African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility 9780226402413

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African Futures

African Futures Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility

EDITED BY BRIAN GOLDSTONE AND JUAN OBARRIO

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40224-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40238-3 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40241-3 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226402413.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goldstone, Brian, editor. | Obarrio, Juan, editor. | American Anthropological Association. Annual Meeting (109th : 2010 : New Orleans, La.) Title: African futures : essays on crisis, emergence, and possibility / edited by Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.| Most contributions derive from an invited session on “African Futures in Crisis”, held at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans in 2010. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016023752 | ISBN 9780226402246 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226402383 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226402413 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Africa—Social conditions—21st century—Congresses. | Africa—Forecasting—Congresses. Classification: LCC HN773.5 .A3254 2016 | DDC 306.096—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023752 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

BRIAN GOLDSTONE AND JUAN OBARRIO

ONE

/ Introduction: Untimely Africa? / 1 PART I: RETHINKING CRISIS

JANET ROITMAN

T WO

/ Africa Otherwise / 23 BRIAN LARKIN

THREE

/ The Form of Crisis and the Affect of Modernization / 39 R A M A H M C K AY

FOUR

/ The Productivity of Crisis: Aid, Time, and Medicine in Mozambique / 51 PART II: EMERGENT ECONOMIES

JANE I. GUYER

FIVE

/ Money in the Future of Africans / 63 MICHAEL RALPH

SIX

/ Forensics of Capital / 77 DANNY HOFFMAN

SEVEN

/ Brokering Revolution: Imagining Future War on the West African Borderlands / 95

CHARLES PIOT

EIGHT

/ Hedging the Future / 104 JENNIFER COLE

NINE

/ Entangled Postcolonial Futures: Malagasy Marriage Migrants and Provincial Frenchmen / 117 PART III: URBAN SPACES AND LOCAL FUTURES

ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE

TEN

/ Rough Towns: Mobilizing Uncertainty in Kinshasa / 139 FILIP DE BOECK

/ Local Futures, the Future of the Local: Urban Living in a Central African Metropolis / 151

ELEVEN

P E T E R G E S C H I E R E A N D A N TO I N E S O C PA

T W E LV E

/ Changing Mobilities, Shifting Futures / 167 JUAN OBARRIO

/ Time and Again: Locality as Future Anterior in Mozambique / 181

THIRTEEN

PART IV: POSSIBILITIES

BRAD WEISS

/ Getting Ahead When We’re Behind: Time, Potential, and Value in Urban Tanzania / 199

FOURTEEN

ACHILLE MBEMBE

FIFTEEN

/ Africa in Theory / 211

Acknowledgments / 231 References / 233 List of Contributors / 253 Index / 259

ONE

Introduction: Untimely Africa? BRIAN GOLDSTONE AND JUAN OBARRIO

This book of essays approaches the subject of futurity in Africa as an irreducibly open question, one whose potential answers are contingent not only on who is posing the question but also on the myriad specificities—of scale, location, sensibility—that orient it. Emphatically of the moment, the contributions to this volume bear the imprint of the context in which they were conceived: stemming from an invited session on “African Futures in Crisis” held at the American Anthropological Association meetings in New Orleans in 2010, with additional essays later commissioned along those thematic lines, these texts address a conjuncture whereby Africa is posited, paradoxically, not only as a more insular and desperate place than previously had been imagined—think Save Darfur, for example—but also as an ambivalent and even auspicious site of “Africa rising” (as The Economist famously put it in its December 2011 cover story) through investment and speculation—or more promising still, an “African renaissance” (Thiong’o 2009)—in the domains of politics and social and cultural life. How contemporary Africanist scholarship might effectively traverse (or indeed circumvent) these coincident, seemingly contradictory forecasts— their implicit codes and underlying presuppositions and the new images that might dislodge them—is at the heart of the debate that this book engages. What stance might scholars assume in the face of such a motley ensemble of verdicts and diagnoses, which so frequently are rendered as indisputable, even inescapable? Are those who proffer these claims to be responded to on their own terms, within their own coordinates of success and failure, confidence and despondency, and within their own genres of verification? Or might the intervention rather lie in discerning other concepts, other intimations of what it means to hope and anticipate, struggle and despair in Africa today? Could the tempo and timeliness of such inter-

2 / Chapter One

ventions provide a counterpoint to the instantaneity of those pronouncements that dominate the global public sphere? Alternating between the modes of conceptual history and analysis, on the one hand, and close-to-the-ground ethnography, on the other, between sustained phenomenologies of a given place or people and equally sustained critique (and indeed, at times, disclosure of the limits of critique as such), the chapters in this collection speak in a range of voices. What unites them, in a manner somewhat different from other valuable collections that have appeared over the past decade, is not so much a single topical or subdisciplinary preoccupation (e.g., aesthetics [Nuttall 2007], religion and media [Hackett and Soares 2015], love [Cole and Thomas 2009], law and illegality [Comaroff and Comaroff 2006], mental illness [Akyeampong, Hill, and Kleinman 2014], health and healing [Dilger, Kane, and Langwick 2012; Geissler 2015; Luedke and West 2006], cities and urban life [Diouf and Fredericks 2014]), nor a common methodological or theoretical orientation (e.g., Marxism, psychoanalysis, social history, actornetwork theory), but instead a broad concern with how particular senses and experiences of time, of potentiality and emergence, along with feelings of incapacity or impossibility, come together to make certain futures actualizable, inhabitable—and others not at all. In the wake of the various neoliberal experiments with democracy and putatively freer markets; in the wake of decolonization and the well-documented postcolonial disenchantments with previous models of the state apparatus or with popular collective movements; in the wake of Ebola, conflagrations of xenophobia, and the surfacing of new fronts in an ongoing war on terror; in the wake of any expectation, in some places, that there could ever be a reliable source of electricity, water, or work—in the wake of all this, what becomes of one’s relationship to one’s nation, to one’s ethnic group, to one’s church or religion, to one’s family, to one’s locality or region, let alone to Africa and its diasporic elsewheres? In engaging these developments and their attendant problem-spaces (Scott 2004), this collection turns on a distinctive axis of investigation: one in which the global is refracted and recast from an array of localized vantage points, revealing anew “the world and Africa” (to evoke the title of Du Bois’s 1946 study by that name; see also Cooper 2014) by attending to its peripheries, its internal frontiers, its interstices and corridors, its “shadows” (De Boeck, chapter 11; Engelke 2015; Ferguson 2006;) and “underneaths” (Ferme 2001; Nuttall 2009), and its constitutive blind spots, as well as those enduring social projects and emerging cultural forms that, for many observers of the continent, continue to hide in plain sight.

Introduction / 3

Far from presenting a case for African exceptionalism, then, or positing a single totalizing image of futurity and emergence taking place on the continent, the chapters that follow engage a wide, interdisciplinary conversation about imaginations and practices of the future1 while at the same time addressing, from the perspective of specific (if shifting) regional and historical loci, global debates taking place across a spectrum of regions and fields of inquiry. These chapters can thus be read not only as an attempt to move beyond the notorious essentialist and exoticizing tropes—incisively skewered by Binyavanga Wainaina (2008) in his “How to Write about Africa”—that have long seduced scholars of the continent but also as an alternative to a more recent reluctance among some scholars to make any statements at all about Africa for fear of falling prey to such essentialism. Hence the recent suggestion that, averse as anthropologists—as opposed to, say, journalists and politicians—have been to speak of Africa in general, “the discipline that contributed more than any other to what Mudimbe has termed ‘the invention of Africa’ has had almost nothing to say about ‘Africa’ in its time of crisis” (Ferguson 2006: 1–7). Notwithstanding a dose of skepticism as to the facticity and pervasiveness of this “time of crisis” through which the continent and its populations are ostensibly living, the criticism is apt. Moreover, the chapters that follow serve to demonstrate that to speak of “Africa” is not, inexorably, to advance some new (or not so new) reductionist argument but that speaking thus can in fact be intellectually and politically warranted—even if this requires an analytic sensibility imaginative enough to be oriented toward what often becomes a dizzying, overlapping multiplicity of sites, histories, and events. The objective here is neither an Archimedean comprehensiveness nor the discovery of some master category or theoretical schema that would dispel the sundry mysteries in which the term “Africa” seems perpetually to find itself enclosed. The point is to contribute to an ongoing collective discussion on how to “write the world from Africa, or to write Africa into the world or as a fragment thereof” (Mbembe, chapter 15). In short, African Futures navigates a landscape of confronting perspectives, aiming not so much to iron out the contradictions nor to disprove the verdicts (though such disproving will at times be necessary) as to think within the paradoxes, perplexities, and apparent certitudes Africa is taken to insinuate. Taken together, the chapters gathered here attest to the fact 1. See Appadurai (2013); Ferguson (1999; 2006); Piot (2010); Rosenberg and Harding (2005); Wallman (1996).

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that the study of Africa can no longer be confined to its geographic borders, that the matter of where Africa begins and ends is always, necessarily, in a state of flux and cannot be settled conclusively in advance. They attest, too, to the conviction that the categories and phenomena that for so long animated scholarly work on the continent might find themselves exhausted and evacuated of significance. Put differently, these chapters show how such phenomena (local political authority, humanitarianism, militarism and conflict, migration, urbanization, and economies formal and informal, to cite only some of the issues that will be addressed in this collection) might be reconceived by expanding the scope of inquiry, situating our research topoi within broader networks of relationality and wider webs of signification. The chapters in this book, finally, resist the urge to simply flip the script on Africa’s persistent status in the planetary order of things, remaining agnostic on the question of whether the continent is lagging behind the West or whether it is, in fact, the West that is lagging behind Africa. Such dichotomies, after all, seem to leave intact the dubious fiction of a single, universal telos.2 The task, so prosaic and yet so quickly swept aside in the rush to either praise or pathologize the continent, is to expose the inadequacies of telling a “single story” (Adichie 2009) about Africa and its prospects, defying the hegemonic and uniform terms by which we are asked to decide on the “fate of Africa” (Meredith 2006) and acknowledging their currency while locating in their place a veritable montage of simultaneous trajectories. As such, these chapters explore the ways in which the moral, temporal, and epistemological frames that continue to facilitate interventions in Africa might be turned inside out or subjected to arrangements that redefine their meanings and nature, as well as the extent to which dominant conceptualizations of futurity—be they rooted in evolutionary, “end-ofhistory” (Fukuyama 1992), “empty” and “homogenous” (Benjamin 1968), or developmental models of time—have come to be rejected, adopted, or transformed by Africans themselves in a manner unforeseen by what the prevailing formulations in the social sciences have taught us to expect. Once denied its claim to historicity, even infamously exiled from history entirely, the term “Africa” now conjures up a different set of possibilities. The time is ripe, this book contends, to throw light on the plurality of routes through which African futures are being engendered and apprehended. 2. On this point, see the symposium devoted to Jean and John Comaroff’s Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa published in The Johannesburg Salon.

Introduction / 5

Crisis Current debates in the academy and public sphere alike center on the uncertain destiny of the planet, engulfed in a range of crises related to everything from finance, climate, and ecology to security and terrorism. Africa, more often than not, is presented as the exemplary site of this critical conjuncture. This comes as little surprise, for the continent’s contemporary condition has long been held captive to an assortment of demonizing and often cynical diagnoses of its present state and a grim assessment of its impending future. The signs of alleged, multiple, concurrent crises within the continent, reported by academic and policy centers and amplified by the media— regional wars, disease, mismanagement of resources, failed development, widespread anomie, dissolution of social structures, displacement, the demise of genealogy and generation—appear to be nothing if not selfevident.3 Yet the chapters in this volume gesture toward an altogether different line of inquiry, one that demands a thoroughgoing interrogation of the spectacularization of catastrophe typically associated with Africa as well as the attendant stigmatization of African states and political cultures that is rampant in broad sectors of the public sphere. Indeed, this book goes a step further: what would it entail, we ask, not merely to fine-tune or to redirect the category of crisis with regard to contemporary Africa but to subject the notion to a more sweeping critical analysis? How might we provincialize, cut down to size, the very concept of crisis as such? What functions does the term perform, not only in the hands of foreign pundits and policy makers, but for African citizens themselves? Can we begin to imagine Africa beyond the pervasive sign of “crisis”? Such questions arise from the realization that today, as Janet Roitman (chapter 2) notes, it seems impossible to discuss Africa without making recourse in some shape or form to the figure of crisis. Spanning domains as diverse as state governance, law, security, finance, health, humanitarianism, citizenship, and the natural environment, crisis appears as an “omnipresent” feature of contemporary existence, arguably losing in the process whatever conceptual purchase it may previously have possessed.4 More3. See, for instance, Dean (2013); Timberlake (1988). 4. Concluding his appraisal of the history of the term, Reinhart Koselleck observes, “The concept of crisis, which once had the power to pose unavoidable, harsh and non-negotiable alternatives, has been transformed to fit the uncertainties of whatever might be favored at a given moment. Such a tendency towards imprecision and vagueness, however, may itself be viewed as the symptom of a historical crisis that cannot as yet be fully gauged” (2006: 399).

6 / Chapter One

over, as Roitman goes on to assert, crisis must not be construed as a mere descriptor. Rather, it has become a metaconcept of sorts, a linguistic placeholder, a structuring device that, far from simply appraising the quality of this or that phenomenon vis-à-vis a particular calculus or within a specific narrative, literally constructs the narrative itself. On Roitman’s view, then, “crisis” is not just an object of historical knowledge but—here she draws on the work of German historian Reinhart Koselleck (1988 [1959]; 2006)—an “enabling blind spot,” a precondition for historical knowledge, the “place from which one claims access to and knowledge of history” (chapter 2). Likewise—perhaps nowhere as much as Africa—it has come to serve as the chief criterion for determining the significance of events, of what counts as news amid the flow of circumstances that compose the everyday in Africa. Rupture, malfunction, disorder, and disaster, a deviation from a presumptive norm or standard: this is what we tend to hear about. It is in this sense, then, that crisis can be said to constitute not only an epistemological blind spot but also a political one, for its prodigious glare diverts attention away from a whole range of other phenomena such that the urgent, emergencycharged “Event” gets foregrounded to the neglect of, well, everything else (see Roitman 2014). Indeed, in terms of a politics of knowledge, one of the most troubling consequences of the incessant talk of crisis is the simplistic explanatory frameworks it tends to nourish. Jane Guyer (chapter 5) assesses one celebrated work (van de Walle 2001) whose basic premise is the temporal transformation, with regard to African economies, of crisis from the turning point or passing condition its etymology implies into an enduring, even “permanent,” state of affairs. Here crisis, as Guyer puts it, comes to stand “as a large, persistent, and singular condition,” a “point of suspension rather than turning,” one result of which is that within its logic, every process (social, economic, political, or otherwise), every experience or sensibility, is scrutinized as a mere reflection and aftereffect or, at best, as a form of resistance to an intractable dilemma of one kind or another. And the same holds true for the complex historicities of the continent, as the longevity of crisis—itself presented as an effect of a single factor originating in the near or distant past, be it colonial expropriation, the economy, war, or ethnic identity—engulfs all of sociality within the whirlwind of the various maladies of the present. From the vantage of such a scheme, whereby explanations of a given predicament work finally to buttress precisely those double binds (modernity/tradition, customary/state, global/local, urban/ rural) they purport to investigate, the future, it seems, can be imagined only in accordance with an expanding repertoire of technocratic formulas or sal-

Introduction / 7

vaging interventions. Africa as a whole, according to Mbembe (chapter 15), becomes little more than “an event that calls for a technical decision.” This book therefore subjects the very idea of crisis to critique, disentangling the concept and revealing how it functions within the study of contemporary Africa (and beyond) by shrouding itself in an aura of enlightened common sense and privileged insight into a supposedly irrefutable, however unverifiable, empirical terrain. Implicit, too, is a suspicion that the term—more a symptom than a signifier, indeed a diagnostic—is often an alibi for the political-economic management of putative conditions of existential duress (Redfield 2012), thus serving as a key discursive figure in the enormous feedback loop that continues to make and remake Africa’s fraught “place-in-the-world” (Ferguson 2006). And yet, critical though they are, the contributors to this collection are neither univocal in their disavowal of the term as such nor wholly in agreement as to its semantic properties in the specific milieus they address. Two broad currents can be discerned. On the one hand, there are those (Roitman, Ralph, Mbembe, and to a certain extent Larkin and Guyer) who treat crisis less as a description than as an intervention in Africa—even, we might say, as one of the primary bases upon which “Africa” gets produced as such within a global arena. For them, crisis is a “conceptual technology,” as Larkin (chapter 3) puts it, one that fundamentally serves as “a means of categorizing, periodizing, and standardizing” the world—specifically, as a commonplace of social and political discourse about Africa, as a means of narrating an entire continent (and then, in some cases, reaping the fruits that come from it, such as research funding, military and humanitarian involvement, and so forth). Other authors, however, are more ambivalent about the category, not because they find the notion of a “continent in crisis” to be more palatable or accurate, but because they are operating, on the whole, on a rather different scale of inquiry. Thus “crisis,” in these chapters, is presented less as a product of hysteria and abjectifying prognoses than as an opportunity, a term, for Nigerians, of emergence and disjuncture (Larkin), of new modes of work and war making in Sierra Leone (Hoffman), or in urban centers like Kinshasa (Simone) or Arusha (Weiss), at once a catalyst and site for the everyday mobilization of livelihoods. Or, for Malagasy women in Madagascar (Cole) or the so-called bush-fallers in Cameroon’s Grassfields (Geschiere and Socpa), it becomes the affective and existential impetus to find such livelihoods elsewhere. The inclusion of the word “crisis” in the subtitle of this volume, therefore, is highly qualified, seeking neither to legitimize received images of the continent nor to reproduce them unproblematically. Yet we also remain

8 / Chapter One

attuned to the term’s ever-changing capacities. Whether directly, through a critical reappraisal of the category itself, or indirectly, by providing empirical illustrations of its repercussions on the terrain of the ordinary, the following chapters consider the ubiquity and alleged permanence of crisis, approaching it with more than a little suspicion—aware of its prejudicial, self-fulfilling mode of judgment—but, at the same time, taking seriously the rapidly unfolding transformations, fractures, opportunities, and dead ends indexed by the term. Accordingly, we recognize the pitfalls in simply expunging the word from our conceptual dictionaries, for what crisis names, in the end, is not only a verdict imposed by others on Africa and its populations—that is, it is not merely a descriptor that replaces the slower, more exacting work of coming to terms with the play of forces that comprise contemporary conditions on the continent—but it is also, crucially, a condition that is claimed, diagnosed, and inhabited by an untold number of African citizens themselves.5 Be it a Pentecostal pastor, a local doctor, an NGO worker, or a highranking political functionary, it is clear that, in some instances, crisis can be mobilized as a site of enormous “productivity” (McKay, chapter 4) and is often deployed as such.

Present Notwithstanding the pervasiveness of the concept of crisis in popular and academic discourse about the continent, recent times have brought about a shift in the general consideration of Africa, from its presentation as a space of seemingly interminable catastrophe and emergency to—alongside, if not in place of, this image—one of Africa “on the rise.” Thus, increasingly, Africa is being read optimistically in media and policy reports, with the familiar figures pertaining to purported maladies of various kinds gradually giving way to numbers suggestive of rapid economic growth, widening availability and circulation of commodities, the development of new markets and infrastructures, and intensified foreign investment.6 Here Africa 5. A similar point is compellingly made in the introduction to Geschiere, Meyer, and Pels (2008). 6. In tune with this general shift in depictions of the continent, no less likely a pundit than the conservative columnist David Brooks (2014) recently responded to the kidnappings and massacres attributed to Boko Haram in Nigeria with an op-ed titled “The Real Africa.” Attempting to dispel the impression that “Africa is this dark and lawless place where monstrous things are bound to happen” and where, in short, “poor people need our help,” Brooks points instead to what he calls “the real story in Africa”: a story of “an impressive surge of growth, urbanization, and modernization,” corroborated by “phenomenal” figures attesting to the continent’s

Introduction / 9

slowly but steadily emerges as a more vibrant cultural and economic space, which is beginning to change the contours of social structures and class formations, as well as the texture and rhythm of everyday life on the continent. Is the tenacious picture of an “undifferentiated Africa . . . marked by depravity, affliction, and beauty,” one “awaiting the salvation of an equally unmarked ‘West’” (Livingston 2012), finally behind us? If so, the disconcerting reality for Africanist scholars accustomed to deconstructing the assertions of failure that have so long been attached to the continent is that such critical strategies may themselves, in this moment of Afro-optimism, have outlived their pertinence. Even so, as the motif of “doublings” or “shadows” in contemporary Africanist literature powerfully underscores (De Boeck, chapter 11; Ferguson 2006: 15–17; Mbembe 2001; Nuttall and Mbembe 2008), this economic and sociocultural progress is, as ever in capitalist societies, simultaneously producing a startling array of “underneaths” characterized by phenomena such as enhanced violence, social fragmentation, and territorial delinking (Ferme 2001; Nuttall 2009). Capitalist expansion on the continent, after all, is today, after structural adjustment, dominated by the volatile temporality of speculative financial capital, land grabbing, and extractive projects. These accelerated temporalities and their short-term logic impact current forms of government and development programs, as well as the disrupted fast pace of popular economies also subsumed by financiarization. The political economy of the future, on this account, is overdetermined by the fragmented temporality of the market and the media, the long-term cycles of production and reproduction having been overtaken by the instantaneity of consumption.7 The chapters in this volume examine contexts permeated by the sudden changes generated by these socioeconomic shifts. They partake in a paradoxical, fragmentary sense of unity given to the continent by an evident condition of macroeconomic progress that, at the same time, is deepening inequalities and rendering—for large segments of the population—the chances of securing even the most basic livelihood ever more improbable.

“progress” in such indices as national economic growth (Nigeria, Mozambique, Ghana), entrepreneurship, household incomes, life expectancies, and poverty rates. And the continent’s difficulties, he concludes, are by no means specific to Africa. Rather, “in reality”—and note here the perpetuation of the long-standing perception of the continent’s failed or failing states—“Africa faces in acute forms the same problems that afflict every region these days. Most important: Individual and social creativity is zooming ahead. Governing institutions are failing to perform the basic, elementary tasks.” 7. Nuttall and Mbembe (2008); Simone (2009).

10 / Chapter One

Hence a basic premise of this book—namely, that the contemporary conjuncture defies both the bland confidence of lenders, policy makers, and humanitarian organizations as well as the vicious circles of so-called Afropessimist projections. Across the continent, life eludes its demarcation by the usual alternatives to damnation, on the one hand, and donation or salvation, on the other. This volume brings to light a range of emergent social forms and imaginations of different times to come, ones that remain irreducible to—or at least creatively recast—the programmatic visions of development, humanitarianism, and religion. As Africa appears as a global site of experimentation on scales both world-historical and subjective (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011), received categories become increasingly inadequate to conceptualize developments such as the ones examined in this volume and the registers of anticipation, hope, revelation, and anxiety that animate them. Many of the macrosociohistorical and theoretical frameworks of the immediate postcolonial period seem to have outlived their usefulness (Piot 2010)—or, in any case, have seen their assumptions and typologies diminished by historical events that outstrip their applicability. Reductionist explanations that work through absolute reference to the historical past or the hermeneutics of suspicion of some essential underlying substratum appear exhausted. In response to such an impasse, this collection suggests, Africanist scholarship after postcoloniality would do well to abandon a falsified search for lost origins while concurrently refusing to content itself with postmodern evocations of “mere” surfaces and disseminations of epiphenomena. The aim of this book is to generate an archive in the present of in-depth, textured analyses of still emergent processes and identities: theoretical ethnographies of futurity. In short, empirical research on the continent demands new vocabularies and methods that will allow us to make sense of the fast flow of transformations and reversals that have taken place there in recent years. It is in response to this challenge, recombining previous concepts and modes of inquiry or searching for new ones, that the following chapters have been assembled. Together, they form a collection of maps and snapshots of key contemporary formations through which the contours of the future in Africa (and its Euro-American elsewheres; see Ralph [chapter 6], Piot [chapter 8], and Cole [chapter 9]) are actively being imagined: the refiguring of the city through the informal and the informational; the struggle for duration in the face of provisionality, precariousness, and emergency; the production and collapse of assorted techniques of juridification and illegality; regimes of invisibility that seduce desire and subvert everyday linearity; lotteries and Ponzi schemes that hedge the present against

Introduction / 11

tomorrow; new militarized modes of production and governance; apocalyptic revelations of the end of time; visions of impending and unknown worlds; a pervasive yearning for exile. What the contributors to this collection have in common is their antireductionist commitment to plural and open-ended perspectives over the usual predetermined pathologizing and redemptive visions of “Africa.” In the aftermath of the master tropes and grand narratives that oriented the study of Africa over the past few decades, the following thought pieces opt to work within the countless cracks and fissures that have opened up in their wake. The chapters theorize these incipient forms and modalities against the backdrop of a fragmented, post–Cold War, postdevelopment, post-9/11 political-economic landscape. Without a doubt, this is a sociological terrain decidedly unlike that studied by an earlier cohort of Africanist scholars. Increasingly freed from the bloated authoritarian complex that held sway in many countries since the independence period, today’s political apparatus is diffuse, decentralized, and (at least nominally) democratic. The ties that urban state elites maintain with rural spaces and politics are often attenuated and strategic. Amid state pullback, a privatized commons, land grabbing, and the flourishing of political and economic enclaves, novel sovereignties and biopolitical configurations are materializing in cities and villages alike. The savage logics of extractive capital and a new scramble for African land, oil, and minerals have brought a gallery of transnational players to the continent’s doorstep: corporations and venture capitalists that resemble the concession companies of yesteryear, a strategically charitable China, US oil and antiterrorism interests, a burgeoning development-humanitarian-spectacle complex. This volume addresses a social context in which, jostling for influence, these agents blur old boundaries—between public and private, development and entertainment, legal and illicit, military and humanitarian, local and global—and set in motion a new range of possibilities for organizing and unsettling everyday life on the continent. The volume does not presume a paralysis of being defined by the governance of crisis, on the one hand, or by the seemingly eternal return of the customary and tradition, on the other. Rather, it gives expression to a poetics of becoming, of novel and regenerated capacities and potentials. The following chapters illustrate how present horizons of meaning and conditions of possibility are inflected by various political and economic histories of subjection, misuse, and extraction, but show that these are not absolutely constitutive or determining. Against the ubiquitous public rhetoric of atrophy, these chapters anticipate African futures that by no means will

12 / Chapter One

be merely reactive to contemporary neoliberal schemes of accumulation or the purportedly entrenched logics of territorialism and ethnicity. Thus, alert to the profound intricacies of contemporary social, political, religious, and economic formations, these chapters survey sites of the crystallization of the new, the potential, and—in some cases—the hitherto unimaginable: emergent trends, practices, and subjectivities that may provide a window onto possibilities of an “Africa otherwise” (Roitman, chapter 2; see also Povinelli 2011) presently in the works.

Futures In recent years, a number of thinkers in the social sciences and humanities have come to be dubious of the conceptual primacy of “the future” in its various moral and political, even theological, guises (Berardi 2011; Berlant 2011; Edelman 2004; Love 2009). While attuned to such misgivings, the contributors to this volume nevertheless foreground this thematic as a crucial point of entry into the folds of social life on the continent, even as they too, in a similarly critical spirit, perceive in the term many of the conceptual cognates—progress, (re)production, development, and so forth—that for so long imposed on African societies a rigidly normative trajectory on their material, political, social, and intellectual capacities. Speaking of “futures” in the plural, as this collection proposes, is one modest but perhaps meaningful way of mitigating the teleological significations of the category or the adornment of global “History” with a capital H. Recent theorizations of futurity within African studies and beyond have paved the way for a project such as this. In his study of genocide and the political roots of violence, Mahmood Mamdani (2009) distinguishes between “cultural communities,” which presuppose a shared past, or common historical inheritance, and “political communities,” organized around a common project toward the future. The contexts surveyed in this volume show that today, common political futures are not at all secured or preordained, as they were believed to be in the not-too-distant past. The senses of shared ethical and political projects are constantly being reconverted and recombined following the sudden disarray of previously secure structures and the equally contingent emergence of new possible directions. Local political imaginations of the future played a key role in the period leading toward independence in Africa. This was a historical situation determined by the need for elites and popular movements alike to imagine times to come that would be radically different from the immediate

Introduction / 13

past. After the demise of many models and concepts created at that time, today questions of freedom and emancipation engage futurity in an arguably compromised fashion, creatively attempting to deal with the constant return of myriad—and, in many cases, disavowed—life-forms and social signs from an earlier epoch (custom, ritual, autochthony, indigeneity). After experiencing the pitfalls of neoliberal democracy, the vicissitudes of the “rule of law” and “civil society” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Ferguson 2006; Monga 1996), and the deepening of inequalities through deregulation and structural adjustment (Mkandawire and Soludo 1999), long-term political imaginations of the future seem to be engulfed by a continuous present, composing a mélange of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial fragments. Without denying the manifest singularity of this historical matrix, we might also recognize its indebtedness to and multiple resonances with the near pasts that preceded it, which suggests, perhaps, that the materialization of the new in Africa entails less of a “complete break with the past” per se (Meyer 1998) than it does the inventive fabrication of novel concepts and stories through which the past, present, and future can be productively reinhabited. James Ferguson’s pioneering work on the Zambian Copperbelt made a similar point about the emptying of once-assured futures in the region, charting the trajectory from independence to the postcolonial, postindustrial, postnationalist moment as one in which the discourse of “emerging Africa” gradually, painfully gave way to the “abject” realization among many Zambians of having been “pushed out of the place in the world” they hitherto occupied—and the future they hoped and expected to occupy (1999: 236). In what Ferguson described as his “ethnography of decline,” the concept of expectation—which carried with it the certain, secure anticipation of impending end points of arrival in cultural modernity, urbanization, and transformations in intimate realms of domesticity and subjectivity—had been replaced, and to a certain extent produced, by the “shattered” fragments of the “modernization myth.” The idea of historical progress having been decisively undermined, the study of “expectations of permanence,” Ferguson argued, then had to contend with the recombination of identities and processes that bypassed the dichotomies between “traditional” and “modern” and between “African” and “Western” upon which so much theorizing had been based. Different kinds of futures on the continent, he concluded, have to be “grasped through a different system of concepts,” the task being to comprehend “nonlinear difference and the countermodern linearities of decline” (81). The present volume

14 / Chapter One

responds to this early call, attempting to document those new vocabularies that point not to one but multiple “emergent forms of life” (Fischer 2003) observable in the African context. It is productive to put Ferguson’s argument into conversation with other, earlier Africanist texts. For instance, whereas in her celebrated book on agrarian change in sub-Saharan Africa, Sara Berry (1993) recuperated a popular saying from West Africa—“no condition is permanent”—in order to acknowledge economic and ecological historical change in terms of land and agrarian structures, the “expectations of permanence” in Africa, on Ferguson’s terms, have recently been transformed. New forms of governance, intervention, and accumulation have indelibly shaped local forms of hope and aspiration on the ground so that, to a large extent, the exception seems to have become the rule. Within this context, one concept in particular—that of temporariness— stands out as offering an especially poignant glimpse into the conditions of social and political existence on the continent. Indeed, several contributions in this collection (including those of Mbembe, Simone, Ralph, McKay, Hoffman, Piot, Weiss, and Guyer) offer deep and vivid accounts of what might be described as an extended brand of provisional politics emerging in Africa, whereby ostensibly temporary states become permanently stabilized and/or institutionalized, whether by default or by design. Humanitarianism, aid, disaster assistance, population control, public health interventions, famine relief, peacekeeping operations, transitional justice, provisional legal decrees, camps, and zones of internment are all modalities of governance that present themselves as transitory (as responding to crisis and emergency) and yet become constant and long lasting. And the same goes for the sensibilities and aspirations of African subjects themselves: in the wake of “a strong normative teleology, a unilinear trajectory” toward which “all humanity ought to aspire, to which all history ought to lead, toward which all the peoples ought to evolve” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011: 8–9), the everyday itself becomes a site of “encounter with indeterminacy, provisionality, the fugitive, and the contingent,” in terms of not only spatial or physical resources but also “social, political, and moral relations” (Mbembe, chapter 15). The appearance of such forms of a “temporarily” extended present, these authors suggest, remix in novel ways vectors from both past and future. With regard to these questions of temporality and futurity, the recent work of two contributors to this volume, Achille Mbembe and Jane Guyer, has been exemplary within African studies. More than a decade ago, Mbembe observed that “what Africa as a concept calls fundamentally into

Introduction / 15

question” is the manner in which social theory has hitherto dealt with “the collapse of worlds, their fluctuations and their tremblings, their aboutturns and disguises, their silences and murmurings.” According to him, “social theory has failed also to account for time as lived, not synchronically or diachronically, but in its multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences” (Mbembe 2001: 8). Meanwhile, among anthropologists, it was Guyer who, in a now-classic 2007 essay, forcefully articulated the need for “ethnographies of the near future” (410), arguing that what we have instead produced is an obsession with both the very distant past (i.e., origins) and the very distant future (i.e., eschatology), eliding in the process an awareness of “a time that is punctuated rather than enduring: of fateful moments and turning points, the date as event rather than as position in a sequence or a cycle” (416). Guyer’s essay found striking the extent to which, as she put it, “the anthropology of time settles so quickly into the ‘past in the present’ and memory,” proposing that “much relevant thinking about time in anthropology is less illuminating about the future than about the past” (418, ff. 4). It is precisely such an appeal for a rigorous engagement with the everyday experiences of time in Africa and the heterogeneous times-to-come they open onto that Mbembe engages, through reference to the dense, interlocked qualities of that peculiar temporality that he calls “emerging time” or the “time that is appearing” (Mbembe 2001: 16). It is the same appeal that has provided the impetus for this collection. Drawing inspiration from a cluster of other recent works on these issues (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011; Ferguson 2006; Geschiere 2009; Makhulu, Buggenhagen, and Jackson 2010; Mbembe 2001; Nuttall and Mbembe 2008; Piot 2010; Weiss 2004), the following chapters seek to contest the hubris or “tyranny” of experts (Easterly 2015) that would confidently pronounce on “Africa’s future” (Clarke 2012; see also Mitchell 2002; Tilley and Gordon 2010) as well as the developmentalist conceit that there could be a single point, trend, or cycle toward which an entire continent would be inexorably moving. The contributions in this volume illustrate a wide range of desires, rationalities, hopes, demands, and frustrations that together invigorate—or indeed thwart—the potential to conceive of tomorrows that would be resistant to the conventional narratives and logics, both “local” and “imposed,” that have defined the study of African societies for more than half a century. And in this, these chapters bespeak a rather different version of “Africa as a concept”: recombinant, manifold, and now, as ever, spatially and temporally, but never entirely, self-contained. Even so, the following chapters show that what the near- or long-term

16 / Chapter One

future might entail in specific African contexts may exceed even the most sophisticated of Euro-American conceptualizations. These chapters reveal that unique problematics are posed, and new methods and forms of writing are called upon, by milieus punctuated with multiple time scales and fluctuating speeds that are likely to exceed the predetermined teleologies of governance and the eventful time of exception and emergency. What becomes, for instance, of the market and the political, along with their earlier attendant notions of security, citizenship, and territory, amid such drastic defamiliarizations of their given forms and trajectories? Has a theology/ technology of immanent miracles and instantaneous ruptures finally supplanted the teleologies of the party, the state, the intelligentsia, or, lately, the NGO? How might the inauguration of novel intimacies and embodiments, passions and sensory modalities, be mapped in conjunction with the historically specific contexts in which they surface? Today, as Charles Piot (2010) observes, West African citizens from all walks of life are jettisoning, even violently rejecting, the past and its cultural, political, and religious attachments and embracing in their place an emergent repertoire of self-stylings and imaginaries. Yet so much academic and popular writing about Africa seems incapable of following their lead. Surely it will not suffice to hold fast to any grand theory or narrative as the key to apprehending these transformations. What would it mean, this volume asks, to think the future on its own terms, wherever and however it materializes? It is within the field of indeterminacy opened up by this possibility that the distinctive worlds elucidated in this book begin to make their claim upon the present.

Untimely Perpetuated by the media, humanitarian organizations, and agencies of global governance, the temporality of crisis in Africa—a now-oriented temporality of being either in the midst of or on the “verge” (Redfield 2013) of impending disaster—seems to foreshadow a future that could only reiterate the tragic contours of the present. This projection, as was argued above, is reproduced in recent prognostications that purport to find in particular African countries a “success story” in relation to which the rest of the continent and its afflictions might be contrasted. Of course, there is nothing especially new about this arrangement. From Enlightenment thought and dialectical philosophies of history that considered the continent to be located outside of history to modernist social programming aimed at moral improvement and population control to

Introduction / 17

contemporary accounts of globalization that exclude the continent from transnational economies and a world citizenry, Africa has often been portrayed as not being in sync with the pace and direction of planetary history, and its localities presented as remote spaces frozen in time, precariously governed by custom and calamity. Whereas the continent has been and still is a formidable laboratory of modernity, this gesture continues today in the presentation of the historicity of crisis as an abstract and perpetual state that casts the continent as ahistorical and its citizenry as ruled by atavistic political and cultural passions. In view of such a tenacious tendency, what analytical purchase might we possibly find in arguing for an untimely Africa? Would not such a move simply recapitulate all those totalizing, exceptionalizing images of a single, doomed, irrelevant “Africa” in contradistinction to which the present volume has been conceived? The following chapters suggest, however, that an untimely sensibility is indispensable to the task of thinking and writing about Africa otherwise, to apprehending it in such a way that the questions we have grown accustomed to asking of the sub-continent might be subjected to the shock of other responses posited by different voices. Responding to the familiar charge that critical theory is out of step with contemporary politics, Wendy Brown asserts that the aim of critical theory should be to “contest the very senses of time invoked to declare critique untimely” (Brown 2005: 4). The value of untimeliness as an analytical stance, writes Brown, drawing on Foucault (1997) and Nietzsche (1997), consists in its attempt to contest “settled accounts of what time it is, what the times are, and what political tempo and temporality we should hew to in political life.” Thus, far from indicating irrelevance or obliviousness, an untimely sensibility is one that seeks to “grasp the times by thinking against the times” (Brown 2005: 4).8 This book contends that to approach contemporary Africa and its potential futures in an untimely manner is to parochialize the judgment that underwrites so much pontificating about the continent today; it is to resist the breathless, unreflexive urgency of humanitarian campaigns and media headlines—both those that feed a perception of the continent as pathological and disaster-prone and those that would trumpet exceptions to this rule in the form of liberal democratic success stories and economic comebacks. As exhibited in these pages, an untimely intervention aims at taking

8. The prospect of an “untimely” critical practice has gained traction in recent years among anthropologists in particular. See especially Pandian (2012); Rabinow (2007); Rabinow and Marcus (2008); Wilder (2009).

18 / Chapter One

the pulse of what is emerging before it becomes fully crystallized, discerning unexpected resonances between apparently unlike entities and oddly, counterintuitively entangled circumstances and events. In the chapters that follow, this approach is evinced not merely in the specific themes addressed by the contributors but, instead, in the styles of argumentation, evidence gathering, and collation that bring them to light, with a twist. Whether surveying empirical terrain typically covered by more sensationalistic genres of reportage (e.g., nascent forms of warfare, the provision of medical resources in postconflict urban environments, apocalyptic discourse, the dizzying topographies of African megacities) or exploring issues that, though eminently current and momentous, fly somewhat below the radar of international punditry (e.g., flaws in transitional justice, ruptures within peacekeeping, Ponzi schemes, the powers and emplacements of money, transnational marriage and migration, the shifting dialectic of mobility and belonging, the political economy of militarism), these chapters propose that our conceptual rubrics and explanatory frames must be sought in the flow of social and political worlds as they are actually composed and decomposed, as they are dreamt up and desired, in the multiple times they may inhabit. What materializes from such a method is an Africa incessantly on the move and in the making, one situated beyond the reach of postmodernity and postcoloniality alike, a space—indeed a concept—indifferent to both romantic utopia and dystopia. It is, in sum, an “untimely” Africa that “contests the very senses of time” (Brown 2005: 4) through which the continent has long been acted upon and apprehended.9 The following chapters track the everyday effects of this untimeliness. In the aftermath of previous large political and economic programming and myriad rhythms, speeds, experiences of time, and imaginations of past and future, recombinations of ritual and norm coalesce and collide, creating a space of possibility. The temporalities of kinship structures, migration, warfare, work, intimacy, spirituality and devotion, consumption, and accumulation generate potentials that escape the temporal frameworks of (trans)national governance through law, development, or capitalist extraction. This multiplicity, which inflects the basic composition of quotidian life, as these chapters demonstrate, represent different local vectors of “time on the move” (Mbembe 2001), unfolding in disparate directions, es-

9. For a recent, more general set of reflections on the peculiar temporality (“damaged time”) in which the postcolonial world presently finds itself, and what an untimely perspective such a moment might necessitate or entail, see Scott (2014).

Introduction / 19

chewing the unidirectional programs of “transition” and their mandatory phases and stages, be it in reference to democratic transition, transitional justice, or a transition to capitalist accumulation. Instead, what we find is an excess proliferating on the ground, a material surplus of meanings and intensities, of strivings and exhaustions— ones irreducible, moreover, to imported programs of statecraft and wellbeing (see Jackson 2011). Positioned somewhere between “postcolonial melancholia” (Gilroy 2006) and a postdevelopmentalist “nostalgia for the future” (Piot 2010), there is resilience, sober and unsentimental. Brazenly cosmopolitan yet enmeshed in singular biographies and localities, saturated with conflicting promises, the Africa glimpsed in these pages is one of creative practices of remembrance and anticipation—and also, to be sure, of active forgetting.

T WO

Africa Otherwise JANET ROITMAN

Cameroon, 1993. Two Decades Past. Crisis. J’ai la crise. When I traveled through Cameroon in the early 1990s, people everywhere lamented, “J’ai la crise.” Literally translated as “I have the crisis,” this beleaguered statement was intoned in the same way that someone would say, “I have a cold” or “I have the flu.” At the time, it seemed clear that one could only conclude that Cameroonians were living in times of crisis (Mbembe and Roitman 1995). That is to say that crisis, for those living in Cameroon some two decades ago, was more than a set of statistics. La crise was a condition and, as lived experience, had become an imperative, or a figure, of rationality. Doubtless, the lived experience of what is deemed “crisis” cannot be reduced to a statistical event or an ensemble of socioeconomic indicators. Such representations disregard the ways in which crisis becomes a device for understanding how to act effectively in situations that belie, for the actors, a sense of possibility. But still we must ask, if crisis designates something more than a socioeconomic indicator or a historical conjuncture, what is the status of that term? How did crisis, habitually a signifier for a critical, decisive moment, come to be construed as an experiential or historical condition?1 The mere idea of crisis as a condition—j’ai la crise—suggests an ongoing state of affairs. Although crisis typically refers to a historical conjuncture (e.g., war, economic recession, famine)—or to a moment in history, a turning point—it has been taken to be the defining characteristic of the African

1. Achille Mbembe and I did not ask this question in our 1995 publication, which is the subject of Roitman (2014), where I reflect upon the status of “crisis” in social science theory and narrative in an effort to consider what is at stake with crisis in and of itself.

24 / Chapter Two

continent for some twenty years now. Can one speak of a state of enduring crisis? Is this not an oxymoron? In effect, how can one think about Africa—or think “Africa” as an object of knowledge—otherwise than under the sign of crisis? This is a crucial question. Needless to say, this is not a particularly African question. The geography of crisis has come to be world geography, CNN-style: crisis in Afghanistan, crisis in Darfur, crisis in Iraq, crisis in Mumbai, crisis on Main Street. The singularity of political events is abstracted by a generic logic, making “crisis” a term that seems self-explanatory.2 In a reversal of this typical manner of starting with a case (“Africa”) and then proceeding on to generalizations (colonialism, postcolonialism, neoliberalism), I begin with a general problem in order to take us to Africa. The problem is not Africa per se but rather the concept of crisis. Crisis is an omnipresent sign in almost all forms of narrative today; it is mobilized as the defining category of our contemporary situation. The recent “crisis bibliography” in the social sciences and popular press is vast.3 As I argue elsewhere (Roitman 2014), crisis serves as the noun formation of contemporary historical narrative; it is the place from which one claims access to and knowledge of history. In considering the status of crisis in such narrative forms, my aim is not to theorize the term “crisis” or to come up with a working definition of it. Rather than essentialize it so as to make better use of it, the point is to understand the kinds of work the term “crisis” is or is not doing in the construction of narrative forms. Likewise, the point is not to demonstrate that crisis signifies something new in contemporary narrative accounts, nor is it to demonstrate how contemporary usages of the term “crisis” are wrong and hence argue for a true or more correct meaning.4 When one speaks of “the crisis in Africa” or when Cameroonians say, “J’ai la crise,” one can only ask, “But what exactly is in crisis?” And that question leads us to consider how crisis is constituted as an object of knowl2. For a fascinating screen-based visual arts project on the term “crisis” in the news media that aims to visualize how the replication of the term generates—and does not merely reflect—a particular situation, see Katie Levitt’s “Poetical Crisis” (http://katielevitt.wordpress .com), which uses live news feeds, data processing, and typographical imagery. 3. Referencing this bibliography, which spans topics from humanitarianism to finance to the environment and so forth would take up an inordinate amount of space, as would the notation of recent conferences dedicated to “explaining the crisis,” which have been impulsively staged by universities, think tanks, and periodicals. 4. For a review of the term “crisis,” cf. Beckett (2008), who shows how crisis has been posited in Haiti in relation to a wider discursive field in which the notion of “decline” is dependent on ideas of progress held to obtain outside of Haiti, most notably in the Global North.

Africa Otherwise / 25

edge. Crisis serves particular narrative constructions and particular truth claims. Most typically in social science writing today, crisis is mobilized to mark out a “moment of truth.” Such moments of truth are sometimes defined as turning points in history, when decisions are made or events are decided, thus establishing a particular teleology. They also are sometimes defined as instances when “the real” is made bare, such as when a so-called financial bubble is seemingly burst, thus divulging alleged “false value” based on speculation and revealing “true value,” or the so-called fundamentals of the economy. As a category denoting a moment of truth in these ways, and despite presumptions that crisis does not imply, in itself, a definite direction of change, the term “crisis” signifies a diagnostic of the present; it implies a certain telos—that is, it is inevitably, though most often implicitly, directed toward a norm. Evoking crisis entails reference to a norm because it requires a comparative state for judgment: crisis compared to what? That question evokes the significance of crisis as an axiological problem, or the questioning of the epistemological or ethical grounds of certain domains of life and thought.

Judging Time? When we take crisis to signify a generalized condition—as opposed to a critical, decisive moment—we assume that a meaningful world is in crisis. But what does it take to posit the very idea that meaning can be in a state of crisis? Moreover, what does it take to envisage a society as breaking down? Such visions can only arise in counterdistinction to imagined alternative societies. Without them, we could not make such a judgment: the affirmation “this society is breaking down” requires a comparison, a comparative state of affairs. As is well known, the etymology of the term “crisis” speaks to that requirement of judgment. The complex details of its semantic history can be found in many places and go beyond the scope of this text. Briefly, it is worth noting that its etymology originates with the ancient Greek term krinô (to cut, to select, to decide, to judge), which suggested a definitive decision. With significance in the domains of law, medicine, and theology, by the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the medical signification prevailed. Associated with the Hippocratic school (Corpus Hippocratum) as part of a medical grammar, “crisis” denoted the turning point of a disease or a critical phase in which life or death was at stake and called for an irrevocable decision. Significantly, crisis was not the disease or illness per se; it was the condition that called for decisive judgment between alternatives.

26 / Chapter Two

In the social sciences, despite widespread usage of the term “crisis” to denote a historical event, only Reinhart Koselleck has elaborated a conceptual history of the term (1988 [1959]; 2002; 2004 [1979]; 2006 [1972–97]).5 He describes a decisive shift in the semantics of crisis transpiring between Hippocratic medical grammar and Christian exegesis. Not surprisingly, one did not replace the other: in the elaboration of Christian theology, with reference to the New Testament and alongside Aristotelian legal language, krisis was paired with judicium and came to signify judgment before God, which Koselleck characterizes as possibly being the unsurpassable signification of crisis in the course of its conceptual history (2002: 237; 2006: 358–59). Throughout the history of its conceptual displacements—which involved the elaboration of semantic webs as opposed to a linear development of substitutions and which I have drastically abbreviated6—the term “crisis” entailed a prognosis, which increasingly came to imply a prognosis of time. Koselleck’s conceptual history of crisis illustrates how, over the course of the eighteenth century, a spatial metaphor came to be a historical concept through the temporalization of history. What does he mean by this? By “the temporalization of history,” Koselleck refers to the process by which, since the late eighteenth century, time came to be no longer figured as a medium in which histories take place; rather time itself became conceived as having a historical quality. In other words, history no longer occurs in time; instead, time itself is now an active, transformative (historical) principle (2002: 165–67; 2004 [1979]: 236). Koselleck’s point, in a sentence, is that this temporalization of history transpired through the temporalization of the Last Judgment: prophecy was displaced by prognosis.7 While prophecy involves symbols of what is already known and entails expectation in constant similitude, prognosis, to the contrary, generates novel events.8 Crisis served this transposition from prophecy to prognosis, or the “channel5. For short articles that offer encyclopedia-style entries on the concept of crisis, cf. Masur (1973); Starn (1971); Béjin and Morin (1976). The numerous texts in German are found in Koselleck’s bibliography (cf. notably 2006). 6. The various “semantic options” are set forth as distinct but not mutually exclusive in Koselleck (2002: 240–44; 2006: 371–72). It is important to note that for Koselleck’s brand of conceptual history, and contrary to a history of ideas, concepts cannot be defined; they have no inner, core meaning that undergoes permutations. Instead, concepts consist of semantic webs of meaning, which bring definitions into a wider relational nexus, thus producing relatively stable units of sense (cf. Koselleck 2004 [1979]: 75–92). 7. For another account of this temporalization, see Lovejoy (1976 [1936]). 8. Although the Last Judgment is yet to come, the Annunciation makes this cosmic event of future historical time already present as the Christian conscience (a point elaborated upon in the important references in Koselleck 2006: 360, footnote 10).

Africa Otherwise / 27

ing of millennial expectations,” because it became the basis for claims that one can interpret the entire course of history via a diagnosis of time. Koselleck’s account of this semantic shift is part of his oeuvre on the emergence of the European concept of history and the ways in which its associated historico-political concepts (e.g., progress) thematize time.9 Prior to the achievement of this shift, crisis did not have a time; it was not historically dated, and it did not signify historical dates.10 By the eighteenth century, the term “crisis” attained the status of a historical concept, which means that it signified temporal spans. But it is now equally apprehended as a temporal category itself: it denotes time (war, revolution, a time of crisis), and it denotes history itself (World War II, the French Revolution, Rwandan Genocide). Through this process of temporalization, the term “crisis” comes to signify a historically unique transition phase, which would mark a fundamental transformation of social relations, as in the case of the French Revolution or Marxist capitalist crisis, both of which signify a fundamental break with the past. Yet it also comes to signify an epoch insofar as this alleged break with the past defines new time; hence we refer, post hoc, to “the medieval era,” “the Renaissance,” or “the Industrial Age.” Through the invocation of the term “crisis” as a historically unique transition phase, which marks off an epoch, historical experience is likewise generalized as a logical recurrence. And we, as narrators of our own history, recognize moments of crisis in terms of epistemological rupture, or a problem of meaning or legitimacy. The role of the historian (as witness) is thus to judge events as both significant and logical. And yet, at the same time, history itself is posited as serving the ultimate form of judgment. This is exemplified, in a trivial manner, by the expression “time will tell” but is best understood in terms of an expectation for world-immanent justice, 9. By a European concept of history, I refer to the project of Begriffsgeschichte, devoted to the study of the fundamental concepts that partake of, and give rise to, both a specific concept of “history” and a distinctly historical consciousness. Koselleck’s extensive writing on this subject and on the ultimate question of the emergence of Neuzeit (the modern age, modernity) as a historical concept has been commented on at length. For brief reviews, cf. Tribe (1989) and Richter (1990). The main body of Koselleck’s work in English includes Koselleck (1988 [original German 1959]; 2002; 2004 [original German 1979]). 10. While serving, throughout the seventeenth century, as a catchword with a range of political applications related to the body politic, constitutional order, and military situations, by the late eighteenth century, its religious connotation was exacerbated, though in a “posttheological mode” or as a philosophy of history (Koselleck 2006: 370). Through its semantic history, crisis, as a concept, sheds its apocalyptic meaning: “it turns into a structural category of Christianly understood history pure and simple; eschatology is, so to speak, historically monopolized” (2002: 242). Read also Koselleck (2004 [1979]), especially chapter 13, and cf. Blumenberg (1997 [1979]).

28 / Chapter Two

which many, from Schiller to Koselleck, have noted is the fundamental condition of modern reason (see Koselleck 2002: 241; 2006: 371).11 It is assumed—as is often the case—that history, as an acting subject, enforces justice. And this judgment is effected, retrospectively, through acts and errors. Judging time (sorting change from stasis, perceiving intervals) and judging history (diagnosing demise or improvement, defining winners and losers) is a matter of prognosis. What are the criteria by which we justify such markings as failure and error? The term “crisis” serves this manner of denoting “history.” It raises the issue of the burden of proof for meaning in history—that events have significance. And it raises the issue of the burden of proof for the meaning of history itself—that we can qualify history itself as an “epoch,” as a turning point, as entailing failure or justice. The idea that history is just or unjust for certain populations is underwritten by the assumption that there is a possibility for world-immanent justice (as opposed to transcendentally derived justice). If a transcendental, such as “God” or “the planets,” is not deemed responsible for the quality of our lives or for the nature of events, we nonetheless mobilize other referents that serve as a nonlocus from which to signify contingency or to qualify the nature of events. Crisis is just such a nonlocus, or an enabling blind spot, for the production of knowledge.12

Times of Crisis? The very notion that one could judge historical time (that it presents itself to us as an entity to be judged and that it can be deemed good or bad, a failure or a success) and that history is defined by a teleology of justice (that there are winners and losers, errors and victories) conjures an extraordinarily self-conscious mode of being. This critical historical consciousness—or this specific way of knowing the world as “history” and 11. With reference to a host of witnesses of the impending or attested crisis, including Robespierre, Rousseau, Diderot, Thomas Paine, Burke, Herder, Fichte, Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Lorenz von Stein, Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Marx and Engels, Koselleck declares, “That the crisis in which one currently finds oneself could be the last, great, and unique decision, after which history would look entirely different in the future—this semantic option is taken up more and more frequently the less the absolute end of history is believed to be approaching with the Last Judgment. To this extent, it is a question of recasting a theological principle of belief. It is expected of world-immanent history itself” (2002: 243, my emphasis; see 2002: 243–44; 2006: 370–97). 12. The point that crisis is a blind spot for the production of knowledge is developed in Roitman (2014).

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this specific way of positing that there is a distinction to be made between historical events and knowledge of those events—is consumed with the puzzle of the inevitable inadequacy of such knowledge. We thus discern historical significance in terms of dissonance between politics and morality, between theory and practice, between knowledge and human interests, between technology and humanity—in brief, in terms of ethical failures. In the social sciences generally, crisis is posited so as to establish the grounds for questioning the terms of normativity.13 In doing so, one assumes that if the grounds for truth are necessarily contingent and partial, truth is nonetheless performed in moments of crisis because these are instances when the contingency of these truth claims are made bare and the limits of intelligibility are potentially transgressed. Examples can be given from the ranks of critical theory,14 the sociology of critique,15 or poststructuralism. To take a contemporary example of the latter genre, epistemological crisis is defined by Judith Butler as a “crisis over what constitutes the limits of intelligibility” (1993: 138). Many scholars, including myself (Roitman 2005), have taken crisis to be the starting point for narration. Following the work of Michel Foucault, we assume that if we start with the disciplinary concepts or techniques that allow us to think of ourselves as subjects—that enable us to tell the truth about ourselves—then limits to ways of knowing necessarily entail epistemological crises. For Butler, then, subject formation transpires through crisis—that is, crisis, or the disclosure of epistemological limits, occasions critique and potentially gives rise to counternormativities that speak the unspeakable (1999; 2004: 307–8; see Boland 2007; Lyotard 1988). For Foucault, crisis signifies a discursive impasse and the potential for a new 13. This refers to the coconstitutive relationship between the cognate terms “critique” and “crisis,” explored most distinctly by Koselleck (1988 [1959]). For commentary on Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis, which is relevant to this chapter, see Edwards (2006), among the extensive secondary literature. 14. Although certain authors associated with the Frankfurt School argued that state capitalism had developed mechanisms to avoid crises, for most others, the teleology or dialectics of social contradictions, the problem of “lost meaning” or alienation, and the grounds for critical reason remained the fundamental sources of crises for modern society. The bibliography is lengthy: see the extensive works of Friedrich Pollock, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Claus Offe, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas. 15. Cf. Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), whose sociology of critique represents a nonFoucauldian approach that similarly (and productively) inquires into the limits of intelligibility as a prime mover in history. Evidently, because it is structurally necessary for capitalism, crisis is construed as productive in Marxist-inspired analyses, as well: see, for example, the works of Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey.

