This article develops a conceptual analysis of the dynamics of violence during the transition from war to peace and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2003 and 2006. I locate the sources, at the local, national, and regional levels, of continued local violence during this transition. Through an analysis of the situation in the Kivus, I illustrate how local dynamics interacted with the national and regional dimensions of the conflict. I demonstrate that, after a national and regional settlement was reached, some local conflicts over land and political power increasingly became self-sustaining and autonomous from the national and regional tracks.

Sometime during the increasingly tense European summer of 1938, the Anglo-Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski sat down to write an introduction to a new book by one of his students, Jomo Kenyatta—a book based on the graduate thesis the latter had written under his supervision at the London School of Economics. A scientific rationalist and atheist, as well as an antiracist, antifascist, and anticommunist, Malinowski was most of all in that fraught time a deeply frightened liberal watching Europe slide into war. During the 1930s he had shifted his focus from the South Pacific to Africa. Over the course of that decade he had become increasingly critical of European colonialism, particularly of what he regarded as its deeply destructive impact on indigenous societies. In his brief introductory essay, Malinowski reflected on Kenyatta's work and, no doubt, on their many long conversations during the three years Kenyatta had studied with him. He commented on the dilemma of the educated African who had “suffered the injury of higher education” and noted that “an African who looks at things from the tribal point of view and at the same time from that of Western civilization experiences the tragedy of the modern world in an especially acute manner” (1938:ix).

The recent upsurge of “autochthony” and similar notions of belonging is certainly not special to Africa. All over the world, processes of intensifying globalization seem to go together with fierce struggles over belonging and exclusion of “strangers.” A central question in the contributions to this special issue concerns the apparent “naturalness” of autochthony in highly different settings. How can similar slogans seem so self-evident and hence have such mobilizing force under very different circumstances? Another recurrent theme is the somewhat surprising “nervousness” of discourses on autochthony. They seem to promise a basic security of being rooted in the soil as a primal form of belonging. Yet in practice, belonging turns out to be always relative: there is always the danger of being unmasked as “not really” belonging, or even of being a “fake” autochthon. A comparative perspective on autochthony—as a particular pregnant form of entrenchment—may help to unravel the paradoxes of the preoccupation with belonging in a globalizing world.

In 1976, in the middle of what was for us a second exile, my father's younger brother died. This death was shortly followed by the news of the death of his 112-year-old aunt, the only grandmother we had ever known. In accordance with custom and tradition, a few weeks later, and against the odds, the family in Wenchi, a town in the Brong-Ahafo region in the middle of Ghana, managed to send to Papa in Standlake, a small village in the countryside west of Oxford, the fragment of the burial cloth that was his aunt's and which he would have received on the day of the burial, had he been there.

Over the past four years the Ivoirian crisis has seen as its central dynamic the mobilization of the categories of autochthony and territorialized belonging in an ultranationalist discourse vehicled by the party in power. More than just a struggle to the death for state power, the conflict involves the redefinition of the content of citizenship and the conditions of sovereignty. The explosion of violence and counterviolence provoked and legitimated by the mobilization of these categories does not necessarily signify either the triumph of those monolithic identities “engineered” during the colonial occupation, nor the disintegration of the nation-state in the context of globalization. The Ivoirian case shows the continued vitality of the nation-state: not only as the principal space in terms of which discourses of authochtony are constructed, but also in terms of the techniques and categories that the political practice of autochthony puts into play. While in some senses the Ivoirian conflict appears to be a war without borders—in particular with the “spillover” of the Liberian war in the west during 2003—it is above all a war about borders, crystallizing in liminal spaces and social categories and on emerging practices and ways of life.

Popular culture in Africa is increasingly intertwined with the public space of nations. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on popular culture, citizenship, and identity in transnational and global contexts, this article analyzes the phenomenal success of the television show Big Brother Africa in 2003 and argues that people's everyday engagement with popular culture, including television, must be a central component of understanding emergent public spaces and citizenship practices in Africa's present and future.

Indigenous Lessors and Non-native Tenants: Land at Stake and Political Engagement in Cameroon

The promotion of the private sector has become an integral part of Ghana's economic development strategy since it embarked on its structural adjustment program (SAP) in 1983. Private sector development, which involves the improvement of the investment climate and the enhancing of basic service delivery, is considered one of the necessary factors for sustaining and expanding businesses, stimulating economic growth, and reducing poverty. This article examines the policies of Ghana's New Patriotic Party (NPP) government and its strategies for making the private sector the bedrock of economic development and for achieving what it calls the “Golden Age of Business.” It argues that while the policies and initiatives being pursued have the potential to help in the development of the private sector in Ghana, the government has to play a more central role in this process, not only by creating the enabling environment for private businesses, but also by providing business with support and protection. While the “Golden Age of Business” is a neoliberal concept, its effective implementation requires a robust statist input.

