POLS 4033/POLS 7036: The State in Africa: Democratisation and

Crisis
Instructor: Professor Keith Breckenridge (keith.breckenridge@wits.ac.za)

Week 1 Introductions and expectations

This course is designed to provide you with a rich analytical toolbox for
understanding states on the African continent. But it is also intended to equip you
with ways of approaching and criticizing the dominant forms of theory in the social
sciences.
It is important to understand at the outset that this is a reading course. You will be
required to complete, carefully and attentively, approximately 150 pages of reading
per week. This will take you a minimum of four hours. Failure to prepare for each
class by completing the readings will be a signal that you are not interested in earning
credit for the course.

Assessment:
The final mark for this course will be composed of:
 a mark for your oral participation in the class (10% of final)
 two 2,000 word essays, the first due on 29 August and the second on October
24 (40% of final). These essays will be submitted on-line using CLE.
 a final exam in the first week of November (50% of final)

Readings you should already be familiar with:

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth: A Negro Psychoanalyst’s Study of the
Problems of Racism and Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 1966.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of
Late Colonialism. Cape Town: James Currey, 1996.

Influential theoretical accounts of the state:

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. “The Colonial Origins of
Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” The American
Economic Review 91, no. 5 (2001): 1369–1401.
Burchell, Peter, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault.
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India.
Delhi: Oxford University Press: Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Corrigan, Philip Richard D., and Derek Sayer. The Great Arch : English State
Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
Evans, Peter. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995.
Giddens, Anthony. The Nation-State and Violence. Volume Two of A Contemporary
Critique of Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985
Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. London: Oxford University Press, 1903.
Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power: The Rise of Classes and Nation-states,
1760-1914. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)
-----------. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast
Asia. Yale Univ Pr, 2009.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial
Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990 – 1992. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992) Chapters 1 – 4.

Further reading on States

Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974) Chapters 1 –
5.
Breckenridge, Keith, and Simon Szreter, eds. Registration and Recognition:
Documenting the Person in World History. Proceedings of the British
Academy 182. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Skocpol, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social
Policy in the United States. Harvard University Press, 1992.
Woodside, Alexander. Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of
World History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Week 2 The Gatekeeper State and the past of this present

The goals of this seminar are:

(1) to provide the class with a common set of terms and problems that we can use to
discuss and debate the characteristics of the state in contemporary Africa.
And (2) to begin to map out some of the primary explanations of the causes of those,
apparently, distinctive state characteristics.
It is, as ever, very important to ensure that you leave yourself sufficient time to
complete all of the reading which, this week, will be some 190 pages. Typically, this
will require at least five hours of focused preparation time. Failure to complete the
reading, and to show in discussion that you have done so, will result in your having to
complete an additional writing assignment for next week.

Required reading:
Cooper, Frederick. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002. (Please read the entire book, if you are
pressed for time you may skip the final chapter).
OR

Akyeampong, Emmanuel Kwaku, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James

Robinson. “Introduction : Africa -- the Historical Roots of Its
Underdevelopment.” In Africa’s Development in Historical Perspective, edited
by Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James
Robinson. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
AND

Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. A Modern Economic History of Africa. Dakar, Senegal:

CODESRIA, 1993, Chaps 1, 13 – 15.

Optional reading:
Abbott, George C. “A Re-Examination of the 1929 Colonial Development Act.” The
Economic History Review 24, no. 1 (1971): 68–81.
Arndt, Heinz Wolfgang. “Economic Development: A Semantic History.” Economic
Development and Cultural Change 29, no. 3 (1981): 457–466.
Freund, Bill. The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of African
Society since 1800. Boulder: Lynn Riener, 1998.
Jerven, Morten. Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development
Statistics and What to Do about It. Cornell University Press, 2013.
Meredith, David. “The British Government and Colonial Economic Policy, 1919–
391.” The Economic History Review 28, no. 3 (1975): 484–499.
Wicker, E. R. “Colonial Development and Welfare, 1929-1957: The Evolution of a
Policy.” Social and Economic Studies, 1958, 170–192.
Concepts and problems:
 Gatekeeper state
 Burden of development
 Commodity cycle
 Debt crisis
 Structural adjustment
Week 3 What is African about the African State?