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form of historical subject. For both, crisis is productive; it is the means to transgress and is necessary for change or transformation.16 This way of taking crisis as fundamental to epistemological and historical change is endemic to thinking about Africa—to thinking “Africa.” To take a recent intervention, the contributors to a special issue of Ethnos, devoted to “Crisis and Chronicity” (Vigh 2008), posit crisis as the point from which ethnography begins: crisis is the means to access both “the social” and “experience.” In his provocative introductory essay, Henrik Vigh proposes a move from “placing a given instance of crisis in context” to “seeing crisis as a context,” by which he means “a terrain of action and meaning rather than an aberration” (8). Vigh and his coauthors take crisis to be an “ongoing experience,” a state of affairs or an enduring condition (see also Greenhouse 2002). This notion of crisis as an ongoing or permanent state of affairs—what is denoted as “times of crisis”—is conceptually fraught. As Vigh notes, the very notion of constant crisis implodes the concept of crisis, since one ends with an oxymoronic “ordered disorder.” He welcomes this implosion of the concept (while nevertheless retaining the term) as a means of “freeing the concept from its temporal confines” (2008: 9). To unleash the concept of crisis from time would clearly be an unprecedented form of freedom (see Roitman 2014), but the claim seems to entirely disregard the conceptual history of the term and Koselleck’s point that crisis is necessarily a temporal concept. The programmatic statements set forth in several edited volumes (Greenhouse, Mertz, and Warren 2002; Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002; Vigh 2008) take crisis as a point of departure for ethnographic insights produced by social scientists as well as a point of departure for the “production of social rules, norms and meaning” (Vigh 2008: 12) generated by local people. This approach is in keeping with a long-standing tradition of social science theory for which crisis serves as a mediation between theory and practice (cf. Benhabib 1986; Habermas 1975; 1984–87; 1987).17 Leaving 16. In keeping with this, because reason has no end other than itself, the decisive duty of critique is essentially to produce crisis; to engage in the permanent critique of one’s self, to be in critical relation to normative life, is a form of ethics and a virtue (Foucault 1997: 303–19; 1985). Similarly, Simon Critchley (1999: 12) sees crisis as necessary for politics, or for producing a “critical consciousness of the present.” Indeed, philosophy would have no purpose in a world without crisis: “The real crisis would be a situation where crisis was not recognized.” If the grounds for truth are necessarily contingent or partial, and if philosophy thus has no intrinsic object, its authority only possibly emerges as such in moments of crisis, which he defines as the “time when philosophy happens.” 17. Vigh claims, “The interesting thing about the perspective of ‘crisis as context’ is that it leads us to realize that new configurations are sought [and] established, even in situations

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that point aside, for ethnographers today, and especially for those doing research in Africa, crisis is a means to account for the emergent. As I argued above, crisis is the place from which one claims access to and knowledge of history. And because crisis is taken to be an instance when the contingency of truth claims are made bare, it presumably grants access to a social world: “When crisis becomes context the order of our social world becomes in other words questioned and substituted by multiple contestations and interpretations leading to the recognition that our world is in fact plural rather than singular: social rather than natural” (Vigh 2008: 16). This claim reiterates the approach to critique associated with the pragmatic sociology practiced by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1991), which takes reflexivity as crucial to practices of justification and the formation of critique. But social reflexivity is inherent to praxis; it is not necessarily or inevitably contingent on crisis.18 Carol Greenhouse states, “Crises, by definition, involve conditions in which people (including the state’s agents) must improvise with the elements of their social and political technologies and cope with a variety of unexpected disruptions and opportunities” (2002: 9). Following Habermas, she takes crisis to refer to “conditions that make outcomes unpredictable.”19 In this sense, crisis seems to allow for interpretations of historical situations that do not partake of linear causality or an ideology of progress. As Pedersen and Hojer (2008) and Vigh (2008) maintain, crisis situations abolish a coherent progression of time: a chaotic succession of changes disrupts linearity. We thus supposedly have “‘progressless’ motion” (Vigh 2002: 17), which nonetheless can be narrated. While that feat of narration deserves more thought, suffice it here to note that the term “crisis” suits contemporary dispositions, which, while committed to narrativity, renounce linearity and causality.

A Politics of Crisis? Africanist anthropologists have much to learn from critiques of historiography (cf. White 1973; 1978). Of course, most scholars now reject any form of historicism (or the validity of claims to knowledge of the facts about where social instability and volatility prevail, and that it grants us an analytical optic able to engage anthropologically in such social processes” (2008: 15). 18. Vigh refers to Giddens (1984) and Beck, Bonns, and Lau (2003) regarding social praxis and routinization. For an approach that takes reflexivity to be central yet does not posit crisis as a means to produce the social and/or history, see the work of Michel Callon. 19. Her reference is to Legitimation Crisis, an early Habermas text.

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the past as well as the grounds for claims to authoritative accounts) or a philosophy of history (or confidence in the teleological nature of time and events). Daniel Parrochia sums up the situation succinctly: From a philosophical point of view, during the last quarter of the century we have witnessed perhaps not “the end of History” but at least the end of philosophies of history, if by that we mean messianic belief systems that entail an unyielding confidence in a teleology of time. Whether it be the Christian eschatology of a paradisiacal community; the Enlightenment belief in the irreversible progress of humanity towards happiness and “perfect health”; the Communist vision of a pacified, classless society; or even the recent utopia of a world of perfectly transparent communication—all are versions (religious or secular) of a “becoming” (un devenir) that is oriented toward a collective imaginary. What remains, it seems, for these majestic manners of organizing shared time is a pointed attention to events. The latter constitute, in their often irruptive nature, the elements of a network, the signification of which is not preordained and which must be reconstituted patiently, like a puzzle or a painting that has no model. (2008: 5–6, my translation)

Recourse to “moments” (“the postcolonial moment”) and events does indeed characterize the constitutive elements of contemporary social science narratives, being a reflection of strategies for avoiding teleology. And “crisis” figures as a part of that constellation of concepts; its increasingly widespread use is, in part, a symptom of such strategies. An entire array of institutions, situations, and processes—the nation-state, humanitarianism, war, migration, empire, citizenship, finance capital—have been interpreted with reference to “states of exception,” “states of emergency,” and “crisis” as the fundamental conditions of their emergence.20

20. Vigh (2008) refers to Walter Benjamin’s “state of emergency” in his definition of “crisis.” See also Fassin and Pandolfi (2010). But see Collier and Lakoff (2008), who, in their work on the concepts and techniques that were elaborated on in the theorization of “emergency situations” for US civil defense programs in the 1950s and the concomitant production of a consensus around the doctrine and ideal of the “national security state,” note the inappropriate referencing of “states of exception” for situations that did not necessarily entail sovereign exception to extant legality. Alongside the passion for Schmidt and Agamben is the influence of Giddens and Beck, who claim that risk has become a primary mode of sociopolitical organization and an ultrareflexive phase of modernity. They argue that “manufactured risk” and “reflexivity” are the defining features of a new, or “second,” modernity, which is given the rather athletic title of “reflexive risk-modernity” (cf. Giddens 1992; 1993; Giddens and Griffiths 2006; Beck 1992; 1999; 2008).

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“Risk,” “catastrophe,” “disaster,” “emergency,” “crisis,” “trauma,” “shock” —these are now rapidly proliferating nouns (often used as adjectives) in a great deal of scholarship today. Some of this work explores the very emergence of such critical situations. For example, a typical and pervasive question guiding current research is, how did “the camp” come to define a fundamental aspect of the nexus between national and international politics in the management of human life? Some of this work considers “the politics of crisis,” taking crisis to be a contested term. Either way, it is typically assumed that although it is contested and an object of various forms of politics, “crisis” is an ontological state, or at least a condition of human history and human affairs. Crises happen, and crises are propagated; they then become sites of contestation, with political and social consequences. Crisis—be it disputed, contested, or authored—has a particular status in history. One particularly compelling exposition of the politics of crisis is Peter Redfield’s (2005) thoughtful article on the ethical dilemmas associated with the genre of humanitarian action pursued by the French organization Doctors without Borders, or Médecins sans frontières (MSF). Redfield discusses MSF’s “global form of medical humanitarianism and the conditions of life in crisis to which it responds,” thus taking up the “bare life” postulate of Giorgio Agamben, or the ways in which, through a specific form of humanitarian ethics and action, “a lower threshold possibility of life” is delimited and perpetuated (329–30). For Redfield, this “stabilization of crisis” is revelatory: it indicates an ethical dilemma.21 To gain insight into this dilemma, Redfield takes crisis both in the Greek Hippocratic sense, as demanding a definitive response, and as a historiographic term, as a narrative device that establishes certain events as moments of truth (335). Crisis is used to denote a state of affairs (war, famine). It is likewise invoked to conjure “the real” insofar as it establishes physical and ethical situations (bare life, the camp) as well as claims for “self-authorizing” action. This double signification is expressed in the following: “Once a state of crisis has been established, then action (especially technical, expert action) acquires a self-authorizing status by virtue of circumstance. In ethical terms, if one has a capacity to act, then not acting takes on new significance” (337). This ethics of action is elaborated according to the imperative to bear witness, which one might surmise, and as was 21. A similar point is made by Alex de Waal (1997), probably the first author to define a “humanitarian mode of power,” in his book Famine Crimes.

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noted above, is a historically Christian ethical imperative that entails the judgment of history and immanent justice. The “self-authorizing” action of so-called humanitarianism that ensues from the immediacy of the crisis frame is eventually and necessarily narrated in terms of “history.” Redfield asks, “For how else are we to evaluate action, if not through its eventual incorporation into a historical frame?”22 He sets that frame to the measure of time by noting how these exceptional, immediate actions have historical effects, the refugee camp having become one of the most enduring features of our contemporary political landscapes. But there is a concurrent measure of judgment and action. The “ethic of refusal” that characterizes MSF-style humanitarianism— the refusal of national politics, of the will of certain sovereign states, and of “the apparent futility of the way the world is”23—involves an appeal to “conscience,” or to the historical form of Christian conscience denoted by Koselleck. The obligation to witness is an equally relevant register for MSF. Redfield (2006) explores this ethics of witnessing (témoignage) and advocacy through his argument that MSF, as part of an international community of nongovernmental organizations, is implicated in processes that serve to define secular moral truth today. The production of those truths and their inscription in history transpires through the act of witnessing, which is posited as a collective moral duty in the organization’s charter.24 Without theological justification for human suffering, this form of witnessing seeks to inscribe human drama in a form of secular, historical narrative. And as Redfield demonstrates, although there are ongoing discussions about the appropriate ways and means of witnessing within the organization, it seems nonetheless that the very possibility of representation itself is left unquestioned. The very impossibility of bearing witness—what is now often signified as the “unsayability” of Auschwitz—is an unexamined problem for this self-proclaimed secular ethics. Also unexamined are the ways in which witnessing is purported to redeem meaning (of events, of suffering) for history (see LaCapra 2004: 175–76). But perhaps this latter point is irrelevant:

22. This is the question that LaCapra (2004: 157) puts to Agamben with regard to the latter’s notion of a “threshold of indistinction.” See his trenchant evaluation of so-called bare life and the problem of witnessing. I thank Vasiliki Touhouliotis for calling my attention to the relevance of LaCapra’s critique. 23. Orbinski quoted in Redfield (2006: 7). 24. This collective duty is not without dissenters or at least discussion about the binding nature of the ethics of witnessing and the guidelines for such ethical action (cf. Redfield 2006: 9–10).

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the “crisis” that conjures humanitarianism is conceivably less the impossibility of representation produced in historical experience—such as the inability to utter, to speak, to narrate, to write—than it is a nonlocus from which to signify contingency. This presupposition is highly reminiscent of what LaCapra (2004) discerns in Agamben’s writing on Auschwitz and his treatment of the problem of bearing witness: “In Agamben one often has the sense that he begins with the presupposition of the aporia or paradox, which itself may at times lose its force and its insistence in that it does not come about through the breakdown or experienced impasse in speaking, writing, or trying to communicate but instead seems to be postulated at the outset. In other words, a prepackaged form seems to seek its somewhat arbitrary content. And the paradox and the aporia become predictable components of a fixated methodology” (176). The presupposition of a form—a paradox, an aporia, a crisis—establishes the slate on which the act of witnessing potentially can occur.25

Africa Otherwise? Today it goes without saying that the African continent is designated and conjured under the sign of crisis. This is not a diagnostic of a continent. It is a diagnostic of history as such. In the same way that our contemporary history is qualified in terms of humanitarian crisis, environmental crisis, financial crisis, and so on, and is thus given ontological status as “history” through these terms, “Africa” is posited as an ontological category of thought under the sign of crisis. Africa is elicited as a category in terms of pathology: we have weak states, failed states, crisis states. Failed states are defined, quite tautologically, as failures of state infrastructures and capacities (Beissinger and Young 2002; Debiel and Lambach 2007; Migdal 1988; Rotberg 2003; Zartman 1995; among many others; but see Bilgin and Morton 2002). As has been noted, this view is concerned with the integrity of a rational-legal bureaucracy and is normative insofar as it presupposes the Weberian definition of the rational-legal state (Bayart 1993; Hibou 2004). But recent attention to the proliferation of nonstate actors on the continent has only exacerbated this failed states or crisis states appraisal, giving rise to interpretations of life

25. For LaCapra, this presupposition of crisis is to be contrasted to an anthropological or historical approach “that does not begin with, or become fixated on, breakdown or aporia but is open and alert to such breakdown or aporia when it occurs in the witness’s attempt to recount traumatic experience” (2004: 174, my emphasis).

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in Africa in terms of legitimacy crises, fragmented or partial sovereignties, and “no-war-no-peace” zones (Arnaut and Hojbjerg 2008; Krasner 2001; Richards 2005). Africa is thereby qualified as being in a condition of crisis, a permanent time of crisis. Crisis signifies the paradox (no-war-no-peace) that serves a fixated methodology for delineating the emergent (new sovereigns, new assemblages). Despite the fact that much of this work disavows the determinism implicit in the dialectic of social contradictions, crisis is mobilized to show how conflict and disorder generate new normativities.26 The conceptual concern for delineating the emergent is not objectionable in itself. The point is perhaps not to renounce crisis as a concept but at least to reflect upon its entailments. The point is to ask questions about our assumption that crisis has a status in history and our assumption that crisis is the status of a particular history. As I have argued herein, inspired by Reinhart Koselleck, “crisis” is a term that is bound up in the predicament of signifying human history. Crisis allows for paradox: it is the enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge. It is a distinction that, at least since the late eighteenth century and like all latencies, is seen not as an enabling paradox but rather as an error or deformation—a discrepancy between the world and knowledge of the world.27 But if we take crisis to be a blind spot or distinction that makes certain things visible and others invisible, it is merely an a priori. Crisis is claimed, but it remains a latency; it is never itself explained because it allows for the further reduction of “crisis” to other elements, such as capitalism, the economy, politics, culture, and subjectivity. In that sense, crisis is not a condition to be observed (loss of meaning, alienation, faulty knowledge); it is an observation that produces meaning.

Futures? When I returned to Cameroon some time after having published “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis,” a new beverage had appeared at the road-

26. This view is reminiscent of the ethnographies of Gluckman and Balandier, who described how custom and social order were produced out of social conflict—a point made by Arnaut and Hojbjerg (2008: 12) with reference to Fischer (1999) and repeated to me by Michael Gilsenan (personal communication, May 2011). 27. I follow Luhmann’s definition: “The distinction that is operatively used in observation but not observable is the observer’s blind spot” (2002: 190). Cf. Rasch’s introductory remarks (2002: 104–5) on this notion of blind spot. My own formulation is very much influenced by Luhmann and Rasch.

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side stalls where one habitually could purchase the three main soft drinks: Coke, Sprite, and (my personal favorite) bright-orange Fanta—all made in Nigeria with high doses of glucose syrup. These familiar brands had been replaced by a very pale, yellow drink consisting of murky water, a spoonful of sugar, and some lemon juice—an insipid substitute for the high-energy Nigerian originals. This new drink was called l’anti-crise: anticrisis. Anticrisis was the remedy to economic hardship in an economic sense: it was the cheap alternative. Yet anticrisis was also taken to be a remedy in the sense of a medicine or a potion that one drinks so as to become immune to disease, bullets, or even love. Made on the streets and at home, the anticrisis drink was part of the region’s unregulated trade. Many an anthropologist would surely take anticrisis to be an instance of the informal market, an ingenious mode of bricolage, and a savvy local manner of responding to the wrath of global markets. These views are valid. However, anticrisis was equally a symptom of the ways in which crisis did not denote epistemological rupture—that is, while a point of resistance, anti-crise was also a clear demonstration that the grounds for resistance are typically devised on the basis of prevailing epistemologies. It was a response, an antidote, and thus the profession or seeming acknowledgement of—and accession to—a particular condition. Were we, then, in “times of anticrisis”? This question brings us back to the matter, raised above, of what is expected of history. Doubtless, the world could be otherwise; we can envisage amendments that would address poverty and well-being. But the movements or publics that emerge around these issues must be acknowledged as such—that is, as effective publics or as movements with legitimate claims. Hence they can never constitute an alternative politics, being inevitably inscribed in, for example, the language of rights and sovereignty.28 Without a nonfoundational foundation for political action, we can only have crisis and anticrisis, not crisis and something else. How would that something else obtain? Thinking Africa “otherwise” militates against the demand for an imagined or prescribed future—or against a moral demand for a difference between past

28. Political legitimacy is generated out of the exile of moral innocence, out of hypocrisy, as Koselleck (1988 [1959]) argued for the private, secret masonic lodges. In Niklas Luhmann’s words, “The secret of alternative movements is that they cannot offer any alternatives” (1990: 141). In related manner, Luhmann argues that because critique, as a “reflexive method for formulating values and norms,” is fully institutionalized, terms such as “justice” and “truth” retain only symbolic functions (1982: 119). In that sense, the dichotomies that structure all social theory ensure the unity of allegedly rival approaches; transformation can only ensue by accounting for that unity.

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and future.29 Thinking Africa “otherwise” means making apparent the ways in which we discern historical significance in terms of dissonance between politics and morality, between theory and practice, between knowledge and human interests, between technology and humanity—in brief, in terms of ethical failures. And thinking Africa “otherwise” requires unhurried reflection about how to displace the very commitment to significance as “history.” Making the term “crisis,” as a blind spot, visible means asking questions about how we produce significance for ourselves—about how we produce “history.” One such question might be, what kind of narrative could be produced in which meaning is not everywhere a problem, in which the future is not a moral demand, and in which the problem is not attributing moral failure?30 This is the crucial question for “otherwise.”

29. I refer to the ethical dilemma noted by Redfield with regard to Médecins Sans Frontières, but the “moral demand for a difference” has been a subject of philosophical speculation and ethics since Kant. The literature is vast; see, for recent commentary, Critchley (2007). 30. In his reflective essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (1970 [1954]), James Dodd (2004: 19) notes similar questions, though with the aim, following Husserl, to show that science itself would not be possible without a human understanding of the world as a problem or experienced as a failure.

THREE

The Form of Crisis and the Affect of Modernization BRIAN LARKIN

A crisis is a moment of categorization, an appellation given to events in the world that combines, orders, and fixes those events into the bounded system that can be called “crisis.” Every crisis is thus a speech act, a performative event issued by those seeking to interrupt the raw flow of reality to impose distinctions. It is a conceptual technology, a means of categorizing, periodizing, and standardizing. It is reflexive, a way people frame and narrativize events in the world.

Crisis and Narrative Crisis is a concept deeply marked by narrativity, which encodes into its essence movement, fluidity, and change. This is because crisis follows the classic structure of narratology established by Vladimir Propp (1968), Tzvetan Todorov (1977), Gérard Genette (1983), and the Russian formalists: a state of equilibrium is defined in which everything is in balance, equilibrium is disrupted by an event or crisis, equilibrium is restored or altered, and a state of balance is once again achieved. According to Todorov, “Every narrative is movement between two states of equilibrium which are similar but not identical. At the beginning there is always a balanced situation . . . then something comes along to break the calm and creates imbalance” (1977: 88), before balance is restored. Crisis, similarly, is a moment of emergency—a point of extremity—that stands in contrast to the periods of stability that came before it and will succeed it and from which the crisis can be made visible as a crisis. “In times of crisis” is the saying we have that captures this segmentation, for the time of crisis supposes the existence of other, noncrisis ridden, temporal states. Narratology is famously structured on a split between events that

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take place in a sequential fashion (the story, or histoire) and the way in which those events are narrated (the plot or discourse). A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to the precise nature of this distinction and whether “real” events can ever exist outside of the process of their narration (Culler 1981). This is because, as film and media scholars have pointed out in detail, what audiences perceive as “real” or “true” only appears to be so because it conforms to aesthetic concepts of how events are narrated. Television news, newspapers, blog posts, and YouTube videos generate techniques (continuity editing, point-of-view shots, handheld camera movements, etc.) that audiences come to recognize as denoting truth according to various codes of realism (Ellis 1982). Hayden White (1987) extends this, arguing that historians are so accustomed to narrative as a formal device that they perceive reality through its structure. “Events only appear to us as real,” he argues, “when they are shown to display the formal coherency of a story” (4). The real only appears to be true “insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity” (6). Scholars of media have long recognized that news media explicitly mimic fictional techniques in order to shape real events within narrative. Thus, when we read about Ebola outbreaks in Liberia, war in the Sudan, or Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, these are events that erupt in the real but which we only encounter framed as narratives. In 1975, Edward Epstein cited NBC producer Reuven Frank, who argued that “every news story should . . . display the attributes of fiction, or drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising action and falling action, a beginning, a middle, and an end. These are not only the essentials of drama; they are the essentials of narrative” (Epstein 1973, cited in Langer 1977: 29; cf. Lewis, cited in Miller 2006). But narrative relies on certain structures. Stories move in one direction; they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They rest, as Victor Shklovsky (1965) points out, on a temporal-causal sequence: because of A, then B. When applied to real events, this imposes an ideological frame upon reality in which stories demand dominant characters who conform to preexisting roles, presume a movement toward balance and equilibrium rather than dwelling on unresolved structural conflicts, and presume causal relations between events that are chronologically ordered but not necessarily related. B may come after A but not because of A. This is why poststructuralists operating in an Althusserian vein saw narrative as deeply ideological, tending toward consensus and a masking of conflict that ultimately served the interests of the status quo. Many critics of narrative have attacked this normativity. Victor Shklovsky (1965), for instance, privileged narratives that “laid bare” the

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formal devices that created the illusion of truth and praised plots that deranged narrative structure and defamiliarized it, foregrounding the techniques that produced narrative causality (see also Jameson 1998).1 Attending to narrative as a formal structure helps us shift analysis away from the content of any particular crisis to the underlying structures by which the crisis is represented and understood. It emphasizes the relational aspect of crisis, its position in a relay that takes on meaning by virtue of its distinction from other segments. The structuring possibility of a crisis is that which came before it and that which comes after it so that the crisis can appear as a thing in the world.

Crisis and Time Because it is embedded in narrative, crisis is fundamentally a temporal category. This takes place in two ways. The first is structural. Narrative implies sequence: events and actions that proceed forward in time. As Mieke Bal argues, “The story [l’histoire] consists of the set of events in their chronological order. . . . The events have temporal relations with one another. Each one is either anterior to, simultaneous with or posterior to every other event” (cited in Culler 1981: 171). In this sense, a crisis always contains within it the past events (the equilibrium) from which it diverges and the future event that marks its resolution. We cannot think of the crisis in itself but as a fold, to stretch Deleuze’s (1991) concept, in the sense of the folding inside of the “forces of the outside.” The crisis cannot be seen as a monad but encodes within it previous histories and structures an implied sense of future. The second sense of time refers more to Reinhard Koselleck’s claim that in the modern era crisis marks time by denoting rupture and the turning of an epoch (see also Roitman 2014). For Koselleck, the time of crisis is an epochal shift from the time that preceded it, a “historically unique transition phase in that it indicates a critical transition period after which—if not everything, then much—will be different” (2006: 371). He argued that in the medieval period, the sense of time encoded in this idea of rupture was eschatological, organized around a concept of end time, whereas in the modern period, crisis indicates a historically immanent transitional phase. While I fully agree with Koselleck’s argument that crisis is relational, always

1. Janet Roitman (2014) makes a related argument that defining crisis as a form of deviance from a norm creates the analytic (and political) mistake of focusing attention on the causes of the crisis leaving the norm unexamined and taken for granted.

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folding in a state of equilibrium into a claim of its disruption, the claim that crisis marks an immanent transition between epochs is far harder to assess in practice than in theory. This is because what defines one stage versus another is mutable and contested and raises the issue of scale.

Crisis and Scale Crisis involves the historical problem of periodicity. There are many issues one could raise about this, but I wish to concentrate on two. If one conceives of crisis as a historical problem, the issue of scale immediately appears. What time frame does one construct for these periods? What duration is involved? For instance, José Maravall (1986), in his magisterial discussion of the baroque, describes this era as one of prolonged crisis. For him this was brought about by religious reform and counterreform movements, the consolidation of absolutist monarchies, economic insecurity, and the belief in a world where occult forces were running riot. Cumulatively, he argues, this produced a world marked by instability, constant change, and the fear of unknown forces behind that change out of which a pervasive sense of crisis emerged. But the baroque epoch he analyzes lasted for more than a hundred years. If we apply this scale to twentieth-century Nigeria, it covers the violent introduction of colonial rule, its end, the rise of nationalism, the Cold War emergence of dictators crushing the nationalist democracy, the imposition of structural adjustment programs, and the return of democracy. It involves the abjection of colonial conquest, the euphoria of independence, a civil war, ethnic conflict, coups, an oil boom, state-led nationalization projects, economic collapse, and neoliberal privatization. Scholars have variously described all these different events as “crises,” typically regarded as separable, discrete units. But thought of within the scale of one hundred years, they compose one crisis, one continual movement. The advantage of Maravall’s analytic scale is its dislodging of crisis from a reference to this economic recession or that political revolt and its inclusion of periods of economic boom and political stability, as well. Thought of in this way, crisis is what is produced by the change from one state to another. It is about movement and transition, the vertiginous disjunct that comes from comparison. It is an experience of transition, of fleetingness—a consciousness of instability. One needs a sense of possibility to understand a sense of abjection, the movement from what was to what is and from what once could have been to what now never can be. Recent African history is divided into periodizing chunks—the colonial

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or nationalist periods, the oil boom era, the time of military rule, the return of democracy. These divisions are motivated by political or economic changes, but they can promote a false sense of unity as if each period was strongly distinct from those preceding or following it. Maravall pushes us to examine the relations between these periods, to think on a broader scale and thus redefine our understanding of crisis. Expanding the time frame, like understanding the underlying formal structure of narrative, also raises the issue of categorization. Classification establishes the borders of normativity; it marks the distinction between what is included and what is excluded. Since Durkheim and Mauss (1963), anthropology has relentlessly examined the principles governing the ordering of people, events, and things into different kinds and groups. This ordering derives not just from qualities internal to objects themselves but externally from normative categorizations that have little to do with the phenomena at hand. A tragedy like the Nigerian civil war is an event in the world with its own realities that caused devastation for millions of people. But its categorization as a crisis is an intellectual act that tells us not just about the event but about the system of distinctions that makes the event appear. Did the crisis begin in 1967 with the declaration of secession by Biafra? Did it begin in 1960 with the establishment of an independent Nigerian state? Or did it begin with Hausa riots against Igbo in the 1950s? Recognizing the naming attribute of crisis—that it is a performative speech act—is not to dismiss the reality, severity, or material consequences for people undergoing crisis but to foreground the ways in which those realities are organized into a system. And that once assembled in this way, other actions can be performed (for more on this, see Roitman 2014). This is why crisis is always a reflexive act. The second advantage of shifting the scale within which we think of crisis is that it helps emphasize that for many social formations—and here I am thinking of urban Africa, but it is germane far more broadly—recent history has been one long, uninterrupted expansion in which moments of seeming stability are still part of broader undulations and should be recognized as such. This is why an understanding of narrativity is crucially important, as it reminds us that narrativization presumes an assumption of an equilibrium that is disrupted by an event that comes from without. As Toby Miller (2006) has argued, the idea of equilibrium in narrative has a consonance with classic theories of structural functionalism in that both assume a state in which opposing forces are in balance until something happens to throw them into crisis. The classic Africanist critique of structural-functionalism, however, long ago argued that African states were

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not in a state of static harmony but historically dynamic and that change was not something that arrived from outside as a “crisis” but was always integral to those societies themselves. The reality is that a period of equilibrium can be hard to distinguish, and in fact, the act of making the distinction needs to be “laid bare” as a categorical act. Take a city such as Kinshasa (formerly Léopoldville). Filip De Boeck (2004) tells us that its population in 1940 was forty thousand. At the end of the Second World War, it had doubled. By 1950 it had reached two hundred thousand, was more than four hundred thousand by independence, and had reached more than a million in the 1970s. Contemporary estimates place it at more than nine million. In that time, political order (chiefdoms, colonial rule, independence, nationalist democracies, postcolonial dictatorships, restoration of democracy) has been constantly in play, and economic life has constantly mutated with one economic system replacing another. To write of the crisis in Congo (be it the assassination of Lumumba, the imposition of Mobutu rule, its violent end, the challenges posed by civil wars) is to assume a period of stability against which crisis can be identified but stability, in fact, is constantly in process. If one reads texts on urban Africa from the 1950s, the 1970s, the 1990s, or 2011, there is invariably a rote statement that X city is undergoing rapid transformation. It is as if transformation is a unique event rather than the state of urban life that has persisted in some cities for more than a century. Any city that has moved from a population of forty thousand to more than nine million within sixty years is in a state of massive, uninterrupted change, and it is one of the lacunae of academic disciplines that few scholars engage with a scale of that length. Constant revolutionizing of production and uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions (to quote Marx and Engels) mean that periods of consensus and equilibrium are often hard to distinguish. Recognizing the constancy of transformation returns us to the illusory sense of stability, disruption, and resolution that narrative imposes on events. To delineate how partial this structure is, Hayden White (1987) compared the narrative ordering of historical events to the sequential structure of medieval chronicles. These chronicles simply listed events: in 712, there were floods everywhere; in 713, nothing was recorded; in 714, the mayor of the palace died; in 718, Charles destroyed the Saxon; and so on. White sees this as a nonnarrative history in which there is no explanation for relation between events besides sheer chronological progression. Bede dying, Charles fighting the Saracens, and a great profusion of crops are all events listed in separate years with no necessary relation to each other, no presumption that A gives rise to B. If one recognizes that urban Africa has

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been in a constant, unrelenting state of expansion, growth, and transformation, the idea of a series (as opposed to a narrative) offers a more fruitful way of thinking of temporal succession than the narrative ordering encoded into the concept of crisis. Why do I emphasize this? Because when I first went to do research in Nigeria, it was at the high point of the crisis brought about by structural adjustment. This was the crisis that consumed the thought of many scholars: Janet Roitman and Achille Mbembe’s (Mbembe and Roitman 1995; cf. Roitman 2011, 2014) “The Figure of the Subject in Times of Crisis” and James Ferguson’s (1999) Expectations of Modernity are just two works that—in different ways—were trying to explore the social subject produced by crisis. But nearly two decades later, Charles Piot’s (2010) Nostalgia for the Future was also structured by the concept of crisis, even though conditions in many parts of Africa, certainly many parts of West Africa, were better. And writing about two decades prior to Roitman and Mbembe and Ferguson, Michael Watts (1992) described the impact of oil capitalism on Nigeria in terms of crisis. Like the poor, crisis, it seems, is always with us. My argument is not that these authors have gotten it wrong; it is that they recognize experiences of dislocation but variably delineate the period and social forces that produce this dislocation. For Watts, the structuring cause of the crisis was the huge influx of oil monies, their fundamental reorganizing of agricultural economies, and the rapid urbanization and nationalist modernization they engendered that brought about massive social dislocation. Both Ferguson and Roitman and Mbembe identify the brutal effects of structural adjustment programs that ended nationalist development and devastated people’s economic existence as the motor of crisis. Watts’s oil boom forms the state of equilibrium against which Roitman and Mbembe, and Ferguson’s emergency is defined. Yet for Watts, this period was anything but an equilibrium; it was a period of roiling uncertainty and massive transformation—the “shock of modernity.” Watts’s shock, in turn, has to be defined vis-à-vis an earlier moment of stability—in his case, late-colonial and early-independence agricultural economies. This was the period of the end of the colonial rule and the vicissitudes of nationalism, which in Nigeria’s case meant a coup, the execution of civilian leaders, and descent into a bloody civil war—times of crisis if ever there were any for Nigeria. Piot’s concept of crisis, in turn, is defined by the end of the Cold War, the withdrawal of Soviet and American support that went along with that war, and the weakening of state sovereignty, which has given rise to new governmental actors from NGOs to religious movements. His concept of crisis depends on constructing the late years of postcolonial dictatorship

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(which are, of course, the years that Ferguson and Mbembe and Roitman examine) as the moment of equilibrium disrupted by emerging, new sovereignties. Each of these scholars ties crisis to a different period structured by its own political economy and social formation, but collectively, it seems, the crisis slides from one period to another, continuing unabated. Strictly speaking, the oil boom described by Watts and the return of democracy examined by Piot should constitute boundaries—limit points whereby the economic, political, and conceptual upheavals described by Roitman and Mbembe, and Ferguson can be identified, defined, and made conceivable. In practice, the drawing of these distinctions is hard to do. A Saussurean system of distinction rests on cleanly defined borders that separate each element in a syntagmatic chain of signifiers—each discrete within its own category, allowing for difference within the category but not between them. What happens when distinction atrophies and the stable elements wander? Koselleck wants the concept of crisis to mark an epochal shift between different eras, and each of these scholars attempts to do this, but in reality, defining those epochs is hard to do. Crisis is not any of the periods defined by Watts, Mbembe and Roitman, Ferguson, or Piot. It lies in their juxtaposition, the constant movement from one to the other, from which the cumulative experience of crisis emerges. The point of view of crisis I am putting forward is one that is cinematic in that it is composed of continual movement, unfolding over time. It is filmic because it stitches together series of events, each one discrete within itself, that combine to present a seamless movement. Crisis is about rising and falling, about stability and its sudden disappearance. Everything moves and is spun around. The famous Nigerian phrase “No condition is permanent” requires us to see beyond the moment of rupture from which “crisis” comes and toward what came before to see how that externality folds into the crisis itself. A crisis is a series of events in the world that gives rise to an affectual sense among participants and observers that things are not working as they should be, that they will not remain as they are, or that a future, once possible, is foreclosed. These events can be terrible for those involved, but naming them as a crisis is to place them within a narrative frame with its own affordances separate from those events themselves. Narrative brings with it its own histories and epistemological entailments—a presumption of stability, a delineation of scale, and thus of origin and motivating causes. To analyze crisis involves taking this reflexive account into our analysis of real-world events. It involves recognizing, naming, and formalizing a condition.

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The Affect of Modernization I want to finish these notes on crisis with some brief observations about modernization, particularly nationalist modernization, which constitutes the structuring outside against which the economic collapse and political disorder of structural adjustment was defined as a crisis. When I first began my research in Nigeria in the early 1990s, I was struck by the gap between how modernization was understood in my intellectual training and the very different depiction of that era in Nigeria. In my research on television—particularly the rise of City Television Kano (CTV) and the cadre of engineers, programmers, directors, and cameramen trained at that time—modernization represented a high point. Formed during the flush of oil monies to Nigeria, this was a period in which engineers and production personnel were sent abroad for training, when CTV bought the latest equipment, when production values were high, and when Nigerians in the television industry felt their work was filled with quality. Technical optimism drove an aesthetic project. CTV was a city-based, northern Nigerian station competing with the federal Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) channel. Whereas NTA made nationally oriented English-language media, CTV specialized in high-quality Hausa-language dramas they saw as absent from national television. They aimed their programming at engaging ordinary Hausa viewers and quickly became enormously popular. It was at once a cultural and political project. Speaking to directors, cameramen, and engineers trained at that time, it was hard not to admire the sense of purpose and ambition they had then. Not only were they working at the top of their professional capabilities (and allowed to operate on an equal level with fellow professionals from other parts of the world), but by doing so, they felt they were pushing their society forward. It was a time of potential, optimism, and belief, in which there was a consonance between individual ambition and a broader societal development. The funding of television stations came from the high modernization driven by oil money and was similar to the erection of factories, the laying of telephone lines, or the building of roads. These projects represented the apex of nationalist-led development and were part of a world where the prospect of incredible futures was realized in technologies and bureaucracies, the belief in the state as an engine of progress (see Larkin 2013), though this was also a period where massively corruption began to fatally wound that belief. Infrastructures were the promise a state made to its citizenry. In return for political support, the state claimed to provide citizens with the infrastructural path to the future. Modernization has too

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often been analyzed as a political or economic doctrine, a false theory of history rather than a form of congealed desire. It is easy to point out its failures and the corruption inherent in its operation, but to move to this critique too quickly is to miss out on the affectual, fantastic side of modernization. Bridges, factories, and television stations are as much objects of fantasy and imagination as are forms of fashion, literature, and film. Bureaucracy tends to be represented in the West as stultifying and boring, but in modernizing Africa, bureaucrats were self-confident, powerful subjects, dressing well and sensual and achieving power through education, knowledge of foreign languages, and mastery of the modern world of documents and files. One cannot understand the desire for emulation represented in something like J. Clyde Mitchell’s (1956) discussion of the Kalela Dance—where manual laborers dressed as white-collar bureaucrats, excitement surrounded the figure of the government worker in early Nigerian novels (such as Obi Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s [1962] No Longer at Ease), or 1960s subjects posed for portraits at the photographic studio of Seydou Keita—unless one understands bureaucracy as an aesthetic project as well as a Weberian system of routinization. James Ferguson argued that “the modernization narrative was always a myth, an illusion, often even a lie” (1999: 253) as well as a set of structural forces and that it is through both illusions and structures that people were interpellated and formed as social subjects. As Walter Benjamin (1999) argues, modernization projects represented the fantasy energy that entered into and held sway over the imagination in ways that were powerfully attractive in a newly independent nation. The building of the Abeokuta Steel Mill in Nigeria—one of the most expensive infrastructural projects (and failures) in Nigeria, which opened in 1983—is nothing if not an aesthetic form that tells us as much about the melodrama of Nigerian politics as it does about production and economics. All over the world, highway projects, corporate headquarters, the laying of fiber-optic cable networks, and so on occupy that messy conceptual boundary where the economic and rational meet the symbolic and fantastic. By the time I was conducting my research, however, if those same directors wished to shoot a program, they had to tape over a program they had made previously, as the station could not afford blank tapes. The equipment, bought then, had not been replaced—only repaired with varying degrees of success. Their salaries had barely risen in the decade since the end of the oil boom, and their once-well-paying jobs now barely allowed them to get by. With the devaluation of the naira, they were impoverished, working illegally on CTV time to try to supplement a meager salary that now

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was not enough to support their families. They did not narrate this through a concept of crisis but through the experience of suffering. “We are suffering” was a common phrase. To focus on crisis as a formal narrative category can run the risk of delegitimizing the experience of suffering (and of crisis) that actors in situations of extremity feel, and that is the reason I would not want to do away with the category altogether. But this experience is precisely relational. Modernization existed as a pleasurable memory whose warm glow suffused contemporary existence and thus opened up spaces of critique and dissent. The affectual memory of modernization was a form of nostalgia with political effects. It did not contribute to the crisis by representing its outside, the external equilibrium against which the crisis can be identified. Rather, it was folded into the crisis itself, constituting it by contributing to the unceasing experience of inconstancy, movement, and transitoriness—the sense that everything changes, rises, or declines.

Inquiring into a crisis involves not just identifying events in the world but also laying bare the categories that are mobilized to define a state of emergency. This involves recognizing crisis as a narratological category that is temporally organized and presupposes a division of history into separable epochs. Reinhard Koselleck, in his exploration of crisis as a concept, argued that crisis represented an immanent transitional phase in that it marks the shift from one epoch to another. In this sense, crisis is always about the future, as the identification of the present event presupposes its future resolution. The time of crisis supposes a time that is not. Crisis is “a single concept limited to the present with which to capture a new era” (Koselleck 2006: 372). A narrative analysis insists that our understanding of the future is embedded in the present. But the problem persists, as I have tried to show, that it is not so easy to define the epoch that is giving way for the new epoch to arise. Crises come thick and fast, piling on top of and tumbling over one another and making the distinctions among what is stable, what is disrupted, and what is resolved uneasy deliberations. There is no way out of this except to make clear the boundaries of the concept when we use it and to be cognizant of the historicity we are evoking when we use the term. The danger is that Africanists invoke crises that, when contrasted with one another, become logically contradictory, as each scholar necessarily invokes a time of equilibrium that another scholar sees as crisis-ridden. This is partly because people tend of think of history as marked by periods of order broken by episodes of disruption (White would argue that this is exactly the imposi-

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tion of narrative form on reality), when in reality, the depth of transformation in the last hundred years—particularly in urban areas—has been intense and unabated. And historians would seek to insist that this dynamism is not a feature of the arrival of Europeans but was an internal feature of African societies. Paying attention to the temporal frame of crisis and its categorization allows us to move beyond the specificities associated with each particular state of emergency and lay bare its structural coordinates.

FOUR

The Productivity of Crisis: Aid, Time, and Medicine in Mozambique R A M A H M C K AY

“Xiiiii!” Susana exclaimed as we chatted in her neatly swept yard. “Malawi was not like this!” I was listening as she and her mother compared the NGO programs being implemented in her neighborhood in Morrumbala, a rural town in central Mozambique, with those they recalled in Malawi, where they had lived as refugees a decade earlier. At the time of our conversation, Susana was reaching the conclusion of a six-month food support program sponsored by the Global Children’s Fund (GCF).1 The program provided monthly packets of rice, oil, beans, sugar, and soap. Yet, as specified by organizational and national guidelines, recipients were limited to no more than six months of support. Underscoring the temporary nature of this assistance, GCF staff delivered the food baskets each month together with a countdown: “Remember, you have three months . . . two months . . . one month left.” If the food basket was conceived of as a discrete and time-limited intervention, however, GCF’s presence in Susana’s life was more diffuse. When Susana and her parents had lived in Malawi in the 1980s and early 1990s, they had received assistance with food, housing, and clothing from transnational agencies, including GCF. Decades later, they once again received assistance from the same agencies, yet the support was short term and delivered to patients at moments of physical crisis. Those around them were expected to float on Mozambique’s rising economic tide. In a context of sharply increasing economic disparity, memories of Malawi evoked a form of assistance more temporally and socially inclusive than the aid Susana currently received. In this chapter, I take Susana’s experiences as a means of asking about 1. I have used pseudonyms for all organizations and individuals named here.

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the material and temporal effects of humanitarian medicine. Despite their decades-long presence in the district and in Susana’s life, GCF and other transnational organizations frequently described their interventions as temporary stops on the hopeful road to “a more prosperous Mozambique” (USAID 2009). Not only were food baskets presented as time-limited, but so was GFC’s tenure in Morrumbala, the institution insisted. Whether in formal policies or informal discourses, GCF staff made frequent mention of the limited nature of their intervention; “we won’t be here forever,” they often noted. Just as the food program assumed that patients, once given six months to recuperate, would return to independent livelihoods, so GCF discourses evoked a future without NGOs.2 Yet alongside discourses of future humanitarian evaporation, GCF engagements with recipients were frequently accretive and temporally dense. In this context, I ask how Susana and her family navigated between the historical durability of interventions in Morrumbala, the short-term horizons of aid in the present, and the future absences they invoked. How were the material and temporal effects of these interventions inhabited? What forms of duration and what contested futures emerged from these humanitarian, material, and temporal engagements? Insisting on the transience of their efforts, GCF was not so different from many humanitarian and global health actors (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010; Lakoff 2010). As scholars have shown, a focus on the urgencies of the present has been characteristic of transnational medical and humanitarian projects around the globe (Cohen 2012). This “evacuation” (Guyer 2010) of longer-term concerns with care both responds to the cyclical temporalities of aid funding cycles and makes possible strategies of moral and political disentanglement for organizations that aim to “leave a light footprint” (Redfield 2013). Analyses of humanitarian action more generally have also emphasized how notions of emergency and crisis response facilitate shortterm temporalities in ways that ignore accretive or longer-term needs, conditions, demands, or projects (Calhoun 2010). In this work of temporal evacuation, “emergency” and “crisis” are key words (1985). As others in this volume have noted, significations of African “crises,” like the narratives that surrounded GCF interventions, entail claims to and about historical 2. These discourses (e.g., USAID 2009–14) often point to Mozambique’s high rates of economic growth over the 2000s as the mechanism by which the need for nongovernmental aid will be obviated (for a more general example of these assumptions, see Sachs 2005). Critics, however, have observed that income inequality in Mozambique has kept pace with economic growth and that economic benefits have not been widely shared; approximately 60 percent of Mozambicans are considered to be living in absolute poverty (Hanlon and Smart 2008).

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time. Roitman, for instance, shows that “for ethnographers today, and especially for those doing research in Africa, crisis is a means to account for the emergent . . . the place from which one claims access to and knowledge of history” (chapter 2). Larkin suggests that crisis is a temporal category, one that “encodes into its essence movement” yet also raises historical predicaments of scale, periodicity, and duration (chapter 3). In Morrumbala, narratives of “life in crisis,” in Peter Redfield’s terms (2013), were central to the humanitarian appeals and actions that underpinned GCF engagements in Morrumbala. They authorized nongovernmental action and justified the acute temporalities that accompanied it, even as they directed attention away from the seemingly “perennial” nature of these interventions (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010: 16). Yet if the temporal contradictions entailed by these interventions aimed, as I will suggest, at a work of political disentanglement, they were also ambiguously productive, as the material resources of intervention gave rise to futures beyond humanitarian temporalities.

Humanitarian Histories I first met Susana during the course of fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2008 in which I accompanied the professional relations, livelihood practices, and forms of value that emerged around the material resources of global health in Mozambique. In Morrumbala, much of my research focused on programs implemented by GCF, a European development organization that had worked in Morrumbala District for more than thirty years. My fieldwork explored how staff, volunteers, and recipients navigated these processes in diverse institutional and social sites. Given the ways in which development settings can constrain and determine (or overdetermine) ethnographic possibilities, I engaged both GCF staff and recipients outside of organizational encounters in a variety of social settings. I spent time with patients, volunteers, and staff outside of GCF offices, at GCF community meetings and food distribution events, since it allowed for conversations and relationships that were not entirely determined by organizational priorities and that made clear my status as a student and researcher rather than a GCF employee.3 In Mozambique, GCF is just one instantiation of global health investment, the scale of which has grown dramatically over the last decade 3. Through these activities, I met Susana and her family, whom I came to know particularly well, since they also assisted with my language instruction in ChiSena. This facilitated my research but also offered me an opportunity to contribute to Susana’s household at a moment when they needed assistance.

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(Jones 2009). At the time of my research, GCF was principally concerned with providing home- and community-based health care, food aid, and livelihood support through its global health initiatives. Together with other transnational “partners,” GCF also provided clinical assistance, medical supplies, and infrastructural support to the local district hospital. Constituting more than 50 percent of Mozambique’s national health budget (Jones 2009; Oomman, Bernstein, and Rosenzweig 2007), these organizations have significantly shaped the forms of support and care available to Morrumbala residents, giving rise to what has been elsewhere described as a “projectified landscape” of care (Whyte et al. 2013). Although Mozambique has received considerable foreign aid since war relief and reconstruction agencies entered the country in the 1980s (Hanlon 2000), transnational organizations have not always played such a central role in Mozambican medicine. In fact, the scale of nongovernmental intervention in health has risen substantially since the country’s independence from Portugal in 1975. In the immediate postindependence period, the socialist Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) government focused public health efforts on state-run primary care (Cliff 1993). By 1977, however, fighting was beginning between FRELIMO and the Resistencia Nacional de Moçambique (RENAMO), an opposition movement fostered by apartheid South Africa and then-Rhodesia, as well as by the anticommunist efforts of the United States (Hall and Young 1997). Fighting was particularly pronounced in rural zones in the center and north of the country, including Zambézia province. In 1986, Morrumbala, located in Zambézia, became one of few urban areas to be occupied and controlled by RENAMO forces (Hall and Young 1997) and became known as a site of particular violence (Finnegan 1992; Nordstrom 1997). By the end of the decade, more than 60 percent of district residents had relocated to refugee camps across the Malawian border, and much of the town’s governmental infrastructure had been destroyed. The physical destruction of health infrastructure throughout the 1980s was compounded by structural adjustment policies, which eroded funding for the public health system (Chapman 2010; Cliff and Noormahomed 1988). This physical and financial dismantling of public services, however, also opened new spaces for nongovernmental intervention. By the time peace accords were signed in 1992, transnational organizations had become central to the provision of health and social services in Mozambique (Hanlon 2000). Such interventions had diverse and sometimes disabling effects. On the one hand, organizations like GCF participated in the postwar reconstruction of public systems; among GCF’s first activities, for

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instance, were efforts to rebuild public schools and health posts and to construct and staff the district’s first social services office (now administered by the Government of Mozambique’s Ministry for Women and Social Action). At the same time, however, they developed “para-infrastructures” (Biehl 2013; Biehl and McKay 2012) of their own in ways that undermined public services and enhanced social inequality (Pfeiffer 2004). In this way, many NGOs contributed directly or indirectly to the very conditions they aimed to ameliorate. The ambivalent effects of nongovernmental medicine were becoming evident by the early 2000s as organizations like GCF took on new roles, extending care for AIDS patients across urban and rural spaces. In Mozambique, as in many parts of Africa (e.g., Hardon and Dilger 2011; Nguyen 2010; Whyte et al. 2013), new global health entities mobilized clinical, pharmaceutical, and community interventions that dramatically changed the institutional and therapeutic landscape of medicine. Supported by new transnational funding structures and institutions, including alliances between pharmaceutical companies, activists, NGOs, and states, these new global health and AIDS initiatives not only made therapies affordable and available but also inscribed new roles for transnational and nongovernmental entities at the heart of public health services. In the process, new medical protocols, accounting practices, techniques of financial and governmental audit, and political and diagnostic technologies were woven into governmental practice (Hardon and Dilger 2011). Not only did nongovernmental entities take on a newly enhanced role in facilitating and providing treatment, but in many places, government practice became increasingly oriented toward managing nongovernmental funds and interventions (Pfeiffer 2013). In Mozambique, the political and medical effects of AIDS interventions were catalyzed by the 2004 decision to make no-cost AIDS treatments available in the public health sector. At GCF, AIDS programming had been implemented as early as 2002, emphasizing palliative care, but the organization soon moved toward supporting patients in treatment. Both palliative and therapeutic programs, however, relied on “partnership” with “local communities.” GCF health programs, for instance, used community volunteers to identify and recruit potential patients for HIV testing and treatment, to accompany them to the hospital, to conduct visits with patients in their homes, and to assist with the management of the food program. The mediation of humanitarian intervention by community relations was evident in Susana’s experience. A little less than a year before I met her, she had returned to Morrumbala after many years of living in Mocuba,

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a larger town in the center of the province. Soon after her return, she had been approached by a neighbor who was a friend of her sister’s and a volunteer for the GCF; he had also seen that she was ill and encouraged her to get tested for HIV. When she tested positive and began treatment at the public hospital, he advocated for her inclusion in the GCF food program. In this way, Susana’s experience exemplified the goals of GCF’s community health initiative, through which neighborhood volunteers were trained to conduct outreach and provide support for district residents who had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and select other chronic diseases. Through commonly deployed developmental and governmental technologies, from community mapping projects to the identification of community leaders, these practices posited “communities” as politically homogeneous and ontologically prior to GCF’s presence in the district—as discrete entities that could be mapped, organized, mobilized, and intervened upon rather than as complex political and social relations in the making. Similar community interventions have been central features of Mozambique’s postwar processes of democratization and neoliberal restructuring in domains as diverse as law, justice, and the environment (Buur and Kyed 2005; Lunstrum 2007; Obarrio 2010). As has been described in accounts of development elsewhere, here too NGOs’ tactics of legibility entailed simplifications—for instance, as diverse social relations became discrete and bounded “communities” in ways that facilitated ongoing GCF intervention (Li 2007; Scott 1999). Moreover, by relying on community structures to manage and implement key portions of their program, organizations like GCF engaged political technologies of community mobilization resonant with colonial and socialist political projects (Gonçalves 2006; Kyed 2007; Obarrio 2010).4 Thus if GCF’s community health programs were in some ways new in the mid-2000s, many GCF staff and recipients understood them within a historical framework that included colonial and postcolonial political technologies as well as long-familiar nongovernmental actors.

Humanitarian Futures When Susana reflected that “Malawi was not like this,” she suggested that things didn’t have to be this way. After all, she had positive recollections of the aid she had received from GCF in the past and the forms of social4. As Gonçalves (2013) has noted, control of timing and the construction of provisionality through timing is a key site in which political power unfolds.

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ity they had enabled. Yet Susana’s concern with GCF’s long engagement in Morrumbala was not matched by a similar attention to history on the part of the organization. Despite their decades-long presence in Morrumbala, GCF’s training practices, documents, and everyday discourses presented their interventions as temporary and always at risk of ending. “We are not the government,” GCF staff members frequently reminded recipients. “We’re just a program that will end one day.” For Susana, however, this emphasis on temporally bounded care was perplexingly insufficient. Despite her relatively small household, the food that Susana received was not sufficient to last through the month; it frequently lasted little more than a week. Had her children been enrolled in a program for orphans and vulnerable children, Susana sometimes mused, they would have been able to stretch this support further. In the meantime, Susana relied on meals shared with her sister’s family, who lived nearby, and on vegetables that she and her mother cultivated in a small plot (or machamba) a few kilometers outside town. Structured as a response to acute medical crisis, the food program was oriented toward a short-term horizon aimed at a return to “normalcy.” In these ways, GCF understandings of their intervention map neatly onto notions of crisis described elsewhere in this volume (Roitman, chapter 2). Patients were seen as rooted in farming livelihoods and localized relations and, simultaneously, as situated on an upward trajectory of national economic development oriented toward a prosperous future. For Susana, however, neither farming nor future could be taken for granted. She had rarely relied on farming in the past, whether in Malawi or in Mozambique, and ongoing health problems made such work painful and difficult; it was only through her elderly mother’s motivation and expertise that she coaxed vegetables, maize, and sorghum from her small plot. While GCF imagined that “community” ties would support patients who were “back on their feet,” for Susana, food aid was a key means by which she was able to cultivate and foster such relations, allowing her to share with her sister and mother rather than simply rely on their support. GCF policies thus rendered, to paraphrase Tania Li (2007), a set of medical predicaments that patients like Susana experienced as not only immunological and metabolic but also social, familial, and economic.

Temporal Borderlands That the emergency logics of GCF’s policies and programs are caught up in complex temporal and social fields is not surprising. Across a variety of

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domains, anthropologists have shown how the legitimacy of nongovernmental interventions often rests on claims to temporariness, even when they extend over the long term (Pandolfi 2010: 154; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010: 10, 16). Describing humanitarian interventions in Uganda, for instance, Peter Redfield has shown how the “geographic and temporal borderland of crisis,” and the uncertainties and instabilities it provokes, can be the ground in which humanitarian actors define their fields of action, determine the scope of their interventions, and evaluate and adjudicate between lives accorded differential value and worth (2010: 174; see also Fassin 2007). Whether in offhand comments, the monthly countdown, or optimistic imaginings of what the long-term future might bring, GCF discourses and policies performed a work of temporal disentanglement, articulating a future without NGOs, even as NGO practices were deeply entwined into local governmental practice. Such articulations were not unique to GCF; analyses of neoliberal policy making and development regimes across Africa have shown how global institutions position themselves as distinct from national governments and economies, even as global norms, practices, and actors are increasingly built into practices of governance (e.g., Mosse 2005). In Morrumbala, narratives of the temporary and exceptional quality of international intervention worked to disentangle interventions from social and historical claims made upon them. Yet while GCF portrayed itself as mobile and time limited, the organization’s historical presence, the deployment of longstanding governmental technologies of community, and the long experience of some GCF workers and recipients with transnational aid lent durability to their endeavors. Invoking the endurance of interventions, residents like Susana not only reembedded GCF practices in a shared history but also articulated a future of social and institutional connection. In her discussion of punctuated time, anthropologist Jane Guyer describes the bifurcation of “an instantaneous present and an altogether different distant future” (2010: 417); global health interventions, marked by the six discrete months of food support rather than unfolding future possibilities for care, are in many ways characterized by such “punctuated” rather than “enduring” temporalities (Cohen 2012).5 Yet as Guyer notes, futures are “still—and newly—inhabited” amid the punctuated temporalities of the present moment (2010: 410). In Morrumbala, figurations of the AIDS crisis mobilized material resources neither disarticulated from nor 5. Thanks to Carlo Caduff for highlighting the relevance of Cohen 2012 to this example.

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wholly determined by nongovernmental intervention. Situated in relation to past interventions and shaped by long-running technologies of development yet oriented toward futures that seem ever more restrictive, the policies and materials of medical aid were governed by a crisis temporality that simplified the historical continuities underpinning GCF’s presence in the district. Yet as Susana sought, and sometimes achieved, access to the dynamic but enduring programs that GCF and other organizations sponsored in her town, she also mobilized, to disparate ends, the material resources that they made available. Whether sharing food or collaborating in market endeavors, Susana and her family engaged in relations of care and sociality that both corresponded to and diverged from the imaginings of community, family, and temporality inscribed in GCF policies. When Susana sent food to her sister’s house or sold it as she had done in the past, she engaged her GCF food basket in relation to multiple temporalities and gendered socialities well beyond the biophysical logics of bodily recuperation or governmental ties of spatialized communities. Emphasizing the endurance rather than the exceptionality of nongovernmental programs, residents like Susana laid claim not only to GCF benefits but also to intermediate futures, incrementally assembled from diverse social and material resources, between the urgent humanitarian horizon and the hope of prosperity yet to come.

