social imaginaries: the culture hero as conjunctural concept in africa

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Social imaginaries:The culture hero asconjunctural concept inAfricaAto QuaysonPublished online: 25 Aug 2010.

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This essay is a contribution to a number of related debates on alternativemodernities, social imaginaries and cultural transitions in Africa. Drawinginspiration from the cultural materialism of E. P. Thompson and CorneliusCastoriadis, the essay looks at urban folktales and legends to define the conceptof the African culture hero. This is in its turn related to the idea of the ‘privatiza-tion’ of the bureaucratic state apparatus, the ways in which ordinary peopleconstantly translate their encounters with the state into the modalities of the gifteconomy. This implies a conversion of the state into the private sphere of kinshiprelations, thus suggesting a different set of contradictions from that which wouldpertain to contradictions deriving from class relations. The essay draws widelyon theories of modernity and the state from both Africa and elsewhere andultimately provides an interdisciplinary research methodology focused on thegenres of everyday life.

T HERE IS CURRENTLY A LA RGE BODY of work on alternativemodernities. In African studies this is to be seen in the work of Ferguson

on cosmopolitanism and localism in the Copperbelt region of Zambia,1 Burkeon the political economy of hygiene in southern Africa2 and Geschiere on the‘modernity’ of witchcraft in Central and Eastern Africa among others. 3

Alternative modernities are encapsulated in specific social imaginaries that canbe seen as operating along certain paths of historical unfolding which, eventhough showing overlaps and tangential crossings, are not easily assimilable tothe history of Western modernity as such.

Despite the increasing number of fine studies on alternative modernities,however, it is still the case that various methodological and conceptualproblems persist in the discussion of the subject. These problems may be posed

SOCIAL IMAGINARIESTHE CULTURE HERO AS CONJUNCTURAL

CONCEPT IN AFRICA

ATO QUAYSON

The Round Table (2001), 362 (721–733)

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Ato Quayson is Lecturer in English, Director of the African Studies Centre, and Fellow ofPembroke College, University of Cambridge. He has published widely on African literature andpostcolonial studies, including two books, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997)and Postcolonialism:Theory, Practice or Process? (2000). He is currently working on representa-tions of disability in world literature.

ISSN 0035-8533 print/1474-029X online/2001/050721-13 © 2001 The Round Table LtdDOI: 10.1080/0035853012008740 4

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around a number of questions: in isolating a particular social, cultural orpolitical phenomenon for analysis, how do we avoid severing it from thecomplex contradictory historical processes that sustain it as an object of studyin the first place? How do we relate such phenomena to the nation-state form inAfrica without either installing the nation-state as the sole and dominanthorizon of significance or ignoring its overdetermining impact in shapingrelations among the populace? How are our readings to be assimilated to theprocesses by which social imaginaries gain coherence and change through timein relation to rather than as merely subversive of the nation-state itself? Thesequestions have no straightforward answers. Social and cultural phenomenamay be seen simply as part of an expressive ensemble often linked to power.This often implies that the individual phenomenon or cluster harbours traces ofits collective provenance. In Edmund Cros’s succinct formulation, ‘everycollectivity inscribes in its discourse the indexes of its spatial, social, andhistorical insertion, and consequently generates specific microsemiotics. …Thus mental structures, landscapes, and life-styles are inscribed in the discourseof collective subjects (generations, employment and trades, family, socialclasses, regional collectivities, etc).’4 With analyses inspired by structuralism,this insight generates efforts to identify the particular syntax of such socio-cultural forms, whether they were ultimately related to classes or other method-ologically definable collectivities. It is, however, with the cultural materialismof E. P. Thompson (for example, in ‘The moral economy’) and in RaymondWilliams’s elaboration of the idea of structures of feeling that we get a fullerand more subtle view of the relation between social imaginaries and socio-political formations.5 These have inspired my own thinking on the subject.

I want to make the following propositions as a means of specifying my ownparticular methodological concerns:

(1) That many, though not all, social, cultural, economic and political phe-nomena are often conjunctural in that they articulate different realities andcan be described from different if not divergent angles. They are best seenas conjunctural concepts.

(2) That the analytical bounding of such phenomena can only act as a heuristicdevice, since in reality such conjunctural concepts are often part of a morelabile set of discourses and practices, and indeed, of other conjuncturalconcepts with which they overlap.

(3) That in particular contexts these conjunctural concepts do not remaininnocent of the play of power. As we shall soon see, if they are truly con-junctural, they are likely to be appropriated for different uses in differentcontexts.

(4) That these conjunctural concepts are best analysed via sensitive perspec-tival modulations that would allow them to be connected to differentdimensions of significance at the same time.

