African Alternatives (review)

Chabal, Engel and de Haan’s collection is billed as exploring African ‘agency’ in the place of discourses of African ‘victimhood’. With the promise of considering the positive potential of agency, their bleak opening points to the realities behind the popular representations of Africa as poor and violent.

The theoretical framing of agency, the key theme of the book, is provided in de Bruijin, van Dijk and Gewald’s opening chapter, which offers a considered analysis of the development of the concept in academic thinking on Africa. It is a compelling and thoughtful discussion, offering an explanation of agency as an alternative to the Afro-pessimism and African victimhood of the early 2000s. Their nuanced conceptualization of agency moves beyond assumptions of ‘having’ agency, and argues that individuals have the promise (which may or may not be realized) rather than the premise of agency. These ideas are developed in Ricard’s chapter on African literature, which revisits concerns over linguistic colonialism and the focus on texts by African authors written in English or French. Ricard calls for literary scholarship to be viewed as a form of linguistic anthropology and makes the case for African writers to utilize their agency to remain ‘African’ and not to become purveyors of ‘mondoromanzo’ texts (standardized, generic best-sellers) about Africa. An interesting chapter, accessible to the non-specialist, loses some of its readability by making sweeping statements that need substantiation and discussion (on p. 33, for example, we are told that Nuruddin Farah ‘is still Somalian, but there is no Somalia’ and that Somalia ‘is no longer on the map’).

Subsequent chapters provide consideration of agency in relation to land rights, livelihoods, migration and tourism. Lentz’s concise and insightful chapter argues for land rights and property to be considered as relationships, not things: multiple subjects are seen as acting with agency in negotiating ownership, access, control and belonging, a process framed by debates around autochthony and indigeneity. Shifting from land rights to livelihoods, de Haan issues a rallying call for livelihood studies to emphasize agency whilst recognizing the importance of collective power relations. He advocates the consideration of multi-local livelihood dynamics, mobility and the diversification of income strategies, and his concluding argument that the next generation of livelihood studies must consider the role of transnational migrants highlights the need for engagement with existing literature on transnational communities. Continuing the livelihoods focus, Frederiksen’s chapter on video parlours, popular culture and youth politics in Nairobi’s slums considers youth agency under multiple constraints. The chapter provides an illuminating consideration of how things have (and have not) changed for youths in the slums over a ten-year period, reviewing the possibilities of agency in their political engagement and immersion in the popular cultural flows that connect everyday dreams and actions.

The following two chapters consider migration in the African continent: both struggle to establish the agency theme in their arguments. Bakewell and de Haas provide a useful overview of migration within and beyond the continent but it is only on the last page that they engage the question of agency. They note how structuralist approaches have failed to consider individual agency in migration patterns and argue that analysis of agency in these movements is desperately lacking. Cornelissen then considers how shifts in authority can be understood through the processes of de- and re-territorialization and migration. In particular, she considers Southern Africa and provides an overview of key migration issues – but not, crucially, the key theme of agency.

The final chapter, van Beek’s consideration of African tourism, summarizes the historical development of tourism in Africa and calls for the development of stronger theoretical approaches. Whilst his discussion of the ‘tourist bubble’ is interesting and signposts various paradoxes in work on African tourism, once again more explicit connections could have been made with the theme of agency. Nevertheless, the outline of theory provides a good starting point for thinking about agency and African tourism.

Despite these shortcomings...