Laurent FOURCHARD

This article explores the power exercised by the National Union of
Road Transport Workers (NURTW) over the transport workers in
Lagos (Nigeria). With the privatisation of transport and the
regulation of motor parks transferred from local governments to
NURTW, the union has been able to expand the power of
unionist leaders who have developed new managerial techniques
to increase their own profits. The NURTW case reflects the
adaptation of neoliberal norms within a union at the expense of
its workers. The article suggests that union power over workers is
as necessary a field of research as the recent renewal on power
resources approach exploring the capacity of unions to empower
workers.

THE 2023 NIGERIAN GENERAL ELECTION is the first in the history of the country to be organized without cash. The outgoing President Buhari and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) imposed one month before the presidential election of the 25th of February 2023 to remove old naira
banknotes from the circulation and to replace them with new banknotes. The major objectives  were to stop corrupt politicians, to limit vote buying and violence sponsored by ‘big men’,  practices that were common in former elections. The process was chaotic and came to be known
as the ‘Naira crisis’: old banknotes became illegal and unusable after the 14th of February  imposing all citizens to deposit their cash while new banknotes were not available or in very  limited quantities. Nigeria was without cash for more than two months, from the last week of
January 2023 until the  mid of April after the Supreme Court of Nigeria ordered the CBN to  recirculate old naira banknotes side by side with new banknotes.  For countries whose cash is at the core of social and economic life, moving into a sudden  cashless policy resulted in major economic pain for citizens and businesses. The swapping of currency notes caused hardship  to citizens on both cases, but the Nigeria case is arguably the first cashless election in the history  of democracy in the global south. The election time period radically transformed a technical
bank operation into the central political issue discussed, commented and protested against. It  triggered a major fight within the party in power, between the executive and the judiciary,  between the political class and the population at large while it arguably changed the  organization of the election.

Du point de vue des acteurs, les termes vigilantes et vigilantisme recouvrent  une pluralité de sens. Leur histoire rend compte des glissements sémantiques  qui dépendent des transformations du cadre juridique, de l’incrimination des  pratiques, de la capacité des forces de l’ordre à monopoliser la violence physique  sur un territoire donné mais aussi de l’historicité et de la mémoire de ces pratiques dans les usages sociaux et politiques. Le déploiement du vigilantisme sous  ses différentes formes traduit les nombreuses modalités de l’exercice du pouvoir  d’État, lequel consiste à tolérer, ignorer, combattre ou disqualifier des pratiques
selon des impératifs historiques plus larges oscillant entre la nécessité pour la  puissance publique de se décharger des fonctions de maintien de l’ordre sur des  groupes particuliers et la revendication du monopole de la violence légitime sur  l’ensemble du territoire national.

À peine sorti, l'ouvrage a déclenché une polémique, moins en raison de son contenu écrit, sur lequel les critiques portaient peu, que sur la violence de ses images 1. De fait, l'ouvrage se présentait non comme un livre universitaire habituel, mais comme un livre au format imposant, affichant en couverture un titre racoleur fait de néons de sexshop, en quatrième de couverture, une femme nue de dos, et proposant un corpus de 1 200 images largement dominé par des photos de femmes et de jeunes filles colonisées dénudées. C'est bien ce contenu iconographique qui a déclenché et alimenté la polémique dans la presse en septembre et octobre 2018. Plus qu'à un livre d'histoire, on aurait à faire à un « beau livre 2 » ou à un « livre porno 3 » ; les éditeurs et l'éditrice n'auraient fait « que reconduire la violence coloniale en exposant sans aucune pré caution ces photos de femmes dénudées, racisées et violentées 4 », « ces images ne se contentent pas de représenter des crimes coloniaux : elles en sont l'outil et le prolongement 5 ». Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel et Gilles Boëstch reprochent à leurs contempteurs de ne pas avoir lu les textes, de n'avoir commenté que les images, et rappellent le caractère scientifique et historique de leur travail 6. Ce compte rendu les prend aux mots. Avonsnous affaire à un livre d'histoire ou à autre chose ? Et chemin faisant, est-ce que ce projet respecte les fondements déontologiques du métier d'historien et, plus généralement, du chercheur en sciences sociales ?