FIVE

Money in the Future of Africans JANE I. GUYER

Introduction: Against the Bracketing of Money from Our Theories The depiction of Africa’s economies as “in crisis” has lasted several decades, and indeed the title of Nicholas van de Walle’s (2001) analysis of the structural adjustment period from 1979 to 1999 is titled African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis. The etymology of the word “crisis” refers to a turning point—originally, in the course of a disease. In society and the economy, which rarely literally “die,” an enduring condition can install itself, and it appears to be this intervening condition—alive but unwell and in continuing danger of deeper collapse—that has justified stretching the literal meaning of crisis beyond its original temporality of the “turning point.” Use of the term “crisis,” then, demands empirical identification of critical features. Is “crisis,” in this long temporal frame, seen as being made up of a continual and widespread proliferation of small moments when lives hover on the brink of new directions, or is it an interpretation of the systemic precariousness of specified structural conditions? Van de Walle’s “permanent crisis” in Africa is clearly in the second camp, as I will explore. But behind it, there is a version of the first: in his own case, poverty. Poverty itself can also be understood in two ways: first, as a question of the level and structure of income quintiles and wealth profiles; and secondly, it has always also carried an implication of precarity from moment to moment. The relationship between existential precarity, moment to moment, and the long processes of a “structure in crisis” is a question for the empirical study of exactly how the effects of an improbable structural condition are generated, perpetuated, and inserted into ongoing life. The diagnosis of

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longevity then opens up a wide and long force field that demands empirical study. Another long temporality has been put into the debate on African economic futures, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. This version is clearly structural and places the bounds of the force field much wider than Africa itself. The claim is increasingly being made that capitalism itself is in crisis—that is, at a fundamental turning point in its history that can transform it. Samir Amin (2011), for example, has named his recent book The Crisis: Exit from the Crisis of Capitalism or Exit from Capitalism in Crisis.1 Regionally specific crises, in the first sense, then become entailments of long, and geographically and politically generalized, historical processes. This chapter focuses on one condition that all parties take to be intrinsic to the African crisis—and, for some, necessary to its resolution—at all levels, from structures to lives, namely, the exchange value of national currencies since the abandonment of the Bretton Woods currency conventions in the 1970s. The theoretical selectivity of empirical focus has varied in its attentiveness to money, but in general, currency devaluation and volatility have been quite widely neglected in the study of experiential crises, in part because, for structuralists, devaluation and submission to market dynamics have seemed necessary for the solution of the perceived crisis. I divide this chapter into two sections: first, and more briefly, an exploration of the analytics of the longevity of “crisis” with respect to African economies, and second, an analysis of money value fluctuations as relatively powerful in generating many varied crises and turning points in shorter time frames and in the experiential register. The actual practices of the money markets, like any market, have created lurches that were unpredictable to at least some participants. Even at its inception, one of the great advocates of markets, Milton Friedman (1987), noted regretfully that exchange rates were subject to micropolitical pressures and diplomatic policy interventions beyond classic market processes. Paul Krugman (1992)—in his book Currencies and Crises, which was written as the EU was beginning to move toward a currency union—is skeptical about unification, based on the challenging practical politics of integration. Wherever the theoretical and political framing places its boundaries, there can be no escaping the fact that this is a market deeply shaped by political, diplomatic, and institutional factors. Untangling these processes will be crucial to tracing the relationship between crisis seen as a structural 1. This is my own translation of the title from its original French to preserve the iteration of the concept of “crisis” that has been cut down from three to one in the English.

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condition and crises as experienced in precarious lives. The first step is to give the whole question of exchange rates a higher profile in the empirical descriptions and future projections made about African crises (always in the plural and writ small as well as large).

Permanent Crisis and the Crisis of Capitalism We have become familiar with a journalists’ version of African crises as consisting of widespread and frequent violence, poverty, and other human disasters. The serious intellectual version of the “permanent crisis,” however, is not this. In van de Walle’s analysis, “permanent crisis” is the condition whereby “the political exigencies of patrimonial regimes are incompatible with economic growth” (2001: 272). The growth of cities, according to his analysis, might eventually “provide economies of scale that nurture a capitalist class” (2001: 272), although “massive corruption,” deriving from clientelism, would be a danger because of the use of new resources to consolidate elites. The “permanent” nature of the crisis is then a political-structural failure of achieving what is defined as economic growth in a world where other regions are moving up growth measures (2001: 5). Van de Walle’s focus on the national state means that two frames of reference are downplayed. The poor conditions of life for the population figure primarily as the result of the failure of national economic growth, so little attention is given to the turbulence in their living conditions except to note that reform itself is an uncertain process. Van de Walle places the uncertainty, however, squarely in the domain of the state, where it opens up spaces for the kind of maneuvering that he calls corruption. Given the political focus, there is no extended analysis of the content of economic reforms that follows their actual trajectories closely enough to perceive and assess the small multiplicities of uncertainty for the populations. Crisis remains this large, persistent, and singular condition: a point of suspension rather than turning. The other frame that is held out of the picture in this account of the fate of structural adjustment is the international political frame, as distinct from the policies of reform that were mandated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Early in the text, van de Walle notes that the 1990s held promise because “several civil wars had ended” (2001: 4) and the IMF had issued a report titled “Africa: Is This the Turning Point?” (Fischer, Hernández-Catá, and Khan 1998). What is hardly alluded to here is that these “civil wars” were deeply tied to the international dynamics of the Cold War, which would then place the bounds for tracing out the longevity

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of “crisis” far wider, and further back in time, than the current incumbents of national elites. Indeed, some elites came to power under Cold War conditions, which would logically encourage them to grasp the changed circumstances of the post-1989 era in order to preserve their position. Hence there may be “corruption” on all sides, as old international alliances and business connections are preserved. Samir Amin (2011) and Immanuel Wallerstein et al. (2013) create exactly this wider framing while also identifying long and persistent economic crises. For them, however, it is capitalism itself that is moving into a period of crisis very similar, according to Amin, to the one at the end of the nineteenth century that promoted colonial domination. As Marx had predicted, national industrial capital was producing declining profits, oligopolies were in crisis, and the response was to make new inroads into the global economy by dispossession—that is, in the twenty-first-century version: through extractive industries, land acquisition from the peasantry, and new forms of labor control. He predicts that violence and disorder will result. Colonial regimes controlled these results by military domination. The current oligarchies control them through “the control of technologies, financial resources, access to the planet’s natural resources, information and communications, and weapons of mass destruction” (Amin 2011: 6). He speculates about the coming clashes that might really be the “crisis as turning point,” with characteristic emphasis on the mobilization of the people as the vector to producing transformation. Wallerstein et al. (2013) vary in their diagnoses, although the idea of an inevitably gathering crisis permeates their text Does Capitalism Have a Future? They expect a structural crisis, which—for them—may take the form of one or several of the following: “terminal crisis of capitalism as a world system; decline of the older capitalist hegemons and their replacement by new ones; and global ecological shock, with resulting transformations yet to be envisioned” (2013: 178). One cannot help noting the assumption that, by contrast with Amin, any order will have “hegemons.” One also holds in mind the other proclaimed revolution—namely, the rapidly moving technological revolution whereby the capacity to generate and manipulate “big data” is linked directly to the capacity to “grow the economy,” largely through financial mechanisms. Numerous projects declare their aim of conquering the “digital divide” with respect to Africa. As far as I know, however, the three notions of long-term crisis—the political crisis of African growth, the global crisis of capitalism, and the technological crisis of the digital divide—have not been systematically overlaid. So in my own analysis here, I move away from the assumption of the longevity

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of “crisis” as a singular, structural condition, either a regional or a worldhistoric transformation, in order to pause over whatever the “present” is, to see what may eventually be traced out as entailments of the components of these and other conditions that happen in the intimacy and causal trajectories of African populations’ daily lives: daily lives that surely will inform any of the movements on which Amin focuses his hope for a different future.

Exchange Rates: The Macrodynamics of Hard and Soft Currencies “Hard” is a designation given to currencies that retain their value over time and, as a result, become the preferred vehicle for the function of “store of value.” “Soft” currencies are those currencies whose values fluctuate over time, which then function mainly as a medium of exchange (Guyer 2012). Systematic devaluations of African currencies, relative to the hard currencies of the world system, were consequent on structural adjustment. Predictably, this put long-term commitments under stress at the national level because debts would need to be paid in devalued currency, and future commitments—for example, in terms of long-term contracts for foreign companies—would have to be estimated under uncertainty. Nigeria, for example, created an official exchange rate in 1985 to deal with these problems, which it kept in place until 2004 primarily for debt repayment. This deviated further and further from the market rate, which led to the creation of a parallel market and many points of arbitrage between the two exchange rates. Between 1996 and 1999, mainly the years under Abacha’s military presidency (1993–1998), a US dollar at the official rate reached a high of about four times the value, in Nigerian naira (₦), of its exchange rate on the parallel market. So those with access to the official auctions were effectively printing naira: buying dollars at twenty-two naira and using them—whether openly or through channels—at more than eighty naira. The very long-term devaluation of African currencies, which results from policy interventions, shows dramatic patterns. The Nigerian naira2 was of a higher value than the dollar when inaugurated in 1972. This barely changed until the mid-1980s. Between 1985, when the official market was installed, and 1995, the parallel rate went from near parity to almost ₦72 to the dollar. By 2011, the exchange rate was around ₦150 to 2. The annual exchange rate is tabulated on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Nigerian_Naira#Exchange_rate_history. Consulted December 10, 2013.

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the dollar, having fallen in lurches, interspersed by short periods of relative stability, or having both risen and fallen within short time frames. The value fell very particularly in the period after the official rate was abolished and the two rates started to converge. The devaluation pattern of the Ghanaian cedi was even more dramatic,3 falling from close to parity with the dollar in 1970 to ten thousand cedi to the dollar in 2006. In the ten years of maximal structural adjustment intervention, from 1985 to 1995, it fell from fifty cedi to the dollar to one thousand cedi to the dollar. Zaire under Mobutu and Zimbabwe, in the first decade of this century, literally and officially “printed money,” although it was to pay government costs, including military salaries, rather than for private profit. One result was rapid national inflation and eventual hyperinflation (in the case of Zimbabwe). Private use of foreign currencies within Africa is likely to remain opaque. The term “private sector” is ambiguous on this point. A recent thesis by Boris Samuel (2013) argues that under these conditions, “investment” itself was very inaccurately measured and reported in national accounts. Due to the devotion of aid to paying parts of the government’s bill (see also van de Walle), it was not possible to distinguish clearly between aid and investment. The situation will become even more opaque if the kinds of “barter” deals that have developed recently in the oil sector become more generalized. In this case, even tracking the dynamics to which van de Walle drew attention at the turn of this century may become practically off-limits as a basis for probing further the relationship between structural—that is, enduring architectural—pillars of the international monetary system, the monetary commitments of the large players (states and corporations), and the money management practices of the African people whose currency is necessarily linked. Even if it becomes very difficult to document in detail, however, this indeterminacy and political maneuvering around the value of ordinary Africans’ daily money in the era of globalized markets, in multiple currencies, must figure prominently in any understanding of their present and future as producers and consumers. Scholars cannot give up simply because obscurity and opacity make research difficult. In extractive economies, national income is largely generated in dollars, and in a globalized consumer economy, much of what people buy originates in, or passes through, hardcurrency processes. So from an anthropological and people’s perspective, there can be no understanding of the political-economic position of Afri3. The annual exchange rate is tabulated on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ghanaian_cedi#Exchange_rate_history. Consulted December 10, 2013.

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can countries or their people without tracing out these major effects and the consequent microdynamics of the money they live with for all the classic monetary functions: reserve savings, exchange, payment, and accounting. Whether or not money prices are a “neutral veil” with respect to comparative value in markets for domestically produced and importexport commodities, as was anticipated by early market theorists, has to be a conclusion of research and not an assumption from the outset. As noted, even Friedman was skeptical that international exchange rates could be free from political manipulation. Bracking’s (2009) important empirical study of international financial institutions as “predators,” relative to the organization of capital flight out of Africa, needs to be followed up by studies of the interface, within Africa, between currencies of varying provenance and hard or soft capacities. In a globalized world economy, where the United States complains about exchange rate manipulation by China, it is striking how entire books by economists are written on trade with the poorer countries of the world (such as Stiglitz and Charlton 2003), on poverty (such as Banerjee and Duflo 2012), and on the future of Africa in particular (such as Collier 2007), with very parsimonious reference to money, exchange rates, and their mediation by all parties. It may be helpful to focus, as do Banerjee and Duflo, on the many “small changes [that] can have big effects,” but at some point, one needs to take in the macroeconomic policies and conditions about which they note, “we may not have much to say” (2012: 272). In 2010, I attended a conference on African poverty with many economists, where I, an anthropologist, was the only person to mention capital flight or exchange rates. I am not sure why. In his book on the international trade in commodities, Peter Robbins (2003) discusses the very important effects devaluation had on stimulating demand for tropical products, which, he argues, then contributed to their overproduction and subsequent price collapse. Producers’ incomes are deeply affected by both processes. Devaluation may raise the volume of products available to put onto the market, but then overproduction cuts the price, and the combined effect probably comes close to a wash in terms of cash income and may be deeply negative with respect to returns to labor (incomes). In the hard-currency formal sectors of African economies, presumably any relevant factor for exchange rate fluctuation and longer-term change is written into contracts and agreements. If these are considered proprietary information, we may not have access to their terms. The people’s strategies and national monetary policies for currencies, by contrast, would be fairly open to research if they were studied systematically. Clearly they have

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their own complex mediation strategies, from the dispersal of members and the organization of remittances in family strategies to informal, but institutionalized, methods of doing business. These latter methods include promissory-note systems for importing used vehicles across national borders (Beuving 2004), regular mediations at border markets (Bolt 2012), and parallel money exchanges known by such names as “Wall Street” (as in Kinshasa). There is literature on these practices, but the emphasis here is on the ingenuity of business practice itself rather than on the exchange rates, their movements, and people’s imaginations about the worth of the monies available to them. Yet a great deal, from national income to the daily lives of Africans, is deeply affected by the relative values produced in these complexes and patterns of change—steady, incremental, or turbulent. With respect to “futures,” are exchange rates treated as if they are predictable, and by whom? They affect the prices of imported consumer goods, national income from exports, travel and earning power in the migrant economy, pilgrimage in the religious economy, and the cost of arms in the military economy. A recent issue of Politique Africaine (2011) is devoted to the macroeconomy par le bas, by which the editors, Béatrice Hibou and Boris Samuel, mean the sites of “the banal practices,” power and social struggle, multiple dynamics, “multiple compromises,” and according to an interview with Morten Jerven, “contradictory figures” (that is, numbers) in the official records. This is what in English slang would be called “getting into the weeds”—that is, getting into all the microecologies of crops other than the main crop of the field, even those that might enable some crops to thrive while others inconspicuously fade and die. Mamdani (2012) has recently confirmed the failure of democratic access to transparency that Abrams (1977) famously noted about Britain thirtyfive years ago. He emphasizes politically democratic processes in the contexts of finance and currency unions. But what about the currencies? One can, in fact, find something about the historical pattern of change of the Ugandan shilling (USh). As the country has opened itself to major hardcurrency investment in the oil and land sectors, its currency has fallen from about USh 1,700 to the dollar in January 2008 to USh 2,400 to the dollar in January 2012. This might be good for stimulating the volume of exports that are “cheap” in dollar terms, but only straightforwardly—that is, if such exports were being produced by the Ugandan citizens and thereby directly affecting their incomes. It would be profitable for one-off sales of goods for hard currencies, but for assets that are the means of production for the future, like land, the sale may be disastrous. Large devaluations can

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be negative in several domains: they raise the consumer prices of imported goods, they are bad for areas of market competition over resource acquisition between businesses denominated in shillings and parties working in dollars, and they are very problematic for their promotion of the alienation of productive assets to hard-currency holders. We might then ask further how exactly the hard and soft currencies and hard and soft sectors relate to each other over a whole range of products, resources, and living situations. The approach of Hibou and Samuel (2012) sets up the vast empirical challenge of addressing the “macro” by being attentive to even the smallest arenas of financial life “from below.” One can start by depicting the changes in African exchange rates in the short period since the 2008 financial crisis.

Frequent Lurches and Proliferating Conditions African Exchange Rates: 2012 as a Percentage of 2008 (Calculated from OANDA) The general direction of the exchange rate value of African currencies since the financial crisis of 2008 has been down, although the losses have varied: from less than a 20 percent drop to the very particularly low level of a 47 percent drop (Ethiopia). The currencies that are linked, very importantly, to valuable mineral resources such as diamonds and gold, or are pegged to the euro, may have declined less than others, but the pattern is not consistent. We might understand this shared pattern as a structural implication of the particular articulation of hard and soft currencies in the financial era. If we want to focus on existential economic crises, then it is not only the overall pattern but also the internal fluctuations that should be opened up for study. These soft currencies have had moments of relative stability and then sudden downward—and very occasionally upward—lurches. For example, the exchange rate of the Botswanan pula (P) went from P 5.95 to the dollar in 2008 to P 7.54 in 2009, then very slowly climbed back to P 6.48, then P 6.43, before plunging back down to P 7.36 in 2012. The Namibian dollar (N$) looks to be among the most stable if the two boundary years are directly compared. But in fact, it fell from N$6.73 to the US dollar to N$9.39, then recovered to N$7.12, then N$6.16, and down slightly to N$6.80. By the end of 2013, it had plunged again to N$10.3 (OANDA, December 10, 2013). The South African rand has also fluctuated, whereas some currencies—such as the Ethiopian birrh and the Tanzanian shilling— have notched downward on a fairly regular rhythm. It is important to note

72 / Chapter Five Table 1. African exchange rates calculated on the US dollar: 2012 as a percentage of 2008 Angolan kwanza Botswanan pula Burundian franc CFA BCEAO CFA BEAC Ethiopian birr Gambian dalasi Ghanaian cedi Guinean franc Kenyan Shilling Lesotho loti Liberian dollar Malawian kwacha Mozambican metical Namibian dollar Nigerian naira Rwandan franc Sao Toméan/Principean dobra Somali shilling Sierra Leonean leone South African rand Sudanese pound Tanzanian shilling Ugandan shilling Zambian kwacha Zimbabwean dollar

0.79 0.81 0.86 0.89 0.94 0.53 0.80 0.56 0.58 0.75 0.84 0.84 0.85 0.88 0.99 0.72 0.90 0.75 0.86 0.69 0.88 0.74 0.73 0.69 0.74

Source: OANDA, “Historical Exchange Rates,” http://www .oanda.com/currency/historical-rates. Consulted July 26, 2012; comparison of January 2008 with January 2012.

that the CFA franc has remained more stable (see Table 1), since it is tied to the euro, so it may be that people are triangulating several intersecting currency dynamics within their region of economic operation. We know of the mobility of people within the continent, so they are crossing from one currency regime to another and probably juggling many calculations in the process (Bolt 2012). We have to probe, then, how unpredictable fluctuations in the value of national currencies in the expanding regional, continental, and global markets could produce multiple and sudden, small and widespread crises with respect to planning for futures. The Exchange Rate and the People Everything produced or owned in Africa, and denominated in local currencies, has become less expensive for dollar holders and more expensive

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for local-currency holders. Obviously, this encourages migration and arbitrage of all kinds. At the same time, as Moyo (2009) suggests, various aid budgets, religious investments, and the expansion of extractive industries all put more hard currency into direct circulation in Africa. The historic “overvaluation” of Africa’s currencies was diagnosed and combatted in 1980 at the dawn of structural adjustment. Then it was argued to favor imports and elites, whose riches in domestic currencies could buy plenty of hard currency for shopping trips to Europe, while discouraging demand for African-made goods on international markets. Now the elites do not need to bother with domestic currencies at all, and even when they do “shop at home,” the exchange rate allows the dollars and euros they control to buy more local goods cheaply than they used to do. African currencies themselves have differentially devalued, leading to cross-border effects of their own. For example, in the midst of the overall devaluation, Piot reports (via personal communication) that exchange rates affected the migrant farm labor from northern Togo, traveling to the farms of Ghana and Nigeria. Nigerian currency fell against their own BCEAO franc (Banque Centrale des Etats de l’Afrique de l’Ouest franc, which is pegged to the euro) by only about 15 percent (2008–12), whereas the cedi fell by about 50 percent. Unless a rise in the Ghanaian wages makes up the difference, the regional distribution of migrant farm labor will clearly favor Nigeria. There is one more element here: the Beninois farm laborers in western Nigeria are often paid in kind, with a motorcycle. The preferred brand is Bajaj, made in India. The naira has remained fairly steady against the rupee, whereas the cedi has fallen, so even a motorcycle from the south-south trade is more affordable in naira than cedis. So if nominal wages remain steady, workers would do much better to earn naira than cedis, even if they were paid in kind. The Togolese migrant workers make the same calculations with respect to payment in kind (Piot, personal communication). The purchasing power of formal-sector wages for nationals is similarly affected by the exchange rate. Nigeria’s minimum wage for formal-sector work, especially at the lowest level of government employment, was the same nominal rate for ten years (2001–11), at ₦7,500 per month. In 2008, this wage purchased US$64.66 worth of goods (like refined petrol at the pump) and 484.68 denominated in yuan. In 2012, this wage purchased only $46.88 worth (72 percent of what it bought in dollar-goods four years earlier) and 297.6 in yuan (64 percent of what it bought in yuan-goods four years earlier). One need hardly speculate on the implications for incentives to parallel employment and petty corruption. Steadily falling real wages have been a cause of labor disputes and nationwide demonstrations

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over the prices of necessities (Guyer and Denzer 2012). If inflation were equally applicable to all prices, including domestic production and employment, then its effect on the producers, who are also consumers, would be balanced out. But it is likely that price volatility is more so due to the cost of imports, which is affected by the new configuration of monies in the world, and the exchange rates of hard and soft currencies. These are all complex and multiple effects but not unyielding to an attempt to trace out logics and then look into the actualities. The sense of new and unconsolidated futures, even if not always felt as dauntingly dangerous, is palpable. I walked through the textile and automobile spare parts markets of Ibadan, Nigeria, seeing a lot of goods from the Indian sub-continent and China. I visited the parallel money changers mediating a deal with Chinese rug suppliers. I have read Meagher’s (2010) book on the eastern Nigerian production of garments and shoes for sale across the West African coast and Beuving’s (2004) work on the secondhand vehicle trade from Cotonou, Benin, to Nigeria. I have listened to research papers by Bolt (2012), Bakary (2012), Titeca (2012), and Lamarque (2012) on the cross-border mediators of currency exchange (in some places by the army) and read work by Ugor (2013) on artisanal oil refining in eastern Nigeria, and in fieldwork, I worried about the rising cost of corrugated iron roofing sheets for rural farmers. In many of these situations, crisis appears as a moment of lapse in coordination: where the circulation of physical cash, when needed, and the predictability of the cash price for inputs, wages, transport costs, and market goods do not come together on the right calendars and rhythmics of life—at least not without strong interventions within local arenas, associations, and collectivities of all kinds. The following is a mundane example of new coordinations and their disruption from a rural economy in the food-supply hinterland of Lagos. Improvements in transport and the relative stability of petrol prices (under state control) allowed farming to expand into more perishable commodities. Anything fresh is heavy and expensive to transport, and watermelons must be among the most problematic of such goods. And yet a sudden moment opened up in which it became highly profitable for farmers to devote large areas to watermelon. This lasted only a couple of years before, suddenly, rising petrol prices and a new gap between input prices (seeds, labor, fertilizer, transport) and sale prices crashed the market midseason, and the young farmers who had specialized in this crop moved into crisis circumstances, unable to pay their workers. Spirals of problems ensued, although they were mainly tractable through local institutions. But the experience has dislodged an optimistic view of the future horizon with respect to cer-

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tain innovations in cash cropping. At one level, this is the ordinary risk of a competitive market, but prices are particularly unstable in a soft-money economy, which intensifies the effect of competition and may considerably shorten the future in which producers have confidence. In all these dense ecologies where “exchange value” is created minute to minute, one can see why “money as a veil” might be a convenient theoretical assumption, since it allows for (huge and unwarranted) simplification. The vectors and actors are many and changing, and the logics of the combined effects on distribution and ordinary livelihoods, as distinct from overall aggregate GDP, are turbulent at best and dismal at worst—except perhaps for niches that we have yet to identify. But it is an abdication of research responsibility to focus only on the models and not on empirical realities. “Money is a veil” is itself a veil to the understanding of straightforward intelligibility in life. For the moment, there is no sign of transparent governing mediation from above to produce predictability in the currency exchange markets. This is a “market”: “failed” or “as usual” (Mamdani 2012). But one can search for those who are taking advantage of it or simply finding means of constant adjustment. The African traders based in China? The textile merchants buying in Pakistan? The long-established money changers as they try to stay ahead of determined competition from the formal-sector banks? We have small investors in the United States who play the fluctuations on the money markets. Are there counterparts in Africa? We need to draw aside the veil and see money for what it still is: a commodity whose value rises and falls in what Mamdani has critiqued Stiglitz for calling “failed markets” and what he sees as markets-as-usual. And alongside such focused work on established, popular money earning and money management in a multiple-currency world, the rapidly expanding innovations in mobile money demand a wave of the kind of attention that Bill Maurer’s Institute for Money and Financial Inclusion is giving to the “payment space.” The ways in which exchange rate dynamics work in this space may well be the new parallel system: not “formal” as distinct from “informal” but “formal” as it burgeons out into popular use, precisely in the niches where something already seems to be happening, like in cross-border trade and far-flung diasporas. Whether, and how, crises and futures in the exchange rate system, on a macro scale, relate to these proliferating small crises of local coordination, some of which collapse into disaster while others define tractable opportunities, is a question for research.

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Conclusion Exchange rates are not everything, but they are something. Collier may have a point that “sudden extra money, whether from export booms or aid, detracts from the hard choices involved in reform” (2007: 116). But it matters deeply that all such booms bring in money in hard currencies, not local currencies, whether in China or Nigeria. Their translation into the economic lives of the people does not pass through a veil. It is mediated by the politics of the wage, the price of local consumer goods, and the exchange rate. There are clearly imaginable scenarios that could lead straight into crises here. However, the brunt of crisis damage will be felt differently in different areas by different groups and in different domains of society and the economy. The economic future is not likely to be one big crisis or an openended, permanent state of incoherence but rather a heterogeneous mélange of opportunities and crises, each one of them “big” for those directly involved. So one analytical and political commitment will be to take each crisis seriously, studying it as a result of intersections of large and small forces, and attending to the experiences of the people living in and through it and trying to be as inventive about recovery as African populations have been in the past.

SIX

Forensics of Capital MICHAEL RALPH

The taxi lets me off at the corner, near the US embassy in Dakar. I weave between the bunkers in search of Lieutenant Colonel Matthew V. Sousa, chief of the office of Security Cooperation for the US Army (though his official designation said US Cavalry). I knew that Sousa was largely responsible for shepherding the agenda of US Africa Command (AFRICOM). Sousa’s office is nestled deep in a web of ramshackle buildings. From the exterior, it is not clear which ones are inhabited, or by whom. A few minutes shy of my appointment time, I slip off my backpack and empty my pockets. An overzealous civil servant hurries me along. Yet there are a few people ahead of me in line, so even after I comply with the specified protocols, my eyes have time to graze the notices affixed to  the wall. I read about a Black History Month essay competition. (I hadn’t realized this was even a holiday in Senegal.) I also see a memo notifying Senegalese people that they are not authorized to join the US military. (What made them think they could?) I come across a plaque paying tribute to the employee of the month. (No wonder he is so eager.) Just then, a towering, broad-shouldered figure strides into the room from an adjoining staircase to the left. He scans the room for “Dr. Michael Ralph.” I raise my hand cautiously. He nods. He moves forward, apologizing for the Senegalese officer who is now eyeing my cell phone suspiciously. Just as he instructs me to turn it off, Sousa slides it out of his hand, giving it back to me. “Ça va,” says the lieutenant colonel casually. Sousa leads me up several flights of stairs, toward an office that sits apart from a common area that is cluttered with desks and nameless people busy at work behind stacks of papers and Post-its in every conceivable size, shape, and color. Sousa begins quizzing me before he even makes it to his seat.

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“Do you speak Wolof?” “Yes.” “And French?” “Oui.” “And . . . you teach at NYU?” “Yes. In the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.” “But your degree is in—” “Anthropology” “From—” “The University of Chicago” Sousa strips off his cap and slides into his seat, satisfied. He asks what he can do to help me. I am interested in the role that Senegal plays as a leader of economic and political reform in Africa. I am also interested in what Sousa makes of diplomatic ties between the United States and Senegal. But my interview happens to fall on the sixteenth day of the January 25 uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. I am suddenly eager to know how the lieutenant colonel understands this protest movement in the broader context of African politics. His terse response catches me off guard. “It’s exciting.” My ears perk up. I wonder if Sousa thinks it would be “exciting” to see mass demonstrations continue to spread across Africa and southwest Asia. I wonder if he thinks it would be “exciting” to witness an uprising in Dakar, as was the wish of many participants to the World Social Forum (WSF), then being held across town. Thus far, there hadn’t been much insurgency except for student protests against the brand new chancellor of the Université de Cheikh Anta Diop. He was altogether unaccommodating, leading organizers of the 2011 WSF to host most sessions in tents on the campus lawn. But then, this season of Arab revolt, which was also a season of African revolt, had caught the global left by surprise. It felt like there were more panels about third world debt crisis and climate change than any other topic. And yet the momentum sweeping across Africa and southwest Asia had finally infused the proceedings. The day before, as I was headed to the US embassy for my interview, a friend told me about a protest scheduled to take place at the Egyptian embassy in Dakar later that afternoon. Meanwhile, I am trying to make the most of my time with Sousa, knowing there are pressing matters elsewhere. In response to a pointed question about AFRICOM, Sousa insists that it is principally concerned with providing a service to Africa—with helping

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Africans cultivate a more intimate knowledge of security, as “security is crucial for economic development.” According to Corporal Steve Denning,1 the United States’ role is to provide “training” in techniques of security: the idea being that African militaries trained by the United States, Britain, and France would be better positioned to foster economic and political stability in their home countries. In this theory of diplomacy, democratic nations with the most powerful militaries are best equipped to provide this form of tutelage. In line with this argument, US, British, and French military officers and diplomats alike insist that Senegal tops the list of Africa’s most democratic nations, one of the few countries where, in the words of one US embassy official, “civilians control the military rather than the other way around.” In his view, this was what made Senegal unlike most other African countries. In the words of General Richard Tompkins,2 “Senegal’s military operations are more sophisticated than most other countries in Africa because the officers are well-educated,” though Corporal Denning put the matter more crudely: “In some of these countries, officers have essentially proven themselves through leadership in the bush.” Fishing for a better way to convey the context of civil strife in sub-Saharan Africa, he cleans it up: “in the field.” Then Denning continues, “As a result, they may know how to fight, but they don’t know military strategy or appreciate what’s at stake in the concept of security.” As examples, he cites Guinea-Conkary, Mali, and Cote d’Ivoire—all former members of Afrique Occidentale Français [the French colonial empire in West Africa]—as sites where such training has made a significant impact. In the view of the military officers and embassy officials I interview, Senegal, better than any other former French colony, appreciates the relationship between security and economic development. As far as Sousa is concerned, “former British colonies like Uganda” have an even more profound appreciation for the relationship between this distinct notion of security and economic growth. It is an odd comparison. Of course, George W. Bush routinely commended Uganda for the instrumental role it played in what he had dubbed “the global war on terror.” Still, President Yoweri Museveni has been criticized for all kinds of political malfeasance. A widely cited 2011 report by the US Social Science Research Council cited the Ugandan military for numerous atrocities and incidents of improper conduct. And the fact that Museveni came to power through a military coup means this tradition of 1. This pseudonym is used to protect the privacy and safety of an interviewee. 2. This pseudonym is used to protect the privacy and safety of an interviewee.

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fostering “civilian control” over the state military apparatus is more complicated and contradictory than US military personnel and embassy officials were suggesting. Sousa seems distracted during our meeting. And as we part, his face seems resolute, pensive. “Let’s just say, there’s a lot going on” are his parting words and partial explanation. In the aftermath of my interview, I move quickly from the US embassy to the Egyptian embassy in Dakar, where many protestors have just arrived from the World Social Forum. A few short hours later, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak finally cedes power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in Egypt as protests give way to celebration and celebrations bleed into strategy sessions concerned with developing a more comprehensive critique of Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade. Visiting the US embassy in Dakar during the height of the “Arab Spring” would later feel like foreshadowing. Exactly one week after my interview with Sousa, a Senegalese veteran, still dressed in his military uniform, set himself on fire in front of the presidential palace. The timing is impossible to overlook, since the formal debut of the “Arab Spring” is often linked to Tunisian shopkeeper Mohammed Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation to protest political corruption and economic stagnation.3 In 2008, a veteran named Keba Diop likewise set himself on fire in front of the presidential palace, claiming the government had defaulted on promised payments. Political scientists and specialists of international relations often rely on normative guidelines for democratic governance when assessing the political stakes in a given nation. Anthropologists, by contrast, focus attention on the rituals, practices, and characteristics that define social life. But both approaches are undermined by the assumption that objective circumstances provide an accurate portrait of governance in a given place. How do the perspectives of privileged actors shape the way we view social dynamics? To what extent is the diplomatic standing of a given polity shaped by factors beyond that country’s control? And what might taking these dynamics more seriously mean for the study of politics? The favorable standing of people and polities is often understood to derive from whether they adhere to well-established laws. But there is a problem with this approach. Frequently, the evidence we use to assess so-

3. From a different vantage, one could argue the “Arab Spring” began as early as November 2010, amid protests in western Sahara, concerning a Moroccan occupation construed by many residents as unlawful.

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cial standing is unreliable. The forensic profile of a country often has more to do with subjective assessments than objective criteria. The concept of forensics is usually deployed in relation to policing, marking the protocols used to adjudicate the social standing of someone who is allegedly responsible for a crime or a civil infraction. But the tendency to privilege specific kinds of evidence and to use that evidence as the basis for moral judgments is likewise used to evaluate the diplomatic standing of a given country. Whether these methods of profiling are reliable is the issue I want to pursue by recourse to the phrase “forensics of capital.”4

The privileged standing that Senegal has been assigned by influential nations like the United States shapes the way that Senegalese military personnel see their country—at least from the perspective of Colonel Birame Diop, whose military assignments require him to engage with these dynamics on a routine basis. Colonel Diop joined the Senegalese Armed Forces as a high school (or lycée) student in the national military academy. But Diop was unsuccessful in his initial attempt at the entrance exam. It was only after a protracted student strike—and the state’s subsequent decision to break the strike by terminating students—that Diop earned a spot on the sparse roll. He went on to a distinguished career as a fighter pilot. He received training at the hands of Egyptian and Moroccan military officials. Through these accomplishments, Diop rose to the rank of colonel. He now spends a great deal of time working closely with the British, French, and most notably US militaries, consulting with officers from these disparate locales during their visits to Dakar as well as traveling abroad to participate in and host seminars. Soon after returning to the United States from my visit to the US embassy in Dakar, I meet up with Diop, who is in New York on his way to Washington, DC, for a seminar. We had initially planned to meet near

4. William Pietz coined the phrase “forensics of capital” as one way to promote a “forensic method of social inquiry into the concrete historical processes of monetized valuation” in a 2002 article titled “Material Considerations: On the Historical Forensics of Contract,” published in Theory, Culture, and Society. Here I build on Pietz’s interest in establishing the social and economic consequences of an ostensibly scientific inquiry. Yet I want to foreground the role that a broad range of scientific judgments plays in adjudicating the moral standing of persons and polities. In this way, I emphasize the forensic calculus that shapes the distribution of capital in a more sustained manner than does Pietz.

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my New York University office in downtown Manhattan. But Diop calls on the day of our appointment to confess that he doesn’t know New York geography as well as he had presumed. He is visiting friends and family in Harlem’s burgeoning Senegalese community and is wondering if we can convene uptown instead. I agree and join him at the designated location, a coffee shop near 125th Street. There I encounter the towering figure of the colonel, outfitted in a well-tailored, navy-blue business suit. We exchange pleasantries in Wolof and sit across from each other at a table in the corner. Intrigued by the way US embassy officials and military officers characterize the Senegalese military, I am keen to ask him about his homeland’s prominent role in international peacekeeping missions. Without a moment’s hesitation, Diop fires back a response so detailed that I wonder if it has been rehearsed: “There are several stages in what we might call ‘the peace process.’ Peacekeeping is but one of them. And, in fact, you can’t always move right to peacekeeping.” If there is no peace, then we deploy strategies for peace building. Once we have established protocols for peace, we can reinforce them through measures of accountability, through peace making and peace enforcement. Once we have built peace, we can turn our attention to maintaining peace, or what you are calling “peacekeeping.” Sketching this model for achieving and securing peace on a scrap piece of paper, Diop carefully details his framework for establishing what professional political scientists call the “democratic peace” while speaking in the first person as if reflecting on the countless peacekeeping missions in which he has participated. Diop visits the United States each year as part of a fellowship program that offers a few representatives from nations across the African continent the chance to receive instruction from senior US military officials. Diop, who has participated in these initiatives for more than a decade, is now tasked with hosting seminars for neophytes. Until about a decade ago, the task of managing the US military presence in Africa was largely in the hands of the US Middle East Central Command (CENTCOM). But with the formation of AFRICOM in 2003, the United States officially established a military presence on the African continent. Though Stuttgart, Germany, is the site of AFRICOM’s official headquarters, its prominent location in Dakar has led critics to ask if this initiative constitutes a new imperialism, as I note to Diop. I point out that critics have inquired about recent trips by US presidents to the African continent, especially to oil-rich nations like Ghana and Nigeria. Some observers, I remind Diop, are concerned that these developments might be part of an effort

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Figure 1. Diagram I later constructed from Diop’s sketch on a Starbucks napkin

to court—to extract—precious resources under the cover of diplomatic aid and effort to promote fair trade. To my surprise, the colonel does not dismiss these critiques. In fact, he insists that economic and geopolitical interests can never be ruled out entirely. In partial appreciation for the critics I cite, he offers a powerful, if enigmatic, observation: “I tell my students that nothing ever goes away—it only changes form. Before, the US and USSR had a Cold War. Now, the US has a Cold War with China.” Presumably in this new “Cold War,” the United States and the Republic of China are each vying for influence with wealthy and influential nations of the world as well as trying to curry favor with the resource-rich, numerically significant countries of the Global South. Perhaps they are, like the Cold War of old, pursuing military advantage through proxy armies and striving to engage protocols for international governance on their own terms, with their own interests in mind. At the very least, I found this analogy intriguing because even in the ostensibly neutral realm of print journalism, the United States and China are frequently construed as two emergent axes of security and economic development.

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Consider the August 8, 2012, New York Times article chronicling US investment in Africa. Centering on then US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, the feature notes that her visit is accompanied by representatives from Boeing, Wal-Mart, FedEx, and General Electric—companies that are striving to cultivate a much more substantial presence in Africa. Noting that more than six hundred US firms have already become involved with commerce on the continent, the New York Times remarks that “China” actually “anticipated” a commercial boom in Africa “long ago.” From a podium in Dakar, Senegal, Clinton emphasizes that the United States has deliberately pursued a more judicious path. “The days of having outsiders come and extract the wealth of Africa for themselves, leaving nothing or very little behind, should be over in the twenty-first century,” Clinton declares emphatically in a comment that the New York Times notes was “widely interpreted as a swipe at China” (Polgreen 2012). Meanwhile, if the United States has lagged behind China in commercial ventures, it reigns supreme in the context of security, or “security training,” in the deliberate language of US military personnel and embassy officials. In addition to the Office of Security Cooperation, through which AFRICOM administers training in security, the US Central Intelligence Agency has partnered with the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia to establish detention sites in Mogadishu, Somalia, for interrogating suspected terrorists (Scahill 2011). The Pentagon has a base at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, which sits on the Gulf of Aden across the Red Sea corridor from Yemen. The Department of Defense has personnel stationed in “US embassies across Africa, including 21 individual offices of Security Cooperation responsible for facilitating military to military activities with ‘partner nations.’” (Turse 2012). But the relationship between militarism and economic development to which Diop, Denning, Sousa, Tompkins, and countless others refer is more intriguing still. If Senegal’s distinguished military experts and battalion commanders are trained by the combined efforts of British, French, and most notably US officers, many of the African nations that have been construed as “rogue” or “terrorist watch list” states have been reared in this other axis. Isaias Aferwerki, the president of Eritrea, received extensive military training in China that he would later use to help his nation wage a successful liberation struggle against Ethiopia. Eritrea, a territory that Italy acquired in 1882, was sacked by the British during World War II as part of an Allied campaign targeting the fascist regime. Eritrea then became a British mandate—that is, a quasi-sovereign territory dubbed incapable of fully governing itself in the League of Nations international treaty regime—until

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1951, when it became part of a joint federation with Ethiopia. But having forged a distinct political identity during the course of some seven decades, the inhabitants of Eritrea were reluctant to concede autonomy. The ensuing decades witnessed a bitter liberation struggle that reached a formal resolution when Eritrea was recognized as a sovereign republic by the United Nations in 1993. Yet Eritrea has generally scoffed at protocols established by international governing agencies like the United Nations and international lending agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, widely understood to establish the parameters for economic and political legitimacy—the modes of state comportment that count as good governance. Thus, within two decades of formal independence, Eritrea has been dubbed a “rogue state” for rejecting UN recommendations and pronouncements. It has earned a place on the US Department of Homeland Security’s terrorist watch list for allegedly supporting Islamic “terrorists” like Al Shabab, accused of fostering chronic political instability in Somalia. Meanwhile, Eritrea has pursued a vision of economic growth that conflicts with prevailing notions of good governance, even though it has proven to be especially lucrative. The Eritrean economy is focused on mining and the extraction of resources as a way to strengthen its economy, with a particular emphasis on gold reserves. Economic experts, especially those working for international governing and lending agencies, routinely condemn this approach to market growth, as do leaders of economic and political reform in Africa. Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, for instance, has insisted in numerous international fora that African nations ought to center their plans for growth on monetary policy and structural adjustment loans. Yet despite enacting a rogue development plan, the highly esteemed Economist Intelligence Unit predicted in late 2010 that Eritrea was the fastest growing economy in the world. One year later, Eritrea was ninth among all countries in the world in raw economic output as measured by real Gross Domestic Product. In this regard, the case of Eritrea exemplifies a stark contrast with Senegal. Still, it is crucial to grapple with, rather than to take for granted, what a particular economic course and genre of militarism means for a country’s diplomatic standing. Part of what accounts for the differential standing of Senegal and Eritrea involves the distinct economic trajectory each country has pursued. Part of what differentiates them has to do with military operations. While the Eritrean military is allegedly in league with terrorists, Senegal’s active military—via a long-standing tradition of UN peacekeeping missions—contributes to the idea that it is a democratic leader.

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Far from merely building on its distinct history of colonial militarism, Senegal’s reputation as a military with a commitment to fostering political legitimacy has to do with the unique mode of statecraft it cultivated in the immediate aftermath of independence and with the pragmatic strategies it has pursued ever since. If Senegal is but one of several former colonies whose soldiers earned privileged standing in an emergent sphere of international diplomacy through colonial conscription, this nation has used military service to build and broker esteem in diplomatic fora in novel ways since achieving independence in 1960. Since the advent of UN peacekeeping missions, Senegal has arguably deployed more troops than any other nation relative to its size—including the United States.

During its first official peacekeeping mission, Senegal was still part of the Mali Federation, together with the former colony of French Sudan. The Mali Federation deployed troops to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960 in the aftermath of a coup d’état that saw Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba kidnapped and then executed by the general of his standing army. A local merchant turned charismatic leader, Lumumba’s political aspirations dovetailed with the Pan-African sensibility that Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania advocated. Lumumba used his inaugural address to register a critique of the historic violence of the Belgian colony and to articulate a new economic and political destiny. But the prime minister’s fiery speech isolated his own president, who was more ambivalent concerning Belgium-Congo relations. Lumumba’s address likewise offended the Belgian king who had attended the ceremony. He also raised the ire of powerful economic and political interests who were keeping tabs on these developments. There is now consensus among historians that the US Central Intelligence Agency colluded with the Belgian government and the Congolese military in the precocious leader’s ouster from power and his assassination a short time later. The Congo is a fascinating place from which to track the relationship between domestic political organization and diplomatic standing, since, as early as 1876, Belgian King Leopold II had explained away his imperial ambitions as a modest effort “to open to civilization the only part of our globe where it has yet to penetrate, to pierce the darkness which envelops whole populations” (Gott 2002) though the Congo Free State would ultimately gain notoriety for the countless laborers who suffered amputations for the smallest of infractions. The Mali Federation authorized peacekeeping forces to the Congo on July 14, 1960, after having been freed from

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colonial rule four months prior. At that juncture, the Congo had only been independent for two months. On August 2, 1960, the first troop disbursement left Dakar after preparing two weeks for one of “the very first uses of the ‘blue helmets’ symbolizing UN forces” (Dietzman 2003: 35), though it is perhaps important to note that France helped outfit the Mali Federation forces—to ensure that they were “equipped to the nines with every necessary piece of equipment” (73). The Mali Federation lasted two more years, at which time Senegal continued to participate in peacekeeping missions. Mali’s military would likewise be active during the decades to come but would be plagued by military coups that undermined the prospect of democratic governance. Meanwhile, consensus would build that Senegal constituted one of the few countries in Africa where civilians control the military rather than the other way around. Given their shared genealogy, it is striking that Senegal is heralded as a democratic leader whose military helps spread democratic governance, while Mali is characterized as a nation whose military has fostered corruption. In other words, to the story of the tirailleurs who were conscripted from across the territories and fought valiantly for France needs to be added the story of the postcolonial reconstitution of the Senegalese military as a peacekeeping entity. This perspective is pervasive in military discourse on the Senegalese military, which routinely projects assessments of Senegalese character backward into a moment when Senegal was not yet an independent nation-state. In discussing the Mali Federation’s 1960 UN effort in the Congo, US Air Force captain Roy Dietzman writes, “The mission of the deployed battalion was to restore peace in the former Belgian colony of the Congo which had been thrown into chaos with their new-found independence” (35). But note that Dietzman’s 2003 study is subtitled “A Review of Senegalese Peacekeeping Missions” (my emphasis). Whether the 1960 UN mission is construed as part of the history of Senegal or Mali, here, makes all the difference. Dietzman refers to troops from the Mali Federation as a “Senegalese contingent” and frequently refers to the “Senegalese Armed Forces” (SAF) as the subject of his forty-two-year history, effectively excising its inception as part of the Mali Federation. In Dietzman’s view, Senegalese soldiers operate with “exacting effectiveness” (50). He characterizes their investment in peacekeeping as “the outward manifestation of a constant will of Senegalese diplomacy to hold a particular position of high regard in the world, and particularly in Africa.” It is tempting to read these developments against the surge in independence among nations of Africa that defined the 1960s. But scholars have

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argued convincingly that the 1940s set in motion the chain of events that translated into sovereignty for many African nations in the 1960s (Cooper 2002). As such, we should consider the dynamics that defined postindependence Senegal to be in concert with the broader context of World War II and the birth of the United Nations as a crucial actor in an emergent framework for international governance. During this period, the mandate for international governing entities and international lending agencies to promote peace and preserve democracy cohered into a shared structure of liability involving newfangled regimes of credit debt and militarism that are too often taken for granted. In the aftermath of World War II, US presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and, later, Harry S. Truman took advantage of the fact that diplomatic and commercial heavyweights like Britain and France were financially drained to leverage the United States’ own position. The US government helped establish international lending and governing agencies, which created elaborate protocols to evaluate whether nations maintained favorable standing in an increasingly expansive diplomatic community. The US government oversaw a shift in sovereign finance where the US dollar became the basis of international currency markets. The Marshall Plan would fund and foster efforts to rebuild Europe. Meanwhile, the United States brokered an end to military conflict, adopting an aggressive agenda for peace. As the first part of the twentieth century had witnessed “more warfare, of greater destructive intensity, than at any other time in world history” (Kelly and Kaplan 2003: 135), the United States self-consciously promoted the idea of “democratic peace”5 as the default template of international relations. This principle was subsequently enshrined as a governing premise of resolutions the United Nations and other governing agencies would endorse. “Democratic peace theory” is one of the most influential theories of governance. It is arguably the “most powerful liberal contribution to the debate on the causes of war and peace.” It is essentially born of the idea that “democracies rarely fight one another because they share common 5. But this was a very particular idea of “peace,” which—despite being conceived amid economic interests and exigencies—deemphasized the role of material concerns for governance. The three most powerful ally nations—the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union —dominated efforts to shape the moral imagination of the United Nations. Moreover, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the Commission on Human Rights, which ultimately produced the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Man, helping to institutionalize a distinction between two different sets of rights—“civil and political rights” in purported contrast to “economic, social and cultural rights,” the latter of which were all but disregarded in deference to the former, while the former remained so vague and unspecified that they were scarcely enforceable. See Normand and Zaidi (2008); Al-Bulushi (2009: 166).

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norms of live-and-let-die” as well as political “institutions that constrain” an otherwise pervasive “recourse to war” (Rosato 2003). This theory constitutes a critique of the realist presumption that international politics is the science of securing and sustaining economic and military advantage. Democratic peace theory is also notable for emphasizing the character or profile of a nation as a proxy for political behavior. In that sense, it is likewise a critique of structural and materialist accounts of international politics. Insofar as democracy is often assumed to be the default template for a just society, it’s worth thinking carefully about whether prevailing assumptions jibe with empirical realities. This is because the most alarming feature of democratic peace theory—as recent research has demonstrated time and again—is that there are numerous, often very blatant, inconsistencies between the diplomatic standing a country manages to secure and the behavior it has historically exhibited. And this has in part to do with the fact that “democracy” is a privileged mode of diplomatic standing. Supporters of democratic peace theory insist that it “socialize[s] elites to act on the basis of democratic norms whenever possible.” Yet in this formulation, a “democracy” is only bound to observe peaceful norms with another “democracy,” not with a nondemocracy. For this reason, casting another country as a nondemocracy has historically been a convenient way for purportedly democratic countries to gain political leverage. Democratic peace theory also tends to overlook the fact that many countries, including the United States, struggled for much of their history to secure diplomatic standing as “democratic.” Even in the midst of the conventions for ratification that resulted in the United Nations, the US government worked actively to deter African American leaders from raising concerns about legalized segregation during deliberations about human rights. They were concerned that widespread knowledge of rampant racial discrimination in state industries and public institutions would undermine the US effort to cast itself as a diplomatic leader (Dudziak 2011; Von Eschen 2004). The idea that democratic nations are accountable to their vast constituencies is a central feature of democratic peace theory. This frequently is not the case. Especially since the advent of military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan during the twenty-first century, the United States has neither relied on congressional approval nor consistently consulted the electorate before embarking on a militarized course of action. It is perhaps true, as democratic peace theorists insist, that democratic nations rarely declare war against each other. Yet even during the Cold War era, the United States and Soviet Union used economic and political leverage to bolster their allies in what was essentially a proxy war (Kwon 2010;

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Westad 2007). And during the past few decades, the United States has increasingly relied on military engagements by special operations soldiers, on private security contractors, and on unmanned aircraft (like drones) to alleviate perceived threats to national security. As such, the idea of “peace” that lurks behind democratic peace theory has little traction analytically. And insofar as an interest in fostering “peace” coincided with a new age of economic and diplomatic leverage in the aftermath of World War II, it is worth asking whether what we are calling “peace” might bring with it its own genre of economic and military advantage for nations understood to be “peacebuilders” and “peacekeepers.” In this context, we should perhaps think more carefully about what it means that three of the countries that sit atop the UN Security Council, three purported beacons of democracy— the United States, Britain, and France—are responsible for training the Senegalese military in matters of security. Since independence, Senegal has been involved in more than twenty missions in at least eighteen different countries involving more than twenty thousand troops. “Their reputation has risen to such a level,” says Dietzman (2003: 27–28), “that their presence proves to be impossible to circumvent on the African scene for any operation wanting to be credible” (48). And Senegal has leveraged this credibility at key moments to shape regional politics and to strengthen ties with its allies. The Cold War made the idea of international peacekeeping especially contentious. With both the United States and the USSR being permanent members of the UN Security Council, either nation could exercise its veto power to undermine a concerted effort to intervene in international conflict situations. As the Cold War fizzled, these nations relaxed their veto power, and the United Nations gained unprecedented influence as a governing body that could adjudicate political tensions between and within nations (von Hippel 2000). Over the past twenty years, this position has fed an increase in the number and duration of formal peacekeeping efforts: in these, the SAF have distinguished themselves among the world’s nations, but most notably among African countries. Senegal would go on to establish a track record for providing UN peacekeeping missions with more troops, percentage-wise, than virtually any other nation. This rate of participation is staggering when you consider that the SAF, with every branch combined, number only thirteen thousand troops, plus an additional six thousand from the national gendarmie, or federal police. Indeed, the singular commitment Senegal has made in this regard has forged a diplomatic record that is exceptional in more than one sense of the term. Senegal was the only African nation to provide troops for Operations Desert Storm and Desert

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Shield. And this was no small sacrifice. While the SAF lost fourteen soldiers in Liberia, sixteen in Lebanon, and two in Rwanda, during the 1990s, ninety-three soldiers died during the Gulf War plane crash, which speaks to the tremendous stakes this diplomatic tradition potentially entails. The praise lavished on Senegalese soldiers tends to involve four distinguishing characteristics. First, they can be deployed quickly (taking only four days to prepare for service in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm). Second, Senegal privileges a “homogenous contingent,” which means the same group is “deployed for the duration of the operation with no rotation of forces.” Third, the Senegalese government is willing to accommodate missions that extend for a “long duration” (often anywhere from six to fifteen months; Dietzman 2003: 70). Finally, Senegal prefers to send high-ranking officials trained in US, French, and British military academies. Here peacekeeping bears an uncanny resemblance to a very different multilateral strategy for global improvement: structural adjustment. Structural adjustment is likewise concerned with measuring the economic and political aspirations of individual nations against a standard that international governing organizations have established. Structural adjustment also uses experts to instruct recipient nations about the normative mechanisms best suited to produce a successful outcome.6 And in both enterprises— with regard to peacekeeping and structural adjustment—Senegal benefits from sanction conferred by the British, French, and US governments.

On January 17, 2005, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade addressed the audience assembled for the Seventeenth Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics from his nation’s own capital, Dakar—only the second time this forum had been held in a “developing country.” Directing his attention to the challenge of financing economic growth in Africa, Wade plunged right into the issue of indebtedness: “So far, African countries have relied on their own domestic efforts and on external aid to finance growth. Unfortunately, external aid has often led to large, unsustainable, indebtedness. There is now a global consensus on the need

6. Here, I build on the literature concerned with the crucial role that the presumed “expertise” of international governing and lending agencies has played in encouraging former colonies to adopt very specific protocols for governance and mechanisms of credit debt, often with unfavorable outcomes for the prospect of economic growth and autonomy; see the work of Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (2003), as well as that of Bond (2000); Easterly (2005); Elyachar (2005); Ferguson (1994); Mitchell (2002); Mkandawire (1991); Olukoshi (1998); Vaughn (2012); among others.

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for debt cancellation. Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom and President Jacques Chirac of France, among other world leaders, have publicly supported the idea. I have been given the honor of preparing an African seminar on debt issues.” After citing the endorsement he had received from the sovereign leaders of France and Great Britain, Wade directed his attention to the circumstances most favorable for economic growth; he cited “good political governance” as the key variable. In Wade’s view, “good political governance” enables nations to manage their own resources, to create the “domestic conditions” necessary to “attract foreign capital.” In this line of argument, “good public governance”—like “good political governance”—is about “democracy, human rights, and everything else within the power of the state.” It also means working to solidify “good private governance” by “creating a business-friendly environment.” In figuring “good political governance” as a composite of “good public governance” and “good private governance,” Wade gestured to Senegal’s exemplary diplomatic standing to justify his assertion that he had been granted the authority—the sanction—to establish mechanisms for debt adjudication that other African nations were expected to heed. Wade spoke about his nation’s “capacity,” gesturing to electricity privatization and the liberalization of the groundnut sector. More than 70 percent of Senegalese people live in rural areas, earning income through access to plant and animal resources (livestock, cotton, and fishing). But the hierarchies that structure labor all but guarantee that returns will be concentrated in the hands of a select few. Much has been made of the shifty marabouts who employ armies of orphans to beg for money on Dakar streets, generating profits from which these young people are excluded.7 But most industries are structured by a similar form of generationism. More than 60 percent of the population is under age twenty (nearly 50 percent is below age fifteen). And of the 50 percent of the population that remains chronically unemployed, more than 40 percent is categorized as “urban youth” in official statistics. For more than twenty years, Senegal has been seeking the remedy to economic stagnation in loans sponsored by the World Bank and the IMF. Senegal secured its first loan from the World Bank in 1967 and has since been approved for 124 loans and credits that amount to nearly US$2.5 billion. This staggering number constitutes one of the lowest disbursement rates in sub-Saharan Africa. Still, it has been more than two de7. For especially penetrating analyses of these dynamics, see Audrain (2004); Perry (2004).

