved spaces, ancestral places: conservation. history and identity among farm labourers in the Sundays River Valley, South Africa

Combining a rich ethnography with social and political history, this book examines 300 years of social conflict over land in the frontier-like Sundays River Valley, the scene of multiple displacements and the location of the extended Addo Elephant National Park. Conserved Spaces, Ancestral Places tells how the historical relationships among farm workers, owners and conservationists have produced a dynamic, uniquely hybrid zone”. The book seeks to contribute to four overlapping themes, and these include; (a) the political ecology of conservation and protected areas (b) the agrarian history of South Africa and the Eastern Cape, (c) the geography and anthropology of space, place and identity, and (d) applied anthropology and population displacement. Overall, the book argues that despite the gains offered to residents around new conservation zones in South Africa, particularly through models of co-management, the question remains whether people have really benefited through their continued displacement and exclusion from reserves. William Beinart has written that the “book is simultaneously a major contribution to debates about conservation and a vivid and eye opening discussion of rural society”.

Mangin Thimothy / New York University

Realité: Politics and Islam in Senegalese Hip Hop

Recent scholarship interrogating hip hop in West Africa has tended to focus on the political and entrepreneurial agency of rappers and their fans through the analysis of lyrics and representations of Black Atlantic imaginaries. Less attention has been played to how the sound used in live performances and recordings articulates social change and agency for the invisible or socially marginalized.
This paper argues that the sound or the sono of Senegalese hip hop articulates a ?reality” derived from an acoustemology informed by a long history of pan-Africanism, borrowing of foreign musics (African diasporic and Middle Eastern), and creative use of indigenous practices. This paper analyzes the 2000 recording and performance of Politichien by the underground rap groups in Dakar, Senegal. I focus on the rap group WA-BMG-44 whose sytle of ji-hard-kor critiqued urban malaise and corruption between ?false? muslim leaders, buisnessmen, and politicians. I will show how WA-BMG-44 weaved political agency derived from African American hip hop with the non-violent resistance of local black Sufi practices in nuanced ways that gave voice to Senegal?s marginalized denizens and set the foundation for future hip hop political activism.

Simran Singh / Royal Holloway, University of London

Popular Music as Civil Society: Locating the political in Hiphop performance in Uganda

This paper investigates urban popular music and/as civil society in Uganda.
Ethnographies of Hiphop performances including the B-Global Hip Hop Summit are juxtaposed with phenomenological narratives of musicians. A critical analysis through perspectives from Western civil society, civil society in Africa and discussions on ?uncivil? society, segregates music first, as a medium of resilience, where issues are articulated on the basis of shared interests and collaborative action for the betterment of society; second, as a site of insurgency, identified by subversion and resistance to inadequacies of the state, revealing shared spaces that integrate both qualities.
Hiphop explicitly discusses social and political issues; performance provides a discursive space for this expression, facilitating interactions and negotiations with broader social contexts, through identity, community and collective action, all concerns of civil society. Uganda is an authoritarian state; engagement with political issues often occurs through means separate from state institutions, in informal spaces beyond the states? purview, suggesting that popular music could function as a form of political civil society.
This paper presents an insight into a vibrant popular musical culture. It raises questions about the political role of music in authoritarian states and contributes to debates on civil society in Africa, with the aim to strengthen initiatives that place music as a transformational tool.

Monteiro Eduardo Rangel / Universidade do Rio de Janeiro

Ladja and Laamb ? musical fights

A Ladja é uma dança de combate embalada pelo canto e o toque do tambor, um transbordamento do Laamb – tradicional luta senagalesa, que mantem viva a cultura da diáspora africana na Martinica. Trata-se de um ato nascido na resistência à escravidão – uma ação performática do corpo que vibra ao toque da pele sonora do tambores, que não se deixa domesticar pelo processo de ocidentalização, na trama sócio-política desta comunidade caribenha.
A Martinica é um estado ultramar Francês, uma ilha que já passou por violentas erupções vulcânicas e políticas, um centro de resistência cultural, onde importantes pensadores como Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, René Ménil e Édouard Glissant, são fundamentais no resgate da memória, e formação de uma consciência crítica local, que se posiciona diante da tensão histórica gerada a partir da diáspora africana. Realidade esta em que a Ladja se apresenta como uma potente metáfora deste pensamento.
O objetivo deste estudo é traçar paralelos entre a Ladja da Martinica e o Laamb do Senegal, pensar como estas danças de combate compactuam com o ato de tomar posição diante do real através do poder da música e do corpo, no complexo processo de transmissão de tradições africanas na contemporaneidade. A Ladja e o Laamb são o grito, o canto, o toque do tambor que dá ritmo à revolução que se luta dançando.

Lindolfo João / Pontefícia Universidade de São Paulo

Songs for Freedom : Griots do terceiro milênio- Das proibições às apropriações

A Diáspora Africana que espalhou o negro pelo mundo para ser explorado na condição de escravo, muito embora carregasse uma inexorável capacidade de destruição de vidas e almas, acabou por disseminar também a cultura, a visão de mundo, forma de contato com o cosmo, e a música que constava de sua bagagem.
Os gêneros musicais originados afro brasileiros, após o período de marginalização e/ou proibição, acabaram por serem abordados pela chamada indústria cultural que, em sua inexorável ânsia por dividendos, imprime a sua capacidade de domesticação de conteúdos visando à maior aceitação pelo público e, consequentemente, um significativo alcance do “produto”.
Assim foi com o samba, que se tornou pagode, o samba reggae ijexá, que se transformou em axé music, a música caipira que se modificou para sertanejo universitário, o forró, agora forró universitário, o funk carioca, entre outros.
Entretanto, há o pitoresco caso do rap. O rap produzido nos EUAs, encontra-se repleto de ostentação e apelo sexual em suas letras. Já o rap brasileiro e o rap francês, por não se submeterem a muitas concessões, permanecem se configurando em discurso de oposição da juventude das metrópoles.
Teria esse gênero musical a capacidade de, na atualidade, apesar de não passar pelos cânones acadêmicos, influenciar positivamente nas trajetórias de alguns jovens fadados a um destino funesto? E alteraria sua percepção sobre as relações sociais e sua possibilidade de crítica e ação quotidiana?

Pelckmans Lotte / Danish Institute for International Studies

Les stratégies du Mouvement Bellah pour la Justice et l’Equité au Nord Mali (MBJEN) et de TEMEDT

On observe des changements importants liés aux revendications identitaires des descendants d’esclaves en Afrique de l’ouest. L’apparition simultanée de nouveaux mouvements anti-esclavagistes démontre que la question de l’esclavage et de ses séquelles connaît actuellement une forte politisation, allant de pair avec une médiatisation inédite dans les espaces publics (inter-)nationaux. Dans cette présentation, j’envisage la crise profonde qu’a connu le Mali depuis 2012 comme une opportunité pour les groupes subalternes, tels que les groupes d’origine servile, pour faire entendre leurs voix dans les espaces publics. Je m’intéresse plus précisément aux fondateurs de deux mouvements disctincts: le Mouvement Bellah pour la Justice et l’Equité au Nord Mali (MBJEN) qui a émergé en aout 2012 et TEMEDT créé en 2006. Ma présentation s’appuiera sur des entretiens filmés avec des leaders du MBJEN et se focalisera sur les différences d’opinion, d’approche et de stratégies entre MBJEN et TEMEDT. Je montrerai comment les activistes du MBJEN ont saisi l’opportunité de la crise malienne pour se rendre visibles sur la scène publique nationale.

Gaasholt Ole Martin / Nordic Africa Institute

Ambivalence in Northern Mali: The inevitability of relating to the Malian state

When employing the history of Northern Mali for purposes of reconciliation or future political solutions, one feature merits further attention. In rapidly changing conflict situations, no one single position reflects a common preference. Furthermore, people have confronted the Malian state in one conflict, to become absorbed into its administrative or armed branches and side with it in a later conflict. The converse has also happened, while some people have modified their position at least once during a conflict. In spite of tactical choices, such changes are reflected in depictions of the sequence of conflicts occurring in Northern Mali. People’s experience of conflict, as it informs and can be employed for the purpose of historical accounts, thus gives direct expression to the ambiguous and changing relationship between the Malian state and Northern Mali. By bringing out the possibility and common practice of occupying changing positions, of entertaining conflicting relations not just to the other ‘side’ of a conflict, but to the often problematic state presence in Northern Mali, historical material can both elucidate the nuances and complex nature of political positions and provide scope for inclusive ways in which to envision political and social relations in Northern Mali.

Konaré Dougoukolo Alpha Oumar / Independent Researcher

Colère et Haine au Mali : de la Légitimité émotionnelle de l’engagement militant.

Nous voulons attirer l’attention sur l’importance des expériences émotionnelles des relations avec l’Etat exprimées dans les témoignages des personnes impliquées dans les conflits identitaires au Mali : ces expériences façonnent les prises de postions futures. La colère et la haine semblent alors des modalités de réaction à la violence ressentie. A travers des entretiens avec des personnes affiliées aux rébellions séparatistes maliennes, aux milices d’auto-défense, et à l’armée malienne, le sens de l’engagement de chacun est exploré. On analysera également les motivations personnelles, l’histoire de vie, le lien affectif aux idéologies et aux prises de positions. Dans cette recherche, le chercheur développe le postulat que la lutte politique est une réponse aux émotions vécues par les protagonistes, qui y trouvent leur solution personnelle. Les entretiens, les échanges épistolaires, les remembrances partagées avec le clinicien chercheur – impliqué lui aussi en tant que témoin et acteur de la récente crise malienne – sont des moments d’introspection, pour donner sens à des affects auxquels le système politique ne paraît pas toujours en mesure de trouver une réaction appropriée. Ce travail s’inscrit de manière active comme une proposition de discussion sur la reconnaissance et le travail de mémoire, dans les revendications nationales au Mali. Les alternances dans les perspectives vont dans le sens de la recherche d’empathie, de réconciliation.

Puigserver Blasco Xavier / Université de Barcelone

Un rapprochement, politique et social, de caractère endogène sur des peuples touareg de l’Azawad pour comprendre la révolte touareg de 2012 et la crise politique dans la République du Mali

La plupart des lignes de recherche qui examine les différents soulèvements armés touaregs qui ont eu lieu au Mali depuis 1963 se réfèrent à des facteurs géostratégies, politiques et économiques de nature mondiale ou sous-régional, ou les facteurs climatiques qui se sont produits dans cette région pour expliquer et argumenter l’inconfort des peuples touaregs et des révoltes organisées par ses combattants. Sans aucun doute tous ces facteurs que nous venons de nommer sont des facteurs à considérer pour expliquer les soulèvements armés touaregs, mais dans ce travail nous mettrons l’accent dans les facteurs sociales et politiques plus endogènes et caractéristiques des communautés touaregs. Développer un travail méthodologique sous le prisme de Longue Durée est particulièrement intéressant pour noter comme la colonisation française a influencé les différentes communautés touaregs, favorisant certains groupes au détriment d’autres, ça c’est le cas du groupe tuareg Kel Adagh qui finira par être le protagoniste de tous les affrontements armés entre cette groupe tuareg et les différents régimes et gouvernements soudanais après l’indépendance de l’ex-colonie du Soudan français et jusqu’aujourd’hui. Identifier qui sont des protagonistes tuareg de cet révoltes et comprendre quelles sont les raisons et leurs revendications politiques au sein de la confédération Kel Adagh nous aideront à mieux comprendre la crise politique de la République du Mali depuis 2012.

Dobronravin Nikolai / St. Petersburg State University

Suggesting a comparative view, starting from the colonial transformation of territories and “tribes” , trying to look at Azawad as one of the postcolonial cases of state creation as a result of external threat/shocks

In the Malian and wider African context, the paper examines the convoluted relations between the colonial conceptualizations of various ethnic groups as “administrative” tribes and the post-colonial attempts by some political movements at creating new territorial states. Such attempts have routinely been treated by the affected states as secessionist. However, “secession” or “separatism” was not part of such movements’ political discourse. The use of the terms by the “legitimate” postcolonial state practically pushed its victims to adopt the idea, re-conceptualizing it as the restoration of a previous sovereignty (typical of the pan-Amazigh and some other postcolonial movements). The paper argues that the concept of runaway statehood is applicable to the ongoing state-making in North Mali under the name “Azawad”, whose supporters seek independence or autonomy from Mali. Differences between the state of Azawad (as proclaimed in 2012) and various “Islamist” entities in the Sahara and Sahel are discussed. Special attention is paid to the interpretation of statehood and sovereignty as represented in various declarations of independence. The paper suggests that the weakness of Azawad as a political entity does not preclude it from potential consolidation.

Capitant Sylvie / IEDES-UMR 201, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

La rhétorique du boom minier comme paravent des conflictualités mais aussi comme facteur d’encouragement d’une « citoyenneté insurgée ». Réflexions sur le Burkina Faso

Le secteur extractif est présenté en Afrique depuis 5 ans comme le « moteur » de la croissance susceptible de transformer les Etats concernés en «Émergents ». Cette rhétorique de « boom minier », véhicule le cadrage normatif suivant : le secteur extractif industriel représente une  opportunité unique pour le pays ; des efforts d’encadrement, de régulation et de transparence restent nécessaires mais le secteur est utile; la modalité industrielle de l’extraction est valorisée par rapport à celle de l’orpaillage associé au désordre, à la violence, à la dégradation des mœurs et à la pollution. 

Or, ce discours dominant dissimule, fait « paravent », aux  enjeux conflictuels qui animent le secteur extractif (exploitation industrielle essentiellement étrangère, faible redevablilité environnementale des acteurs sur le long terme, profitabilité différentielle pour les acteurs locaux, faible contrôle citoyen et local, inégalité de répartition des bénéfices, tensions foncières). Enfin, cette déconnection de l’espace du discours et de l’espace des mobilisations conduit  à radicaliser ces dernières et à faire émerger « une citoyenneté insurgée »  (J . Holston). 
Cette communication entend rendre compte des mécanismes de la fabrication de la rhétorique du boom minier par une analyse des discours et des médias burkinabè. Il entend dans un deuxième temps s’appuyer sur une recherche de terrain en cours pour documenter les ressources de cette citoyenneté insurgée observée aujourd’hui au Faso

Magrin Géraud / Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

van Vliet Geert / CIRAD

Les arènes de la régulation environnementale du secteur pétrolier : à propos des projets chinois au Sahel central (Tchad, Niger)

La géopolitique du pétrole s’intéresse aux jeux d’acteurs autour de l’accès aux ressources et à leur désenclavement. Nous voudrions ici, à partir de l’histoire récente de la China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) au Sahel central (Tchad, Niger, 2009-2014), questionner les rapports de pouvoir sous-jacents à la régulation environnementale. Celle-ci est habituellement présentée comme une affaire technique. Nous voudrions éprouver l’hypothèse selon laquelle elle constitue aussi un enjeu de pouvoir, dont l’utilisation par différents acteurs (Etats africains, compagnies pétrolières, mais aussi Banque mondiale, société civile et populations riveraines) reflète l’asymétrie dynamique de leurs relations. 
Nous éprouverons cette hypothèse en articulant des réflexions sur (i) les implications environnementales du projet Exxon Doba impliquant la Banque mondiale sur la connexion des champs de pétrole de la CNPC au Niger et au Tchad avec le système d’exportation Doba Kribi ; (ii) la manière dont un problème de gestion de boues de forage au Tchad, soulevé par les populations riveraines et une ONG, a été utilisé par le gouvernement dans le cadre de négociations avec la CNPC portant sur le partage de la rente (iii) les enjeux de la mise en place simultanée, au Niger, d’une aire protégée, la Réserve nationale du Termit Tin Touma (RNTT), appuyée par des ONG, et des champs de pétrole du bloc d’Agadem exploités par la CNPC, partiellement superposés.

Yenshu Vubo Emmanuel / University of Buea Cameroon

Reclaiming an Elusive Homeland:  Resistance to the Re-Alienation of Restituted Lands in Buea (Mount Cameroon Region), Cameroon

The lower eastern slopes of the Mount Cameroon Region offer a singular and unique case of the peaceful but piecemeal restitution of lands once forcefully appropriated by one of Cameroon’s former colonizers, put into plantation agriculture, subsequently into a public utility firm under UN trusteeship and mandate, and finally becoming, a parastatal company at independence. The long struggle for the restitution of these lands starting in the late 1940s, and articulated through a local people’s land claims committee, has gone through several phases till the state of Cameroon began to return parts of these lands to local communities in the 2000s. This process has witnessed a number of abuses among which are inequality and inequities in distribution, the re-alienation of lands by a new class of land speculators (including chiefs), the illegal re-appropriation of land portions by corrupt local administrators and the enrichment of a minority to the exclusion of a substantial proportion of local peoples. These developments have ushered into new forms of resistance that recall earlier or parallel struggles although the real nature of the claims, their relation to other initiatives (present or earlier) and their potentials or outcomes are still to be evaluated. Does this constitute a last voice by local peoples to by count in their own affairs or a weak, isolated struggle with little hopes of success? These and other related issues constitute the subject matter of this contribution.

Schlimmer Sina / LAM, Sciences Po Bordeaux

Administrative strategies and multi-level decision-making in Tanzania: an unknown form of resistance towards land acquisitions

The recent wave of investment in land and natural resources of development countries has attracted the attention of media, international organisations and researchers. The question of local responses towards these projects is considered as one of the central issues in the land grabbing debate (Borras et al. 2011 ; Schneider, 2011 ; Adnan, 2013). Several authors have analyzed the struggles of peasants and local communities as one of the central forms of resistance against the large-scale land deals (Banerjee, 2006 ; Greco, 2012). However, few contributions have focused on the state structures of the local target countries as a possible space of opposition towards the interests of incoming investors. Using the example of land deals in Tanzania, the aim of this proposal is to emphasize the strategies of local state actors and the bureaucratic rules that shape the negotiation of the investment projects. The empirical data of my field research has shown that the Tanzanian state (bureaucratic and administrative actors, politicians, the Tanzania Investment Centre) seems to be omnipresent in the various negotiation processes. According to the investment project we can observe changing configurations of actors and rules which can hinder the bargaining progress. By studying these interactions, interests and strategies of a variety of stakeholders through the lens of policy analysis, I will shed light on state activity as a rather unknown form of resistance against land acquisitions.

Lunacek Sarah / University of Ljubljana

Contradictions of “corporate social responsibility”: what about the nomads?

