Good Orientalist, Bad Orientalist: Islam, Sectarianism and Politics in Sudan since the Mahdiyyai
By Gabriel Warburg, London: Hurst & Co. (2003). Reviewed by Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, London.
Reading books on Sudan has all but caused me to lose faith in scholarship. Recently, I began the review of such a book by writing ‘I saw my name misspelt on the first page of this book, and it was all downhill from there.’ What was most disturbing was that one of the two authors of that book was a respected scholar whose work I used to trust, probably because I was completely ignorant about the issues he wrote about. I had then to ask myself: How can I ever again trust writings on unfamiliar topics if what is written about subjects I know about is so unreliable?
Luckily, there are other instances which tend to restore, partially at least, one's faith in scholarship. Gabriel Warburg's Islam, Sectarianism and Politics in Sudan is one such work, professionally done and conscientiously researched. Warburg is an example of what the late Edward Said would call a ‘good Orientalist’, someone who is not tainted with the ethnocentric prejudices usually decried in Orientalist scholarship. This is no mean feat given the particular situation in Israel and the pressures to put scholarship in the service of policy.
The stated aim of this book is to summarise and distil a lifetime of scholarship on Sudanese history, as well as addressing the typical Orientalist trope about the impossibility of both secularisation and western-style democracy in Muslim countries. Thus the work can be seen as performing three different tasks: offering the reader a concise and authoritative narrative of modern Sudanese history; demonstrating that there is a thread which runs throughout this history, namely the central role of Islam in general and the sufi sects in particular; and, finally, using this data to address the issue of the compatibility of Islam and democracy.
The historical narrative exhibits the same quality of scholarship we have come to expect from Warburg. He has tried to update the work by incorporating some recent debates and controversies (for example, over the nature of Turko-Egyptian rule, the causes which provoked the Mahdist revolt and led to its success), which adds value to his contribution. The attempt to discern a constant thread linking past to present (a typical Orientalist theme) also offers some interesting insights.
An example is the way he highlights the successive attempts since the Egyptian conquest to suppress or tame the sufi orders (or, later, the ‘sectarian’ political parties which were based on them), showing how such attempts had been as constant under both foreign occupation and military regimes as they have been futile. He is a bit equivocal about whether former President Nimeiri's conversion to Islamisation was the result of his own sufi conversion and thus another proof of the enduring influence of Sufism, or whether it was a mere Machavellian ploy, even though he apparently favours the latter characterisation.
Where Warburg is at his least convincing is when he addresses the political implications of his historical scholarship, if only because he devotes only a few pages to this endeavour, which is certainly outside his competence, and ends by quoting ‘bad’ Orientalists, namely Elie Kedourie and Bernard Lewis on the problematic question of the incompatibility of Islam and democracy, not to mention making the sweeping (and totally inaccurate) generalisation that ‘democracy has so far failed throughout the Islamic world’ (p. 226).
It is also not surprising that his discussion of the most recent history is the section of his book that gets contaminated with a number of minor and a few more glaring inaccuracies. These range from giving the wrong dates (al-Hindi died in 1982 not 1984), to some major inaccuracies, such as the claim (p. 184) that the Muslim Brothers became Nimeiri's ‘natural allies’ after he fell out with the Communists in 1971 (the truth is that the Brotherhood led the struggle against Nimeiri in the universities and trade unions and joined the coup against him in 1976; he never trusted them even after they had joined his regime in 1977).
In between, a number of other inaccuracies dot the work, including the claim (p. 200) that the government of Sadiq al-Mahdi was planning to abrogate Islamic legislation when the June 1989 occurred (not true, the agreement with the SPLA only stipulated a temporary freeze on Islamic punishments), or that (p. 184) Hasan Turabi had travelled to London in early 1977 to inform his allies in the National Front that he was pulling out of the anti-Nimeiri alliance (incorrect, for Turabi was in prison at the time, and it was Sadiq al-Mahdi who made the deal with Nimeiri in a secret meeting in the summer of 1977 without consultation with his other opposition partner). Also the claim (p. 203) that it was students from the Omdurman Islamic University who led the 1964 uprising against the military regime (the university did not exist at the time). More far fetched is the claim (p. 206), admittedly ascribed to a partisan source, that the Islamists had set up military training camps in Sudan in the 1970s manned by fighters who trained in Libya, Iran, Afghanistan and Lebanon, which would have been impossible under the Nimeiri regime.
These surprising inaccuracies are indicative of the contested nature of the more recent sections of Sudanese history, and the proliferation of many sources prepared to make very wild and unsubstantiated claims and, more worrying, the readiness of many to believe them without checking against more credible sources.
With regard to Warburg's main claim of continuity, this also needs to be qualified. Were the Mahdi to rise from his grave today, he would not at all recognise the ‘Islamist’ rhetoric of his Oxford-educated great grandson, Sadiq al-Mahdi, and would certainly brand it as outrageous heresy. Neo-Mahdism is more neo than it is Mahdism. Similarly, although sufi groups still maintain a significant influence, the modern Islamist discourse and activism is not what most sufi groups would identify with. Even going back to the Mahdist movement itself, the suggestion that it had swept to success because of its affinity with Sufism neglects the fact that it had faced a lot of resistance on religious and ethnic grounds throughout its career.
As mentioned earlier, the rather sketchy treatment of the issue of Islam and democracy leaves a lot of gaps. Central to it is the claim that secularism does not have a chance in Sudan, which only leaves the option of seeking some accommodation between Islam and democracy, a difficult proposition given the demands of the non-Muslim southern minority. Warburg's book was written long before the current peace deal was signed in 2005, and thus does not factor in the complex formula it had worked out to accommodate the demands of Islamism and southern nationalism. It is still tentative and there are no guarantees it will work. But it is a significant attempt at accommodation. It is also important to distinguish between the role of ‘sectarianism’ in national politics and the increasing drift towards Islamisation, since the sectarian parties have actually been secularly inclined when not pressurised by modern Islamists.