In this seminar we will examine the question of whether there is a common political
or cultural form to all the states on the African continent. Does it make sense to use
the concept of the African state analytically? This is a debate that can be usefully
pursued in both directions – you may argue that there is nothing, except perhaps
geography and a shared history of being the targets of racism, that combines African
countries and their states; or you may insist on the common political effects of
demography, property relations, slavery, and a common political – economy of
colonialism on the form of the modern state in Africa. Be sure, however, that you are
aware of the details of both positions before you make your own case. The reading
for this week (180 pp) should take you between four and five hours.

Required reading:
Appiah, Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. London:
Methuen, 1992, vii-xii, 1-27, 159 – 172, 181 – 192.

OR

Iliffe, John. Africans: The History of a Continent. Cambridge Univ Pr, 1995, pp 1 –
125.

Optional reading:

Ake, Claude. Democracy and Development in Africa. Brookings Institution Press,

2001.
———. The Feasibility of Democracy in Africa. African Books Collective, 2000.
Austin, G. “Resources, Techniques, and Strategies South of the Sahara: Revising
the Factor Endowments Perspective on African Economic Development, 1500–
20001.” The Economic History Review 61, no. 3 (2008): 587–624.
Césaire, Aimé, and Robin D. G. Kelley. Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly
Review Press, 2000.
Fallers, Lloyd A. The Social Anthropology of the Nation-State. The Lewis Henry
Morgan Lectures 1971. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co, 1974.
Hall, Bruce S. A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960. African
Studies. 115. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Manning, Patrick. “African Population, 1650–2000: Comparisons and
Implications of New Estimates.” In Africa’s Development in Historical
Perspective, edited by Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn,
and James Robinson. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Menkiti, Ifeanyi A. “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought.”
African Philosophy: An Introduction 3 (1984): 171–182.
Mkandawire, Thandika. “Thinking about Developmental States in Africa.”
Cambridge Journal of Economics 25, no. 3 (2001): 289–314.
Samatar, Ahmed, and Abdi I. Samatar. The African State: Reconsiderations, 2002.
https://works.bepress.com/ahmed_samatar/7/.
Tempels, Placide, Colin King, E. Possoz, and Margaret Read. Bantu Philosophy.
Présence africaine Paris, 1959.
Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. A Modern Economic History of Africa. Dakar, Senegal:
CODESRIA, 1993.

Concepts and problems:

 Race, racism and racial essentialism
 Demography and state formation
 Disease environments
 Resource endowments
 African philosophy
Week 4 Stateless political traditions

For the five-hundred years before 1500 the dominant forms of political authority and
structures of power on the African continent were, mostly, very different from the
Feudal states of Europe, the Ottoman empire, the Mandarin bureaucracies of East
Asia, or the Mayan and Incan civilizations of the Americas. On most of the continent
political relationships before 1600 were very local, fiercely constrained by animals,
the forest and by disease. Jan Vansina has called the structure of allegiances and
relationships that emerged in the Central African forest the equatorial political
tradition. Understanding what this was, how and where it worked is not an easy task,
but it is very important to all of the later theoretical accounts of politics on this
continent.

Required reading:

Cohen, David William. Womunafu’s Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-

Century African Community. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977, pp 3 – 122,
131 – 152.

Optional reading:
Jack Goody, Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1971), 1-38, 73-76
Vansina, Jan. Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in
Equatorial Africa. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, 71 – 99,
129 – 145, 197 – 234, 239 - 266
Jan Vansina, “Pathways of political development in equatorial Africa and neo-
evolutionary theory” in Susan Keech McIntosh, Beyond Chieftaincies:
Pathways to Complexity in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999)
Vansina, Jan. Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in
Equatorial Africa. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990
Vansina, Jan. The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press: Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Concepts and problems:

 Homesteads
 Brotherhoods
 Ritual politics
 Infrastructure
 Slave trade
Week 5 States, Empires and Capitalism

Practices and trajectories of state-building were altered and accelerated very

dramatically by the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade at the end of the 15th
century. Many difficult questions remain unresolved today about the consequences
of these processes and this time on the work of politics and the structures of society
and the state in the societies most powerfully affected by the slave trade.