The rise in uranium prices at the beginning of a new millennium made possible for then president of Niger to sell the concessions for exploration and mining not only to more than 3 decades present French company AREVA (COGEMA) but also to Chinese and other companies. Great part of concessions is covering a vast land that nomads use in their seasonal migration to salty pastures. To Tuareg and to Fulani pastoral nomads from southern parts of the country those salty pastures are crucial for survival of their stock, and therefore to survival of humans. As in other parts of Africa is the case of nomads, this land officially doesn’t belong to them, so they do not have control over its use. A Tuareg rebellion in 2007 addressed issues of demanding of companies to give something back in the region and take account of local populations, including nomads.  Hostages were taken also later on to press on mining companies. While Chinese mining companies doesn’t seem to put much attention to
environmental issues, AREVA is going in line with ‘corporate social responsibility’ exposing publicly their seeming interest in well being of population and supporting development projects in the region. But among individual schooled Tuareg, gardeners and nomads not necessarily the same strategies and discourses about future good life are at stake. The projects don’t really take into account different aspirations of nomads themselves. Also those causes of problems deriving from mining are not addressed.

Brunet- La Ruche Bénédicte / FRAMESPA, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès

From “police rounds” to the court: Negation and uses of political revolt through its repression in Dahomey (1894-1940)

Cette communication a pour objet de présenter l’évolution des modes de répression des révoltes dans une colonie d’Afrique occidentale, le Dahomey, de 1894 à 1940. Il s’agit aussi de saisir la manière dont les auteurs de ces actes sont considérés et sanctionnés par les tribunaux et la façon dont ils se présentent et peuvent utiliser l’arme judiciaire pour contester le système répressif.
Le gouvernement colonial recourt aux tournées de police et à l’indigénat pour réprimer les rébellions jusqu’aux années 1910. Des réglementations de plus en plus nombreuses sanctionnent alors les atteintes à l’autorité publique devant les tribunaux, marquant une judiciarisation de la répression des atteintes à l’ordre colonial pendant l’entre-deux-guerres. Les tribunaux qui jugent ces affaires dénient la nature politique des actes de révolte, en les considérant comme des intérêts catégoriels par lesquels notables ou lettrés cherchent à asseoir leur pouvoir. L’incapacité politique présumée de la population colonisée telle qu’elle ressort des jugements s’accentue à l’égard des femmes, qui ne peuvent être pensées comme actrices dans les révoltes même lorsqu’elles en sont à l’origine. Les auteurs d’atteintes à l’autorité se défendent et sont jugés de manière différenciée selon qu’ils sont déférés devant les tribun aux indigènes ou français, le renvoi devant les juridictions françaises permettant aux prévenus d’utiliser la scène judiciaire pour contester le processus pénal colonial.

Piret Bérengère / Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles

le Polain Pascaline / Université Saint-Louis- Bruxelles

Men dedicated to supply the shortage of means. The small justice and the small judges of the Belgian Congo (1908-1960).

Depuis une dizaine d’années, la mise en valeur de la justice coloniale et la prise en considération de l’expérience de la justice à travers ses acteurs nous conduisent à écarter la présentation traditionnelle du système judiciaire du Congo belge. Elle organise les institutions de manière duale, opposant les juridictions d’essence européenne aux juridictions dites indigènes ou opposant celles réservées aux justiciables africains à celles dévolues aux justiciables européens. Si ces distinctions sont opérantes en théorie, la pratique fait ressortir d’importantes divergences entre les juridictions traditionnellement contenues sous l’étiquette « justice européenne ». Le profil des juges, leurs missions et leur pratique de la justice sont autant d’éléments qui justifient l’extraction de certains tribunaux de cette classe et permettent la création d’un nouvel ensemble. Celui-ci répond à la logique de «petite justice» telle que développée par B. Durand permettant de garantir l’application du droit colonial et la protection des justiciables. Les juridictions relevant de la petite justice sont créées dans le but de rendre une justice rapide et proche des justiciables. Les juges qui les président sont d’ailleurs des agents administratifs du ressort, investis de fonctions judiciaires. Leur activité dense témoigne de leur importance dans l’administration de la justice au sein de laquelle elles servent de charnière entre les juridictions coutumières et celles relevant de la haute justice.

Abwa Daniel / Université de Yaoundé I

Le législatif au secours de l’administration coloniale: les cas de la révolte des population Yevol (1928) et l’affaire Um Nyobe-Gelis (1955)

Au Cameroun, territoire sous mandat français (1916-1945) et sous tutelle française (1945-1960), il y a eu plusieurs cas de collision entre le pouvoir législatif et l’administration coloniale. Généralement, c’est le législatif qui vient au secours de l’administration coloniale par une parodie de justice devant la conforter dans sa gestion des populations idigènes. Nous avons choisi deux cas qui illustres parfaitement deux types de soutien. Dans le premier cas, il s’agit d’une population qui se révolte contre les exactions de son chef de canton, Edjoa Mvondo désigné par l’administration coloniale. Outrée par ces exactions, cette population saisit le procureur de la République pour que justice lui soit rendue. De connivence avec l’administration coloniale, l’autorité judiciaire refuse de dire le droit. Ce qui oblige cette population à saisir la ligue de défense de la race nègre.
Le deuxième cas a lieu contre le secrétaire général de l’UPC, parti qui revendique depuis sa création en 1948 l’indépendance et la réunification des deux Cammeroun. Face aux succès de plus en plus importants que remporte ce parti tant au Cameroun qu’à l’extérieur de ce territoire, et, en vue de museler son secrétaire général, le haut commissaire Roland Pré fait appel à la justice française qui remet au goût du jour une vieille affaire déjà jugée et classée pour se donner un moyen légal de le retirer de la circulation. C’est l’affaire Um-Gelis. Le piège est cependant vite éventé.

Gendry Thaïs / EHESS

Un mouvement de révolte contre l’ordre colonial eu lieu dans le Royaume du Sanwi, en Côte d’Ivoire, entre 1915 et 1918. Les habitants, leurs chefs en tête de fil, élaborèrent une campagne politique pour récupérer leur autonomie politique et protester contre l’utilisation abusive de l’Indigénat dans leur cercle. Pendant deux ans ils s’exilèrent par milliers en colonie britannique et harcelèrent l’administration française ; ils voulaient être reconnu comme une force politique avec qui le pouvoir colonial devait négocier. L’échec du mouvement les poussa à rentrer en Côte d’Ivoire après avoir négocié leur amnistie.
Après leur retour, l’administration de la Côte d’Ivoire n’eut de cesse de chercher une occasion de condamner les chefs, ceux qu’elle voyait comme les meneurs du mouvement, ceux qu’il fallait exemplairement punir pour faire oublier l’affront et les velléités de rébellion.
Les administrateurs et les Sannvins firent appellent à la panoplie des régimes de droit disponibles dans les colonies pour continuer la bataille. Dans cette longue affaire judiciaire, indigénat, droit coutumier et droit français, s’entrechoquèrent et se contredirent. A partir de ces croisements, nous mènerons une réflexion sur la qualification du délit politique, l’instrumentalisation de la “coutume” dans le traitement du politique, et les stratégies développées par les sujets coloniaux pour s’affirmer comme sujet politique sur le terrain colonial.

Manière Laurent / Centre d’Etudes en Sciences Sociales sur les Mondes Africain, Américain et Asiatique (CESSMA)

Le recours à l’expédient disciplinaire dans le Dahomey colonial des années 1930 : de la révolte fiscale à la contestation de l’indigénat

Dans la colonie du Dahomey comme dans tout le reste de l’AOF , l’impôt de capitation est en général mal accepté par les populations qui tentent souvent de s’y soustraire de diverses façons : refus de payer, fuite individuelle ou collective, fausse déclaration… A partir du second semestre de l’année 1931, cette forme de résistance, jusqu’alors localisée ou épisodique, connut une ampleur sans précédent. Le Gouverneur constate qu’une importante partie de la population du sud du territoire ne s’acquitte plus de sa taxe. L’on se rend vite compte que les effets de la crise économique mondiale ne suffisent pas à expliquer cette défection, exceptionnelle par son extension, sa durée et la variété des modes opératoires utilisés.
Les Commandants de cercle, chargés de l’administration du territoire, répriment alors massivement le défaut de paiement par des peines d’amende ou de prison. Depuis la fin des années 1920, le volume de ces punitions disciplinaires prononcées par les administrateurs s’était stabilisé à un peu moins de 3000 sanctions annuelles. A partir de 1932, ce nombre grimpe de façon tout à fait singulière avec 4200 punitions annuelles enregistrées cette année-là, puis 8900 et 7500 les deux suivantes.

Lecomte Frédérique / Théâtre et Réconciliation

Du théâtre dans les pays sortant de conflit

Je fais, dans les pays en conflit ou post conflit, du théâtre avec les communautés et pour les communautés.
Dans ma communication, j’exposerai la difficulté de faire du théâtre dans la perspective humanitaire et les contradictions inhérentes aux commandes des ONG : la qualité artistique qui n’est pas prioritaire, le cahier des charges qui est contraignant, les contraintes de temps et d’argent.
Je parlerai aussi de la censure à différents niveaux : la censure des acteurs, des bailleurs, des ONG, de l’état, l’autocensure.
Je raconterai comment je contourne les difficultés utilisant l’humour, la légèreté, l’ironie de la catastrophe. Comment et dans quel état d’esprit j’élabore un projet artistique cohérent, qui n’élude pas les questions délicates, voire conflictuelles, telles que les conflits ethniques, les conflits de terre, les relations entre les victimes et les bourreaux. Une œuvre théâtrale jouée en extérieur devant des milliers de personnes, dans l’optique d’une démocratie vivante, publique et visible.

Graham Aubrey / Emory University

The Borders of Creativity: How the humanitarian regime has constrained local photography in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo

“Take my picture – I am suffering!” demanded an elderly woman at Mugunga III Internally Displaced Peoples camp in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her command is not unfamiliar. In spaces of where individuals access humanitarian aid, the trope of visualized suffering is well known, embodied for the camera, and often photographed. This ‘suffering’ cliché together with images of ‘aid-helped success’ and an issue’s ‘sprawl’ compose a standard visual humanitarian aid portfolio. In the eastern DRC where humanitarian aid is some of the densest in the world, such tropes are embodied, manipulated, and employed by subjects and photographers alike within specific spatial bounds.
The binary of zones of (or anticipated) humanitarian aid, and zones without hope / desire for aid, define the expected types of photographs and photographic career paths for the region’s photographers. Consequently, photographers choose, or tack, between the well-established categories of vernacular studio/ event photography and that of humanitarian aid.
This paper examines the power of the cliché in dictating the (nonetheless porous and fluid) borders of photographic creativity in the eastern DRC. By exploring the images, careers, and photographic intentions of local Congolese photographers and their subjects, I argue that the humanitarian regime has greatly impacted their photographic ability to challenge the visual norm, drive change, or catalyze or support local resistance.

Amico Marta / Centre Georges Simmel

Desert rebels or artisans of the nation? Malian artists facing the conflict – Rebelles du désert ou artisans de la nation? Les artistes maliens face au conflit

L’éclatement d’un conflit armé au Mali en 2012, et les revendications d’autonomie de mouvements politiques du Nord du pays, ont enclenché des mouvements de fracture et de recomposition des identités maliennes contemporaines. Tenants d’une parole souvent engagée qui bénéficie d’une large écoute au niveau national et/ou international, les artistes ont été portés à s’engager de plus en plus dans le débat politique, couvrant le rôle de porte-voix de messages parfois opposés, de la critique sociale au soutien des pouvoirs en place, de la rébellion à la réconciliation.
Dans cette communication je prendrai en compte deux catégories ou genres musicaux, pour interroger les dimensions culturelles du conflit à l’aune de différents moyens de fabrication et de diffusion d’une parole politique. Les rappeurs, forts du soutien du jeune public malien, ont été guettés par les autorités nationales mais aussi censurés pour leur critique aux fausses promesses de la démocratie malienne et à l’inadéquation des références traditionnelles face aux dimensions globales du conflit. Sur les scènes internationales de la World Music, par contre, le « rock du désert » de la « musique touarègue » s’est chargé d’une symbolique d’authenticité et de résistance à l’emprise d’un pouvoir central considéré comme discriminant et répressif des minorités présentes sur le territoire.

Maguire Cindy / Adelphi University

Ord Tiffanie / Arizona State University

Arts-Based Activism Towards Liberation: The Case of the Western Sahara

We examine the work of local and international artists engaged in the use of arts and culture as a tool for community development, resistance and political activism in the Western Sahara refugee camps of SW Algeria. The long-standing conflict over the Western Sahara, often referred to as the last African colony, has forced tens of thousands of Sahrawi refugees to call tent cities their home in the Algerian desert for almost 40 years relying almost exclusively on international aid. Many other Sahrawi live in what they term the “Occupied Zone” in Morocco, which been called a “police state” by human rights activists.
The Polisario, the governing system in the refugee camps, works with local and international non-profit organizations in utilizing arts-based activism towards liberation. These organizations and annual arts festivals, with participants from the camps and abroad, include ARTifariti (art festival), FiSahara (film festival), SandBlast (music studio), Sahara Libre Wear (fashion) and Art, Film, and Music Schools for youth and adults. Our focus is on ARTifariti, a festival with the stated mission to improve the lives of the people living in the camps as well as to garner international support for the Sahrawi cause.
Even as the government and community welcomes the work of these organizations and festivals, tensions exist with competing artistic and aesthetic visions and ways that art can be used.

Matignon Emilie / LAM, UPPA

Le Lay Maëline / LAM, CNRS

La catharsis théâtrale en question : ressources et limites

Dans une optique de résolution des conflits, de nombreuses ONG internationales ont recours au théâtre participatif – sous diverses formes – dont elles font un outil de « pacification par le bas » et/ou thérapeutique, notamment lorsqu’il suscite des phénomènes de catharsis. Très souvent inspirées du théâtre de l’Opprimé d’Augusto Boal, les méthodologies convoquées créent des espaces de dialogues et favorisent la révélation de vérités à travers la performance d’actes symboliques ou les témoignages apportés par les acteurs et l’assistance.
La dimension cathartique apparaît, dans cette perspective, comme un élément incontournable de l’élaboration de ces spectacles. Appuyant leur légitimité sur l’ancienneté de cette pratique dramaturgique que l’on fait remonter à l’Antiquité, les ONG, comme les artistes, y ont largement recours dans un sens parfois fort différent du sens originel de la catharsis, également parfois éloigné des traditions théâtrales locales. Certaines de ces formes traditionnelles sont en effet plus enclines à une forme de distanciation qu’à l’expression cathartique. Par ailleurs, les organismes commanditaires de tels spectacles ravivent parfois des traumas que les sociétés en transition n’ont pas toujours la capacité de gérer et qui questionnent les conséquences psychologiques du pouvoir cathartique de l’art dans de tels contextes.

Olsson Hans / Lund University

“We are winning the Spiritual war”: Spiritual Practices and Pentecostal Migrants in Zanzibar

What does it mean to be a Pentecostal Christian in a predominantly Muslim setting? In the context of Zanzibar the answers to this could be summoned in the word resistance. Here, the small minority of Pentecostals stand against the cultural and social fabric of the archipelago. The presence of vocal Pentecostal churches made up by job-seeking mainland migrants has turned churches into locations of contested social space. When asking Pentecostal members of major Pentecostal branches in Zanzibar about how they cope with growing social tensions many see the emerging conflicts as signs that they “are winning the spiritual war”. With Zanzibar regarded as a potent hub for spirits and evil forces, affecting the society at large, Pentecostal identity implies an ongoing commitment to fight evil. Thus, generally life is seen as a war, “a field of spiritual warfare” where adherence to practices not only protect but also help engage and convict spiritual forces.
Based on ethnographic research on Zanzibar, this paper focuses on how spiritual warfare praxis support Pentecostal migrants in their interpretation of current socio-political developments as a means of negotiating their role in the Zanzibar society vis-à-vis a Muslim majority. The focus on Pentecostals spiritual practices reveals how a contextual theology of salvation is produced in conjunction to the threat of a powerful enchanted world experienced in relation to the social setting.

Habte Etana / School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London

Evangelical Christianity as an Instrument of Resistance in Imperial Ethiopia: A New Approach

The Ethiopian empire had beaten back European colonialism in 1896 in the north, but itself practiced it in the south. Unlike the rest of Africa, where evangelical Christianity encountered indigenous African beliefs, the encounter in Ethiopia is between the oldest and established form of Christianity, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (EOC) – representing the ‘nationalist’ aspirations at the political centre of the empire-state – and the Evangelical form introduced by the Western missionaries. Moreover, the circumstances that eventually led to the emergence of African Independent Churches elsewhere are also largely absent in the case of Ethiopia.
Based mainly on empirical data drawn from Qellem, western Oromia, Ethiopia, this paper underlines Evangelical Christianity as a considerable force of resistance. Intentionally or not, the Evangelical movement in Qellem represented a voice of resistance because it challenged the ideological foundation of the Ethiopian empire— building a nation-state under the dominant Amharic culture by destroying all other languages and cultures. This approach will hopefully shed light on the national political crises which characterised the period (1941-1974).

Ravalde Liz / University of Edinburgh

Catholic Forgiveness for ‘African’ Sins: Adapted Forgiveness and Resistance among Catholics in Eastern Uganda

Many Catholics in Kaberamaido District, Uganda, put a heavy emphasis both receiving and granting forgiveness in their day-to-day lives. At the same time, however, many of these Catholics also condone and even engage in the practice of culo kwor (“paying for life”), whereby a suspected murderer may be beaten or killed, and have his property stolen or destroyed by members of the family of the deceased.
This paper examines this paradox, demonstrating how the concept of forgiveness has been adapted by local Catholics as an implicit form of resistance against certain Catholic moral standards. I argue that the concept of forgiveness is used selectively, and is predominantly applied to behaviours which are seen as acceptable within a long-standing local moral local framework, but which are regarded as “immoral” by the Catholic Church. As such, it acts as a means for people to retain the normality and acceptability of certain “un-Catholic” behaviours, whilst remaining committed Catholics. Meanwhile, in cases where the Catholic and local non-Catholic moral worlds converge, such as murder, the concept of forgiveness, as conceived in this context, loses its necessity.
Thus this paper shows that not only do charismatic and evangelical forms of African Christianity offer forms of resistance to the religion of the older, more established mission churches, but these churches are also implicitly resisted by adaptations of their own concepts, beliefs and practices by their own members.

Niedźwiedź Anna / Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków

Lived Catholicism in Contemporary Ghana as an Expression of Local Identities, Resistances and Empowerments

‘Mission churches’ in Africa recently went through a significant transformation, which might be described as a shift from ‘the white man’s faith’ to religion lived by local peoples. Based on ethnographic field research, I am going to explore this shift, focusing on the example of the Catholic Church in Ghana.
Reforms of liturgy and the development of the concept of ‘inculturation’ as well as a growing self-esteem of African clergy have made Ghanaian Catholicism more strongly ‘Africanized’. Dances, local music, and charismatic prayers are now a regular parts of services. My focus will be on lay Catholics and their experiences. I will point to grassroots activities instigated by lay people such as: overnight ‘healing and deliverance’ meetings, gendered and generational group support (among females and youth), and usage of indigenous symbols within Catholic setting. Numerous indigenous concepts are manifested and lived within frameworks of local Catholicism, enabling expression of various identities (e.g. ethnic, gender). They are also used by groups and individuals as a means of empowerment, providing tools to contest, resist and change these theological concepts which seem foreign. On the other hand ‘Christianization’ of various aspects of local cultures enable people to contest those elements of ‘indigenous’ traditions that are perceived as oppressive by ‘modern’ Catholics. Thus, I am interested in the twofold, complex and ambiguous nature of ‘African-Catholic enchantment’.

Lauterbach Karen / Lund University

Wealth and Power in Ghanaian Christianity

This paper discusses wealth and power in Ghanaian charismatic Christianity. One of the main features of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity has been the so-called prosperity gospel in which money and riches are seen as a blessing from God. People come to church and sow financially in order to receive blessings such as education, job promotion or marriage. At the same time, rich flamboyant pastors are seen as spiritual powerful, and their wealth is seen as a direct sign of their access to spiritual power. This paper discusses the amassment and use of wealth in Ghanaian charismatic Christianity from a historical perspective and analyse it both in relation to mainline Christianity and in relation how other social groups have accumulated and redistributed wealth. The approach is to look at how ideas and practices around wealth in Ghanaian charismatic Christianity resonate with local ideas on wealth, religion and power and to relate this to discussions of how wealth and power is legitimized. The paper argues that rather than mainly seeing the focus on prosperity in charismatic Christianity as an adaption of a global religious ideology it can also be read as an expression of resistance to ideas of wealth introduced by missionary Christianity that separated religious virtues and the possession of wealth. Moreover, the paper discusses the relationship between the accumulation of wealth and the legitimization of power in the public sphere.

Money Duncan / University of Oxford

“Even if we are the highest paid workers in the world, the fact remains we are entitled to fight”: White mineworkers on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1930-1950

The Copperbelt has generally been understood in terms of its place in the ‘national’ story of Zambia. This paper argues that it is better understood by tracing how the Copperbelt was linked to other mining regions around the world – in Britain, the US, Australia and South Africa – through flows of people, capital and ideas.
Wildcat strikes and community political mobilisation in Zambia’s mining communities have a long history, especially among white mineworkers. Along with their industrial skills, the thousands of highly mobile and transient white mineworkers attracted to the Zambian Copperbelt in this period brought with them the traditions of the international labour movement. Coupled with knowledge about working conditions and developments in other mining centres around the world, these mineworkers successfully contested the control of the mining companies over the workplace and the mining towns.
This paper seeks to place developments in antagonistic industrial relations and the provision of increasingly lavish community welfare on the Copperbelt within a wider international context. Both the mining companies and their white workforce framed and pursued their aims with explicit reference to mining centres globally. In particular, the white workforce combined disinterest towards the larger African workforce with a keen awareness of the condition of British, American and Australian miners.

Rubbers Benjamin / University of Liège

Protests against the reform of the mining sector. The dynamics of the field of labour politics in Katanga, D.R. Congo

In the early 2000s, the Congolese government was forced, under the pressure from the World Bank, to restructure the Gécamines. The main assets of this public mining company were sold to private investors, and its own staff downsized from 24,000 to 14,000 workers. Since then, Katanga province witnessed an influx of foreign companies, which caused a huge increase of mining investments. This ‘great transformation’ of the mining sector has given rise to various forms of protest actions, political tensions, and campaigns to reform the governance of the mining industry. Most expressions of popular discontent in Katanga, however, were spontaneous and short-lived. Based on long term research, this paper aims to reflect on the conditions that allowed for a more organized and long-lasting political mobilisation to emerge: the struggle that an action group led during ten years to demand more adequate compensation for the 10, 000 workers made redundant from Gécamines in 2003-2004. To understand the strategy of this action group, it will be compared to those developed by trade unions in the course of the same period. The aim of this analysis is to study the various reactions to the reform of the mining sector together, as moves within one same field of action – the field of labour politics, which is worked by distinctive constraints, cleavages, and logics since the colonial period.

Capps Gavin / University of the Witwatersrand

Communities Divided: The Class Contradictions of “Possessive Collectivism” on South Africa’s Rural Platinum Belt

This paper argues that rural mining communities are neither static nor homogenous, but should be conceived as dynamic collectivities that are both differentiated and actively constructed as a way of advancing or defending claims on landed resources. Based on a study of three tribal authority areas on the Rustenburg platinum belt, it shows how intensifying land struggles are mediated though conflicts over group boundaries and identities, and how this in turn is articulating a potentially new yet contradictory rural class politics. In a context where chiefly authorities are becoming major shareholders in local mining operations, the key issue is whether the ‘tribe’ should be the only legitimate land-holding unit, or if collective ownership of mineralised land should reside in smaller socio-political groups (claiming descent from the original buyers) and who should represent their corporate interests. This has generated what may, in a play on Macpherson, be termed rival ‘possessive collectivisms’ that draw legitimacy from competing versions of history and are now fought out through the law. It concludes that while these small-group struggles against the emergent mine-chief nexus are a source of a potentially progressive politics, the attempt to establish property rights through more exclusionary group definitions may itself be an element of rural class formation (cf. Peters) that could act as a divisive force against those labelled outsiders, not least migrant mineworkers.

de Alencastro Mathias / University of Oxford

Why diamond companies, and not the state, are the target of social and political mobilisation in Lunda Norte, Angola

This paper seeks to understand the reasons why, and the ways in which, social and popular mobilisation in Lunda Norte is organized around corporate governance. By the time the civil war ended in 2002, the Angolan elite and the populace both shared the assumption that only diamond companies could effectively govern Lunda Norte. The Angolan government, on the one hand, while engaging in a massive project of reconstruction via state resources across the rest of the country, continued to discharge much of its regulatory power to diamond companies in Lunda Norte. The population, on the other hand, focused its energies on achieving ‘better’ – which in many ways meant more, not less – corporate governance from mining companies.

This is because the population of Lunda Norte shares a rose-tinted, factually dubious collective memory of an idealised ‘golden age’ under DIAMANG, the all-powerful colonial company that continued to operate well into the postcolonial period, and believes that present-day diamond companies could and should deliver more and better healthcare, education, and infrastructure than the distant Luanda state. While it acknowledges that a form of ‘resistance from below’ against the status quo existed and continues to exist in the Lundas, this paper explains why popular contestation continues to take place mostly in the form of claims-making within the colonial-old boundaries of the diamond sector’s private indirect government.

Mususa Patience / University of Cape Town

“We were there before the mines”: rural struggles and mining investment in North Western Province, Zambia

Mine investments in the new Copperbelt, North Western Province of Zambia, are posing a major threat to the livelihoods of its rural dwellers. In the Musele chiefdom, in the district of Solwezi, First Quantum is developing its Trident Mines, a greenfield site. The chiefdom’s residents have been involved in a dispute with the state and the mining company over several issues, including contestations around the land acquisition process for mining and surface rights. Underlying the dispute is the fear that mining will bring no significant benefits to the indigenous residents of the area, while damaging the environment and radically altering the local political ecology. Mining revenue collection is nationally centralised and communities affected by mining have little say on how it is spent. The paper describes social and political processes of mobilisation around these issues drawing on the case of the formation of the Musele Nkisu Taskforce, a rural community advocacy group. The author was directly involved in the formation of the taskforce. The main focus is on the micro-politics of community–mining relations, in particular the constellation of factional interests that emerged in the interactions among community, mining company, state and NGOs.

Omanga Ducan / Moi University, Kenya

Meshak Koskei and Bwayo Humphrey / Moi University, Kenya

Social Media and the Making of the New-Baraza: Chiefs and Mediated Deliberative Practices in Kenya’s Local Administration

The baraza in Kenya generally refers to a formal public gathering for the purpose of interaction between the ruled and the rulers. Previously, the baraza was used extensively as a quasi-compulsory public meeting convened mostly by chiefs and addressed by politicians and civil servants and were spaces of state-centric discourse often meant to legitimize a provincial political ideology.
The ‘new baraza’ represents the increasingly mediatised deliberative practice that is complementing and in some instances appearing to displace the age old baraza in Kenya. At its core, the ‘new baraza’ is shaped by social media, specifically Twitter and mass mobile phone text messaging, thus transcending economic and technological hurdles and vastly transforming deliberative practice and group action in local communities. Using data obtained from the field, we argue that the deployment of Twitter as an administrative tool in the central rift region of Kenya as a mode of maintaining cohesion and social mobilisation is not necessarily new, but rather a refashioning of the old baraza. The paper shows
– how the combination of simple mobile phones and Twitter create the ‘new baraza’ which then becomes an effective site in convening and cajoling the public for various kinds of group action
– how deliberative action in the new baraza is embedded in the everyday interactions
– how the new baraza appropriates some of the defining characteristics of technologically networked communities.

Lamoureaux Siri / Max Planck Institute, Martin Luther University

Digital rights activism and social movements: controversies of knowledge production in Sudan

This paper presents recent research on the ongoing digital rights movement taking place today in Sudan.The notion of “digital rights” has emerged in recent years alongside human rights as a global discourse and development imperative, notably in the Arab Spring where it aligned with social movements. While highly debated, it is nonetheless thought by some observers to have changed the scope of these revolutions. No revolution took place in Sudan, but digital activism based on open-knowledge philosophy – that “information is power” has introduced new tools and techniques for social movements, which have been highly controversial, due to their potential subversive power. Facebook, Twitter, Ushahidi in particular along with SMS are potentially threatening since they enable new ways of producing evidence and shaping “truth”.
Digital activists in Sudan, in fact, are subject to digital sanctions and surveillance not only from the Sudanese government but also from the US, which has since 1997 placed an embargo on the import or export of goods to and from Sudan. While Sudanese initiatives are subject to extraordinary constraints, digital activists have engaged in a variety of concerns from health or education charities, elections monitoring, nomad routes to the 2013 floods in Khartoum. In this paper, I discuss the ideologies, epistemologies and technical constraints of digital activism in Sudan, and problematize the assumptions of Open Source theory for this context.

Brunotti Irene / University of Leipzig

Cyberbaraza and contemporary political transformations in Zanzibar

Since 2010 a power sharing agreement has been included in the constitution of Zanzibar and, soon after elections, the opponent party´s leader Seif Sharif Hamad has been appointed as First Vice President. This process (maridhiano – reconciliation) radically changed a sociopolitical context where identities´ features have always played a decisive role in social and political participation. In a context where political and civil rights have been denied for decades, the new political scenario has allowed different feelings of belonging and identification. These very feelings seem to be represented and reproduced on the internet, more specifically throughout social networks (tovuti za kijamii, blogu and alike – cyberbaraza). Although issues of access and freedom mine the assumption that the internet replaces former ways of political participation, the unique narratives appearing on the web portray an important shift in Zanzibari self-identification and, possibly, in social participation. In analyzing the sustainability of the political transformation and because of the imminent Tanzanian general elections (October 2015), a study on the digital socialscape opens up to confrontations (concerning also critical issues like the Union) disentangled from previous identity framework and conveyed into a new creative mobilization.

Kołba Magda / Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Sciences

Kenyan citizenhood in the digital sphere. New spaces for activism and resistance created by Kenyans on-line.

With more than 2 million Facebook users and almost 50% internet penetration rate, Kenya is one of the Africa’s dark horses in the ICT-usage race. It is also home of many innovative solutions in the digital politics sphere. The citizens can, and do, watch the Parliament’s doings via the mzalendo.com website. The politics is widely commented and discussed on all the social media platforms and using all the available technologies.
One could say that whatever happens in a so-called „real world” has an immediate reaction in the on-line sphere by the citizens themselves. Only during last year there were several examples of citizens movements that have started in the social media sphere and resulted in actions undertaken by citizens(e.g. mydressmychoice march) or by the Government(e.g.#KenyansOnTwitter and the policymakers’ reaction). In my presentation, I would like to present some of them and propose to treat social media and ICTs in general as a tool for creating new spaces for citizens’ agency (and not a space per se). I will discuss the concept of tactical media and the citizens’ role in creating their content – and thus, being a co-author of a public political discourse. I will also focus on Boelstroff’s et. al. digital anthropology methodology and its relevance when analysing African societies’ activities in the digital sphere.
The presentation will be based on on-going field research, both in Nairobi and remotely.

Merolla Daniela / Leiden University, the Netherlands

Amazigh / Berber Websites. Cultural and Political Strategies

My paper addresses the cultural engagement of Amazigh/Berber websites and Facebook pages such as www.tamazgha.fr/, www.agraw.com,http://www.amazighworld.org/, marokko.nl, MNLA Mouvement National pour la liberation de l’Azawad Facebook page, New world Embassy of Azawad Facebook page, and the way in which these sites interact with, respectively, the social movements that participated in the riots of the Rif region (Morocco) in 2012 and the Tuareg military rebellion that led to the contested “new state” Azawad in Mali, the fighting between the MNLA and Islamist groups, and the international military mission MINUSMA. I explored Amazigh websites as framework for cultural expression in the dynamics of online and offline cultural productions (Merolla 2002, 2013). My present investigation focuses on the way in which the cultural and often humanist discourses diffused by Amazigh websites – set up in the Maghreb and in the diaspora – engage the dynamics of social and military uprising.

Niane Boubacar / UCAD/FASTEF 

Entre engagement sociopolitique et réalisation personnelle des Sénégalais formés dans l’ex-bloc de l’Est

La présente communication tente, à partir de l’exemple des Sénégalais formés dans les pays de l’ex Bloc de l’Est d’analyser le processus de domestication ou du bon usage de l’internationalisation : circuler ses savoirs / pouvoir (se) circuler soi-même. Autrement dit, quel est le degré d’anticipation (sens du placement) de ceux-là qui ont été formés à l’Est ; leur capacité à déconstruire /retraduire (adaptation) un modèle sociopolitique ou idéologique ? Pour ce faire, au moins trois axes de questionnement peuvent être retenus : i) le rôle, la place des agents de facilitation ou ‘passeurs’ (partis politiques – centres culturels – gouvernements – etc.) et les médiations usitées par eux pour identifier, sélectionner, acheminer les candidats, ainsi que les modèles et processus d’inculcation dans les pays d’accueil ; ii) les réseaux de sociabilité, d’intégration et de reconnaissance, en particulier le poids et le degré d’influence des associations dans l’insertion professionnelle et/ou sociopolitique des diplômés ; iii) les mutations et permanences dans les trajectoires socioprofessionnelles et politiques.
Il s’agira de voir in fine, si l’on peut parler, pour le cas de ces anciens étudiants, de la transformation des savoirs et sens ou plutôt de simple reconduction d’une inculcation. Ont-ils pu ou non, faire montre d’une capacité d’élaboration de postures socioprofessionnelles aptes à faire émerger un nouveau modèle sociétal, ou tout au moins de nouveaux paradigmes ?

Mateyi Jean / LAM-Bordeaux 3

La traversée du rideau de fer des syndicalistes gabonais

Au Gabon, des leaders syndicaux, pour des raisons personnelles ou de formation, ou encore pour participer à des conférences internationales, partirent au-delà « du Rideau de fer ». La lutte d’influence entre les puissances occidentales emmenées par les Etats-Unis et les démocraties populaires, conduites par l’Union soviétique, s’était concrétisée par des ingérences de plus en plus nombreuses dans les affaires intérieures des pays nouvellement indépendants. Au Gabon, ces ingérences se sont manifestées dans plusieurs domaines, et en particulier dans les mouvements de jeunesse et à travers le syndicalisme. Sur plan intérieur, le syndicalisme reste au Gabon l’un des moyens d’expression des classes démocratiques. Il constitue un droit fondamental, un moyen d’expression particulièrement nécessaire dans les pays sous-développés qui ont un pressant besoin d’améliorer le niveau de vie de leurs ressortissants. Ceci nous amène à nous interroger sur le profil et les motivations de ces syndicalistes qui se sont ralliés aux pays de l’Est. Qui étaient ces syndicalistes ? Dans quels mouvements syndicaux exerçaient-ils ou militaient-ils ? Quelles étaient les principales réclamations de leurs syndicats ?Ces syndicalistes étaient-ils considérés comme des agents subversifs par le gouvernement gabonais ? Quelles ont été les méthodes déployées par l’état gabonais afin de réduire leur influence ? Telles sont les questions auxquelles nous tenterons de répondre à travers notre communication.

Demintseva Akaterina / Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Economiques (EHESE)

Portrait sociopolitique des étudiants africains en URSS entre les années 1960 et 1980

Dans les premières années qui suivent l’indépendance des pays africains, l’Union Soviétique met en place un programme d’accueil des étudiants originaires de l’Afrique dans les différentes universités du pays. Les autorités soviétiques attirent l’attention qu’il ne faut pas seulement inviter les étudiants en provenance d’Afrique ou d’Asie à étudier en URSS. Il s’agit aussi de les former idéologiquement. Aussi, les programmes pédagogiques incluent des matières destinées à l’étude de l’idéologie marxiste-léniniste.
Vers le milieu des années 60, le nombre d’étudiants africains qui suivent un cursus en URSS est multiplié par deux par rapport au début des années 60. Cependant, si on remarque que les origines sociales sont diversifiées, l’administration manquait d’informations sur les conditions de vie avant l’arrivée en URSS. Aussi, il est intéressant de s’interroger sur le profil sociologique des étudiants, leurs parcours d’intégration dans la société soviétique et leurs idées politiques. Tout comme, il est nécessaire de se questionner sur l’impact de l’enseignement idéologique pendant leur études et au moment du retour au pays. Ces connaissances ont-elles renforcé des idées d’opposition par rapport à l’ancienne puissance colonisatrice ? Ont-elles été le moteur pour un alignement avec le bloc de l’Est ? Ou au contraire ont-elle constitué la base pour une critique sociale aussi bien sur le bloc occidental que sur les pays de l’Est ?

Ngwé Luc / FMSH-RIAM

Partir à l’Est comme forme de contestation de l’ordre colonial et post-colonial au Cameroun. Le cas des militants de l’Union des Populations du Cameroun

Le processus de décolonisation marqué par une lutte armée dans un contexte de guerre froide naissante cristallise les clivages politiques au Cameroun et dans une moindre mesure les trajectoires des mouvements politiques dont l’Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC). Ce parti qui conteste l’ordre colonial et revendique l’indépendance dès sa naissance en 1948 reçoit sous différentes formes, le soutien de certains pays d’obédience communiste. Banni du jeu politique dès 1955 et soumis à une forte répression depuis lors, ce parti va pourtant continuer à contester le pouvoir d’Ahidjo ainsi que l’indépendance acquise les considérant comme « fantoches » et avec eux l’ordre post-colonial ainsi mis en place. C’est dans ce contexte que l’UPC enverra ses militants dans les différents pays d’obédience communiste au gré des alliances et des désalliances avec ses différents soutiens.
Ces processus et situations appellent de nombreuses questions. Que signifie pour l’UPC le fait de partir à l’Est pendant la période coloniale et post-coloniale ? Que signifie pour les différents militants à différentes périodes le fait d’aller faire des études ou des formations à l’Est. ? Quels types de formation reçoivent-ils et quelles sont leurs trajectoires ? Ces départs constituaient-ils des stratégies de conquête du pouvoir d’Etat ou engageaient-ils plus globalement une contestation d’une forme d’ordre politique, social et sociétal ?