Warburg's book remains, nevertheless, a characteristically positive contribution to scholarship on modern Sudanese history, reflecting its author's compassion, erudition and familiarity with his subject, and a fitting crowning for an illustrious career.
Religion and African Civil Wars
By Niels Kastfelt (ed.), London: Hurst and Co, (2005). Reviewed by Nathalie Wlodarczyk, Kings College, London.
This edited collection contributes to an area of study that is increasingly gaining ground, both for Africa and the wider world. Although the role of religion in violent conflict has been a subject for academic study for centuries, recent resurgence of violent religious movements in Asia and the Middle East as well as the continuing persistence and growth of religious communities in Africa and Latin America has brought on a new wave of research. Africa, often a particular victim of ethnocentric analysis has been the focus of studies both seeking to reinforce and counter such prejudice. Although the bulk of the research presented in this volume was written almost six years ago, and lacks more recent developments, it throws up some important insight and considerations for both practical and conceptual engagement with contemporary African civil wars. The most important of these insights is the need for more in-depth analysis of religious and political contexts to appreciate the ways in which these interact and create or impact on patterns of behaviour in wartime.
The volume highlights a number of themes through its diverse case studies, all linked to the nexus of religion and war on the continent: the rationality of religion in war, exploring the logic of the adoption or adaptation of religious beliefs and practices to wartime needs; religion and meaning, looking at religion as a source of inspiration and explanation both in and after war; and tied to this, religion as a resource for peace and reconciliation in a post-conflict setting. The themes are by necessity interconnected, especially as religious belief and practice is closely tied both to existential questioning and legitimacy. As a result it lends itself both to explaining phenomena such as war and offering guidance for engagement or redress. In their respective considerations of the civil war in Sudan between the government and the southern based rebel movement the SPLA, Sharon Hutchinson and Andrew Wheeler show how both traditional religious beliefs and Christianity came to shape the way in which southern rebels conceived of the war and their own roles in it, despite the overtly secular ideology of the leadership. Because of the cultural context most of the fighters were drawn from, as well as their encounters with Christian missionaries both in refugee camps and aid delivery capacities, religious interpretation of events became widespread. But at the same time, the experience of war forced spiritual ideas to evolve to accommodate the necessities of war – such as killing – and incorporate the experience of violence.
In a similar appreciation of the logic of evolving conceptual frameworks employed by armed groups, Paul Richards suggests that the organisational structure of the RUF in Sierra Leone took on a sect like form because ritualistic behaviour is a functional and therefore natural reference point for a group removed from their normal context. In this sense, child soldiers recruited often coercively by the rebels came to shape their own group dynamic, in part inspired by some of the ideological convictions of the leadership, but equally by the circumstance of secluded bush life with little adult supervision. Richards focuses on the functional sociology of the RUF, and the ‘non-spiritual’ side to religious organisation. While his observations are undoubtedly penetrating, he avoids questions about the role played by actual spiritual beliefs and practices in reinforcing or complicating that organisation. In a setting where spiritual belief is practically universal and spiritual practitioners can be found both amongst civilians and fighters, it would perhaps have been helpful to consider this dimension as well – especially as the spiritual imagery is what has led to much of the ‘new barbarism’ commentary this research intends to counter.
The considerations of the role of the Church and religious communities in Rwanda and Burundi by Timothy Longman and in the DRC by Rene Devisch provide some valuable insight into the historical and spiritual developments of religious institutions and their impact on local communities. Longman situates the passive and active participation of the Catholic Church in Rwanda in the 1994 genocide within a longer tradition of close collaboration with the state, and Devisch shows how the challenges of urbanisation and failing development has refocused attention on spiritual resources that can reconnect people with more communal traditions. In both cases, the analysis throws light on events and developments that can only be effectively understood in a historical context.
But what is perhaps missing from this compilation are some more daring conclusions from the insights presented by the studies. For a continent where religion is a natural part of everyday life – and in extension politics and war as much as cultural practice, as perhaps best illustrated by Ellis and Ter Haar in their 2004 study – some more specific guidance for the implications of this reality on war and the way we engage with it would have been helpful.1 A few such conclusions can, however, perhaps be drawn from the implicit assumptions presented in the volume: firstly, the religious dimension to behaviour, also in conflict, needs to be better appreciated and understood to make sense of activity that may at first seem alien or irrational to an external (and particularly Western) observer. Secondly, conceptual frames of reference will always be sought by individuals and groups to explain and give meaning to the activity they are engaging in. In a context where religious belief is widely shared, it will be a natural reference point for such explanation and meaning.
Finally, behaviour will always result from an interplay between the cultural context, practical challenges and material and conceptual resources. The combination of these will no doubt differ depending on the particular case, which is why a grounded understanding of the context is so important. All the contributions to this volume display an acute awareness of the central importance of context and as such should be instructive for any other research undertaken to deepen our understanding of the role of religion in war, be it in Africa or beyond.
Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims Imagining the State in Africa
By Donal B. Cruise O'Brien, London: Hurst & Co. (2003). Reviewed by Janet Bujra.
Donal Cruise O'Brien's book is a timely antidote to fevered equations of Islam with terrorism and to notions of a clash of civilisations with fault lines running so deep that no dialogue is possible. Though Symbolic Confrontations takes Africa as its case study it has much to say that is relevant to the understanding of Islam in the global setting, particularly in the way it addresses the novel and challenging topic of how Muslims relate to the secular state.
