Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (review)

This collection of ten ethnographic chapters, plus introduction and afterword, examines the sociocultural manifestations of neoliberal policies in Africa in the 1990s, a time when open market competition led to the realignment of state and corporate interests. The volume is impressive for its ethnographic scope and conceptual coherence. Authors share an analytic commitment to understanding neoliberalism from historical and comparative perspectives. Each chapter emphasizes that new patterns of governance and politics are outcomes of African communities' different and complex ways of engaging with colonialism and modernity.

In the introduction, Brad Weiss proposes that the lack of present-day security in much of Africa is related to the powers of the market to include and exclude people from its forces, despite the fact that people often imbue the market with the promise of ensuring social, through financial, equity. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, in a perceptive afterword, consider that the current mode of cultural production in Africa is one of "retroduction"—a degenerative mode that in fact makes way for new forms of cultural innovation. Together, Weiss and the Comaroffs provide a valuable theoretical framework for synthesizing the case-specific central chapters.

These chapters are loosely divided into three broad categories. The first, on personhood, includes chapters on the Senegalese Murid trade (Buggenhagen), on homosexuality and the Anglican church (Hoad), on Malian Muslim saints (Soares), and on the commodification of Ghanaian national culture (Shipley). The second, on youth, includes chapters on Zulu ritual and estrangement (White), on generational conflict over schooling in South Africa (Ngwane), and on hip-hop global imaginings in Tanzania (Weiss). The third, on moral panic, includes chapters on poetic photos in South Africa's Cape Flats (Makhulu), on spirit possession and schooling in Kenya (Smith), and on Pentecostal deliverance from corruption, also in Kenya (Blunt).

But there is nothing obvious about the clustering of chapters into these categories. The contributions are so rich and overlapping that they might be connected in various ways. The personalization of religious authority as a manifestation of neoliberal ideals of human—and consumers'—rights, for instance, is evident in the studies of Soares, Blunt, and Hoad. Buggenhagen's fascinating account of gendered and generational Senegalese class transformations, and of the decline of senior male authority as a function of new locations for employment, is mirrored and elaborated in chapters on marginalized male youth (see Weiss, White, and Ngwane). Likewise, Shipley's fascinating discussion of Ghanaian tradition as a marketed commodity is comparable to Smith's careful analysis of the hidden capital accumulation associated with Kenyan schooling, and to Makhulu's fine discussion of state legal premises in South Africa.

Individually, the ethnographic chapters suggest that neoliberalism is perhaps best understood not through abstract analysis, which often leads to the reification of concepts, but in terms of what people say and do and how people's passing commentaries reflect their understandings of political and economic changes. One useful illustration of how neoliberalism is experienced, rather than of what it is or what it does, is given by Robert Blunt, who notes that economic liberalization in Kenya in the 1990s corresponded with a transformation in the casual shorthand TKK. TKK once stood to mean "give a little bit" (toa kitu kidogo in Kiswahili) and referred to the need to raise community funds for public projects. But across the years, TKK has come to mean "give everything" (toa kila kitu), that is, give everything you have to services that were once public but are now privatized, such as schooling, health care, road works, even branches of the police force. This change in meaning is a simple but profound illustration of people's own awareness of the effects of neoliberal policies upon their lives.

As a whole, Producing African Futures raises important and interesting questions about the vagaries of securing a future under present conditions. What are the prospects, means, and modes of meeting present needs and preparing for a future...