Scarfo-Ghellab Grazia / Ecole Hassina de Travaux Publics Casablanca 

La formation des ingénieurs marocains en URSS. Entre stratégie nationale et parcours individuels

Pour comprendre les départs d’étudiants marocains vers l’URSS à partir des années 60, et en particulier celui de ceux partis poursuivre des études d’ingénieurs, il faut prendre en compte plusieurs aspects : le contexte historique, la faiblesse du Maroc en termes de cadres techniques au lendemain de l’indépendance et les stratégies familiales et individuelles. A partir de ces données, il est difficile d’inscrire la mobilité estudiantine marocaine vers l’URSS – qu’on la regarde du point de vue de l’histoire nationale ou sous l’angle des histoires individuelles – comme une forme de protestation contre l’ancienne nation de tutelle. Toutefois le travail de terrain n’est qu’à ses débuts. Notamment, les responsables des partis de gauches, qui ont participé à l’envoi de ces jeunes marocains en URSS n’ont pas encore été interviewés. Leurs récits pourraient finalement nous révéler encore un nouvel aspect qui rendrait encore plus complexe ce phénomène.
Notre intervention vise alors la présentation de nouveaux résultats du travail du terrain : d’une part, tirés de l’analyse des entretiens avec d’autres responsables de la politique éducative marocaine, mise en place par l’Etat et par d’autres acteurs privés (comme les partis politiques, justement), à partir des années 60 et pendant toute la période soviétique (jusqu’au 91), d’autre part issus de l’analyse des entretiens avec d’autres ingénieurs partis se former en URSS et notamment avec des femmes ingénieurs.

Chepngtich Pamela / University of Bayreuth

Vernacular Photography as Subject of Research: Ethical Considerations

Private photographs, especially from Africa, offer an alternative story concerning the subjects portrayed. In my study on varied photography genres on Refugees in Dadaab, North-Eastern Kenya, it is evident that Snapshots transgress dominant representations of refugees in Kenya. Such photographs highlight the largely marginalized, more positive themes concerning refugees, as compared to the more accessible institutional representations.
Yet the academic study of such private photographs demands a consideration of various factors that come into play, for example the shift in context from their private consumption to the now more public, academic consumption. This shift demands a consideration of not only copyright ownership of such photographs, but also fair use of these images in considering the views and possible rights of the subjects concerned.
In this article, I interrogate these two points in order to understand my use of these pictures in my study. Such a probe offers methodological foundations for studying such photographs.

Pinheiro Bruno / University of São Paulo

Representations of Brazilian Capoeira through an Illustrated News Magazine: a Case Study

This paper analyses two photographic narratives published by the Brazilian illustrated news magazine “O Cruzeiro” about Capoeira. These narratives reflects the main debates on photojournalism’s professional practices concerning to Afro-Brazilian communities during the re-democratization period, after the dictatorship known as the New State (1930-1945). With the growth of the commercial mass media industry after 1946, images of expressions of Afro-Brazilian culture as the Capoeira and the Candomblé started to be reproduced and associated with the most diverse discourses. The French photographer Jean Manzon published the first of the narratives studied in here in January 1947, in which he associates Capoeira with criminal practices, based in the racial models of criminal anthropology’s literature diffused at Brazilian universities until 1930, that legitimated the criminalization of Afro-Brazilian communities in media. Pierre Verger, also a French photographer, published the second narrative analyzed in January 1948. Verger associated the theme with the rhetoric of the folklore studies that has become an important issue of State after 1946, supported by UNESCO’s agenda on cultural heritage. Based on those analyses, it will be possible to follow the multiple re-appropriations of Capoeira’s visual dimension by the Brazilian mass media industry and the relations among the different agents related to that process: Capoeira players, journalists and state officials.

Zeitlyn David / University of Oxford

Balancing the Practical with the Ethical: a Case Study from Cameroon

Developing the archives of the work of Jacques Toussele, a studio photographer from Cameroon, with the help of the British Library Endangered Archives Program has involved a continual set of compromises between the practical and the ethical.  In the absence of documentation we cannot get permissions from the people in the photographs since we do not know who they are. (Even if we did have names it would be extremely hard in practice to track down the c 100,000 people depicted, many of whom are dead).  The BL has a rigorous take-down policy which has been designed to addresses this sort of dilemma but such policies may not be being applied in the Cameroonian Universities which hold copies of the archive. The photographer holds the negatives and hence some of the rights, but in whose legal system? And beyond the narrowly defined scope of jurisprudence how can and should researchers and archivists deal with local concerns about witchcraft and notoriety which affect attitudes to archives and display? Archives are concerned with the long-term so responses have to address attitudes which may have changed and may change again. Archivists and researchers are stuck in the middle. This is not necessarily a bad place to be.

Miescher Giorgio / Centre for African Studies, University of Basel

Photographs beyond Ruins: The Usakos Old Location Albums, 1920s-60s

The paper focuses on three private photographic collections kept by four women in a central Namibian town called Usakos and how these collections became the centre piece of an exhibition which is scheduled to be launched in the local municipality building in mid-2015.
The photographic collections are part of a diverse culture of remembering, memory work and community building in the Usakos location which was forcefully removed in the 1960s. These images constitute personal albums, subjective narratives of and aesthetic interventions in the course of a history that left people out of sight/site; a history that denied them visibility and voice as residents, citizens and human beings. The photographs cover a wide range of genres, subjects and locations; they include portraits of family members, images of public spaces, of leisure activities, and street-views. Most of the pictures were taken by African itinerant photographers and residents of the old location, whose work was considered to be part of an inclusive, cosmopolitan notion of community and African cultural production.
The social, cultural and aesthetic variety of life in the ‘old location’ informs the ways in which people relate to these photographs today: with pride and a deep sense of nostalgia and loss. Forced removals and decades of economic hardship and political tutelage ruined a thriving community, and the photographs have become distant reflections on a landscape meanwhile marked by decay and dislocation.

Ricard Maxime / Université du Québec

The reorganization of extraversion strategies of the former rebels Forces Nouvelles in Ivory Coast: Political dilemmas of state formation in a post-war context

Citizens living in the northern and portions of the western territories of Ivory Coast experienced rebel governance under the rule of the Forces Nouvelles during a major period of the Ivoirian crisis. Allies to the new political power, they redeployed their military and economic network across the whole territory starting 2011.
It will address the dilemmas posed by the practices of this military and economic network for the Ivoirian state and society since 2011. The aim is to provide an alternative way of understanding post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire using a theoretical framework combining historical sociology (Bayart 1989) and political economy (Hameiri 2012). The argument of the paper is that financial accumulation of ex-rebels participates in a continuing militarization of the State and society which extend the exacerbation of extraversion strategies, highlighting the continuities of the “neither war nor peace” governance of the year 2000s.
The value of such research is two-fold. Empirically, it seeks to understand these dilemmas and processes based on a two-year (2012 and 2013) experience in the Peacebuilding sector in Ivory Coast, both in western Côte d’Ivoire and Abidjan. Conceptually, it allows us to provide an alternative way for framing transitions from civil war away from normative judgments of what is not happening and towards understanding what is happening in the post-war state formation process in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Fofana Moussa / Université Alassane Ouattara de Bouaké

« Gnambros », « Syndicate » and « Germs »: After the political violence, the violence for all

Au sortir d’une dizaines d’années de crise militaro-politique dont le dénouement fut une violente crise post-électorale soldée par 3000 morts, le défi majeur qui se présente à la Côte d’Ivoire sous le régime du président Ouattara est celui de la réconciliation nationale et la construction d’un Etat de droit. Le contexte de la gouvernance actuelle reste cependant marqué par la persistance de diverses formes de violence larvée qui peuvent être de obstacles à la cohésion sociale escomptée même si l’on relève des indicateurs d’une normalisation de la vie sociopolitique et de réelles embellies économiques. Cette proposition s’intéresse aux jeunes qui dans l’espace urbain d’Abidjan sont les porteurs de cette violence. Il s’agit entre autres des ex-combattants mal démobilisés, des « gnambros » et autres « syndicats » essaimant les gares routières et usant de violence pour rançonner dans le secteur du transport ou encore les jeunes pré-adolescents dénommés « microbes » qui inquiètent au quotidien les habitants de certains quartiers. L’enjeu de cette proposition est de montrer, d’une part, la proximité entre ces acteurs jeunes et d’autre part comment ils intègrent une nomenclature de la violence structurelle mobilisable en temps de crise politique.

Oura Kouadio Raphaël / Université Alassane Ouattara de Bouaké

Déguerpissement du Parc National du Mont Péko et la question de la relocalisation des infiltrés dans l’espace périphérique

La rébellion armée de 2002 a renforcé les infiltrations du Parc du Mont Péko qui subit l’agression de milliers de clandestins.
En 2013, l’Etat a arrêté Amadé Ourémi, le chef de file, mais s’est retrouvé face à de nouveaux défis. L’Etat veut procéder à un déguerpissement sans faire de dégâts. Outre les préoccupations sociales, il poserait des problèmes sécuritaires. Par ailleurs, le déguerpissement constitue un manque à gagner économique car cela suppose la destruction de milliers d’hectares de cacao en production. L’enjeu est aussi diplomatique: la question de la réinsertion des occupants burkinabè préoccupe le Burkina Faso. Que faire des populations qui sortiront du parc? Où les reloger en cas de déguerpissement?
Voici autant de préoccupations qui justifient les hésitations de l’Etat ivoirien dans la mise à exécution de la politique de déguerpissement. Mais, en attendant, le parc continue de se dégrader, sans doute à un rythme plus accéléré. La question de la maîtrise de l’espace occupé et des espaces périphériques au parc se pose de plus en plus. A ce jour, la connaissance de la superficie colonisée et des espaces périphériques est nécessaire. Ce papier entend étudier la dynamique spatiale de l’occupation du parc et de sa périphérie depuis 2002 en vue de saisir les potentialités foncières dont dispose encore la périphérie à recueillir d’éventuels déplacés.
L’analyse de l’occupation actuelle de ces deux espaces aidera à une meilleure relocalisation des infiltrés déguerpis.

Kra Kouamé Walter / Université Alassane Ouattara de Bouaké

Le déguerpissement du parc national du mont Péko (Côte d’Ivoire) : une dynamique confligène

Après l’arrestation de Amadé Ourémi (leader emblématique des infiltrés du mont Péko et ex-chef milicien durant la crise post-électorale de 2010-2011), le gouvernement ivoirien a amorcé la dynamique du déguerpissement des milliers d’occupants de cette aire protégée de 34 000 ha colonisée par la cacaoculture. Mais la préparation au déguerpissement s’est heurtée à une résistance farouche des ex-combattants de Ourémi. Par ailleurs, les populations autochtones des villages environnants, sollicitées par les pouvoirs publics pour accueillir temporairement les déguerpis, sont réticentes. Elles ont peur d’être « envahies » et ruminent contre ces infiltrés qui ont pillé un parc dont leurs ancêtres avaient été évacués pour cause d’utilité publique. Cette situation a fabriqué un sentiment de frustration potentiellement explosif. Frustration des ex-combattants qui se voient dépossédés d’un bien (le parc) considéré comme une juste récompense de le
ur effort de guerre ayant permis au régime actuel d’accéder au pouvoir. Frustration des autochtones qui sont demeurés dans la pauvreté contrairement aux infiltrés qui jouissent des retombées de la cacoculture. De cette double frustration se dégagent des risques de violence collective entre les infiltrés et les acteurs étatiques pour le contrôle du cacao du parc, et entre les autochtones et les infiltrés sur fond de vengeance. L’objectif de l’article est d’étudier ces risques et de mettre en relief les défis à relever pour les dissiper.

Tine Benoit / Université Assane Seck de Ziguinchor, Sénégal, Chercheur associé au Laboratoire Printemps (CNRS – France)

Du mouvement y’en a marre à la révolte tunisienne: entre technologisme et sociologisme

Notre premier terrain, le Sénégal, qui a connu des événements moins médiatisés que ceux des pays dudit « printemps arabe », nous permettra d’aborder cette articulation sous un autre angle qui met l’accent sur le fait que la mutation organisationnelle et culturelle s’opère le plus souvent de manière silencieuse par-delà des déterminations techniques et sociales. Plus particulièrement, il s’agira de partir des événements du 23 juin 2011, ayant consacrés l’éveil citoyen ou ce qu’on a appelé le NTS (nouveau type de sénégalais) (Savané, Sarr, 2012).
Quant à notre recherche en Tunisie, elle s’est appuyée sur une revue de la littérature après les événements du 14 janvier 2011; laquelle s’inscrit dans un engouement sans précédent des chercheurs francophones et anglophones pour le cas d’étude arabe.
L’hypothèse que nous proposons est qu’il est possible de participer au décloisonnement des deux approches scientifiques visiblement opposées (le technologisme et le sociologisme) en proposant une approche médiane rappelant la nécessité de transcender ces deux lectures et de montrer les phénomènes que les deux lectures concurrentes négligent.

Vanvyve Adrienne / Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgique)

The Insurrection of October 2014 in Burkina Faso: Role and Use of Facebook

Les 30 et 31 octobre derniers ont marqué un tournant historique pour le Burkina Faso : une insurrection populaire a provoqué la chute de Blaise Compaoré, à la tête du pays depuis 27 ans, alors qu’il préparait le vote pour la modification de la Constitution pour se représenter aux élections présidentielles de 2015. Depuis 1987, Blaise Compaoré avait installé un régime politique ambigu pouvant être apparenté à une « démocratie à double façade » où les libertés prennent place sur un arrière-fond autoritaire : la « démocratisation » s’accompagnait d’un contrôle strict et de dispositifs non officiels – corruption, clientélisme, violence, intimidation – afin de laisser émerger des espérances politiques, tout en limitant l’émergence d’éléments trop subversifs. Une telle configuration politique engendre la frustration de la population burkinabè dont les signes de mécontentement n’ont fait qu’à se multiplier, jusqu’à provoquer le renversement du régime. C’est dans un tel contexte à la fois de liberté et de contrainte que la question du rôle et de l’usage de Facebook prend toute son importance. En effet, au-delà des démonstrations de rue en octobre dernier, ce réseau social a joué une part non négligeable dans la mobilisation et la résistance du peuple face au pouvoir. A partir d’entretiens récoltés auprès de jeunes de Ouagadougou, centre névralgique du pays, cette présentation tend à présenter le rôle, l’usage et la portée de ce média durant le mouvement « Octobre 2014 ».

Marin Léonie / IMAF

Les nouvelles formes d’engagements politiques : l’exemple de Facebook en Afrique de l’Ouest

Adon Seka Adouby Appolinaire / Université Félix H. Boigny

Facebook et « rattrapage ethnique » en Côte d’Ivoire

L’un des travers de la gouvernance Ouattara est sans doute le rattrapage ethnique après son accession au pouvoir. En effet, si sa gestion économique permet à la Côte d’Ivoire de se reconstruire et de bâtir de nouvelles infrastructures pour le bien-être de la population ivoirienne, force est de reconnaitre que la nomination des ressortissants du nord à 65% à la tête des postes clés de l’Etat, a mis en mal la réconciliation nationale recherchée par le Président. Interrogé par une radio étrangère sur cette question, le Président OUATTARA avait répondu qu’il faisait du “rattrapage ethnique”. Vu la frustration d’une partie des Ivoiriens, il se dédira plus tard à travers la RTI (radio télévision nationale). Malgré cela, ce sujet sera l’objet de débats houleux, de contestation et de justification selon le bord politique et l’origine ethnique des Ivoiriens sur les réseaux sociaux, notamment sur facebook.
L’approche qualitative utilisée pour mieux comprendre la réaction des internautes ivoiriens, nous a permis de déterminer 3 argumentaires principaux selon le bord politique et l’origine ethnique des Ivoiriens sur le sujet en fonction de leur fréquence d’apparition sur facebook.
Il s’agit premièrement des partisans du camp de l’ex-Président Laurent GBAGBO, présentement en prison à la Haye à la CPI, des caciques ressortissants du nord et certains partisans du RHDP, rassemblement qui a porté OUATTARA au pouvoir.

Klopper Sandra / University of Cape Town

Healing the Hood: The Role of Spraycan art in Fostering Community Cohesion in South Africa

This paper explores how, through a series of loosely related developments, the work of Cape Town-based hip hop graffiti artists has changed since the late 1980s. Drawing attention to the impact unforeseen events had on them, such as the apartheid state’s decision to unban political organizations in 1990, the influx of European and British graffiti artists following this decision, the passing of stringent city by-laws aimed at thwarting their activities, and their growing involvement in community projects both locally and abroad, I trace the shift in their work from seeking to attain local and international fame among their hip hop peers to a commitment to making a positive difference through their art. Relying on community initiatives and large corporate sponsors, these artists initially produced murals for communities that were relocated to the Cape Flats during the apartheid era. But their interest has since expanded to impoverished villages in the Western Cape and large urban centres elsewhere in South Africa, where they have created increasingly inventive works that seek to transform the spaces in which socially and economically marginalized communities continue to live throughout South Africa. In the process of exploring this history, I draw particular attention to Falko’s seminal role in nurturing this creative explosion of spraycan art across the country.

Niang Abdoulaye / Gaston Berger University, Saint-Louis, Senegal

La reconfiguration du champ des arts appliqués à travers les graffiti: Discuter les esthétiques, la commodification et l’engagement sociopolitique

Le hip hop a débuté au Sénégal à partir du milieu des années 80. Si ses débuts sont illustrés par la reproduction de modèles extérieurs, ce mouvement social s’est réorienté vers un engagement politique nourri d’une créativité et d’un ancrage davantage locaux. Ainsi, les graffeurs, en s’appuyant sur l’idéal de positivité, qu’il s’agisse de graffiti à thèmes ou purement décoratifs, gagnent en légitimité. Dès lors, Il est de plus en plus fait appel à des groupes comme Doxandem Squad, Mizerables Graff afin de conscientiser à propos du Sida, du choléra, etc. Mais, mieux encore, les graffeurs décident d’eux-mêmes de contribuer à des sensibilisations sur le respect du code de la route, l’importance des études pour les jeunes, mais aussi pour dénoncer les inégalités, la corruption, pousser la population à réagir etc. Cependant, parallèlement, les graffiti sont devenus le lieu de construction d’un business autour de la mode et de la décoration, avec les tableaux d’art, les jaquettes d’albums, les salons de coiffure, etc. En bref, mon but est d’aller au-delà des simplifications abusives et de discuter la complexité d’un art à facettes multiples. Ainsi, j’analyserai les multiples tensions et défis (entre l’activisme sociopolitique et la professionnalisation, la « liberté d’expression » et les contraintes liées au marketing, ou liées à l’aide matérielle de la part d’institutions étatiques ou non, etc.) qui interviennent dans la structuration du mouvement graffiti.