Required reading:
Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp 1 – 128.

Optional reading:

Bay, Edna G. Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of
Dahomey. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.
Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the
Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Guyer, Jane I. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago,
Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Henige, David. “Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West
African Population and the Pyrrhonian Critic.” The Journal of African History 27, no.
2 (July 1986): 295–313. doi:10.1017/S0021853700036689.
Inikori, Joseph E. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in
International Trade and Economic Development. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
https://books.google.co.za/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=IRJDv5tmF1MC&oi=fnd&pg=PP2&dq=inikori&ots=1fsro6Fys_&sig
=n-i2rZ1K3nOFhdQuZkb90rY5y50.
———. Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African
Societies. Hutchinson London, 1982. http://library.wur.nl/WebQuery/clc/220651.
———. “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey.”
The Journal of African History 17, no. 2 (1976): 197–223.
———. “Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England.”
Social Science History 13, no. 4 (1989): 343–379.
———. “The Import of Firearms into West Africa 1750–1807: A Quantitative
Analysis.” The Journal of African History 18, no. 3 (1977): 339–368.
Klein, Martin A., Jan Hogendorn, Joseph E. Inikori, and Stanley L. Engerman. The
Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the
Americas, and Europe. Duke University Press, 1992.
Law, Robin. “Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections on the Historiography of the
Rise of Dahomey.” The Journal of African History 27, no. 2 (January 1, 1986):
237–267.
———. “Royal Monopoly and Private Enterprise in the Atlantic Trade: The Case of
Dahomey.” The Journal of African History 18, no. 4 (1977): 555–577.
Manning, Patrick. “The Warp and Woof of Precolonial African Industry.” African
Economic History no. 19 (January 1, 1990): 25–30. doi:10.2307/3601888.
Nwokeji, G. Ugo. The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African
Society in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Ojo, Olatunji. “Slavery and Human Sacrifice in Yorubaland: Ondo, c. 1870-94.” The
Journal of African History 46, no. 3 (January 1, 2005): 379–404.
Reid, Richard. Political Power in Pre-colonial Buganda: Economy, Society and
Warfare in the Nineteenth Century. London: James Currey, 2002.
Wilks, Ivor. Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a
Political Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
University Press, 1975.
Wilks, Ivor. “Land, Labour, Capital and the Forest Kingdom of Asante: a Model of
Early Change.” In Evolution of Social Systems, Friedman, J. & Rowlands, M.
J. (eds.), Pittsburgh University Press, 1977., 1977.

Concepts and problems:

 World systems
 Local agency
 African and Atlantic Slavery
 Property and accumulation
 Markets and value systems
Week 6 Conquest and the Colonial State

The colonial state has an intriguingly contradictory nature in our contemporary

scholarship. It was, on the one hand, a brutal and disruptive force, spreading
violence and shattering the ideological and social coherence of the polities across the
continent. On the other hand it was ridiculously poor and weak, incapable of much
more than the most basic forms of tax collection. In this seminar will try to decide
whether one of these accounts of the colonial state is correct, or whether they should
combined. We will also consider closely the long-term effects of the structures and
functions of colonial government.

Required reading:
Young, M. Crawford. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994, 1 – 12, 43 – 76, 77 – 140, 244 – 293.

Optional reading:

Comaroff, Jean, and John L Comaroff. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics
of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991.
Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a
Bourgeois World. University of California Press, 1997.
Canale, Suret. “Chapter 6 Guinea in the Colonial System.” Essays on African
History: from the slave trade to neo-colonialism. (London : Hurst, 1988.)
Lonsdale, John. “The Conquest State of Kenya, 1895-1905.” Unhappy Valley:
Conflict in Kenya and Africa. (London: James Currey, 1992.)
Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press, 1982,
205 – 81.

Concepts and problems:

 Bula Mutari
 Indirect rule
 Violence
 Consciousness
 Tribalism
Week 7 Indirect Rule and its effects

One of the distinctive features of both the colonial and the post-colonial states in
Africa has been the reliance on unelected customary authorities for the many tasks of
local government, especially (but not exclusively) in the countryside. The effects of
this arrangement, which Mamdani has called decentralised despotism, have been
diverse and powerful. In this week we examine indirect rule and its consequences for
the vast majority of Africans who still live and work on the land.

Required reading:
Berry, Sara. No Condition Is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in
Sub-Saharan Africa. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, 3-21,
22 – 42, 43 – 67, 101 – 134, 159 – 181.

Optional reading:
Afigbo, Adiele Eberechukwu. The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern
Nigeria, 1891-1929. Cambridge Univ Press, 1972.
Allman, J. M. The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent
Ghana. Univ of Wisconsin Pr, 1993.
Atanda, Joseph Adebowale. The New Oyo Empire: Indirect Rule and Change in
Western Nigeria, 1894-1934. Longman Ibadan, 1973.
http://www.getcited.org/pub/101460393.
Atieno-Odhiambo, Elisha S. “Democracy and the Ideology of Order in Kenya.” In
The Political Economy of Kenya, 177–201. New York: Praeger, 1987.
Atieno-Odhiambo, Elisha Stephen. “Hegemonic Enterprises and Instrumentalities of
Survival: Ethnicity and Democracy in Kenya.” African Studies 61, no. 2 (2002): 223–
249.
Ayandele, Emmanuel Ayankanmi. The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842-
1914: A Political and Social Analysis. London Longmans, 1966.
Barkan, Joel D., and Michael Chege. “Decentralising the State: District Focus and the
Politics of Reallocation in Kenya.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 27, no. 3
(1989): 431–453.
Bush, Barbara, and Josephine Maltby. “Taxation in West Africa: Transforming the
Colonial Subject into the ‘governable Person.’” Critical Perspectives on Accounting
15, no. 1 (2004): 5–34.
Comaroff, John L. and Simon Roberts. Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of
Dispute in an African Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press:
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Conklin, Alice L. “Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The
Case of France and West Africa, 1895-1914.” The American Historical Review 103,
no. 2 (April 1, 1998): 419–42. doi:10.2307/2649774.
Crowder, Michael. “Indirect Rule: French and British Style.” Africa: Journal of the
International African Institute 34, no. 3 (July 1, 1964): 197–205.
Delius, Peter. A Lion Amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the
Northern Transvaal. Oxford: James Currey, 1996.
Guy, Jeff. Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal. Pietermaritzburg: UKZN
Press, 2013.
Fallers, Lloyd A. Bantu Bureaucracy. Cambridge: Heffer, 1956.
Lugard, Frederick John Dealtry. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa.
Mann, Gregory. “What Was the Indigénat? The ‘empire of Law’in French West
Africa.” The Journal of African History 50, no. 3 (2009): 331–353.
Matthews, Z. K. “An African View of Indirect Rule in Africa.” Journal of the Royal
African Society 36, no. 145 (October 1, 1937): 433–437.
Ntsebeza, Lungisile. Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of Land in
South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2006.
Okia, Opolot. Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya: The Legitimization of Coercion,
1912-1930. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Oomen, Barbara. Chiefs in South Africa : Law, Power & Culture in the Post-
apartheid Era. Oxford: James Currey, 2005.
Roberts, A. D. “The Sub-Imperialism of the Baganda.” The Journal of African
History 3, no. 03 (1962): 435–450.

Concepts and problems:

 Hegemony
 Despotism
 Uncertainty
 Property rights
 Kinship
Week 8 Decolonisation and the Burden of Development

One of the most important – and surprising – results of recent research in to the crisis
of the postcolonial state has been the stress which scholars place on the unmanageable
burden of the development projects which these states inherited in the 1960s. The
crises of development took place in stages – some before decolonisation and others a
generation later, but they resulted, by the early 1980s, in extremely weak states across
the continent. In this week's seminar we will explore the developmental burden and
the shattering of the state through a close study of the society of Zaire / Congo – the
most problematic but also, arguably, strategically the most important state on the
African continent.

Required reading:
Young, Crawford, and Thomas Turner. The Rise and Fall of the Zairian State.
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984, extracts.

Optional reading:
Cooper, Frederick. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in
French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Ferguson, James. The Anti-politics Machine:“ Development,” Depoliticization, and
Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990.
Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on
the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Freund, Bill. The African City: A History. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Herbst, J. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control.
Princeton University Press, 2000.

Concepts and problems:

 Expert-led government
 Cold-War
 Developmentalism
 Debt-trap
 Patrimonialism
 Infrastructural politics
 Mining corporations
Week 9 Science, technology and the modernising State

Science and technology have been instruments of state-building in many contexts, but
their place on the African continent is a bit mysterious. Colonial conquest was
famously aided by strategic technologies like the telegraph and quinine, and it was
often justified by the claim that Africans lacked science and key productive
technologies. But what was the place of science and technology in the postcolonial
state? Was there too much of one or the other, or both, or too little, or was the
problem one of the distribution of power and agency?

Required reading:

Hecht, Gabrielle. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. The MIT
Press, 2012, 85 – 106, 107 – 170, 287 – 339.

Optional reading:

Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies
of Western Dominance: Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Alpern, Stanley B. “Did They or Didn’t They Invent It? Iron in sub-Saharan Africa.”
History in Africa 32, no. 1 (2005): 41–94.
Diouf, Mamadou. “Senegalese Development: From Mass Mobilization to
Technocratic Elitism.” International Development and the Social Sciences:
Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (1997): 291–319.
Freed, Libbie. “Networks of (colonial) Power: Roads in French Central Africa after
World War I.” History and Technology 26, no. 3 (2010): 203–223.
Headrick, D. R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the
Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1981.
Hodge, Joseph M. Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and
the Legacies of British Colonialism. Series in Ecology and History. Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2007.
Killick, David. “Cairo to Cape: The Spread of Metallurgy through Eastern and
Southern Africa.” Journal of World Prehistory 22, no. 4 (2009): 399–414.
Kriger, Colleen E. Pride of Men: Ironworking in 19th Century West Central Africa.
Heinemann Portsmouth, NH, 1999.
Livingston, Julie. Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging
Cancer Epidemic. Duke University Press, 2012.
Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press, 1982,
1 – 29, 93 – 201.
Rottenburg, Richard. “Social and Public Experiments and New Figurations of Science
and Politics in Postcolonial Africa.” Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 4 (2009):
423–440.
Miescher, Stephan F. “Building the City of the Future: Visions and Experiences of
Modernity in Ghana’s Akosombo Township.” The Journal of African History
53, no. 03 (2012): 367–390.
Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002.
Tilley, Helen. Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem
of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Verhoeven, Harry. Water, Civilization and Power in Sudan: The Political Economy of
Military-Islamist State-Building. The African Studies Series, 131,1. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Zeleza, Tiyambe, and Ibulaimu Kakoma, eds. Science and Technology in Africa.
Africa World Press, 2003.

Concepts and problems:

 Vernacular / global science
 Networks and infrastructure
 Technology
 Science
 Technopolitics
Week 10 Women, gender and the problems of tradition

Required reading:
Thomas, Lynn. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction and the State in Kenya.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, extracts.

Optional reading:
Awondo, Patrick. “The Politicisation of Sexuality and Rise of Homosexual
Movements in Post-colonial Cameroon.” Review of African Political Economy
37, no. 125 (2010): 315–328. doi:10.1080/03056244.2010.510624.
Cole, Jennifer, and Lynn M. Thomas. Love in Africa. University of Chicago Press,
2009.
Cooper, Barbara M. Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in
Niger, 1900-1989. Oxford: James Currey: Oxford: James Currey, 1997.
Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. African Women: A Modern History. Translated by
Beth Gillian Raps. Westview Press Boulder and Oxford, 1997.
Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa: The History of an Idea from the Age of
Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Ohio University Press, 2009.
———. Sexuality and Social Justice in Africa: Rethinking Homophobia and Forging
Resistance. Zed Books, 2013.
Gqola, Pumla Dineo. “How the ‘cult of Femininity’and Violent Masculinities Support
Endemic Gender Based Violence in Contemporary South Africa.” African
Identities 5, no. 1 (2007): 111–124.
Hunter, Mark. Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South
Africa. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Livingston, Julie. Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging
Cancer Epidemic. Duke University Press, 2012.
Lonsdale, John. “Soil, Work, Civilisation, and Citizenship in Kenya.” Journal of
Eastern African Studies 2, no. 2 (2008): 305–314.
Niehaus, Isak. “Renegotiating Masculinity in the South African Lowveld: Narratives
of Male-male Sex in Labour Compounds and in Prisons.” African Studies 61,
no. 1 (2002): 77–97.

Concepts and problems:

 Tradition
 Masculinity
 Sexuality
 Reproduction
 Violence
Week 11 The Rhizome State, Patromonialism and Bureaucratic Rationality

Required reading:
Bayart, Jean Francois. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London:
Longman, 1993), 1-104
Mbembe, Achille. On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001,24-65, 66 - 101 is optional.

Optional reading:
Bayart, Jean-Francois, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice Hibou. The Criminalization of the
State in Africa. Oxford: James Currey, 1999.
Chabal, Patrick, David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibert,
and Elisa Silva Andrade. A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Chabal, Patrick, and Jean-Pascal Daloz. Africa Works: Disorder as Political
Instrument. Oxford: James Currey, 1999.
Ellis, Stephen. The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious
Dimension of an African Civil War. New York: NYU Press, 1999.
Isak A Niehaus, Eliazaar Mohlala, Kalla Shlokane. Witchcraft, Power and Politics :
Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld (Anthropology, Culture
and Society Series) ( New York: Pluto, 2001)
James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on
the Zambian Copperbelt (University of California Press, 1999)
Celestin Monga, The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa
(Boulder and London: Lynne Reiner, 1996), 79-107
Week 12 The resource curse, dependency, extraversion and state power : the
Angolan exception

Required Reading:
Bayart, J.-F. “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion.” African Affairs 99, no.
395 (2000): 217–67.
de Oliveira, Ricardo Soares. “Business Success, Angola-style: Postcolonial Politics
and the Rise and Rise of Sonangol.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 45, no.
04 (2007): 595–619.
de Oliveira, Ricardo Soares. “Illiberal Peacebuilding in Angola.” The Journal of
Modern African Studies 49, no. 02 (2011): 287–314.
Shaxson, Nicholas. “Oil, Corruption and the Resource Curse.” International Affairs
83, no. 6 (2007): 1123–1140.
Supplementary Reading:
Shaxson, Nicholas. “New Approaches to Volatility: Dealing with the ‘resource Curse’
in sub-Saharan Africa.” International Affairs 81, no. 2 (2005): 311–324.
Young, Crawford, and Thomas Turner. The Rise and Fall of the Zairian State.
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.
Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso,
2011.
* Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on
the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
* Ferguson, James. “Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global
Capital in Neoliberal Africa.” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 377–383.
Reno, William. “War, Markets, and the Reconfiguration of West Africa’s Weak
States.” Comparative Politics 29, no. 4 (July 1, 1997): 493–510.
Billon, Philippe le. “Angola’s Political Economy of War: The Role of Oil and
Diamonds, 1975–2000.” African Affairs 100, no. 398 (January 1, 2001): 55–80.
Taylor, Ian. “China’s Oil Diplomacy in Africa.” International Affairs 82, no. 5 (2006):
937–959.
De Oliveira, R. S. Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea. Columbia Univ Pr, 2007.
Shaxson, Nicholas. Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil. 1st ed. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Week 13 Nongovernmentality and humanitarianism : government without
states

Required reading:
Mann, Gregory. From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to
Nongovernmentality. African Studies. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press,
2015.

