Law and Social Order in Africa Introduction

From the colonial period onwards, there has been a marked expansion in the range of formal and informal institutions enforcing regimes of law and social order across Africa. At the same time, practices and ideas about law, justice, policing and professionalism have proliferated, drawing on a diverse range of influences. This themed part issue explores the lived realities of law and social order in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Building on a rich and growing literature, the articles examine how diverse actors such as ‘ordinary’ citizens, the police and legal professionals understand, enact and contest ideas about law and social order. The articles that follow adopt different disciplinary perspectives and draw on fieldwork from Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The papers also illustrate how thinking about law and social order can cast a light on important themes for Africanist scholars, such as processes of formal and informal institutionalization on the continent and the public’s investment in such institutions.

As Benedetta Rossi notes, there has been ‘a renewed emphasis on institutions and organisations as loci of anthropological interest’ (Rossi 2004). One emerging theme throughout this collection is the degree to which the formal and informal institutions of law and social order are merged, distinguished, utilized and challenged in everyday practices of policing and justice. Through Owen’s work on policing in Nigeria, we see how institutions operate to gain a grip on the minds and bodies of their members, and how this is adopted, adapted and subverted in everyday life.

Despite their challenges, this collection demonstrates that formal state institutions also remain important to the wider political community in which they are embedded. This is not just because they are of practical use (albeit inconstantly) but also because, to varying degrees, they have maintained a hold on the imaginations of their citizens. As Verheul demonstrates in the context of Zimbabwe, for example, people have appealed to the Zimbabwean courts despite their compromised nature, animated by ideals of citizenship that are shared by many in Zimbabwe who – like her informants – have been the victims of political persecution. Such analysis, which gives us insights into the degree to which the public are invested in the law, and in the formal institutions of the state that are apparently tasked with its enforcement, is an important counterbalance to the widespread literature that has focused almost solely on the failures of the state across the continent, and the presence of alternative forums for tackling issues of law and social order.

These articles also seek to move beyond the observation that institutions are ‘hybridized’ (Boege et al. 2008), believing that this assertion of syncretism does not tell us meaningfully how institutional assemblages have been formed, precisely what forms of legitimacy they draw on to bolster their claims to public authority, nor how they negotiate their presence in everyday life alongside multiple other institutions (Goodfellow and Lindemann 2013). More promising is the rich literature on the anthropology of statehood that has emerged over the past few decades. From that we can see how and why those making claims to public authority in the arena of law and social order might seek to emphasize, imitate or shed the symbols and practices of ‘stateness’ (Lund 2006; Jensen 2008).

Related to the focus on formal and informal institutions, the place of professionals and professionalism in the maintenance of law and social order is a theme that emerges in all four articles. In Owen’s study, the transformation of civilians into police occurs within a ‘total institution’ that both deconstructs old subjectivities and produces new forms of solidarities and identities. For Karekwaivanane, the personal and professional ethics of the first generation of African lawyers in Zimbabwe were ‘formed’ on the margins. This allowed them space to develop alternative conceptions of their roles as lawyers and to transcend the formalist identity that was espoused by the wider legal fraternity in then-Rhodesia.

However, professionalism is not just part of a select group’s self-identity: it is also a standard by which citizens judge ‘professionals’. As the articles by Cooper-Knock and Verheul...