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African Power Through the Looking-Glass
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
Extract
The language of African scholarship, like Africa itself, is a harp of many strings. It allows for countless variations, even though the central theme may recur. ‘Power’ is undoubtedly one of the most familiar of such themes: the variations played upon it are legion, ranging from the popular to the esoteric, from the classical to the lyrical.
Jean Ziegler's tune in his latest work, Le Pouvoir africain (Paris, 1971), clearly fits into the latter category. Even though the settings he has chosen for investigating African power – Burundi (indigenous) and Brazil (imported) – are likely to capture anyone's imagination, the author's manifest enthusiasm for the exotic seems to exceed the limits of the ‘sociological imagination’. Quite aside from the question of whether generalisations about African power are at all feasible on the basis of such limiting cases, Ziegler's handling of his subject matter raises a number of difficulties for the uninitiated reader – not the least of which is his tendency to lump together the form and substance of power in an ethnographic present seemingly fixed once and for all in time and space. Another difficulty stems from his peculiar terminology, at times so elusive as to confuse rather than illuminate the phenomena discussed: what, exactly, is meant by ‘la spécificité irréductible africaine”, or ‘la sociabilite africaine’ is anyone's guess. Ziegler's constant preoccupation with the surface manifestations of power – or, better still, with his own vision of these phenomena – occasionally leads him into a vein reminiscent of the worst examples of journalistic sensationalism, from which he only extricates himself by lapsing into calculated imprecision.
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References
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