What I want to do in the rest of this article is to focus on the notion of cultureheroism as such a conjunctural society imaginary concept and to try and readrelated processes of African postcolonial relations through it. The culture herois a conjunctural concept that finds articulation in literature, in politics and in

THE CULTURE HERO AS CONJUNCTURAL CONCEPT IN AFRICA

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what I want to term the genres of everyday life (urban stories and myths,rumours, sensational stories and folktales among others). At the simplest level,the trope of culture heroism may be defined as a mode of characterization thatcan be contrasted with other typologies of social characters such as beggars,priests, big men, witches and so forth. But its complexity as a conjuncturalconcept also derives from the various degrees to which this characterization isappropriated in different contexts and made to articulate specific collective andpolitical interests, imaginings and aspirations. Rather than settle for a micro-semiotic analysis of the concept, however, I want to go a step further to defineits relation to a particular conceptualization of civil society, and concomitantly,to the postcolonial state form in Africa. I describe this in the idiom of privatiza-tion, something which, though understandable from an economic perspective(ie of divestiture programmes, projects for the privatization of security, etc), isdeepened and rendered more complex when seen from the perspective ofattempted conversions of the bureaucratic nexus into the economy of the gift, inwhich the bureaucratic state apparatus is frequently translated into relations ofpersonal reciprocity and operationalized via circuits of gift exchange. Takenfrom the viewpoint of urban myths and their putative relationship to a socialimaginary, the various tropes of culture heroism reveal a particular ‘privatiza-tion’ of the public sphere. Most of my examples will be drawn from WestAfrica, which is where I am most familiar with, but I hope that with certainqualifications the conceptual apparatus developed here could be extended toother contexts in Africa. My main purpose here is not to treat the conceptexhaustively (something which would require a fuller study on its own) but tooutline problems and to open up avenues for further exploration.6

Culture heroism and the genres of everyday life

The culture hero is not a homogenous concept across Africa. To do justice tothe concept one would have to distinguish between different forms of cultureheroism. Some of these might include traditional characterizations of recog-nizable social figures such as the ones mentioned in the previous section. Wewould also have to attend to the various sources that might help set out the mainparameters of the concept. These include urban tales and myths, ideas from theindigenous sphere, recent popular videos that provide particularly rich views ona variety of contemporary topics (romantic love and its many problems, thevagaries of existence in the city, the fear of the other world, the chicanery ofpoliticians, etc) and popular novels which themselves have proliferated specificcharacter types.7 There are also various contexts for the circulation of charac-terizations of the culture hero: in the domain of rituals and festivals (funerals,naming ceremonies, etc), in the sensational tabloid press, in the exchange oftravellers’ narratives between the been-to and those who remain at home and,perhaps most significantly, in drinking bars and the contexts of alcoholconsumption.8 This is not to say that all these sources and sites produce a singleor coherent characterization of culture heroism, but that these are the siteswhere the process of abstraction of the social imaginary of culture heroism maybe identified. Although my focus here is predominantly on urban folktales andlegends, all the various sites and sources I have mentioned form the background


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to the discussion.In a 1997 essay entitled ‘Politics and urban folklore in Nigeria’, Nigerian

Ropo Sekoni suggests that many urban myths are transpositions of folktalemodels into new frameworks to reflect changing sociocultural concerns. Theirmodes of transformation are interesting in themselves and Sekoni traces thevariety of transpositions through which folktales have passed into urbanNigeria. These he divides into roughly three phases. The first is that of thecolonial era, when folktales and folktale motifs were re-interpreted to presentcritical perspectives of the colonial administration or the whiteman. We shouldpause to note in this regard that in certain contexts the characters of folklore hadtheir real-life counterparts working in the colonial administrative environment.A glimpse of this is provided in Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s fascinating semi-fictional account of the life of Wangrin in his inimitable The Fortunes ofWangrin.9 The stories about Wangrin were themselves first related to HampatéBâ in his childhood by a griot. Encountering Wangrin in later life gave him theopportunity of hearing more stories from the man himself, something which hethen set down many years afterwards. The range of circulation of the stories ofWangrin and the fascination he held for Hampaté Bâ, himself an accomplishedoral raconteur, marks Wangrin out as a culture hero of no ordinary stature. AsHampaté Bâ shows, Wangrin was a very astute and manipulative player withinthe French colonial bureaucratic apparatus from the late 19th century to the1940s. He was an interpreter who, thanks to his indispensable rôle in mediatingthe contact between his people and the French colonial bureaucrats in Senegal,was able to play one against the other to his own advantage. He was a masterfulcolonized Machiavelli and, read against other better known Africans in theservice of colonial bureaucracies, provides an interesting perspective on theambiguities of the formation of the colonized administrative elite. Wangrinmaterializes in an uncanny way the behaviour of the trickster figure of Africanfolktales, but this time with practical consequences for the French colonialadministration in Senegal.

