Regimes of Responsibility in Africa

Genealogies, Rationalities and Conflicts

Benjamin Rubbers, Alessandro Jedlowski, Benjamin Rubbers, Alessandro Jedlowski

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789203608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Regimes of Responsibility in Africa ­analyses the transformations that discourses and practices of responsibility have undergone in Africa. By doing so, this collection develops a stronger grasp of the specific political, economic and social transformations taking place today in Africa. At the same time, while focusing on case studies from the African continent, the work enters into a dialogue with the emerging corpus of studies in the field of ethics, adding to it a set of analytical perspectives that can help further enlarge its theoretical and geographical scope.

Chapter 1

Historical Regimes of Responsibility in ‘the Politics of the Belly’

Jean-François Bayart

The idea of responsibility is inseparable from notions of a sense of social or cultural belonging and material interests. Senses of belonging, and interests, come by definition in many forms. Responsibility, on the other hand, is tied into categories of space and time: the space in which it is exercised, and the time to which it is indebted, whether it be the time of human beings or of God. In other words, responsibility carries conflict within itself.

To understand this, we need simply take up one relatively brief historical sequence, that of structural adjustment programmes from the 1980s to the 2000s. Their protagonists saw themselves as caught up in various registers of responsibility. African donors and political and economic leaders sometimes shared a common vision of macroeconomics and the need for Africa to make an ‘adjustment’ to the constraints and opportunities of the global market, but this did not mean that they felt responsible to the same authorities. Some were accountable to multilateral institutions, but these did not necessarily have the same agenda and each of them fostered different or divergent interests, if only because they were the echo chambers of their national shareholders. Others were the representatives of their nations, but also of narrower circles of belonging constitutive of these nations, starting with what is called ethnicity; this comes endowed with a specific ‘moral economy’, as John Lonsdale (1992) has demonstrated in the case of the Kikuyu in Kenya. In these circumstances, the ‘Washington Consensus’ was a useful (or useless) fiction, a ‘working misunderstanding’ (Sahlins 1993), which mainly provided the framework for hard-headed negotiations between donors and recipients of multilateral and bilateral credits – for example, negotiations on the setting of economic indicators such as the rate of inflation, or the terms of taxation. The overlapping of these regimes of responsibility generated a considerable degree of irresponsibility, judging by the deleterious consequences of this period for civil peace, for the health and education of the populations involved and for their standards of living. But structural adjustment programmes concerned other actors than individual states and the institutions of the Bretton Woods or UN systems – in particular they concerned companies torn between the expectations of their shareholders, employees and customers, and more or less preoccupied by their social responsibility (CSR, or corporate social responsibility), and they also affected the forces of civil society, which embodied other repertoires to do with citizenship, religion, environment, health, public education and so on.

From this brief overview, it can be concluded that, during the short sequence of structural adjustment, responsibility was the subject of a complex process of utterance on the part of a multitude of actors, and that its development took the form of a ‘constellation’ (Konstellation).¹ It is this very same complexity that we must understand and problematize in terms of the historicity of African societies – for these societies, like all others, but perhaps more obviously than others (because of their history and their cultural practices), are made up of a plurality of space/times (Bayart 1979). The representations of responsibility that prevail within them stem from this heterogeneity, and the more or less contradictory rationalities that it fosters.

The Interweaving of Historical Durations

The African political classes chose, in the aftermath of independence, to reproduce the territorial framework inherited from colonization and endorsed the principle of the nation-state. As a result, they stayed within a framework going back two centuries, combining the expansion of the capitalist mode of production with the universalization of the nation-state as a mode of political organization on the level of the international system (Bayart 2007). This sequence was paradoxically accompanied by the crystallization and intensification of particularist forms of social identification, of which ethnicity and religious denomination are the two main examples evident across the African continent. Each of these three dimensions tends to have its own regime(s) of responsibility.

Such transformations have profoundly affected West African and Saharan societies since the nineteenth century. On the one hand, they have come into conflict with these societies’ main political, economic and cultural mechanisms, especially their relation to territory, sovereignty, wealth and poverty, spatial mobility, freedom and dignity, and therefore responsibility. On the other hand, they have been the subject of often large-scale, and always creative, appropriation on the part of all of their actors. This twofold reality casts doubt on most of the interpretations which emphasize the supposedly insurmountable contradictions between a state inherited from colonization and traditional local societies, in the form of a zero-sum game. Things are actually much more complicated, as the regimes of legitimacy, security, social responsibility, wealth enhancement and the cultural and political representation of ‘good government’ simultaneously play a part in these historical dimensions, in different spaces and disparate durations that fit into each other rather than succeeding one another. Analyses distinguishing between pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods, and contrasting Africa with European or other entities that have made a dramatic entrance into African history, are totally inadequate when it comes to understanding the political problems that African states encounter, and the crises and conflicts which affect them.

