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Bayart, Jean-Frangois, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice Hibou. 1999. THE CRIMINALIZATION OF THE STATE IN AFRICA. Oxford: James Currey. 126 pp.
Chabal, Patrick and jean-Pascal Daloz. 1999. AFRICA WORKS: DISORDER AS POLITICAL INSTRUMENT. Oxford: James Currey. 170 pp.
It is fortunate that in the same year, the excellent "African Issues" series of London's International African Institute gives us the best that French Africanist scholarship has to offer. The Criminalization of the State in Africa is exemplary of the Ecole de Paris, whose chef de file is none other than France's premier Africanist, Jean-Francois Bayart, and which includes such other luminaries as Jean-Pierre Chretien and Achille Mbembe. Africa Works is representative of the Ecole de Bordeaux, centered around that University's famed Centre d'etude d'Afrique noire and the journal Politique africaine, led (inter alia) by Patrick Chabal, Jean-Francois Medard, and Daniel Bourmaud, a School which ostensibly differs from-but often agrees with-Bayart's group in its approach to the study of African politics and society, as this review will demonstrate.
First published in French in 1997 as La criminalisation de FLat en Afrique (Editions Complexe), The Criminalization of the State in Africa definitely bears Bayart's intellectual imprint and builds on the author's earlier seminal work, The State in Africa (Longman, 1993), in which he developed the concepts of la politique du ventre ("the goat grazes where it is tied," "those in power intend to 'eat"') and of the "rhizome state" (socalled because of its metaphorical resemblance to a tangled underground root system). Resolutely taking a Tongue duree historical perspective A la Fernand Braudel, the authors suggest that contemporary Africa is returning to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "a slide towards criminalization throughout the subcontinent is a strong probability" (pp. 30-31). Furthermore, following Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital, and European States (1990), they argue that in Africa, the interaction between power, war, capital accumulation, and various illicit activities constitutes a specific political trajectory which must be viewed in a long-term historical perspective. According to the authors, this process of criminalization of politics and the state in Sub-Saharan Africa reflects the increasing normalization of patently criminal practices: "the relationship between economic accumulation and tenure of political power in Africa now exists in new conditions. These have been created by the restoration of authoritarian...