Rabine Leslie / University of California, Davis

The Dissemination of Graffiti Movements for Social Change Across West Africa

Exercising aesthetic ambition, passion and ingenuity in the face of a dire lack of resources, Senegalese graffeurs have made Dakar a transnational hub of urban street art. They have attracted artists from Europe, West Africa and the US to their city. This paper presents the views of artists from Benin, Togo and Burkina Faso who see the Dakarois graffeurs as inspiring their fledgling movements. They support each other, as Togolese artist Sitou Matt Imagination says, “in our goal of being able to establish graffiti a bit everywhere in Africa because for us graffiti can be a tool to change consciousness.” The artists from other West African countries may not enjoy the acceptance and freedom to paint any public wall that Senegalese graffeurs have enjoyed. But like the Senegalese, they make graffiti art a force to cleanse and beautify the disintegrating spaces of their cities. Painting complex layerings of stylized words, images, and colors on city walls, they aim to inspire their people to take responsibility for education, health, public cleanliness, and civic values in general. Through their wild style and mix of languages, they revolt against French neocolonial domination. Artists from Europe and the US in Dakar also see it as an urban hub in the transnational community they are working to build. Together these artists from many cultures present a concrete vision of the multifarious creative exchanges among marginalized and dominant cities and countries.

Gwande Victor / University of the Free State Bloemfontein Campus

Dombo Sylvester / Great Zimbabwe University

Speaking through the walls: Political graffiti and the fight against dictatorship in Zimbabwe, c. 2000 – 2013

Since gaining independence from Britain in 1980, Zimbabwe has been led by Robert Mugabe and his ZANU PF party. His government has tried to shrink the space for democratic engagement. This has led to the rise of social actors exploring alternative ways of engaging the state. Most of them have used clandestine means such as pirate radio stations, Internet newspapers, mobile phone text messages, protest music, social media, and graffiti. This paper unpacks the role of graffiti in the fight against dictatorship by raising pertinent questions regarding audience, message and impact. In Zimbabwe, graffiti draws largely on issues that are either addressed or deliberately ignored by the state-controlled public media, communicating them in the form of comic relief, satire, irony, raw and uncensored language to an audience without access to predominantly English print and electronic media. Reading political graffiti has allowed these people the opportunity to discuss issues they would not openly discuss, like the rigging of elections, failure of leadership, the Chinese in Zimbabwe and corruption. More importantly, graffiti has attacked the president of the country, a crime that attracts a prison sentence. But Zimbabwean graffiti is interesting not only because its makers are weak. As this paper shows, President Mugabe’s government and its allies have also deployed techniques to respond to their critics, and to silence subversive graffiti artists by erasing their work.

Lee Christopher J. / Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: Political Travel to the Soviet Union during the Twentieth Century

This paper examines political travel by African and African American writers to the Soviet Union during the long twentieth century. It specifically considers the ways in which travel writing by activist-intellectuals like Alex La Guma of South Africa conceived the USSR as a “dreamworld” (to use a term of Susan Buck-Morss’s) that offered paradigms of social conviviality and economic development that contrasted with the “catastrophes” of the colonial and postcolonial worlds. This history of image and knowledge-making has since become marginalized in political narratives of South African history, reflecting the neoliberal present which post-apartheid South Africa has embraced. This paper concludes by arguing for the importance of these “lost futures” and how they might challenge prevailing narratives of South Africa’s past, by situating them within a deeper history of black radicalism during the twentieth century.

Matusevich Maxim / Seton Hall University

“I Have the Feeling That I Have Known Her a Long Time”: Angela Davis and the Soviet Dreams of Freedom

In the 1970s, the case of a radical black American academic Angela Davis, accused by the state of California of being an accessory to murder, captured the imagination of the millions of Soviet citizens as well as the residents of other Communist nations. The virtual cult of Davis in the Soviet Union was to a large extent the product of the massive efforts exerted by Soviet propaganda which for decades had been taking full advantage of the ugly reality of Western (and especially American) racism. Yet the preeminence of Angela Davis as a cultural symbol on the “other side” of the Iron Curtain also reflected on the eagerness of Soviet citizens to engage in a discourse on freedom. For the majority of Soviets receptive to the official propaganda, the persecution of Davis in the United States presented another vivid example of the capitalist machine of racial and economic oppression in action. For others, this tale of guns, hostage-taking and daring escapes became an extension of the familiar Hollywood-fueled American myth of the Wild West, rough justice, and a free-wheeling and gun-toting pursuit of liberty. But the dissidents within the Soviet imperium (Alexander Solzhenytsin among them) took a far less charitable view of Angela Davis, often arguing that her celebrity in the USSR and beyond not so much promoted as undermined the cause of freedom.

Chomentowski Gabrielle / EHESS

From the East to the West. Educational, Intellectual, and Political Trajectories of African Filmmakers

Thanks to a new international cultural policy inaugurated by the PC of the USSR, from the 1960s to the 1980S a small number of young and talented African artists from countries such as Senegal, Mali, Burkina-Faso and Mauritania, received Soviet scholarships to study at the famous Moscow Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). For the Soviet hosts, cinema had to play a concrete political role: to disseminate the communist message beyond the Soviet borders, to help the struggle for independence against imperialism and capitalism, and to demonstrate the sympathy and the friendship, as well as the interest and the spirit of tolerance of the Soviet Union towards the postcolonial friends. Yet who else could disseminate those ideas better that the Africans themselves? Obviously, many of those students became the filmmakers who latter marked both the national and the African cinema with their aesthetics and militant spirit. This paper aims, on the one hand, to examine the Soviet aid for the development of the African cinema and, on the other, to explore the mobility and the intellectual trajectories of a group of African filmmakers, in order to map out the political, ideological and cultural transfers that took place through the so-called “iron curtain”.

Smirnova Tatiana / EHESS

Abdou Moumouni Dioffo: An African Scientist and Intellectual Between Soviet Union and France

The aim of this paper is to examine the appeal and impact of the communist example on the transformation of ideas regarding educational policies and scientific research in Africa and in Niger in particular. The Nigerien Professor Abdou Moumouni Dioffo is one of the key figures in order to explore these transformations. Founding member of the communist FEANF (Fédération des étudiants d’Afrique Noire en France) and of the Marxist-Leninist PAI (Parti Africain de l’Indépendance), Moumouni traveled first to China and then to the Soviet Union, where he spent more than two years (1962-1964) studying solar energy. It was also during this period that he wrote his study-manifesto “L’éducation en Afrique”, in which he denounced the colonial legacy and introduced a project of educational reforms inspired both by the African cultures and by the communist example. His book influenced the educational agenda led by UNESCO in Africa in the 1960s-1970s. Advocate of the development of scientific research, Moumouni headed the Niger Solar Energy Office from 1969 to 1985. Yet, during this period his ideas seem to undergo some change. In this paper we suggest to examine Moumouni’s trajectory and the evolution of his thought in order explore both his relationship with the communist countries or ideas and what seems to be his detachment from them.

Heywood Linda / Boston University

Queen Njinga of Angola: Violence, Diplomacy and Gender and the Keys to Notoriety and Remembrance

Queen Njinga of Angola (1581-1663) has gone done in history as the only African leader to became a legend during her own life not only in Angola but in sacred and profane spaces of Europe and America. The paper argues that Njinga’s calculated use of violence against allies and enemies alike, her strategic use of soft power in the form of religious diplomacy, and the elaborate lengths she went to expand and exploit the gender norms of her own society had no comparisons in world history. Using published and unpublished sources as well as oral traditions recorded and collected in Angola and the Americas, the paper interrogates the life of this extraordinary woman who by successfully combining violence, diplomacy and creating new gender conventions in many ways shaped the shifting legacy of notoriety and sacred memory which she has garnered in Angola and elsewhere. The paper shows that the continuing fascination with this Angolan leader has much to do with the way Njinga creatively appropriated and exploited strategies of violence, diplomacy and gender norms from the African and Afro-Europeans conventions dominant in Angola at the time to set down the parameters for how her contemporaries and later generations from Angola and elsewhere would remember her.

Buri Maryann / York University

Beyond Slaves and Wives: Free Black Women and the Church in Eighteenth Century Benguela

On October 19, 1776, Caeta Sebastiao, a free black woman from the hinterland of Benguela, was buried in the Catholic church. Caeta never married and had no relatives, yet she was able to access a position of social standing in Benguela, according to her obituary, through involvement in the church. Many free, freed, and enslaved women from the hinterland received church burials in Benguela in the late 18th century. Black women were considered part of the church community much more frequently than black men; local constructions of gender determined that the church could be a social space for African women. An examination of how these women engaged in Catholic dying practices offers new insights into the role of African women in evolving Luso-African coastal societies during the slave trade. Burial records offer a wealth of information on the social position of individual African women, as well as the extent to which they participated in Catholic rituals upon their deaths. This paper examines burial records from the church of Nossa Senhora de Populo between 1770-1800, engaging in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the findings; it shows that women were able to gain access to social power and act as cultural brokers in the wider community through conversion to Catholicism and membership in Catholic Brotherhoods. While many African women became socially mobile through domestic relationships with European men, others strategically negotiated participation in the Church.

Dulley Iracema / London School of Economics

The production of gender in Protestant ABCFM missions in the Central Highlands of Angola

The project of the Congregationalist American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), active in the Central Highlands of Angola from the 1880s to 1961, was founded on the pillars of Christianization, literacy, and education through work. ABCFM archival sources reveal that missionary schools were based on a strict gender division, in both continuity and rupture with pre-colonial patterns of gender differentiation. One of the main purposes of education in ABCFM missionary schools was to train male Christian preachers and qualified workers and female Christian housewives and mothers, and the long-term effects thereof can be observed in the present gendered structure of Protestant families in the region. In considering the production of gender in ABCFM missionary schools in Angola, this paper intends to address the following issues: How was a gendered habitus produced in missionary schools? What kind of behavior was expected of male and female Christians and how were such dispositions inscribed in their bodies? To what extent can one affirm that there was continuation and/or rupture between this gendered Christian habitus and pre-colonial gender structures?

Paredes Margarida / PPGA-UFBA, Salvador e CRIA, Lisboa

Deolinda Rodrigues: Female Masculinities as Strategy of Resistance and Subversion in the MPLA Liberation Struggle in Angola

This paper will address the MPLA guerrilla fighter Deolinda Rodrigues, an ‘avant la lettre’ feminist who explored different gender roles and challenged the ruling order in the anti-colonial liberation movement to which she belonged from 1956 until 1967. The nationalist struggle was designed as a space where, to reinvent herself, she was required to broke with values linked to femininity and calling upon attributes considered as masculine, such as authority, decision, strength, courage, bravery and violence. In order to build herself as a “comrade in arms” fighting in a movement where male dominance was naturalized and where women’s emancipation was subject to the priority of national liberation, Deolinda was taken to subvert the ruling order and to articulate multiple dimensions of social construction of masculinities, or rather, alternative masculinities such as “female masculinities” (Halberstam 1998) to achieve the objectives of her nationalist activism. This reflection upon Deolinda Rodrigues will be based on MPLA documents, her biographical writings, the book “Diário de um Exílio sem Regresso” (2003) and testimonies recorded by former MPLA comrades who were interviewed in Angola during fieldwork undertaken in Anthropology (2011).

Keshodkar Akbar / Moravian College

Global Flows, Local Mobilization: Impact of Zanzibari Indian Ocean Diaspora on socialization and politicization of local religious communities in Zanzibar

While Zanzibar served as a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean cultural and economic center under the rule of the Omanis, the aftermath of the 1964 Revolution initiated a new era of displacement for Zanzibaris; thousands of them fleeing in exile or as refugees across the western Indian Ocean. Despite their dispersal, many of these Zanzibaris, while become integrated into other societies, have managed to renew their association with Zanzibar in the post-socialist era, in many instances with access to far greater financial resources than their Zanzibari counterparts. By incorporating Appadurai’s framework of “scapes” for directing new forms of global cultural flows (1990), this paper, based on ongoing ethnographical research on Indian Ocean social networks, examines how, through their ability to shape new social imaginaries in the lives of Zanzibaris, members of the diaspora across the Indian Ocean are influencing the development of new social and political ideologies and modes of religious mobilization within different Muslim communities back in Zanzibar. Drawing on examples of the Ibadis from Oman, the Bohras in India, the Ismailis in Kenya, mainland Tanzania and Zanzibaris in the United Arab Emirates, this paper analyzes how social imaginaries associated with transnational cultural flows enable the diaspora to become instrumental in mobilizing local communities and contesting local ideas of belonging, and in turn advocate new models of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism.

Mirzai Behnaz / Brock University

African Identity Formation/Transformation in Iran

Iran has been the locus of cultural, economic, and population exchanges for millennia. As elsewhere, newcomers gradually assimilated within and transformed native populations; indeed, cultural identities have constantly evolved in Iran, leading to the emergence of multiple ethnicities. I will discuss the development of identity formation among African communities within the context of Iran’s richly multicultural society, focusing on their cultural representations and practices. I argue that a combination of Islamic and local customs served as unifying factors in the integration of Africans arriving in Iran both before and after emancipation in 1929. While the representation of political identity has historically been determined by governmental policy, Persian customs and Islam have consistently worked together in forging a comprehensive national identity, blurring subnational feelings and sentiments. Simultaneously, local ethnic and religious variables continued to create subethnic and multiethnic identities. Today, the result is seen in the existence of multiethnic groups of people that celebrate a myriad of national, religious, ethnic, regional, and cultural identities.
Afro-Iranian is a general term that can easily be expanded to refer to many subethnic identities (e.g., Afro-Bandari Iranian, Afro-Baluchi Iranian, and Afro-Arab Iranian). While each group had a distinct experience of identity formation and transformation based on specific geographical, cultural, social, and political circumstances, we must underline interrelationships and the integration within and among people and cultures associated with the African diaspora in Iran. My approach to the study of African descendants in Iran is primarily based on personal observations, interviews, oral traditions, archival materials, and literature. Local geographical variations and cultural diversifications of subethnic societies in Iran had a direct impact on the formation of the distinct cultural identity and communal patterns of the Afro-Iranian population, which could best be understood through first-hand observation. Fieldwork in rural and urban areas of Iran’s southern provinces was crucial in appreciating the communities of African descendants.

Sanchez Samuel / niversité Paris Diderot Paris 7

Perilous shores: Of Malagasy kingdoms, piracy and attacks against foreign traders on the coasts of Madagascar, 16th-20th centuries.

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Malagasy coasts were often considered dangerous by European seafarers. Over the same period of time, European trade was slowly integrating the Indian Ocean world, thereby altering its organization. While the phenomenon of 17th-century European piracy has already been studied at large, the question of Malagasy attacks against the vessels that anchored in the coastal waters of Madagascar has never been studied in its own right. Indeed, even if Malagasy piracy attacks have often been made mention of, they have never been given more thorough consideration by scholars – whether R. Kent, J.-P. Vérin or S. Ellis, among others. This phenomenon cannot be considered independently from its Malagasy context and deserves to be studied specifically. It is from such a perspective that I will examine the role of Malagasy political economies in relation to this issue. I therefore propose to establish a census and present a typology – classified in regions and periods – of the different types of attacks – whether crew killing, cargo theft or hostage-taking – perpetrated over time by various Malagasy powers.
These attacks launched against Atlantic seafarers in fact revealed internal Malagasy competition over the monopoly of trade, the latter being synonymous with reinforced political power. It may also be seen as evidence of the then existing competition between the various Indian ocean trading networks involved in Malagasy economy.

Bastião Maria Pereira / Leiden University

“Brazilian” slave traders in Mozambique Island (early 19th century)

Although the Brazilian slavers had first docked in the Mozambican ports as early as the 17th century, the Brazilian demand for “Moçambiques” only became significant in the first decades of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the strengthening of the English abolitionist movement in the Atlantic Ocean. While slave-trade between Brazil and the African coastal corresponding to present day Mozambique has already been studied regarding the volume of exported slaves, the socio-cultural dynamics brought by this trade has been neglected. Hence, this paper intends to study the Brazilians who acted as slave traders in Mozambique Island between the late 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century. The overall intention is to reconstruct their personal pathways, and get to know their networks and their business strategies in the Indian and the Atlantic contexts, their family strategies and their integration in the insular society. By so doing, this paper seeks to better understand the relationships that these men established between themselves,with others and with the space(s) in which they acted, namely Mozambique Island but also, and as far as possible, with the other ports where they had traded. The analysis will draw upon manuscript sources gathered in the Overseas Historical Archive (the Overseas Council collection), for instance, population maps, juridical documents including witnesses lists, military documents, among others.

Neposteri Silvia / Università degli Studi di Pavia and Inalco (Paris)

Islamic groups’ migrations and the heritage of writing in the south-east of Madagascar

À partir de 2000 av. J.C., l’Océan Indien a été parcouru par nombreuses vagues de migrants arrivés sur l’Île Rouge. La migration et le mélange culturel représentent donc évidemment un élément non négligeable dans la compréhension de l’histoire aussi bien que de la civilisation malgache. Notre communication propose une présentation des voyages des groupes islamisés parvenus au sud-est de Madagascar (XIIème-XVème siècles). Une attention particulière sera consacrée à l’organisation traditionnelle du groupe antemoro, installé sur les côtes du fleuve Matitanana. Pour mieux en comprendre la structure sociale, on reviendra aussi sur les informations contenues dans quelques sorabe, manuscrits en langue malgache transcrite en caractères arabes. Le voyage des ancêtres est décrit en détail dans certains manuscrits et joue un rôle pivot dans la mémoire collective aussi bien que dans la construction de l’identité et la justification des prérogatives des groupes nobles. L’écriture sorabe sera donc présentée comme source documentaire et comme outil chargé d’une valeur sociale et politique fondamentale dans le système de pouvoir antemoro. En conclusion, le cas ethnographique antemoro donnera l’occasion pour contribuer au débat scientifique à propos de plusieurs thèmes historiques et anthropologiques d’intérêt, tels que l’héritage des migrations islamisées à Madagascar ou encore les dynamiques de pouvoir et d’intégration/exclusion sociale liées au rôle politique de l’écriture.