The very notion of periodization, which in any case is criticized by a growing number of historians, is misleading and does not help to understand the historicity of African societies in their complexity and multidimensionality. Like all societies, but in a more obvious way when analysed in detail, and when we get away from the mythology of dependency that sees the colonial period (or the Atlantic slave trade) as the be-all and end-all of their historicity, African political societies are based on the interweaving of heterogeneous, ‘long’, ‘medium’ or ‘short’ durations (durées), in Fernand Braudel’s sense (1949).

But, as well as drawing on the analytical convenience of Braudel’s distinction, we need to understand, as Henri Bergson (1889) would put it, the ‘compenetration’ of these durations, both from the point of view of the objective structuring of societies – their political organization, their mode of production and their social relations, for example – and in their cultural and political consciousness. This ‘compenetration’ of durations gives rise to traumatic memory effects, which can be described, as Bergson does (here drawing on the psychiatrist Pierre Janet), as ‘false recognitions’ or ‘memories of the present’. This same compenetration also leads to hybridizations between heterogeneous political forms or repertoires, of various origins, and to many different (and even competing) senses of identification and belonging.

These effects of memory and hybridization, this logic of the overlapping and concatenation of different durations, and these respective elements of ‘undivided continuity and [of] creation’ (Bergson 1911) are constitutive factors in the reproduction of the nation-state south of Sahara and most of the political crises it undergoes. They are all the more complex because in reality the three orders of duration (short, medium and long) also come in several guises. Even if we leave aside the transformations that shaped the medieval age and the early modern age of the subcontinent over several centuries, neither the colonial moment nor the post-colonial moment have been immune from changes that give them their true historicity, notwithstanding their polemical essentialization in terms of ‘colonialism’ or ‘neocolonialism’ or postcoloniality.

The state in Africa may suffer less from its congenital maladaptation to local societies than from the way it was grafted onto them, and from its powerlessness (or its deliberate political reluctance) to meet the expectations it raises among its citizens, including in situations of political bankruptcy and civil war (cf. Lombard 2016). The state is a rhizome: it has a real historical base, interacts with local authorities, and has seen its bureaucratic principle largely adopted even in the lower strata of society (Bayart 1989 and 2013).

The coherence of the whole of the Saharan and West African region seems to stem from a historical sequence which has been its matrix and which continues to configure social, economic and political transformations within it: namely the shift from a world of empires to a regional system of nation-states, in the context of the global expansion of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As in the Eastern Mediterranean, the nation-state, in West African and Saharan countries, is the result of imperial combinations, rather than of any unitary imperial matrix, since colonial empires in the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century were grafted onto earlier imperial forms, or onto memories of them, and even sometimes formed a real synthesis with them which has lasted until today, as in the emblematic case of Morocco (Hibou and Tozy 2015). Shaped by the colonizer, the contemporary nation-state thus interacts both with imperial logics which are themselves heterogeneous and with logics of lineage that are not antagonistic to the former (pace the postulates of historicist evolutionism) but in fact fuel them. Historians and anthropologists have demonstrated that the old states of Africa were structured by the intermediation of lineages.² The memory of dead empires is perpetuated today through these lineages, reproduced by family stories and genealogies – the ‘histories’ (tawarikh) that are the ‘most popular genre of historical writing’ in the Sahara and the Sahel (Scheele 2012: 162) – and more broadly by the oral tradition, in a more or less conflictual and polemical way. The contemporary nation-state, far from having reduced the significance of lineages, has embraced them and continues to rely on them.³ Nation-state, empire, lineage: each has its memories, each has its regimes of responsibility, which interact with the global categorical imperatives both of monotheisms and markets.

As a commercial space integrated into the longue durée, the Saharan and Western African region has generated, from one trading zone to another, and within different societies, ‘marginal gains’ which have been the main driver of accumulation in a context of monetary pluralism and financial informality.⁴ The Sahara, the Sahel and the Forest were thus highly lucrative crossover areas, depending on several factors that included supply and price differentials between the British and French empires during the Second World War, the exit of Mali from the franc zone in 1962 and the nationalization of its foreign trade, the vagaries of the subsidy policy for staples enforced by the Algerian state, the return of Mali to the franc zone in 1984, and the devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994 – to cite just one example, namely the political economy of the border between Mali and Algeria. As a counterpart to its contemporary territorial division, the Saharan and West Africa region includes a trans-societal architecture of vehicular trade networks that tend to be identified in ethnic terms, at the risk of simplifying things and erasing the internal divisions of these transitive peoples.

In the words of Jane Guyer, the Saharan and West Africa region has been ‘marketable, but not bankable’ (Guyer 2004: 16). Given the failure of free trade to penetrate the continent economically, the European powers tried to remedy the situation in the second half of the nineteenth century by moving from an ‘imperialism of intent’ to an ‘imperialism of result’, which implied its effective military occupation (Hopkins 1995: 248). They did not succeed in the colonial framework, any more than they did later on through official development assistance or structural adjustment. Even today, ‘everything seems changeable, negotiable, redefinable all the time’ (Guyer 2004: 18). The resulting multidimensionality of African societies makes the creation of scales of equivalence and (in)commensurability crucial, both within these societies and at their interface with their surroundings.