This article explores stories that some central Africans in the middle Sangha River basin and in northern Gabon have told about gorillas and chimpanzees. Such tales have provided opportunities for Africans to debate the consequences of their engagements with outside people, resources, and processes. But their meanings have proliferated in different social, cultural, and historical contexts. Central Africans have used such stories to make claims about access to and control over human productive and reproductive labor, forest resources and spaces, and other forms of wealth; racial and ethnic relations; and human existence and death. These stories provide critical insights into the reasons people hunt or protect great apes, and they illuminate the complex social and political tensions generated by conservation interventions. Great ape tales thus offer conservationists insights into the challenges and promise of managing an important game population, as well as the potential social consequences of their interventions.

While Baka “Pygmies” are regarded as among Africa's most indigenous peoples, their autochthony seems lacking in features that would give them standing for special consideration by die state. Somehow, indigenousness does not equal autochthony. Other mobile indigenous peoples such as traders and pastoralists have also been seen as less than autochthonous. These groups lack “roots in the soil,” which makes them less subject to the authority of the state than farmers. Further, as an acephalous society, Baka political culture cannot be appropriately adjusted to interact with the hierarchical structure of the state and related institutions. For this reason the problematic autochthony of Baka is less an issue of rights within the existing structure of the state—of civil rights—than of human rights. Unfortunately, this human rights issue is not really on any policy agenda, not even that of the working group for the U.N. Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the popularity of Pentecostalism and the formation of religious identity in an Eritrean city. Examining the penetration of Pentecostal Protestantism into longstanding Christian churches in Asmara during a time of rapid socioeconomic change in Eritrea, it looks at how Pentecostalism discontinues its relation with the past, conceptualizes the present, and generates an autonomous image of itself in the highly competitive religious marketplace of an Eritrean urban space. The article discusses how and why this movement increasingly favors Bible reading and networks of religious meetings as the principal mediums of transmission of its teachings and the expansion of its denomination, breaking deliberately from traditional Christian churches and using local forces and resources.

The recent wars in the DR Congo have led to a marked upsurge in both elite and popular discourse and violence around belonging and exclusion, expressed through the vernacular of “autochthony.” Dangerously flexible in its politics, nervous and paranoid in its language, unmoored from geographic or ethno-cultural specificity, borrowing energy both from present conflicts and deep-seated mythologies of the past, the idea of autochthony has permitted comparatively localized instances of violence in the DRC to inscribe themselves upward into regional, and even continental logics, with dangerous implications for the future. This article analyzes how the “local”/“stranger” duality of autochthony/allochthony expresses itself in the DRC through rumors, political tracts, and speeches and how it draws energy from imprecise overlaps with other powerful, preexisting identity polarities at particular scales of identity and difference: local, provincial, national, regional. Across each, autochthony operates as a loose qualifier, a binary operator: autochthony is adjectival, relational rather than absolute, policing a distinction between in and out, and yet not indicating, in itself, which in/ou t distinction is intended. Thus many speak of “Sons of the Soil,” but of which soil, precisely? The slipperiness between different scales of meaning permits the speaker to leave open multiple interpretations. This indefiniteness is a paradoxical source of the discourse's strength and weakness, suppleness and nervousness, its declarative mood and attendant paranoia.

South Africa's economic and political liberalization have engendered new patterns of immigration and urbanization that find South Africans and foreign migrants converging on the streets of inner-city Johannesburg. As they interact, citizens and non-nationals have developed competing idioms for relating to one another and the space they share. For South Africans, this often means appealing to a nativist idiom that locates commonality amidst an allochthonous citizenry while attempting to prohibit foreign transplantation. Non-nationals counter this with an idiom of permanent transit, a way of positioning themselves as outsiders lodged in a superior and unrooted state. These idioms represent competing visions for the inner city's future. For South Africans, the idiom is a generative node of modern nationalist formation. For those permanently passing through the city, it is an idiom of a denationalized “nowhereville.”

Through an examination of the Tanzanian experience, this article takes up a challenge forcefully posed by Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject to examine connections between late colonial and postindependence state power on the African continent. The discussion is critical of Mamdani's argument that postindependence authoritarianism in Africa can be understood as an institutional legacy of late colonialism. However, connections to colonial times did exist in the frames of legitimation that underpinned the frequently authoritarian actions of the postindependence Tanzanian state. One such connection was the persistent paternalism vis-à-vis their “subjects” that characterized the political imagination of state elites; another was the fact that “the colonial past” served as an important reference point in the construction of a deeply Manichean discourse and practice of politics after independence.