The Governance of Daily Life in Africa: Ethnographic Explorations of Public and Collective Services (review)

Resulting from a conference held in Leiden in 2002, this book presents a collection of thirteen contributions on the provision of public and collective services in Africa. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, these deal with topics as diverse as politics in refugee camps in Senegal, waste management in Ghana, drinking-water supply in Niger, and health services in Tanzania. Though most contributions deserve some attention, for reasons of space I will focus on those of particular interest to me.

Contributions by Gerhard Anders and Julia Hornberger show the relevance of legal anthropology in the study of the interplay between state and society. Anders analyzes in depth how a civil servant sought and obtained from his service two cars (with drivers) to carry the corpse of his housekeeper's mother back to her village. From this case study, the author argues that "corruption" in Africa is best understood not as a practice in conflict with official rules, but as the result of a negotiation among several different types of norms: the heterogeneous body of laws and regulations; the expectations of redistribution, or feelings of obligation, existing in kinship and patron–client networks; and the moral debts circulating among colleaguesn at work. For Anders, civil servants do not in any simple way fail to enforce official rules because of informal pressure from parents, clients, or colleagues. Instead, they need to be seen as active agents, playing with the ambiguities in the interrelations among official, personal, and informal professional norms.

The contribution of Hornberger offers a "thick" ethnography about the consequences of the 1999 Domestic Violence Act for the police of West-bury, Johannesburg. Women in this district regularly call the police to lodge a complaint against their male partner in the name of this legislation, but in most cases they withdraw it some days later. The author argues that such withdrawals result less from women's powerlessness and fear—or the image of victimhood that brought about the legislation to begin with—than from a form of gendered agency. Women use police intervention, or the threat of it, to solve private conflicts; they want to teach men a lesson, not to break off their relationships with them. This practice of inviting the state into the domestic sphere, Hornberger shows, has a long history in Westbury. It also contributes, he says, to "emasculating" men, because the relationship of men to women has helped define male identity: since the colonial period women have commonly been represented as dutiful mothers at home suffering from the violence of absent husbands, and such a notion of men's power over women has been a crucial component of the masculine self. And the practice of calling on the police to enter into domestic disputes on the side of the women also erodes the masculine identity of policemen, who are now required to perform what they see as the feminized job of the social worker. Although the female point of view is missing, I found this focus on the processes of subjectivization particularly suggestive.

Contributions by Jacky Bouju and Wiebe Nauta succeed in taking into account the point of view of all stakeholders—an integrative approach that often remains but wishful thinking in the literature. The two authors also offer interesting reflections on the concepts of public space and public good. Bouju argues that the behavior of the inhabitants of Bobo-Dioulasso regarding the cleanliness of common areas is related to their sense of connectionn or lack of connection to the urban community. According to this perspective, waste can be conceived of as a form of resistance against public authorities, though there is the risk here of confusing what could be simple neglect with a weapon of the weak. Nauta also shows that the concept of public good may be subject to different forms...