The National Union of Road Transport workers (NURTW) is the main transport organization in Nigeria and has replaced local governments in most garages of the country. The NURTW exercises its authority in Lagos garages through its own set of rules, qualified here as garage laws. They aim at providing revenues for the union, for state institutions, for police bodies and at ordering motor parks and disciplining drivers. Based on observations and 80 interviews with unionists, the article looks at the ways these laws are implemented by unionists and agberos or local touts turned into union workers. Some rules depend on the authority of union chairmen but most of them are routinized and powerful mainly because they are co-produced by the union and state institutions. Understanding garage laws helps to move beyond visions reducing transport unions as mafia organizations and states in Africa as weak institutions unable to implement state laws.

Over the past decade, the exploration of xenophobia, particularly of the violence xenophobia may unleash and its related effects on citizenship outside of Western Europe, has been limited. If there is a large body of research on autochthony and xenophobic practices in a number of African countries, much less is known on the outcomes of xenophobic violence and how it reshapes the making of authority, the self-definition of groups making claims to ownership over resources and the boundaries of citizenship. Analyses of collective violence in Africa have devoted much attention to conflict over land ownership, civil wars or vigilantism while quantitative studies have placed much emphasis on putative difference between labelled groups in the production of “ethnic violence”. In this issue, we understand autochthony, nativism and indigeneity as local concepts used by actors in situations of xenophobia. Xenophobia is consequently understood as the systematic construction of strangers as a th...

Le Nigeria a dissocie depuis quatre decennies le corps des citoyens en deux : les indigenes et les non indigenes. Les indigenes sont ceux qui peuvent faire remonter leurs racines genealogiques a une communaute de personnes originaires d’une localite. Les gouvernements locaux produisent des certificats d’indigene qui certifient cette origine. Cet article explore la relation entre les fonctionnaires des gouvernements locaux, leurs intermediaires et les usagers en quete de certificat dans trois Etats du Nigeria. L’analyse montre comment les candidats se pretent a ces procedures, comment la relation bureaucratique constitue un apprentissage ordinaire de l’Etat et redefinit l’appartenance a une citoyennete locale exclusive, et a quelles conditions la production de documents devient une question politique conflictuelle.

<alinea/> In Nigeria?s two largest cities, Lagos and Ibadan, urbanist and policing concerns are emerging almost simultaneously but the anticipated links between poor neighbourhoods and criminality are not in evidence : violent crime like delinquency occurs readily outside the geographical boundaries of poverty. This study hopes to show that high crime areas, far from overlapping geographic areas of poverty or

ABSTRACTThe dramatic urban change taking place on the African continent has led to a renewed and controversial interest in Africa's cities within several academic and expert circles. Attempts to align a growing but fragmented body of research on Africa's urban past with more general trends in urban studies have been few but have nevertheless opened up new analytical possibilities. This article argues that to move beyond the traps of localism and unhelpful categorizations that have dominated aspects of urban history and the urban studies literature of the continent, historians should explore African urban dynamics in relation to world history and the history of the state in order to contribute to larger debates between social scientists and urban theorists. By considering how global socio-historical processes articulate with the everyday lives of urban dwellers and how city-state relationships are structured by ambivalence, this article will illustrate how historians can part...

This paper seeks to trace the origins of offences by youths as a distinct social concern in Lagos and examines the categorization of a group, the ‘juvenile delinquent’, by colonial administrators and welfare officers. While organized pickpocketing and prostitution by young people emerged as an issue in Nigerian newspapers in the 1920s, it was largely ignored by local administrators until the appointment, in 1941, of the first Social Welfare Officer. This led to the implementation of new administrative and judiciary machinery which combined two processes: it legislated ‘juvenile delinquency’ into existence as a clearly identifiable social problem; and criminalized a large portion of urban youth, especially female hawkers. The combination of these processes constitutes what can be called the invention of juvenile delinquency in Nigeria.

