Wale Adebanwi (editor) - Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa

CAMBRIDGE CENTRE OF AFRICAN STUDIES SERIES

Series editors: Adam Branch, Emma Hunter, and Christopher Warnes

The University of Cambridge is home to one of the worlds leading centers of African studies. It organizes conferences, runs a weekly seminar series, hosts a specialist library, coordinates advanced graduate studies, and facilitates research by Cambridge-and Africa-based academics. The Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series publishes work that emanates from this rich intellectual life. The series fosters dialogue across a broad range of disciplines in African studies and between scholars based in Africa and elsewhere.

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Wale Adebanwi, ed.

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa

Ethnographic Encounters

Edited by Wale Adebanwi

Foreword by Jean and John L. Comaroff

Ohio University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Adebanwi, Wale, editor. | Comaroff, Jean, writer of foreword. | Comaroff, John L., 1945writer of foreword.

Title: Everyday state and democracy in Africa : ethnographic encounters/edited by Wale Adebanwi ; foreword by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff.

Other titles: Cambridge Centre of African Studies series.

Description: Athens : Ohio University Press, 2022. | Series: Cambridge Centre of African Studies series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021050767 (print) | LCCN 2021050768 (ebook) | ISBN 9780821424902 (paperback) | ISBN 9780821424872 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780821447796 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Public administrationSocial aspectsAfrica. | BureaucracySocial aspectsAfrica. | AfricaPolitics and government.

Classification: LCC JQ1875 .E94 2022 (print) | LCC JQ1875 (ebook) | DDC 320.96dc23/eng/20211014

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050767

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050768

In fond memory of J. D. Y. Peel (19412015): teacher, mentor, friend.

[Williams James took the stand that] any philosophical system which does not answer the questions of lifeof real, grimy, everyday lifecan be called to account as not fulfilling its vocation.

Dr. James Lectures, Wellesley College News, 15 March 1904, in William James, Pragmatism (1975, 275)

It is important to clarify that the critique of life is not carried out in the abstract but is rather a meditation on the conditions that make the struggle to live, to stay alive, to survive, in sum, to live a human life, the most important aestheticand therefore politicalquestion.

Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (2017, 174)

And what does this prove? That everyday life should be put to the question as a whole. Homo sapiens, homo faber and homo ludens end up as homo quotidianus, but on the way they have lost the very quality of homo; can the quotidianus properly be called a [wo]man? It is virtually an automaton, and to recover the quality and the properties of a human being it must outstrip the quotidian in the quotidian and in quotidian terms.

Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (2000, 164)

In understanding what it means to be well, we must therefore take into account not only what we need as a bare minimum to survive but what we need for our lives to be worthwhile.

Michael Jackson, Smoke and Mirrors, in Life within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want (2011, 60)

Contents

JEAN AND JOHN L. COMAROFF

WALE ADEBANWI

FERENC DVID MARK

WALE ADEBANWI AND EBENEZER OBADARE

FRED NYONGESA IKANDA

E. FOUKSMAN

ERIC TROVALLA AND ULRIKA TROVALLA

LORI LEONARD

ROSE LVGREN

NICHOLAS RUSH SMITH

DANIEL E. AGBIBOA

KATRIEN PYPE

ROGERS OROCK

JUSTIN PEARCE

JENNIFER RIGGAN

EDOARDO QUARETTA

HELLE SAMUELSEN

VICTORIA BERNAL

Foreword

JEAN AND JOHN L. COMAROFF

This volume, notable for both its timeliness and breadth of vision, mobilizes the distinctive, decentering perspectives of ethnography to capture the living practices, the everyday vernaculars, of the state and democracy in contemporary Africa. The essays in it exemplify the turn in African studiesperhaps, more accurately, returnto treating these phenomena, in the first instance, as ordinary activities of world-making rather than as formal institutions or enshrined sovereignties; although, to be sure, those ordinary activities animate the manifest architectures of governance, the concrete abstractions, that bear down on the human beings who create and inhabit them.

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters finds uncanny resonance in what, on the face of it, is a starkly different take on the enigmas of African politics today, politics at once mundane, material, mythic: William Kentridges haunting Shadow Procession (1999) and its sequel, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015). These animated films depict a recurring progression of moving images, the relentless march of history across the African continentembodied here in anonymous human forms tramping en masse across the dystopic landscape of Johannesburg, amid the detritus of abandoned mines, industrial ventures, im/possible futures (Maltz-Leca 2018, 178). Some figures stumble or limp on prosthetic limbs. Some drag their possessions or tote the masters burden. Some wear robes, bearing aloft palm fronds. Others march in coordinated defiance, striving, it seems, to interrupt the inexorable flow. A jubilant female soldier, up high on a platform, pans the horizon with an oversized gun as an associate waves a mammoth flag. A third holds aloft what looks like an iron cage in which he appears entrapped. Max Webers modernity on the moveeconomy, society, state, democracy?going who-knows-where. Then a giant megaphone strides by on legs of human scale, as if broadcasting in the language of stateness (Hansen and Stepputat 2001, 5).