Introduction: new ethical fields and the implicitness/explicitness of ethics in Africa

Throughout history, people on the African continent have experienced momentous transformations of their lifeworlds and ways of living, some of them irruptive, uncompromising and cataclysmic, others of a more subtle and negotiable nature. What remains to be dealt with in more detail by anthropologists are the manifold ways in which these transformations are reflected in, and have a bearing on, people’s ethical demeanours, commitments and debates. Given the complexity and variability of these processes, it is not possible or even desirable to give a conclusive answer to this question. Instead, taking account of historical and sociocultural specificities, this special issue features in-depth case studies of ethics as ideals in practice from several countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Botswana, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania). In doing so, the contributions combine a presentation of ethnographic findings with a discussion of a new conceptual approach for a practice-oriented anthropological study of ‘ordinary ethics’ (Lambek 2010).

In this introduction, we argue for a rather fluid notion of ethics that entails people’s convictions, value judgements and sentiments on how to live a morally good and/or just life. We suggest that the making and unmaking of ethical fields takes place within the context of state politics, the influence of international organizations and the emergence of new publics and local NGOs that provide people with new ideas about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. We show that these ethical fields emerge in dialectical processes between what we call the ‘implication’ and ‘explication’ of ethics.

In what follows, we first briefly reflect on previous anthropological work on ethics in Africa. We then delineate the parameters of our conceptual approach, before finally commenting on how the articles in this special issue broaden our understanding of everyday struggles in contemporary Africa to achieve or to maintain a certain ethical composure, to win relevant others over to committing themselves to particular ethical principles, or to position oneself in relation to the (un)ethical claims of others.

The anthropology of ethics in Africa: a selective review

Broadly speaking, in the history of anthropology, the study of ethics in the everyday lives of people in Africa has most prominently – but, for a long time, only implicitly – been associated with ethnographies of witchcraft. This is because the study of ‘witchcraft’ provides insights into how people conceptualize what it means to lead a morally ‘good’ life. Looking at this research allows us to critically position ourselves in relation to assumptions that are widely held in this field and have had some influence on how ethics in Africa have been interpreted.

Since the early work of Evans-Pritchard on the Azande (1937), studies of witchcraft in Africa from colonial times to the present have raised the issue of ethics by demonstrating the power of ‘the danger from within’: that is, the envy and malevolence emerging from within intricate circles of kin and family networks, from friends and neighbours. In this ‘anthropology of evil’ (Parkin 1985), over the decades the debate has increasingly drawn attention to processes through which ethics interact with change and transformations in the realms of the family, religion, economy and politics (Ashforth 2004; Geschiere 1997; 2013; Moore and Sanders 2001; Niehaus et al. 2001; ter Haar 2007), thus offering useful analytical tools for studying ethics as ‘ideals in practice’.

One of the earlier high points in debates on ethics in African societies was Gluckman’s(1972) seminal study of witchcraft accusations and witch hunts. According to him, the latter emerge in situations of a ‘moral crisis’ and in contexts of profound social and political change.¹ With a view to colonial Africa, he argues that they were born out of the communal desire to reorder society and that, in giving public expression to convictions about how people should conduct themselves, they also espoused imaginaries about what society ‘is’ and how it is supposed to be.

As Csordas (1987) notes, ethically informed imaginaries of a reordered society like these inevitably go together with counter-imaginaries of evil, so that witchcraft accusations...