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cades since Senegal has been able to meet its annual obligation to lending agencies. The World Bank requires Senegal to eliminate the “administrative, legal, regulatory, and fiscal impediments to private investment,” especially where “foreign direct investment” is concerned, which proves that this sort of debt management program is not merely a repertoire of fiscal policies but a mode of statecraft. If the Senegalese tradition of peacekeeping proves there is no neutral territory in international diplomacy, then neither is there in any place market mechanisms are concerned. The structure of debt that Senegal endorses means it is constantly subjected to programs for good governance established by international financial institutions instead of the institutions that voters, intellectuals, and activists might bring to bear through principled debate and concerted action. The idea that Senegal provides a model of “good governance” implies that other African nations should follow its lead. But the teleology embedded in this assumption has thus far proven to be unjustified. For all the praise it has garnered, Senegal remains plagued by many of the same economic problems as neighboring countries. Far from presenting the image of an African future free from crisis, Senegal testifies to a crisis that plagues democratic governance. Senegal bears witness to privileged nations’ unique capacity to confer favorable diplomatic standing on countries that endorse the economic and political trajectory they have sanctioned. The way that a nation’s profile is tethered to mobility in the world of nations—what I am calling the forensics of capital—involves managing evidence within a distinct temporal regime. Privileged nations arrive at a consensus about a country and then establish a narrative suitable to that conclusion. At the same time, they omit, or carefully recalibrate, evidence contrary to their claims. In April 2010, the IMF and World Bank announced that Senegal would be awarded US$850 million in debt service relief with “more likely to follow”; both institutions cited the nation’s “political stability” and “broad ranging structural reforms,” including privatization and deregulation of the economy. The affluent nations that make up the financial consortium known as the “Paris Club,” which includes the United States, Britain, France, and Russia, among others, offered to provide an additional US$400 million upon learning the news. Leaving no room for speculation, the IMF and World Bank cited “reduced the role of the state in the economy” and the “improved business environment” as Senegal’s most important reforms. Six months before receiving this distinction, Abdoulaye Wade had actually been accused of trying to bribe an IMF representative with

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€133,000 in cash, which he insisted was simply a farewell gift. Meanwhile, a diplomatic cable dated February 2010, two months before this announcement was made, reveals a US ambassador engaged in private conversation with Wade about the rising tide of corruption throughout the Senegalese government. In this sense, the fraught nature of Senegalese peacekeeping missions meshes with its status as a leader in debt management to suggest that “stabilizing” any diplomatic or economic scenario turns out to be rather more vexed than it is taken to be in prevailing discourses on good governance. The loans that the IMF and World Bank made available to Senegal as a testament to “good governance” suggest that if the forensic profile is a kind of diplomatic profile, it is also a kind of credit profile. Senegal’s standing as a leader of economic and political reform in Africa underscores the fact that the national character it has been assigned equates to subjective estimates about its moral integrity. Whether the people of Senegal rely on the same evidence to assess the profile of their polity, and whether they would come to the same conclusions, remains another matter entirely.

SEVEN

Brokering Revolution: Imagining Future War on the West African Borderlands DANNY HOFFMAN

Deep in the West African rainforest, a four-hour walk from the nearest drivable road, Morgboima seems an unlikely place from which to start a war. But if war comes, Alicious Koromah will be at its fore. First a soldier in the Sierra Leone Army, then an irregular fighter with the Civil Defense Forces (CDF) militia, Koromah had firsthand experience on the frontlines of Sierra Leone’s ten-year conflict. He does not hope to see war again. He would prefer that international companies come to the forest and employ young men to fell trees or dig diamonds. But if, instead, someone comes to Morgboima looking for men to take up arms, and he or she is prepared to pay, Koromah is ready to fight. “If anyone comes with force and says to the youth, ‘Let’s go spoil,’ we’ll go spoil,”1 he said. “During the war, money flowed freely. Now if you go to Kenema, there is no work. If you go to Freetown, there are too many people, and they have connections that we do not.2 We have democracy now, but we have no jobs. So if any group comes to Sierra Leone looking for war, I will be the first to join them.” Alicious Koromah represents both the continuity of crisis and a new discourse of global insecurity in this part of West Africa. As a young man digging diamonds in the forest, he earns no salary. He has little contact with his child, girlfriend, and parents, all of whom live far from the mines. He is a stranger in the village where he lives and is as marginal a citizen of his immediate surroundings as he is to the Sierra Leonean state. If he finds

1. The Sierra Leonean Krio phrasing means, in essence, to cause destruction or return to war. 2. Kenema is the third-largest city in Sierra Leone and the closest urban area to Morgboima. Freetown is the nation’s capital and major city.

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gems in the rough rivers or forest bedrock, he has little choice but to sell them to the crew bosses for a fraction of their market value. Divided among his crew, Koromah’s share of even that meager profit will be less than half. It will be enough to sustain him temporarily but hardly enough to alter the course his life is set to take. In this, he is no different from thousands of young men on either side of the Sierra Leone–Liberia border—young men endlessly following rumors of wealth buried in the jungle. These were the conditions that in 1991 led to war. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) invasion was a complex mix of local, national, and regional politics.3 But at least in the beginning, the RUF promised a new, more democratic, government and a future of economic prosperity for the youth of Sierra Leone. Theirs was a message of independence from the country’s ruling elite and greedy elders, a message that resonated with the young people (young men in particular) who worked the region’s diamond and agricultural sectors but who found themselves largely shut out from the more prosperous future such labor was supposed to guarantee. The RUF invasion quickly degenerated into a brutal campaign against the very population it claimed to liberate. But at least for a short while, it was a movement that resonated in an impoverished southeastern Sierra Leone. Well into the war, even those youth allied with factions fighting against the RUF still maintained that the original grounds for its war were just. Despite the structural similarities, however, Sierra Leone today is not Sierra Leone in 1991. The differences are important. There remains the very real possibility that young men could once again be recruited for war in this region. But the logic of what such recruitment might look like has changed along with so much else. More than two decades on, there has been a profound shift in who might be able to translate and facilitate the connection between young men and the market for violent labor. And there has been a profound shift in how that brokering would have to be done. It is hard to imagine young men in this region today mobilizing behind a political project that simply promises them a better tomorrow. Revolution, if it comes to Morgboima and the hundreds of other enclaves of youth that stretch across these borderlands, will be little more than an employment scheme. It will be a form of work that, whatever its grander political ambitions, will be primarily about generating income for the young men who will labor again at war. Crisis may be not only West Africa’s new normal but West Africa’s new work. 3. The origin of the RUF invasion is covered in detail in Abdullah (1998); Gberie (2005); Keen (2005); Peters (2011); Richards (1996).

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On the Border, 1990 The Sierra Leone–Liberia border is an area of dense rainforest, few drivable roads, and sparse population. It is, however, one of the richest natural resource environments anywhere on the planet. Southeastern Sierra Leone and western Liberia have tremendous stocks of old-growth timber, a broad diversity of wildlife, and, crucially, an abundance of high-grade alluvial diamonds. It has also been the epicenter of a period of extended instability and fighting that began more or less in late 1989 and has only recently come to an end. Today this region is again experiencing an influx of young men. Many of them are veterans of the decade of fighting in Sierra Leone and the decade and a half of instability in Liberia. The postwar economy has by and large failed these ex-combatants. The older, more established diamond mines in Sierra Leone are no longer as productive as they once were, so groups of male youth are today pushing further into the forest regions to prospect and to work new mines. They labor under harsh and dangerous conditions. Not surprisingly, these youth are angry, desperate, and uncertain about their futures. This situation is at least somewhat analogous to the situation on the border some twenty years ago. In the early 1990s, a number of armed factions were able to recruit young men from this border region to join their forces. Some of these were rebel groups intent on overthrowing the government of Sierra Leone or that of Liberia. Others were progovernment forces trying to stop the rebellions. But what they had in common was an ability to recruit young men who were living an unstable, marginal existence, an ability to convince them to take up arms in violent struggle. There were important distinctions between the various fighting factions, but here I focus on a few common themes. In the earliest stages of recruitment on both the Sierra Leone and Liberia sides of the border, young men were brought into these armed groups by figures recognizable as classic “brokers.” These were often young men themselves, men who had lineage and language ties to the region and could therefore claim a kind of local belonging. But crucially, many of them were also perceived as having other kinds of connections, connections to a world beyond the rainforest and beyond the rural village. Many of the leaders of the RUF in Sierra Leone, for example, had been students in its capital, Freetown (Abdullah 1998; Rashid 1997). Their command of Krio and English, their familiarity with global popular music and cinema, and their fluency in anticolonial rhetoric made them appear cosmopolitan and modern to young men

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in the mines, young men who themselves generally lacked formal education or urban connections. Similarly, leaders of the progovernment Special Forces unit of the CDF were young men with ties to ruling families in the chiefdoms of the southeast but who had themselves been educated in Freetown, Bo, and Monrovia and had business ties across both nations.4 They therefore had access to a larger national and transnational community than did the boys they were attempting to recruit. In short, these were figures that could “translate” between worlds, to use Clifford Geertz’s term (1980: 228). They were charismatic “specialists” who took advantage of a situation of upheaval and uncertainty and positioned themselves to “stand guard over the crucial junctures of synapses or relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole” (Wolf 1956: 1075). Mohammed is a good example. Mohammed was a key recruiter for the progovernment forces in Sierra Leone and then later for the rebels in Liberia. When I asked Mohammed how he could bring so many young people out of the forest regions to fight, he inevitably touched on a number of different facets of his own persona and biography. He grew up in a refugee camp in Sierra Leone where Liberian dissidents were training to invade Liberia, so he knew something about military affairs and about the politics of both Sierra Leone and Liberia. His father was a successful Sierra Leonean businessman with a Liberian wife, so Mohammed could place himself in multiple lineages. He was educated in one of Sierra Leone’s top high schools, but his father was the chiefdom speaker of a rural district, so he had allegiances that were both rooted in the capital and distinctly outside it. He was an accomplished soccer player in school and an avid listener of the BBC radio news, someone who commanded respect within his cohort because his connections to wealth, knowledge, physicality, and worldliness were at least somewhat more extensive than other people’s. Once he became involved in the militia, Mohammed used both his background and his affective acumen to rise to a position of some power. Mohammed invariably talked about “his boys” in terms that were paternalistic and capitalistic. He cared for them holistically, making sure they had food and medicine at home, weapons and ammunition at the front, and drugs and alcohol when they needed it. But there was no question that he controlled them. Once they became part of the militias he worked with, he—not they—controlled their labor and could extract profit from it. Mo-

4. The CDF Special Forces played a central role in the CDF advances on Freetown during the 1997–98 coup and made up a substantial portion of CDF fighters deployed in Freetown after the 1998 reinstatement of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government.

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hammed the broker sat atop a “cheap, hardworking, and disciplined labor force” (Geertz 1960: 236) and was “the adult figure to which this group look[ed] for a model and guide” (Geertz 1960: 237). It is important to consider here exactly what it was that brokers like Mohammed offered young men as they sought to draw them into the labors of war. To some degree, they were able to draw on ethnic nationalist sentiments, discourses of masculine responsibility, or the promise of revenge for past violence. But what made these young men most effective as brokers in these early days of the war was their ability to promise an alternative future at the level of the nation.5 Whether they did it in terms of a new political dispensation, a Pan-African renaissance, universal employment, or universal formal education, the brokers who brought new fighters into these factions did so by creating an imaginary future of radical new possibilities for stability, wealth, and power in a country reclaimed for its youth. Ironically, their own marginality leant these promises credence. Like Geertz’s Javanese kijaji, they were insider-outsiders who had achieved a measure of success in multiple worlds at once without being wholly associated with any one of them. To the “minoritarian” community of young men on the border, if not for the nation as a whole, these broker figures seemed to promise a new and attractive line of flight. They spoke of, and embodied, wide-scale structural transformations. Whether or not they were ever in a position to offer it, they promised revolution in the true meaning of the term.

On the Border, 2012 To reiterate, the situation on the Sierra Leone–Liberia border in 2012 looked, in many ways, very similar to the situation in the early 1990s. Young men working the mines had no more faith in their national leadership than they had two decades before, and their economic prospects were, if anything, even worse. In the overcrowded mining camps in 2012, there was little food and no medicine. Young men worked miles from their families and home communities. There was a great deal of talk about going back to war. No one, exactly, claimed to want war. But young men threatened that they were prepared for it if their current situation did not improve. Morgboima is representative of other nodes in this rural border net-

5. As I have suggested elsewhere in a more in-depth look at the CDF, the latter phases of the war were markedly different. What I describe in this chapter are essentially the end points of a process that I have mapped in greater detail in Hoffman (2011).

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work. What had until very recently been nothing more than a small village in the bush was suddenly teeming with young men from around southeastern Sierra Leone. Dozens of youth had exploited distant family connections to secure places to sleep in the community, striking out early in the morning to prospect in the forest rivers or to sift recently discovered diamond claims. Hundreds more slept in the forest, coming into Morgboima on occasion to buy food or get news from the outside. Still more pass through Morgboima in groups of two or four or ten on their way to the unguarded Sierra Leone–Liberia border crossing and the vast, productive tracts of forest yet to be exploited. It is in conversation with these young men that a significant difference emerges between the past and the future. When I asked recently what it would take to send these men back to the bush—back, in other words, to war—the answer was virtually always the same: cash. Universally, these young men argued that it didn’t matter who offered to fund them or what cause they were to be fighting for. When Alicious Koromah claimed that he would be the first to join in the next armed conflict, he was unequivocal: “If any group comes to Sierra Leone looking for war, I will be the first to join them.” I heard versions of this claim repeated again and again. The young men I spoke with claimed that it did not matter if the cause was to overthrow or to defend the government of Sierra Leone. They claimed they would be every bit as willing to lead a rebellion in Liberia as they would be to help to put one down. They were prepared to go to Iraq or to Afghanistan, but it didn’t matter whether they were hired to fight on behalf of American forces or to fight against them. Al-Qaeda, the British, the Americans, NATO, the African Union—any one of these were viable as an employer and equally viable as an enemy. The only requirement was that the work of war be paid for in hard currencies and up front. Coming from men who had spent years fighting before they ended up living the hard, dangerous lives of miners, these did not seem like idle threats. As far as I know, there was no active recruitment taking place at the time I visited these mines, though there had been sporadic efforts over the years to draw men to Côte d’Ivoire and to Guinea. And in the capital, private security firms were hiring West Africans for work in Kabul and Baghdad.6 But I have no way of knowing exactly what would have happened had there been realistic opportunities for these men to travel to new 6. I am grateful to Maya Mynster Christensen for her personal communications and insights detailing this recruitment to private military contractors (see Christensen 2012).

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battlefields at home or abroad. What I engage in here is a kind of speculative anthropology. But the language that these youth used to speak about their desires and their opportunities is illustrative. After two decades of violence, these men had given up on the idea of a future that could be secured through anything except the logic of hard currency. Appeals to ethnic affiliation, political patronage, ideology, revolution, patriotism, masculine responsibility—all of these had been tried in the recent past, and they had failed. What was left was the cash nexus, and it was through that nexus that everything flowed. Money was not an end in itself for these young men. But it was the only medium through which the future could be imagined. Achille Mbembe (2006) has argued that the notion of debt, so central to West African sociality, has become completely monetized. The strange way in which money circulates through Africa, ubiquitous and yet virtually impossible to access in any predictable way, has generated a “new economy of persons . . . based on purely market and object-like relationships” (2006: 304). This complete monetization of the imaginary is what lay at the heart of arguments like the one made by a miner named Joseph Margai. Margai described how angry young men had been when they joined with rebels in the early 1990s. The RUF, he said, recruited fighters through brokers who could help young men see how corrupt the existing government had become and how the nation could be transformed through violence: “When the war came, it was the young men who fought. In the first war, we took up arms because they came and told us about the suffering in this country. We knew it, and so we joined them in arms. Even children carried arms, and for good reason. They reminded us of our suffering.” Joseph then argued that the current situation was worse—but he effected a subtle shift, saying that while young men were equally willing to take up arms, what would motivate them was not the quality of their suffering but quantities of cash: “And now the condition is the same. We are not rogues. But even me—I would steal if there was anything in this village to steal. Today is worse than yesterday. The conditions of youth in this country, anyone who comes with money, we would join them. Now we are suffering even more. If you brought millions here right now, we would sign up—even if it was only a million leones [less than five hundred dollars], we would sign up. We could at any time take marijuana, take alcohol, and we could do anything.” Young men like Joseph had, in essence, given up on the idea of a future that could be secured by anything except cash in hand. Violence was the one commodity they possessed that they could exchange for hard currency, and they recognized that there is indeed a global market for it.

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It is the figure of the broker who perhaps says the most about the differences between the possibilities for recruiting and deploying violent labor in the early 1990s and the possibilities for recruiting and deploying violent labor in the second decade of the new millennium. And it is this figure who gives the greatest texture to our understanding of the future African crisis. The broker at this historical moment, the contemporary analogue to those, like Mohammed, who previously recruited the laborers of African violence, would not be engaged in an act of translation. His or her authority is not predicated on fluency in the languages of multiple worlds. His or her authority is not predicated on the promise of making intelligible and accessible otherwise mystified and unattainable spheres. Nor does the broker’s success rest on charismatic performance, or what we might call “affective power or labor.” If the ex-combatants with whom I spoke are any authority on their own experiences, then there is no nonmonetized appeal to the future that they will find persuasive. And this, after all, is the foundation of the broker’s affective work: his or her promise to deliver a different future in exchange for loyalty today. At an earlier moment in this region, there were brokers who could recruit young men to fight with the promise of a new government or an African renaissance—charismatic politicians and entrepreneurs who combined insider and outsider status. What they promised, partly by representing it themselves, was a different set of possibilities for local youth going forward. Today, by contrast, visions of the future—at least a future rooted in West Africa—seem to hold no purchase.7 Those forms of appeal have proven time and again to be hollow. The brokers who until very recently bore a striking resemblance to Geertz’s “cultural middlemen” (1960: 230) have no credibility, having repeatedly failed to facilitate the exchange of violence (the one thing these young miners have to offer) for stability, security, and change. The only role for the broker in this ethnographic context, at this historical moment, is a conduit for the flow of currency. He or she cannot trade in imaginaries or affect and cannot traffic in or translate regimes of value. In fact, for that very reason, we could hypothesize that the most effective broker in the labors of violence would be the complete stranger—the most radically Other. The ideal broker, the figure who could most effectively recruit and deploy the violence of young men on the Sierra Leone–Liberia 7. For more on the impossibility of the future in West Africa, see Piot (2010); Simone (2001).

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border, would be the figure who has the least recognizability or legibility in the local imaginary. He or she would not come to the borderlands peddling a vision of a better tomorrow through collective mobilization. He or she would represent no meaningful political project, no vision of a wholesale transformation of the present. What he or he has to offer is crisis would be a future in which violence can be made profitable but for which there is no market for revolutionary programs of structural change.

Conclusion In early 2010, while I conducted fieldwork on the Sierra Leone–Liberia border, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave an unusually pointed speech aimed at the government of Nigeria. This was a few months after Umar Abdulmutallab, the so-called underwear bomber, attempted to blow up a passenger plane bound for the United States. Abdulmutallab, according to Clinton, represented one possible future for African youth: violent religious “radicalization.” Young African men like Abdulmutallab, she argued, were disillusioned by West Africa’s “unbelievable” corruption and “disturbed by his father’s wealth.” I cannot speak to the specifics of Abdulmutallab’s case. But I would argue that Clinton, like many others, has identified only half of the problem correctly. There is indeed a kind of violent radicalization of young men at work in West Africa, and it is rooted in the disturbing ways in which money flows through this region. But it is not, as Clinton implies, a radical turning away from modern capital. Instead it is a radical reduction of relations into a base logic of exchange, a funneling of relationships through the cash nexus. The future crisis that Clinton and others in the global security business seem to fear is that a cadre of shadowy brokers will find their way to West Africa and recruit young men for violence. They will do so through an act of translation: appealing to them as young men by speaking the language of marginality and offering them a vision of a different, peaceful, prosperous future in exchange for their loyalty and their violence today. What miners on this border region seem to suggest is a different kind of radicalization. It is one that opens space for a different and more troubling kind of broker, at least for those concerned about African futures: the broker who promises nothing, mediates nothing, and translates nothing except the materiality of cash.

EIGHT

Hedging the Future CHARLES PIOT

Togo after the Cold War is a wild and wondrous place. A site of abjection and state collapse, it is also one of enormous cultural innovation and excess—of proliferating religiosities and occult imaginaries, of empowered NGOs and eviscerated sovereigns, of personal longings to exit the nation and embrace modernities long denied. This chapter explores a Ponzi scheme that was all the rage in Lomé in 2010 (and again in 2012–13), a scheme that condenses many of the desires and cultural imaginaries of the contemporary moment. A hope machine—it was called Redémar (“start over,” “reignite”)—this Ponzi drew energy from a collapse in value registers, both economic and political, while seeking to transform a foreclosed present (and sordid past) into a miraculous future.

In Togo in summer 2010, seemingly all systems of value were in flux. In late June, the price of gasoline jumped 20 percent, engendering a strike and the barricading of Lomé streets by motorcycle taxi drivers. Public transportation and food prices followed suit, generating a second strike, this time by long-distance drivers. Then, dominoes falling, medical health professionals went on strike, demanding higher pay and benefits. The hikes in gasoline and food prices were tied to the shift in political value that has been under way for the past decade, for the Togolese state intentionally allowed the cost of gasoline to float up, claiming that the era of subsidies was over and that the market would now dictate pricing. This shift in political value—from dictatorial-patrimonial to neoliberal—has been in the works since the end of the Cold War, a long, slow burn that has not only hollowed out state function and eliminated social services but

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also undermined long-standing authority relations. As is the case throughout much of West Africa, it is not uncommon these days to hear nostalgic longings for a return to the certainties of the dictatorship era, if not to the dictator himself (De Boeck and Plissart 2006: 103). Village “tradition”—for many, still an ultimate value—and the chiefship system that underwrote it has also been in free fall because of attacks from charismatic Christians. Pentecostals demonize spirit and ancestral worship, labeling them “Satanic,” and insist that churchgoers turn their backs on ceremonial practice, an intervention that has driven a stake into the heart of village religion and unsettled long-standing forms of authority (Piot 2010: 57–64, 103–18). If the church has brought scandal to the village, it also has been rocked by rumor and intrigue. In summer 2010, several high-profile pastors were accused of misappropriating church funds, and others were accused of adultery and dabbling in the dark arts (thus of engaging in practices against which they preach). Another rumor had it that the new churches were in the business of selling pièces detachées, or “used car parts.” The term “used parts” here is wryly refigured as body parts destined for the international organ trade—a speculation fueled by the fact that some of the churches reclaim the bodies of their dead members prior to burial. Of course, a Pentecostal community that insistently inhabits a “We are forever falling into sin” credo—and that purposefully challenges earthly regimes of value—both invites and subsists on the idea of scandal and crisis. Indeed, the church repeatedly performs scandal, not only for its congregants, but also for the larger population, in the process normalizing the very idea of the scandalous. This gives one pause: Is the crisis generated outside of or within culture? Is it generated within apocalyptic imaginaries or in a turbulent political economy? Is it “real” or merely rhetorical? Here I follow Janet Roitman (2013; chapter 2) who provocatively suggests that “crisis” is an organizing trope and figure of the imagination (both popular and scholarly) as much as a description of the real or of events in the world. For charismatic Christians, it is also a type of self-fashioning. The biggest story of the summer, headlining newspapers in Lomé for weeks and the first topic of conversation in workplaces and bars, was the flaming out of a Ponzi scheme that had captured the imaginations of—and large sums of money from—more than fifty thousand Togolese. But more on this below.

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On the streets of Lomé these days, where the hustle economy is a way of life, very little can be taken for granted. When buying gasoline, you had better make sure the meter on the pump has been reset to zero. Otherwise, the vendor will charge the full amount and skim the difference. When taking your car to a mechanic for servicing, you never know whether an oil change means new or old oil, whether “new” break shoes mean old ones at a “new” price, what other parts might be traded out while the mechanic is working on your car, or whether a part removed this time will be sold back to you the next. Asking for a receipt, you imagine, might provide some sort of verification—until you realize that all “factures” are easily falsified. Hoping to avoid the risks of purchasing a “Chinese” (pirated) phone on the street,1 I decided to get one at the Nokia store instead. When a friend heard this, she scoffed at my willingness to trust the brand, commenting simply that “you never know whether a Nokia is a Nokia or not.” “Even at the Nokia store?” I asked. “Especially at that store,” she shot back. This same person purchased ten bags of cement for a masonry job at a boutique she owned, only to discover, when told by the mason that she needed to buy more, that he had appropriated four for himself. Another acquaintance, a carpenter I have known since childhood and someone otherwise honest to a fault, told me that he and his coworkers routinely plundered every worksite. “At the end of the day, we take materials home with us—a piece of lumber, some cement, maybe a tool. We get paid almost nothing, so this is how we make it worthwhile.” At Togo’s two universities, passing grades reflect money gifts (or sexual favors) to teachers as much as performance in the classroom, and receiving medical treatment at Lomé’s clinics and hospitals often depends on whether nurses and doctors have been “thanked” along the way. In an instance of skimming of a different stripe, the sons of a penniless man I know agreed to foot his medical bills but insisted that they accompany him to the pharmacy for fear that if he went alone, he would skimp on the meds and pocket the money. “Imagine,” one of the sons remarked, “that he would try to turn his sickness into a market, and, even worse, that he would seek profit from the money of his children.” 1. All pirated products in Lomé today are widely referred to as “Chinese,” regardless of their provenance. This attribution is in no small measure due to the fact that those Sanya (Chinese) motorcycles that came onto the market a decade ago, underselling Yamahas and Hondas by a third, became nightmare machines within two years, demanding constant repair.

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One of these same sons helped his mother buy a female sheep from a man who lived in her neighborhood in December 2010. They thought the offer to be a good deal because the ewe was pregnant, and the man’s asking price was only slightly above the cost of a single sheep. A week after the purchase, the animal died, and in cutting it open, they found its belly full of plastic bags—bags, they surmised, that the man had fed it to create an appearance that would inflate its price. In a widely publicized moment in fall 2010, one that deserves a place on any “can you top this?” list, a soccer team claiming to be the Togolese national team played an international match in Bahrain, a match the host country won 3–0. Authorities back home learned of the match when Bahrain complained that the Togolese team had not put up a strong effort and seemed winded by halftime. After an investigation, the chairman of Togo’s soccer federation declared that the players were “completely fake. We have not sent any team of footballers to Bahrain. The players are not known to us” (ESPN 2010). Upon further inquiry, it was discovered that an ex-coach saw an opportunity to profit from an oil-rich country eager to promote its soccer team (and willing to foot the bill for the match) and recruited players off the street, outfitting them with jerseys from the national team. Upon hearing of this episode, a Lomé friend commented wryly, “I think we have taken 419 [the art of the scam] to a new level—to one that even Nigerians and Ghanaians would be proud of.”

Let me return to the Ponzi scheme. Inserted into the heart of this hustle economy, and amid summer 2010’s value free fall, a get-rich quick investment surfaced in Lomé. Known by its acronym Redémar2—“start over,” “reignite”—it promised annual returns of more than 200 percent and offered a menu of investor options. For 420 CFA francs (US$850) down— the smallest sum one could invest, thus ruling out most of the Togolese and indicating a class dimension to this scheme—investors chose whether to receive monthly checks or their equivalent in kind, sacks of food (rice, sorghum, beans), or containers of gasoline. Alternatively, for US$6,000 (3 million CFA francs) down, investors received US$600 each month for the rest of their lives. By early 2010, Redémar was paying out handsomely—US$150 per month on an US$850 investment—and its headquarters in Lomé had be2. “Redémar” is an acronym for Réseau pour le Développement de la Masse sans Resources (Network for the Development of the People/Masses without Resources).

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come a crowded intersection of clients coming and going. The buzz was only enhanced at the time of Togo’s presidential election in February, when a giant picture of Faure Gnassingbé, the sitting president, appeared outside Redémar headquarters, suggesting that Togo’s wealthiest family was not only supportive but also an investor. By midsummer, more than fifty thousand people in Lomé had cobbled together life savings or taken out bank loans to invest in Redémar. Moreover, money from the diaspora began pouring in, with diasporics seduced by the idea that a one-time investment might produce monthly payouts to their families for the rest of their lives, thus relieving them of the burden of having to send remittances home ever again. (Quel rêve!) This buzz, this visibility, this “materiality” (Musaraj 2011) of people coming and going, of investors leaving headquarters with checks in hand, of individuals toting Redémar containers of gasoline and corn around Lomé was instrumental in converting the skeptics and winning over the public. Such bringing-into-visibility also spoke back to the secrecy and invisibility of much of the operation—to the mystery of where Redémar’s profits came from and who was behind the scheme. Gaps in knowledge also opened the door to the rumor mill. The money came from Gaddafi, one line of speculation had it, who was willing to bankroll the scheme in order to increase his influence in West Africa—a

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speculation that seemed to be reinforced by the fact that Redémar’s headquarters was located in a Muslim center in Lomé where Gaddafi was hosted when he visited in 2009. Another thread had it that Redémar was a laundering operation for Nigerian drug money. A third suggested that it was the first family’s money, here cleverly deployed to convince a skeptical public that things were moving again in Lomé. A fourth rumor, popular with Lomé’s charismatic community, was that this was the devil’s money—and that the public’s scurrying to and fro in pursuit of it was a sign that the end of times was at hand. There was also speculation that Redémar would soon start rewarding loyal clients with a villa. Oddly, the multiplicity and shape-shifting nature of the accounts—their excess—far from undermining Redémar’s credibility, only seemed to enhance it. Thus it was the public’s fertile rumoring, as well as its coming and going, and the general buzz created around Redémar that gave it social facticity and made it real. Moreover, in that such rumors posited an outside—a “real” source of the scheme’s money—the investing public became the author of its own misrecognition. Since Ponzi schemes are financially self-referencing—they have no sources of external income from investors themselves, with interest generated from those within—nothing would seem more appropriate than the fact that Redémar clients (and eventual victims) closed the circle themselves by conjuring Redémar’s identity as real, thus also holding critique at bay. When, unannounced, Redémar was shut down by the Togolese state in July 2010, there was a boisterous public outcry. Redémar had not missed any payments, the Togolese had been making money, and, a common refrain on the street, Redémar was fulfilling functions that the state had long ago abandoned. Many assumed that it was jealousy or threat—that Redémar’s acting like a state had led to state intervention. There were also rumors that Redémar’s president had eyes on national office, even on the country’s presidency. For its part, the state, willing to act now that the election was safely behind it, claimed it was protecting its citizens from what had occurred in Benin next door, where a similar scheme in summer 2010 had crashed and disappeared the money of more than two hundred thousand investors.3 Moreover, the official fears in Togo were that Redémar failure might take down the banking system as well, for thousands of investors—civil servants, retirees, school teachers, and those not only from Lomé but also 3. The Benin Ponzi scheme, written up in the New York Times (Nossiter 2010), swallowed US$180 million in investor money.

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from upcountry—spent spring and summer 2010 borrowing money from the banks to reinvest in Redémar at a time when there had already been a string of recent bank failures.4

How could a historian come to believe that a fashion, an enthusiasm, an infatuation, or even exaggerations do not reveal, at a given moment, the existence of a productive nodal point in culture? —Michel Foucault

While the attraction of this instant-riches scheme was certainly that of Ponzi practices all over the world5—and there has been a rash of them since the mid-1990s, from Russia and Romania (Verdery 1996) to Albania (Musaraj 2011) to Guatemala (Nelson 2010; Stoll 2010–11) to the Caribbean to New York City—it also drew special charge from the Togolese post–Cold War moment, both feeding off of and into its imaginaries and pressure points (Piot 2010). First note that currency events like this—currency loss, devaluation, even outright abolition—are nothing new for colonial and postcolonial subjects. The colonial period in Togo was marked by the replacement of the cowry currency first by a German currency, then by several French ones. Each time, much congealed wealth was lost and simply disappeared. The last fifteen years have seen similar currency free falls—most notably in 1994 when France devalued the CFA franc (which lost 50 percent of its value overnight) and again in 2007 with the reissue of the CFA franc after a massive counterfeiting scheme was uncovered in Cote d’Ivoire (and when many who had old CFA francs failed to cash them in). This is all to say that monetary loss, fluctuating value, and crises of commensuration are nothing new here. Neither is the response to such scenarios: the search for new means and the multiplying of registers of value (Guyer 2004). Thus one way to view practices like 419 or product piracy is to see them as responses

4. IDH (Investiture Dans l’Humain), the largest and most successful microfinance lender in Togo, went belly up when the bank’s president let friends dip into bank funds to purchase cars and homes. Similarly, the coffers of Banque Populaire, a bank in which many I know had invested their life savings, were plundered by the bank’s directeur générale in 2009, leaving clients penniless. 5. At the time, no one other than a few in the Lomé press referred to Redémar as a Ponzi scheme. As long as people were making money, wishful thinking kept pushing them into other theories of the money’s provenance. It was only after Redémar was closed by the government that it became widely referred to in the press and beyond as a Ponzi scheme.

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to a loss of wealth or currency devaluation, as attempts to replace one value register with another or to revalue that which has lost value. Second, Ponzi economics fits seamlessly with local principles of circulation and debt, of borrowing here to pay there. “Liquidity is our problem in Lomé,” a friend said as she dipped into a church fund she was safeguarding to finance a personal venture. Fully intending to reimburse the church, she was unable to and looked elsewhere for backup, eventually borrowing from a sibling to repay the church. Here she met her limit, and her sister’s money disappeared (needless to say, generating significant conflict between the two). Had other dipping pools been available—loan money from a “micro” (a microfinance NGO), a bank, or a workplace account they would have been added to the chain of resources to be plundered for debt. In Lomé’s parallel (informal) economy, which for most is the only game in town, growth and profitable investment—investment that produces increase—is largely nonexistent. Vendors subsist on the endless circulation of small margins. Most aim just to keep things moving, to keep money in circulation, dipping and borrowing when they have the chance. I’ve run the figures on items sold in several Lomé boutiques, those myriad hole-in-thewall retail stores that line the dusty streets of the capital, selling soap, spaghetti, batteries, and phone cards, and their profits are negligible to nonexistent. However, as long as potential buyers are walking in the door, as long as money is sometimes changing hands, and as long as the debts are not too deep, the store remains solvent and is considered a success. Then, too, each vendor hopes—and prays—for a miracle, a sudden windfall that will change everything. I followed a parallel case in 2009: the business affair of two Lomé entrepreneurs who imported used tires from Germany for resale on the local market. By the time everyone had taken their cut (the friend they sent to Germany to purchase the tires, the German customs and freight agents, the brokers and customs officials at the port in Lomé, the warehouse operator, the street kids who drummed up publicity, the friends they hired to help with sales, and all those whose palms had been greased along the way)—and all this alongside buyers (Togolese, Nigerian, and Malian tire merchants, as well as friends, patrons, and uncles) constantly seeking to get the best of the sellers, driving the prices of the tires ever lower—any imagined profit had vanished into air. “We lost money on the tires themselves,” one of the project’s progenitors said. “We made some money from other goods we packed into the freight container [that transports the tires from Germany]—radios, televisions, a car motor. But this was barely enough to

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keep us going. The main benefit from this business is the relationships we build along the way with all those who have taken their cut, relationships that will help us in the future.”6 I am suggesting here that rather than reading Ponzi financing—borrowing from Peter to pay Paul—as anomalous or exceptional, we see it as the norm and that we read the Togolese economy as being Ponzi-like through and through. Moreover, it is capitalist finance not just in West Africa but also around much of the globe that is Ponzi-like. When an investment firm shuffles money from here to pay its investors there, it is engaging in Ponzi behavior. Transferring debt from one credit card to the next—raising money here to reimburse there—is a type of Ponzi scheme. When the US government borrows money from China to pay off its debt, it is doing something similar. Most famously, perhaps, US economist Hyman Minsky (1982; 1986) argued that Ponzi finance is intrinsic to capitalist economies: “Every investment project with a long gestation period and somewhat uncertain returns has aspects of a ‘Ponzi’ finance scheme” (Minsky 1982: 106; see also Minsky 2008 [1986]: 70, 364).7 Third, and despite charismatic dismissals of Redémar (as the work of the devil), there was a distinctly Pentecostalite (Meyer 2004) aspect to it. Both Ponzi schemers and Pentecostals attempt to transform a foreclosed present into a miraculous future, albeit substituting an earthly utopia in the one for a heavenly paradise in the other. Both share apocalyptic sensibilities and what Jane Guyer (2007) has referred to as “punctuated” temporalities. Both are antigenealogical and hedge the present against an inchoate end times. (Which again begs the question: does apocalyptic religious thought subtend apocalyptic economic desire or vice versa—and why the convergence now?) But note that there can be no single “future” to which all acolytes, investors, or everyday citizens subscribe. For one, earthly and heavenly futures are vastly different, as are the means to attain them. For another, earthly futures themselves (and presumably heavenly ones as well) come in many stripes: some oriented toward alleviating economic precarity, oth-

6. Redémar economics is not relational or anticapitalist in this classic sense—in that the aim of investing is not to produce relationships. Still, no economy, including Redémar’s, escapes the social-relational entirely—for investment provides money to support one’s family, to reimburse one’s debt, to improve one’s social lot. 7. Redémar investors, however, saw it as “interest,” not unlike what a capitalist draws from an investment scheme. But these same Redémar clients had no problem imagining that their “interest” was money taken—borrowed Ponzi-like—from other investors.

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ers toward accumulating standing, others toward advancing social projects or careers. Then again, many in Togo and throughout the subregion today throw their lot with the diaspora, imagining that the United States or Europe (or, increasingly, China and Ukraine) might provide a more capacious future than what is possible at home. In short, the Togolese inhabit multiple, disparate futures—many of which remain elusive, often disappearing before being realized. Fourth, and also related to the West African Pentecostal, Redémar was a hope machine turning a desperate present into a hopeful future, attempting to calibrate risk and master time. Redémar’s very name—“start over”— tapped into deep cultural sentiments and a certain perpetual optimism that courses through the streets of Lomé: optimism that when things go bad—a business deal, a relationship, an election—all that is needed is a fresh start. But it’s also the case that Redémar represented hope in a new register, promising—and for a while giving—people money they had always desired, bypassing a state they distrusted and despised, enabling the fantasy of replacing the state with a nonstate entity and indeed with an entity they had willed and fantasized into being. In a very real sense, the people were performing and fabulating their own desires. In all this, there was something postauthoritarian and rhizomatic about the phenomenon. Indeed, Redémar was described in the press as, and called itself, a “reseau,” a network (see footnote 3). It appeared out of nowhere and spread like a brush fire through the streets and bars and homes of Lomé, it was authored by the public, and it was deeply affective and antigenealogical. As such, Redémar congealed not only the anxieties but also the desires of the current conjuncture. To be sure, the figure of the state cycles through Redémar narratives. But the state is an abject figure, one that has long frustrated, blocked, and stood in the way of citizen desire. When Redémar was shut down, the newspapers were full of antistate rhetoric, and there was a protest march in Lomé against the state’s intervention. Moreover, the image propagated by Radio Trottoir of the president of the country investing in ReDéMaRe was that of a state actor investing as a private citizen. I read Redémar as, among other things, a fantasy of state abolition. A week after Redémar was shut down, an article appeared in the Lomé newspaper Le Rendez-Vous titled “Corruption au sommet! Le sort de ReDéMaRe entre le conseil des ministres et les dessous de table” (Corruption at the Top! The departure of ReDéMaRe between the council of ministers and what lies under their table). The article was a diatribe against the state and

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its ministers, who, it suggests, are a band of crooks who were paid off to shut down Redémar—perhaps by the international community or perhaps so that they could take their own cuts from Redémar coffers: Togolese have traversed an unparalleled misery. . . . Redémar brought happiness in this desert of misery . . . allowing people to raise their heads above the crowd and make their way again. . . . None of the investors took Redémar to court. . . . None complained of losing their money. . . . Why shut it down? Why not put Redémar to the test—give it 6 months and see what it can do. . . . The Togolese people are like a lost dog. Without a master, he is left to fend for himself. . . . But when this dog is pursued he will turn around and bite back. . . . Some will say that we’re playing the Devil’s Advocate because we’re on the take. But we have no personal interest in defending this network.8 We are not defending Redémar but the life of over 46,000 homes. This business is no longer that of a single entrepreneur. It is that of the people.

Coda Throughout 2011, the joke on the street was that “Redémar would soon redémar.” (Is this not an illustration of Achille Mbembe’s [1992] insight in one of his early articles on the postcolony that postcolonial power on the streets of West Africa is met with utter cynicism and raucous laughter at every step?) Then, in December 2012, as if willed back to life by the divinatory powers of the pavement, this money machine reemerged with a new organizational structure and a dreamy new name: Marché de Crédit en Nature Perenne (MCNP; “Perennial Credit Market,” “Unending Credit Line”). Captured by the promise of (still) impossibly high dividends (180 percent a year), five thousand investors stepped forward within a month to deposit their cash. The state also took 20 percent, its quid quo pro for allowing Redémar-MCNP to reopen its doors. Predictably, state cooperation didn’t produce a positive reappraisal so much as generate more cynicism and laughter—namely, over how the state had now figured out a “legal” way to plunder Redémar for profit. MCNP’s organizational structure is more rhizomatic than its predecessor’s. No longer top-down and centralized—Redémar cycled all decisions

8. This latter reference—to paying off the press—represents an interesting truth claim in a climate in which seemingly anything and anyone can be bought for a price. It refers here to the fact that certain journalists were rumored to have been paid off by Redémar—and that the press had become its propaganda machine.

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and cash flow through a single office—MCNP is run as a franchise, with “bureaus” in quartiers throughout the city that are each operated and partially owned by local entrepreneurs. Decentralization thus gives MCNP new visibility in neighborhoods, further solidifying its populist persona. For me, the most interesting aspect of Redémar’s new physiognomy is that investor identity is now tied to a biometric system of smart cards and fingerprint verification, the first of its kind in Lomé. To gain access to one’s account and withdraw earnings (or to receive food via the in-kind option), members insert their thumbs into digital readers at one of the neighborhood centers. Needless to say, this talk-of-the-town identity system is deeply performative, giving Redémar-MCNP renewed cachet and visibility (by adding the latest digital technology to its museum of objects). But ironies abound: while concretized—made material—through the fingerprint and fingerprint technology, identity is rendered into the most abstract and virtual of registers—recorded digitally and stored as information in a databank. Moreover, while biometric membership aims to prevent fraud and secure an identity that is singular and real, it does so in the name of a scheme that pulls money from a hat—fake money for real members, as it were. Note, too, that value manipulation is going on throughout the new system (thus returning us to the issues of commensurability and fluctuating value with which I opened this chapter). Rejiggering occurs not only in the large sense, in which Ponzi schemes produce profit from thin air— borrowing from Peter to pay Paul—but also in ways more available to the public eye. Thus, after paying out on schedule for the first five months of 2013, MCNP announced in May that it was “reevaluating” its operations and temporarily converting all cash to in-kind payments, instructing members to retrieve their monthly returns at designated food stores around town. But the prices of rice, oil, and condiments at these boutiques were dramatically marked up, reducing returns by at least one-third.9 Members saw through the scam immediately, and for the first time there was serious grousing on the street. In closing, I want not only to draw attention to the slippery nature of value and identity in this house of mirrors—to commensurability’s and identity’s volatility and “temporariness” (Mbembe, chapter 15)—but also to return to the temporalities of Ponzi economics and desire. If Ponzi (like Pentecostal and post–Cold War) time is miraculous time—punctuated and 9. Thus 75 CFA francs (US$150) spent on food at one of MCNP’s boutiques could be bought for 50 CFA francs (US$100) elsewhere.

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nonlinear—it also aims to replace (sordid) pasts with (more hopeful) futures, conjuring an end time when finance capital delivers returns through investment alone. And yet, despite their disavowal of pasts—ones that are variously dictatorial, economically precarious, and sinful—the Togolese remain nostalgic for a time when piracy and fakes were not the order of the day and when the (dictatorial) state provided jobs and a modicum of value commensurability. Trapped by such ambivalent, even schizophrenic, longings and temporalities, the Togolese embrace of Ponzi economics—of its attempt to purchase a new future—ought to be read less as misrecognition and more as a register of popular desire’s frustration with the temporariness of an ever-abject present.

NINE

Entangled Postcolonial Futures: Malagasy Marriage Migrants and Provincial Frenchmen JENNIFER COLE

To examine the question of African futures, it is crucial to consider the perspective from which that future is imagined. African and European imaginings of the future have long been implicated in one another, the two continents existing as the conditions of each other’s possibility through mutual, but unequal, appropriation. Wrongheaded yet amazingly persistent, European ideas held that Africa stood outside of history as the dark continent to which Europe would bring the light of reason, history, and progress (see Hegel 1956 [1899]; Ba 2007; for critical engagements, see Gassama 2008; Mbembe 2008).1 Europe supposedly embodied the pinnacle of social and cultural evolution; Africa figured as a place that was “developmentally delayed” and in need of catching up (Ferguson 2006; Mudimbe 1988). From this perspective, the social institutions, cultural values, and political forms that characterized Europe quite literally were Africa’s future. European colonization of Africa was supposed to jump-start that process, even as politically and economically, Europe retained its position of power and control (Ferry 1897). Leaders of African independence movements subsequently tried to reclaim specifically African futures. But the years of contact and colonial rule had left their mark. The very form of the nation-state, through which 1. On a visit to Dakar in 2007, then French president Nicolas Sarkozy echoed Hegel when he stated, “The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history. . . . They have never really launched themselves into the future.” Sarkozy made this statement in his speech at Dakar’s main university, leaving many dignitaries opened-mouthed. “The African peasant only knew the eternal renewal of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words,” he said. “In this realm of fancy . . . there is neither room for human endeavor nor the idea of progress” (Ba 2007).

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modern African leaders sought to formulate a program of political selfdetermination, was inherited from the colonial encounter and modeled on European ideas. Like many former colonial subjects, urban Africans, schooled during the colonial period and in the following decades when Western-led development projects were ubiquitous, yearned to attain an economic standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed in Europe. Each continent’s imagined future rested on an assumption of a division between the two places, part of a more general tendency to imagine and organize the world in terms of culturally discontinuous homogenous units (Glassman 2011; Malkki 1992). In practice, of course, people and their histories mixed, even as competing political communities tried to incorporate others in ways that erased the traces of those interactions. European colonies became a kind of laboratory where the “inclusions and exclusions built into the notions of citizenship, sovereignty, and participation were worked out” (Stoler and Cooper 1997: 3). By introducing new social practices and ways of categorizing the population, diverse metropolitan actors transformed not only colonial subjects but their own societies as well. “The colony was not a mere extension of the modern world,” Comaroff and Comaroff note. “It was part of what made that world modern in the first place” (1992: 293). Today it is widely recognized that the entanglements created during the colonial period have changed and grown more complex with time. Nowhere is this entanglement more visible than with respect to France and her former African colonies. During the colonial period, the French government instituted a division between citizens and subjects; unlike citizens who enjoyed a full set of rights, subjects were bound by a set of restrictive laws referred to as the indigénat. Although assimilationist French colonial policy promoted the idea that colonial subjects could eventually become French citizens if they adopted the language and cultural norms of metropolitan France, the distinctions made between metropolitan and French populations, compromised this promise of enfranchisement and inclusion (Balibar 2004; Wilder 2005). Not surprisingly, the process of decolonization in the French empire was especially protracted. And France has continued to shape the economic and political fates of many of its excolonies even forty years after the victories of African independence movements (Cooper 2009). As more former colonial subjects seek to move to the French metropole, French and African futures grow increasingly entangled in ways that both draw on and transform this shared past. Given their entangled histories, it should come as no surprise that the forms that future will take, and what role people who come from France’s

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former colonies in Africa will play in it, remain deeply contested. Since the early 1990s, France has experienced growing threats to its sovereignty, which many perceive as threats to long-standing, highly valued French ways of life. Increasing globalization and European integration, on the one hand, threaten France from without. Meanwhile, events like the youth riots that took place across the banlieu—urban ghettos located on the outskirts of major cities—in 2005 or the terrorist attacks that occurred in 2015 emerged as internal threats. These types of events have also drawn attention to new kinds of racialized boundaries within French society (D. Fassin 2010). Recent French administrations have reacted, in part, by patrolling external boundaries, especially by trying to block the flow of legal and illegal immigration. They have proliferated and tightened laws that regulate entry into France and the acquisition of French citizenship (Ferran 2008). To avoid these laws, many migrants to France seek loopholes in the government’s policy of family reunification, a policy that is based on the premise that having a family is a universal human right but one that is always managed by particular states to their own ends. Over the last ten years, and particularly during President Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency between 2007 and 2012, the French administration made family reunification ever more difficult, arguing that immigration should be “chosen” (choisi) rather than “suffered” (subi). The logic is that because migrants initiate the legal process of family reunification, it is suffered by the French, rather than “chosen” according to the needs of the national economy (see Cette France-là 2010). Successive administrations have also increasingly portrayed the differences between the categories of citizen and migrant in sexualized, racialized, and religious terms. During the 1970s, the quintessential migrant was the lonely male. Today, the quintessential migrant is female (Cette France-là 2010). This shift in focus partly results from the changing world economy and greater numbers of female migrants. It is also the product of the current French migration regime in which exceptional appeals for citizenship may be granted if a person is subject to culturally, racially, and religiously marked violence, like forced marriage (E. Fassin 2010; Ticktin 2011). The effect of these state policies is to “create and maintain a racialized post-colonial nation-state, where minorities are named and rendered visible in French society primarily by taking on the form of gendered and racialized victims” (Mbembe 2009; Ticktin 2011: 156). From this perspective, ex-colonials are incorporated into the metropole, but only when their sexual practices and racial origins mark them as constitutive outsiders. Rather than focusing attention on how the French state implements its categories to restrict or control immigration, especially from its former

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African colonies, this chapter moves in a complementary direction by focusing on the people who are subject to its laws. I focus particularly on the entangled futures that emerge through transnational marriages between coastal Malagasy women and the Frenchmen who marry them. Malagasy women marry Frenchmen because they believe that the only way they can achieve the prosperity integral to their ideas of what it means to have future is to leave Madagascar and live in France. Frenchmen less explicitly frame their marriages to Malagasy women in terms of “having a future.” Still, these men are aware of their own comparatively marginalized position within French society as well as France’s diminishing position in the global world order. They too sense that to build a satisfying future life, they have to expand their horizons. By drawing from their pasts and adapting them to their present circumstances to create new personal futures, these couples contribute to new collective futures as well. I focus on how Malagasy women deploy their gendered and racial attributes in order to simultaneously fulfill the men’s needs and adapt to the constraints imposed on them by French immigration regulations. Tracing out the mundane ways through which women seek to build their futures, it becomes apparent that in their efforts to adapt to state categories, these immigrant wives and the men who seek them out also give these categories new kinds of embodied substance. And as they create and give meaning to the notion of “having a future,” they also contribute to the renewal and reproduction of the lower echelons of French provincial society. By marrying these Frenchmen and contributing to the regeneration of provincial French communities, these women also contribute to the formation of a new, racialized French working class.

The View from Madagascar: Looking toward Metropolitan France Today, many women in small towns and cities on Madagascar’s coast say that they want to marry a Frenchman and move to France because “there is no avenir” in Madagascar, a complaint they’ve had for the last twenty years. What does it mean for women to say that there is no avenir in Madagascar and even to borrow the French word? In part, it implies that one can no longer live in the same place where one’s ancestors lived. According to one common view of how the past and future come together in the present that I frequently encountered during my fieldwork in eastern Madagascar, descendants build a future by living as their ancestors lived (Cole 2001). In practice, this means farming the same patch of land, living in the same

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house, and maintaining the same ancestral tombs as their parents and grandparents did. By engaging in these activities, descendants remember their ancestors and give them power. In turn, ancestors are supposed to use that power to bless their descendants and make them prosper. When blessed by their ancestors, living descendants enjoy health, prosperity, and many children. They are able to amass wealth and grow webs of dependents around them—to “flourish” (vanona), as the east coast Malagasy I knew put it. This hope of ongoing growth and flourishing captures what it means to have a future. Yet how one achieves growth is, again, partly a matter of perspective. Many east coast Malagasy imagine that their ancestors want their descendants grouped around them, bearing children and farming fields, but actual, living people have never been able to make their futures by remaining fixed in place. Instead, they have often moved to new places and adopted new, foreign practices. As in the Cameroonian case depicted by Geschiere and Socpa, these Malagasy also associate movement with the future as people leave home in search of better fields and new opportunities. Since the colonial period, some Malagasy have left home to work in the military or gone to school in the regional capital. Others have sought work on plantations or been dispatched to various towns throughout the island as part of their employment in the colonial, and now postcolonial, government. No matter where they have gone or what new practices they have adopted, they have typically sought to reconnect with the past embodied in their ancestors. To be without a past, which in local terms means to be without ancestors, is to be no better than a slave: the definition of a slave, according to the Malagasy, is someone who is “lost,” has no connections to their ancestors (Bloch 1993 [1971]; Cole 2001; Feeley-Harnik 1984; Graeber 2007). Many different cultural practices express the importance of movement with connection: for example, when peasants go out to farm new, unclaimed land, they usually eventually try to perform a cattle sacrifice. During the cattle sacrifice, they invoke their ancestors, thereby symbolically rooting those ancestors in the land, a ritual act that brings their ancestors with them. So, too, do those who move away often seek to return to their ancestral land in old age; at the very least, their bones are often brought back to the ancestral tomb if they die elsewhere—an act that is widely considered to be a primary moral imperative (see Bloch 1971). In the past, men who left their ancestral land gained fame and glory if they returned wealthy. But their wandering also meant that they ran the risk of being “lost,” unable to rejoin the ancestral tomb and thus unable to be remembered as an ancestor, at least by their descendants who remained

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at home. To build a future characterized by growth, then, means to move forward—or to spread geographically outward—while still retaining ties to the ancestral past rooted in a particular geographical locale. While rural Malagasy today are still unlikely to look to Europe or European ways of life for models of how to build a future, the notion of “overseas” (andafy) has long loomed large as a source of inspiration for urbanites. Their current fascination with foreign commodities and practices has roots in the precolonial period, when Malagasy people eagerly interacted with traders, pirates, explorers, and European missionaries as a way to gain foreign goods and skills and thereby build their own wealth and prestige. Since the colonial period, urbanites have simultaneously looked to France for their models of consumption and material development, even as they feared that adopting those models would lead to the loss of Malagasy identity (Cole 2010). To navigate this tension, they have often sought to localize foreign practices in distinctively Malagasy ways. They have also used various foreign commodities and practices in their efforts to build social distinctions with one another. For example, during the early colonial period, elite students who attended Christian mission schools adopted French fashions, certain aspects of French family life, and French material culture in their everyday lives in order to signal their modernity and improve their social status, thereby contributing to the formation of the national elite. Their goal was to achieve their own version of a Europeanized lifestyle within Madagascar: they still maintained connection with their ancestral past because this future was set in Madagascar and because it entailed simultaneously adopting new practices and continuing to practice the rituals through which their ancestors were created and remembered. Similarly, during the 1970s and 1980s, the Malagasy built their futures by selectively borrowing foreign ideas and practices, this time in the form of state socialism. Madagascar’s socialist government proudly touted a future that the Malagasy would build free of Western imperialism, though urbanites continued to avidly consume Western products in order to create local social distinctions and signal their political sensibilities.2 Despite the continued power of “overseas” to evoke a distant place from which new things arrive, most urbanites sought to borrow practices from elsewhere to develop and promote their growth at home. A new pattern emerged in the 1980s, when the economic reforms insti-

2. But in a newly independent Madagascar, those images, objects, and practices often originated in the United States—whether the cowboy movies or the styles of African Americans— rather than the former colonial power.

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tuted by the IMF devalued Madagascar’s currency and profoundly restructured the economy. As the buying power of the Malagasy Franc (later to become the Malagasy ariary) deteriorated, previously successful ways of building a future that had emerged at the end of the colonial period—for example, going to school, getting a degree, and then finding secure work as a government employee—were harder to achieve for aspiring urbanites. Generally, urbanites found it difficult to amass the material resources that enabled them to create families and support dependents. This scarcity, in turn, made the exchanges that bound people to one another, and through which they sought to extend families and ancestries forward in time, difficult to enact. Though the strain on families ramified through many relationships, including between parents and children or among siblings, the tensions manifested most visibly in the context of husband-wife relationships. While it had long been the case that older men, and particularly those with resources, took younger women as mistresses and wives, often leaving women to raise children alone, poverty exacerbated these longstanding tensions in gender relations (see Cole 2010). Women perceived themselves to be, and likely were, abandoned more frequently and left with fewer resources: they felt unable to flourish in the ways they had learned to expect. Urbanites also gained a sharper awareness of their relative poverty as the new post-1990s global economy brought with it new media (the Internet, foreign television) and new social actors (tourists, NGOs, and foreign investors). These changes also brought with them a new future horizon that was hitherto not readily contemplated: leaving Madagascar, the island of the ancestors, and moving to France. Primarily because of gender ideals emphasizing that women should follow their husbands while men should accumulate wealth in people and things at home, it is now mainly Malagasy women who pursue this option.3 Coastal Malagasy women traditionally gain resources not only through farming and trading but also through the artful management of their intimate ties to men. Not only is it normal, polite, and decent for a man to give his lover money or gifts in return for sex and care, since doing so signals love and appreciation (see Cole 2009; 2010), but women also usually control the flow of resources within households. Consequently, women 3. Some Malagasy also claim that it is easier for Malagasy women to find French husbands than for Malagasy men to find French wives. While this may be partially true, the preponderance of women over men who pursue this strategy is also clearly tied to local gender ideals and ideas about intermarriage. In many other francophone countries, including Cameroon and Senegal, both men and women adopt this strategy (see Johnson-Hanks 2007; NeveuKringelbach 2016).

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have long drawn on their intimate relations with men to amass resources, increase their social status, and develop networks of their own: it is what they are taught to do from the time they are small. A common pattern among urbanites, at least in the early postindependence period, was for men to work outside the home and turn their wages over to their wives, who could then use the money at their discretion. This complex intertwining of sex, love, material resources, and gendered forms of power is one reason Madagascar’s declining economy tore at the fabric of families: men had fewer resources yet continued to share them with many women. When they could, women responded to these circumstances by looking for new ways to achieve the flourishing they desired. And with the influx of both foreigners and new media that took place in the 1990s, they have increasingly sought to marry Frenchmen. The Malagasy sometimes refer to these women as koresy, from the Malagasy word for “correspondent,” since they often meet their husbands via letter or Internet-mediated correspondence; they are also often referred to as vadimbazaha, a word that means “the spouse of a European,” which is also the term I adopt here. In the past, many Franco-Malagasy couples lived in Madagascar (see Bois 1997; Tisseau 2011). Since the 1990s, continuing economic and political instability has meant that most couples choose to live in France instead.4 Women’s fantasies of life in France combine their understanding of what it means to be a vadimbazaha in Madagascar and their imagination of how French people live. In coastal Madagascar, the title of vadimbazaha has long been synonymous with status and power (Bois 1997). The vadimbazaha in Madagascar are often married to men who work for foreign companies and enjoy a privileged expatriate status; consequently, they can live far more extravagantly there than they could in Europe. Many own large villas and command a retinue of servants: maids, nannies, a security guard, possibly even a chauffeur. Women seeking French husbands, as well as the women’s extended families, imagine their futures in France to be similarly luxurious. Images of the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysees, buildings in Paris, or Versailles taken from movies, television shows, advertisements,

4. Women find Frenchmen in bars or hotels when men travel to Madagascar or through family connections, marriage agencies, or the Internet. Most of these women have completed a few years of high school, though a few also have some college education. Although their proximate motivations for seeking French husbands vary, in almost all cases, the women who seek out Frenchmen have already experienced failed love affairs or marriages in Madagascar, as the case of Laurencia that I discuss illustrates; many already have children. They know that locally, many men are likely to view them as less desirable and that they therefore have fewer opportunities to secure households of their own.

