Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa (review)

The essays in this fine volume together provide a compelling justification for the value of anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork in analysing the widespread phenomenon of vigilantism in Africa – including cases from Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and South Africa. As the editors make clear, the state figures prominently in these chapters because at stake in vigilante practices are questions of ‘who is entitled to formulate legal principles, to enact justice, to police morality and to sanction wrongdoings’ (p. 1). As these case studies also suggest, the relationship between the state and vigilante groups can change over time, from an initial rationale for vigilante action rooted in popular perceptions of state failure to maintain law and order, to a situation where vigilantes act as agents of state power. Further, these essays illustrate that this often contradictory relationship is not simply the consequence of change over time. Many vigilante groups can act simultaneously in the interests of the state and in opposition to it.

Community policing forums in South Africa, the focus of essays by Buur and Kirsch, are the most clear-cut examples of how vigilante groups can be concurrently state and non-state actors. They depend for their legitimacy on their ability to do what the state cannot: provide protection from crime. Yet they also uphold ideals that are deeply connected to the sovereignty of the state. As other authors in the volume point out, even in contexts where vigilantes are not so formally affiliated with the state, they present themselves as champions of ideals – law and order, justice, and the exercise of power and the use of violence in the name of moral rectitude – that are the basis of state sovereignty. Vigilantes do not commonly contest the legitimacy of those ideals, but rather assert that they are better placed to police them, thereby reinforcing the pre-existing political/ moral order.

The volume as a whole reveals that vigilantism in Africa encompasses a diverse spectrum of groups and practices. While several case studies focus on widely publicized urban forms of vigilantism, the chapters by Pratten, based in Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria, and Grätz, focusing on southern Benin, illustrate how vigilantism can also be a rural phenomenon with deep historical roots – as Pratten, in particular, is careful to show. Further, some vigilante groups are more overtly ethnic or religious in their orientations, as Harnischfeger’s piece on the Oodua People’s Congress in south-western Nigeria and the Hisba in northern Nigeria vividly demonstrates. The range of cases – vigilantes protecting a single rural community, others looking for justice on behalf of an entire ethnic group or a whole religion, or hunters’ groups who transmogrify into vigilantes and eventually become soldiers-for-hire in a civil war (as in the study by Hagberg and Ouattara, set in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire) – suggests the scope of the comparisons at play in this insightful volume.

While the relationship between vigilantes and the state is a dominant preoccupation of the book, some of the authors usefully contest a state-centric focus. In his foreword, Abrahams points out that the quest for order, including moral order, is a more powerful force in explaining vigilantism than is suggested by what he calls ‘hard-nosed’ economic and political perspectives. Pratten, against the state-centric perspective, emphasizes vigilantism’s ‘cultural logics, social motivations, historical discourses and embodied practices’ (p. 119). Buur points to – but does not follow up on – the intriguing and quintessentially anthropological notion that, across Africa, large numbers of people are stuck in the social position of perennial ‘youth’– unable to work, marry, and become seniors. That is, poverty, unemployment, and political disenfranchisement leave young people culturally, as well as economically, insecure, creating the climate for both crime and vigilantism. Without dismissing the importance of the state, both Buur and Pratten extend constructively the purview necessary for a fuller understanding of vigilantism.

A final crucial issue that many of these essays...