The strengths of this work are twofold. On the one hand, whilst focussing on religion as a set of beliefs and potent symbols, it insists on embedding these within an exploration of social relationships and politico-economic realities. Its key example is Sufi brotherhoods in Senegal and how religious organisations relate to the state and to the project of state control and governance. It explores these relations in historical depth so that the continuities extending through colonial rule to post-colonialism are critically exposed. This example is then taken as a stimulus to further questioning of comparative examples, from Nigeria to Mali and from Kenya and Ruanda to South Africa. If religion is the major variable in this account, considerable attention is given to cross-cutting identities around which confrontation may be organised, such as ethnicity, linguistic groupings or generational difference. We are offered thought-provoking examples where ethnicity is not the sine qua non of explanation and where solidarities around religion incorporate people of different ethnic backgrounds at the same time as religion borrows ethnic languages and styles to promote its cause. Conversely, the world of religion which is presented here is a world of men relating to other men, with barely any reference to how gender inequity (or solidarity) is elaborated in religious symbolism and practice.
A second major contribution of this work is the way that it underlines the social diversity of Islam whilst illustrating its symbolic unity. Not only is Islam in Africa seen to be its own creature, creatively adapted over more than two hundred years to African conditions and in no sense a passive proxy for more affluent and powerful agencies of religion operating from the Middle East; it is also shown to have its own divergences and differences, strikingly illustrated with the example of competing Islamic brotherhoods in Senegal, where 90% of the population is Muslim.
The book argues an intriguing thesis regarding the relation of secular state to institutionalised religion: ‘Islam has… helped to give substance to institutions of Western importation, in the institutions of the colonial and post-colonial state: less a clash of civilisations, pitting Islam against the West or the rest, than a negotiation of civilisations, Islam coming to the rescue of the Western institutional legacy in Africa’ (178). Religious pluralism in Africa has called for a state which stands above potentially divisive differences, but also paradoxically the existence of the state as a secular institution has not threatened the potent hold of religion: the relationship can be one of synergy rather than threat. This may go beyond religious support for state institutions – Cruise O'Brien is arguing that Islam has also provided a symbolic vocabulary for political communication and democratic accountability.
In the colonial period the brotherhoods in Senegal played a crucial role as intermediaries in a process of indirect French rule; they also promoted the creation of a cash crop economy by setting up groundnut estates and organising peasant production. In the postcolonial phase they were for a long period central to the delivery of electoral support to the ruling party of Leopold Senghor (himself a Catholic), as well as sustaining the export-oriented economy on which Senegal depended.
Cruise O'Brien demonstrates that this was no one-way process. Brotherhood support for the state has always come at a price, with the main centres of brotherhood activity being able to demand and get infrastructural investment to secure their local economic activity and political sway. Conversely these benefits have not simply underpinned local religious leaders (the ‘saints’), who are also able to collect religious tithes – they have also been redistributed to their disciples, originally largely of peasant origin. The local Sufi lodges operate as a ‘Muslim welfare state, organising not only devotional activity, but also agricultural production and marketing, distribution of charity and hospitality and representations to state authority’ (58). This last aspect is a significant one, with Cruise O'Brien arguing that the Mouride order in particular was able to press the postcolonial state to improve producer prices, and, as economic crises and drought led peasant producers into debt and migration, it swung into confrontation with the government, threatening both peanut production and the hold of the state over its populace. The order was at one point ‘well on its way to become Africa's first independent peasant trade union’ (38), and thereafter, Sufi support for the ruling party was more conditional. Cruise O'Brien's argument is not that this signified the end of the symbiotic relation between state and Islam but that it is part of a long political process in which each side learns to live with and negotiate productively with the other.
The parallels between the Senegalese example and other comparative cases show that Islam has engaged the secular state in a variety of ways, often to mutual advantage. Its apparently authoritarian role as deliverer of the faithful and of a localised social order is being transformed as both states and religious institutions wrestle with globalisation, economic crises and political challenge. Here Cruise O'Brien has some useful things to say about democratisation as it takes hold in Africa and is translated into local terms. In the postcolonial era, democratic arithmetic has had religious pay-offs in some instances. In Nigeria for example, Islam was boosted by its electoral majority in the North. Valued not as multi-party competition or the promotion of liberal values or even accountability, democracy is seen as a process by which political consensus or evenhanded coalition politics may be achieved and conflict avoided. Here Islam can offer precedents. Cruise O'Brien describes the way in which Sufi orders, based as they are on the charisma of saintly leaders, depend more on the assent of disciples than on genealogical authority. As peasants were driven into towns by economic hardships, the Mouride came to be the backbone of a class of traders whose relations of religious trust contributed to economic success. Establishing urban religious associations, they asserted some democratic autonomy of saintly control, whilst remaining within the symbolic consensus. And as Sufi leaders became more discriminating in their support of politicians they were more effectively able to demand benefits for their followers and thus boost their popular power whilst at the same time protecting themselves from the insistence of younger followers that religious leaders should keep out of politics.
Cruise O'Brien's conclusions, especially in the case of Senegal, are clearly based on extensive first hand investigation and his persuasive argument is grounded in rich ethnographic detail. He is on less sure ground in the chapter on Kenya which focuses on the emergence of a very short-lived Islamic political party in the early 1990s. Largely formed by dissident youth from a minority community, this was unable to find purchase amongst Kenyan Muslims, mainly because they are in no sense a social or political bloc. Nor is the state generally seen as embodying ‘Christian’ hegemony in the way that Cruise O'Brien implies.
This book is made up of a set of previously published pieces, with some revision and up-dating. It has all the flaws of such a compilation, with chapters seemingly addressed to a variety of audiences, a fair bit of repetition and some of the vital foundational information not appearing until the third chapter. It needs close reading for its detailed and far-reaching argument, but it also rewards such attention, reminding us of an already extensive literature in this field (to which Cruise O'Brien's own contributions are substantial) and of the critical need for a more nuanced and problematised understanding of the diversity of ways in which Islam relates to the state in Africa. That the capacity of the state to play a secular role is not necessarily diminished by the existence of thriving religious communities is reassurance we all need in troubling times, even though ‘secular’ here is taken to mean impartiality in relation to religious divisions, rather than a challenge to faith-based ways of thought.