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and history books intertwine and embellish the perceptions that women form from their local experiences to create an image of life in France as one of untold luxury. One marriage migrant remarked to me, “I thought France was the red carpet and that you just sat around all day painting your nails.” Women see marriage to a Frenchman as salvation from poverty and a way to attain the flourishing that enables them to have a future. It is also a cause for family pride and celebration because families expect that the resources that their daughters obtain through the relationships will flow, at least in part, to them. Some Malagasy women even liken marriage to a Frenchman and the acquisition of French citizenship to a quasi-sacred gift of life. Spurred by such dreams, around ten thousand Malagasy women married Frenchmen and migrated to France between 1995 and 2009 (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies 2011). Draconian efforts by the French state to limit immigration notwithstanding, these women continue to enter France in smaller numbers as brides today.

Truncated French Futures and the Predicaments of Frenchmen Malagasy women could not hope to attain this new future, however, if the economic, political, and social changes taking place within France had not also made it harder for certain Frenchmen to “have a future,” helping create a group of prospective husbands willing to seek out Malagasy wives. What might it mean to “have a future” in France, and how does it relate to these men’s choices? In classic mid-twentieth-century terms, it meant imagining one’s life according to a classically modernist narrative of increasing prosperity and progress. In the period after World War II, France underwent a period of rapid economic growth and industrialization. Supported by a booming economy and a strong, centralized welfare state, most French people imagined their life courses in terms of an ordered sequence of schooling, marriage, employment, and then state-funded retirement. Provincial, especially rural, France signified ambivalently in this narrative, sometimes representing a supposedly authentic French past and at other times representing a particularly French way of engaging with modernity (Peer 1998; Rogers 1987; 2000). Rural, agricultural areas especially also became a place where it was hard for some men to have a future, in the sense of growing more prosperous, raising a family, and being cared for in old age. During the second half of the nineteenth century, and accelerating across the twentieth, many people left the countryside and moved to the city to take up jobs in industry, service, or public administration. The

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urbanization and economic growth that took place in the mid-twentieth century valorized urban life and stigmatized those who worked the land (Bourdieu 2008). More than most others, male peasants suffered from this set of social and economic changes. In the context of rising prosperity—in which French citizens enjoyed considerable benefits, including the sacred August vacation and comparatively shorter work weeks—peasant men, whose work was hard and dirty and didn’t earn much money, made unappealing marriage partners. Women, who could more easily enter growing service industries, had more opportunities to leave rural areas and move to the cities, leaving behind men who were often the youngest sons of their families and were expected to care for their aging parents (Bourdieu 2008; Jegouzo 1991; Perrot 1980). Many families with small, rural farms found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, despite state subsidies. Without a wife and the possibility of offspring, their means of livelihood increasingly outmoded, these men feared becoming obsolete. While aging peasant bachelors have been in search of wives for some time, they have been joined by older divorcés from modest professions: builders, taxi drivers, bakers, tree trimmers, and low-level government employees. These men, too, face an uncertain future. In part, they fear they will find themselves old and alone—a result of the increasing divorce rates in the 1980s and 1990s and judges’ tendency, particularly in the 1980s, to give custody of children to women, leaving the men alone. They may also worry that their retirement funds will be insufficient to offer them the kind of old age they had hoped for. Marrying a Malagasy woman offers an appealing solution to problems ranging from loneliness and the need for everyday care to the fear that one will not have descendants to ensure one’s posterity. For both of these groups, this is the story of more than a personal future or even a familial future; it is also the story of emergent social and cultural futures and the creation of a rural postcolonial social formation, as well. The way these men seek to transform their present lives and build their futures takes them back, circuitously, to the colonial past.

Colonial Cartographies of Desire and Postcolonial Entanglements Malagasy women and Frenchmen are drawn together through “cartographies of desire” (Pfleugfelder 1999), sedimented conventions and practices that emerged over the course of the colonial period in which intermarriage between Frenchmen and Malagasy women figured prominently. Although Madagascar occupies a relatively small place in the French colonial

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imaginary compared to Algeria or Indochina, it has long been seen as a place where relationships between Frenchmen and Malagasy women are easy to establish and common (Galibert-Ratsiorimihamina 1997; Tisseau 2014). Gauguin did not paint his famous island girls there, but he might well have. Many men also remember learning about Madagascar in their youth, whether from the exotic images on stamps that soldiers sent home from their trips to the edges of the French empire or through the French history books they read in school. Contemporary circuits of tourism, including sex tourism, further inform their amorous longings. Against the cultural pathologies attributed to Muslim women and men, the Malagasy are often portrayed—and portray themselves—as “kind” and “easy,” especially in comparison to immigrants from the Maghreb. As one husband, a veteran who had fought in the Algerian war, remarked to me, “Malagasy don’t make trouble,” by which he meant that unlike North Africans, they do not create visible social unrest. Importantly, the majority of Malagasy women identify as Catholics. Their simultaneous foreign origins, physical appearance, shared colonial legacy, and practice of a familiar Catholicism make them alluring, exotic, and familiar all at once. Even so, Africanness and African sexuality signify ambivalently: the directors of the marriage agencies I spoke with said that most Frenchmen would not marry an African woman as a first choice. They argued that most men prefer native-born, white Frenchwomen because they want someone of roughly the same social status—a sentiment that men’s families often shared. Drawing from widely circulating state discourse (Le Monde 2009), many also assume that while Frenchmen marry these women to gain care, sex, companionship, love, and possible posterity, African women marry these men only to get citizenship papers, obtain wealth, and run away. Frenchmen, according to this narrative, want a better present and a future, while Malagasy women only want to use Frenchmen to gain access to citizenship and then build their futures elsewhere. To navigate this tension and carve a place for themselves in their husbands’ communities, women selectively racialize their reproductive, sexual, and caring labor.

Gendered Essentialisms and Racial Seductions In order to attract men and prove their moral respectability, Malagasy women deploy a racialized femininity that they develop in counterpoint to what they imagine Frenchwomen to be like as wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. Josephine, for example, explained to me that “Malagasy women have a gentleness, a sweetness. Frenchwomen talk back too much.

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We Malagasy women, we tolerate more in our men. We’re family oriented, and we respect men. We bring these Frenchmen ambiance and serenity. We have our Malagasy culture, and we keep our familial culture even as we adapt.” Many Malagasy women also claim that, contrary to the narrative that African women seek French husbands only for material gain, they are, in fact, less materialistic, more thrifty, and more family oriented than their French counterparts. They argue that given these traits, they are better suited than Frenchwomen to make good wives, especially given the modest means of the men they marry. At the same time that these women foreground their racialized femininity, however, they also engage in “whitening practices.” What I am calling “whitening practices” refers to concrete marriage and childbearing choices and selective investments among kin that orient toward what they see as their future lives in France but grow out of practices with a long history in Madagascar. During the colonial period, coastal women sought out European husbands in part because they wanted métisse, or mixed-race, daughters. As one woman told the colonial commission on mixed-race children, “To have a child by a white man is a precious advantage.  .  .  . When the child turns out to be a girl, if she is beautiful, when she is older she too will find a European and continue to help her mother” (see Decary 1938). Similarly, upwardly mobile coastal men who made their way into the colonial or postcolonial administration sought fairer-skinned women of either Merina or Chinese origin in order to “make beautiful” (mahatsara taranaka) their descendants and cement their social positions. There is even an east coast proverb that alludes to this strategy and the dangers that accompany it, offering a Malagasy version of “I told you so.” In the scenario to which the proverb responds, an ambitious coastal man tells his parents he wants to marry a lovely, light-skinned Merina girl. The Merina, who inhabit central Madagascar, conquered much of the east coast during the nineteenth century. In many coastal areas, Merina are perceived as treacherous, the kind of people who only pursue their own interests. Moreover, in many coastal families, it is taboo to marry a person of Merina origin. The parents tell their son that despite the woman’s beauty, it would be a bad idea to marry her, but he does so anyway. In the event, the woman betrays him, and his parents say, “It was Kamisy’s desire” (Sitrapo Kamisy). The proverb indicates the long-standing nature of whitening practices. It also alludes to the implicit dangers of betrayal and subsequent social humiliation that such marriages carry. Women elaborate similar racial strategies in France when they bear children with white Frenchmen: they seek to improve their descendants and,

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through them, their ancestries. Even when women end up separating from the men they initially marry, they usually remarry other white Frenchmen rather than other Malagasy or African men who have acquired French nationality. The goal of familial whitening also shapes how they select which Malagasy kin to bring to France, often explicitly choosing to adopt children who are comparatively light skinned. For example, one woman married a retired French customs agent. Having no children of her own, she went on to adopt her nephew and find French husbands for three of her nieces. Her cousin, who had also married a Frenchman, described the selection process: NANAH:

Her brother, Charles, he has tons of children in the country. So they

picked the prettiest ones. If you saw this one girl, you know she’d be worth a lot. She has a body like this (runs her hands over her hips). If you saw her! JENNIFER: NANAH:

They deliberately chose the prettiest one? How do they choose?

She is whiter than I am! She’s tall! She is only fifteen, but she’s already

five foot six inches. They put her in the Lycee Français [to train her]. Franceline chooses all the pretty girls in the family and put them there. Her sister in town teaches French, and they sent the girl to live with her. That way, as soon as they find a vazaha to marry her, she’s ready.

For one of the darker-skinned girls, however, the aunt only managed to find a Comorian man from Mayotte who had French nationality—a step up the matrimonial ladder but, from the girl’s perspective, not nearly as appealing. Disappointed at the sight of her prospective husband, the girl pleaded with her aunt, “Mother, why can’t I have a handsome, white husband, like you?” to which her aunt tartly replied, “You’ll stay where you’re put.” The aunt clearly enacted a strategy that was keyed to what she saw as the relative value of her niece’s physical attributes, the demands of the marriage market, and the future needs of the family to have connections in several different places. Read in tandem with women’s efforts to foreground their racialized sexuality, and what they proudly refer to as their familial values, it appears that women seek to simultaneously “lose” their race and “keep” what they see as the attributes of Malagasy culture. Yet such a distinction is difficult to maintain, given the close connections between notions of race and culture. And from the perspective of a certain strand of French popular thought, it is not easy to lose the traces of foreign racial origin. After all, a woman who is visibly dark skinned is referred to as typée, a word that harkens back to colonial categorizations of racial “types,” while a classically good-looking

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French woman may be referred to as racée—thoroughbred or pedigreed. The vadimbazaha deliberately play upon these racial hierarchies, tinkering with their families’ makeup through marriage and childbearing.

Rooting in Place through Labor Contrary to their fantasies of spending days putting on nail polish and visiting the Eiffel Tower, women find themselves having to engage in what they and others see as lower-class forms of work. In Madagascar, people seek to build their social status and create new futures through their accumulation of resources and their ability to share that wealth with others. A family member past childhood who doesn’t contribute to the household epitomizes unwanted, stigmatized dependency. These interlinked notions of labor and the ability to support others with human dignity and flourishing take on even more urgency in the French context because right-wing politicians and popular discourse alike portray immigrants as taking advantage of state welfare and local resources. Malagasy wives respond by proudly proving their worth through labor. These women also dearly want to work because they know that simply marrying Frenchmen is not enough to achieve their goals. To be sure, they want their relationships with their husbands to give them a home, the benefits of French citizenship, and economic security. But they are also used to controlling their own incomes, having often already worked in Madagascar. One common way for a woman to indicate that she is suffering in a marriage is to say that she only “touches” money either when she slots the two-euro piece into the deposit box on the shopping cart or when her husband hands her his credit card to pay for groceries at the store. By contrast, women want and expect to control money of their own that they can share with their natal families. Yet the jobs Malagasy women find that give them their own disposable wealth also mark them socially as occupying the lower rungs of the French social and economic ladder. Many women work in agriculture, whether on the farms owned by their husbands or, alternatively, alongside other immigrants, students, or retirees who seek seasonal labor on larger farms. Even today, small-holding peasant agriculture requires grueling physical labor yet earns little money. Farmers can hardly ever take vacations because of the need to care for livestock daily: cows need to be milked at exactly the same time every day. Fruit comes ripe at a certain season and will spoil if left too long on the trees. It is a constrained and unglamorous life, which is partly why the men who live on these farms find it difficult to attract wives in the first place.

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To be sure, given their fantasies of what life in France is like, many women are disappointed by the circumstances in which they find themselves. One woman, who ended up on an isolated farm with her retiree husband, sat and wept, calling out to her ancestors that she was doomed and would be lost to them forever, no better than a slave. But most get over their initial sense of shock and disappointment and make do—even thrive. The story of Laurencia and Francis helps illuminate how these couples come together and the way in which they enable each other’s futures. Laurencia came from a town in northeastern Madagascar from whence many vadimbazaha hail. Her younger sister, Veronique, had married a French farmer a few years prior. When Laurencia’s marriage to a Malagasy man ended after she caught him cheating, she decided to seek a Frenchman to marry. Meanwhile, her husband’s aunt approached her sister, who had lived in France for several years. Veronique’s calm and hardworking nature impressed her, the aunt said. She wondered if Veronique knew a girl in Madagascar who might marry her son. Within minutes, Veronique had whipped out a picture of Laurencia, and the women began making arrangements. Francis’s mother and father were of modest means; they spent their adult lives running a farm that Francis’s father had inherited. Francis was the youngest of the three children; he had an older brother and sister. His older brother had shown no interest in farming, gone to technical school, and become an electrician. His sister had married a local man. Francis, however, loved working the land and wanted to inherit the farm. Yet to succeed, he needed a mate with whom to run it. Not inclined to go to discos or get out, he had few ways to meet other women. He had been on the verge of entering into a marriage with a Moroccan woman when his mother, discomfited by the idea of a Muslim daughter-in-law, sought out Veronique for help. When Francis’s mother went looking for a suitable wife for her son, she did so with a keen awareness that without some help, he might never marry. I do not know how Laurencia’s husband, Francis, reacted when he first saw Laurencia’s picture. What I do know is that Francis was keenly aware of how hard it was to maintain the farm and wanted a partner. He paid for her plane ticket to France, and just before her visa expired, they married at the town hall. A few years later, by which time they had also adopted Laurencia’s niece, they held a grandiose, white wedding. Laurencia had experience with agricultural work, which she had done as a young woman before moving to the town. She was energetic and worked hard. Like many women, she went on to participate fully in the life of the farm—milking cows, driving tractors, or picking fruit. Her labor was essential to the suc-

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cess of the enterprise. Much as Laurencia knew that her marriage to Francis had rescued her from a state of continual dependence in Madagascar, he knew that her labor sustained his way of life in France. Though Laurencia happened to marry a farmer and work in agriculture, many other Malagasy women find jobs as domestics or caring for France’s burgeoning elderly population. In the southwest of France, where 30 percent of the population is over the retirement age of sixty, the aging of the population feels palpable in rural gatherings. Many old people live in retirement homes. Others continue to live in their own homes, their relative independence fostered by French social security, which partially covers the cost of people coming to their houses to feed, bathe, and generally care for them. Much as Filipina, Caribbean, and Latina women predominate in the care industry in the United States, African migrants change diapers, feed, and bathe elderly French people. Such caring labor signifies ambivalently for both the women engaged in it and the general population. Coastal Malagasy women see contact with other people’s excrement and bodily effluvia as polluting: this type of labor is considered to be demeaning. It is the kind of service that only the lowest of the low must endure. Certainly any woman who engages in such intimate care in a family setting—for example, bathing a sick elder or birthing another woman’s baby—expects to be ritually purified. At least some of the elderly French people these women care for feel equally polluted. Having grown up in a time when there were many fewer Africans living in France, they have not acquired a veneer of political correctness and politeness and feel entitled to make overtly racist or rude comments that only accentuate the Malagasy women’s sense that the work is degrading. The vadimbazaha defend their dignity, arguing that any work carries intrinsic value and is far better than living off welfare. They claim that as people who come from an ancestor-venerating culture, they bring a needed element of humanity and compassion to the French elderly who were abandoned by their own children. The ways that women sustain French families and thereby build a place for themselves in these communities contains a powerful historical irony. The Malagasy—the coastal Malagasy in particular—were renowned for their reluctance to work for the French colonizers (Feeley-Harnik 1984; 1991). The French had to enact more labor laws in Madagascar than in any other colony to try to manage the Malagasy economy (Thompson and Adloff 1965: 445; cited in Feeley-Harnik 1984: 6). Even now, when young girls from the countryside often seek work as maids in town, their wealthier Malagasy employers complain bitterly about how they never stick with the work and leave the moment they are asked to do something they do

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not like. Today, Frenchwomen no longer want to marry peasants, and they increasingly compete in the labor market, contributing to new family arrangements and new social and cultural formations. They can do so in part because other women from poorer countries come to take their place (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). Shifting the location of where one could build a future brought about what sixty-five years of direct political control over Madagascar could not. Coastal Malagasy women contribute to the social reproduction of the French population through their intimate labor in France. Their labor on local landscapes enables these women to root themselves in a figurative French social landscape, carving a place for themselves at the edges of provincial life.

Building Futures by Linking to the Past To achieve flourishing and thereby make an avenir, as I’ve suggested, it is not enough simply to acquire French kin, whiten one’s descendants, or to build a place in the local economy through labor. After all, to root oneself entirely in the French landscape would be to lose all connection to Madagascar as well as one’s family and ancestors—to become the social equivalent of a slave. It is no wonder that when one Malagasy woman announced to her father that she was going to move to Europe to marry a Frenchman, he responded by asking, “Why do you want to go and make yourself their slave?” The vadimbazaha seek to reconcile these competing demands by bringing kin to France, on the one hand, and sending resources back to Madagascar, on the other. Bringing people and sending money or goods embody two sides of the same process, since social relations are instantiated and maintained through material exchanges. Most women who move to France already have children in Madagascar, and they always try to bring those children over, usually by having their French husbands “recognize” (réconnaitre) them as their own. Given that many Malagasy women do not record their children in the civil registry at birth, it is easy for a woman to claim that a child has no Malagasy father and that the Frenchman can take his place. Women do not see this process as erasing the children’s Malagasy paternities. To the contrary, they usually maintain relationships with their fathers’ families, prompted by the belief that the children need their paternal ancestors’ blessings. In return, fathers expect that their far-off children will occasionally remember them by sending gifts or money. Women also bring other kin, as well—usually sisters, cousins, mothers, and aunts—in a pattern of racialized, transnational hypergamy. Northern

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east coast Malagasy kinship ideology and practice holds that one should not differentiate among kin, an imperative revealed in kinship terms in which aunts are classified as “little mothers” and nieces and nephews are referred to as one’s children, as well as other practices that imply equality and substitutability. This moral imperative to include, however, is crosscut by gender: the “children of men,” or descendants of brothers, are considered to be more powerful and have more rights than the “children of women” who descend from sisters. As the politics of Malagasy kinship converge with the French politics of gender to make it easier for Malagasy women to go to France, this hierarchy becomes inverted: the “children of women” may be less powerful in traditional Malagasy kin terms, but as French citizens, they are more powerful in terms of the wider global hierarchy. Women, in turn, seek to compensate for their inability to get their brothers to France by bringing their brother’s daughters instead. At the same time, the desire to “make beautiful” descendants means that the moral push toward equality among kin is in constant tension with the politics of color and suitability: women select which kin to favor based on not only their own attachments but also who they think they can “place.” Finding one’s place, a concept that blends ideas of geography and social opportunity, is often shaped by physical appearance: where light skin and straighter hair are seen as more valued and therefore easier to market to men, as the case of Nanah’s cousin illustrated. Female kin move to France and bear children with Frenchmen, contributing to a division among sisters, mothers, and aunts in France and among brothers, nephews, uncles, and fathers in Madagascar. Meanwhile, the flow of resources back home also memorializes and enlivens those relationships, as well as the common ancestors in whom they are rooted. The vadimbazaha further reinvigorate their connections to their ancestors and kin by building houses for themselves or their parents or by beautifying and renewing their ancestral tombs. With her husband’s permission, Laurencia took some of the money that she earned from raising and selling calves for veal and used it to build a house in Madagascar; she also traveled home to hold a sacrifice in her mother’s natal village. Such actions recognize and constitute the power of the past embedded in ancestors. To invest resources in a project signifies its social value: it communicates to others one’s loyalty and commitment to ancestral roots. When women take their limited resources and use them to build houses in Madagascar, when they pay the thousand-dollar plane ticket required to return home, or when they send money from abroad to participate in ancestral ceremonies, they revivify the power of the past and the hold it has over them. It reaffirms their connections to Madagascar. The woman who found herself lost on her el-

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derly husband’s farm in the countryside and called out to her ancestors did so with good reason. But in reaffirming those links, women may also mark themselves as connected more to Madagascar than to France in the eyes of those around them. They must walk a fine line between maintaining the links to their ancestors that they see as part of what enables them to have a future and demonstrating their commitment to life in France.

Conclusion No one can foresee all the consequences of their actions. When Malagasy women imagine their possible futures in France, they draw from the limited knowledge and experience they possess, conjuring up images of France as a place where everyone is rich—at least in comparison to Madagascar. They imagine that they will have new access to material resources and relationships that will enable them to grow and flourish, spreading geographically outward, even as they maintain their connections to Madagascar. Their French husbands, meanwhile, imagine that by marrying a woman from a poor African country and former French colony, they will incorporate these women into the metropole, drawing on their love, care, and labor to build happier futures for themselves in France. For these marriages to occur, however, women have to orient to the categories through which the French state will (grudgingly) recognize their claims and grant them entry and citizenship. These women go to France hoping to become vadimbazaha, a role with a long history in Madagascar. But the moment these women get on the plane that will take them to France—and even before that, when they go to the French consulate to get their visas for entry—they pass, like Alice, through the looking glass. As they come out the other side, they are transformed into marriage migrants: foreigners whom the French believe are trying to game the system of family reunification so as to be able to live in France. Consequently, women soon find that to build meaningful futures for themselves, they must also work to reshape the perceptions of the people around them and on whom they depend. They also have to go where there is, in effect, a need for them— men who want to marry to make their lives less lonely or who need their help or old people who need their care. But the emotional, physical, and even economic needs of the French people these women build relations with are necessary but not sufficient for them to build futures in France. Rather, to really flourish on their terms, they must both sponsor other family members’ migrations and send money home, forging many different kinds of connections back to Mada-

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gascar. The double movement that the vadimbazaha engage in paradoxically both roots them in French families and French socioeconomic landscapes and pulls them back toward Madagascar. Women self-consciously “whiten” their social relations through one set of practices, but they simultaneously reinstate a racial identity as they systematically seek to bring their “nonwhite” children and kin with them. In so doing, these women and the men who marry them revivify and reentangle the complex ties that have long connected France and Madagascar, generating new possibilities. In France, these women help make the futures of older Frenchmen and contribute to the regeneration of rural communities. As they do so, they also give state categories new meanings and historical resonance. The state’s categories of “citizen” and “foreigner,” or the more recent categories of “chosen migration” versus migration that is “suffered,” are only the latest in a long series of ways to define insiders and outsiders in France that draw from a much larger, historically produced field of meanings. By marrying and growing their futures on French soil, the vadimbazaha inadvertently create a future for the category of “African migrant” that resonates with the colonial past, fleshing it out but also giving it new associations. They also generate a place for themselves at the bottom of the French socioeconomic and status hierarchies. By building their futures in France, the vadimbazaha also coconstitute their position as part of a new, racialized French working class—one in which many members are likely to retain their connections to France’s former colonies. Sustaining life and providing a future for their husbands in France also enables the vadimbazaha to contribute to the reproduction of families back in Madagascar. At first glance, and from the perspective of Madagascar, these women’s success in France may perpetuate the idea that the only way to have an avenir is to marry a European man and settle in France. Visiting these women’s families and seeing the way life moves on among their kin at home, however, suggests otherwise. Their kin who remain in Madagascar may complain that they have no future, but they usually continue to get married, have children, build houses, and rebuild their tombs nonetheless. Their continued growth, if not always on the terms that they would like, points to the necessity of having connections with Europe in order to forge a future in Madagascar. It also points to (re)emerging postcolonial hierarchies that are intrinsic to how those futures are made.

TEN

Rough Towns: Mobilizing Uncertainty in Kinshasa ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE

Part One: Inordinate Calculations in City Life My friend and I are sitting in a terrace bar in Ngaliema, a rough town in the city of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, shortly before ten o’clock on a midweek night. The terrace is situated above a lane along which sit small store after bar after store, none with memorable characteristics. Not long after settling into the refreshments, crowds carrying plastic chairs over their heads began to pass. After nearly a hundred people had passed with their chairs, we finally were inclined to ask what was going on. The people at the surrounding tables indicated that these passersby were making their way home after a two-day around-the-clock prayer session at a nearby church. Congregants had to bring their own white plastic chairs. Their uniformity suggested that congregants bought their individual seats as part of some bulk deal. After forty-eight hours focused on prayer, with what we were told were only the sparest of breaks for some water and food, it was understandable that the multitudes seemed a bit wobbly on their feet, suspended in a rush to get home but without the energy to do so. The uniformity of their collective pursuit over the past hours probably accentuated the textures of the street, drawing the returnees’ attention to attractions not obvious to us, for some of the congregants would suddenly pull up to a particular bar, café, food stand, or hawker and put down their chairs with no apparent order. At first, given the little we knew, it was easy to account for these interruptions in the journey home as simply being easily understandable breaks. The terrace at which we were sitting was not in the immediate vicinity of the church, so it was clear that for many, the walk back would be long. After some initial moments of reticence, these small, improvised con-

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vocations became increasingly animated, and the thread of conversation intensified, even as people stayed only a few moments and moved on, moved out of sight, or simply adjusted their location, moving the positions of chairs within the group or to another. Others simply stopped in the middle of the lane, sitting alone and content. A few simply abandoned the chairs altogether or exchanged them for no obvious reasons. The abandoned chairs would be seized in seconds. All their potential uses could not go unnoticed for long. The parade seemed relentless, and we soon began to wonder whether only a single church or prayer service was involved or a special two-day event had been held at several congregations in the area. At some point, we were convinced that we had already spotted certain characters and wondered whether they were pursuing some kind of grand circuit, as if circling some invisible crucible. The white chairs held over black bodies in lines of motion induced a certain hypnotic effect, especially as some in the crowd had not yet been prepared to give up vocalizing the litanies of the past days. Since this was midweek, we were also curious as to how so many people had found the time to devote forty-eight hours to uninterrupted prayer and could now afford additional minutes, approaching hours, in a game of musical chairs, planted here and there. As the uniformity in invoking the divine is sure to precipitate a fair amount of boredom, perhaps many in the crowd were eager for some other readily accessible socializing. As a drinker at the next table remarked, the issue was not so much that they had missed work for a couple of days, if indeed they had it, or most certainly interrupted the busy search for getting by that is incumbent on nearly everyone in this city. Rather, even as they had been gathered in this appeal for divine guidance and intervention—an effort that introduced new thermodynamics into the city—they had been “away” from the city for two whole days. Who knows what could have transpired during this time? This is cruelly ironic, since the hardscrabble struggle for survival seemingly never alters much of anything. Our neighbor at the next table chalked up all the chair business to people taking the opportunity to “catch up.” But indeed if this was the primary motivation—which, given the constant restlessness of seat adjustments, the moving from one miniconvocation to another, and the highly erratic rhythms of entrance and exit, seemed far from certain—then catching up on the situation itself could not be done with a single approach or implantation. Catching up would require people coming at each other, as the sources of information, from different approaches and with different durations. Another drinker at the same table, far ahead of his friend in the num-

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ber of beers consumed, remarked that too much time with God inevitably makes a person lose his or her way and that some had probably forgotten how to get home. Others, he remarked, may not have even had a home, as he heard that some people simply carried their chairs from one prayer service to another, having perfected the arts of both sleepwalking and sleeppraying, and took advantage of the food on offer. Whether or not these were the flippant remarks of inebriation, his sidekick was quick to chime in that with these days spent united in prayer, people’s minds were now more clear as to how to sort out and prioritize their debts—to decide to whom they would pay off certain obligations or, taking advantage of the lingering light of the Lord, whether they would put pressure on debtors to settle up. As the night wore on, with the shaky electricity wavering between off and on, there were as many interpretations as there were designs for the unfolding of this exodus, which, no matter what the extraneous speculations were, was still aimed back home. The hesitation of some to return straight home is not dissimilar to that which Isabelle Stengers refers to as an integral part of all practice—that any action is situated in contexts of shifting implications whose velocities of recombination and even the identification of exactly who or what might be involved poses uncertainties that should be approached with a sense of humility and caution.

The Somewhere between Clarity and Opacity What I call “rough towns” are those heavily populated districts in cities that have to, in many ways, fend for themselves. A rough town seems to be a world of its own in a patchwork of other towns that seemingly make up a larger city, but it is a place where, for all intents and purposes, the city exerts a limited integrative force, where the city itself is a collection of rough towns and is itself a rough town. One aspect of life in a rough town such as Ngaliema that is difficult for both insiders and outsiders is the intense proximity of lives, as well as organic and inorganic matter in various states of composition, making it is seemingly impossible to account for, let alone imagine, a line of progression (De Boeck and Plissart 2006). This is the case, despite the plenitude of available stories about the rise and fall of built environments, social projects, and individual lives. In contrast to the routine, middle-class orderliness that creates the veneer of an endless, stable present, Ngaliema shows its daily wears and tears in ways and in response to events seemingly too numerous and variegated to provide a rational account. The highly visible ways that events impact each other become the arenas of daily interventions. Since there are no “strong narra-

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tives” that steer these “to’s and fro’s” into a readily identifiable direction, some residents depend on “stepping into the middle of things” to see what kinds of advantageous scenarios could be put together. For example, Kinshasa’s markets are full of people, the majority of which are neither buying nor selling anything in particular. Rather, they are present in the market simply to take their chances, to act as if there are deals about to be made, or simply to be the person called upon to be the extra hand or the stranger nobody knows, ready to stand in at a moment’s notice. Rough towns not only show the excess of past use but convey the possibility of an order in conditions where explicit attempts to impose structured orders are too vulnerable to inequities of power, porous interchanges with various externalities, or the absence of an authority that is able to instantiate itself over the long run (Bayat 2009; Cross and Morales 2007; Gervais-Lambony 2003; Goldstein 2004; Konings, van Dijk, and Foeken 2006; Ndjio 2006a). Popular economies—fragmented and overcrowded though they may be —are themselves forms of political contestation, just as the academic accounts about them are replete with arguments about their functions and efficacies (Eckstein 2000; Gooptu 2001; Hickey and Mohan 2008; Hilgers 2009; Lindell 2010; Meagher 2010; Telles and Hirata 2007). They do not necessarily bring a coherent program into view but rather keep things unsettled, even volatile, and as such aim to preclude the foreclosure of possibilities—instead deferring resolution to another time, since the present may render residents at an extreme disadvantage. As such, popular economic practices may connect residents in an unnamed, unrecognized collectivity; they are a tissue of shared relations woven by a shared experience of a “loaded” temporality, an interregnum between destruction and renewal.

Impossible Readings The aforementioned congregants, seemingly hesitant in their return home, have to sort their ways through such a loaded temporality. Even as most have little to work with, few materials and resources to rearrange, and few real diversities to keep in play, an incessant recomposition of their social worlds, reflected in the game of musical chairs, persists despite the absence of any other concrete evidence for it. The quotidian rhythms and scenarios will usually drudge along in the formats in which they have long been familiar. It is not as if the look and the character of their immediate surroundings are remade with any great disjunction—there are few additions

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to the built environment or to economic or social activity. At the same time, there is a paucity of evidence for exactly how that which does remain and persist secures its apparent stability. When city spaces are usually assessed in terms of their continuity or change, it is possible to point to certain “devices,” such land valuation, wages, cadastral, zoning, municipal policy, fiscal frameworks, or censuses, as a series of road marks (Latour and Hermant 2003; Lefebvre 1996). Of course, narratives and records can be compiled that identify certain stabilities of belonging or association— for example, certain households have long resided on particular plots, or parcelles, and these are often subdivided to accommodate more temporary residential stays. Various associations exist, organized around particular ascriptions, loyalties, beliefs, and identities that anchor capacities to represent Ngaliema and other such districts in ways that facilitate predictability and a sense of order. Many residents have had the same occupation (and preoccupations) for most of their urban lives, and as such they “show up” in the same places every day. They buy similar items from steady suppliers and pass their time in the same bars or houses of worship, and as such the districts amass and reflect well-worn “grooves” of individual trajectories. Often, looking at the built environment—the streets, the infrastructure, the buildings—it is possible to read the histories that have been made. At the same time, inhabitants are subject to (and subjectified by) a series of “tipping points” in which everything they must do to put together and reproduce a viable existence potentially undermines it, and as such they must adapt to ruptures and recalibrations of life that go beyond contingency (Barad 2007; Mol 2005). Ways of doing things that otherwise would just fall into place can sometimes slip, lose conviction, or become unthinkingly habitual, raising certain doubts, even panic. The long held assumption about rough towns is that even without formal jobs, governing institutions, and regulations, the exigencies of having to bring about a basic order of things would compel the formation of authority and collaboration. Persons related by kinship and collective ancestry would find their way, in terms of each other, to establishing concrete routes of association and mutual implication that carried with them senses of responsibility and obligation. Regardless of how vague, arbitrary, or indifferent “official things” might be, inhabitants would still know what to do. Yet such enactments of stability and cohesion require the continuous expansion of exteriorities. If, for example, I were to drive a minivan—a job I might have attained from a cousin whose ethnic identity was the critical criteria for his getting job in the first place—it may be expected of me to

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also provide such an opportunity to a nephew or niece. This would mean either dividing my time behind the wheel, finding them a place behind some other wheel, or finding some other places for the “wheels to go.” Of course, there will be “natural cycles” when people come and go, when vacancies open up by virtue of others leaving. But in sectors such as transport, marketing, and informal service work, the usual story is the need to expand spaces of accommodation and maneuver. To stay in place, to maintain some kind of stability, no matter the unit of analysis, expansion requires the elaboration of exteriority (Guyer 2004; Roitman 2005). So while the accomplishments of “social capital” are certainly demonstrated over long periods of time, their very persistence can undermine not necessarily the functionality of social capital but the demarcations among people, things, and spaces that have enabled their self-recognition. In other words, people may have to go a long way out of their way (of doing things, of collaborating) in order to “keep to a straight path.” The maintenance of familial relationships that depend on certain clarities of generational authority, divisions of labor, and practices of responsibility and care may require actions that may not only militate against these clarities but use the performance of them—now dissociated from any substantial underlying “feeling” or conviction—as an instrument to competitively maneuver across relationships and activities that they otherwise might not have access to. Family connections may be plied in ways that intentionally act to delimit possibilities for other family members, yet maintaining “family performances” is necessary, as a kind of conventional currency, in order for these other maneuvers to work.

Economies of Space (and Time) In supposedly “normative” city spaces, there is a “spacing out” of activities, people, places, and things that is authorized by the enfolding of a series of norms into legal and policy frameworks, as well as the use of certain risks—health, safety, environmental—to authorize specific governmental interventions into people’s lives. The differentiation of economic, domestic, recreational, public, private, religious, and civic activities is accomplished through and by spacing. Design elements and the cultivation of elaborate semiotic systems also facilitate the capacity of residents in dense urban environments to switch up performances and expectations as they navigate transitions that may be undertaken across thresholds of intensive proximity (Massey 2005; Read 2006). Such spacings and subsequent differentiations are buttressed by strong property markets and rules of occu-

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pation, as well as recourse to correction if ambiguities and  transgressions take place. At the same time, such spacing out would not be possible if there were not a temporality of repetition in which the repeated iteration of things remains the same, no matter the passage of time or whether the things themselves were the same. What this temporality points to is the same sense of contingency. A situation or thing could always be something that it is not; it need not be what it is (Meillassoux 2007). In urban sensory environments—where behavior is observed, scanned, and scrutinized with such regularity and scope so as to resiliently establish new parameters of normality and threat, so as to anticipate danger in advance—it can often seem that residents are locked into highly prescriptive regimens for how to think about what is possible. Despite all the ways in which space can be augmented, thickened, particularized, and extended, the promise of a flat ontology, in which the city is the basis to keep on going, reaching, and diversifying, falls flat. Everything appears too meaningful; everything is offered up to the possibility of its meaning something. So this sense of contingency, of things not having to be what they are, propels us into the possibility of experiencing all those mundane and differentiated aspects of urban life that we think we know so well as perhaps something else. It also means that in some respects, normal towns and rough towns may not be all that different; the relationship between them may not be simply a “one way street.” In any control system, there will be gaps and time lags, lapses in coverage and disputes over jurisdiction; capacities will be skewed, and many things and places will be objects of discrimination and underdevelopment. Rules will never apply to everyone, and not everyone will adhere to the rules. But for the most part, populations and activities will be functionally “spaced out,” elaborating their exteriors through institutional transactions and pluralizing possibilities for education, training, consumption, leisure, and provisioning. Markets will concretize specializations, niches, and innovations; these will be folded into the reproduction of social units and lifestyles as these, in turn, exert an impact on what is to be expected from the city. “Spacing out” in rough towns such as Ngaliema is certainly not absent, as conventions and the legacies of past practices distribute the emplacement and movement of inhabitants within specific routines and territories. But the amplification of contingencies reiterates the imperative for expansion—as part and parcel of the reproduction of the stability of the social configurations on which residents rely to secure a position within the

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city—and produces an intersection of heterogeneous actors, agendas, maneuvers, resources, and times. The insularity of occupations, households, associations, pathways of movement, and transactions is maintained to the extent to which these are capable of being largely suspended in the operations of the street or the “public” space at any given moment. Things are always passing through each other, particularly in settings where there is limited capacity to separate things out and keep things on their supposedly “designated” paths. There are prolific “interruptions” that not only hold things up in terms of a delay in reaching their final destination but also “hold them up” to be viewed, not as discrete units or activities, but in the “light” produced by their participation in this intersection itself—as if the intersection were a particular process of apprehension. Down the road from Ngaliema in the district of KasaVubu is the rambunctious Marché Gambela market. When overloaded buses pour out of the small lanes surrounding it onto the main road, using all available space to attempt actually accessing the road, all face a kind of gridlock; pedestrians, passengers, and traders all scurry for cover. But they also enter a scene in which many people are taking note of what people are carrying, how much of a particular commodity is loaded onto the rooftop of a bus, or what kinds of things are being transferred from one bus to the other. They take note of how particular goods are being moved from one stall to another or from one stall to a waiting bus. They take note of how particular goods are added to or subtracted from a bundle by another trade or how another deal enters the scene. This “recalibration” may simply be a mask or diversion from the “real” deal. For example, a deal might be made at the end of the day among a group of traders who have conspired to sell rice at an inflated cost and who will use the proceeds to start buying out those who might have privileged access to underinvoicing in the port at Matadi. In other words, at these intersections of “messiness”—where it is not always clear who is in charge, who has the advantage, who is able to head in a certain direction, and even to whom a certain volume of goods might belong—there are no ready devices to predict just how things might turn out. Of course, the mess at the intersection is eventually disentangled as bodies, money, goods, and speech become useless—caught in some indeterminate circulation. Things must land somewhere; they must be put to use somewhere. So eventually, sometime before midevening, Gambela will empty out. Yet no matter how much a trader has made by the end of the day, the reality remains that he or she owes something to someone— creditors, family members, fellow traders, patrons. They need not be paid today, but at least in the abstract, something must be set aside. As such,

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traders look for ways to help fund a last-minute purchase, help cover an urgent debt in return for a favorable volume of a certain good or service, or join the collective purchase of a service, such as protection, expedited delivery, circumvention of tax or duty, or help in funding someone who is traveling and has a good jump on a favorable price of some bulk purchase. These possibilities are only discernible in a particular kind of “light”— from a particular kind of vantage point. And it is this vantage point that is constructed by the intersection of exteriorities looking for their expansionary spaces. These intersecting currents—these activities and lives overflowing onto each other—produce many opportunities for a kind of parasitism in which people simply try to live off the various pragmatics entailed in momentarily trying to sort out the messiness of these intersections. As trading, preaching, policing, politicking, servicing, informing, mediating, reconciling, buying, and selling come together in a mix in which it is sometimes not clear precisely what kind of activity is occurring—simply because they all may be taking place at once and through a variety of actors who are switching their roles at “high speeds”—there are opportunities for many to assume any role they can imagine, in the moment, and see where it takes them. At the same time, the messiness of the intersection and the need to adhere to some kind of coherent way forward means that strictly defensive maneuvers may be of limited value. In other words, in these intersections of heterogeneity in which many different modes of operation are simultaneously enacted—everyone simultaneously trying to buy or sell something, everyone trying to convey a particular objective or history in the midst intermingling aspirations and backgrounds—a certain opportunism becomes the primary vehicle of wading through the complex mixtures. In urban environments where things are weakly “spaced-out,” there will be a great deal of suspicion about complicities, about things not really being what they seem to be. There will be anxieties about being tricked or betrayed, about being drawn into associations and implications over which one has little control. People will worry about being held culpable for things of which they are not aware. They will worry about situations in which they may have little recourse for definitive arbitration and in which the process of trying to “explain” themselves may further arouse suspicion or even be seen as definitive proof of culpability. Circumventing this problem, then, may take the form of actively availing oneself to be used in someone else’s “game” as a means of conscious triangulation. To not stand out at the end of the day, to not be left “holding the bag,” may require a person’s facility to “blend in” to as many scenarios as possible

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so that others cannot get a precise “angle” on him or her for sure and thus remain unsure about the implications of dealing with him or her in a particular way. In the deployment of these multiple hedges, then, it sometimes is impossible to discern who or what is doing what to whom. How far do the implications of a particular argument or agreement travel? Where does it unfold? What impact does a particular event in a particular household, market, church, or bar actually exert? How and upon whom does it ramify?

Uncertainty as Urban Resource In many ways, Kinshasa is an incomplete city, with its swarms of garbage, exposed electric cables, crumbling buildings, chaotic market, and rampant insecurity. Yet it remains very much a city—a city replete in the intensity and scope through which actions and events ramify across physical and social landscapes. It is a city in a constant state of being perturbed, full of productive and debilitating ways in which such oscillations are passed onto and through inhabitants. Of course, there are moments of stasis and boredom. Not everyone who enters the fray knows exactly what to make of it, or with it. There are those who, for whatever reason—family status, individual psychology, disability, gender—get nowhere and are stuck in precarious relationships of dependency and inactivity. For all the inordinate, collective effort to create the semblance of a dynamic life, there is often little more to show for it than simply keeping inhabitants in place. But it is this very oscillation of inhabitants traveling wide and far, and going nowhere; of substantial amounts of money being accrued and lost, invested and wasted that propels inhabitants not to take any representation, image, or view of the city for granted. This uncertainty makes it difficult for residents to get a “handle” on things—makes it difficult to plan and anticipate. A person’s ability to take risks and initiative is usually predicated on him or her having some confidence in what is likely to ensue by virtue of having taken a particular course of action. If the person cannot work out a sense of probability, then he or she will unlikely act in “the dark.” The capacity to represent the immediate future and to anticipate the likely responses of others to one’s actions is critical to civil life—to people working and residing with each other. At the same time, situations in which representations cannot be taken for granted do not obviate the need for initiative. Regardless of individuals’ levels of uncertainty, they cannot stand still. In such situations, it is difficult to maintain a sense of eligibility. In other words, considerations of whether a person possesses the capacities, identity, authority, and

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background that qualify him or her to speak and act in certain ways are set aside. While ascriptions of gender, history of residence, age, and ethnicity continue to be obvious to residents—are continuously kept in view—their applicability to questions about who gets to do and say what to whom is provisionally tempered. The complexity of interrelationships produced by residents seeking various means, games, and associations to keep themselves afloat produce uncertainties in attempts to make clear accounts of what is taking place and the actors involved. These uncertainties generate hesitation in the ways in which residents read things and deal with each other. This hesitation is reflected in circumscriptions of eligibility—in which people speak or act only if they feel they are eligible to do so. Hesitation, which is so necessary in navigating the ins and outs of rough towns, then must sometimes be tossed to the wind. Just as those returning to their homes after two days of prayer may have been hesitant to do so, they also did not seem to hesitate in their seemingly random pattern of putting down their chairs. This setting aside of eligibility opens up space for people to work with each other in situations of immediate concern. These situations could include resolving a wide range of domestic or public misunderstandings and disputes, repairing of a broken infrastructure, or getting access to advantageous prices of inputs through acquiring them in a specific volume, which would mean people pooling resources together. A striking feature of everyday Kinois life is the ways in which people say all kinds of things to each other, propose various courses of action and projects, and intervene in various crises without being obviously eligible to do so. They act without having the “right” kind of identity or background that would provide a readily available explanation for why they are speaking and intervening in a particular manner. In part, this practice is a reflection of a long-term willingness, or even resignation, on the part of residents to take and make use of “whatever is at hand.” It could even be argued that such hodgepodge interactions reflect a lack of discernment or discrimination. But at the same time, the ways in which young and old, strangers and neighbors, men and women incisively present each other with speech and actions that run against the grain usually associated with their status reflect a capacity for people to see possibilities in each other that potentiate new configurations of action, new ways of working together, that are often necessary for generating opportunities to get ahold of important resources. This is especially the case when the systems of supply—of limited goods, information, opportunities, mobility, and services—are continuously being

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shifted “here and there.” “Fires” are put out in one place, only to break out in others; favors have to be returned, and new obligations are incurred— and local urban provisioning systems often resemble a Ponzi scheme. Of course, the suspension of notions of eligibility can turn into longterm struggles and implosion as opposed to momentary tactical maneuvers. Upending relied-upon forms of authority and legitimacy threatens to create a free-for-all in which everyone has implicit permission to deceive everyone else, and individuals then have a hard time finding reliable spaces to operate in and practices to operate with. Kinshasa has certainly witnessed spasms of violence in which the suspension of eligibility translates into the sense that no one’s life counts for anything, since it is not anchored or recognizable anywhere. Still, to act without eligibility is to act in situations in which persons may not otherwise act, making the actor visible in so doing. As visible, these agents provide others with information about what they can expect from them. When people make themselves known in this way, without hesitating or feeling anxious about their capacity to do so, it enables others to feel secure in their presence. Of course, the unanticipated and unknown could always occur. But even here, a tolerance for the unanticipated could gradually evolve with an underlying confidence that people making themselves visible and available to be known could then be engaged as either active or silent resources for sustaining local residence, for being in the city. In urban areas full of intensive proficiencies of surveillance and prediction—where the ordinary is to be regulated at all costs so that the exceptional might have free reign—what are we then to make of the supposedly exceptional urban spaces that seem to grow in number and constituencies, if not in value? Clearly there is a strong global tendency to leave rough towns alone, and increasingly many different institutional actors are joining in to sing “praises” of the ways in which such districts exemplify a certain sufficiency. The question is not what kinds of administrative devices should be imposed or what rights should be constituted but rather how to multiply the ways in which such districts—in their struggles to configure and coordinate viable connections to “things beyond them”—can show up in public discussion and reference. What are the ways in which residents circumvent the constraints of the “cards they have been dealt” to access opportunities elsewhere? Who is paying attention? How might attention be paid? As residents of cities everywhere find their options limited, more might be found in places where one would least expect to find them.

ELEVEN

Local Futures, the Future of the Local: Urban Living in a Central African Metropolis FILIP DE BOECK

The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is. —Joseph Conrad (1962 [1917]), foreword to The Shadow-Line: A Confession

Introduction: Anthropology and the Figure of the Local1 Nzofu, a small Luunda village of some two hundred inhabitants, situated on the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, was the local rural setting where I carried out my first long-term field research. For almost two years, between 1987 and 1989, I lived in this village, a tiny lifeboat in the middle of a landscape resembling an ocean in which wave after wave of hills, each one in a fainter hue of bluish grey, seemed to stretch out as far as the eye could see, right into Angola and its bloody civil war. The world of Nzofu has always been intertwined with more global forces, and this long before Angola’s postindependence war, for this part of Congo and Angola was one of the core areas in which the historical form of the trans-Atlantic slave trade took shape from the seventeenth century onward. More recently, it was the scene of extensive transnational diamond trafficking, which connected places such as Nzofu with major cities in Africa, Europe, and Asia (De Boeck 1999). 1. An embryonic version of this chapter was first presented at “Reinhabiting the Local,” a conference on the affective, sensory, and political meanings of the local in recent anthropological theory, organized at Johns Hopkins University in 2007 by Veena Das and Deborah Poole. I thank the organizers and participants, and in particular Michael Lambek and Juan Obarrio, for their comments and remarks.

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And yet, in spite of all these historical and contemporary links with a wider world beyond its own horizon, the village of Nzofu still appeared to the naive anthropologist that I was then to be a kind of primordial anthropological “local,” one of the spots that Vansina once termed “lost corners in the world” (Vansina 1982). Rereading my doctoral dissertation now (De Boeck 1991), it also strikes me how much my description of Nzofu could have been that of a local African village in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Looking back on this “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 1983), it is simply incomprehensible to what extent I overlooked most of that village’s cultural, political, and economic connections with a transnational, indeed global, world, even though these connections were shaping up under my very nose. Given the disciplinary critiques that have broadened and “resited” the scope of anthropological investigations since the mid-1980s (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a; 1997b; Marcus 1995; Olwig and Hastrup 1997), it has fortunately become unthinkable to return to Nzofu or any other “local” as the unproblematic unit of analysis it once was in anthropology, representing a level of social organization and community that symbolized small-scale, informal Gemeinschaft. Over the past two decades, we have been made increasingly aware that the local always operates within specific historical conjunctures and within the broader cultural imaginaries that such conjunctures elicit. Rather than a static pole in a dyadic opposition with the global, the local is, above all, a relationship and is therefore situational, positional, and processual. In theoretical and narrative terms, it constantly forces us to “frame” and zoom in correctly, to choose the right scale and parameters, and to position ourselves accordingly. This problem of scale, of proportion and position, of partial connections (Strathern 1991; 1995), and of nearness and distance also accounts for the fact that the realities of the local so often continue to elude us. But whereas previously we might have been too close to the reality of the local to perceive it properly, we now run the risk of being too removed from it to notice the full complexity of its dimensions. With anthropology’s recent fascination with large-scale processes of globalization in a neoliberal age, the category of the local runs the risk, now even more than before, of remaining out of focus, invisible, and in the shadows. I am convinced, however, that over the past two decades, the discipline of anthropology has let go of the local too easily—that, on the contrary, the necessity of grasping and understanding what happens at the level of the local has never been more urgent in understanding the global world we all live in. In what follows, I will ask how anthropology might attempt to resurrect and reinhabit the category of the

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local in the current moment of global neoliberalism. How can we reinfuse the local with meaning to make it more than a mere “zone of awkward engagement” within a network of translocal and global connections (Tsing 2005)? As I will argue, current neoliberal urban reform and development plans, and their implied teleological futurities, have a tendency to conceptually obliterate the reality of millions of local lives in Africa’s urban centers and rural worlds. Time and again, a number of common assumptions are evident in these policy engagements, governance practices, and private investment frameworks. Above all, they are marked by a profound lack of attention for, and a total disregard of, the small-scale connections, negotiations, and decisions that people engage in daily in order to make a living and survive in the moment of the urban context. Unintended effects of economic change and inadequate utilization of empirical information in strategic management decisions, as well as an oversight of the complexities of poverty and the myriad connections between and across divergent urban (and rural) spaces, exacerbate these concerns and policy challenges. Now, more than ever, therefore, I consider it to be one of anthropology’s crucial public roles to counter these annihilating strategies by reinvesting meaning in the notion of the local and by making the contents of the lives lived “in the shadow of the Sheraton” (Moyer 2003) more visible again.

The Vanishing of the Local in Neoliberal Teleologies The local world I currently work in is no longer the rural site of Nzofu but has become a megacity instead. Over the years, and similar to the way in which many Congolese discover the city upon leaving their villages, I followed in the tracks of my Luunda informants in Nzofu to explore some of Congo’s secondary towns, such as Kikwit. And as was the case with many of my rural acquaintances, this journey finally led me to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Belgian Congo, as in the postindependence Zairian/Congolese nation-state, the “village” was invariably constructed as a dark and static shadow—part of a dynamically developing city, imagined by the Belgian colonial administration as a centre extra-coutumier, a center that defined itself as “extralocal” and “outside of tradition,” thereby escaping the weight of what was perceived by the colonizer as the dark forces of autochthony and offering a new start for a radically different, more enlightened type of society. Fifty years after the sun of independence dawned on Africa, however, these “extralocal” African urban centers have in turn become the unknown

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dark spots on another, more global urban map. A megacity such as Kinshasa, Africa’s second-largest city south of the Sahara and once an international pinnacle of colonialist modernity, has itself become a place of distance and “remoteness” (Piot 1999), a local “shadow city” (Neuwirth 2006), “off the map” of the global cityscape. At best, Kinshasa and similar megacities across the African continent only seem to exist as eccentric landmarks in a planetary geography of slums filled with “excess” or “surplus humanity” (Davis 2006). At worst, they are imagined as ungoverned and ungovernable “real population bombs” that pose a major “security threat” to the global community (Liotta and Miskell 2012). Although Davis and Liotta and Miskell approach urban life-forms from two radically opposed ideological directions (the former is an American Marxist writer, independent political activist, and urban theorist, whereas the latter are US defense policy and homeland security analysts), their reading of the urbanscape in the Global South is similarly harsh and apocalyptic. Davis as well as Liotta and Miskell explicitly use the figure of Kinshasa, alongside Lagos and other urban centers in the Global South, as an example that epitomizes such a dangerous and disastrous urban environment. They build their case by picking the data that fit their arguments from a wide variety of scholarly literature, including the emerging body of work by anthropologists and geographers on cities in the Global South. On the whole, this new urban anthropology tends to offer a rather different and much more nuanced view of the ways in which urban residents manage to generate functioning environments and become “active agents in constructing meaningful lives for themselves” rather than being “simply passive victims of inexorably structural processes beyond their control” (Murray and Myers 2006: 3). However, Liotta and Miskell’s response to the dangers that Kinshasa and other “Leviathan mega-cities” supposedly pose to global security does not take this local urban agency into account. Rather, it perceives it as a threat. That is why they advocate an international (and, if necessary, even military) intervention, spearheaded by the United Nations or by an ad hoc coalition, in order to administer and reform such cities. One of the ultimate solutions Liotta and Miskell propose for such a reform is the “charter cities” approach, which they borrow from Stanford economist Paul Romer. To launch these charter cities, “poor states would lease chunks of territory to enlightened foreign powers, which would preside over a kind of imperial protectorate” (Liotta and Miskell 2012: 199). The charter city would thus form a special urban reform zone with a new system of rules that would ideally drive economic progress. What this amounts to in reality may be observed in an increasing number of cities throughout Africa.

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All over the African continent, international real estate groups invest huge amounts of money in the construction of satellite cities that are built from scratch alongside existing cities. Conceived of as huge, gated communities that are run by means of specific bylaws for members of a newly emerging African middle class who are the beneficiaries of the current economic Afro-optimism, these new segregationist cities redefine the existing urbanscapes alongside which they are built as “not city,” thereby generating new geographies of inclusion and exclusion (see Watson 2013). In Kinshasa, for example, an embryonic version of the charter city is being built under the name Cité du Fleuve (De Boeck 2011). Branded as part of the “revolution of modernity” that president Kabila is promising the nation these days, it consists of two artificial islands in the Congo River. These islands will supposedly become the new administrative and commercial city centers of Kinshasa, redefining the existing city, with its ten million inhabitants, as an “urban fringe,” “slum,” or even “village.” In this respect, it is interesting to look at the website of Congo-Forêt, a private enterprise that is loosely connected to the Cité du Fleuve project and is part of a regional agricultural portfolio, the activities of which consist in converting savannah in Bandundu province into rubber plantations. Congo-Forêt promotes its agricultural activities to possible investors in terms of responsible, village-level ecological and human resources management. The latter consists of “community involvement” aimed at upgrading the local living environment of three thousand villagers. In 2011, the website of Congo-Forêt phrased it as follows: During 2010, Congo-Forêt opened a store [Meikles Dima] and small club that is accessible by the whole community on the property overlooking the Kasai River. This meeting place has grown in popularity over the past few months and is often crowded with families who bring their children for entertainment. Judging from the distances that people are travelling to our property, it is clear that there are very few places that people can go to and certainly no place that offers entertainment for the children. Our vision is to expand the store and entertainment area to offer families a safe play area for their children and a means for them to interact and develop their special awareness abilities [which are severely lacking according to UNICEF] on simple apparatus. (http://www.congo-foret.com/community.html)

And so we are back to where we started: more than fifty years after Congo’s independence, its cities are being reframed and reconceptualized in neocolonial terms, while the threat posed by its urban citizens is neu-

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tralized by redefining them as childlike villagers, conceptually barred from the future of the Cité du Fleuve, returned to the past of the village, and physically subjected to perverse forms of “shadow evacuation” toward rural hinterlands that serve as the renewed decor for reinvented comptoir economies with strong Leopoldian overtones.2

Investigations of Shadow Much in the way that my initial understanding of what Nzofu, as a quintessential “African village,” stood for in geographic and temporal terms made its actual content invisible to the beginning anthropologist that I was, the concepts of “village” and “slum,” as they are used in current debates about the possibilities of urban reform (cf. Rao 2006), function as huge black holes that suck in and thereby completely obliterate their content: the resourcefulness and determination of millions of urban residents who somehow manage to successfully negotiate everyday life in their urban locales and who, much like black South Africans under apartheid, become “shadow people” (cf. Pillay 2007). Being defined as visible or invisible has everything to do with the power constellations in which one is inscribed and entangled and also with the (im)possibility of constructing and putting into broader circulation an objectified identity of oneself. Unable to give a more global voice to its own identity constructions, Kinshasa, as with many other non-Western cities and in spite of its considerable size, remains a “black hole of informational capitalism,” to cite Castells, who, in the third volume of his Information Age trilogy, applied this label to the whole of the African continent (Castells 2000). As the ultimate trope for urban dystopia and “noir urbanism” (Prakash 2010), Kinshasa therefore continues to occupy a very weak, peripheral, and invisible position on the formal map of the territories that constitute the global city. Yet urbanscapes such as Kinshasa’s often take the lead within more invisible global networks of material as well as mental territories that are interconnected, networked, entangled, and transposed by more informal social infrastructures and cultural imaginaries. As such, Kinshasa and similar cities around the world constantly generate new forms of urbanity and sociality that have the capacity to deeply mark the rest of the global community. It remains very important, therefore, to take seriously the material

2. In urban policing and security vocabularies, a shadow evacuation “occurs when there is an evacuation directive for a specific danger zone, but people outside the danger zone evacuate when they do not have to” (Boyle 2009: 198).