century (and by extension in other times and places) was by no means a linear process, driven exclusively by the interests of global capitalism. Instead, this story of gin illustrates how the development of markets occurred as a kind of negotiation among producers, distributors, and consumers, and in particular how local understandings of goods shaped their place in the regional economy, complicating terms like local and authentic. As the anti-alcohol movement forced virtual prohibition, the quantities of gin imported declined sharply; after 1920 schnapps became almost exclusively a ritual liquid. A drink that in the late nineteenth century had been associated with the modern Atlantic economy became the province of "traditional" men. Drawing on distillery records, as well as British and West African archives, court records, and oral sources, van den Bersselaar shows the interplay of consumers and commercial interests in defining and redefining a commodity demonized by temperance advocates as a "vile substance" but defended by others for its spiritual and medical powers. The distilleries struggled to distinguish their various brands, but they did not entirely grasp the degree to which their products had been captured by consumers. Following the Second World War, several of the companies attempted to expand sales by repositioning schnapps as a drink for the rising class of affluent West Africans; yet this advertising campaign failed entirely to reach a public that saw Dutch gin exclusively as a "traditional" drink— precisely the niche it continues to occupy today.

Laurent Fourchard, Andre Mary, and Rene Otayek, eds. Entreprises religieuses transnationales en Afrique de l'Ouest. Hommes et Societes series. Paris: Editions Karthala; lbadan: IFRA, 2005. 537 pp. Footnotes. Tables. Bibliography. euro32. Paper. This edited volume gathers multidisciplinary scholars - political scientists, historians, historians of religions, sociologists, and anthropologists - from West Africa, Europe, and Canada to examine the growing importance of transnational religious movements within West Africa. Although five of the essays concentrate on Islamic movements and two on African religions, most focus on Pentecostal movements in the coastal region between Cameroon and Cote d'Ivoire. Although transnational movements have a long history in West Africa, newer Pentecostal churches have found political and linguistic borders to be significant obstacles to their expansion. As in most collections of this size, the essays vary in quality and there is some repetition of material. The essays on Islam acknowledge the role of itinerant scholars and their close association with the growth of Sufi orders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they concentrate on religious developments since independence. Roman Loimeier examines the history of such transna- tional contacts in Northern Nigeria and how they changed in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Marie Miran focuses on the particular challenges of Muslim minorities in Cote d'Ivoire, Benin, and Ghana who were often de- pendent on outside scholars and officially recognized Islamic associations. Sophie Bava examines the networks of support that the Mouride Sufi broth- erhood created for Senegalese Wolof transients in Niamey, while Muriel Gomez-Perez provides an interesting glimpse into the way that Reformist Islamic movements in Senegal have challenged the colonial and postcolo- nial collaboration of many Muslim leaders with the authorities of colonial and national governments. Souley Hassane examines northern Nigeria's and Niger's Muslim communities, focusing on the leadership of Cheikh Abubakr Mohammed Gummi and Cheikh Youssouf Hassan Diallo, their critiques of the political economy of their respective states, and the role of cassettes and videos in the dissemination of their teachings. Lacking in this section is discussion of the extraordinary creation of Senegalese Mou- ride communities, complete with businesses and marabouts, in many North American, European, and African cities. Only two articles focus on the transnational dimensions of African religious traditions. Veronique Duchesne and Pauline Guedj provide a fascinating description of the relationship between a particular spirit cult in the southern Ghanian town of Akonedi and African diaspora communities in the United States. The authors skillfully link the history of the shrine complex in Larteh to political developments during the Nkrumah years in Ghana and the growth of pan-Africanist interests in religion in the American African diaspora. Emmanuelle Kadya Tall also describes the transnational dimensions in the vaudou tradition, focusing on an international festival, Ouidah 92, which celebrated vaudou as part of the national cultural legacy of Benin. She traces the lives of five priests of Tron cults involved in protection against witchcraft and the procurement of wealth - both important issues in the turbulent years since independence. …

It is often considered probable that the recent rise of vigilante groups in Nigeria means an erosion of the state monopoly of legitimate violence as well as a marked decline in state sovereignty over the national territory. However, this conclusion does not take into consideration the fact that in Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a term initially proposed by the police in the mid-1980s as a substitute for an older practice known in the western part of the country since the colonial period as the ‘hunter guard’ or ‘night guard’ system. Hence, instead of looking at vigilante groups as a response to a supposed increase in crime or a supposed decline of the police force, we should consider them – initially at least – as a first attempt to introduce forms of community policing in order to improve the appalling image of the police. As such, in south-western Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a new name for an old practice of policing that should be considered in an extended timeframe (from the 1930s onward), a...