What this book illustrates is that culturalist explanations of religion are insufficient to understand the success of religious movements such as the brotherhoods in Senegal (and in other examples like Hizbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Palestine or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, even perhaps the Islamic Courts in Somalia). In situations of state incapacity or inadequacy, it is not the detail of belief or faith that counts as much as the capacity of religious movements to mobilise organisational activity around social welfare for their followers and/or to deliver the peace and security which most people crave and without which normal life and especially economic activity is impossible. Religious movements may do this with or against the state (the role of Christian missionaries in establishing educational and health facilities under colonial rule is one example of the former; the LRA in Uganda is a failed example of the latter). Symbolic confrontations (in Cruise O'Brien's terms) are the language in which such power politics are played out.
Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa
By Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar, London: Hurst & Co. (2004). Reviewed by Maia Green, University of Manchester.
Worlds of Power aims to explain the links between religion and politics in Africa and, by extension, the specific attributes of political practice on the continent. Religion holds a special place in African cultures and worldviews. It is the association of power with spiritual forces and with spirits which ensures the ongoing imbrication of the political and the religious. It is not possible to understand politics and political transition without grasping the salience of religion for many African citizens, from peasants to presidents, who are daily engaged with a range of mystical powers. The powers with which people are engaged range from the monotheistic Gods of world religions to possessing sprits and witchcraft.
Powers from spirits and the more ambivalent powers associated with witchcraft provide a rationale for events and happenings in the world, situating political action within a religious universe. According to Ellis and Ter Haar, this universe has consequences for the ways in which African people interpret their position within the global relations of injustice through which their marginality is consolidated. This marginality and the political and economic uncertainty it generates fosters what might be termed spiritual demand, reinforcing the hold of religious ideas and cosmologies as they are invoked to interpret the exigencies of experienced political and social worlds and, in particular, creating space in the spiritual marketplace for the personification of evil to become more prominent in discourses of witchcraft, possession, vampirism and zombification. Religion here is not simply interpretive practice, through which people apprehend the world. African conceptual and social worlds are constituted religiously, hence the book's overarching contention that ‘it is largely through religious ideas that Africans think about the world today, and that religious ideas provide them with a means of becoming social and political actors’ (2004:2).
The centrality of the religious has far reaching implications both for political action on the continent, which can only be grasped in terms of its relation to religion, and for political analysis. A new approach to political science in Africa is called for, one which begins from the premise that there are no clear boundaries, conceptual or institutional, between domains of religious and political action. Given the narrowness of much political analysis of Africa and the increasing importance of new forms of religious participation on the continent this call is timely. It is not particularly new. Other disciplines, notably anthropology, have long recognised the simultaneity of political and religious modes of organisation. Indeed, Ellis and Ter Haar make extensive use of ethnographic sources to support their argument, along with evidence culled from religious tracts and popular media. However, whereas an ethnographic approach would situate local manifestations of cultural expression within historically determined institutional contexts the macro-continental scope of World of Power leads perhaps inevitably to macro-claims regarding African propensities to construct the world religiously, claims running perilously close to a cultural essentialism reinforcing the tendency to view politics and the problems in many African countries as further indication of African exceptionalism.
Although the arguments presented in the book seem comfortably convincing, from the account of witchcraft allegations as a search for justice in an unjust world to the moral concerns of the new Christianities, they do not confront the accepted truisms expressed in scholarly and popular representations of core African values of kinship, patrimonialism and community. Fundamental questions are left unanswered, most importantly the material and institutional conditions which create the possibilities for these emerging hegemonies of the sprit. Why is the religious imaginary the felt response to questions of morality in the world rather than, for example, a politics of justice? How and why do such moral concerns legitimate injustice, exclusion and victimisation, as in the case of practices against those alleged to be witches?
The book's overwhelming answer is that because there is a legacy of ancestral practices around sprits that people have a propensity to experience and construct the word religiously. After the politics of the belly, the politics of the spirit? Is it an intellectual injustice not to accord to Africa a politics of social action, that does not demand explanation in other terms?
Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa
By Adam Ashforth (2005), University of Chicago Press; Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa by Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (eds.) (2001), Routledge; Witchcraft, Power and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld by Isak Niehaus (2001), David Philip, Cape Town and Pluto Press, London. Reviewed by Roy Love, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield.
These books are about what is frequently referred to as ‘the occult’ in African society, where this term has a dictionary definition of ‘transcending the bounds of natural knowledge, mysterious, magical, supernatural’. Religion on the other hand is ‘belief in a higher unseen controlling power or powers with the emotion and morality connected therewith’ (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary). The boundary between the two, if there is one, may appear to be unclear to an external observer but for adherents of the principal sects of mainstream religions the small scale, local activities of practitioners of the occult such as soothsayers, magical healers, spirit mediums, witch-doctors and witches are often condemned as dangerous and potentially evil. Yet throughout Africa, as in much of the rest of the world, both spheres of activity coexist, often depending on the support of the same individuals. The three books reviewed here provide an invaluable summary of the range and ubiquity of occult belief to be found across the African continent as well as exploring its rationale by relating it to forms of modernity reacting to change in the wider social and economic environment. Although two of the books were published in 2001, when taken together with Ashforth (2005), they form a trio which usefully brings together a number of common features, and patterns of reaction to social and economic change, which tend to prevail across borders and over time.
In brief, Moore and Sanders have edited a fascinating collection of papers on witchcraft, fetishism, cannibal transformation and its variants, commodification and trade in body parts in countries as ostensibly diverse as Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Malawi, Ghana, Niger, Tanzania and South Africa. The book by Niehaus is an ethnographic study of the recent history of witch-hunting in the small community of Bushbuckridge in Northern Province of South Africa, while Ashforth offers a more personal ethnographic account of the widespread prevalence of belief in witchcraft in Soweto. The similar strengths of belief in occult powers in urban as much as in rural South Africa are echoed in the continent wide review of Moore and Sanders which ranges from rural, small town Tanzania and the pastoralist Tuareg in Niger to the highly urbanised environment of Lagos in Nigeria and urban Malawi. It is in part a tendency for occult belief to persist amongst city dwellers that prompts all authors in their assertion that it is a phenomenon of modernity rather than an atavistic legacy of ‘traditional’ premodern village life.
In Tanzania, for instance, Todd Sanders shows how the demand for the services and products of occult practitioners (such as ‘medicines’ to provide good fortune or to undermine another's prosperity) generated by structural adjustment, has been met by providers travelling from marketplace to marketplace in a more openly and mobile commercial way than hitherto (and reportedly incorporating such bizarre commodities as human skin). Similarly, in southern Nigeria, Misty Bastion suggests that the anonymity of mass urban life lends itself to suspicion and fear of neighbours, which encourages pre-existing beliefs in human-animal hybrids sent by witches to abduct, possess, rape and rob the innocent and unaware.
Given the continued prevalence of belief in witchcraft throughout South Africa, Niehaus explores the related phenomenon of community inspired witchhunts, which in their civil repercussions inevitably draw in the state (producing in South Africa, for example, the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1957 and the 1996 Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders in Northern Province). In this case he also analyses the critical role of the ANC Youth League, marginalised in many other respects after the 1994 election. Fisy & Geschiere (in Moore & Sanders) also discuss the role of both colonial and post-colonial state in Cameroon in its use of legal statute to control local communities, of which witchcraft served as an example. Interestingly, in the North East province of South Africa, amongst the socio-economic changes in the community, particularly during the later apartheid years, was an expansion in the number of churches especially of the Zionist and Apostolic variety, a change which Niehaus associates with an escalation in witchcraft beliefs because (a) of the more sharply divided concepts of good and evil in these churches and (b) the population influx caused by apartheid relocation which considerably weakened existing community relations. The latter effectively destroyed traditional mechanisms for limiting the impact of witchcraft accusations, leaving a gap to be readily filled by uncontrolled, vigilante type witch hunting scares.
Adam Ashforth's book is based on a period living with a family in Soweto with which he developed close personal relationships. This has lead to a book that is no less scholarly than the others but which uses numerous examples and anecdotes drawn from family friends, neighbours and other rapporteurs from the local community. He very effectively paints a vivid picture of a dense and established urban society in which belief in witchcraft is extensive and pervasive. In this he confirms, and repeats, the argument in the Introduction to Moore & Sanders that witchcraft today is a phenomenon of modernity, even of many modernities. As in the other examples reviewed here he also places it centrally in the social milieu of struggle and competition for limited resources in the form of employment, access to education, and material advance through trading and dealing, where it is driven by motives of envy, protection, and propitiousness.
All three books have comprehensive introductory sections, the most perceptive and analytical being by Moore and Sanders; all place the phenomenon of witchcraft and similar occult practices in the contemporary arena of social and economic change, frequently as a result of structural adjustment. Ashforth is somewhat more discursive than the others and his methodology perhaps less rigorous, with phrases like ‘Nobody doubts that …’ (p.224) or ‘Many African Christians … consider …’ (p.207) or ‘Most people profess …’ (p.206) though, having said this, he does set his findings in the wider theoretical context, with a chapter, for instance, on ‘Believing and Not Believing in Witchcraft’ in which he critically assesses the rationality and modernity aspects. The title of his book is somewhat misleading, however, as there is less on ‘violence and democracy’ than some readers might be expecting.
The significance of these books for political economists lies partly in their exposure of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘occult economy’, partly in their frequent reference to socio-economic change associated with ‘development’ and its global imperatives as key factors in the perpetuation of belief in the supernatural, partly in the interactions between occult practices and the state at local and even national level (both in attempts at civic control in one direction and in influencing political leaders in the other), and partly because of an often seamless overlap with religion which is at times denied and rejected and other times assimilated and adapted. To the degree that religion in Africa has a political economy dimension, then the amorphous body of belief that comprises traditional religion, magic and witchcraft, cannot be divorced from that discourse. Nor is a discourse of the occult restricted to contemporary Africa. It is apposite to conclude this review with a reminder of the universality of the human propensity to cope with uncertainty via paranormal means, even at the highest political levels, for instance in the regular reference by former US President Reagan and his wife to astrologers to guide their daily actions. Many would say that George Bush's apparent dependence on a literal biblical form of Christianity, and his daily group prayers in the White House, are no more rational, and not so far removed from the world of spirits and mediums studied in the books reviewed here.
The Roots of the War on Terrorism and Implications for Both Sides: On Reading Mahmood Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, Cold War and the Roots of Terrorism
Fountain Publishers, Kampala & E & D Ltd., Dar es Salaam (2004). Reviewed by Tunde Zack-Williams
In this theoretically sound and empirically well-crafted book, Mamdani seeks to address one important question: How did 9/11 happen? His answer is organised into an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. In the introduction Mamdani analyses the relationship between modernity and violence as well as providing a chronology of the Cold War from an era of proxy war and containment to rollback, in Reagan's war against the ‘evil empire’.
In a critique of ‘cultural interpretations of politics’ or ‘Culture Talk’, Mamdani dismisses the dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims: the former being secular and westernised and the latter fanatical and pre-modern. In his view, this Manicheanism refers to political rather than cultural or religious identities and is the consequence of a poverty of analysis. In this regard, Mamdani strikes an accord with orthodox Islamists, who reject any notion of ‘political Islam’, seeing it as a Western construct and a mis-reading of the colonial situation, particularly the events stemming from the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. For them, Islam and the state are one and the same thing; consequently, there can be no discourse on the separation of state and society.
In order to understand the rise of ‘the war against terrorism’, Mamdani seeks to explain what he calls ‘Islamic terror’, which he claims was a marginal phenomenon prior to 9/11, but which has now come to occupy the centre of Islamist politics and Western foreign policies. In rejecting the claims of Cold War triumphalists such as Fukuyama (end of history) and Huntington (clash of civilisations), Mamdani argues that this great shift, which led to 9/11, came out of recent history, particularly the late Cold War (p. 11). For Mamdani, 9/11 was the result of an alliance that turned sour, and which should be understood as the unfinished business of the Cold War. Terrorism as understood here is born out of a political encounter.
