Hard Work, Hard Times Hard Work, Hard Times Global Volatility and African Subjectivities Edited by Anne-Maria Makhulu, Beth A. Buggenhagen, and Stephen Jackson Global, Area, and International Archive University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London The Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA) is an initiative of International and Area Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the University of California Press, the California Digital Library, and international research programs across the University of California system. GAIA volumes, which are published in both print and open-access digital editions, represent the best traditions of regional studies, reconfigured through fresh global, transnational, and thematic perspectives. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished univer- sity presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Manufactured in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48 – 1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Contents Preface vii Foreword, by Simon Gikandi xi 1. Introduction 1 Anne-Maria Makhulu, Beth A. Buggenhagen, and Stephen Jackson 2. The Search for Economic Sovereignty 28 Anne-Maria Makhulu 3. “It Seems to Be Going:” The Genius of Survival in Wartime DR Congo 48 Stephen Jackson 4. This Is Play: Popular Culture and Politics in Côte d’Ivoire 69 Mike McGovern 5. Self-Sovereignty and Creativity in Ghanaian Public Culture 91 Jesse Weaver Shipley 6. “May God Let Me Share Paradise with My Fellow Believers”: Islam’s “Female Face” and the Politics of Religious Devotion in Mali 113 Dorothea E. Schulz 7. “Killer Bargains”: Global Networks of Senegalese Muslims and the Policing of Unofficial Economies in the War on Terror 130 Beth A. Buggenhagen 8. Border Practices 150 Charles Piot Notes 165 References Cited 185 Contributors 215 Index 217 v Preface After Afro-Pessimism If much current scholarship focuses on two distinct, yet interrelated, aspects of contemporary capitalism — neoliberalism and globalization — scholars of Africa must address the attendant difficulties of the postcolonial condition, as well. Questions about Africa’s “place-in-the-world,” that is, at the conjuncture of the neoliberal, global, and postcolonial brought schol- ars working across the African continent together for a conference, After Afro-Pessimism: Fashioning African Futures, at Princeton University in April 2005. Acknowledging many of the challenges facing contemporary Africa — the unevenness of North-South relations, the limits on national sovereignty, and perhaps most terrifyingly, the scale of the African HIV/ AIDS epidemic — the participants stressed another sort of challenge besides. While concerned to examine the experiences of ordinary Africans, and while holding to a commitment to recording and theorizing such experi- ences, most agreed that the discourse of African “emergency” detracted from critical work. Africa has, to all intents and purposes, become an object of intervention by development experts, World Bank officials, and NGOs keen to devise “solutions” to its many problems. This dominant paradigm has made instrumentalizable knowledge more or less the only form in which “Africa” can be apprehended. So much for the reveries of scholars. The questions that we and our fellow conferees sought to pose, then, were, How might one construct worlds within and beyond the language of predicament? Was it even possible to conceive of alternative spaces in which the imaginative and social practices of African agents could bring about “other orders of reality?” Might concepts of “invisible governance,” “regimes of unreality,” or even religious imaginaries offer new theoretical landscapes that would accommodate ideas of African political possibility? These and similar questions defined our deliberations. vii viii / Preface After Afro-Pessimism was inaugurated with a keynote address by Chinua Achebe, the renowned Nigerian literary figure, novelist, and poet, who had been invited to speak directly to the idea of “Afro-pessimism.” Achebe’s corpus has long addressed the early challenges and indeed fail- ures of African independence and the colonial grip that remained to shape the African state into a hybrid and semi-autonomous form, and therefore could offer a genealogy of cynicism whose historical and analytical conti- nuities with the discourses of crisis and emergency were striking. Since April 2005, much has changed in the world, including deepening military entanglements in the Middle East, an ever-expanding “global war on [Islamist] terror,” and no less than the near-collapse of the global econ- omy in late 2008. These changes have led us (like many others) to examine not only Africa’s but the United States’ “place-in-the-world.” Scholars from a variety of political perspectives now openly debate whether the United States remains an imperial power or beacon of free-market capitalism, or is becoming simply one nation within a larger system, caught in the clutches of world recession. Even former U.S. Treasury Secretary Alan Greenspan, an architect of the Washington Consensus and one of the fiercest defenders of free-market ideology, recently conceded that perhaps he had gone too far in advocating extreme deregulation. As a meltdown in the mortgage market, which brought down several titans of finance capital in early September 2008, turned into a credit crisis, and then the American economic downturn went global, one could no longer speak of the African continent as a place uniquely and exclusively plagued by volatility, or, for that matter, corruption. For financial and, indeed, moral crisis seemed to have spread to every corner of the globe. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the U.S. “war on terror” have dragged on, we have witnessed some of the most flagrant civil and human rights violations in U.S. history — most notably, at the offshore prison for terror suspects in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — leaving many around the world to question more aggressively U.S. positions on human rights in such fraught locales as Darfur, Congo, and Ivory Coast. The global credit crisis has been spectacular — our knowledge of its contours and proportions, scale and implications remain to some degree unknown, even as economists and financial commentators begin (as of this writing) to offer tremulous assurances that the recession is “over.” The matter of preexisting disparities, to which we have all become inured, is perhaps less impressive, and yet its contours and proportions, scale and implications are surely as immense. Further, these phenomena are of course mutually implicated. It is precisely the degree of speculation and Preface / ix volatility in the global economy that has generated winners and losers, haves and have-nots. So what we observe in the global South — in African metropolitan centers, conurbations, and megacities — is the articulation of instability both local and global that has produced an elite with untold amounts of wealth, on the one hand, and a growing underclass attracted to the capital, opportunity, and anonymity of the city, on the other. As much as Cape Town and Dakar, to take just two examples, have seen an explosion of self-built, irregular, and impermanent housing on their peripheries, built by rural migrants seeking better lives, these urban centers are also sites for the construction of new boutiques, hotels, and casinos for the jet- set who have capitalized on global asymmetries. These questions — of continuity and change, power, inequality, and vol- atility — organize this volume and direct our attention toward those poli- tics, processes of subject formation, and enduring forms of value through which African subjects craft meaningful lives. The original participants for After Afro-Pessimism included Adam Ashforth, John Comaroff, Carol Greenhouse, Brian Larkin, Charles Piot, Janet Roitman, and Jesse Shipley. To these, a great debt, intellectual and personal, is owed. Their comments and contributions gave significant shape to this book and to the central ideas in it, and we would like to express again our appreciation for their insights. The present volume includes some of these contributors and adds others. The latter joined the project as it evolved, in a sense picking up the conversation where we left off in April 2005. The Princeton conference was made possible with the generous sup- port of many departments, centers, and individual sponsors at Princeton University. These include the Program in African Studies, the Center for African American Studies, the Department of Anthropology, the Depart- ment of English, the Office of the President, the Council of the Humanities, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Prince- ton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the Princeton University Public Lecture Series, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical