Civic Agency in Africa: arts of resistance in the 21st century ed. by Ebenezer Obadare and Wendy Willems (review)

Civic Agency in Africa: arts of resistance in the 21st century is a collection of essays that makes innovative interventions in the debates around how we think about the agency and resilience of ordinary people. The collection includes a foreword by the late Patrick Chabal – probably one of the last pieces he wrote.

The editors set out to challenge and complicate some of the ways in which academics, governments and NGOs think about agency, resistance and co-optation in the context of Africa. In their introduction, they write about the genesis of the project: Ebenezer Obadare’s interest in political jokes in Nigeria led him to reflect on the ways in which ordinary Nigerians ‘engage, deconstruct and wrestle with’ the state. Humour, they write, is ‘an integral part of an array of stratagems … to recuperate dignity and selfhood amid the humiliations and savageries of everyday postcolonial life’ (p. ixxx). The most exciting contribution of this collection lies in the fact that the various authors engage with ways of theorizing ordinariness and agency, without always assuming that African individuals are victims.

Instead, in the chapters collected here, we read about ordinary people singing, selling goods, gossiping, sending SMS text messages, scamming, dancing and, most significantly, laughing. The collection is not a seamless whole, and the editors do not pretend that a coherent argument will emerge through the papers collected together. Instead, the multiple approaches, regions and disciplines map emergent ways of thinking about ordinariness, agency and resistance. The collection documents and analyses resistance and agency as cultural practices, drawing on the work of Achille Mbembe in On the Postcolony, James Scott’s books Weapons of the Weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: hidden transcripts, as well as Patrick Chabal’s work, in particular his Africa: the politics of suffering and smiling. The argument is made unevenly and diversely, as one would hope for a field of inquiry that does not wish to establish a new dogma.

The editors have divided the papers into four sections. Part I deals with ‘Postcolonial state formation and parallel infrastructures’.Itincludesachapter by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni on global technologies of domination, offering a very useful and incisive overview of the subaltern question, and another by Bettina von Lieres on citizen action ‘from below’, in which the author compares Angola and South Africa as case studies. Part II is called ‘Embodied modes of resistance and the postcolonial state’ and includes a chapter on how market and informal traders are re-making Nairobi, written by Ilda Lindell and Markus Ihalainen. The next chapter, by Basile Ndjio, is on ‘hustlers’ or 419-style entrepreneurs in Cameroon (the number ‘419’ coming from the section of the Nigerian penal code dealing with fraud), followed by Susan Thomson’s on everyday forms of resistance to the narrative of national unity in present-day Rwanda.

Part III, on ‘Popular culture as discursive forms of resistance’, includes a chapter on political commentary in South Africa, in which Innocentia J. Mhlambi pays attention to strategies of resistance and co-optation by formal and informal political commentators. Another, by Grace Musila, deals with racialized humour and the ways in which humour can, even temporarily, make taboo topics visible. The last chapter in this section is by Jendele Hungbo on the politics of Fela Kuti’s music and his political activism. The final section is called ‘Publics as everyday sites of resistance’, and includes a chapter by Dorothea Schulz on local radio stations in Mali and their creation of affective communities, and a chapter on the heterogeneous audience reactions to political cartoons in South Africa by Daniel Hammett.

Through the essays in this loosely curated collection, there emerges a strong sense of new directions in African studies. The collection seems to favour certain regions (west and south), possibly as a result of the editors’ local...