Mamdani dates the late-Cold War era to the period from America's humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam in 1974 to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1990. In his view this period was characterised by the following features, which together helped to strengthen political Islam and stimulate the shift towards Islamic terror:
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Proxy low intensity conflicts led by the US, on the one hand, and the USSR, on the other;
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The overthrow of pro-American dictators in Iran and Nicaragua which the Reagan administration interpreted as a reversal in the wake of the evacuation of Vietnam – and which led to a change oftactics away from super power troop confrontation to proxy wars (e.g. in Mozambique, Angola, the Belgian Congo) embedded in the policy of ‘containment’;
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The emergence of ‘low intensity conflict’, which Mamdani identifies as the CIA's euphemism for terrorism. The shift from ‘containment’ to ‘rollback’, which demanded the total subordination of all rogue regimes and the declaration of total war against the ‘evil empire’.
In Africa this policy of ‘roll back’ involved:
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Support for corrupt dictators such as Sese Seku Mobutu, and covert support for RENAMO (Africa's first terrorist movement) and the reactionary wings of the Angolan liberation movement, the FLNA and UNITA;
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Stronger collaboration with apartheid South Africa, including the latter's invasion of Angola, and the policy of ‘constructive engagement’;
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Formal and informal region alliances such as the Safari Club during the Kissinger era, which brought together Egypt, the Shah's Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, facilitating interventions in the Congo, and Somalia.
[T]his is the setting in which the United States organised the Afghan jihad and that informed its central objective: to unite a billion Muslims worldwide in a holy war, a crusade, against the Soviet Union, on the soil of Afghanistan (p.128).
Mamdani then addresses the big question: How did right-wing Islamism, an ideological tendency with small and scattered numbers before the Afghan war, come to occupy the global centre after 9/11? He points to the Afghan jihad, which provided it with the skills, organisation, confidence and a coherent objective, noting that previously right-wing Islamists never had the aspiration for drawing strength from popular organisation. Above all, the Afghan jihad was funded through Islamic charities. Indeed, this was how al-Qaeda (‘The Base’), and its leader Osama bin Laden, got drawn into the movement.
In Mamdani's work we can identify three potential routes to terrorism, which appears likely to occur where there has been:
1) A determined quest to undermine leftist, nationalist projects such as in Mozambique & Nicaragua;
2) The internal degeneration of guerrilla movements such as in Sierra Leone & Liberia;
3) The use of political violence by non-ideological groups, such as by Uganda's Lords Resistance Army.
However, in my view, a mono-causal explanation is simply an attempt to explain away international terrorism, a phenomenon of global importance. Mamdani's ‘Afghan origin of the war against terrorism’ thesis ignores important antecedents, namely, the Iranian Islamic Revolution. Indeed, the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan aside, it could be argued that confrontation was inevitable between the two ideological Titans, namely Islamic fundamentalism, on the one hand, and Western Neo-Conservatism laced with Christian fundamentalist dogmas, on the other. The rise of Islamic challenges makes nonsense of the triumphalism of the ‘end of history’ and ‘end of ideology’, since the victory seems to have been over Fascism and Soviet state-capitalism.
The end of the Cold War and the need to bolster the military industrial complex necessitates the rallying of citizens in the process of social catharsis and new collective consciousness in a fast moving technologically driven world. The global economic Manicheanism: that of the ‘developed land’, where Christianity has been appropriated as the official ideology, and the periphery where the vast majority of believers are Muslims, has raised major problems of ideological cohabitation, which some have called a ‘clash of civilisations’. Can the war on terrorism be won in a milieu of gross economic, social and political inequalities? This vexatious question has major implications for global security and in particular for law and order, in the periphery. Thus, Danish cartoons and inopportune Papal asides easily triggered inter-faith violence in the periphery, as in Nigeria and Egypt, among others. Whilst Mamdani's ‘global peace movement’ may help to raise political awareness at the centre, issues such as global poverty, political and social humiliation, must be central to any agenda to end global terrorism.
In conclusion, Mamdani has managed to produce a thought-provoking book, pointing to how foreign intervention can easily produce a monster threatening even the most powerful nation on earth. At a time when debate on the rationale for military intervention in Iraq, and the consequences of such an intervention is so fractious, Mamdani has added a brief but very persuasive angle, which should not be easily dismissed.
Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries
By Christopher Cramer. London: Hurst & Co. (2006). Reviewed by Graham Harrison, University of Sheffield.
In this book, Chris Cramer does more than the title claims. Currently, the main intellectual focus on civil war has been shaped by the research question: ‘is civil war caused by greed or grievance?’ Driven by the aggregation of proxy indicators of inequality, political struggle, and resource availability, this research is necessarily highly ahistorical, generic, and abstract. In theoretical and case study chapters (on Angola), Cramer both refutes this approach empirically and in terms of its assumptions about the nature of societies.
So far, so good. Certainly for ROAPE's readership, the ability of orthodox economists to understand civil war in any specific country should appear absurd. But, this is a starting point for some more global arguments about the nature of the relationship violence and capitalism.
Violence is the ‘original sin’ of the emergence and consolidation of capital's power within societies. The consolidation of property rights, the radical shifting in class relations, the establishing of modern states, and the insertion of societies into global capitalist relations are all processes that involve violence. This violence, Cramer argues, is best understood not as an event but as a spectrum which stretches from low intensity armed criminality to nationally-defined territorial schisms and warlordism. By rejecting the ‘civil war-as-an event’ perspective, Cramer moves our view of (perhaps protracted) episodes of violence from exceptional to tendential. That is, to say, violence is not an aberration of capitalism; it is one of its constitutive properties.