Alfagali Crislayne / Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp-Brazil)

Knowledge Transfer and African Labor: the Village of Nova Oeiras and its Iron Factory (Angola)

The main goal of this paper is to analyze life and work conditions of the people who lived in the village of Nova Oeiras, especially those who worked with the iron transformation in the Royal Iron Factory of Nova Oeiras. On one hand, the factory installation was part of the Portuguese colonization project in Africa, and it was related to mineralogical and scientific studies that were growing in the second half of the eighteenth century, in the context of Pombal’s policies to develop the manufactories. On the other hand, it involved workers from a diverse cultural, social and legal matrix: Europeans, Africans, deportees, prisoners. This research aims to discuss how this mosaic of individuals, which was united by the knowledge about the iron smelting and forging, was related to the most important interests of the colonial and metropolitan authorities. The study of African techniques that were employed in the iron smelting and forging will be used as thread of analysis, since it allows to understand the disputes, conflicts, customs and traditions involving both the Portuguese colonization strategies of domination, and also the forms of resistance articulated by Africans. In order to do this, we will analyze the José Alvares Maciel writings, an important naturalistic that visited the Iron Factory in 1800.

Leblan Vincent / UMR 208 PALOC IRD-MNHN

A Human/Animal Colonial Frontier : Naturalistic Chimpanzee Captures or the Making of Racial Identities in French Guinea, 1920-1930

In the context of the first simian models for research on infectious diseases in the French colonial empire, the administration organized chimpanzee captures to supply the Pasteur Institute with experimental subjects. This presentation sheds light on the moral economy of capture and care of primates by analysing the role of these living specimens in defining the relationship of colonial science stakeholders to the Other. To this end, I have used a collection of press articles, correspondence between the colonial administration and professional hunters, a touristic hunting narrative, as well as iconographic data. Attempts to catch, tame and/or domesticate the chimpanzee reveal the species’ liminal status, allowing Europeans (e.g. doctors, veterinarians, journalists and trophy hunters) to gauge the distance they introduced between themselves and the “indigenous”.

Lainé Agnès / Institut des mondes africains (CNRS-Univ Paris 1 – EPHE – EHESS – IRD – AMU)

De la collecte scientifique à la concession coloniale : l’itinéraire d’un naturaliste parisien au XIXe siècle.

Nous présentons l’itinéraire d’Aimé Bouvier, un naturaliste peu connu, voyageur, collectionneur et taxidermiste, membre de plusieurs sociétés savantes et promoteur de voyages d’exploration et de collectes en Afrique, qui fut parmi les premiers actionnaires de compagnies concessionnaires au Congo et à Madagascar à la fin du XIXe siècle. S’appuyant sur des sources d’état civil, annuaires du commerce, récits de voyage, bulletins de sociétés savantes et archives des compagnies concessionnaires, la recherche emprunte à la microstoria sa démarche biographique pour identifier les articulations socio-historiques entre les divers aspects – marchands et savants – du naturalisme avec l’entreprise de colonisation.

From Scientific collection to colonial concession: the route of a Parisian naturalist in the Nineteenth Century.

We present the route of Aimé Bouvier, a little-known naturalist, traveler, collector and taxidermist, member of several learned societies and promoter of explorations and collections in Africa, who was among the first shareholders of concessionary companies in Congo and Madagascar at the end of the nineteenth century.
Based on sources of civil status, trade directories, travel accounts, journals of learned societies, and archives of concessionary companies, research borrows from the microstoria biographical approach to identify the socio-historical links between the various aspects – merchants and scholars – of naturalism with the colonial enterprise.

Carré Benoît / Unité de gestion Botanique, UMR 7205 CNRS-MNHN

Production of Naturalistic Knowledge in Madagascar: the Example of Raymond Decary’s Wood Collections

Raymond Decary (1891-1973) was a colonial administrator in Madagascar from 1916 to 1944. He possessed an uncommon ability to work and was also ethnologist, naturalist, geologist and historian. Throughout his career, this man for whom “the collection should be a means, not a goal, a way to advance science and knowledge” explored all fields of research.
Its collections are now deposited in the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, and include many fields of studies: minerals, animals, plants, ethnographic objects, mission maps, 200 books and 400 articles, as well as 13 volumes of his field diary, recently published by his daughter recently.
With more than 40 000 samples of plants, Decary’s collections are a precious source of information on the flora of Madagascar. At these Herbarium collections are related a collection of samples of wood and richly knowledgeable anatomical slides, including several type specimens. It is through this particular collection and Raymond Decary personality, that we will discover a real ethnography of Madagascar, rooted in a time of great historical and colonial upheavals.

Leport Julie / Université de Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès

Fish in Dakar : Persistences and changes

Au Sénégal et à Dakar en particulier, le poisson est un aliment central. Son importance est à la fois nutritionnelle, identitaire, symbolique, sociale et économique. Or, la surexploitation des ressources ainsi que les politiques d’exportation du poisson menées par le gouvernement entraînent une raréfaction des ressources et donc une augmentation des prix du poisson sur les marchés dakarois. Dans ce contexte, comment évoluent les modèles alimentaires ? Quelles sont les stratégies mises en place par les populations ?
Pour répondre à ces questions, une étude qualitative a été menée à travers des entretiens individuels et des observations participantes de sessions alimentaires (approvisionnement, préparation et consommation) auprès de 29 mangeurs dakarois. Puis une étude quantitative sous forme de questionnaire a été réalisée auprès de 800 dakarois. L’échantillonnage a été fait selon la méthode des quotas croisés selon l’âge, le sexe et le quartier d’habitation.
Outre l’augmentation du budget alimentaire lorsqu’ils le peuvent, les dakarois agissent à la fois sur les aliments – baisse de la qualité et/ou de la quantité de poisson, poisson séché -, sur les plats – substitution des plats à base de poisson par des bouillies de mil par exemple – et sur la structure de la journée alimentaire – alimentation de rue, un seul repas par jour. Le recours à l’une ou l’autre de ces stratégies et les discours de légitimation qui les accompagnent diffèrent selon le niveau de vie des individus.

Chevalier Sophie / IIAC (LAU), Université de Franche-Comté/CNRS/EHESS

Strategies of Food Consumption. A Case Study of Durban

If the food prices in South Africa are usually more controlled than elsewhere in Africa, nevertheless food inflation there exposes the less affluent classes to considerable precarity. Based on a long-term study of food consumption among the lower middle classes across the range of Durban’s communities, including urban food supply chains as well as individual shopping and cooking preferences, I will focus here on strategies for coping with increasingly precarious livelihoods and fragile claims on social status.
I describe two aspects of my informants’ economic and social behaviour:
• by organising their provisions through access to a wide range of shopping possibilities – from traditional markets to huge supermarkets chains – they have the means of budgeting and coping with the inflationary prices of certain food items;
• by maintaining strong links to their community of origin, food provisioning and consumption are built around community norms of sharing rather than social class identification.
These two aspects allow them to cope with the uncertainties of economy and of their class status. Each trend offers an obstacle to realising the project of individualised consumption which underpins neoliberal capitalism.

Picchioni Fiorella / SOAS (University of London)

Impacts of food price changes on food security in Africa: preliminary estimates of Minimum Calorie Expenditure Shares

There are conflicting views of the impacts of the 2008 global food price spike on global and African food security. Key questions concern the extent to which food insecure populations have experienced food price increases (as a result of interactions between global prices and their transmission to domestic markets, domestic supply-demand situations and domestic policies) and how far the effects of any food price rises have been counteracted by economic and income growth. This suggests that it is the relationship between food prices and income that is critical for food security. This paper sets out preliminary insights on the effects of recent global and domestic staple food price changes on the food security of poor people in a sample of African and other countries using a novel food price indicator, the Minimum Calorie Expenditure Share (MCES). This calculates the expenditure required to meet a minimum per capita calorie from staples consumption as a share of total expenditure in different income groups of a population. We describe the methodology and its data needs for construction of national estimates and for building regional indicators before presenting preliminary estimates of post 2000 MCES series for a sample of African and comparator countries. The main patterns of change are then compared with findings from other studies and conclusions drawn regarding food price impacts on food security and the possible use of MCES in monitoring these impacts.

Stevano Sara / SOAS (University of London)

The production of food vulnerability: Food price, seasonality and agricultural labour in northern Mozambique

Assessments and conceptualisations of food security are often reliant on snapshot-based measurements of access to food. For instance, although the role of seasonality in shaping food consumption and security has been repeatedly highlighted in some literature, food research and policy has frequently neglected the importance of seasonality. However much more can be understood about food vulnerability if its study is grounded in the analysis of the underlying determinants, on the one hand, and in the observation of its seasonal and temporal dynamics, on the other hand. This paper investigates the interactions between food price fluctuations, seasonality and agricultural labour in the province of Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique. The combination of high food prices and agricultural cycles are at the basis of the organisation of productive and reproductive activities – i.e. during the rainy seasons poorer households need to resort to occasional agricultural wage work in order to respond to food shortages and increased food prices. Addressing these interactions offers a lens to look at the processes of production of food insecurity over time and how it differently affects socio-economic groups. Efforts to tackle food insecurity must address the structural patterns that underlie the production of food-related vulnerability.

Johnston Deborah / SOAS (University of London)

The response to food price spikes in the workplace: A case study of Ethiopian flower farms

Rises in food prices can affect the workplace. Those dependent on wage work may try various strategies to achieve sufficient consumption. They may search harder and even migrate for better paying employment, or, if there is structural and associational space in the jobs where they presently work, they may attempt action to push up wages. For employers in sectors that demand large amounts of timely labour, food price spikes can lead to problems obtaining sufficient labour. In this case study of the Ethiopia flower sector, the reasons why some farms provide food is discussed in the context of competition for labour. Rises in food prices in Ethiopia have significantly changed the ability of poor workers to provision food for their households. Food provision for these workers increases their food intake but does not resolve food insecurity and raises issues about health outcomes.

Bank Leslie / University of Fort Hare

The Limits of Ubuntu. Suicide, Mutuality and Migration in Mandela Park, Hout Bay, Cape Town

The paper focuses on the moral panic and controversy that has emerged around a series of male suicides in the urban settlement of Mandela Park since 2012. About a third of Mandela Park’s residents come from the same rural areas in the Eastern Cape Province. The reason for this is that Xhosa-speaking labour migrants from that area all lived in the migrant labour barracks in the Hout Bay harbour precinct during apartheid. As they gained access to space, they invited their wives and children to join them. The old migrants served as gatekeepers, favouring people from their own home areas and excluding others. In the initial years of settlement, social solidarity amongst the ‘Gatyana people’, as they called themselves, was strong. They expressed admirable traits of ubuntu (human solidarity), supporting their neighbours, cousins and clansmen to settle in Hout Bay. By 2012, a different ethos prevailed amongst Gatyana neighbours and kinsmen in Mandela Park. There was enormous suspicion amongst them and some very serious accusation of witchcraft and murder. Many of these accusations were associated with incidents of suicide amongst young male breadwinners in Gatyana urban households. The accusations connected town and countryside and cut across families. The aim of this paper is to explore these extraordinary circumstances and explore some of the social and cultural dynamics at work – especially those related to questions of mutuality, relatedness and kinship.

Le Marcis Frederic / Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon

Bonnet Emmanuel / IRD & Caen University

Negociated Neihgbourhoods. Understanding Neighbourhood in the context of political and sanitary crisis (Ivory Coast)

The development of Abidjan is largely the product of Houphouët Boigny’s urbanisation policies, which aimed to foster the emergence of black middle class. As a result, Abidjan has become a highly segregated city and has been the site of a major political crisis following the 2008 elections. Abidjan also has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in French-speaking Africa. This paper begins with these three realities (socio-spatial inequalities, HIV, political crisis) to question neighbourhood and relatedness in relation to the notion of territory. Building on anthropological and geographical fieldwork carried out within a clinical trial on early HIV prophylaxis in Abidjan, we analyse how these realities depend on circumstances (Retaillé, 2012). We show how these circumstances are blurred with an ontology of experimental subjects (Brives, 2013) on the one hand, and with social capital, on the other. The locally salient notion of neighbourhood emerges as a negotiated and unstable reality. The paper argues that clinical trial logics partake in producing territories but that these are not definitive. They belong to specific temporalities and are the product of negotiations between structural constraints and actor’s capacities: they shrink, expand and transform relatedness accordingly.

Desplat Patrick / Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Cologne

“The House is not to be Exposed”. Navigating Proximity and Distance in Urban Neighbourhoods of Mahajanga, Madagascar

This paper explores the desires for privacy as well as social articulations and materialities of fearing other’s envy among Middle class families in the cosmopolitan port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar. A common expression in everyday talk demands tokatrano tsy ahahaka, the house is not to be exposed: Private matters belong to the family and should not be brought to the public, while at the same time their members are expected to block off external negative influences. To retreat to a private space is particularly important within Middle Class families, who are driven by their aspirations for a Better life as well as anxieties about losing their status and the few materiel things they were able to accumulate. Most present is the fear of the envy of others which is perceived to be responsible for the omnipresent gossip and the occasional ill-will with rather severe consequences like witchcraft or other forms of violence. Shielding food, house, everyday life at the house from curious eyes through curtains, plants, verandas and proper fences are common material practices to keep others at distance, an often fruitless attempt given the limited housing space of popular residential quarters of the neighbourhood, which demands – at the same time – an open door of sociality and solidarity. Drawing on recent fieldwork in Mahajanga, the paper engages in questions of how Middle class families navigate and balance social proximity and distance in their urban everyday life.

Cesnulyte Egle / University of Warwick

Solidarity, competition and witchcraft among Mtwapa sex workers in Mombasa, Kenya

The Kenyan Coast and Mombasa City are popular sex tourism destinations hosting many sex tourists from Kenya and international destinations. Mtwapa is a neighbourhood of Mombasa that is notorious for its clubs, bars and beaches where one can find a sex worker; the high number elderly European men owning properties and having ‘wives’; as well as a great number of sex workers who live and work there (renting properties or owning them). This paper relies on life stories and in-depth interviews with women from Mtwapa who identify as sex workers, and aims to explore the cooperation and competition that prevails among women in the sex industries.
The sex trade is a dangerous occupation –there are many risks posed by violent clients, the police, and lifestyle. In order to remain safe, groups of women selling sex often cooperate with each other and create certain ‘codes of conduct’ that they comply with. Being part of such ‘friendship’ circles makes one’s work at night safer and gives a degree of protection. At the same time, sex workers also face fierce competition and possible violence from their colleagues, because good clients are few, and competition for them can get out of hand. This paper will explore how competition in Mtwapa’s sex scenes interacts with threat of violence related to prostitution and results in the discourse and practices of witchcraft that are employed to cope with such ambiguities and fears.

Malefakis Alexis / University of Zürich, Switzerland

Too familiar to trust. Ambivalent social proximity among Wayao street vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Close social relations are crucial for rural migrants in Dar es Salaam but in the city their positive value may be inversed. For a group of Wayao street vendors, social relations with relatives, age mates and fellow villagers were important for their migration to the city and their debut in the streets. But subsequently they re-evaluated their social relations to their colleagues and neighbours dramatically. Individually challenged by urban life, they viewed their interdependence as keeping them from developing the faculties necessary for success in the city and often denigrated themselves as uneducated, untrustworthy, and lacking foresight. In that social narrative, all colleagues were considered similar. The ambivalence of social proximity became most apparent with respect to the question of trust. Trust here is understood as an epistemic operation of interpreting a situation and suspending incomplete knowledge in order to reach to a favourable expectation of the future. According to their narrative, the Wayao were intimately familiar with one another since they considered all to be similar in terms of education, social background and economic performance. In addition, they observed their peers closely in the small backyard where they worked. Thus they could not suspend incomplete knowledge, as in their understanding their mutual familiarity was all-encompassing, and therefore could not establish trust in their relations. The paper is based on 14 months of fieldwork.

Toulabor Comi / LAM, Science Po Bordeaux

Les motocyclistes « casquent » le rire sur les routes du Bénin

C’est seulement en août 2014 que les pouvoirs publics ont décidé d’imposer le port obligatoire du casque aux motocyclistes dont le nombre a considérablement augmenté depuis les années 1990 avec l’entrée massive des zémidjans (taxis-motos) pour tromper l’endémique chômage des jeunes sans perspective d’emploi.
Dans cette contribution, il s’agit de voir, à partir de certains clichés, comment le motocycliste béninois contourne la décision ministérielle par une inventivité et une créativité débordantes (des casseroles de cuisine aux paniers d’osier, etc…) qui déclenchent une activité soutenue des zygomatiques mais qui désarment aussi la police nationale et le Conseil national de sécurité routière.
Si les clichés et les situations suscitent sourire et fou rire, il n’en demeure pas moins que l’impuissance des autorités incapables de contrôler la qualité des casques participe aussi du rire. Les casques en osier nouent des drames mortels sur les routes béninoises où le respect du code de route est très aléatoire, mais cette dimension tragique de la circulation n’est pas l’objet principal de mon intervention qui insistera sur sa dimension drôle et rieuse.

Iwata Takuo / Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan

Laughter in political transformation in Africa

This paper aims to focus on “laughter” in political transformation in African　countries from a different angle. In African studies (especially in social science), we, researchers, tend to focus on tragic or failed aspects such as conflict, dictatorship, poverty, and economic crisis etc. We might be likely to find some “solutions” or show prescription to overcome difficulties with which African people and states have been faced for decades.
However, researchers have frequently encountered “laughter” during their own field researches in Africa. African people does not only live in tragedies, but also enjoys “normal” life with laughter while repeatedly suffering from human (political) disasters. This is too natural phenomenon. However, we might not have paid sufficient attention to this daily human act in social (even human) science researches. Laughter or acts of laugh should be full in human life in African society as well as other parts of the world.
This paper suppose that political situation influences on the character of laughter in human life. Political situation has been changing in the 21st century. Therefore, the laughter might mirror the social and political reality in Africa. This paper reflects on the laughter through case studies Benin, Burkina Faso, Togo, and other African countries in order to understand political transformation in African countries.

Bandaogo Zacharia / IMAF

“Give me the power and I will give you back the laugh”: Humor and the politician’s derision in time of peace and war in Côte d’ivoire

Dans les périodes calmes ou dramatiques, l’activité politique génère des passions secrètes. Chaque parti met en place une gestion des passions politiques, une gestion des adhésions affectives et des hostilités contre les concurrents. Observant les oppositions politiques et les protestations collectives, les humoristes, les caricaturistes et les artistes musiciens portent un autre regard sur le pouvoir mais aussi sur les politiques qui se le disputent. Pourquoi ne pas en rire ? Telle semble être la problématique qui ressort de leur « prise de position ». Une « prise de position » qui pose en elle-même la problématique du pouvoir. Le cas d’Adama Dahico, humoriste qui rentrera en compétition avec les acteurs politiques qu’il tournait auparavant en dérision, illustre bien ce qu’est ces rapports de pouvoir mais aussi et surtout les passions individuelles et collectives. Politiquement, l’humour à l’égard des détenteurs du pouvoir politique est partie llement significatif de même que la violence. La guerre qui par son aspect dramatique oppose les politiques, devient à travers l’humour un moyen de rapprochement. Cette contribution vise à mettre en évidence cette manière qu’ont les humoristes, les caricaturistes et les artistes musiciens de rire des politiques en période de paix et de guerre. Au-delà du rire, il s’agira de décrypter et d’analyser le sens des vocables qu’ils utilisent pour informer l’opinion des accointances, des alliances et des tractations politiques.