Optional reading:
Ake, Claude. Democracy and Development in Africa. Brookings Institution Press,
2001.
———. The Feasibility of Democracy in Africa. African Books Collective, 2000.
Ake, Claude. “The African Context of Human Rights.” Africa Today 34, no. 1/2
(March 1, 1987): 5–12.
Ake, Claude. “Rethinking African Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 1
(1991): 32–44.
Bräutigam, Deborah. “Aid ‘With Chinese Characteristics’: Chinese Foreign Aid and
Development Finance Meet the OECD-DAC Aid Regime.” Journal of
International Development 23, no. 5 (2011): 752–764.
Brown, W. “‘ The Most We Can Hope For...’: Human Rights and the Politics of
Fatalism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2–3 (2004): 451.
Englund, Harri. Prisoners of Freedom : Human Rights and the African Poor.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Englund, Harri, and Francis B Nyamnjoh. Rights and the Politics of Recognition in
Africa. Zed Books, 2004.
Englund, Harri. Prisoners of Freedom : Human Rights and the African Poor.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Englund, Harri, and Francis B Nyamnjoh. Rights and the Politics of Recognition in
Africa. Zed Books, 2004.
Fisher, William F. “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices.”
Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (January 1, 1997): 439–464.
Oloka-Onyango, J. “Beyond the Rhetoric: Reinvigorating the Struggle for Economic
and Social Rights in Africa.” California Western International Law Journal 26
(1995): 1.
Kende, Mark S. “South African Constitutional Court’s Embrace of Socio-Economic
Rights: A Comparative Perspective, The.” Chapman Law Review 6 (2003): 137.
Hanlon, J., D. Hulme, and A. Barrientos. Just Give Money to the Poor: The
Development Revolution from the Global South. Kumarian Pr, 2010.
Mkandawire, Thandika. “Aid, Accountability, and Democracy in Africa.” Social
Research 77, no. 4 (December 1, 2010): 1149–82.
Piot, Charles. “Hedging the Future.” Johanesburg: JWTC and WISER, 2014.
———. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Sen, Amartya. “Elements of a Theory of Human Rights.” Philosophy & Public Affairs
32, no. 4 (2004): 315–356.
Sen, Amartya. “Elements of a Theory of Human Rights.” Philosophy & Public Affairs
32, no. 4 (2004): 315–356.

Week 14 When states are not “the State”: Absent states and state effects

Required reading
Abrams, Philip. 1988. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.” Journal of
Historical Sociology 1(1): 58-89.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of

Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind.” Current Anthropology 42(1):
125-138.

Gupta, Akhil. 1995. Blurred Boundaires: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of
Politics, and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist 22(2): 375-402.

Roitman, Janet. 2004. “Productivity in the Margins: The Reconstitution of State

Power in the Chad Basin,” Pp.191-224. In Anthropology in the Margins of the State,
Veena Das & Deborah Poole (eds). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Jackson, Stephen. 2005. “ ‘The State Didn’t Even Exist’: Non-Governmentality in

Kivu, Eastern DR Congo,” Pp.165-196. In Between a Rock and a Hard Place: African
NGOs, Donors and the State, Jim Igoe & Tim Kelsall (eds). Durham: Carolina
Academic Press.

Herbst, Jeffrey & Greg Mills. 2009. “There Is No Congo,” Foreign Policy, March 17,
2009. Electronic document,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/03/17/there_is_no_congo.

Raeymaekers, Timothy. 2009. “Who Calls the Congo? A Response to Jeffrey Herbst
and Greg Mills.” Electronic document,
http://rubeneberlein.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/who-calls-the-congo-a-response-to-
herbst-and-mills/.

Concepts and problems:

 State ideas and state effects
 Governmentality and non-governmentality
 State “failure” and “success”