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transformation of their social fabric—even more so because this transformation does not necessarily run according to the lines of the new technology paradigms as outlined, for example, in Castells’s sociology of cities in the age of information. Often, this transformation is developed on the basis of very different practices, technologies, communicative channels, social infrastructures, and other forms of what Julia Elyachar has referred to as “phatic labor” (Elyachar 2010). But not only do such forms of phatic communion contribute to shaping and designing products and marketing plans of major telecom businesses (2010: 453). The urban commons that emerge from this kind of labor also share many of the main dimensions of social change constituting Castells’s “new society”: they are often very global, though not necessarily in terms of their material, technological, or institutional capacity; they are the living illustration of the demise of the sovereign nation-state, of the crisis of the family, and of patriarchy; and they are an important site for the redefinition of identity around religion, nation, ethnicity, and locality. The need, therefore, remains to explore the social fabric and often unexpected ways in which material transformations and various new infrastructural and technological uses are locally generated and given form and content. Regardless of whether that “local” is a village, a megacity, or a continent, it is by documenting and investigating the various forms of the social machine—with all the destabilizations and thickenings of urban/rural and global/local articulations that occur within each of these locations (Nzofu, Kinshasa, “Africa”)—that the “black hole” may acquire a different dimension. The hole, it seems, stays black not only because of a lack of “local” content (whatever that “local” may stand for: a place, a quality, a mentality, a morality) but mainly because of the lack of knowledge of essential characteristics of various kinds of cultural material (new socialities, or specific forms of aesthetics, commerce, movement, authority, violence, combat, and crisis) that continuously remain hidden in the shadows or are difficult to grasp and comprehend when looked at by means of the more conventional tropes and categories many of us still use to describe social life. A different interpretation of the very notions of the black hole and the shadow may help us achieve this. The black hole image referred to above continues, of course, a long-standing Conradian discursive tradition about Africa being a dark continent, a heart of darkness, and an Afrique fantôme. But instead of a dismissal of the “black hole” analogy as yet another utterance reconfirming the hegemonic and colonizing discourses that underpin the disconnection, or at least the specific hierarchies through which the

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African local is connected to a wider global world, it is a reappraisal of the notion of the shadow that we need, somewhat along the lines proposed by Ferguson in his Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (2006). He urges us to try to read into the possibilities of “blackness,” into the forceful realities of the “shadow,” that so far have remained unexplored, even though metaphors of shadow have been pervasive in scholarly work about, for example, shadow economies and shadow networks (Duffield 2002), shadow states (Reno 1995), twilight institutions (Lund 2007), shadows of war (Nordstrom 2004), shadow globalization (Jung 2003), and postcolonial realities characterized by informality, irregularity, clandestinity, illegality, and occult practices “in the shadow of the law” (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 16ff.; Spyer 2006). In the work of all these scholars, the postcolony is portrayed as a world where the shadow and the invisible have become, as it were, institutionalized (cf. Nordstrom 2004). I was reminded of Ferguson’s call while watching Drawing Lesson One: In Praise of Shadows, a recording of a 2012 lecture by William Kentridge.3 The lecture took me back to William Kentridge’s “Black Box/Chambre Noire” installation, which I visited at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in the summer of 2006. The Black Box project is a marvelous piece of work—a veritable theatre of shadows, combining puppets, animated film, and Mozart’s Magic Flute to reflect on the Herero genocide, colonialism, the idea of Enlightenment, violence, destruction, loss, and “Trauer Arbeit,” among other things. In Kentridge’s aesthetics, shadows and their endless variations play a key role. In the Black Box piece, as in much of his earlier work,4 the artist probes the depths of darkness by exploring the versatility of light and its absence, creating a true encyclopedia of shadows, at times elusive and at other times almost palpable. In a short text titled Black Box: Between the Lens and the Eyepiece in the catalogue that accompanied the original Black Box exhibition in Berlin, Kentridge reflects upon Plato’s allegory of the cave, the nature of film as “shadowgraphy,” the art of shadows that transform themselves, and “the child who plays with shadows, delighting not just in seeing the image of the creature on the wall but also in watching and grasping the illusion” (Kentridge 2005: 47). He asks, what is it that we learn from shadows? What can be clarified through the obscurity of shadows? Is obscurity really so obscure, or does it just depend on how one reframes that which takes place between the lens and the eyepiece?

3. See Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center (2012). 4. See Kentridge’s animated film The Shadow Procession (1999). For an overview of Kentridge’s work, see also Bonami and Alemani (2006).

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One of the metaphors that Kentridge is playing with is that of the “illuminating shadow”: “If you have an image, and a shadow across it, you invert what is light and what is dark, and the shadow itself functions as a kind of spotlight” (Kentridge, 2005: 51). And he adds that the shadow’s ability to transform itself is one of the key elements for understanding it. A shadow forces one to think differently about dimensionality and relationality, for example. It is not a solid object; its essence is a lack of dimensionality. Shadows, therefore, are essentially shape-shifting realities, resisting objectification, colonization, synthesis, and summary. Ultimately, then, something about shadows makes us very conscious of the activity of seeing and perceiving. Shadows challenge us to reframe the reality we perceive and to develop a specific kind of ethnographic imagination. An ethnography of shadows makes us aware of how we shape meaning through this “inescapable need to make sense of shapes” (Kentridge 2005: 47). It is clear that the shadow is “good to think with,” and I would therefore like to enforce the need for a reconsideration of the notion of the shadow, and of (in)visibility, in order to better understand the local and the specific modes of connection and disconnection that give shape to different networks acting upon each other and intervening on different levels of social life. A shadow, Kentridge and Ferguson remind us, is not only a dim or empty likeness; it also implies a bond and a relationship. A shadow is not a copy; it is not only negative space, or a space of absence. If the local is the shadow of the global, it never is just merely that. To take “shadow” as an analytical starting point to understanding the local offers the possibility to reflect differently on the place that locally situated people occupy and to reconsider the specific ways in which their bodies, words, practices, dreams, desires, and imaginaries (are made to) move and connect in a more global world as well as the specific ways in which embodiment not only displays but also is able to rework certain political and economic hierarchies.

Kinshasa’s Local Shadows In the urban realities that I have analyzed over the past two decades (cf. De Boeck and Plissart 2004), the only way to capture and interpret the forms of local life that the city generates is to take the notions of the shadow and the invisible quite literally. Here local reality is the occultus in its double sense: not only are the processes that structure urban local lives often clandestine and therefore often remain hidden and unrecognized by more formal economic and political frameworks, but local reality itself has become

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impossible without a “knowledge of the hidden” and of the spiritual world beyond the physical reality of everyday life. Indeed, in a city such as Kinshasa, people continuously switch between two modes of existence: the reality of the first world, of the diurnal, and a more invisible urban world that exists in what the Kinois themselves refer to as the nocturnal “second” world, or second city, an occult city of the shadow, forming a topography and historiography of the local Congolese imaginary that is no less real than its physical counterpart. This constant slippage between visible and invisible, between the diurnal and the nocturnal, between the dead and the living, and between reality and its double—its shadow, reflection, or image—heavily impacts the ways in which relationships and copresences are shaped in the urban context. This leads to a constant religious transfiguration of local reality, a transformation that is also promoted in the reenchanting spaces of Christian fundamentalism, for example, or in the ceaseless production of the figure of the devil and the witch within the temporal framework of the apocalyptic. These shifts are evidenced by what people perceive as the constant invasion of the space of the living by death, and they have led, among other things, to new forms of death management in the urban site (cf. De Boeck 2009b) and also to the deepening of intergenerational rifts that are played out, for example, in new forms of witchcraft accusations directed by parents and elders at their children and grandchildren (cf. De Boeck 2009a). Here, in summary, local urban experience seems, above all, to be generated in the folds and shadows of the city, which itself exists as a huge friction zone marked by a generalized feeling of uncanniness and of various forms of material and spiritual insecurity. Rather than offering a steady ground—an unchanging background or canvas against which to read the passage of time and of one’s life, enabling one to generate a sense of stability and meaning and to interpret change and transformation—the local manifests itself as a pool filled with quicksand, a topos as unstable as the sandy hills on which Kinshasa was constructed. This is true not only with regard to the level of an unmoored imaginaire but also with regard to the very materiality that determines people’s lives. Often my interlocutors in Kinshasa tell me, “When I leave my home in the morning, I do not know if I will make it back alive in the evening. And each day, when I do come home in the evening, I tell myself: it is a real miracle!”5 Between morning and evening, between leaving home and returning, there are so many material and logistical obstacles, so many dan5. On the role of the miraculous in daily African lives, see also Goldstone (2011).

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gers lurking, so many parameters changing, that there is the constant possibility of sudden disappearance and imminent death. The local realities of one’s street or one’s neighborhood never offer a steady décor for one’s daily activities. The local is not necessarily the familiar. In the few hours between the time that one goes to bed and the time that one gets up again in the morning, the world as one knows it might vanish. Overnight, one’s street might turn into an unknown territory and a social minefield: prices might change and one’s francs might devalue by 500 percent; soldiers might erect roadblocks on all the roads that give access to the neighborhood; the power relations between local gangs (Zoulou, Armée Rouge, Salopards, Antichrist, Mbeli-mbeli, Les Anglais, Les Allemands, Bana Bolafa, Onu-Britanique, Les Rois de Bengazi, etc.) might switch; the man selling Coca-Cola in the kiosk across the street might get neck-laced because he was caught stealing in an adjacent compound; neighbors and friends might become foes, accusing one’s children of being witches; sudden and inexplicable deaths might occur; a building might collapse; erosion due to heavy rainfall or deficient drainage might sweep away the neighbor’s house; electricity might get switched off, only to return three hours, or three weeks, later; the main electricity cables or water pipes feeding the neighborhood might get stolen by the very people who are supposed to fix it; and so on. In this city, in which every item seems to have been used and recycled long after its keeping quality, most objects and buildings have become soiled, touched, and tainted by thousands of eager hands, like a decrepit and worn-out house where too large a family lived for far too long. The material infrastructures of absence, lack, and incompleteness that determine the daily rhythms of urban life; the very architectures of degradation and decay that often constitute the physical life of the local; the technologies of fixing and repairing that such an architecture generates—everything adds to the feeling that to venture into the local world of one’s own street in the morning is to venture into a vast, and increasingly exotic, unknown. Terrain eza miné!: “the terrain is full of landmines.” To understand the local, therefore, necessitates a combined reading both of territorial, material, and physical experiences and of the realms of the social, the mental, and the imagined. Local urban life is constructed through fragments of built material forms, through dreams and architectures of the imaginary, and through the relationships between individuals who turn such local worlds into a collective subject. Each intention reveals its apparatus and each apparatus its intention. By looking at apparatus and intention, at material and mental transformations and the social machine generating them, what appeared as a black hole and as shadow no longer

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sucks in locally situated lives and narratives to render them invisible but reveals “the thing” of the local, its content. The black hole, in other words, then reveals itself to be the powerful producer of narratives, experiences, and various lines, material and spiritual, that produce the surroundings and forms, but also the contents, of these local worlds.

The Local and the Line This brings me to another point—that of the line, of the shadow lines, to paraphrase the title of one of Joseph Conrad’s later novels (1962 [1917]), the threads and traces of which constantly shape new forms of local sociality. A theory of the shadow necessitates a methodology of lines and an understanding of their “entanglement” (Nuttall 2009) and of the ways in which they might become lines of flight and open up possibilities.6 As Fanon famously stated in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonial world was a compartmentalized, dichotomous world, consisting of the city of the colonizer and the city of the colonized (Fanon 2002 [1961]). Today, we cannot continue to look at the postcolonial realities by means of the same compartmentalizing linearities that applied to the center-periphery, rural-urban, or local-global oppositions of the colonial world, even though projects such as Cité du Fleuve try to revive it. If the shadow is, as I stated earlier, about doubling, about a bond, and about a relationship, it means that in order to perceive it, we have to develop new ways of perceiving, new ways, above all, of perceiving connectedness. As with Kentridge’s idea of the illuminating shadow, we have to learn to adjust our lens and our focus in order to see other, hitherto more invisible, lines that establish these connections, networks, and numerous strands of transposed meaning and action in the multiple but simultaneous territories between local and global that mark the world today. How can we uncover some of these other lines, usually excluded in the figures that our analytical models commonly map out, to determine and capture the spaces in the practice of everyday life? The ordinariness of many of the lines and of the connections we make analytically is often responsible for creating the black hole in itself. By contrast, the lines and connections drawn out by people in the context of the everyday movements of their lives often defy such closure and exclusion and call into question established notions of flexibility and fixture. In a beautiful text on lines and the paradoxes about allegories of iden6. For an interesting archaeology of the meaning of the line, see also Ingold (2007).

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tity and alterity, Valentin Yves Mudimbe states, “Our physical geography, the whole domain of our culture, including mental configurations and our relations to nature, are topographies structured by lines” (2008: 25). In his essay, he starts off with the idea that the lines generated by the movements and physical interactions of people, ideas, commodities, and so on can no longer be described or interpreted as straight lines. Indeed, postcolonial subjects’ lives no longer unfold as “straight stories,” to paraphrase film director David Lynch’s movie title. In popular cultural practices and narratives, linearity has come to mean something else. Local biographies and physical interactions are not, and probably never were, generated as straight lines. Rather, they develop into cultural topologies that basically are more like “lost highways”—marked, that is, by deviations from straightness, by negations of unambiguous closure, and by instability (in economic terms, certainly, but also politically or morally). Living in the local often means that one cannot afford to live with the safety net of steadiness and durability. The local, in this respect, is anything but static. Consider the complexity of the lines occurring throughout the lifetime of an ordinary Congolese man or woman. Here the biographies of many of my acquaintances in Kinshasa come to my mind, such as Trésor’s:7 Kinshasa, February 2012: As a kid, Trésor grew up in Masina, a crowded municipality in Kinshasa where most inhabitants have their roots in neighboring Bandundu province, and many share a Yaka ethnic background, as does Trésor himself. He was fourteen in 1993 at the time of the second wave of looting that swept through Kinshasa and the country as a whole [the first “pillages” took place in 1991]. Trésor and his friends participated in the looting frenzy and got away with lots of goods from some industrial plants not far from where he lived. With the money he made from this, Trésor decided to leave home. He paid his way to the Angolan border and crossed into Lunda Norte in search of dollars and diamonds, as so many young people did during those years. At the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) checkpoint on the border, he was directed to a UNITA diamond mine along the Cuango River, where he celebrated his fifteenth birthday. There was not much else to celebrate, though, for Trésor failed to find any diamonds. Instead, he became very ill due to the harsh treatment and the unhealthy working conditions in the mine. Desperate, he spent the last of his money on transport to return to the Congolese side of the border. 7. Trésor is a pseudonym.

164 / Chapter Eleven More dead than alive, he made it to the border town of Kaungula, where one of his uncles lived. The latter took him in, and there he was slowly nourished back to life. After a while, though, when it became clear that he had not returned from Angola with money, he was thrown out. For lack of an alternative, Trésor returned to Kinshasa. He was seventeen when Laurent Kabila’s troops marched into the capital in May 1997. Seeing the young, rubber-booted kadogos, Kabila’s infamous child soldiers, walk through the city with their guns, Trésor decided to join the army. When the second war broke out a year later, when Rwandan troops tried to take Kinshasa and rebel movements in the east gained control over a large part of the country, Trésor was sent to the front near Mbuji Mayi, the capital of eastern Kasai province, in the central-western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. When, after a couple of years, his relatives in Kinshasa still had not received any news from Trésor, they assumed that he had died, and a mourning ritual was organized. And then, thirteen years after his departure, Trésor miraculously showed up on the doorstep of one of his other uncles in Kinshasa. During all these years, Trésor had lived a soldier’s life at the front but one day decided that “war does not build a country,” and in an attempt also to save himself from his own war traumas, he deserted the army, leaving a wife and two children behind in the outback where he had been stationed for the past four years. With the little money he had managed to set aside over the years, he started to make his way from distant Kasai to Kinshasa. When I met him in March 2012, he had been living at his uncle’s for three months. Penniless, he was waiting for his uncle to set up a meeting with a local police officer in an attempt to integrate himself into the police force and make enough money for his family to follow him to the capital. Increasingly frustrated and impatient with his situation, however, Trésor started to drink more, and one night, while totally drunk, he was arrested after a row in a bar where he had insulted a high-ranking army officer. By the time I left Kinshasa in early April, Trésor had just been released from a week in jail, where he had taken a severe beating. Three months later, he was still waiting to join the police force.

Within the Congolese context, Trésor’s biography is by no means an exception. Other people’s lives are often even more complex and unpredictable than his. Setting off from unexpected points of departure, and in more or less successful attempts to steer the course of one’s life, undamaged through it all, while fighting the constant threat of dispersal, the lines described in the course of such biographies connect figures of a praxis in their dimension of a negation of standard, straight lines. As “an opening up to

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the unexpected,” to use Mudimbe’s expression (2008: 26), these lines often overrun all known boundaries (gender, belief systems, ethnicity, etc.), forcing people to live simultaneously in multiple territories and making of each of them a community in itself (28). This is not so much to make the, by now, overly familiar point concerning the much-celebrated capacity of postcolonial subjects to strategically use multiple identities in various contexts. The point I want to make, rather, is that none of this ever seems to be carefully planned in advance. People are, of course, conscious actors and participants in their own lives, struggling, to some extent, to stay in control and therefore continuously seizing and capturing the moment and the opportunity to reinvent and reimagine their lives in different ways. But at the same time, these processes of seizure remain highly unpredictable. In such lives, there never is a straight line between today and tomorrow—or between here and there, possible and impossible, success and failure, life and death. Rather than existing through habit and routine, or being formatted by the temporalities of the static and the unchanging, postcolonial local lives are often shaped through movements of the unexpected, which constantly seem to be steering local actors off course, launching them into new orbits. Such lives, therefore, are never fully autonomous projects either. Rather, they seem to consist of constant stops and starts directed by the tricky and unforeseeable processes of seizure and capture, which in turn are structured not only by the spatialities of various networks, of shifting contexts and of connections, but also by the specific temporality of the moment—unpredictably caught between the immobility of endless waiting and the effervescence of sudden movement. Living in the local, which in itself has become increasingly unstable and nomadic, constantly generates new opportunities and openings while simultaneously causing sudden closures and producing a lot of fallout and collateral damage along the way (as illustrated, for example, by the dispersal of Trésor’s family). Living and surviving in the moment of the local, therefore, often necessitates an extreme (mental and physical) flexibility as well as a mastery of the tricky skills of improvisation, a capacity that Kinois sometimes describe as “mathématiques.” And indeed, to steer your life unharmed through all the pitfalls, all the possible parameters of your daily existence, seems to demand an advanced knowledge of higher mathematics and of topics such as chaos, fractals, mobility, and dynamics. Generated in the moment and therefore rarely knowing where they will end up, the meandering lines of local lives constantly generate conjunctures and conjectures of sudden action and passivity, power and powerlessness, expectation and disappointment, rise and fall, dream and nightmare.

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In summary, because of the often instantaneous, spontaneous, improvised, and random nature of the lines that unfold throughout individual biographies and because of the equally unplanned ways in which these individual biographies get caught up and become entangled in other lines and networks of physical and mental contact with other people, places, discourses, practices, and ideas, the line of one’s life rarely is a straight line forward. It is almost never unidirectional but, on the contrary, fundamentally “anti-teleological” (Malaquais 2011). Therefore, perhaps, lives lived locally remain difficult to capture within the historicist approaches of modernity and its accompanying ideologies of linear development, progress, and accumulation. Living and surviving in the moment of the local, on the contrary, almost never is a project that one can plan ahead of time. Prepared to open up to the unexpected, and not necessarily by choice, local lives are profoundly marked by the dynamics of the hazardous and the accidental, and that is also why their memories and imaginaries often remain diffuse and opaque. To deal with the local is to live with risk and deal with hazard, necessitating constant betting and speculation. This is also, paradoxically, what these local lives have in common with entities such as hedge funds, money market funds, and other investment vehicles that constitute the dark money of the global “shadow banking system.” Even though this shady world of global finance is ideologically driven by the modernist teleologies that have become so impossible in daily life, it is attracted to Kinshasa and similar places in the Global South precisely because of that genomic or systemic similitude that illustrates that the unpredictable is located not only in an “Africa” but also in the global scape. Understanding the spatial and temporal specificities of local lives might therefore also be a good starting point for an analysis of the ways in which global capital embeds itself locally or for a better understanding of the kinds of velocities and accelerations, as well as aspirations and futurities, that are generated and shared in the spatial vector where local actors and the forces acting upon them meet.

T W E LV E

Changing Mobilities, Shifting Futures P E T E R G E S C H I E R E A N D A N TO I N E S O C PA

In many African societies, there is and was a particularly close link between mobility and visions of the future. It was not for nothing that in many parts of the continent, colonial authorities were obsessed with “floating populations” as structural elements of disorder, against which the first priority for imposing order was to “fix” people (Roitman 2005). Yet, in practice, colonial measures encouraged new forms of mobility. Indeed, up to the present day, mobility has remained a crucial element in people’s reflections on the future. It is all the more important that in many parts of the continent, the 1990s brought some unexpected shifts in the patterns of mobility that had developed in the course of the colonial and postcolonial periods. However, as in so many other respects, the implications of this “post–Cold War moment” (Piot 2010) are still far from clear. In this chapter, we propose to address a few aspects of these shifts in mobility patterns and explore their implications for people’s visions of the future. We will mainly refer to Cameroonian examples—notably from the Grassfields (west and northwest regions), seen by many in the country as a vanguard of social change—but we also will address the broader relevance of these examples for the continent as a whole.

The Urban-Rural Continuum: An African Style of Urbanization Colonial authorities may have often complained about the ongoing mobility of what they called “floating populations.” Yet, as mentioned previously, they added new forms of mobility despite their professed aim to once and for all “fix” the people. Following what we have called elsewhere “the colonial paradox” (Geschiere 2009), they tried to build new forms

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of administration on people who belonged to a certain area (“natives,” or autochtones). In order to control them, these people had to be fixed in the locality where they supposedly belonged to make them available for taxation, labor services, and the enforced production of surpluses for the market. This was a first aim of colonial rule throughout Africa. Yet, for the larger colonial projects, the new authorities invariably preferred migrants, who were seen as more active and entrepreneurial—in sharp contrast to the locals, who were mostly depicted as lazy and resistant to change.1 As a consequence, most poles of economic growth that were created during the colonial period are now hotbeds of struggles over autochthony, belonging, and the need to exclude “strangers”—especially because the neoliberalization of the continent in the 1990s brought back democracy and added decentralization.2 The result of this complex intertwinement of mobility and fixity was the crystallization, especially in the first decade of the postcolonial period, of a mode of partial urbanization—often characterized as “an urban-rural continuum”—that, according to many, was more or less special to Africa (see Geschiere and Gugler 1998). Urbanization in Africa often meant that urbanites simultaneously remained villagers, following a pattern of circular migration—regularly returning “home” to their villages, sending their children there during holidays or when they were sick, and planning to retire there after service in the city. Their ongoing commitment to the village was expressed in their obligation to “build at home”—that is, to construct a house in one’s village of origin. For the Yoruba area, where urbanization has a relatively long history, Dan Aronson spoke in 1971 of “a rural-urban continuum” still uniting city and village, with people constantly moving between the two poles at different phases of their lives. In the same year, Joseph Gugler suggested that in the Igbo area—building on extensive literature on the highly visible role of so-called tribal unions there—urbanites lived in “a dual system” between city and village. From a different perspective, Claude Meillassoux (1975) and Samir Amin (1973) characterized wage laborers in Africa as “semi-proletarians,” since most of them retained a footing in the village economy; this would explain why wages in Africa could remain relatively low: the costs of the reproduction of labor could be shifted to the village economy. From yet another perspective, novelist Chinua Achebe saw it as 1. Cf. striking examples in Delafosse (1972 [1912]); see further Geschiere (2009). 2. For Cameroon, striking examples are the two main cities, Yaounde and Douala, where the so-called autochthonous populations (Ewondo and Duala) complained of becoming a minority due to the rapid immigration by the Bamileke from the western Grassfields (see, for instance, Franqueville 1968; Ela 1983; Socpa 2003).

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special to Africa that even the beggar in the city streets had a family and a village behind him. Indeed, still in 1992, Cameroonian television news (CRTV) raised general concern when, for several consecutive days, it ran a brief report showing the body of a young kid—probably a bandit—who had been found in the streets. It was presented as shocking that no one had come forward to claim the body. A few days later, the news showed a French priest burying the body in a small cemetery he had arranged especially for such unclaimed bodies. People were equally shocked that it was happening more often that no one came forward to bring these bodies back to the village— where they should be buried. The funeral “at home”—that is, the obligation to bring the body of the deceased to his or her village of origin—was (and is) a keystone in this mode of partial urbanization. It reminded urbanites constantly of their “belonging” to the village; moreover, funerals thus became a chosen occasion for villagers to get back at their “brothers” in the city, especially those who had not enough respected their obligation to share their new riches with those “at home.” Thus, in many parts of the continent, funeral practices were a powerful reaffirmation of the central place the village retained in people’s visions of the future. However, it is clear that the vision, so poetically formulated by Chinua Achebe, of even the poorest individuals in African cities still having a family behind them may be becoming less and less applicable. For many cities, this has become decidedly a thing of the past. Indeed, a series of changes seems to indicate that this migratory model, supposedly a special version of urbanization in Africa, is under heavy strain.3 Already the authors quoted above, who emphasized the ongoing commitment of urbanites to their villages during the first decades after independence, have raised the question of how long this model will hold. Would this commitment remain as strong for urbanites of the second or third generation? A clear sign that there are indeed changes in this respect are increasing uncertainties about and variations in the idea of the funeral “at home.” The massive expansion of urbanization in many parts of the continent makes it increasingly difficult to organize costly funerals “at home” for all these urbanites. 3. Cf. Timothée F. Tabapssi’s study of 1999, with the telling title Le modèle migratoire bamiléké (Cameroun) et sa crise actuelle. The Bamileke are one of the Grassfields groups of the western part of the country (see below); they were seen by many in the country as the main example of successful migrants precisely because their close ties to the home community enabled them to work together in urban centers in other parts of the country. But Tabapssi notes that already in the 1990s, this “migratory model” that was once so successful was in crisis.

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In some areas, people experiment with subterfuges, sending only certain attributes of the deceased home but burying the body in the city (Geschiere 2014). In other areas, the whole idea of sending the body back to the village seems to be absent. For instance, in the main Congolese cities (Kinshasa, Brazzaville, and to a lesser extent Lubumbashi), there is no trace of the idea that funerals should take place in the village. A very different trend emerged here of funerals being taken over by gangs of young people (boys and girls) who turn it into a confrontation between generations. Especially when the deceased die relatively young, the rebellious youth—often not even relatives—aggressively confront older family members of the dead, seizing the coffin with the body, and accusing family members of foul play and secret conspiracies.4 Yet it would be too easy to see a decline in urbanites’ commitment to their villages of origin as a unilineal and general process. Some of the changes that marked the “post–Cold War moment” in Africa had reverse implications. The growing emphases on both political liberalization (the return of multipartyism) and decentralization (the new-style development through NGOs and bypassing of the state) brought about a comeback of the village and localist belonging that was often somewhat artificial but nonetheless quite real in its effects. The notorious Opération Nationale d’Identification launched (but never fully carried out) by former President Laurent Gbagbo in the Ivory Coast may be an extreme example, yet it marked the return of autochthony and the emphasis on belonging that has quickly become a hallmark of African new-style politics. In 2002, the new Gbagbo regime announced this operation of “national identification,” which would oblige all Ivorians to return to their villages “of origin” in order to be registered there as citizens. Abidjan was not to be considered a “village of origin” (except to the Ebrié, its “historical autochthons”). All persons who could not claim a village of origin within the country were to be considered immigrants and would therefore lose their citizenship (see Marshall 2006). How directly such plans might affect all urbanites is clear from the words of Mr. Séry Wayoro, directeur d’identification of this operation: “Whoever 4. See De Boeck (2006; and also his challenging 2010 movie on the same topic). Cf. also Joseph Tonda (2005); this author sees a striking contrast in this respect between the Congolese cities and Libreville, where people still set great store on burying their dead in the village (oral communication). Cf. also Noret and Petit (2011) on funerals in Lubumbashi; Geschiere (2014).

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claims to be Ivorian must have a village. Someone who has done everything to forget the name of his village or who is incapable of showing he belongs to a village is a person without bearings and is so dangerous that we must ask him where he comes from” (quoted in Marshall 2006: 28). Clearly, different trends are crossing each other. The commitment to the village may become ever more strained, but there are also powerful factors pushing toward a reaffirmation of these links. Moreover, it is not only political considerations—like the one mentioned above—that play a role. These are often mixed with powerful emotions. In this sense, the “funeral at home” is certainly not everywhere in the continent a thing of the past. In the rest of this chapter, we propose to concentrate on two recent changes that affect this complex and contradictory configuration of mobility and localist belonging that are of particular relevance to people’s shifting perceptions of the future. First of all, we explore the increasing dissatisfaction among local elites with the pretensions of urban elites, “sons of the soil,” who claim that their success in urban contexts—often in other parts of the country—makes them the obvious candidates for running the political affairs of their villages of origin. In the case of Cameroon, it is quite striking that stories about such tensions come especially from the Bamileke area (West Cameroon), even though people always cite these Bamileke as constituting the examples of local communities that could profit from an ongoing commitment of “their” urban elites. Apparently, even in this area, at least some villagers are weary of urbanites’ ongoing interventions in local affairs and tend to keep them more and more at bay. A second and even more profound undermining of the old model of partial urbanization flows from the sometimes dramatic proliferation of new forms of global migration. In Cameroon, the novelty of these forms of transcontinental migration is indicated by the new term “bush-falling,” which highlights the highly adventurous, and sometimes even desperate, forms these migration projects assume. The term may be particular, but it refers to a trend that, of course, recurs in many parts of Africa and especially in West Africa. The firm conviction of many youngsters—boys and girls—that they have to leave their village because they believe there is no future for them there conveys a dramatic rupture with the old commitment to the village of origin as a stable element in people’s perceptions of the future. The question is whether, even in this context, the rupture is complete. There are powerful countervailing tendencies to try to tie even these more adventurous migrants to their origins.

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The Revenge of the Village: Keeping Urbanites at Bay Touring through the Bamileke area, the unprepared traveler may be surprised by the huge and gaudy mansions, often built on conspicuous spots. The biggest ones are often built some distance away from the village, on a hill along the main roads. These are striking examples of how the urban elites have come to fulfill their obligation to “build at home.” As previously mentioned, the Bamileke are often cited as the examples of urban migrants who take their obligations toward their villages of origin seriously. Once settled in the city, they will do everything they can to construct a maison du village as quickly as possible; not to have achieved this would be a sign of social failure, making one the target of constant mockery. Yet, over the last few decades, this building “at home” has taken on new dimensions, resulting in quite awesome structures. A striking example, for instance, is the house of Claude le Parisien at the eastern entrance of the Bamileke area (along the highway from Yaounde, the capital). He is said to have gathered considerable riches as a feyman, but he has now been coopted by the politico-administrative elite around President Biya.5 Another example is the castle near Bandjoun owned by Yves Michel Fotso, the son of Victor Fotso, reputed to be the richest man in Cameroon.6 It is quite clear that these houses surpass any local traditions of building. The elites hire professional architects (often from Italy and Belgium) to conceive their mansions. The result is a complex mixture of styles—“Tuscan” but with oriental elements or embellishments that remind one of historical castles in Europe. By their ostentatious grandeur, these buildings are, of course, emphatic affirmations of another current saying in Cameroun: Un grand n’est pas un petit—a comment often cited to explain why extravagant forms of consumerism are an obligation for everyone who pretends to be such a Grand. But these houses are also meant to show how serious these elites are taking their commitments to their villages of birth. And, indeed, not only the elites themselves but also the villagers may speak with some pride of these 5. Feymen are the Cameroonian equivalents of the Nigerian 419s—global tricksters who, especially in the 1990s, were so successful that Cameroonians experienced difficulties getting visas for other African countries. See Basile Ndjio (2006a) on feymen and also on the cooptation of at least some of them into the political-administrative elite. 6. Unfortunately, the son is now in prison because of a corruption scandal during his term as director of Cameroun Airlines. (The national airlines company never recovered from this scandal but has now been reborn under a new name: Camair Co.)

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impressive constructions: they show that the village has important elites. Yet their increasing splendor makes these houses, at the same time, an ambiguous signal. It is striking, of course, that the bigger houses are often built at a considerable distance from the village. And even more modest urban elites who build closer to the village often go to considerable lengths to fence off their compounds. In practice, these houses can become a focus of growing animosity between the elites and “their” villagers. Two bones of contention can be mentioned here. The first is the houses themselves, which by their closure express a distance that especially younger people in the village find increasingly difficult to support, notably when the homes’ proprietors seem unwilling to address the youngsters’ plight in finding jobs or getting access to training facilities that might assure them positions—for instance, as civil servants or in private companies in China, the Emirates, or Qatar. The second is the democratization process that forced urban elites to return to their villages if they wanted to retain their roles in national politics and civil service. Local elites often find it hard to make a place for them at the local level. The following are a few rapid remarks about both issues. The elite mansions in the countryside may be big, but the proprietors themselves hardly live there. So the mansions are guarded by poorer relatives or even by strangers hired especially for this purpose (mostly young Muslims from northern Cameroon of Chad). Of course, these people are strictly admonished to make only minimal use of all the available facilities. The consequence is that these houses have an empty, somewhat frightening, aura.7 Young people, especially, often find it hard to accept such glaring differences in lifestyles. Many boys and girls will maintain that there is no future for them in the village and that they can’t live there (see below), though there are still many who stay. For them, it is of the utmost importance to bring as many elements of an urban lifestyle to the village as possible. Electricity is essential, since the television and mobile phones it powers puts them into contact with the outside world. Often the elite houses have generators that could provide this electricity, but the owners are cautious about allowing them to be used by others—certainly in their absence. The second issue, on the other hand, relates to recent political changes. One of the effects of processes of democratization in Cameroon is that

7. Compare M. Bastian (1993) on the fear such houses inspire among Igbo villagers— their very presence close to the village seems to confirm all sorts of weird rumors about the occult means by which these elites have enriched themselves.

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elites now have to take their rural constituencies much more seriously if they want to stay in politics or maintain their position in the administrative hierarchies. Under one-party politics, elites were severely discouraged from trying to build up their own support base. They were reminded time and again that they owed their candidacy for a post only to the party summit (the president and his close collaborators) and that any attempt at creating their own following would be seen as an effort to disturb “the unity of the Cameroonian people” and therefore as signs of subversion; especially under Ahmadou Ahidjo, the first president of Cameroon (1960–82), this could have had terrible consequences. And since the voters could only confirm the candidacies proposed by the party, politicians looked “up” rather than “down” to promote their political chances. All this changed dramatically after 1990, when the regime of President Biya (who had succeeded Ahidjo in 1982) struggled to remain in power and to neutralize the effects of multipartyism by obliging the elites—many of whom were in the government’s pay—to return to their areas of origin and campaign for Biya and his party. This was a truly dramatic turn: what used to be forbidden and dangerous up to the end of the 1980s suddenly became obligatory (see Geschiere 2007; Socpa 2000; 2003). However, the “return” of the urban elites, who now have to actively lobby for support on the local scene, was not always favorably accepted by local elites who rather preferred to keep them at bay. As a local businessman explained to one of us, I am not at all happy with these vultures who return from the city to do their politics here in the village. . . . They have done bad things. I mean they have had their hands in the till of the State, therefore they fear l’épervier (an anticorruption campaign). Or they are worried that they may lose their post. This is why they come to look for support here. How can one explain that someone who lives in Douala or Yaounde becomes mayor in his village or even Member of Parliament or the Senate for his region? . . . What do they want to show us? Let them go back to where they live and do their politics there. (see Socpa 2009)

At the time of our conversation, this young man typically sided with the opposition, which has been particularly strong in this region since the return of multipartyism in the country in 1990. However, the region’s prominent elites, by a large majority, still side with the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (Rassemblement démocratique du Peuple Camerounais), the ruling party. They have to support this party because they de-

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pend on the regime for the continuation of their lucrative posts. This is also why they are requested to return to their villages and campaign there for the president. Yet the consequence is that they are looked upon with increasing suspicion by at least some villagers—especially the more ambitious ones, who have not been able to profit from the prevailing division of power and are, therefore, more inclined to oppose the regime. This reflects a more general pattern of how democratization and the return of multipartyism can easily undermine the ongoing loyalty of the villagers toward “their” elites in the city.

Bush-Falling: A New Way to Confront the Future? Next to these shifts in older forms of mobility between village and city, there are also novel patterns of mobility that deeply influence people’s visions of the future. This is certainly the case for the new rage of bushfalling. Cameroonians are almost as creative as the Congolese in inventing ironical labels to comment on the more surprising turns of everyday life in permanent crisis. Bush-falling is one of the more eloquent examples of this.8 It is a completely new term—having emerged only since the end of the 1990s—that suddenly came into fashion, especially in the anglophone southwestern part of the county.9 It expresses a new and quite particular view on transcontinental migration, especially because of the completely new implications given to the notion of bush. As is the case elsewhere in Africa, this term used to refer to the more primitive parts of the country: 8. Another one is the saying “Impossible, ce n’est pas Camerounais” (“Impossible is not Cameroonian”). This seems to be a creative appropriation of Napoleon’s famous exhortation (“Le mot impossible, ce n’est pas français”) in his letter to General Jean le Marois, who despaired after the debacle in Russia (winter 1812) and the growing strength of the allied forces. The letter is from July 9, 1813 (two months before his disastrous defeat in the battle of Leipzig). Napoleon meant to convince the general and his soldiers that they could prevail against all odds. However, the Cameroonian version has the opposite implication. People use it when confronted with one more idiotic turn in everyday life—especially when it relates to effects of the government’s caprices. 9. The present-day country of Cameroon has a complicated colonial history. Annexed by the Germans after 1885 as “Kamerun,” it was invaded by the British from the west and the French from the east during the First World War. Since the Peace Treaty of Versailles (1918), it was split up into two mandated territories under British and French rule. After a plebiscite in 1961, the major part of Cameroon (British) was reunited with “Cameroun” (French) to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon (after 1972, the United Republic of Cameroon). The whole country remained officially bilingual but clearly divided into anglophone and francophone parties. However, Pidgin English (and a term like bush-falling is definitely pidgin) is also very present in the southern part of francophone Cameroon—notably in Douala, Cameroon’s major city.

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calling someone a bushman used to be (and still is) a direct insult, meant to mock him or her for displaying coarse behavior. However, present-day bush-fallers are persons who are top notch: girls dream of going out with a “real” bush-faller, boys have deep respect for girls who went to bush, and bush-fallers’ families are admired.10 Indeed, bush has acquired an opposite meaning, since it stands now for Europe or, more generally, the richer parts of the world (the Gulf states are definitely seen as bush, as well). The second part of the term, falling, seems to be associated with the idea of luck. Thus the term “bush-faller” evokes the image of a hunter who ventures into the bush in order to return with rich booty. The term and its popularity aptly sum up the now increasingly general idea that young people—boys and girls—have to leave the country somehow, since there is no future anymore for them there. Indeed, the adventurous ways in which people try to make the passage—through the desert, across the sea, paying important sums of money to passeurs of highly limited reliability—betray despair and deep disappointment with the situation at home.11 In a pioneering article, the Cameroonian journalist Julius Nyamkimah Fondong compares earlier generations of migrants from the anglophone part of the Grassfields (present-day Northwest Province) with present-day bush-fallers (Fondong 2008). The earlier anglophone emigrants mainly went to America—hence their nickname, in local pidgin, of America Wandas. Fondong emphasizes their deep differences with the bush-fallers. The America Wandas were well-educated kids who obtained scholarships to study abroad in places where they were well received. Originally, most of them planned to return after their studies: their diplomas would guarantee them well-paid jobs in public service in their home countries. However, with the shrinking of the government after the regime had to accept structural adjustment (1987), and in the general context of crisis, many chose to remain in America and find a job there. Yet this did not mean that they cut ties with their home villages. On the contrary, even though they increasingly identified with the United States, they set great store by maintaining their relations with their families at home, sending regular remittances and participating or even initiating development projects there.12

10. My former PhD student Jill Alpes first drew my attention to this notion. See Alpes (2011); see also Francis Nyamnjoh (2011). 11. Even students will now often say that they are ready to change their nationality and move; some will also say they regret that they were born in Cameroon (or even in Africa). 12. A typical example of this is discussed by Ben Page (2007), who mentions that the first project of the association of elites from the town of Bali in America (one of the most powerful of such associations) was the building of a mortuary. The aim was to assure that the body

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The profile of today’s bush-fallers is totally different. They are often hardly educated, and even if they have diplomas, they hardly use them in their efforts to get out.13 They mostly just leave, taking their chances without having any contacts in the country they plan to reach (and if they succeed at all at “crossing over,” they often end up in another country than they had originally planned). It is very difficult to quantify the new phenomenon of bush-falling precisely because of its highly adventurous and improvised character. Jill Alpes’s vivid stories of people’s migration projects are full of reversions and new beginnings: many experienced deportation and repatriation (some even several times), but often this did not discourage them. Indeed, the very fact of having been to bush seems to make a return without success impossible: for all sorts of reasons, people are under heavy personal pressure to leave once more. Also striking in Alpes’s case studies is people’s fixed belief in luck. Many of them are familiar with the risks and hardships that await them. The horrors of the trip through the desert and illegal crossings to the Canary Islands are well known. And even when one can leave with a plane ticket and papers—Alpes rightly stresses the relativity of any notion of “legal” or “false” in this context—a wide array of dangers is all too real (e.g., being locked up at airports in far-out parts of the world, constant risk of expulsion and special dangers when one is deported back to Cameroon). During the discussion after a lecture I gave in 2010 in this part of Cameroon (at the University of Buea), one staff member after another insisted on the deplorable effects that the bush-falling fashion had for the area, draining it of its most enterprising people. The staff tried to give their complaints more weight by graphically detailing all the risks that such more or less illegal forms of migration entailed. But it was clear that many of the young people present were not deterred by all this. Such setbacks are seen as “only” a question of bad luck. Many seem to believe firmly in their own “luck.” Striking is the rapid emergence of migration agencies—a completely new phenomenon that only came up in the 1990s—that help people organize their migration projects and provide them with “papers” of unclear status.

of someone who died in America (or elsewhere in the diaspora) could be properly conserved on the spot so that all the preparations for an appropriate funeral could be duly made. This example shows, most tellingly, how much these earlier elites—even when they had become transcontinental migrants—stuck to the old pattern of partial urbanization. Clearly, the village was still center stage in their conceptions of the future. 13. Alpes (2011) mentions, for instance, that when her research assistant was offered a scholarship to Europe, it took some persuasion to convince her that this was a much better way to go abroad than leaving like a “real bush-faller.”

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The very success of such migration “brokers”—apparently they make good profits and acquire a new status through their knowledge of bush—testifies to the strength of the new dream of bush-falling (see Alpes 2011: chapters 1 and 2). Bush-fallers’ determination to leave at all costs and their firm conviction that there is no future for them in the country itself seem to imply that the new craze of bush-falling brings about a drastic rupture in the preoccupations with the village and localist belonging in older conceptions of the future. In 2012, Antoine Socpa conducted a survey among students of the University of Yaounde I following a course on migration and development. One question was “If you were given the chance to change your nationality, would you do it, and which one would you prefer?” Almost 98 percent of the respondents chose European Union or United States citizenship. The most common reason given for this was that they would enjoy better lives in those locations so that they also would be able to assist their families back home. Recurrent statements were also that they “did not come to life to suffer” and that they could not be “plus royaliste que le Roi”—meaning that they could not be expected to love their country more than those who were ruling it but refuses to do anything to secure better lives for its youngsters. Apparently, there is a direct link between the often-heard complaint about the “crisis of patriotism” among African youngsters and the enthusiasm for bush-falling. The veneration of the bush-fallers focuses on their new lifestyle, which sets them apart from the locals as clear cosmopolitans. The very popularity of the notion seems to express a true frenzy “to go global.” Yet, even for bush-fallers, the pull of the local remains. Their families will emphasize— rightly or wrongly—that they heavily contributed to the bush-fallers’ migration projects. And the parents fully realize that the more adventurous character of the bush-faller’s undertaking will make it questionable whether he or she will return or even maintain any links with the family at home. The metaphor of the hunter who ventures into the bush and returns with rich booty has a sting here: there are also many stories about hunters who found greener pastures in the bush and decided to found a new settlement there. So the family will double its efforts to bind the migrant and make sure that he or she will not “forget,” even from a considerable distance. As mentioned previously, bush-falling is quite a new phenomenon in Cameroon. But reports on similar forms of transcontinental migration suggest that the African family—and the general equation of “witchcraft” with the intimacy of the family is of particular importance here (Geschiere 2013)—can have a long reach. In the 1980s, many people in Cameroon

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repeated the saying that “witchcraft will not cross the water.”14 However, with the rapid intensification of overseas migration, they are no longer so sure of this. A striking example of how families try to maintain their grip on migrants, even when they are far away, comes from Galia Sabar’s (2010) article on Ghanaian Pentecostals in Tel Aviv and their more recent fears. Especially after the start of the intifada in Palestine at the end of the 1980s, when Israeli employers were less and less able to profit from cheap Palestinian labor, the number of African immigrants to Israel increased rapidly. Sabar, an anthropologist at Tel Aviv University who had already worked in several parts of the African continent, began studying the African churches that Ghanaian immigrants notably created in Israel from 1998 onward. In 2000, she noted a sudden change in her informants’ stories. There were ever more references to witchcraft and evil ghosts coming in. One informant told her that “the witches are now in Israel.  .  .  . The Jewish rabbis have stopped protecting us. . . . They stop closing this area to protect it and then the bad witches from home enter. They come from home.  .  .  . Our families from Ghana send them” (Sabar 2010: 111, see also p. 127). This was accompanied by ever more church members complaining of vague, psychosomatic afflictions. Sabar sees a direct link between these accounts and the rising crisis of the immigrants: police harassing them, many losing their jobs or having to satisfy themselves with less-well-paid ones. Indeed, people increasingly complained about their relatives at home who did not seem to understand how difficult it was becoming to gratify all their demands and to keep sending them money. Many dreaded calling home and feared the phone calls from home even more. Of course, it became increasingly easy (and cheap) to call, but this seemed to augment the pressure. As another of her informants complained, “I lost much of my work . . . but my family keeps calling . . . every week. . . . They want more and more. . . . When I say I have nothing, they get angry with me. . . . Now it is hard for me even to walk. . . . I am praying to God to protect me from the bad spirits they send me.  .  .  . Oh God, please help me” (Sabar 2010: 122). The wider importance of these examples is clear: transcontinental immigrants cannot be seen as individual actors, even if they come by themselves; they carry with them a heavy load of expectations from family members who claim to have “sent” them (even if they hardly contributed 14. Apparently this was also a way of reassuring anthropologists from abroad that they would come to no harm (oral communication, Miriam Goheen).

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to “the passage”) and expect to profit from their success. Or, to return to the example of Cameroon’s adventurous bush-fallers, even this cosmopolitan dream does not imply a complete rupture with “home” and localist ideas of belonging. It is striking, though, that home and family become ever more a negative antipole—a kind of threatening counterpoint—and, therefore, hardly a basis for developing a consistent conception of the future. Yet the very insecurity of the bush-falling trajectory makes it also quite difficult to deduce a more confident view of the future from it.

Implications for Visions of the Future What are the implications of these changes—especially the more recent ones—for people’s view of the future? Clearly there are contradictory trends here. As Piot (2010) warned already, the impact of the post–Cold War moment is still full of surprises and uncertainties, certainly for Africa. At first sight, both shifts in mobility that were highlighted above seem to point toward the implosion of the postcolonial model of partial urbanization that would have been special for Africa. The growing dissatisfaction of the villagers appears to inspire them to keep the urban elites at bay and to remind the latter not to interfere too directly in village affairs. Such growing tensions seem to express ever deeper inequalities that can no longer be bridged by relations of kinship. In an opposite sense, the novel fashion of bush-falling appears to open new, global horizons and to express a determined effort to break out of familiar frameworks. But both trends seem to converge in undermining the rural-urban continuum that marked relations of mobility in many parts of Africa during former decades Yet, as mentioned previously, there are strong countervailing trends, as well. Democratization and decentralization (strongly supported by the new ways in which development funds become available) push the elites back to the village. To the villagers, elites still provide an obvious opening for getting at least some access to globalization and new opportunities. And even the bush-fallers seem to have great difficulties in really taking their distance from their families. As Bayart (2004) shows most cogently, stratégies d’extraversion were and are central to African social formations. Yet mobility patterns continue to be marked by unexpected twists and articulations. Precisely the changing ways in which mobility is combined with belonging and kinship will remain crucial to people’s visions of the future.

THIRTEEN

Time and Again: Locality as Future Anterior in Mozambique JUAN OBARRIO

War and Politics June 2014. Mozambique is technically at war again. The country has enjoyed two decades of peace since a post-civil-war agreement between the Marxist government of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and the guerrillas of the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) ended a fifteen-year-long devastating conflict that was emblematic of “hot” struggles fought within the context of the Cold War. At present, the two former enemy camps in the war are the two main parties in the country’s democratic system, yet every event of local or general electoral politics, its ritualized competition of sublimated violence and its secrecy, evokes the dynamics and discourse of the war. At the elite level, chicaneries, animosity, and pressure, as well as negotiation, saturate the political sphere; at the local level of the majoritarian rural population, the dread of a possible, certain, return to war reemerges in the form of rumors about local political alliances having been broken, the resurgence of spirits and other invisible forces, or the circulation of information of concealed deposits of weapons from the war in the 1980s, buried underground, ready to be used. In Mozambique, general elections are scheduled to take place in October 2014. The levels of contention have reached unprecedented levels. Since early 2013, small RENAMO platoons have carried out sporadic attacks against military and civilian targets. A year ago, RENAMO moved its headquarters back to the Sorongosa Mountains, the mythic and symbolic center of a civil war that articulated material and spiritual war machines, visible and invisible forces. As local elections approached, the combats became more frequent, and this month FRELIMO attacked the compound. The RENAMO leader, Alfonso Dhaklama, escaped, and his party declared the end of the peace agreements of 1994.

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In its analysis of the conflict, the international media emphasize political struggles, the deficiencies of the democratic system, the inaccuracy of its constitutional division of powers, its mechanisms of distribution of resources, or political and military maneuvers. Yet something crucial that is seldom highlighted and remains relatively obscured is the fundamental role that the level of locality—that is, the realm of the rural customary— has played within this dialectics among violence, law, and the political throughout Mozambique’s recent postcolonial political history.

Locality/Customary The regional standard to compare all processes of postconflict conditions, collective memory, and transitional justice in sub-Saharan Africa is constituted by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The success, failure, or shortcomings of its mandate; its procedures; and its final report have been widely debated from different perspectives. Across the border, in Mozambique, a related yet paradoxically different process has taken place in the last twenty years through the connected modes of democratic transition and transitional justice. Besides national union, what is lacking today in Mozambique is—as some local organic intellectuals put it in interviews I conducted—“a process of reconciliation between the people and the state.” Emerging from a bloody civil war and eighteen years of an Afro-socialist experiment, the Mozambican state began a deep process of legal and administrative reform in the late 1990s. This extensive postwar legal reform, which to a large extent was engineered and funded by foreign donors, was aimed at developing the internationally mandated goals of decentralization, democratization, and rule of law. In this process, an ambiguous legal recognition crucial to the politics of state decentralization was accorded by the state to the realm of the “customary” and its authorities. Through policies such as the recognition of chiefs and the legal redefinition of local “custom” in terms of the global neoliberal category of “community,” the state implicitly engaged with the past and its legacies of violence. Indeed, this legal engineering constituted a revision of a most conflictive political history and functioned as a politics of memory whereby the state attempted, through new legislation and legal inscriptions, to rewrite late colonial and postcolonial history, harnessing it toward the project of a democratic future. In the absence of large, state-sponsored theaters of truth and reconciliation, this juridico-political recognition of locality can be seen as an attempt to develop an implicit policy of national understanding. This process,

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which produced a new narrative on the recent trajectory of the nation-state, also represents a politics of mourning. Yet this condition, which could be defined as a process of “reconciliation without truth,” begs the question of an impossible mourning. If mourning takes place within certain time limits that establish the threshold of the future around the certainty of the presence of the (dead) body, then certain African nations such as Mozambique, lacking in a process of materialization of memory, could be defined as pathological, “melancholic” states. These nonplaces of memory open up complex spaces for a reflection on futurity, temporal territories where the modes of repetition and the return of past figures and practices under new guises seem to shape the contours of the political, time and again. Who hegemonizes this process? Who controls the flow of this politics of time? The melancholic return of the customary has been a central feature in many postwar conditions in Africa, especially in the field of transitional justice. Within this context, Mozambique presents some highly salient and original features. Even though a large number of local chiefs provided crucial support to FRELIMO’s anticolonial guerrilla war, the socialist regime led by FRELIMO after independence in 1975 dismantled the system of “customary” authorities and laws, repressing all “traditional” ritual and magico-religious practices. Numerous scholars and political leaders, both inside and outside Mozambique, have underscored FRELIMO’s fierce repression of “customary” authority, law, and ritual as one of the main causes for the explosion of the civil war (Geffray 1990). At present, different works of memory and different juridico-political practices of commemoration are overlapping “on the ground.” The power of chiefs as juridico-political authorities is still widespread in the rural areas; initiation rites shape subjectivities, and legal institutions created by the party-state regime combine aspects of a socialist ethos with supposedly antithetic “customary” norms. Various local temporalities and regional historical narratives about the recent articulations of war and history resignify, contest, or oppose the new hegemonic narratives promoted by the state. Yet the realm of the customary far exceeds the restricted space of chieftaincy, where it is usually circumscribed. As ethnographic examples presented later in this chapter show, the fields of ritual, magic, rumor, and legend are fundamental axes of the customary, usually articulated as more or less coherent local politics around various grammars of “kinship.” The state-sponsored legal reform also aimed at recognizing a majority of the country’s “customary” courts, which are informal instances of various sorts (mosques, Zionist churches, associations of healers, neighbors’ and elders’ councils, and chieftains). The rationale of this reform regarding

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processes of informal conflict resolution was enacted through encounters between “traditional” and Western imaginaries of power and between law and sacredness. Both “customary” authority, on the one hand, and diverse traditional spiritual practices, on the other, are also deeply embedded in the legacies of colonialism and socialism. The colonial regime shaped the realm of the “customary” and repressed the spirit cults, while the postcolonial government, labeling them as “obscurantism,” attempted to do away with both in favor of an enlightened “rational modernization.” Moreover, as RENAMO mobilized numerous chiefs across the country against the government, these chiefs restructured certain expressions of “customary” rule and also reinstated traditional practices, such as diverse spirit cults. The civil “war of spirits” (Wilson 1992) thus further extends the connections among violence, spiritual forms of healing, and “customary” rule. In today’s democratic context, shared by the two former camps in the war, the state’s recognition of the legitimacy of these practices is an implicit way of dealing with a most disturbing past and constitutes the background of the current process of peace building. As it has been extensively documented, the domain of the “customary” was central to colonial governance in Africa, later becoming crucial in postcolonial reforms of the state and citizenship. The reappraisal of the legality of custom and chieftaincy was central to an implicit politics of recognition and reconciliation, also constituting a fundamental, if striking, feature of the postsocialist transition from civil war toward a liberal democratic regime in Mozambique. Yet this process is shot through with deep ambiguity, presenting entwined relations between law and violence, illustrating the way in which the might immanent to juridical right—the force of law—at the same time enables and interrupts the process of legal recognition (Derrida 2002). For the sake of a pragmatic political calculation, the state implemented a politics of recognition in the early 2000s that reproduced the simulacrum of “traditional” juridico-political practices and authorities deeply involved in the history of colonial dominance. The limits to this recognition of difference were given not only by this fetishization of the past and its figures but by a political history marked by violence from colonial oppression and civil war. This history of enforcement of state law encompasses the role of the local “customary” chief as a depository of colonial repression as well as the punishments enacted under “customary” laws, which at times collide with human rights and international law while reflecting a larger process of continuity between the arbitrary violence of both colonial and postcolonial regimes.