Besigroha Linda / Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies

Broadcast Humour and Stand-up Comedy as Forms of Social Commentary in Uganda

Humour is essential to societal interactions in Uganda and the dour-faced generally ridiculed. The stereotypical cheerfulness attributed to people on the African continent is proven true so often as Ugandans choose to laugh about the things that irk them most about their society, be it corrupt and inept officials, poverty or even death. The customary phrase, “that’s our Uganda” accompanied by a helpless-looking shrug, may fool observers into thinking that Ugandans simply accept circumstances as they are. However, a closer look at the language of humour employed in various settings, as well as across social boundaries, reveals a society that takes a keen interest in shaping its future with the resources available to it. Indeed, humour as social commentary, becomes one such resource for coming to terms with the present and shaping the future. This paper uses the example of Ugandan comedian, Anne Kansiime, to discuss how television and stand-up comedy are reconfiguring discourses on gender within the country. In fact, Anne Kansiime, through YouTube and social media, has become a house-hold name among many Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Certainly this paper contributes to the general academic debate on humour and social transformation in Africa.

Imbert-Vier Simon / Institut des mondes africains (IMAF)

«Améliorer Wikipédia ?», un retour d’expérience

Depuis que l’ex-CEMAf a demandé à ses membres d’«améliorer Wikipedia», en particulier les pages consacrées à l’Afrique dans sa version francophone, je me suis investi principalement sur les articles concernant mon terrain de recherche, la Corne de l’Afrique. En quatre ans, j’ai réalisé près de 4000 «contributions», d’importances très inégales.
Ce parcours a permis de rencontrer une grande partie des difficultés qui attendent le «spécialiste» confronté à Wikipédia : légitimité des discours, temps passé, lutte contre les préjugés et les idées reçues… mais aussi de montrer l’apport de la démarche.
Les modes de fonctionnement de l’encyclopédie permettent de surmonter la majorité des difficultés et de rendre le contenu plus conforme à l’état des savoirs. Les points les plus difficiles restent une représentation très occidentale du monde (dont le paradigme est peut-être l’onomastique) et la mobilisation de ressources sur des sujets pointus et peu documentés mais politiquement et idéologiquement mobilisés. Une difficulté imprévue a surgit avec l’utilisation d’une documentation universitaire très récente.
Enfin, je tenterai un bref bilan général de la démarche du CEMAf.

Guittar Michelle / Northeastern Illinois University

Page Laverne / Library of Congress

Edit-A-Thons: Collaborating to Improve Wikipedia Content for African Studies

Libraries, from the Library of Congress to Northeastern Illinois University, are hosting Wikipedia Edit-A-Thons to create and/or improve the content of Wikipedia articles on topics relevant to African Studies and the diaspora. To illuminate aspects of previously-undocumented local African American history, two small universities in Chicago, Illinois hosted a Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon, finding relevant primary and secondary sources, creating a scaffolding structure to frame the article, and on the day of the event, guiding students to relevant materials to create a Wikipedia page in real-time. At the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., with the same goal of illuminating underutilized valuable ephemera and photograph , staff members held an Edit-A-Thon, drawing upon their subject expertise in African Studies and knowledge of the collections, to enrich Wikipedia pages that had been identified as in need of improvement. This kind of event has important implications for those in African Studies worldwide. Librarians and scholars of African Studies, who have access to valuable primary source material and important secondary sources, can easily hold similar events to disseminate otherwise privileged knowledge in a way that is free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Information about how to host a similar event will be provided.

Pensa Iolanda / Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI)

The role of scholars in contributing to Wikipedia

The role of scholars in contributing directly or indirectly to Wikipedia is extremely important. Scholars can write, share and review content related to Africa with a specific expertise, not largely available at present among the Wikipedia community. They can suggest how to improve articles, involve students in writing and translating content as an assignment, produce articles for Wikipedia sessions of scientific journals and release content under open. Acknowledging Wikipedia articles as contribution to scientific journals is an increasing approach among academic publications; a well structured and complete article is not an original research but it is more and more widely recognized as a complex and valuable contribution supporting original research, making it understandable to hundreds of thousands of readers, and facilitating further studies with relevant references.
The contribution is based on the experience of WikiAfrica (www.wikiafrica.net), “Share Your Knowledge” (a project involving 100 institutions in contributing to African content on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects), “Mobile A2K: Culture and Safety in Africa” (with research documentation such as 4000 images of public art in Douala between 1991 and 2013 made available on the Wikimedia projects, of four years of teaching experience and Wikipedia assignments at NABA and of the research project Wikipedia Primary School.

Millstein Marianne / The Nordic Africa Institute

Trajectories of Movement Politics in Cape Town

South African cities have experienced an intensification of urban protests. Contrary to previous actions, these protests are described as spontaneous responses to service delivery and, with some exceptions are short-lived and only weakly linked to more durable networks and social movements. While still under-researched, a debate is emerging as to what extent these modes of protests, as a politics of urban citizenship, differ from previous waves of social movement mobilisation and action and, if so, what account for these shifts. For instance, Hart (2012) sees these protests as ‘movements beyond movements’ and link this to a broader crisis of nationalism and democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. While it is critical to place these protests in this broader political and economic frame and shifting identities in a post-apartheid South Africa, it does not say much about the nature of urban politics and exactly how and why current protests are, assumedly, something ‘new’.
Perhaps it also conceals important continuities between waves of collective action. In this paper I will explore these trajectories in Cape Town. Based on literature reviews (including a systematic assessment of case studies) on the first wave of social movements and the recent wave of protests, media reports and my own work in Delft, I will explore possible continuities and ruptures and discuss implications of these for a shifting politics of urban citizenship.

Di Nunzio Marco / Université Libre de Bruxelles/University of Oxford

“Asking is necessary”. The Entitlement to Ask and the Politics of Development in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

‘Asking is necessary’, a 65-year-old carpenter, who had been working in the construction sector in Addis Ababa for more than forty years, told me after that some of his colleagues and members of the labour union had been fired from an international construction company after they made demands for better working conditions and better salaries. This paper examines the ways construction workers try to instate their ‘entitlement to ask’ through collective action as a lens to investigate the effects of the arrangements governing capital investment in African cities on how, why and by whom the ownership of urban development is claimed and maintained.
Addis Ababa is a paradigmatic case. The construction of Dubai-style buildings and large infrastructural projects in the city has drawn the attention of international investors and business commentators, bearing witness to the making of an ‘African success story’. This paper provides a critical commentary to the current discourses on Africa rising, while situating struggles for the city through the analysis of the political arrangements shaping economic growth. I argue that our understandings of these struggles should not exclusively focus on finding ways of redistributing the benefits of economic growth more fairly. It should extend into the ways claims and demands from below are taken into account to affect – and not simply ‘assess’ – how development, economic growth and collective wellbeing are conceptualized and pursued.

Eberth Andreas / Leibniz University of Hanover Institute for Science Education (Geography Education)

Everyday Life of the Youth in the Informal Settlements of Nairobi, Kenya: Construction of Place of an Empowering Civil Society

Considering areas as ‘spaces’ omits the individual perception as socially constructed ‘places’. How can we inquire and analyze this phenomenon?
Nairobi as ‘space’ is presented as a metropolis coined by strong socioeconomic disparities. The numerous slums and their inhabitants appear as marginalized ‘spaces’.
However, by inquiring the characteristics of the everyday life of the 15-24 year old youth who were born, grew up, and still live in there, the image of the slum as ‘place’ can be taken into consideration.
A case study, applying the method of reflexive photography, visualized this phenomenon in August 2014. The participants individually took pictures of their everyday life, which, according to them, are particularly relevant. These photos are the basis for the following interviews.
The analyses of the inquiries illustrate that the participants hardly framed negative images like criminality or HIV/Aids. Rather, they presented their environment by showing a high degree of involvement in community-based organizations. This shows that the adolescent inhabitants of the settlement have a strong connection to their slum, thereby implying it more to be a slum: their home. Being organized in youth groups, they create their own place according to their personal visions.
This generation appears as an empowering civil society that appropriates and develops their place independently from political responsibilities.

Bénit-Gbaffou Claire / CUBES, School of Architecture and Planning, Wits University

Do Street Traders have a “Right to the City”? The Politics of Street Trader Organisations in Inner City Johannesburg, post Operation Clean Sweep

Street trader organizations are paradoxical objects for study. They are seldom looked upon as social movements – academics present their division, their fluidity, their fragility; media are prompt to call them ‘fly-by-night’, ‘opportunistic’, organizing only ‘popcorn protests’. It is difficult to use the concept of the “right to the City” to analyse their claims – so contested are rights to dense inner city spaces, between a variety of users, not all of them in dominant socio-economic positions; and so ambiguous is the figure of the street trader – poor and oppressed but also appropriating public space for profit, and increasingly claiming, in neoliberalising cities, her identity as entrepreneur.
Through the study of street trader organizations active in Johannesburg inner city, in the aftermath of the 2013 ‘Operation Clean Sweep’ (where the City of Johannesburg unsuccessfully attempted to evict all street traders from its inner city), the paper seeks at better understanding the politics of street trader organizations – how they frame their claims, forge unlikely alliances and enter in divisive conflicts, understand their commonalities and divergences, in relation to a municipality that creates or consolidates their divisions to rule. Of particular interest will be the question of the progressive character (or not) of these claims; organisations’ common concern for street traders’ political representation; and their quest for forms of autonomous management of street trading.

Bertrand Monique / Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, UMR 245 – CESSMA

Social Mobilisation against Land Evictions and Grabbing in Bamako, Mali: Leaders and Grassroots

For the last decade, many land ownership conflicts have caused an increasing movement of collective protest in Bamako. Resistance to “land grabbing” and evictions is widening in the urban space, through various types of litigations and juridical segments of the housing market. Contestation is no more limited to poor communities or irregular settlements, nor to requests for compensation. It is now connected to international networks of activism, mobilised as a matter of “human rights”. Open protests about speculation and corruption rather enlighten the limits of the participative paradigm in the Malian capital.
In this context, the strengthening of a coordination of associations imposes three levels of analysis: about the movement’s leaders, the victims and their local representatives. Beyond the political crisis which shook the country in 2012, mobilisations more generally follow the transformation of Bamako under liberalism, and the changing clientelism relationship along the political trajectory of Mali. The grassroots commitment, however, expresses a tactical legitimacy on ownership, and basically alternates between disaffiliation and comeback to the collective action. Fragmentary or intermittent social interactions make difficult for the leaders to promote a common advocacy for property and customary rights. Land disputes finally combine an undoubted process of individuation and reinforced social networks.

Eboko Fred / IRD – CEPED (Paris)

Maurice Enguéléguélé (IAG, Dakar), Fatoumata Hane (Univ. de Ziguinchor), Sylvain Faye (UCAD, Dakar), Mathias-Eric Owona Nguini (FPAE, Yaoundé) et le Groupe Gouvernance et sida en Afrique

Gouvernance et sida en Afrique. Crise financière et recomposition de l’action publique internationale. L’exemple du Fonds mondial

L’expansion de la pandémie du sida et les réponses internationales, entre le milieu des années 1980 et le début des années 2000, ont signifié pour les États africains l’avènement d’injonctions internationales contradictoires. Entre la “désétatisation” imposée par les Programmes d’Ajustement Structurel et la “bureaucratisation” dans le sous-secteur de la santé que représente la lutte contre le VIH/sida, c’est un modèle d’action publique qui a vu le jour, qui concerne plus généralement le paysage de la “santé mondiale”. La crise financière internationale, intervenue en 2008 a généré une baisse des ressources internationales, un impératif pour les États africains de générer des ressources domestiques et parallèlement une crise de gouvernance du Fonds mondial. Dans la configuration plus générale des politiques publiques, les États africains sont “encadrés” désormais par une constellation d’acteurs avec lesquels ils coécrivent l’action publique. Cette présentation propose une analyse panoptique des principaux acteurs internationaux, leurs fonctions pratiques et les trajectoires des États africains, par le prisme de l’action du Fonds mondial.

Smith Julia / University of Bradford, England

From AIDS Exceptionalism to the End of AIDS: Civil society organizations and the reframing of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa

Through a convergence of activism and policy approaches, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa has been framed as exceptional, with AIDS exceptionalism referring to arguments that the epidemic requires a response above and beyond that of other health interventions. Civil society organizations (CSOs) used the AIDS exceptionalism frame to justify their participation in the HIV/AIDS response and to advocate for a human rights based approach to the epidemic. In recent years, as the concept of AIDS exceptionalism has been challenged, CSOs have struggled to justify their participation in the HIV/AIDS response, and to assert a continued rights-based approach.
This paper draws on key informant interviews, primary documents and secondary sources to analyze how HIV/AIDS CSOs have engaged in the post-exceptionalism reframing of the Sub-Saharan African HIV/AIDS epidemic and response. It considers three reframing processes: the post-MDG agenda, the key populations frame, and the end of AIDS frame. It argues that the legacy of AIDS exceptionalism has results in the exclusion of HIV/AIDS CSOs in the framing of the post-MDG agenda. The key populations frame provides opportunities for CSOs to assert their role in, and a rights-based approach to, the HIV/AIDS response, but faces particular socio-political restrictions in Sub-Saharan Africa. The end of AIDS frame is unhelpful in a context where HIV/AIDS remains a persistent public health challenge.

Coulibaly Nonlourou Marie Paule Natogoma / Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies/ University of Bayreuth (Germany)

Les mécanismes sociaux de pouvoir et de contre-pouvoir des organisations locales de lutte contre le VIH/sida en Afrique de l’ouest

En Afrique de l’ouest comme dans d’autres pays en développement des associations communautaires locales ont été créées à l’instigation des personnels de santé des services publics et d’ONG internationales de lutte contre le sida. Par ailleurs, certaines ONG nationales jouent le rôle d’interface entre les institutions étatiques, les bailleurs de fonds internationaux (qui ne peuvent directement atteindre les bénéficiaires au niveau local), et les associations locales (qui ne peuvent mobiliser par eux mêmes les ressources dont elles ont besoin). Cette étude cherche à comprendre les stratégies d’adaptation qu’adoptent ces organisations locales face au déclin des financements internationaux, et face au triple défi de suivre les directives nationales, de satisfaire les bailleurs de fonds et de répondre aux besoins de leurs bénéficiaires. L’étude empirique des organisations locales dans les zones frontalières de la Côte d’Ivoire, du Ghana et du Togo, révèle qu’à travers l’action de leurs leaders, ces organisations établissent des relations informelles avec les acteurs étatiques et les organisations nationales. Cela leur permet de mieux maîtriser les jeux de pouvoir et de contre-pouvoir, de dépendance et de contre-dépendance avec les organisations dont elles reçoivent des appuis et ainsi de maintenir leur présence dans les zones où elles interviennent auprès des populations affectées par le VIH.

Chabrol Fanny / SESSTIM (Marseille)

The treatment of viral hepatitis as a new priority in the post-HIV era: new mobilisations but same old problems?

In the wake of vanishing AIDS funding internationally a new public health priority has been emerging: the treatment of viral hepatitis. As the life expectancy of people living with HIV in Africa increases with improved access to antiretroviral drugs, a growing number of them develop symptoms of co-infection with viral hepatitis. While the newly available treatment against hepatitis remains prohibitively expensive, this new public health emergency in Africa benefits from the transformation of AIDS activism in the North, former AIDS activists having found a new pharmaceutical scandal to fight against. Drawing on fieldwork in Yaoundé (Cameroon) I will argue that distinct “African” epidemiological patterns (for both hepatitis and HIV) allow for two arguments.
First, African state and non-state actors are “awaiting” funding for hepatitis-related activities. This passive attitude draws attention to the dependency context and to how former AIDS actors prepare themselves to the expected arrival of international funds by strategically reorienting their activities with regard to hepatitis. Secondly, viral hepatitis is an old iatrogenic epidemic in Africa – one that, like Ebola, offers a vantage point on the failure of ruined healthcare systems. For decades, mobilisations against hepatitis have predominantly consisted in silent and “soft” forms of activism by clinicians. Having very little political leeway, they prefer open critique within their professional fields to public protest.

Deacon Harriet / The Open University

A comparative review of cultural rights provisions in the Kenyan constitution

Kenya’s new Constitution was adopted in 2010, one of a large number of African constitutions revised since the 1990s. After a discussion of global trends in constitutional provisions for cultural and minority rights since the 1940s, the paper will offer a brief history of constitution making in Kenya since 1963 and set out the main provisions of the Kenyan Constitution of 2010. It will then compare and contrast cultural rights provisions in Kenya’s 2010 Constitution with those in other countries and in relation to international human rights instruments. The paper is part of a broader research project exploring the impact of cultural rights provisions, including rights for minorities and non-discrimination provisions, in Kenya’s new constitution on Kenyan society and its heritage sector

Lynch Gabrielle / University of Warwick (UK)

What’s in a name? The politics of naming ethnic groups in Kenya’s Cherangany Hills

In January 2013, representatives of the Sengwer community from Kenya’s Cherangany Hills submitted a request for inspection to the World Bank Inspection Panel on the basis that they had suffered harms as a result of a World Bank project in their area. One allegation was that the Bank had violated its own policies by replacing the term ‘indigenous peoples’ with ‘vulnerable and marginalised groups’ half way through the project without carrying out free, prior informed consultations. This paper analyses this politics of names and naming in the context of Kenya’s new constitution. The paper analyses the strategies involved in becoming indigenous as a means to bolster claims and assert rights over a cultural, socio-economic and newly devolved political space through an insistence upon a particular ethnic label and brand. The paper reminds us of the constructed and negotiated nature of ethnic identities, and highlights the extent to which names are imbued with cultural and legal meaning that can help legitimise certain engagements and interventions and delegitimise others.

Kern Florian / University of Konstanz

Holzinger Katharina / University of Konstanz

The Variance of Persistence: Six trajectories of institutional change in East Africa’s contemporary traditional polities

Recently, the study of traditional political institutions and authority in sub-Saharan Africa has seen a renaissance in the social sciences. A veritable wave of studies investigates the relationship between the pre-colonial social organization of ethnic groups and contemporary policy outcomes. However, traditional polities show remarkable variance in the changes they have undergone since independence, and in the way they organize today. In this paper, we present evidence from fieldwork in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania showing the diversity of contemporary organization of Africa’s traditional polities. Focusing on six different ethnic groups, we demonstrate how strategies of re-organization relate to the local contexts of cultural rights and recognition. While some traditional polities virtually ceased to exist, others have maintained and modernized their organization and political influence. Others again have recently overhauled their group’s principles of organization, or organize in clubs or cultural associations. Our findings suggest that the commonly used scale of ‘hierarchical’ (centralized) vs. ‘non-hierarchical’ (decentralized) social organization poorly captures the modern complexities of organization in traditional polities.