This multidimensionality involves the formation of values, but also of space–times, regimes of truth and repertoires of identification. Far beyond the sphere of market exchange, Western and Saharan Africa is historically characterized by its mobility and by a fungibility that leads another anthropologist, Sarah Berry (1993), to say that, in its space, ‘no condition is permanent’. Indeed, the phrase ‘the African Frontier’ has been used to conceptualize the driving force behind the political formations of older times (Kopytoff 1987). This characterization remains relevant today, even in the literal sense of the term: frontier towns which arose simply by fostering the ‘marginal gains’ of smuggling – towns such as al-Khalil on the Algeria–Mali border, Fotokol and Amchide on the Nigeria–Cameroon border, and Mbaimboum on the Cameroon–Chad–Central Africa border have become crucial places of transit and trade on both sides of the relevant monetary and commercial zones by institutionalizing new forms of homelessness, belonging, and local cosmopolitanism, and by sharpening the greed of armed forces from the Tuareg, Aqmi and Boko Haram rebellions and of gangs of coupeurs de route (highway bandits who set up road-blocks).

African societies have become twofold, with a diurnal dimension and a nocturnal dimension of the invisible; this is another manifestation of the characteristic mutability of social affiliations and itineraries, often picaresque and found in various guises, for example therapeutic, religious or professional.⁵ ‘He who can do more can do less’, as the saying goes: in societies where some men can turn into panthers or other wild animals, it is easy to change economic activity or political camp by being a sobel, a soldier by day and a rebel by night, as in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, or by practising parliamentary ‘transhumance’, as in Benin in the same period. Identity-swapping and its ‘marginal gains’ are not limited to the monetary or commercial orders alone. They are consubstantial with the social life and history of Western and Saharan Africa and assume a cultural shape there (so long as we do not take a culturalist view of the latter). Jane Guyer, with her experience as an anthropologist and historian of economics and currency, has written about the ‘tradition of invention’ in Africa, an ironic reference to the process of ‘the invention of tradition’ that Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger highlighted: this enables her to reject the idea that a tradition can ever be anything but ‘invented’: ‘Social and cultural life in Africa during the centuries preceding colonization was much more inventive in everyday life than we can imagine today’, she argues – and asserts that ‘Africa has never been traditional’ (Guyer 2000 and 2007; see also Vansina 1990: ch. 9; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Adventurism, cunning, betrayals or political reversals, and fraud are only epiphenomena of this cultural and historical tendency, the recurrence of which gives rise to moral judgments that may be understandable but are analytically irrelevant since what is at stake is actually a form of ‘moral economy’. The dance mask was its primary artistic expression and is still commonly used in cultural and ritual associations (cf. Argenti 2007; Beuvier 2014). The merchant, the hawker, the transporter, the migrant, the itinerant fighter, the smuggler, the ‘digger’ and the preacher are paradigmatic contemporary social figures of this mask.

In addition to its connection with the imperial and lineage logics of the past, a second feature of the West African and Saharan region that we are considering is its multi-century commercial integration into both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic worlds, in a logic of ‘marginal gains’: ‘non-equivalent exchange, through the use of quantifiable currencies, was a familiar institution in West and Equatorial Africa, to which the spread of currencies may well have profoundly contributed. People gained familiarity with negotiating intervals, performing precedence and exchanging goods and services that were explicitly not the match of each other while still measuring value on a monetary scale’ (Guyer 2004: 47). This market economy is not driven by the rational–legal calculation inherent in the spirit of capitalism, as problematized by Max Weber, but by the unpredictable ‘performances’ of its actors, according to varied cultural repertoires whose dramaturgy is all the more evident when it unfolds in a context of crisis, for example a shortage ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction. Regimes of Responsibility in Africa: Towards a New Theoretical Approach
• Chapter 1. Historical Regimes of Responsibility in ‘the Politics of the Belly’
• Chapter 2. The Use(fulness) of Discourses of ‘Responsibility’ on the DRC’s ‘Sovereign Frontier’
• Chapter 3. High Officials’ Responsibility and State Accountability in the Age of Neoliberal Discharge: Views from Mozambique
• Chapter 4. Reproduction, Responsibility and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire
• Chapter 5. Human Care or Human Capital? Corporate Responsibility and HIV Management at South Africa’s Mines
• Chapter 6. What Are People with Disabilities Responsible For? The Study of Political, Social and Family Responsibilities in the Context of Locomotor Disability (Cape Flats, South Africa)
• Chapter 7. Diverting Makila Mabe: Understanding Responsibility in Kinshasa’s Pentecostal Worlds
• Chapter 8. The (Ir)Responsible Witch: Ambiguities among the Maka of Southeast Cameroon
• Chapter 9. The ‘Return of Culture’: Spiritual Threats, Asylum Policies and the Responsibility of Anthropological Knowledge
• Index