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The realm of the customary—chieftaincy, segmented communities, magic, and ritual—occupied a central role not only in late colonial times but also during the first years of socialism and the war. Let us examine a brief example of how current segmented reformulations of the meaning of this recent history, understood as a precess of difference and repetition, frame the unfolding of state politics in the locality.

Locality I: Segmentation and Local Politics Angoche, the ancient capital of a Sultanate established in the seventeenth century in today’s Nampula province, is a town located 250 kilometers away from the provincial capital. In 2004, I interviewed the newly elected RENAMO mayor of Angoche along with a young local FRELIMO politician. The mayor offered a delicately woven history of the region, from ancient precolonial times to the moment of conquest, and a political explanation of the civil war—a story that, the young FRELIMO cadre said, with its emphasis on historical difference along ethnic lines of conflict, “put in question the feasibility of democracy in Africa.” The mayor had started his political activity as a young FRELIMO cadre after independence in Angoche. He occupied various positions in local administrative units until the early 1980s, when he became the head of the local state company that produced cashew nuts. He worked in the Portuguese-run cashew factories at a time when Nampula was the largestproducing province in the country. His trajectory in managing both local state units and state-owned productive companies encompassed political changes that dovetail with the dynamics of historical difference in the region. In 2000, the mayor switched allegiances and joined RENAMO, as did other high- and lowerranking officers of the FRELIMO forces in the province. One night, close to the date of local elections, as we were discussing matters with the mayor and local FRELIMO politicians, he sought for his to appear amicable, as he seemed to want to leave the possibility of future negotiations open. The night in which we spoke at length, the mayor deployed a tale of circulation and politics. He spoke for hours about the movements of currency and commodities, the traffic in slaves, the subsequent incursions of foreign sovereigns—Arabs, Portuguese—into the coastal region, the colonial military campaigns, their advancements and retreats. Developing a regional version of national history, he materialized armies, navies, trading expeditions, multitudes of enslaved workers, the meandering trajectory of regional military, economic and political elites.

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The mayor explained regional and national divisions and enmities through versions of historical facts. He spoke about social divisions in the province, segmentary splits (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987) between Makhuwa groups from the coast and those from the hinterland, cultural differences that find their expression in political, partisan struggles or quarrels within factions of one single party. The mayor attributed this opposition to the historical process by which local Makhuwa elites who trafficked in slaves settled in the coastal areas in the eighteenth century, capturing people from the hinterland that they would sell to Arab trading elites from the Sultanate, centered in Angoche and nearby islands. The conversation then switched toward issues of ethnicity. The young FRELIMO officer referred to various different groups, their age-old aspirations and novel forms of organization, and the way in which an ethnic revival, generated by the deregulation and decentralization of the former socialist state apparatus, was then sweeping the nation, from local politics in the north to struggles among white, mulatto, and black intellectual, political, and economic elites in Maputo. The discussion of the reethnicization of the political and neonativistic ideologies echoed the political climate in the province at the time, marked by a revivalist notion that at long last the north, relegated from political power and control of the economy since independence by the FRELIMO southern elites, finally had a possibility of attaining a larger share of recognition and management of resources. The ongoing policies of decentralization of the state—and FRELIMO’s need to reach out to emergent movements that suffused local politics with the reappraisal of elements from local language, ethnicity, and religion that had been dismissed by the nationalist postindependence regime— generated a reinforcement of “local power,” or different versions of the “customary” that reemerged as legitimate, even if deeply ambiguous, modes of governance. This economy of differences, its effect in terms of regional variations, was addressed that night by the mayor in terms of an interpretation of relations between politics and war produced through the lens of custom: “The civil war took place because African ideology demands reciprocity. There was one given sector or faction that was accumulating too much power and resources, absolutely marginalizing other sectors. They were consuming, eating everything without sharing with the others.” He presented an interpretation of the civil war that emphasized the original split in FRELIMO ranks and the officers who formed RENAMO a few years into the postindependence period. He placed the relevance of this historical fact over the crucial early support that RENAMO received from Lisbon and former Portuguese settlers, as well as from the South Afri-

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can apartheid regime and the CIA. In his account of recent history, the war had been more of a local process, a regional type of conflict along ethnic or customary lines, than an epiphenomenon from Cold War dynamics. The mayor located at the root of so much conflict and terror the alienation supposedly felt by vast groups within the Mozambican population, particularly in the center and north of the country. It was a hypothesis similar to those presented by Christian Geffray (1990), who, following his field research in Nampula in the mid-1980s, had explained the support lent to RENAMO by rural populations in the countryside in terms of their rejection of the central state’s policies against the “customary” and chiefs, as well as the program of collective villages implemented in order to restructure both kinship formations and the rural economy. Yet the mayor’s version of the history of the war, while also assuming the northern regions’ rejection of FRELIMO party-state policy, located its roots in different factors: ethnicity and segmentation. In his account, war was waged by groups such as the Sena—the dominant group in the central regions—which were ethnically and culturally different from the southern Shangana elites who had led FRELIMO since the days of the anticolonial war and had ruled the country since independence. These groups had allegedly felt alienated for years from the distribution of power and resources organized by southern elites, unleashing what amounted to an ethnico-cultural conflict. He reinforced his view, in which political parties, war machines, and ethnicity seemed to dovetail across similar cleavages: “FRELIMO did not circulate the revenues, they did not reciprocate; given African ideology it was obvious that we would lean towards war.” Yet the account was given backward. History seemed to be thought and debated from the vantage point of the present juncture, from the perspective of the votes that have given RENAMO the electoral hegemony in the province. There was, at the time, a consensus within the public sphere at both the national and regional levels that to achieve hegemony in the political present, the battle over the narration of recent history first had to be won. Hence the political present as a continuation of a past of warfare across segmentary divisions—of ethnic groups, of clans—was shaped by contemporary conundrums of power and law. By the end of that long night in which we talked at length, the mayor spoke about the two opposing political camps while subtly implying the resilience of the customary and its segmentary dynamics, which constituted the main, underlying local political structure, encompassing the seeming political transformations of changing allegiances toward parties and state units. It was a recognition of the crucial role of segmentation in

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local politics and the opposition that the segmentary community had always exerted against all forms of centralized political power in the region, from the time of the Sultanate to the colonial state and its postcolonial, socialist successor. Toying with two empty glasses, switching their positions to represent FRELIMO and RENAMO tactics, he smiled dizzily and said, “It is always the same. It seems as though it changes, but nothing ever actually changes.”

Time/Space: Of the Customary The “customary” as an oral domain of norms has always been a concept defined by the state in opposition to its official written codes and legislation. This key issue also signals to the apparent arbitrariness of violence deployed under “customary” law, which is supposedly not regulated as in codified state legislation. Yet this field appears to be crucial for the state to perform its functions. Through the demarcation of this allegedly external realm by means of constant research and inscription, the colonial state actually delimited itself. After a postcolonial interregnum, this invocation of the “customary” for self-fashioning has been reproduced at present: in rural areas and urban centers—through ritual-political and religious ceremonies of recognition of the “customary” or juridical-historiographic discourses, such as the contents of legal reform—the state deploys an ambiguous politics of memory, harnessing a version of history and an imaginary of natural law and sacred violence linked to war that fuels the legitimacy of the state apparatus itself. Through the juridical reconstruction of the realm of rural “custom,” the urban Afro-modern sphere actually shapes itself and, through a double movement, both differentiates and distances itself from the space of customs and tradition while implicitly drawing its political legitimacy vis-à-vis local political actors and international donors from the very existence of that realm. Nevertheless, both spheres, the urban and the rural, are contiguous not only in spatio-temporal terms but also in economic and political terms, and the interconnections between both are so profuse that the distinction really only exists at an abstract, administrative level. The traffic of continuities and links along the rural-urban continuum denies the state’s construction of differentiated spaces and temporalities separated by a tangible border. Their differentiation along social segregation, economic enclaves, labor reserves, and development corridors, which goes back to colonial governmental policies, is merely a matter of juridical discourse. This depiction of difference is not merely an abstraction that (mis)represents the

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actual state of things, but rather it is itself a discursive practice that has palpable effects on the real; through its expression in the juridical instruments, it reveals itself both as a technology of state power and as a productive discourse that structures the political field itself. The rural-urban administrative distinction, as the neoliberal creation of the juridical concept of “community” shows, is a dangerous supplement to local collective memories and their charge of remembrances, of spectral, absent/present pasts projected onto the near future. Locality, as the space of the colonial “customary” or the neoliberaldemocratic “community,” appears thus as the place of a future anterior: a condition in which current practices of governance bring together elements from the past and a still-emergent present and in which the alchemy of precolonial, colonial, and early postcolonial temporalities are enmeshed.

Locality II: Customary against the State Toward the end of our interview, in mid-2004, the mayor of Angoche alluded to the widespread gossip in the region about the local government’s debts and its involvement in the propagation of cholera. Stretching his ambiguous place as mediator between camps, he attributed the escalation of rumors and covert accusations to undefined “opposition groups.” A few days earlier, I had spoken with the former FRELIMO mayor. He had told me, complaining with a regretful grimace, that during the electoral campaign of the previous year, in the light of a local state campaign to purify water with chlorum, RENAMO groups had spread the word that he had gone to the city of Nampula to “buy cholera” and infest the town’s running water with it. Soon thereafter, the rumors expanded to encompass other corpses, trafficking in people, and disappearances: an antigovernment sentiment had begun to expand throughout the province. If recent theorizations on biopolitics have analyzed ways in which the law captures life as an object of governance (cf. Agamben 1998), customary notions of life and the living that exist on the ground unfold through a resilient materiality that presents a strong counterpoint. Being based on singular conceptualizations of the body and the relations between its flesh and the realms of kinship, ancestrality, and spirituality, they might be considered a reversal of the biopolitical paradigm, showing how, momentarily, the local turns the tables against broad schemes of governance and in precarious, provisional ways, life might capture the law for its own purposes. In order to look at another angle of the predicament of African democracy as a balancing act between the politics of life and death, let us

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consider, through the specific case of Mozambique, another aspect of the continuities between war and the political, or between colonial and postcolonial social dramas, through something that might be called the “folklore of biopolitics”—that is, local imaginations of the governance of the body. In 2004, during my fieldwork in peri-urban and rural areas in Nampula province around the time of local elections, the mysterious appearances of corpses and body parts, as well as rumors about the disappearances of children in the region, generated a chaotic social context that achieved its zenith with the emergence of widespread gossip that the “state knew everything” regarding these events and the culprits. “The government,” so the buzz went, “knows the identities of the criminals and is their accomplice.” Soon afterward, in northern cities and in nearby rural areas, the accusations were interpreted as the return of the “Chupasangue” vampire (Meneses 2008). The Chupasangue, or Bloodsucker, was a vampire figure whose myth emerged in the northern region for the first time around 1977 (cf. Serra 2003). Experts have underlined the connections between the legend on extraction of blood, or life, and the establishment of Grupos Dinamizadores (GDs), Marxist party state units and the beginning of primary care medical services and blood donation campaigns implemented by FRELIMO in the northern rural countryside. Other versions of the myth implied that strangers attacked people at night and extracted blood with from their heads with syringes. In 1978, local rural populations in the north would stay up all night chanting and clapping ritual hymns in order to ward off the vampires and foreign beings. It was at that time that a certain economy that entangled bodily fluids and governance begun to take shape: it was widely assumed that the extracted blood was used to fund the consolidation of the new independent status of the country, which was somehow related to the stocking of hospitals. The myth also supported connections between blood and money: the trade in vital bodily fluids, it was also believed, financed the creation of a new currency (in 1980, the metical replaced the colonial escudo as the national currency). The imaginary of a war that ended in 1991 continued to permeate regional politics in the years to come. The early 1990s were marked by deep social tension in Nampula. As in other parts of the country, RENAMO’s boycott of the local elections was associated, by large sectors of the population, with the danger of a return to war: it was widely believed that RENAMO leaders were retreating to their former military garrisons. Ru-

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mors about large deposits of weapons buried underground, ready to be used, proliferated in the region. Meanwhile, the spread of a cholera epidemic created even further alarm and turmoil in the rural and peri-urban areas. In this context, several events took place that would produce, as a common effect, an indictment of the state. In some of the most densely populated urban neighborhoods in Nampula, where I was conducting research on justice and customary law, a rumor began expanding rapidly, affirming that the first care units were, in actuality, centers for the propagation of cholera. The government was allegedly behind a mega-operation to exterminate a large part of the population. Another rumor started spreading immediately afterward, based on supposed information about Europeans vaccinating children in schools, killing them on the spot by means of strange substances. In the face of the outburst of cholera, a government program of water purification was implemented in the city of Nampula. New rumors emerging in peri-urban neighborhoods had it that, actually, the government was adding cholera to the water under the pretext of cleaning it. An economy of death soon reemerged. The corpses of people who died of cholera were not being returned to their relatives but rather kept in plastic bags to be disposed. The families were not allowed to visit their sick relatives at the hospitals, did not receive the bodies, and hence were unable to perform the proper cleansing and burying ceremonies. In Nampula and Angoche, covert information spread quickly about the alleged fact that the government was using the corpses of the cholera victims, as well as all the blood and organs supposedly extracted, to pay back the interest on the national debt to foreign donors. Soon, two new facts would be uncovered that located these key social processes in a relational space between the “customary” and the “state.” Evidence was found by the police, throughout the province, of practices of bodily violence. Corpses, sometime dismembered or presenting signs of torture; body parts; organs; and hearts were uncovered in the midst of both rumors about and solid denunciation of the disappearance of people—in particular, children. Although these findings seemed to lend some credibility to the ever-expanding rumors, after a deeper investigation, the two conclusions to which these discoveries led were related to “traditional” local practices and party politics. The bodily remains that were found were allegedly intended for use in ritual practices of sorcery. As in the recent past, healers and some of their “clients” were imprisoned, accused of ordering

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the killings and dismembering dead bodies. The second significant datum was that the groups of people initially detained in connection to these ritual crimes were “RENAMO militants.”1 With the impending ritual of the secret ballot and the recurring accusations against it of nontransparency, fraud, and hidden maneuvers, other forms of political secrecy were also mobilized. Intentions and ultimate goals were duplicitous; nobody in the “public” sphere knew who was propagating the rumors, where they had started, or what aims they pursued. Was it the spontaneous work of a local “community”? Was it propelled by RENAMO? Or was it all staged as an ultimate ruse of political reason by the government itself? Both political parties blamed each other for the violent effects that the myth produced. Local modes of sociability understood as a scheme of debt relations spilled onto the field of the political. The various meanings of narratives being projected coalesced for a moment on the idea that the “government” was paying back its foreign debt with corpses. This mythic explanation for the governmental management of the effects of an epidemic made visible, for an instant, undercurrents within the space of the “customary” that dealt with the outcome of war and the effects of a new system imposed by strange foreign actors, a new political landscape of democratic electoral politics and structural adjustment policies.

Conclusion: Future Anterior The resurgence of the customary represents a crucial aspect of the transition between colonial and postcolonial regimes throughout Africa. This political context shows how jurisprudence can be understood as constituting both a legal reform of the state and an implicit official historical narrative fit to revisit a recent, most conflictive, past. Since the democratic transition of the 1990s, the Mozambican state has been reflecting on the legacies of colonialism, socialism, and the civil war as the historical conditions of its democratic present, through the relations between the poles of violence and the law, as well as between the “modern” and the “archaic.” Based on this process of reflection, expressed in the state’s juridical discourse, two political conditions are thus unfolding in parallel: a broad politics of recognition and an alleged, deep process of reconciliation. But

1. Information for this section is based on the aforementioned volume by Carlos Serra, newspapers and television news from 2004, and interviews and observations I carried out with local dwellers and state officials during fieldwork in Nampula’s outskirts around the time of the events narrated here.

Time and Again / 193

this analogical politics contains a fundamental paradox, which is best conveyed through the grammatical (and political) figure of the future anterior. The aporia consists in a situation whereby a postcolonial liberal democracy that enforces a modernist legislation, representing it as progressive and oriented toward the future, embraces the violent legacies of colonialism entrenched within the allegedly past-oriented modalities of “traditional authority” and “customary” law. The juridical reform of the state granted citizenship rights to a broad, ethnically diverse population, promoting a subtle articulation of futureoriented constitutionalism with past-oriented “custom,” which also constituted a problematic dialectic between bylaws with potential for emancipation and fierce, authoritarian statutes from the past. This operation of legal reform produces a conundrum: a future anterior time in which the modern—liberal democracy, citizenship rights—necessarily “will have been” traditional, uncovering “custom” as the telos of postcolonial history. The contemporary moment seems to blend all possible epochs into a condition of potential becoming. The articulation of a diverse array of juridical regimes representing the colonial past and postcolonial present are mixed in schemes of governance into which insinuates itself the ghost of the “precolonial.” This is the precedent of the “customary,” the space of locality currently defined as “community.” Within the postsocialist, neoliberal regime’s recognition of the “customary,” the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial epochs appear as almost indistinguishable historical moments within a deeper present. The dialectical circuit of governance that merges the various levels and epochs produces a leftover. The ongoing political operation of subtraction of the future from the past gives as its result a surplus of historical meaning. The recognition of locality represented a late liberal technology of governance (negotiated between the postsocialist elites and the donor agencies) as well as a recognition of the force and legitimacy of customary structures after the role they played in the violence of the civil war. It was also a response to a broad demand from local populations, which express that force of custom under various formations of imagination, ritual, and power. As an infinite negativity seemingly interrupting all potential movement toward future progress, the current manifestations of the precolonial in terms of local authority, or as ritual practices and imaginations, cannot be fully assimilated into the official “recognition” enforced by the state. Crucial elements of violence and magic, central to the realm of the customary, cannot be articulated by the juridical reforms of the modern secular state

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and constitute an excess that undermines the process of “rule of law” and the foundations of the democratic regime that aim at encompassing all historical difference. The neocolonial elements within the contemporary—political, economic, “developmental” in its structural adjustment variety—reproduce historical aspects of a colonial legacy (law, “custom,” economic extraction) that are tamed through the contingency of current politics. Both the broad field of governance (development, population management) and the restricted field of the locality (indigeneity, custom) seem to project a condition in which all possible imaginations of the future cannot represent anything other than a repetition of past schemes—that is, time and again, the eternal return of the same. Current technologies of governance— democratic transition, structural adjustment, juridical recognition of local custom—aim at transforming the infinite openness of the future into the closed circuit of a future anterior. Yet the present moment appears to represent something novel, located beyond the mere label of the neocolonial. To be sure, an element of foreignness is at stake: the “neoliberal,” “transnational” moment related to the absolutism of markets, speculation, economic fragmentation, and restraint of national sovereignty. This foreign vector intervenes at every level—central, “local”—shaping the outcome of the political, from the ministerial and developmental capital city of dark financial flows to the rural countryside of the “customary” villages. Through postsocialist juridical reform, the state claims to be able to process all historical remainders and subsume all negativity back into the dialectical system of governance. It attempts, for instance, to subsume the absolute explosion of “local” difference that emerged out of the transition after socialism: be it ethnic, cultural, linguistic, political, or “customary.” Yet the result of this operation is still unclear. As of yet, there is no answer to whether the movement of difference can be halted, consolidating a hegemony on the political field that rejoins all differential elements, all past historical moments, “toward a better future,” as the governmental slogan for general elections had it back in 1998. While the state aims at governing a local territory full of disjunctions and calibrating its multiple temporal fractures, a politics of anachronism emerges on the ground. Beyond the effects of juridical technologies and capital’s articulation of the “customary,” vernacular rituals and imaginaries of citizenship defy the calculus of the law and the economy. In Mozambique, with its transitional peace and reconciliation process— through which a reformed civil state was shaped out of the devastating

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consequences of war and where former enemy political camps, armies, and ethnic groups are attempting to rebuild a common nation—the coalescence between the emergence of new technologies of governance and the return of old ones transforms this postcolony in a temporal space crowded with paradoxes, in which locality is experienced as the dominion of the future anterior.

FOURTEEN

Getting Ahead When We’re Behind: Time, Potential, and Value in Urban Tanzania BRAD WEISS

In the introduction to his powerful exploration of the discourses of development in Lesotho, James Ferguson notes that there has been a discernible shift in the meanings and connotations of the term “development,” as this category has been defined and deployed by various institutions and agencies since the late 1940s. Initially, development was essentially synonymous with “Modernization” in its Rostowian version. Development implied a process of transition toward a “modern” capitalist industrial economy and thus necessitated a modernizing transformation. This transformation and transition entailed a wholesale reorganization of social and economic relations and activities. This reorganization was implicitly understood to have a directional movement, from the disparate and contingent pasts of the premodern toward a unitary, modern future. As the inadequacies of this model, to say nothing of the abject failures of its concrete programs, became apparent (to some, at least), a second alternative vision of development emerged, according to Ferguson, sometime in the mid-1970s. In a fashion that is at once more straightforward, and more subtle, development has come to refer to a grand program for the alleviation of poverty, one that may be less concerned with the establishment of specifically “modern” institutions and practices than with the enhancement of the so-called quality of life in a particular geopolitical region—be it a neighborhood, a polity, a nation, or a continent. With this second set of meanings, Ferguson notes, “the directionality implied in the ‘development’ . . . is no longer historical, but moral” (1990: 15). Of course, it is quite possible to conflate these alternative sets of meanings—policy makers do it all the time, assuming that the “modern” is identical to the “good.” Indeed, it is difficult to fathom, given an enlight-

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ened, liberal political cosmology, how anything moving forward in time— anything characterized as “progressive”—could be anything but positive. In this chapter, I am equally interested in the ways in which vernacular understandings of development are taken as moral concerns in the pronouncements and practices of many men and women in northern Tanzania, in the city of Arusha. Like many contemporary African urbanites, residents of this community are quite familiar with both the rhetoric and programming of international development. What is especially striking about their takes on development, as my ethnographic evidence will illustrate, is that it is characterized by concrete modes of grasping temporal organization and process as a moralized field—that is, as a way of comprehending time as a domain of social value. Ideas like “progress” and “moving forward,” as well as “being behind” and “returning back,” which are entirely commonplace in Arusha, appear to conjoin claims about historical transition and qualitative transformation in ways that might seem to resonate with the ideological advocates of liberal or neoliberal development, structural adjustment, and the entire “development ‘apparatus’” ably described by Ferguson. They do so, however, from a situation—and I would suggest, within a cosmological (or what some might call an ontological) purview—in which social practice shapes and is shaped by very different understandings of time, value, and sociality. My aim in this chapter is to elucidate these understandings— especially as they are embodied in cosmological practices intended to promote “development” and to examine both their articulation and disjuncture with those models summarized by Ferguson. The study of time and temporality as modes of social value has, of course, a seminal and enduring place in social theory. From Marx’s account of the alienation of labor time in The German Ideology (Tucker 1978) to Durkheim and Mauss’s account of categories of time as an expression of social classification (1963) to E. P. Thompson’s work on the transition in temporal consciousness from task-orientation to abstract “clock time” under capitalism (1967; a work that owes a major debt to Evans-Pritchard’s seminal work on Nuer modes of time reckoning [1939]), the notion that temporal consciousness is a mode of social consciousness is firmly established. What has also become clear in much contemporary work (see Munn 1992 for an older but still excellent review) is that the reified divisions between “linear” and “circular” (or sometimes “static”) orientations of time that once characterized much anthropological thinking are entirely inadequate to grasp the complex, nuanced ways in which multiple modes of reckoning time; of experiencing various temporal qualities (e.g., rhyth-

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mic, enduring, compressed); and, most especially, of creating an order of relationships and activities (e.g., via systems of credit or rituals of the life course) that constitute time appear as a manifold totality in any specific situation. It is this manifold complexity, the interpenetration of different ways of grasping the significance—and especially the possibilities—of time, that I hope to get at in my examination of “development” in Arusha. This, too, may help us come up with a way to frame a comparative account of what is at stake in thinking about “future(s)” in Africa and elsewhere.

Time and Potential: A Troubling Image To be sure, in-depth, explicit discussions of the meaning of “development” and the causes of Tanzania’s putative underdevelopment are not entirely typical in Arusha—especially within the social milieu of barber shops and bus stands where I conducted my ethnographic research in the early 2000s (Weiss 2009). More commonly, pragmatic attitudes and understandings are embedded in accounts of personal fortunes and failures and in the kinds of shared experiences of struggling and surviving that circulate in conversations throughout the town. On occasion, though, “development” itself may be directly addressed. I once visited a pair of artists in a modest studio they ran. The subjects of their paintings often included themes from what one of the artists—Mr. Mullel, a somewhat older man—described as “traditional” folklore. To demonstrate these “traditional” forms, he showed me a series of paintings he had completed, paintings that presented colorful, virtually psychedelic depictions of a spirit he called a chunusi. The chunusi, he told me, is a wild insect-like creature known to inhabit waterways, from which it attacks its victims in order to gorge on their blood. While the painters did characterize the chunusi as a “traditional” image (ya kitamaduni), their paintings were not meant to capture a folkloric past, or even to appeal to an art market interested in “folk art,” but to comment on contemporary concerns. Far from simply being mythological creatures, both painters told me stories of children disappearing in Mwanza on the southern shores of Lake Victoria, of bus crashes, and of dangerous bridges right there in Arusha, all of which were widely attributed to the work of chunusi. To continue, and to elaborate on the relationship between the chunusi and other contemporary modes of insecurity, Mullel showed me works that took up a very similar theme—paintings he had done when he briefly resided in Mozambique. Here the motif was wild spirit familiars called mazimbwi (plural; zimbwi, singular). In one painting, Mullel depicted a pair

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of these creatures as suitors to a beautiful girl. With one hand each, zimbwi offered her food; at the same time, one of the creatures looked to steal the milk from her breasts, while the other prepared to slit her throat in order to devour her. Mullel had been inspired by his experiences in Mozambique, he told me—not only by the stylistic forms of Makonde sculpture, which were incorporated into his aesthetics, but by the history of Mozambique, pursued as it was at the time by both the Soviets and the West, two potent familiars offering support in exchange for mineral wealth and other extractable resources. Both artists described this painting as an example of a paradigmatic relationship between Africa and international development agencies that promise aid as a cover for their profiteering. And both made explicit connections among chunusi, mazimbwi, and political and economic exploitation—all without, in any way, seeing the “traditional” folkloric motifs as mere metaphors of such entanglements. This remarkable set of paintings and the rich motivations described by these artists are far too complex for me to discuss in the full detail that they demand. The fact that the practices of international development are explicitly thematized in both the artwork and the painters’ analyses of them is certainly noteworthy; the way in which “traditional folklore” and “Third World exploitation”—each, again, explicit categories—are so conflated as to be evidence of the very same meaningful, political process should not be terribly surprising to anthropologists, accustomed as they are to the routine interpenetration of the customary and the contemporary and the making of multiple modernities. But I cite these artworks and the artists’ overt theorizing on their themes in order to illustrate an important dimension of the elaborate constitution of temporality and morality instantiated in these representations that is critical to wider understandings of “development” in Tanzania. What these paintings thematize is the sense in which development is grasped as a potential for growth—like the bodies of the lost schoolchildren or the doomed prospective bride—which can move forward to realize its promise, be cut off before that potential can be realized, or in the worst cases, actively be subverted so as to divert that potential for nefarious purposes. What more apt illustration of such subversion of potential could there be than nursing not a growing child but the source of one’s death? Note, then, that this moralization of time is not predicated on an epochal transformation—that is, from a generalized condition in which “development” was once absent and then becomes present. Rather, the dangers of “development” are grasped as a threat to the properly managed temporal unfolding of productive processes—like raising healthy children—whose value lies in their potential for growing and yielding a

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secure future.1 This potential is something that is available—and at risk— in a wide array of contexts and eras: in the “traditional” past, in revolutionary Mozambique, and on the Tanzanian tarmac.

Moving ahead and Returning Back Part of the significance of such “potential,” or “promise,” as a temporal form lies in its very flexibility. On the one hand, it suggests a concern with growth that is particularistic; that is, it describes the unrealized value of an entity—a person, a community, a nation—that is distinctive to it and thus not comparable to anything else. At the same time, because the value of potential is unrealized and so lies expressly in the future, it is quite easy and common to speak of it as an abstraction—and thus in absolute terms— as though growth toward one possible future were comparable with any possibility, as though all possibilities converged on a single scale of evaluation. This brings me to a second, ideologically charged, disquisition on the problem of development in Tanzania. Consider the following verses of the best-selling rap artists Hard Blasterz Crew: Tuko nyuma kimaendeleo

We’re behind in development

Sababu ya rusho

Because of being thrown aside,

Udhaifulifu na upendeleo.

Weakness, and favoritism.

Tuko nyuma. (Mpaka lini?)

We’re behind. (Until when?)

Source: http://www.reverbnation.com/ngomanagwa/song/14334078-hard-blasters -ft-lb-geniuz-tupo

These laments seem to resonate with both a kind of (neo)liberal epistemology as embedded in the “modernization” paradigm of development and their radical critics. Indeed, Tanzanians, rappers among them, are given to denunciations of the “fact” that they are “behind.” And they are keen to attribute that deplorable condition to “weakness and favoritism”— most frequently to that exhibited by Tanzanian officials. It would be a mistake, though, simply to see these assertions about a failure to progress— that is, about being “behind”—either as parroted liberal denunciations of African corruption or as politicized critiques of Africa’s underdevelopment at the hands of the rich and powerful. To recognize the cultural registers of

1. This notion of “potential” recalls similar ideas about time, the body, and social and biological reproduction presented in my work on plastic teeth extraction in Haya communities (Weiss 1996: 155–79).

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Tanzanians’ conflicted experiences of development—and, in particular, of being “behind”—we need to turn from these ideological pronouncements and examine, in a little more detail, the ways in which moralized temporal understandings, like those of “potential” and “progress” already alluded to, are embedded in everyday practice and discourse in Arusha. The fear of being “behind” relates quite directly to the particular valences of the KiSwahili term for development, maendeleo. This term is an abstract noun derived from the verb kuendelea, generally transliterated as “moving forward,” or “going ahead,” but the term also connotes not just directional movement but a pattern of activity—so it can be rendered as “to keep on going,” “to persist,” or “to continue.” Thus kuendelea mbele, which in English would sound redundant as “go forward ahead,” is a standardized form in vernacular KiSwahili, meaning “to keep going ahead,” or “to continue moving forward.” These semantic possibilities recall the senses of development indicated above, as growth or the realization of a valued potential is a continuous process, while “going forward” also suggests progressive movement. My purpose in specifying these alternatives is not to argue that the cultural significance of “development” in urban Tanzania derives from the semantic structure of Swahili; it is rather to suggest a range of possible meanings that can be deployed in people’s actual interpretations of their worlds. Note, for example, that connecting the notion of movement with that of continuity makes it possible to understand “progress” not as a unilinear—or even linear—passage but rather as an ongoing condition of possibility, one whose character is both directional and reversible. Development, in other words, is an intrinsically unstable and flexible condition, part of a continuous and discontinuous process that “goes” and “returns,” travels forward and backward. This understanding further recalls the way that the Zambian miners and urbanites Ferguson worked with described socioeconomic change “in terms of nonlinear fluctuations of ‘up’ and ‘down,’” (Ferguson 1999: 252) and saw historical unfolding as neither linear nor static but as having a “recursive” quality (251) in which old methods (like “traditional” folkloric representations) are remarkably suited to contemporary conditions. Again, it is not simply the case that speakers need to differentiate between “continuing” (kuendelea), “moving ahead” (kuendelea mbele), and even “continuing indefinitely” (kuendelea nyuma) but rather that in actual discussions of changing economic conditions, and—perhaps especially— personal circumstances, men and women routinely pair “getting ahead” (kupata maendeleo; literally, “getting [some] development”) with “falling behind” (kurudi nyuma; literally, “returning back”). Indeed, while “devel-

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opment” is infrequently cited as a self-conscious category of reflection and interpretation, “falling behind” and “returning back” are constant topics of discussion. “You get a little bit of development,” goes the standardized complaint, “and one day, you know you are going to return back.” Far from a lockstep, unilinear transition, then, development sounds more like a kind of economic indicator—shorthand for one’s standard of living. While it is true that maendeleo is taken more as an achieved moment perpetually at risk than it is as a fundamental restructuring of relationships, it would be a mistake to see development simply as a matter of accumulation, something to be stored up until it is depleted. Kupata maendeleo and kurudi nyuma are not just alternative idioms of developmental progress or change; they are also a discourse of moral culpability. Progress and futurity, being ahead and returning back, are not mere descriptors of economic circumstance; they are assertions of values and so depend on the socially meaningful forms of relationships that facilitate or impede the acquisition of these circumstances.

“Fast Business” From this perspective, “returning back” is not simply an impersonal decline in acquired development; it is more like an active imposition on one’s capacity for growth. Indeed, “returning back” is often understood to be a problem created by those who want to impede the development of others or—in a related fashion, and as we have already seen—to subvert the growth processes upon which development depends. In discussions with people involved in informal-sector practices in Arusha—from used clothing sellers to bus touts to hair salon workers—such illicit obstacles to maendeleo are most often described as biashara kwa haraka, or “fast business.” Wealth and development are certainly widely aspired to throughout town, but there is also an implicit recognition that these are not—or, more accurately, should not be—ends in themselves to be pursued at any cost. The problems of “fast business”—which presumes that proper accumulation has a measured pace, that its temporal form is controlled and comprehensible—are the dangers that it poses both to those who engage in such business and to those who are the object of this business. In the most transparent sense, business that is too fast is likely to be a charade, a quick score that collapses just as quickly. As soon as you get ahead, you find that you return back. But the problem of “fast business” is not only its chimerical allure but the active threat that engaging in such business poses for the wider world that one is a part of. Moreover, the notion of “fast business” is

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seen to be relevant to a host of contemporary enterprises such that, increasingly, those who have “gotten a bit of development” are often assumed to have engaged in “fast business.” This is a routine source of gossip and rumor that circulates around any number of activities and especially around rapidly changing fortunes (and misfortunes). There are three main areas of activity that are themselves thought of intrinsically as forms of “fast business” or that can be associated with certain practices (which I discuss in more detail below) that are commonly associated with efforts to make money quickly and effortlessly. The most enduring kind of activity, one already alluded to in my discussion of chunusi, is the transportation business. There is a long-standing association, in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa (Masquelier 1992; McIntosh 2009; Weiss 1996), of bus transit, and long-distance travel more generally, with uncontrollable movement and exploitative danger, all in the pursuit of accumulation. In part, this is an expression of the way in which roads and automobility themselves instantiate a concrete mode of reconfiguring temporal (as well as spatial) relationships. So the hazards of bus transport become an apt metaphor—indeed, an icon—of the ways in which maendeleo entails a shift in the moral qualities of productive processes. In Arusha in the 2000s, the enterprise perhaps most commonly associated with biashara kwa haraka was tanzanite mining. Mining for this precious gem is carried out primarily in Mererani, fewer than a hundred kilometers from Arusha, and can be an alluring prospect, especially for the young men I worked with in Arusha’s informal sector—primarily barbers. Yet all the men I knew who had considered looking for work in these wildcat mines were reluctant to do so, not just because they knew it was inherently dangerous and largely a matter of luck, but because they considered it to be biashara kwa haraka. Many men had stories of boys they knew, either from their rural homes or from the neighborhoods where they lived, who had been driven to “get rich quick” and suffered as a consequence. “They send young boys down the mines,” one man told me. “They call them a ‘snake.’ He carries a torch and is tied to a rope, and he crawls down a hole until he comes to the vein. He makes everyone else rich, but he can die in a mine collapse, and he’ll never get paid a penny for his work. It’s all biashara kwa haraka!” Others pointed out that men went to the mines to get rich but had to pay for all the essentials of existence at the mines—“mpaka maji chafu!” (“even for the filthy water!”) that men claimed was sold by the “prostitutes” (malaya) who worked in the vicinity of the mining barracks. In other words, doing a job whose sole purpose was to accumulate personal wealth

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turned every act into a form of market transaction. Just as striking were the temporal implications of these activities. As many young men put it, “the money comes and goes just as quickly”—a statement they would utter while dragging their finger under their nose to indicate the fact that income from mining was quickly spent on drugs. Indeed, the most well-known cautionary tale of mining profits tells of a “Maasai” miner who made a major strike and built a huge nightclub as a monument to his fortune— which quickly led to the demise of his business and his utter destitution. The “fast business” associated with maendeleo distorts temporal modes of production, so the value of such productive processes is as quickly lost as it is made. The final form of “fast business” that is seen to exemplify this kind of activity is not exactly an economic venture but (at least ideologically) a spiritual one. The allure of “fast business” is a widespread trope in religious discourses in Arusha. I noted this when I asked people about the rise of Pentecostalism in the region and made plans to attend a week-long crusade that was held in town in 2006. Many of the people I talked to, some of whom were interested in Pentecostalism, saw it as a form of “fast business.” For some, this meant that the church leaders were only out to enrich themselves by making converts—as the expression goes, “buy a new religion.” For others, it was the act of conversion itself that was seen as a form of “fast business,” or a path pursued by those who thought that “being saved” was a path to easy financial success. While a number of studies have articulated connections between Pentecostalism, the “Prosperity Gospel,” and neoliberal modes of production (see especially Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Guyer 2007), I was later struck by the fact that those who attended the Pentecostal crusade often offered conversion narratives that described a process in which they had renounced past attempts to pursue “fast business,” usually aided by (in their view) nefarious, non-Christian spiritual means, and turned to Pentecostalism not as a source of prosperity but as a mode of healing and as a path to a very long-term commitment to God that would allow them, as I was routinely told, “to die without being afraid.” In other words, “fast business” was a powerful trope across religious discourses that worked as a foil for religious adherents of any form to denounce dangerous alternatives to the lifelong pursuits to which they were committed. At the same time, of course, the fact that “fast business” is so routinely vilified demonstrates that it is widely seen to be a pervasive possibility of contemporary life, whose obvious appeal needs to be resisted at every turn. Given the way that “fast business,” an exceedingly rapid and overreach-

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ing form of trying to “get ahead,” not only distorts temporal processes of growth but is characterized by efforts to impose on others’ prospects for developing their own potential, it is not surprising that the term biashara kwa haraka is also virtually synonymous with ambiguous spiritual practices like sorcery and the propitiation of majini spirits. The depraved attempt to achieve development by means of such forces best exemplifies the conjunction of “getting ahead” and “falling back,” and not only are each of the practices I have discussed—automotive transport, mining, and Pentecostalism—seen as emblematic of “fast business,” but those who pursue these practices are also routinely assumed to engage in the dark arts of majini cultivation. Moreover, the links of “fast business” to treachery demonstrate how the temporal organization of development, as a form of continuous growth, is constituted within a social milieu that maendeleo itself reveals to be organized as an agonistic order. That is, development is intrinsically at risk because any potential that is generated (potential that is essential to the very form of maendeleo) can be understood as a value that is either achieved at another’s expense or exposed to others’ intentions. In sum, the contemporary expansion of “fast business”—which is a both a challenge to development and a characteristic feature of development—means that “getting ahead” for some implicitly entails “returning back” for others.

Concluding Futures There is nothing terribly novel in asserting that transformations in the forms of social value ushered in by market relations, commodity exchanges, or structural adjustment have reshaped and reinvigorated such cosmological practices as spirit possession, witch finding, and prophecy. By way of some brief concluding examples, I want to suggest something slightly different: it is not simply that “new situations demand new magic” but also that the meaning of new situations is often revealed by the modes of magic through which they are encountered. We can look from “the outside in,” as it were, at constructions of development from the perspective of practitioners of spirit divination and devotion, a proliferating practice in Arusha today, to see how the magical remakes the market. I asked the devotees of a particular jini that was widely recognized throughout town what they thought of the circulating rumors about the dangers of this spirit. Many claimed this same jini was responsible for the deaths of dozens of bus passengers, sacrificed by wealthy bus owners in order to satisfy these bloodthirsty beings. The devotees I knew—most of whom specifically sought out spiritual blessings for their economic enterprises—were unfazed by these

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reports. They insisted that they knew the proper way to respect their spirit but that there were other waganga (“diviners/healers”) in town who acted only for the sake of money. These others, I was told, just engaged in “fast business,” working for their own profit and not for the benefit of those who sought the spirit’s help. “Fast business,” in other words, not only describes the resort to illicit aid from spiritual forces; it also works as a category within spirit devotion to distinguish between the proper and improper pursuit of development. The meaning of “business” itself is thus shaped by the cosmological constraints of spiritual obligation. As a last case, let me recount a conversation I had with two young women about this sorcerous construction of development. Rehema and Khadija worked in a salon owned by a pair of Chagga women who—according to theses two—had been set up in their business by wealthy husbands. Khadija and Rehema had worked in such shops over the past five years, each hoping to earn enough money to support the children for whom they were the sole sources of regular income. At a small bar near the wattle-and-daub rooms they rented, Khadija and Rehema described their assumptions about “fast business” to me. Not surprisingly, the exemplars of sorcery they focused on were the kinds of people they worked for: entrepreneurial, educated, characteristically Chagga families. In their view, it wasn’t Chagga ethnicity that marked them as suspect so much as it was their place of residence: a rapidly expanding industrial and residential community called Njiro south of the town center. Njiro has witnessed tremendous growth in the past decades and is the site of utility plants, private industrial factories, and other widely decried sources of dangerous hazardous wastes; it is also home to World Vision Tanzania. But Njiro is preeminently thought of, at least by the folks I know best in Arusha, as a location for the bloated, newly built homes of arriviste entrepreneurs. In short, Njiro is a place that is beset by conspicuous signs of “development,” opulent houses that are a testament to the concentrated accumulation of wealth in Arusha, all achieved at the cost of the thorough contamination of the community’s potable water. Such “developments,” then, are plainly evidence of growth and expansion at a pace that is uncontrolled and, as such, morally threatening. Again, little is surprising in the assertion that such places as Njiro, where the benefits of prosperity are riven with pollution (in every sense), are built out of the nefarious practices of its inhabitants. Khadija and Rehema, by contrast, lived in one- and two-room hovels, built of wattle and daub, in a sprawling tangle of single-story tenements that were densely clustered along the road to Nairobi. It would make no sense, they said, to look for

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businessmen or healers dabbling in “fast business” among their neighbors. So when Khadija asked why was I so interested in the black arts of majini and sorcery—why should I worry about these things when surely they did not exist where I came from?—Rehema answered curtly before I could reply, “Isn’t that where rich people come from?” In short, the very model of “development,” as it has been impressed upon the residents of Arusha, is understood implicitly as the quintessential origin of a disturbing cosmological bargain. In a world where “moving forward” is a movement at risk, it is clear that development cannot imply a decisive break from the past or a momentous rupture in material conditions. But, as I hope my examples have illustrated, development is grasped in the urban experience of Arusha’s men and women as a reevaluation (and thus a moral understanding) of growth and potential—that is, of temporality itself. In her recent, seminal essay, Guyer notes the ways in which temporalities have been reorganized in both macroeconomic theory and evangelical Christianity in ways that suggest “the decline of the near future” in public culture (Guyer 2007: 410). She contrasts the current era with the abiding concerns with “rationality” and “forecasting in a foreseeable future” that characterized much of twentieth-century temporal rhetoric. Today, the immediacy of events and the assurances of “the long term” dominate our imaginations and practices. The material presented in this chapter resonates, in many ways, with Guyer’s assessment. In particular, “development” is experienced and reported by men and women in Arusha as a process that threatens potential as the source of value to be concretely realized in what can be thought of as a “foreseeable future.” While this is tied less to ideas of “rationality” or forecasting, per se, the notion of potential is clearly tied to processes that are imminently knowable, that can be impeded by (largely opaque) practices with a foreshortened temporal horizon (i.e., “fast business”). At the same time, when Tanzanians denounce the fact that they are “behind,” they are clearly asserting that they have a powerful claim on those whom they regard as “ahead.” It would be a mistake, though, to see this concurrence of temporal and moral claims as having a definitive directionality. The “development” to which Tanzanians might seem to aspire is apprehended as having its own potential—one that can remake the world but that is itself at risk. We should expect, then, that “fast business” is pervasive where rich people come from—that, for the advocates of development as well as their targets, “getting ahead” is never far from “falling behind.”

FIFTEEN

Africa in Theory ACHILLE MBEMBE

To write the world from Africa, or to write Africa into the world or as a fragment thereof, is an exhilarating and, most of the time, perplexing task (Mbembe 2001). As a name and as a sign, Africa has always occupied a paradoxical position in modern formations of knowledge (Mudimbe 1988). On the one hand, Africa has provided most of our modern disciplines with their foundational categories. From anthropology to political economy, from poststructuralism to psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, Africa has been the purveyor of some of the most compelling concepts without which the face of modern criticism would be utterly poor. On the other hand, it has been largely assumed that “things African” are residual entities, the study of which does not contribute anything to the knowledge of the world or of the human condition in general. This assumption has itself led to too narrow a definition of what “Africa” stands for in the history of human thought and too vulgar a conception of what “knowledge” is all about and whom it is supposed to serve. Today, the overwhelming belief is that, coupled with science and technology, market capitalism and “humanitarian” interventions will sort out most of Africa’s problems. Complex social facts such as war, mass poverty, joblessness, disease, and illiteracy are treated in uniquely materialistic terms, as if all of these were purely technical matters and the human subjects implicated in these dramas had no histories, no affect, and no morals. History itself has been reified in a set of abstractions, and the sense of being at the edge of a future so palpable in the immediate aftermath of colonialism and Apartheid has quickly vanished. As radical changes have unfolded, each requiring ever more complex modes of explanation and understanding, Africa has witnessed a surge in problem-oriented research that has become attractive to governments and

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private funding agencies because of its putative relevance to “real-world” challenges. Funding scarcity, in turn, has led numerous scholars to work as NGO entrepreneurs and consultants, to stockpile short-term research contracts, and to shift rapidly from one topic to another, a practice that increases the atomization of knowledge rather than the thorough understanding of entire fields. The research for hire financed by philanthropic organizations and development agencies favors the collection of large data sets and privileges the production of quantitative indicators over qualitative indicators and critical analyses. Buttressed by an explicit, and at times unqualified, commitment to instrumentalism and social empiricism, it mainly treats Africa as a crisis-prone entity. The crisis itself is understood simply in culturalist and technicist terms as an event that calls for a technical decision. Needless to say, this kind of research has not resulted in as big of an improvement in knowledge as might have been expected. Nor has it made any space for critical analysis and theorization. Yet, as the new century unfolds, many increasingly acknowledge that there is no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination or to pose new questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded on. Recent ethnographic studies of Africa have shown how to draw on multiple models of time so as to avoid one-way causal models; how to open a space for broader comparative undertakings; and how to account for the multiplicity of the pathways and trajectories of change (Guyer 2004). In fact, there is no better terrain than Africa for a scholarship that is keen to describe novelty, originality, and complexity and is mindful of the fact that the ways in which societies compose and invent themselves in the present—what we could call the “creativity of practice”—is always ahead of the knowledge we can ever produce about them. As amply demonstrated by Jean and John Comaroff (2011) in their book Theory from the South, the challenges to critical social theory are nowhere as acute as they are in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps the epicenter of contemporary global transformations—in any case, the site of unfolding developments that are contradictory, uneven, contested, and for the most part undocumented. Here, fundamental problems of poverty and livelihood, equity and justice, are still, for the most part, unresolved. A huge amount of labor is still being put into eliminating want, making life possible, or simply maintaining it. People marginalized by the development process live under conditions of great personal risk. They permanently confront a threatening environment in conditions of virtual or functional

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superfluousness. In order to survive, many are willing to gamble with their lives and with those of other people. This is a deeply heterogeneous world of fractures, frictions, and frackings. Power relations and the antagonisms that shape late capitalism are being redefined here in ways and forms not seen at earlier historical periods. Contemporary forms of life, work, property, production, exchange, language, and value testify to an openness of the social that earlier descriptive and interpretive models can no longer account for (Simone 2004). New boundaries are emerging, while old ones are being redrawn, extended, or simply abandoned. The paradoxes of mobility and closure; of entanglement and separation; of continuities and discontinuities between the inside and the outside, the local and the global; or of temporariness and permanence pose new challenges to critical thought and intellectual inquiry (Guyer 2011). These processes have coincided with the redrawing of the global intellectual map—a shift that started during the era of decolonization. Besides traditional northern Atlantic research institutions and centers of learning, alternative circuits of circulation (South-South, North-East, South-East) have emerged during the last quarter of the twentieth century. This worldwide dissemination of thought has been buttressed by a worldwide circulation and translation of texts, a highly productive invention and reappropriation of concepts, and the denationalization of the great academic debates. Whether the denationalization of the humanities and academic discussion has brought a truly global perspective to conventional Western or Southern theory and criticism remains to be seen. At the very least, it is now recognized that the world can be studied from everywhere and anywhere (Looser 2012). Major transformations in the way in which we think about the histories of the world are under way (Chakrabarty 1995; Chen 2010; Davutoglu 1994). In this context, any inquiry into the place of Africa in theory is necessarily an interrogation concerning the experience of the world in the epoch of planetary power (Hale 2011).

The State of Theory Today Theory has been not only the name of the West’s attempt at domesticating contingency but also the way in which the West has distinguished itself from the “Rest.” The foundation of the modern university itself and the current geopolitics of knowledge at the planetary level rests, to a certain extent, on a Yalta-like division of the world between the West, where theory is

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done, and the “Rest,” which is the kingdom of ethnography. In this global cartography of knowledge production, the functions of marginal regions of the world are to produce data and to serve as the test sites of the theory mills of the North. To be sure, historically, theory (at least among the Western Left) has always been many things at the same time. It has always been an investigation into the conditions and limits of knowledge. But the task of theory, at least in the human sciences, has also always been to ask, what characterizes our present and our age? In other words, it has been about the “construction of the intelligibility of our time” and about finding out “who is the collective subject that belongs” to that time of ours, as Roland Barthes once put it. Obviously, then, theory was always conceived as a political intervention, something somewhat beyond criticism as such. What gave it its edge was its presupposed capacity both to transform the existing structures of power and to imagine alternative social arrangements. In this sense, theory was always understood to be a means of struggle—which allows Michael Hardt to define it as a form of “philosophical and political militancy.” Whatever the case, critical theory emerged in Western Europe between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in response to transformations in the economy, society, and culture. At stake in these transformations was a radical change in the character of the capitalist economy and the liberal political order. This was indeed a time of multiple transitions— out of a notionally liberal nineteenth century and into an era of monopoly formations, imperialist adventurism, and late modern forms of conquest and colonization; of the blurring of the boundaries, already then, between private and public spheres; of the displacement of skilled artisanship by the serialized processes that would ultimately lead to Fordism; of the subversion of traditional structures in the world of work; and of the collapse of utopian revolutionary hopes. These processes had a huge impact on the nature and forms of cultural criticism. Witness, for instance, the Frankfurt School’s interest in the withering away of the culture of autonomous individuality and the way it paved the way for the expansion of the state—an expansion that, for Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, encouraged a conformist and manipulative culture industry that nurtured a regressive subordination to bureaucratic administration and allowed for the emergence of what Marcuse in particular called “the unidimensional man.” There is no agreement today as to what theory is and what distinguishes it from “criticism.” As with the term “critique,” “theory” today covers a wide variety of practices—from (1) methods of questioning the truth of authority to (2) techniques to reveal the figures of power that operate in domi-

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nant discourses, institutions, or social processes to (3) ways of investigating the limits of human reason and judgment (Hardt 2011). Furthermore, over the last quarter of the twentieth century, there has been “something of a flight from theory, a re-embrace both of methodological empiricism and born-again realism; also a return to the ethical and the theological” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011: 47)—to which I would add the growth of versions of popular science that have produced a ready public for arguments that seek to reduce human nature to biology. The increasing theoretical confidence of theology and biology has resulted in the story of “being human” becoming more and more conflated with the story of “human nature” (Smith 2007). The “flight from theory” has left a vacuum in which sociobiology, genetic reductionism, neurosciences, and cognitive sciences have flourished. These disciplines are annexing core humanities questions of intentionality, agency, memory, sexuality, cognition, and language. In the process, they have reasserted a domain of inquiry that focuses not so much on the modes of production of the historical and the social as on “the place of human beings in the universe.” To a certain extent, their goal is to produce a theory of how “history” is humanly produced as an essence and not as openness to contingency. In the United States in particular, or at least in certain sectors of the US academy, theory is nowadays haunted either by melancholia or by hysteria (Brown 1999). Like hysteria, theory is a strange discourse that is never satisfied with a neat answer. It is always asking for more. It is asking for more in the name of a certain notion of truth at a time precisely when, thanks partly to deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the idea that “there is no truth” has gained a lot of traction. This is a time, too, when interrogations of truth now reverse the question of representation—when history itself tends to be understood either as memory or as representation. The problem of representation has, in turn, destabilized the dimensions of language, reference, and even thought itself. The idea that there is no truth is filling some of us with a certain kind of real terror. In such a context, theory is nothing but the discourse of a relation to a missing master or mistress. And as we know all too well, where the master or mistress is missing, the discourse of hysteria always tends to mask—or compensate or substitute for—his or her absence. To the above should be added the overwhelming feeling today that critique has run out of steam (Latour 2004). We keep making the same gestures when everything else has changed around us, says Bruno Latour. We keep fighting enemies long gone, wars that are no longer possible, and we are ill-equipped in the face of threats we have not anticipated and for

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which we are thoroughly unprepared. In short, we are on the ready but one war late. How should we get out of this impasse? By “renewing empiricism,” says Latour (2004: 231), getting closer to facts, cultivating a “stubbornly realist attitude” in relation to what he calls “matters of concern.” As we can surmise, Latour’s crusade is mainly directed against “deconstruction,” which he would like to replace with something he calls “constructivism.” For Mary Poovey, on the other hand, “we now need to move beyond theories of representation” (what she calls “language-based theories”) to “consideration of social processes”—a project that requires, according to her, the formation of “alliances with practitioners in the social and natural sciences” (2004)—as if the human and natural worlds were not, to a large extent, organized into discrete series of signals and messages that invite recognition and interpretation, a certain way of coming to terms with language and with representation. Yet most of the recent assumptions concerning the death of theory can be contradicted. Rather than theory having died, what we have witnessed is its displacement. This displacement has been rendered possible by three processes. The first is that the disappearance of the very idea that truth is but a fiction. The second is that abstract theory has never had such a hold on the material and social reality of the world as it does today. The particular power of economic abstraction is a case in point. Theory is always a particular theory of the world. Increasingly, that world is being constructed by invisible entities like finance capital and abstract singularities like derivatives—a business, says Nigel Thrift, “that uses theory as an instrumental method, as a source of expertise and as an affective register to inform an everyday life that is increasingly built from that theory” (2006: 301). The power and effectiveness of abstractions depends not so much on whether their depiction of the world is accurate as it does on their capacity to constitute a world. This is indeed the case when “idealized apprehensions of the world produced through theory” end up being held up “as desirable states of being” to which social, economic, political, or cultural life should conform (Leyson et al. 2005: 431). As a practice that flows from abstraction to action, theory becomes a guideline or a template that operates on different scales and registers. On the other hand, theory has been displaced into myriad critical practices, some of which are flourishing, alongside new forms of public and politically committed intellectual work. Some of these critical practices are direct responses to an emphatic moment of urgency, which itself seems to have rekindled the utopia of the radically new. They are also facilitated by the rapid transformations in contemporary media. Here I refer not simply

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to the arts of transmission of knowledge but also to the fact that the sensibilities, ethoses, interiors, and public lives of most people today are determined more and more by television, cinema, DVDs, the Internet, computer games, and technologies of instant communication. Critical intellectual practices today are those that are capable of writing themselves within a frame of immediacy and presence, those that are able to locate themselves in nodes that attract other texts, forms of discourses that have the potential to be forwarded, redistributed, quoted, and translated in other languages and texts, including video and audio. The result is not only a transformation in the language of knowledge itself but also a displacement of theory, the kind of disarray in which it finds itself these days. The stakes are rendered even higher as a result of various key transformations in contemporary life. The biggest challenge facing critical theory now is arguably the reframing of the disciplines and critical theory in light of contemporary conditions and the long-term sustainability of life on Earth (Chakrabarty 2009). If to survive the ecological crisis means to work out new ways to live with the earth, then alternative modes of being human are required. The new ecological awareness forces us to recover an appreciation of human limits and the limits of nature itself. Anthropocentrism—that is, the privileging of human existence as determining the actual and possible qualities of both thought and being—should become the object of a renewed philosophical critique. So should the age-old natureculture and human-animal divides, as well as the opposition between an instrumentalist attitude toward nature and what has been taken to be the “nature worship of the primitive.” The extent to which new modes of being human in relation to other species are prefigured in contemporary arts, technology, and natural and environmental sciences should be at the core of any rethinking of the project of knowledge itself. A second challenge stems from the alliance between technology, capital, and militarism, with the aim of achieving what the late French critic André Gorz called “ectogenesis.” In his mind, the term “ectogenesis” did not simply imply the separation of science and politics from morality and aesthetics. It also stood for the attempt to industrialize the (re)production of humans in the same way that biotechnology is industrializing the (re)production of animal and plant species (Gorz 2010). Such a planetary pursuit of pure power and pure profit without any goal other than power and profit itself—a power indifferent to any ends or needs except its own— is driven by capital’s attempts to transform life itself into a commodity in an age when all beings and species are only valued in terms of their availability for consumption (Ziarek 2012). The degree to which capital today is

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adept at increasingly exploiting this constitutional consumability of beings and species represents a major inflection point in the history of humanity. It radically redefines the very nature of “the human” and forces us to revisit the categories by which we used to conceive of social life. If indeed the possibility of our experience of the world pivots precisely on the question of availability and consumability, what then remains of nature, politics, and the social? Not very long ago, we conceived of the world as a huge arithmetic problem—a world in which, as Simmel reminds us, things and events were part of a system of numbers. We acted as if it were a world whose deep secrets could be revealed and harnessed if we subjected it to rigorous procedures of calculation, reification, formalization, classification, and abstraction. Today, our world is one in which the human body, and indeed life itself, is more and more part of a vast system of “info-signs” and electronic codes. It is a world governed by electronic reason, one in which an important dimension of technological development is converting the human body into information (from DNA testing to brain fingerprinting to neural imaging to iris or hand recognition). A consequence of this shift is the significant alteration not only of traditional modes of perception and subjectivation but also of traditional definitions of what “matter” consists of and of what qualifies as “human.” The long twentieth century has also seen the emergence of a general phenomenon that might be called “image capitalism.” Image capitalism is a form of capitalism in which the image is not simply taking over the calculative functions yesterday associated with numbers; rather, the image has become a techno-phenomenological institution. The circuits from affect to emotions and from emotions to passions and convictions are, more than ever before, attached to the circulation of images meant to stimulate desire, the connection of affect and capital serving to reconfigure not only “the everyday” but also the physical, political, and psychic conditions of embodiment in our time. Any attempt to theorize culture today must therefore attend to these new pathways of capital. Furthermore, contemporary technologies of the image and the convergence of visual, digital, and consumer cultures have created belief structures and paved the way to “practices of affect” that accord a preeminent role to faith, sincerity, and conviction, sometimes in lieu of reason and calculation. Moreover, they have transformed what is taken for “fact” (“evidence,” “the real”) and altered the basis of our sensory experience and the connections of human beings to otherwise incomprehensible phenomena. The impact of these transformations in terms of contemporary conceptions of material

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causality, or in terms of the ways in which we fill the space between fear and anxiety, truth, fiction, and the imagination—these are questions we have hardly begun to explore that might help explain the troubling psychic presence of the image to the real, its capacity to double reality, its power to replace the inanimate with the animate, and its anarchic unruliness. The image’s uneasy status as a double of the real and its power to excise time have their origins in a deep anxiety about what constitutes the real—an anxiety that has become a cornerstone of contemporary life. But what gives such power and value to the image at the start of the twenty-first century is the fact that it keeps the human person in circulation. It traces the shadow of the human subject and creates an exact transcription of his or her presence, based on the image cast by his or her shadow. It captures and preserves permanently what we know to be a transient form or a fleeting life and existence. Liberal political principles (liberty, equality, the rule of law, civil liberty, individual autonomy, and universal inclusion) have been overtaken by neoliberal rationality and its criteria of profitability and efficiency. As a result of the colonization of everyday life by market relations, the worship of wealth and the workings of a mode of production that depends on the destruction of the natural foundations of life—our work, our needs, our desires, our thoughts, our fantasies, and self-images—have been captured by capital. An impoverished conception of democracy as the right to consume has triumphed, making it difficult to envisage a different economy, different social relations, different ends, different needs, or different ways of life. This in turn has led to debates about whether humans indeed want the responsibility of authoring their own lives and whether they can be expected “to actively pursue their own substantive freedom and equality, let alone that of others” (Brown 2010: 55). Finally, the neoliberal drive to privatize all forms of art has resulted in the endless commodification of culture and its permanent translation into spectacle, leisure, and entertainment. This significant development comes at a time when global capitalism itself is moving into a phase in which the cultural forms of its outputs are critical elements of productive strategies (Scott 2000). Because the arts and culture have become integral parts of the economic, their capacity to engage critically with the velocities of capital can no longer be taken for granted. Spaces of culture are no longer just aesthetic spaces; they are also commercial spaces. This is one of the reasons why culture is more and more understood as “heritage,” “custom,” “the ancestral,” and it is in this sense that many would like to view it as a set of practices reducible to cash. Identity, on the other hand, is under-

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stood as “difference”—religious, ethnic, racial, gender, national. To be sure, “culture” and “identity” have not lost their affective, auratic, and expressive potentials. But maybe more than ever before, marks of otherness (now called culture, identity, and authenticity) and even meaning itself are more and more exchanged, valued, and allocated as a function of the market (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). On the other hand, the hypertechnological enframing of the life-world and the growing implication of art and culture in global systems of militarization of consciousness represent major challenges to critical arts practices. In the militarized landscape of our time (with its obsession with surveillance and security), to “demilitarize” culture itself should become a cornerstone of the new humanities.