Cramer is, I think, absolutely right. The country whose history I know best, Mozambique, offers a litany of violent dispossession, coerced taxation and labour, resettlement, and rebellion which are all part of any representative narrative of the emergence of capitalism in that space. Paul Richards' recent work on Sierra Leone/Liberia provides a detailed account which shows how violence is interlinked with development failures and the ideologies that they have generated.
But, the conclusion that Cramer draws from this perspective is an unsettling one. If capitalist development is intrinsically violent, we have to entertain the possibility that violence might be ‘progressive’, in the sense that it offers a technique to further a process of accumulation, class formation, the establishing of new forms of market activity, and so on. Violence is not straightforwardly ‘development in reverse’; rather it is part of the ‘tragic’ historical narrative that is most associated with Marxist theories of history. In other words, capitalist development is both about progress and substantial hardship, alienation, and oppression. If this is the case, then conflict resolution becomes a far more complicated process to understand or evaluate. Peace becomes ‘war by other means’ in which war marketeers, the elites of warring states and warlords, soldier-entrepreneurs, militias and mafias, each are compelled to defend their ‘passionate interests’ in a context where, formally, war is over.
Here, Cramer highlights how poorly the liberal vision of society and violence make sense of this disposition, played out in so many contexts through sub-Saharan Africa. The highly ideological imagining of conflict resolution as a return to a ‘proper’ state of affairs in which civic individuals or family farmers return to a market-based and harmonious order does not speak to any of the issues Cramer raises. Rather, for Cramer, the challenge is to recognise that expanding accumulation is necessarily a disruptive and potentially violent process, to map the patterns of accumulation that are being prosecuted in a society, and for states to try to innovate policies which will ensure a peaceabilty – or at least order – to capital formation and then to maximise the social returns from the creation of surplus. This set of challenges represents, in effect, a political economy of the developmental state. If we are to borrow the concept of the developmental state to understand African political economies, it would be better to take these signals about the necessarily unpleasant nature of capitalist development and the importance of an innovative political intervention in processes of accumulation (which might involve support for a nationally-oriented capitalist class), rather than try to imagine schemes of institutionalist state modelling to be transposed from one world-region to another.
In sum, Civil War is not a Stupid Thing effectively makes a substantial argument about violence and capitalism that deexoticises and historicizes Africa's long and difficult engagement with capitalist social relations. This rigorous and highly readable book tells us that capitalist development in Africa is not best understood as an aberration from a model of ‘proper’ development (a premise that has sustained a modern history of development aid); rather, Africa's history of development tells us something important about the nature of capitalism itself.
Liberal Democracy and its Critics in Africa: Political Dysfunction and the Struggle for Social Progress
By Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo (ed). London: Zed Books/ Codesria (2005). Reviewed by Rita Abrahamsen, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
This is a deeply pessimistic book, and its conclusions about democracy's fate in Africa are as disquieting as they are despairing. While acknowledging that democratic institutions and procedures are increasingly becoming the norm on the continent, this group of African scholars paint a picture of continual oppression, blatant vote rigging, pervasive corruption, and general political decline. Indeed, the volume's editor concludes that ‘current democratic practice and process have been dysfunctional in Africa’ and that liberal democracy has been hijacked by self-interested political elites (p.201). In short, according to these writers, little, if anything, has been gained in terms of freedom and prosperity from the overthrow of dictatorial regimes. The book consists of nine chapters, including a general introduction and conclusion by the editor. The remaining chapters are single-country case studies, reflecting on various aspects of the democratic process in Algeria, Cameroon, Kenya, the Republic of Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic.
Overall, the image that emerges is one of despair and decline. In the case of Algeria, Rachid Tlemcani describes a ‘police state’, where the ‘army remains the only authentic party’ in the country (p.35). The transition to democracy, he shows, has meant more security personnel, oppression and social conflict. Joseph-Marie Zambo Belinga's chapter usefully illustrates how political elites in Cameroon have manipulated and instrumentalised ethnicity in order to win or retain power. In the case of both the Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, democratic liberalisation is also found to have led to a revival of ethnic sentiments and violence, spearheaded by political parties competing for power.
In the CAR, democratisation is described as ‘the trigger of implosive, social tensions and the key opening of a Pandora's box of old African evil practices, real or mythical: tribal/regional/ethnic and political conflicts’ (p.185). The portrayal of Nigeria is equally bleak, and democracy here is described as ‘a mere charade’ (p.150). In the case of Ghana's elections in 2000, extensive unfair practices are revealed, despite international observers' declaring them generally ‘free and fair’. On the issue of women's participation, Beatrice Onsarigo shows not only the serious lack of women's involvement in decision making, but also the active strategies of male Kenyan politicians to obstruct their empowerment and political awakening, for example by branding the International Federation of Women Lawyers Kenya a campaign to legalise lesbianism and abortion.
Many interesting insights emerge from the case studies. In particular, the three chapters highlighting the revival of ethnic identities can be seen to provide a useful rebuttal to arguments that democracy cannot work in Africa because of ethnicity; ‘tribalism’, as Belinga reminds us, ‘is always the sign of something else, the mask of social, political and economic conflicts’ (p.47). In other words, the fact that democratic politics has often intensified ethnic rivalries does not mean that it need always be so, as ethnic hatred is frequently the result of irresponsible political action. On the more critical side, many of the case studies are already somewhat dated, relying primarily on material from the 1990s, and given that they do not provide much by way of theoretical contributions, this distracts from the overall value of the volume. There is also at times a dangerous tendency to generalise from one single case study to ‘Africa’, as when Tlemcani uses Algeria to describe African states as ‘police states’ and maintains that African democracies are ‘karaoke’ democracies, where the actors may come and go, but the songs remain the same. Surely, greater attention to specificity and difference is merited. There is also a sense that in their eagerness to critique liberal democracy, any benefit that may have accrued (however small and imperfect) in terms greater accountability and freedom of speech and association have been passed over in silence by the authors. Liberal democracy may not be the panacea for all Africa's ills, but neither is it necessarily their root cause. Finally, the overwhelmingly pessimistic appraisal of democracy of this volume is often couched in the familiar idiom of ‘the unsuitability of Western models’, calling instead for ‘social democracy that genuinely suits our ancestral values, cultures and traditions’ (p.42). Disappointingly, the authors have worryingly little to tell us about what such a democracy might look like, and how it might come about.
Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order
By James Ferguson, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2006). Reviewd by Graham Harrison, University of Sheffield.
Global shadows is a compelling read. It presents a reflective analysis of the normative and theoretical premises that have arisen in studies of African sociopolitical change over the last twenty years. As such, Ferguson has two positions which he wishes to argue against, one vigorously and the other more moderately. The former is neoliberalism, the latter – less easily delineated – is a melange of post-structuralism and cultural relativism. This is not a book of new anthropological material; rather, Ferguson writes as series of essays which are explicitly ambitious, perhaps employing some writer's license, in order to frame some profound points about the nature of Africa's current ‘place-in-the-world’ (in Ferguson's phrase) and the ways in which we understand that placing. By-and-large, Ferguson's arguments are refreshing, incisive, and (for this reader) persuasive.
What is Ferguson arguing? Fundamentally, that Africa is neither insufficiently connected to capitalist globalisation, nor that it is traditional or in modern parlance intrinsically different/specific in its socio-cultural foundations. Theories of (neoliberal) convergence and cultural relativism fail to understand the full import of these points because the seminal political question regarding Africa and the political economy of globalisation is the historic failure of modernisation as an international project that shaped all aspects of international involvement in Africa throughout the post Second World War period (with the usual caveats about the hidden agendas that ‘development’ aid obscured and the self-seeking nature of many Western states which reminded many nationalist and left-wing intellectuals of colonialism). It might seem odd to evoke the idea of modernisation as a reference which is positively couched. Ferguson's secular work, The Anti-Politics Machine, is often referenced alongside the work of James Scott and ‘post-development’ writers who provide critical renditions of modernisation. Ferguson does not contest this, but salvages something from modernisation which is extremely important. Its importance is most evident in the fact that stating it baldly seems almost embarrassingly obvious: two key components of modernisation are the desirability of a general material improvement in social well-being, and progression towards a more equitable international polity or society of states. As guilty as modernisation perspectives are of ethnocentrism, teleology, and paternalism, it seems equally convincing that the two components mentioned above are immanent to the modernisation tradition and that there are no arguments against the desirability of both of these.
There is a need to be clear here: Ferguson has no need to evoke benevolent external agencies, or a need for more ‘education’ for Africans, and he certainly has no truck with the World Bank and its intellectual pilot fish. What he does argue in regards to modernisation is that it draws our attention to something historic, material, and of great importance: ‘Africans who lament that their life circumstances are not modern enough are not talking about cultural practices. They are speaking instead about what they view as shamefully inadequate socio-economic conditions and their low rank in relation to other places’ (p. 186).
This understanding of modernisation is not amenable to the current global project of ‘poverty reduction’. The book rails against neoliberalism as a project which has accelerated processes of social decline. Furthermore, the most virile forms of globalisation that have engaged Africa have been socially ‘thin’, hopping from locale to locale (p. 41), connecting strictly delineated spaces to broader circuits of investment and trade, the epitome of which is oil extraction investment. Thus, neoliberalism as a development doctrine and more concrete forms of global capital actively produce – in Ferguson's definition – anti-modern and exclusionary social relations: enclaves, militarised boundaries, transnational patrimonialism, and buccaneer investment.
His second adversary, a genre of post-structural anthropology and politics, is engaged with rather than attacked. Here, Ferguson argues that the normatively attractive premise that Africa deserves to be understood with an awareness of the enduring and patronising nature of thinking about Africa which derives from the age of European empire contains within it a liability. This is that a respect for alterity, difference, and relativism draws focus away from the material, and more specifically the massive inequalities between Africa and the West. Ferguson uses two short texts (written by African authors in extremely different circumstances) to make the point that we should both avoid ‘victimology’ but also recognise that is it not necessarily retrogressive to speak about Africa as victimised. Africa has problems; it is ill-advised to say ‘Africa works’ and that any identified problems are a result of Western epistemologies that start with eschatology and ‘absence’. But, ‘Pay attention! Our [Africa's] problems are not ours alone. You [the West] have responsibilities which you must not ignore’. This represents a claim on the West, formulated in terms of social justice, not charity, for ‘graciousness and solidarity that are, in the West as presently constituted, chillingly absent’ (pp. 174-5).
In essence, then, Ferguson's formulation of a failed modernity in Africa is one of a failed globalisation which requires us to think not about ‘better aid’ or ‘debt forgiveness’ (both inescapably imperial norms) but of global social justice in a way that has been set out meticulously, and in a sense quite moderately, by Thomas Pogge (2005). This line of argument is developed eloquently and in a readable fashion. There are a few minor shortcomings that are worth noting if only because they are conspicuous. First – and as the author notes – much of the narrative is quite sweeping. As a reader who ‘knows’ East Africa, I found the general narrative convincing, but I couldn't help but feel that quite a lot of importance was missing. Indeed, much of the book is focussed on Zambia which explains to some extent Ferguson's arguments more generally, bearing in mind Zambia's quite unique and spectacular rise-and-fall of the copper extraction industry. Far less is said about the complex hybridised agrarian social relations that still constitute sub-Saharan Africa's ‘masses’. And, it is very much a collection of essays, some of which have been published in modified form elsewhere – which does detract focus on the important points the book develops (I found this especially in regards to the chapter on the short life of a Zambian political magazine).
Finally, there is no conclusion. Instead, each essay has a short conclusion of its own and there is no drawing together and reflecting on the important points made throughout. The provisional comments on Iraq seemed rather awkwardly placed at the end of the final essay.
James Ferguson should be congratulated for bring material issues of social wellbeing to the fore, premised on norms of universality and justice. Judicious, authoritative, and committed, it should be read by all.