Ouma Akoth Steve / The Open University (UK)

Because of Culture: Homeland and human rights communities in contemporary Kenya

The Constitution of Kenya promulgated in August 2010 envisages a state that promotes culture and the Bill of Human Rights concurrently. This constitutional framework that entangles culture and human rights unfolds in a much longer practice of ethnicizing politics in Kenya. Yet, we have remarkably little empirical evidence of the impact that the promotion of culture has on human rights practices in Kenya. This paper examines a hypothesis of one aspect of cultural practices in claim-making using the new constitution, By examining the unfolding of the notion and practices of community in claims for human rights among communities at Yala Swamp, Siaya County, I will demonstrate how claims of homeland and cultural communities are outlined in the constitution, and the role of cultural communities in envisioning future human rights practices in Kenya.

Hughes Lotte / The Open University (UK)

FGM: The ‘female circumcision’ crisis revisited

The so-called ‘female circumcision’ crisis of 1928-31 in colonial Kenya centred in part on colonial control of female bodies and a drive to end certain cultural practices. It caused a major rift between African Christians and European mission churches, as well as internecine conflict within the Gikuyu community, and sparked widespread resistance. Africans saw the attempt to stop what is now called FGM (though some scholars and campaigners prefer other terminology) as an attack on their culture. Today, despite being outlawed, FGM is still practised in several communities, and is even resurgent in some. Its proponents, who include women, again see the attempt to eradicate it as an attack on their ‘culture’, especially when that culture is perceived to be endangered. The issue is again dividing Christians, as well as pitting Christians against followers of ‘traditional’ faiths, This paper will draw on new fieldwork material to explore some of the continuities between this earlier crisis, and the moral panic which surrounded it, and the contemporary contestation and moral panic around FGM, in the context of constitutional change, human rights activism and international donor activity.

Chalfin Brenda / University of Florida

Mapping States, Mapping Seas: Maritime Surveillance and Commodity Flows in the Western Gulf of Guinea

This paper traces the emergence of new modalities of maritime surveillance in the western Gulf of Guinea focused on the tracking and regulation of resource and commercial flows and the wider maritime domain. Extending the reach of the state into uncharted territories, these surveillance networks move beyond strict national jurisdictions into the high seas. A space not exclusive to any state, it is one that all are deemed responsible for due to the official laws of the sea and moral injunctions of seafaring. Focused on the roll-out of the International Maritime Organization-sponsored Vessel Tracking and Monitoring Information System (VTMIS) by Ghana’s Maritime Authority the paper unpacks the shifting constitution of state sovereignty as it “intra-acts” with new technologies, knowledge forms, locations, and resource flows. State oversight in the maritime domain depends less on co-presence than the reading of remote satellite and radio signals, silences, convergences and disappearances. Though fluid, remote, and unbounded, this political economic field nevertheless has concrete material foundations and manifestations. Thus, examined alongside maritime surveillance technologies and practices in the western Gulf of Guinea is their reliance on international financial and technical assistance and their claims on terrestrial space through the installation of transponders, receivers and listening posts.

Dua Jatin / University of Michigan Ann Arbor

After Piracy? Mapping Itineraries from Piracy to Infrastructure in the Western Indian Ocean

By 2014, the golden age of Somali piracy had ended. From its heyday between 2007- 2011—a period where over 150 ships and some 3,741 crewmembers were held hostage— incidents, successful or otherwise, of maritime piracy plummeted over 80 percent in 2013. At the same time, a transnational security apparatus established in the wake of piracy continues to transform the Western Indian Ocean into a space of security and surveillance. Through private security contractors onboard commercial ships, coastguard initiatives on land in Somalia and manned and unmanned aerial surveillance, the Western Indian Ocean is constructed as a site of threat, danger, and profit. Through an ethnographic focus on private security contractors in Somalia and at sea, this paper focuses on this slippage and movement between piracy and counter-piracy, illicit and licit as key to understanding the futures of piracy in this region. Specifically, attempts to transform the Western Indian Ocean into a “sea of security” highlight the deep imbrication between political authority and economy in post-state Somalia where political authority is deeply tied to practices of rent-seeking and protection. The futures of piracy are then a vantage point through which to understand larger projects of state and institution building in this region.

Stenmanns Julian / Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Engineering Global Territories: On the Political Geographies of Transport Infrastructures

The paper charts the ways in which transport infrastructures recast the political geographies of West African states in an era of Supply Chain Capitalism. In recent years, the prospect of many Sub-Saharan African states is increasingly being negotiated through the prism of logistics and transport infrastructures. “African logistics”, as a recent PwC report indicated, stands for the chance “to build tomorrow’s markets”. Building on ethnographic fieldwork on “African logistics” on the docks of Freetown (Sierra Leone) and Tema (Ghana), I ask in this paper how the practical art of building up transportation and governing transnational supply is recalibrating the spaces of states. Drawing on Chandra Mukerji’s notion of “territorial engineering” and James Scott’s analysis of a statecraft that operates through territorial grids, I discuss newly crafted transport infrastructures as political technologies of transnational governmentality. Mobilising the notion of global territories I trace how these standardised yet diverse arterial corridors, hubs and zones reconfigure national territories.

Hoenke Jana / University of Edinburgh & Phillips-Universität Marburg

Of ports, mines and pipelines. Thinking new political geographies through large-scale economic infrastructures

While Africa has often been portrait as peripheral to major global economic flows, many sites are neatly integrated into networks of global production and trade. When it comes to large-scale economic activity, gold mines in South Kivu and central Guinea are at the heart of the global economy. They are linked to infrastructures through which goods, people, and ideas move. These economic sites are ‘frontier zones’ in which new forms of power and authority emerge and become visible. They decentralize but also recentralise command and control of rules, revenue and commodities (e.g. through indirect discharge). Such political geographies are at once physical and virtual, backed by force, social relations and discourses. This paper will use empirical work on industrial mining projects in DRC, Tanzania and Guinea in order to review conceptual tools available for thinking and mapping political geographies emerging around the governance and contestation of large-scale economic infrastructures. Rules and sanctions operational in everyday practices diverge from regulatory spaces mapped out on (policy) paper to begin with. As ordering requires constant work, it is further useful to think in terms of permanent ‘political situations’ (Barry) characterised by uncertainty, ambiguity and contestation. Examining connections, the materiality of security technologies, and everyday practices of how space is lived and imagined provide key entry points for mapping contested political geographies.

Schritt Jannik / Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Oil Zones The Entanglement of Western and Chinese Petro-Assemblages in Niger

This paper explores oil’s large-scale economic, political, legal and socio-technical infrastructures in Niger. Economists have described the infrastructure of oil as an enclave industrialization that builds only a few or hardly any linkages with the rest of the country’s economy and therefore does not promote economic development. Political scientists have emphasized the political effects of enclave economies and oil rents on corruption and authoritarianism. Social scientists described the oil enclave as an attempt to disentangle economics from its wider surroundings in which they are deeply enmeshed in order for (neoliberal) capitalism to propel forward. This paper adds three important dimensions to these studies: First, oil enclaves are seen as multifaceted transnational assemblages of heterogeneous political, legal, economic and socio-technical elements that I call ‘oil zones’. The concept of oil zones is able to combine perspectives of different academic disciplines that otherwise often compete against each other. Second, instead of generalizing global oil infrastructures, this paper distinguishes between a Western and a Chinese oil zone with quite different heterogeneous elements and thus particular qualities. Third, this paper empirically studies the (dis)entanglement of Western and Chinese petro-assemblages for the particular local of Niger with which the elements of the assemblages associate and the effects they produce.

Obućina Vedran / University of Rijeka

The influence of the Islamic Revolution on the political islamic movements in Africa

The rise of the Political Islam in the African continent coincided with the decline of the socialist/secular Arab movements and the rise of Pan-Islamism. Instrumental for the latter were the ideas stemming from political Islamic thinkers, such as Qutb, Khomeini, Mawdudi, ibn al Uthaymeen. However, the influence of these thinkers prevailed in a full fledged revolution only in Iran. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a turning point in the history of contemporary politics, as it influenced so many Islamic movements, Shi’a and Sunni. Only after the Islamic Revolution many Middle Eastern and North African movements embraced Islam as core ideology. This paper provides a comprehensive study of the direct and indirect influences of the Iranian Islamic Revolution on Africa. Especially accentuated are: (1) Front Islamique du Salut in Algeria; (2) National Islamic Front in Sudan; (3) Wal Fadjri in Senegal; and, more recently, (4) the uprisings labeled as Arab Spring. The paper does not look at the genesis of these movements, but shows how the Iranian Revolution was instrumental in helping those movements to emerge or take shape. Key ideas stemming from this revolution concerned social justice and fight against oppressive regimes.

Dowd Caitriona / University of Sussex

Radicalisation, conflict and the political economy of Islamist violence in Kenya, Mali and Nigeria

Neither political Islamist movements nor violent Islamist activity are new phenomena in Sub-Saharan Africa, but recent years have witnessed a sharp escalation in the frequency and intensity of Islamist violence there. This paper seeks to understand this phenomenon as a process associated with the political, economic and social characteristics of the national and sub-national spaces in which Islamist groups operate, and the political economy of conflict in which they choose to use, or (de-)escalate the use of, violence. Contrary to a dominant narrative that emphasises the transnational and highly mobile nature of Islamist violence, this analysis focuses attention on the local characteristics within which such groups operate, including interactions between violent Islamist groups, state security forces, armed non-state actors, and civilians. Islamist violence typically emerges in areas with pre-existing legacies, histories, forms and agents of violence, but the analysis of Islamist groups is often divorced from these contexts. Here, the activity of violent Islamist groups is conceptualised as part of a dynamic and fluid conflict environment, the contours of which are shaped by the presence, number, concentration, fragmentation and configurations of other conflict actors competing for community support, wider political relevance, and/or strategic advantage. The research explores these themes in relation to Islamist violence in Kenya, Mali and Nigeria.

el-Taraboulsi Sherine / University of Oxford

Gender Norms and Female Participation in Radical Movements in Northern Nigeria

Analysis on the Jama’atul Ahlus Sunna Liddawat Jihad (JAS) or Boko Haram has highlighted multiple dimensions of a chronic crisis: expanding Islamist extremism in Northern Nigeria, the government’s failure to address radicalism, critical data gaps on Islamist radical groups, as well as the position of women in Northern Nigeria. Women have become the locale within which ideological and other battles are fought – often within an Islamic garb. However, women have not been passive actors; they have contributed to resisting radicalism and, at times, shaping it. Available literature has lamented women’s victimization and celebrated their struggle for empowerment but has shied away from the other side of the coin; women who participate in radical movements, and who may also be seeking a form of empowerment by using different means. The paper explores how women engage in radical movements in Nigeria and how their participation is translated across the different spaces in which they exist – the family, the radical group and the public space at large. The study incorporates a wide range of respondents in Northern Nigeria including women who belonged to different Islamic sects, women in civil society and those working with the government on countering terrorism. Men’s views are also taken on board. The study’s findings address drivers of women’s radicalism, modes of their participation in radical movements as well as recommendations for a “soft approach” to tackling radicalism.

Roy Emilie / Al Akhawayn University

Islamizing the Public Sphere through the Education of Pious Citizens in Bamako’s Medersas

The arabisants emerging from Bamako’s médersas have constructed and controlled a social and political sphere as self-conscious Muslim, pious citizens and productive agents in the officially secular Malian public sphere. Médersas are providing the tools to debate this engagement and the limits of it regarding political and social issues. The arabisants are at the forefront of a return to religion that speaks to a concept of re-traditionalization where Islam is claimed and celebrated as both a factor of internal cohesion and of social peace. The choice for the arabisants is never between participation in modernity or Islam however, but rather between an Islamicized and a Westernized modernity.
This paper discusses how the arabisants have focused their activism on moralizing the daily lives of Malian and the Malian state by creating a class of pious, educated, and well-informed Muslim citizens rather than by direct involvement in the political process. Islam mondain – a form of sacralisation of daily life that allows one to live as a pious Muslim in a secular, pluralistic, and democratic environment – as it unfolds in Bamako’s médersas and beyond, is linked to “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary” as a form of political action described by Bayat (2010). This thus paper illustrates the agency of the Malian arabisants in defining their political activities, rendered Islamic, in the public sphere in light of Bayat’s theorizing of daily life as politics.

Doyle Shane / University of Leeds

Marriage strategies in modern Uganda

In recent years political and religious leaders in Uganda have asserted that the institution of marriage has been undermined by what are defined as western innovations, such as homosexuality, human rights, and individualism. This paper will consider current debates in Uganda about marriage and tradition by arguing that marriage in the pre-colonial past was diverse, that concerns about the corrupting influences of westernization go back more than a century, and that formal marriage was undermined during the colonial period above all by missionary and legislative interventions. The paper will focus on female strategies within marriage and other less formal unions over the past century, examining the various resources they have employed in their attempts to establish sustainable or advantageous relationships.

Buswell Clare / Flinders University of South Australia

Women’s Livelihoods and Men’s Power: Customary Lore and Women’s Agency in Colonial Kenya

Myths, folklore and oral traditions tell us stories and instil moral lessons from our pasts. They are transferred down the generations by songs, riddles, teachings and story telling, and strongly influence social behaviour and social hierarchies. By examining some myths and oral traditions, as expressed within the context of customary lore concerning women, their behaviour and roles within their communities, this paper examines the influences that those oral traditions had on colonial government policy. The paper argues that the collision between lore and law that occurred in colonial policy in Kenya produced a rigid moral authority in the formulation of laws concerning women. Such policies produced a stark relief between the moral authority of women’s livelihoods and the raw power of men’s rules.

Herman Margaux / CFEE, IMAF

De l’utilisation des alliances matrimoniales comme un outil de promotion sociale, par les femmes des élites (Éthiopie-17e-19e siècles)

Dans l’historiographie dédiée à la monarchie chrétienne éthiopienne, les alliances matrimoniales ont systématiquement été analysées comme un outil politique utilisé par les dirigeants en place pour asseoir leur pouvoir et leur règne. Cette recherche veut, au contraire, prendre le contre-pied de ce schéma et aborder différentes stratégies de femmes des élites, qui, une fois mariées, se sont hissées en haut de l’échelle politique et ont permis l’ascension sociale de leur famille. En effet, même si le mythe de fondation de la royauté exclu les femmes de tout exercice du pouvoir politique et bien que les chroniques royales ne leurs dédient qu’une infime considération en comparaison de celle qui est accordée à leurs homologues masculins, les femmes des élites ont réussi, dans la durée, à acquérir une marge de manœuvre importante sur l’administration du pays et à influer sur l’histoire politique du royaume. L’étude de la carrière de ces femmes de pouvoir, ayant vécu entre le 17ème et la fin du 19ème siècle, permet dès lors de revisiter l’histoire géopolitique de cette partie de la Corne de l’Afrique et d’aborder les rapports évolutifs des différentes régions composant le royaume éthiopien moderne sous un nouvel angle.

Médard Henri / IMAF, Aix Marseille Université

Princesses, mariage, inceste et conversions au Buganda au 19e siècle

La place des femmes de sang royal est toujours complexe dans les monarchies des sociétés patrilinéaires. Le Buganda n’est pas une exception. Les princesses sont prises dans les logiques contradictoires de la sacralisation du sang royal et du modèle patriarcal monarchique. L’exacerbation du culte des souverains au 19e siècle pose le problème de l’hypogamie des princesses. Pour préserver le prestige royal, les souverains hésitent entre un inceste stérile et le célibat des princesses. Loin d’être des potiches, les sœurs et les filles du roi sont des personnages influents dans les luttes d’influence de la cour. Elles ne subissent pas passivement l’interdiction qui leur est faite de se reproduire.
Dans les années 1870, un nouveau modèle politique se diffuse via le christianisme et en particulier l’église anglicane. Le sens subversif de l’existence lointaine d’une reine régnante, Victoria, mère de famille nombreuse et chef de l’église anglicane n’est pas perdu pour les princesses. Pendant une vingtaine d’années, les femmes royales vont tenter de réaménager, en leur faveur, leur statut matrimonial et leur place dans la monarchie.

Gaudio Rudolf / Purchase College, State University of New York

Urban desires: eros and infrastructure in Nigeria’s planned capital

Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, is a sexy young city. Conceived in the 1970s, its central location, monumental buildings and well-lit highways were meant to rally the nation’s regions and ethnicities after a bloody civil war. The capital’s infrastructural splendor was also designed to project an image of Nigeria as the ‘Giant of Africa’—the most populous country on the continent and the lodestar of Black people worldwide. As a planned city supposedly unfettered by tribal attachments, Abuja has a contradictory reputation when it comes to sex. On one hand, it is popularly imagined as a space of freedom and hedonism, where politicians and businessmen cavort with high-class prostitutes, and underemployed youth look for big men and women to be their sugar daddies and sugar mummies. On the other hand, Abuja is a site of spectacular repression and intolerance. The city government enacts periodic clampdowns on street prostitution while the National Assembly passed the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act in 2014. This paper situates Abuja’s sexual contradictions within the larger set of tensions generated by (many) Nigerians’ aspirations for their capital to be seen as a beacon of African modernity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as well as critical analyses of popular media representations and Abuja residents’ talk about life in the city, the paper treats eros and infrastructure as simultaneously material and discursive domains, and demonstrates how they are mutually constitutive.

Dankwa Serena / University of Berne

“Women are my friends”: rethinking same-sex friendship and erotic intimacy in postcolonial Ghana

My contribution focuses on the discursive practices of women who desire women in postcolonial southern Ghana. It relays on my own ethnographic and historical research, which suggests that the ongoing (scholarly) omission of female same-sex relations in West Africa is not only a result of a masculinist coding but of a discursive emphasis on sexuality as a domain seemingly separate from friendship. Unlike in the global North, where homosexual marriage has become a powerful avenue to recognize same-sex intimacies as more than just “friendships,” friendship plays an important role in shaping erotic intimacies between Ghanaian working-class women. Framed by conditions of postcolonial precariousness, these intimacies need to be understood through women’s claims to the significance of erotic power and enjoyment. Doing this research, it has proven necessary to decenter sexuality in order to grasp same-sex passions in their full complexity and explore the genealogy of “supi” and other terms indexing Ghanaian historical understandings of female intimacy. Besides friendship, kinship emerges as a crucial metaphor in broaching a veiled, intimate same-sex discourse that is usually drowned out by Africanist anti-gay rhetorics. Focalizing sexual relationships that are considered friendships or siblinghoods by those who are involved in them, this paper seeks to dethrone the primacy of the sexual and challenges the analytical boundaries drawn between friendship, kinship, and sexuality.