The “New” Southern Question Everything above should be read in light of the fact—highlighted by Jean and John Comaroff in Theory from the South—that at the present moment, “it is the Global South that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large.” The study of Africa has long been (and is still) dominated by two modes of argumentation. The first has been descriptivism and presentism. “Presentism” is neither a method nor a theory; it is a way of reading African life-forms that simply relies on a series of anecdotes and negative statements or that simply turns to statistical indices to measure the gap between what Africa is and what we are told it ought to be. This way of reading always ends up constructing Africa as a pathological case, as a figure of lack. It is a set of statements that tell us what Africa is not. It never tells us what Africa actually is. The second is a tradition of detailed, vivid, and richly textured ethnography and historiography of life-forms. Deeply embedded within a tradition of “area studies,” thick ethnography, interpretive history, and symbolic analysis have become powerful examples of how we should think and write about human agency, as well as what analytical strategies we should deploy in order to describe and interpret specific forms of social life in particular settings. The extent to which this tradition indirectly helped set the stage for the critical debates on the forms and methods of social inquiry that dominated the mid-1980s to mid-1990s has unfortunately not been sufficiently recognized. Indeed, by the time we entered the 1990s, the study of life-forms and life-worlds in Africa had yielded precious gains in at least four major arenas of social life: informality and struggles for livelihood; the question of singularities (rather than of individuality or individuation); the logics of

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mobility and multiplicity (that is, of unfinished series rather than a calculus of countable collections); and the logics of experimentation and compositional processes. These gains included, for instance, expanded conceptions of rationality and subjectivity that were not limited to that of the individual, self-interested, and risk-averse social actor; the realization that the self, or the singular, is not only a fiction or artifice or something we come to believe through habit; the discovery that our lives are always in the making (the theme of life as potentiality, a process of fragile actualization); and the notion that, in many ways, our lives do acquire a certain unstable consistency, even in the midst of shifts, instability, and volatility. Not only in the wake of structuralism but also after the demise of certain forms of Marxism, the collapse of theories of modernization, and the crisis of certain forms of world-system analysis, this tradition has also engaged, if indirectly, with several key concerns of social theory in the late 1980s and mid-1990s: the matter of form and forces; questions of historical agency; the connections among context, intentionality, and what today we would call subjectivity but in those days was named “consciousness,” or even “ideology”; the making of practice and the pragmatics of repetition and change; the thorny questions of power and domination and of resistance and liberation; and more generally, the vexing issues of the body and its unfinished yet excessive qualities, of the nature and figures of the political (see, for instance, Comaroff 1985). During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the best studies of African life-forms helped us understand that historical and cultural structures are not necessarily mechanical reflections of underlying social and economic structures. In fact, they are equal to them in “ontological” standing. In turn, social and economic structures are themselves as much objective facts (if this means anything at all) as they are the products of the interpretive work of human actors. The best works on Africa have also shown that we can expand our ethnographic reach without losing the capacity to make general analytical and theoretical points. This can be done if, on the one hand, we take seriously the task of historicizing institutions, practices, and cultural repertoires and if, on the other hand, we take just as seriously the reality of the long-term sedimentation of experience—la longue durée (Bayart 2009). Search for alternative acts of thinking—exploring other ways of speaking; taking seriously the images, sounds, and senses; and thinking as philosophically and historically as possible about the precariousness of life in Africa, the intensive surfaces of power, and the various ways in which events coexist with accidents. Indeed, if the project is to “rethink Africa”

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or, for that matter, to write the world from Africa or to write Africa into contemporary social theory, then there is no better starting point than the question of time. Time is neither uniform nor homogeneous. Structures of temporality in colonial and postcolonial conditions are thoroughly entangled with the vicissitudes of the affective, with the subjective play of desire and uncertainty. In such contexts, we can only refer to the abstraction of time as a rhetorical figure. For many people caught in the vortex of colonialism and what comes after, the main indexes of time are the contingent, the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the fortuitous—radical uncertainty and social volatility. Radical changes go hand in hand with various other gradual and subtle shifts that are almost imperceptible, and sudden ruptures are deeply embedded in structures of inertia and the logic of routine and repetition. To account for change in such a context is therefore to account for simultaneity, bifurcation, multiplicity, and concatenation. The task of the critic is therefore to help us think philosophically about the various ways in which events coexist with accidents. The interrogation of time is very much related to the interrogation concerning the daily amount of labor involved in the production of the sense, if not the illusion, of stability or continuity or something like permanence in the face of the known temporariness or volatility of almost all the arrangements of social existence. Indeed, the question of temporariness has been central to recent efforts to account for life-forms and life-worlds in Africa. One of the most brutal effects of neoliberalism in Africa during the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the generalization and radicalization of a condition of temporariness. Arjun Appadurai is right when he argues that for the poor, many things in life have a temporary quality—not only physical and spatial resources, but also social, political, and moral relations. What he says about the poor in Mumbai—the fact that the social energy and personal creativity of the poor is devoted to producing a sense of permanence—is true for many people in Africa. For many people, the struggle to be alive is the same as the struggle against the constant corrosion of the present, both by change and by uncertainty, as Appadurai rightly argues—especially when he ties up the struggle against the constant corrosion of the present with the work of producing one’s own humanity in the face of powerful, dehumanizing, and at times abstract and invisible forces. Temporariness can also be described as the encounter—a very regular occurrence—with what we cannot yet determine because it has not yet come to be or will never be definite. It is an encounter with indetermi-

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nacy, provisionality, the fugitive, and the contingent. Temporariness is not simply an effect of life changing rapidly; it also derives from the fact that vast domains of human struggle and achievement are hardly the objects of documentation, archiving, or empirical description—and even less the objects of satisfactory narrative or interpretive understanding. It has to do with the colossal amount of things we literally do not know. It also has to do with the fact—as shown in the best of the current history and anthropology of African life-forms—that uncertainty and turbulence; instability and unpredictability; and rapid, chronic, and multidirectional shifts are the social and cultural forms taken, in many instances, by daily experience. Then there is the question of labor, which, at least in the history of capitalism in South Africa, cannot be delinked from the histories of race and of the body—especially the black body, the body that is at the same time a body and a commodity but a body-commodity that enters into the realm of capital under the paradoxical sign of the “superfluous,” superfluity. But what does the superfluous designate? In the history of race and capital in South Africa, the superfluous means, on the one hand, the valorization of black labor power, and on the other hand, its dispensability—the dialectics of valuation and dissipation, indispensability, and expendability. It seems to me that this dialectic has been radicalized in this neoliberal moment. The dialectics of expendability and indispensability have been radicalized in the sense that today many people are no longer indispensable specimens. Capitalism in its present form might need the territory they inhabit, their natural resources (diamonds, gold, platinum, diamonds, and so on), their forests, or even their wildlife. But it doesn’t need them as persons. Not long ago, the drama was to be exploited, and the horizon of liberation consisted in freeing oneself from exploitation. Today, the tragedy is less in being exploited than in being utterly deprived of the basic means to move, to partake of the general distribution of things and resources necessary to produce a semblance of life. The tragedy is to not be able to escape the traps of temporariness. These are also times of high social velocity. In South Africa, for instance, hypermobility is dramatically expressed through the emergence of a black middle class that is hungry to consume and willing to contract debt and spend money on housing, fridges, cars, and all the trappings of a highly consumerist society, an increasingly privatized society with a very raucous and even uncivil public sphere. And then one has to look into the contradictory political effects of welfare, consumption, and privation—which themselves are the result of the displacement of the sites of the political, of the refiguring of the political after years of resistance. The political is no longer where it used to be. Welfare and consumption

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are, in any case, the two main technologies of social discipline, if not “pacification,” that the government is using after years of mobilization to demobilize people. And it seems to me that these are two technologies critical to the making and unmaking of citizenship in South Africa today.

Collisions and Collusions There is no accident without some form of collision or even collusion. I see three instances of collision and collusion happening in the continent. There is, first of all, collision and collusion that occurs when privatization has to be carried out in an environment fundamentally characterized by privation and predation. I see a second collision, or collusion, when extraction goes hand in hand with abstraction in a process of mutual constitution. After all, the places where capital is most prosperous on the continent today are extractive enclaves, some of which are totally disconnected from the hinterland in some nowhere that is accountable to nobody. The third instance of collision and collusion comes in the form of a coalescence of commerce and militarism. Here, in order to create situations of maximum profit, capital and power must manufacture disasters and feed off of disasters and situations of extremity that then allow for novel forms of governmentality, of which humanitarianism is but the most visible. These three instances of collision and collusion epitomize three modalities of Africa’s entanglement with global capital. In spite of its uneven incorporation into the world economy, this region does tell us a lot more than we might want to think or hear about the future of global capitalism—and not only in its extractive and at times militarized version, by which I mean the kind of “primitive accumulation” that lies close to, but is not always coincident with, the vast global shadow economy that is dependent on illegal activities like smuggling, drug and people trafficking, and money laundering, through which trillions of dollars circulate around the globe outside formal legal reckoning. Let’s call this extractive economy of unprocessed raw materials the “raw economy.” It has been the source of growth in Africa over the last decade. This growth has been largely the result of a tremendous demand for export commodities and the resulting high prices of crude oil and minerals. Africa today supplies the world economy with more than half its diamonds, platinum, and cobalt and more than a third of its strategic minerals like vanadium. The logic of extraction that underpins this “raw economy” might not be the same as the logic of deindustrialization that seems to partly characterize Northern economies. But both seem to have quickened the accumu-

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lation of surplus populations. Marx used to divide “surplus populations” into three categories: “latent” (made up of those with insecure employment), “floating” (composed of those cycling rapidly in and out of the labor force), and “stagnant” (composed of those only rarely employed; Marx 1976). To these three categories we should add a fourth composed of those who will never be formally employed. The expansion of capitalism in this new phase of globalization and its transformation into a financial system significantly intensifies this process. In fact, it confirms global unemployment, unemployability (?), and the rise of surplus or superfluous populations as part of what Marx called its “absolute general law.” Such a rise itself points toward the growing crisis of reproduction going on worldwide— a crisis of reproduction that Africa has, to use one of Jean and John Comaroff’s terms, “prefigured.” Whether old categories of “production,” “work,” “exploitation,” and “domination”—and more recent ones of “bare life” or “naked life,” inherited from recent theorizations of sovereignty and the state of exception—suffice to write into theory such planetary recodings of situations of misery, debt, and enforced idleness is open to question. Indeed the reality is that it is possible today to produce increasing quantities of commodities with decreasing quantities of labor. In other words, labor has ceased to be the great wellspring of wealth. The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by a finance industry that is constantly refining the art of making money by buying and selling nothing but various forms of money. The amount of capital the finance industry siphons off and manages far exceeds the amount of capital valorized in the real economy. The value of this capital is entirely fictitious, based as it is on debt and on expectations of future growth and profit. The continent’s historical experience shows that in order to expand, capitalism paradoxically does not need to absorb everything in its path. It does not need to interiorize everything that was hitherto exterior to it. In fact, it needs to keep producing or generating an exterior. And for this to happen, it needs to do two things. On the one hand, it needs to keep jumping from place to place—hopping, as James Ferguson (2006) says. The machine might be constantly “breaking down” (Jameson 1998: 7). Whether it is repairing itself remains to be seen. In any case, whenever it attempts to solve its local problems, it is usually either by “mutation onto larger and larger scales” or by a singular concatenation of profit making and, where necessary, war-making activities and the militarization of trade. This is how the dynamic of expansion can produce its full effects. Africa also teaches us that global capitalism cannot expand without what we should call massive “racial subsidies” or “discounts.” It needs

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to work through and across different scales of race as it attempts to mark people either as disposable or as waste. It needs to produce, order, segment, and racialize surplus or superfluous populations to strategic effect. This takes various forms. One of these is these populations’ incorporation into military markets. Significant in this regard is the fact that today, white, working-class masculinity has been alienated in the deindustrializing contexts of Euro-America, allowing for an accumulation of “excess masculinity” upon which the military complex is drawing. To maintain military numbers, unemployed or underemployed whites are not enough. Vast reserves of racially disenfranchised men have been recruited. It hardly matters that some are uneducated. Those with criminal(ized) pasts are granted “moral waivers” that allow them, for the first time, to join the lower rungs of military ranks and to, hence, gain a semblance of enfranchisement and citizenship. Those who are marked as waste are disenfranchised, or simply spatially confined within the prison-industrial complex (Gilmore 2007). Another form is through cross-border migrant labor. Labor operating in the interstices or the entrails of the global economy is hyperexploited. The racial subsidy is precisely what allows global capital to feel no sense of responsibility for its actions, crimes against humanity, or horrendous damage done not only in Euro-America but to the rest of the world as well. Seen from Africa, global capitalism today seems to be moving in two directions. The first is toward increasing exploitation of large parts of the world through what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” which, as suggested earlier, is increasingly taking the form of a raw economy. The other direction is toward squeezing every last drop of value out of the planet by increasing the rate of innovation and invention; through an active refiguring of space, resources, and time; or even by boosting difference and inserting that difference into the cycles of reproduction of capital—the race subsidy. Furthermore, significant too is the increasing conflict between market forces and democracy. Democracy should normally imply the rule of the majority. Since the rich in any given society are almost always a minority, democracy in the form of majority rule should—taken to its logical consequences—imply the rule of the poor over the rich. It is also the idea that people have rights that take precedence over the outcomes of market exchanges, and one of the roles of a democratic government is to honor, to some extent, this most human expectation of a life outside the law of the market and the right of property. Historically, the biggest fear of capital has always been that the rule of the poor over the rich would ultimately do away with private property and the “free” play of market forces. Faced with

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this dilemma, capital would rather abolish democracy in order to save capitalism from a majority dedicated to economic and social redistribution. Today, we have reached a stage at which it is increasingly apparent that capitalism is not naturally compatible with democracy. For capitalism to be compatible with democracy, capitalism would have to be subjected to extensive political control, and democracy would have to be protected from being restrained in the name of market power. The collapse of the international credit pyramid on which the prosperity of the late 1990s and early 2000s had rested only highlights this realization. Under the emerging international politics of public debt, global capital increasingly requires that the “average citizen” pay—for the consolidation of public finances, the bankruptcy of foreign states, the rising rates of interest on public debt, and if necessary the rescue of national and international banks—with his or her private savings and through cuts in public entitlements, reduced public services, and higher taxation (Streeck 2011). The capacity of national states to mediate between the rights of citizens and the requirements of capital accumulation is severely affected. The tensions between economy and society, between market power and democracy, can no longer be handled exclusively inside national political communities. They have become internationalized. Markets are dictating, in unprecedented ways, what presumably sovereign and democratic states may still do or not do for their citizens. The preemption—or even suspension—of democracy by market forces is now propounded as the only rational and responsible behavior in a world in which individual debt, public deficits, and public debt have resulted in the mortgaging of the futures of entire nations and the expropriation of their citizens. Euro-American democratic states—just like African states during the long years of structural adjustment programs—are in danger of being “turned into debt-collecting agencies on behalf of a global oligarchy of investors” and the propertied classes that are now firmly entrenched in what looks like “a politically unassailable stronghold, the international financial industry” (Streeck 2011: 29).

The World as Method An epistemic reorientation is once again needed. The Western ethnocentric tendency to reinterpret the world and all its socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes from a Euro-American perspective has led the world to a cul-de-sac. This epistemic reorientation has been attempted in a number of disciplines (world history in particular), where it has raised various methodological questions not unlike those implied by the Comaroffs’ “counter-

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evolutionary” and “prefigurative” approach (Abu-Lughod 1989; Arrighi 2007; Frank 1998). For instance, should the global system be studied as a single world system? Would it better be described in terms of its many nodes and edges or as a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? Should we rather understand regions of the world in their own terms, mindful of the fact that they experience separate models of development that may overlap in various ways but that are nonetheless essentially independent? Or is it that what we need is a horizontally integrative macrohistory, one that seeks for the connections between the various events that are happening in regions that have traditionally been considered separate? To what extent does our ability to link events in one region to subsequent events in those regions connected with it depend on a close identification of the series of paths that tie the various regions of the world? Under what conditions do simultaneous and momentous events triggered in a particular region of the world lead to similar outcomes and similar implications elsewhere? This brings me to Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. As he himself said in an interview by David Harvey before his death (Arrighi 2009), Arrighi’s variety of world-systems analyses had deep African roots—just as, I must add, some of the most significant social theories of the twentieth century (a story, that of the work Africa does in twentieth-century theory, that still needs to be properly written). In fact, some of the key categories Arrighi will later deploy in his work were forged during his African experience—especially his encounter with “the Africa of the labor reserves” (Amin 1973), that is, the trajectories of accumulation through racialized dispossession in the context of white-settler colonialism in southern Africa (see Arrighi 1966; 1970; 2002; Arrighi, Ashoff, and Scully 2009; Arrighi and Saul 1973). It was in southern Africa that he discovered that the full dispossession of much of the African peasantry (so as to provide low-cost migrant labor for the agricultural, mining, and manufacturing industries) not only ended up raising labor costs but hindered the development of capitalism by eliminating the ability of the rural labor force to subsidize its own reproduction and capital accumulation. In this sense, the southern African experience stands in marked contrast to accumulation without dispossession and associated rural development and industrialization throughout much of East Asia. It is significant that, having started his attempt to account for the longue durée of capitalism and its current crises in Africa, Arrighi ended in East Asia, and in particular in Beijing. To be sure, his project was not necessarily to decenter Euro-American theory or to highlight the plurality of theories

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that emerge from the processes of decolonization (Lionnet and Shih 2011). He ended up in Beijing because China has become the workshop of the world. He ended up in China because Euro-America is no longer where the most advanced production facilities are located, although Euro-America is still able to cream off a substantial part of the superprofits created elsewhere. He ended up in China because Euro-America depends, more than at any time in its history and nowadays in an increasingly parasitic manner, on the productive labor of others. In their timely critique Theory from the South, the Comaroffs did not end in China, although they agree that some of the most energetic and innovative modes of producing value are increasingly relocated southward and eastward. The production of value is one thing. The capture or appropriation of value physically produced elsewhere is another. How surplus value created in newly industrializing nations is captured by deindustrializing ones through transnational production networks, foreign trade, and international finance is key to our understanding of the future of global capitalism. They did not end in China, and maybe they should have—or maybe not in China as such but in that space of new material relations being formed between China and Africa in particular. Indeed, it might be that if Euro-America is indeed evolving toward Africa, Africa in turn is likely to evolve toward China rather than toward Euro-America. The need to feed a vast and growing productive capacity compels Chinese capital to source raw materials from all over the world, especially in Africa. China is now the world’s largest consumer of Africa’s copper, tin, zinc, platinum, and iron ore and a large consumer of its petroleum, aluminum, lead, nickel, and gold. The ongoing acceleration and redistribution of global productive forces that China is leading will not bypass Africa forever. Without Africa, China will not be able to indefinitely lend so that America (the globe’s most parasitic nation) can buy Chinese and other Asian products and see a sizeable portion of its enormous debt written off through the fall in the value of the US dollars and treasury bills China holds. If America’s irrecoverable debt to China is the price China pays for the enlargement of her own productive base, then for America to be put in a position where she can no longer exact this right of seignorage, China will need to build a stronger domestic economy of her own. But this she cannot do without Africa. A theory from the South will therefore attend, as the subtitle of the Comaroffs’ book would have it, not only to “how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa,” but also to the conditions under which Africa (the South) and China (the East) are trying to weave the paths that tie both regions together in the present and in the future. For us in Africa, one of the impli-

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cations of China’s—and for that matter India’s—ascent for the future of theory is that it forces us to reflect anew on the multiple ways to grow the wealth of a nation. Prior to the arrival of capitalism, Africa may not have known models of growth based on labor-intensive forms of production and husbandry of natural resources. The region’s subordinate incorporation into the Euro-American-centered regime of accumulation did not simply erase the historical matrices that governed the production of wealth prior to the arrival of capitalism. One such matrix is the existence of a long tradition of market economics that mobilized human rather than nonhuman resources and protected rather than destroyed the economic independence and welfare of agricultural producers. These historical matrices might reemerge as resources as Africa tries to formulate a place for herself in a world where the power of the West has begun to decline.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

The editors wish to thank Charlie Piot for his support and encouragement during the various phases of conception and production of this volume. Thanks are also due to T. David Brent, Priya Nelson, and Ellen Kladky at the University of Chicago Press for their expert work, as well as to several anonymous reviewers for the press who provided incisive and helpful commentary.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Jennifer Cole, a cultural anthropologist, is professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development and Chair of the Committee on African Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research examines how personal change across the life course shapes, and is shaped by, broader political, economic, and cultural transformations: the unruly terrain where person and history meet. She is the author of Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (2001) and Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar (2010), in addition to several coedited volumes. Filip De Boeck is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. The author of Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City (2004) and the coeditor (with Alcinda Honwana) of Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa (2005), he also directed a documentary film, Cemetery State (2010), about urban youth’s management of death in Congo’s capital. He is currently preparing a book and exhibition project on urban life in various Congolese cities. Peter Geschiere is emeritus professor for the Anthropology of Africa at both the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. He is coeditor of Ethnography (SAGE). Since 1971 he has undertaken historical-anthropological fieldwork in various parts of Cameroon and elsewhere in West and Central Africa. His publications include The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-colonial Africa (1997), The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (2009), and Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison (2013).

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Brian Goldstone is an anthropologist and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. His first book, A Fire Upon the World, explores Ghana’s thriving miracle culture and the larger Pentecostal movement to which it belongs. His current research builds on this work, examining the recent, controversial proliferation throughout West Africa of Pentecostal “prayer camps” as alternative sites for the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. The project situates the emergence of this psychospiritual therepeutics within the nexus of global mental health, humanitarianism, theologies of health and healing, and the ethics and effects of affliction. His essays have appeared in Jacobin, South Atlantic Quarterly, History of the Present, Theory & Event, Anthropological Quarterly, The Johannesburg Salon, Public Books, and the volume Secularism and Religion-Making (2011). Jane I. Guyer is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She graduated from the London School of Economics (BA Sociology, 1965) and the University of Rochester (Anthropology, 1972), and has taught at Harvard, Boston University, and Northwestern University. At Northwestern University she was Director of the Program of African Studies (1994–2001). Her field research in Africa has focused on agriculture and money, which drew her into historical work, such as her edited collection entitled Feeding African Cities (1987). She published Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004) and has another collection of essays forthcoming entitled Legacies, Logics, Logistics: Essays in the Anthropology of the Platform Economy. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. Danny Hoffman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. His research in Sierra Leone and Liberia focuses on youth mobilizations and militancy. He is the author of The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia (2011). Brian Larkin writes on issues such as the materiality of media and their breakdown and failure; piracy and intellectual property; infrastructure; religious mediation; and the circulation of cultural forms. He is the CoDirector of the Program in Comparative Media at Columbia University and is Tow Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College. Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained a PhD in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a DEA in Political Science at the Institut

Contributors / 255

d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988–1991; a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC, from 1991 to 1992; Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996; and Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. He was also a visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written extensively on African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1996). On the Postcolony was published in French in 2000, the English translation was published in 2001, and a new African edition was published in 2015. Ramah McKay studies humanitarian and medical practice in Mozambique. Her work has explored the temporalities of labor and care through which medicine is made in contexts of transnational intervention, and the diverse historical and transnational circuits that underpin the movement of bodies, knowledge, and medical materials in and out of Mozambique. She teaches in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Juan Obarrio teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a PhD from Columbia University. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Mozambique and has published essays on law, custom, violence, and magic. He has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Social Science Research Council, and American Council of Learned Societies. He has been a visiting professor in Paris, Johannesburg, and Buenos Aires. He is the author of The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique (2014) and A Matter of Time: State of Things and Secrecy in Northern Mozambique (forthcoming). He currently conducts research on healing, politics, and religion in West Africa. Charles Piot is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, where he has a joint appointment in African and African American Studies. His area of specialization is the political economy and cultural history of rural West Africa. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), attempted to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place within the modern and global. His recent book, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War (2010), explores shifts in Togolese political culture during the 1990s, a time when the NGOs and charismatic churches take over

256 / Contributors

biopolitics, reorganizing social and political life in the absence of the state. His current project is on Togolese who apply for and attempt to game the US Diversity Visa Lottery. Michael Ralph is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and Director of the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University. He is the author of Forensics of Capital (2015). He has published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Souls, Social Text, Public Culture, South Atlantic Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Sport, Transition, Cultural Dynamics, Transforming Anthropology, and Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. He is the editor of Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, as well as a member of the Souls editorial working group, the Social Text editorial collective, and the editorial boards of Disability Studies Quarterly and Hau. He is faculty advisor to the student-run Journal of Social and Cultural Analysis. His newest research is concerned with slave insurance, life insurance, and the historical implications of quantitative strategies for establishing and regimenting the monetary value of life. Janet Roitman is professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is the author of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (2005), an analysis of unregulated commerce in the Chad Basin, which gives insight into transformations in the nature of economic regulation and citizenship. Her recent book, Anti-Crisis (2014), inquires into the status of the concept of crisis in social analysis, taking accounts of the “subprime mortgage crisis of 2007– 08” as a case in point. AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist and research professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and Visiting Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at the African Center for Cities, University of Cape Town. He is the author of In Whose Image? Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (1994), For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (2004), City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movement at the Crossroads (2010), and Jakarta: Drawing the City Near (2014). Antoine Socpa holds a Doctorat 3e cycle in Medical Anthropology from the University of Yaounde I, Cameroon, and a PhD in Social Anthropology from Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is currently an Associ-

Contributors / 257

ate Professor affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, University of Yaounde I, Cameroon. His publications include a major book, Democratization and Autochthony in Cameroon, and several articles in international peer-reviewed academic journals. Brad Weiss is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary. The author of four books, he has been a residential fellow at both the School of American Research and the National Humanities Center. He has been the Executive Editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa, and served as the President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. His current project is examining the “local food” movement with a focus on niche-market pig production and consumption in central North Carolina.

INDEX

Abacha, 67 Abdulmutallab, Umar, 103 Abeokuta Steel Mill, 48 Abrams, Philip, 70 Achebe, Chinua, 48, 168–69 Adam Smith in Beijing (Arrighi), 228 Adorno, Theodor, 214 Aferwerki, Isaias, 84 Afghanistan, 24, 89, 100 Africa, 2, 3, 8n6, 9–11, 19, 31, 55, 58, 78–79, 82, 84–85, 87, 91–92, 94, 101, 117n1, 118–19, 151, 166, 175–76, 180, 182, 202–3, 206, 211, 213, 226–28; African futures, 117, 201; “Africa rising,” 1, 8, 13; black hole analogy, 156–58; capitalism, expansion of, 225; and China, 229–30; collisions in, 224; collusions in, 224; commerce and militarization, 224; as concept, 15; in crisis, 5–8, 23–25, 30, 35–36, 43–44, 49, 52–53, 63–66; as crisis-prone, 212; currencies, devaluation of, 67–71; customary authority, and colonial governance, 184; customary authority, resurgence of, 192; as dark continent, 117, 157; and descriptivism, 220; digital divide in, 66; economic futures of, 64; exchange rates in, 63–76; experimentation and compositional processes, logics of, 221; extraction, and mutual constitution, 224; extralocal urban centers in, 153–54; “fate” of, 4; funeral at home, 169–71; futurity of, 12–14, 17; global

capital, entanglement with, 224; global capitalism, and racial subsidies, 225– 26; and life-forms, study of in, 220–23; livelihood, informality and struggles for, 220; melancholic return of the customary in, 183; mobility and multiplicity, 220–21; modernity, as laboratory of, 17; money, circulation of in, 101; as otherwise, 6, 12, 17, 24, 37–38; permanent crisis in, 63, 65; precariousness of life in, 221; and presentism, 220; and privatization, 224; rethinking of, 221–22; shadow people, 156; singularities, question of, 220; temporality of crisis in, 16; temporariness in, 222–23; as term, 4; and time, 222; as untimely, 17–18; urbanization in, 43–45, 168–69; urban transformation in, 44–45; villages in, 169–71. See also African futures Africa Command (AFRICOM), 77–79, 82, 84 “Africa: Is This the Turning Point?” (report), 65 African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis (van de Walle), 63 African futures, 2, 4, 11–13, 17, 47, 52–53, 58–59, 64, 72, 74, 97, 103, 112–13, 115–16; exchange rates, 70, 75; postcolonial, as entangled, 117–18, 120–21, 124, 126–27, 130–31, 135–36 African Union (AU), 100 Afrique Occidentale Français, 79 Agamben, Giorgio, 32n20, 33, 34n22, 35

260 / Index Ahidjo, Ahmadou, 174 AIDS, 55–56, 58–59 Albania, 110 Algeria, 126–27 Alpes, Jill, 176n10, 177, 177n13 Al-Qaeda, 100 Al Shabab, 85 Althusser, 40 Amin, Samir, 64, 66–67, 168 Angoche (Mozambique), 185–86, 189, 191 Angola, 151, 163–64 anthropology, 43, 211; and local, 152–53 anticrisis, 37 apartheid, 156, 186–87 Appadurai, Arjun, 222 Arab Spring, 80, 80n3 Aristotle, 26 Arnaut, K., 36n26 Aronson, Dan, 168 Arrighi, Giovanni, 29n15, 228 Arusha (Tanzania), 7, 200–201, 204–6, 208–10; Pentecostalism, rise of in, 207 Asia, 78, 151, 228 Auschwitz, 34–35 Baghdad, 100 Bahrain, 107 Bakary, Djanabou, 74 Bal, Mieke, 41 Balandier, 36n26 Banerjee, Abhijit, 69 Banque Populaire, 110n4 Barthes, Roland, 214 Bastian, M., 173n7 Bayart, Jean-François, 180 Beck, Ulrich, 32n20 Beijing (China), 228–29 Belgian Congo, 153 Benin, 73, 74, 109, 109n3 Benjamin, Walter, 32n20, 48 Berry, Sara, 14 Beuving, J. J., 74 Biafra, 43 big data, 66 biopolitics, 189; folklore of, 190 Biya, President, 172, 174–75 black body, and labor, 223 Black Box (Kentridge), 158

“Black Box/Chambre Noire” installation (Kentridge), 158 black holes, 156; local content, lack of, 157; and shadows, 161–62 Blair, Tony, 92 Boko Haram, 8n6, 40 Bolt, Maxim, 74 Boltanski, Luc, 29n15, 31 Bond, Patrick, 91n6 Botswana, 71 Bouazizi, Mohammed, 80 Bracking, Sarah, 69 Brazzaville (Congo), 170 Bretton Woods, 64 Brooks, David, 8n6 Brown, Wendy, 17 Burke, Edmund, 28n11 Bush, George W., 79 bush-falling, 7, 177, 177n13, 179–80; lifestyle of, 178; meaning of, 176; as new term, 175; transcontinental migration, 175, 178–79 Butler, Judith, 29 Caduff, Carlo, 58n5 Cairo (Egypt), 78 Callon, Michael, 31n18 Cameroon, 7, 23, 36–37, 123n3, 167, 168n2, 171, 177; consumerism, extravagant forms of in, 172–73; decentralization in, 180; democratization in, 173, 175, 180; feymen in, 172, 172n5; multipartyism in, 170, 174–75; Pidgin English in, 175n9, 176; urban elites, 174–75, 180; village, as concept, 156; villages, elites in 172–75, 180; and “witchcraft,” 178–79 Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (Rassemblement démocratique du Peuple Camerounais), 174–75 Cameroun Airlines, 172n6 Canary Islands, 177 capitalism, 66, 223, 225, 228; and democracy, 227 Castells, Manuel, 156–57 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 84, 86, 186–87 Chad, 173

Index / 261 Charlton, 69 charter cities approach, 154 China, 11, 69, 74–76, 83–84, 112–13, 173, 229–30 Chirac, Jacques, 92 Christensen, Maya Mynster, 100n6 chunusi (spirit), 201–2, 206 Cité du Fleuve, 155–56, 162 City Television Kano (CTV), 47–49 Civil Defense Forces (CDF), 95, 98, 98n4 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 84, 103 Cold War, 42, 45, 65–66, 83, 89–90, 104, 181, 187 collective memory, 182 Collier, Paul, 69, 76 colonialism, 24; and temporality, 222 Comaroff, Jean, 118, 212, 220, 225, 227–29 Comaroff, John, 118, 212, 220, 225, 227–29 Commission on Human Rights, 88 Comte, Auguste, 28n11 Congo, 44, 155–56, 163–64, 170, 175 Congo-Forêt, 155 Congo Free State, 86 Conrad, Joseph, 151, 157, 162 Côte d’Ivoire, 79, 100, 110; national identification in, 170–71 Cotonou, 74 crisis, 37, 52, 57, 96, 105; bearing witness, 34–35; as blind spot, 36, 36n27, 38; categorization, as moment of, 39, 43, 50; and change, 42, 49; as cinematic, 46; as concept, 24, 32, 44–46, 49; as condition, 23–25; contestation, as sites of, 33; continuity of, 95; double signification of, 33; emergency, as moment of, 39, 51; as epochal shift, 41–42, 46; as fold, 41–42, 49; and future, 49; gathering crisis, 66; history, signifying of, 28, 36; longevity of, 65–67; modernization, affect of, 47–49; and narration, 29, 31, 44–45; narrativity of, 39–41, 43, 49; normativity, terms of, 29, 36; observation, and meaning, 36; oil monies, influx of, 45–46; as ongoing experience, 30; as ontological state, 33; politics of, 30n16, 33; as real, 33; as reflexive act,

43; relational aspect of, 41–42; and scale, 42–46; self-authorizing action of, 33–34; as series of events, 46; as state of affairs, 33; as state of emergency, 49–50; structure in, 63; as temporal, 30, 41, 50, 53, 58–59; as term, 24–28, 36, 63; theory and practice, as mediation between, 30; and time, 3, 41–42; transformation, as necessary for, 30 Crisis, The (Amin), 64 crisis of reproduction, 225 Crisis of the European Sciences (Husserl), 38n30 Critchley, Simon, 30n16, 38n29 critical theory, 29, 212 critique, 29, 31 culture, and identity, 219–20 Currencies and Crises (Krugman), 64 currency: circulation and debt, 111; devaluation of, 110, 122–23; money prices, as neutral veil, 69 customary authority, 192; and ancestrality, 189; colonialism, legacy of, 184, 193; and kinship, 183, 189; legal reform of, 183–84; Socialism, legacy of, 184; spirit cults, repression of, 184; and spirituality, 189 Dakar (Senegal), 77–78, 80–82, 84, 87, 91–92, 117n1 Darfur, 1, 24 Das, Veena, 151n1 Davis, Mike, 154 De Boeck, Filip, 44 decentralization, 115, 168, 170, 180, 182, 186 decolonization, 2, 228–29 deindustrialization, 229 Deleuze, Gilles, 41 democracy: and capitalism, 227; suspension of, 227 democratic peace, 82, 88 democratic peace theory, 88–90 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 86–87, 139, 151, 153, 164, 170n4 democratization, 56, 173–75, 180, 182 Denning, Steve, 79, 84 descriptivism, 220

262 / Index development, 200–201; fast business (biashara kwa haraka), 205–8; and modernization, 199, 203; as morally threatening, 209; movement and continuity, 204; progress, and futurity, 205; and progress, as ongoing possibility, 204; at risk, 208; and sorcery, 209–10; temporal organization of, 208, 210; and time, 202 de Waal, Alex, 33n21 Dhaklama, Alfonso, 181 diamond trafficking, 151 Diderot, Denis, 28n11 Dietzman, Roy, 87, 90 Diop, Keba, 80–82, 84 Djibouti, 84 Doctors without Borders (Médecins sans frontières) (MSF), 33, 38n29; witness, obligation of, 34 Dodd, James, 38n30 Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Wallerstein), 66 Douala (Cameroon), 168n2, 175n9 Drawing Lesson One (Kentridge), 158 Du Bois, W. E. B., 2 Duflo, Esther, 69 Durkheim, Emile, 43, 200 Easterly, William, 91n6 Ebola, 2, 40 Ebrié, 170 Economist Intelligence Unit, 85 ectogenesis, 217 Egypt, 80 Elyachar, Julia, 91n6, 157 empiricism, 216 Engels, 28n11, 44 Enlightenment, 16, 32 epiphenomena, 10 Epstein, Edward, 40 equilibrium, 43, 45–46 Eritrea, 84–85 essentialism, 3 Ethiopia, 71, 84–85 ethnography, 30, 213–14, 220 Ethnos (journal), 30 Euro-America, 227–30; excess masculinity, 226 Europe, 73, 113, 117–18, 122, 124, 151, 172, 176, 177n13, 214

European Union (EU), 64, 178 evangelical Christianity, 210 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 200 exchange rates, 68, 72–73, 75–76; and futures, 70; hard currencies, 67, 69–71, 74; par le bas macroeconomy, 70; soft currencies, 67, 71, 74 Expectations of Modernity (Ferguson), 45 expendability, 223 Famine Crimes (de Waal), 33 Fanon, Frantz, 162 fast business (biashara kwa haraka), 205, 209–10; forms of, 206–8; majini spirits, synonymous with, 208; and mining, 206–8; and Pentecostalism, 207–8; potential, notion of, 210; transportation business, 206, 208 Ferguson, James, 13–14, 45–46, 48, 91n6, 158–59, 199–200, 225 Fichte, 28n11 “Figure of the Subject in Times of Crisis, The” (Roitman/Mbembe), 45 Fischer, Michael M. J., 36n26 Fondong, Julius Nyamkimah, 176 forensics of capital, 81, 81n4 Fotso, Victor, 172 Fotso, Yves Michel, 172, 172n6 Foucault, Michel, 17, 29–30, 110 France, 79, 88, 90, 92–93, 110, 120, 122– 24; banlieu (urban ghettos), 119; cartographies of desire, 126–27; citizens and subjects, division between, 118–19, 136; colonial period of, 118; family reunification in, 119; industrialization in, 125– 26; Malagasy women, 126–36 Frank, Reuven, 40 Frankfurt School, 29n14, 214 Freetown (Sierra Leone), 95, 95n2, 97, 98n4 Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), 54 Friedman, Milton, 64, 69 Gaddafi, 108–9 Gauguin, Paul, 127 Gbagbo, Laurent, 170 Geertz, Clifford, 98–99, 102 Geffray, Christian, 187

Index / 263 Gemeinschaft, 152 generationism, 92 Genette, Gérard, 39 German Ideology, The (Marx), 200 Geschiere, Peter, 121 Ghana, 68, 73, 82, 86, 107, 179 Giddens, Anthony, 31n18, 32n20 Gilsenan, Michael, 36n26 global capitalism, 225–26 Global Children’s Fund (GCF), 51–54, 58– 59; AIDS programming at, 55–56; crisis, notion of, 57 globalization, 16–17, 152 Global North, 24n4 Global Shadows (Ferguson), 158 Global South, 83, 166, 220; urbanscape in, 154 Gluckman, 36n26 Gnassingbé, Faure, 108 Gonçalves, Euclides, 56n4 Gorz, André, 217 Great Britain, 70, 79, 88, 88n5, 90, 92–93 Greenhouse, Carol, 31 Grupos Dinamizadores (GDs), 190 Guatemala, 110 Gugler, Joseph, 168 Guinea, 100 Guinea-Conkary, 79 Gulf War, 91 Guyer, Jane, 6, 7, 14–15, 58, 112, 210 Habermas, Jürgen, 31, 31n19 Haiti, 24n4 Hard Blasterz Crew, 203 Harvey, David, 29n15 Hausa riots, 43 Haya communities, 203n1 Hegel, G. W. F., 117n1 Herder, 28n11 Hibou, Béatrice, 70–71 Hippocratic school, 25–26, 33 history, 31, 34, 49–50; judgment, as ultimate form of, 27–28; temporalization of, 26–27 Hoffman, 14 Hojbjerg, 36n26 Hojer, 31 Horkheimer, 214 “How to Write about Africa” (Wainaina), 3

humanitarianism, 34–35 Husserl, 38n30 Ibadan (Nigeria), 74 identity: and alterity, 162–63; and culture, 219–20 Igbo, 43, 168, 173n7 image capitalism, 218 India, 73, 229, 230 indispensability, 223 Indochina, 126–27 Information Age (Castells), 156 instrumentalism, 212 intentionality, 221 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 65, 85, 92–94 Investiture Dans l’Humain (IDH), 110n4 Iraq, 24, 89, 100 Italy, 84 Jerven, Morten, 70 jini, 208 Kabila, Laurent, 155, 164 Kabul, 100 Kalela Dance, 48 Kant, Immanuel, 38n29 Keita, Seydou, 48 Kenema (Sierra Leone), 95, 95n2 Kentridge, William, 158–59, 162 Kikwit (Congo), 153 Kinshasa (Congo), 7, 44, 70, 139, 142, 148–50, 153, 155, 157, 163–66, 170; informational capitalism, as black hole of, 156; and local life, 159–62; occultus in, 159; shadow and invisible, shifting between in, 159–61; as shadow city, 154 Koromah, Alicious, 95–96, 100 Koselleck, Reinhart, 5n4, 6, 26n6, 27n9, 28, 28n11, 30, 34, 36, 37n28, 41, 46, 49; crisis, conceptual history of, 26–27 Krugman, Paul, 64 labor: and body, 223; and race, 223 LaCapra, Dominick, 34n22, 35, 35n25 Lagos, 74, 154 Lamarque, Hugh, 74 Lambek, Michael, 151n1 Larkin, Brian, 7, 53

264 / Index Latour, Bruno, 215–16 League of Nations, 84 Lebanon, 91; Ponzi scheme in, 91 Legitimation Crisis (Habermas), 31n19 Leopold II, 86, 156 le Parisien, Claude, 172 Lesotho, 199 Li, Tania, 57 Liberia, 40, 91, 96–100, 102–3 Libreville, 170n4 Liotta, 154 local lives, 157, 158, 163, 170; as antiteleological, 166; and extralocal, 153; local elites, and urban elites, dissatisfaction with, 171; as unstable, 165–66 Lomé (Togo), 106, 106n1, 107–10, 110n5, 111, 113, 115; informal economy in, 111; and liquidity, 111; Ponzi scheme in, 104–5 Lubumbashi (Congo), 170 Luhmann, Niklas, 36n27, 37n28 Lumumba, Patrice, 44, 86 Lynch, David, 163 macroeconomic theory, 210 Madagascar, 7, 122n2, 128, 130, 132–33, 136; and ancestors, 120–21, 134–35; currency, devaluation of, 122–23; France, nod toward, 122, 124–25, 135; gender relations, tension in, 123–24; kinship ideology of, 133–34; movement, and future, association with, 121; overseas (andafy), notion of, 122; slave, definition of, 121; urbanites in, 122–24. See also Malagasy women maendeleo, 204–8 Maghreb, 127 Makhuwa groups, 186 Malagasy women, 120, 123, 123n3, 124n4, 125; cartographies of desire, 126–27; as exotic, 127; as koresy, 124; labor, and worth, 130–33; physical appearance, and finding one’s place, 134; racialized femininity of, 127–30; as vadimbazaha, 124, 130, 132–36; whitening practices of, 128–29, 136. See also Madagascar Malawi, 51, 57 Mali Federation, 79, 86–87, 111 Mamdani, Mahmood, 12, 70, 75

Maputo (Mozambique), 186 Maravall, José, 42–43 Marché de Crédit en Nature Perenne (MCNP), 114–15 Marché Gambela market, 146 Marcuse, 214 Margai, Joseph, 101 Marois, Jean le, 175n8 Marshall Plan, 88 Marx, Karl, 28n11, 44, 66, 200, 225–26 Marxism, 221 material causality, 218–19 Maurer, Bill, 75 Mauss, 43, 200 mazimbwi (spirit familiars), 201, 202 Mbembe, Achille, 7, 14–15, 23n1, 45–46, 101, 114 Mbuji Mayi (Kasai province), 164 McKay, Ramah, 14 Meagher, Kate, 74 mega-cities, as threat to global security, 154 Meillassoux, Claude, 168 Mererani, 206 Merina, 128 Middle East Central Command (CENTCOM), 82 Miller, Toby, 43 Minsky, Hyman, 112 Miskell, 154 Mitchell, J. Clyde, 48, 91n6 Mkandawire, 91n6 mobility patterns, 175, 213; and belonging, 180; colonial paradox, 167–68; and fixity, 168; floating populations, 167; global migration, new forms of, 171; hypermobility, and black middle class, 223; and kinship, 180; and localist belonging, 171; partial urbanization, 168– 69, 171, 180; urban-rural continuum, 168; visions of future, 167 Mobutu, 44, 68 modernity, 17, 32n20, 45, 154–55 modernization, 221; affect of, 47–49; and development, 199 Mogadishu (Somalia), 84 Morgboima (Sierra Leone), 95, 95n2, 96, 99–100 Morocco, 80n3 Morrumbala, 52–54, 57–58

Index / 265 Moyo, Dimbaza, 73 Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), 181, 184–88, 190, 192 Mozambique, 51–52, 52n2, 53, 56–57, 181, 190, 201–3; AIDS interventions in, 55; cholera in, 18, 191; civil war in, 186–87, 192; colonial legacy in, 194; customary, realm of, 182–89, 193–94; decentralization in, 182, 186; democratic transition, 182; local custom, redefinition of, 182; locality, recognition of, 182–83, 189, 193–95; as melancholic state, 183; para-infrastructures in, 55; politics of mourning, 182–83; politics of recognition and reconciliation in, 192–93; potential becoming in, 193; rational modernization in, 184; reethnicization in, 186; rule of law, 182, 193–94; rural-urban continuum in, 188–89; segmentary divisions in, 187–88; transitional justice, 182–83; transnational organizations, role of in, 54–55 Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), 181, 185–89; customary authority, repression of, 183; guerrilla war of, 183 Mubarak, Hosni, 80 Mudimbe, Valentin Yves, 3, 162–63, 165 Mumbai (India), 24, 222 Museveni, Yoweri, 79–80 Mwanza, 201 Nairobi (Nigeria), 209 Namibia, 71 Nampula (Mozambique), 185, 187, 189; body parts, appearances of, 190–92; Chupasangue vampire, 190 Napoleon, 175n8 narratology, 39–40, 41 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), 163 nation-states, 117–19, 153, 183 NATO, 100 neoliberalism, 2, 24, 42, 152, 168; neoliberal democracy, 13; neoliberal rationality, 219; neoliberal restructuring, 56; neoliberal urban reform, 153 New York City, 110

Ngaliema, 141, 143, 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17 Nigeria, 7, 8n6, 37, 40, 42–43, 45, 47–48, 67, 73–74, 76, 82, 103, 107, 111 Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), 47 Njiro (Tanzania), 209 Nkruman, Kwame, 86 No Longer at Ease (Achebe), 48 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 52, 55–56, 59, 104, 111, 123, 170, 212; temporariness of, 58 normativity, 40, 43 Nostalgia for the Future (Piot), 45 Nyerere, Julius, 86 Nzofu, 151–53, 156 Office of Security Cooperation, 84 Olukoshi, Abebayo, 91n6 Operation Desert Shield, 90–91 Operation Desert Storm, 90–91 Opération Nationale d’Identification, 170 Page, Ben, 176n12 Paine, Thomas, 28n11 Pakistan, 75 Paris Club, 93 Parrochia, Daniel, 32 Peace Treaty of Versailles, 175n9 Pedersen, M. A., 31 Pentecostalism, 207, 208 phatic labor, 157 Pietz, William, 81n4 Piot, Charles, 14, 16, 45–46, 73, 180 Plato, 158 political economy, 211 Politique Africaine (journal), 70 Ponzi schemes, 104–5, 107, 109, 109n3, 110, 110n5, 111–12, 112n7, 115–16, 150 Poole, Deborah, 151n1 Poovey, Mary, 216 Portugal, 54 post-Cold War, 180 postcolonialism, 24; postcolonial theory, 211 postcolony, and shadow analogy, 158 poststructuralism, 29, 211 poverty, 63, 69, 153, 199, 211–12 presentism, 220 primitive accumulation, 224, 226

266 / Index problem-spaces, 2 Propp, Vladimir, 39 psychoanalysis, 211 Qatar, 173 Radio Trottoir, 113 Ralph, Michael, 7, 14, 77 Rasch, William, 36n27 rationality, 210 Redémar (“start over”) (Réseau pour le Développement de la Masse sans Resources) (Network for the Development of the People/Masses without Resources), 104, 107–10, 110n5, 112n6, 112n7, 115; biometric membership, 115; as hope machine, 113; Pentacostalite aspect to, 112; re-emergence of, 114; shut down of, 109, 113–14. See also Ponzi schemes Redfield, Peter, 33–34, 38n29, 53, 58 Resistencia Nacional de Moçambique (RENAMO), 54 Revolutionary United Front (RUF), 96–97, 101 Rhodesia, 54. See also Zimbabwe Robbins, Peter, 69 Robespierre, 28n11 Roitman, Janet, 5–7, 41n1, 45–46, 53 Romania, 110 Romer, Paul, 154 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 88n5 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 88 rough towns, 139, 141, 143; eligibility, notion of, 149–50; social capital, 144; “spacing out” in, 145, 147; temporality of, 142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 28n11 routinization, 48 Russia, 93, 110. See also Soviet Union Rwanda, 91 Sabar, Galia, 179 Sahara, 80n3 Saint-Simon, 28n11 Samuel, Boris, 68, 70–71 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 117, 117n1, 119 Saussure, 46 scale, and crisis, 42–46

Schiller, 28 Schlegel, 28n11 Schleiermacher, 28n11 Schmidt, 32n20 secular ethics, 34 Sena group, 187 Senegal, 78–79, 81, 84–86, 88, 91–92, 123n3; good governance, as model of, 93–94; peacekeeping missions of, 87, 90 Senegalese Armed Forces (SAF), 87, 90–91 Serra, Carlos, 192n1 sex tourism, 127 shadow evacuation, 156n2 Shadow-Line, The (Conrad), 151 shadow lines, 162–66 shadows, 158, 162; and invisibility, 159; as shape-shifting, 159 Shklovsky, Victor, 40–41 Sierra Leone, 7, 96, 100; brokers in, 97–99, 102–3 Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), 98n4 Simmel, Georg, 218 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 14 slave trade, 151, 185 social empiricism, 212 Social Research Council, 79 social science theory, 30 social theory, 200, 221 Socpa, Antoine, 121, 178 Somalia, 84–85 Sousa, Matthew V., 77–80, 84 South Africa, 54, 71, 156, 186–87, 223–24 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 182 Soviet Union, 83, 88n5, 89–90. See also Russia space, 144, 147; designated paths, 146; public space, 146; spaces of culture, as commercial spaces, 219; temporality of repetition, 145 spaces of culture, as commercial spaces, 219 Stengers, Isabelle, 141 Stiglitz, Joseph, 69, 75, 91n6 structural-functionalism, 43, 44 structuralism, 221 subjectivity, 221

Index / 267 Sudan, 40, 86 Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, 80 Tanzania, 71, 86, 200–202, 206, 210; development, conflicted experiences of in, 203–4; fear of being behind in, 203–5 Tel Aviv (Israel), 179 temporality, 14–15, 18; and colonialism, 222; and development, 208, 210; growth, as particularistic, 203; and morality, 202, 204, 210; potential, significance of, 202–4; of repetition, 145; of rough towns, 142; and time, 200–201 temporalization, of history, 26–27 temporariness, 14, 115–16, 222–23 theory: critical practices, 216–17; critical theory, challenges facing, 217; death of, 216; displacement of, 217; and ectogenesis, 217; and hysteria, 215; as instrumental method, 216; and melancholia, 215; practices of, 214–15; state of, 213–20; versus criticism, 214 Theory from the South (Comaroff and Comaroff), 212, 220, 229 Thévenot, Laurent, 29n15, 31 Thompson, E. P., 200 Thrift, Nigel, 216 time, 222; and crisis, 41–42; historical quality of, 26; moralization of, 202; potential, significance of, 202, 203; and temporality, 200 Titeca, Kristof, 74 Todorov, Tzvetan, 39 Togo, 73, 104–5, 107–10, 110n4, 111–13, 116 Tompkins, Richard, 79, 84 Touhouliotis, Vasiliki, 34n22 transitional justice, 182 Truman, Harry S., 88 Uganda, 58, 70, 79 Ugor, Paul U., 74 Ukraine, 113 unidimensional man, 214 United Emirates, 173 United Nations (UN), 85, 88–89, 154; Declaration of the Rights of Man, 88n5; Security Council, 90

United States, 11, 54, 69, 75, 78–79, 81–84, 86, 88, 88n5, 89–90, 93, 103, 112–13, 122n2, 132, 176, 178, 215, 229 urban anthropology, 154 urbanization, 167–69 urban reform, 156 urbanscapes, 154, 156; segregationist cities, 155 urban spaces, 150 van de Walle, Nicholas, 63, 65, 68 Vansina, Jan, 152 Vaughn, Sarah, 91n6 Vigh, Henrik, 30, 30n17, 31, 31n18 von Stein, Lorenz, 28n11 Wade, Abdoulaye, 80, 85, 91–94 Wainaina, Binyavanga, 3 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 66 war on terror, 2 Watts, Michael, 45–46 Wayoro, Séry, 170–71 Weber, Max, 48 Weiss, Brad, 14 West Africa, 14, 45, 79, 95–96, 102–3, 105, 108–9, 112, 114, 171; debt, monetization of in, 101 West Cameroon, 171 White, Hayden, 40, 44, 49–50 witnessing, 34–35 World Bank (WB), 85, 92–94 World Bank Conference on Development Economics, 91 World Social Forum (WSF), 78 world-system analysis, 221 World Vision Tanzania, 209 World War II, 88, 90 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 162 xenophobia, 2 Yaounde (Cameroon), 168n2 Yemen, 84 Yoruba, 168 Zaire, 68 Zambézia province, 54 Zambian Copperbelt, 13 Zimbabwe, 68. See also Rhodesia