The second phase that Sekoni notes in Nigerian urban stories is that of thedirect aftermath of decolonization when different political figures came into thelimelight and their followers created fantastic stories about them to augmenttheir political capital. Thus it was common in the 1960s to hear apocryphalstories about how the WHO had attempted to buy Nnamdi Azikiwe’s brains forpreservation.10 Azikiwe was from the Igbo minority in Eastern Nigeria and thestories about him served to strengthen their claim to his being the mostintelligent politician to emerge out of post-Independence Nigeria. In the 1970sAwolowo, of Western Nigeria, also had his share of legends, one of whichsuggested that he had been spotted on the Moon with his wife just before the1979 elections. Both these examples hint at the desire to raise the profile ofpolitical leaders and to project them as larger than life, in part extension andpart transformation of the ways in which they would have been treated in theindigenous domain.

Sekoni notes that during the 1980s a different trope of culture heroismbecomes manifest in urban Nigeria. This is that of the trickster figure, mainlyexpressed in stories about ordinary Nigerians who are able to outwit theirmasters (often political) and make away with large sums of money, posh cars or


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even the numbers of Swiss bank accounts.11 As he goes on to point out, themain feature that distinguishes these urban folktales from the traditional ones(which have a subjective poetic mode, as he puts it) is that they are essentiallyrealist in temper and have real-life characters in a variety of recognizablymodern social rôles. As we have already noted with regard to the character ofWangrin, it is clear that the realist temper of the urban folktales can be tracedmuch further back. At any rate the significant thing from Sekoni’s account isthe degree to which in 1980s Nigeria, at the same time as the discourse of urbanfolktale becomes focused on exploring the escapades of various anti-hegemonictrickster figures, there is a move in the opposite direction of appropriatingresources from the indigenous realm to ground hegemonic discourses andprojects at the higher level of official political discourse: ‘At the same time thatthe masses switched to the anti-hegemonic narrative form, pro-hegemonicpropaganda for such projects as the Green Revolution, Ethical Revolution, WarAgainst Indiscipline, and Mass Mobilization for Social Reliance were couchedin the subjective poetic mode’.12 In the particular case of urban myths, one thingthey seem to share in common across Africa is a close relation to ideas of thetrickster. In Arthur Goldstuck’s two collections of South African urban myths,for instance, one notices the emphasis that is placed on the wit and resourceful-ness of the dispossessed.13 Sometimes these urban myths have well-knownfigures such as Nelson Mandela at their centre. In other cases the centralcharacters are ordinary people. Repeatedly we find that urban myths arecentrally about the exercise of wit in the face of bewildering social and politicalrealities. Thus Sekoni’s Nigerian accounts seem replicable for other urban areasin Africa. In my view a subgenre of urban myths and folktales, however, mightbe seen in the various stories that circulate about how ordinary people eitherinteract with the bureaucratic state apparatus or, as is now increasingly the case,respond to the pressures of globalization. One such story from Ghana, whichgot as far as being retold by a radio disc jockey, pertains to a wealthy middle-class woman and a dutiful kayayoo (market porter) whom she regularly paid onvisits to the market to have her groceries carried to the boot of her car.14 Thestory goes that after several months of carrying the groceries for the same rate,the kayayoo one day hikes up her price by a whopping 500%. To her middle-class client’s bewildered protests the kayayoo plants her fists firmly on herwaist, cocks her head to one side, and asks: ‘Where have you been all thesemonths, my dear? Don’t you know that the dollar has gone up?’ The kayayoo’sprice hike is a direct response to the dollarization of the Ghanaian economy andthe fact that everything seems to be linked to the dollar such that, with theunpredictable fluctuations in the rate of the local currency against the dollar, theprices of goods keep going up. Not to be frozen out of account by the vagariesof the economy, the kayayoo also hitches up her service to the rising rate of thedollar. And good for her too, we might add.

As will have been noticed, many of the urban tales Sekoni Ropo discusses aremale-centred. However, the kayayoo’s story tells us that these urban tales are byno means dominated by men. There have historically also been strong womenculture heroes. Examples that come to mind are Yaa Asantewaa of the Ashantis,who led them in war against the British towards the end of the 19th century, andlegendary figures such as Anowa, a prophetess of the Akan people. In Nigeria


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we have evidence of female heroism in the robust women-led anti-taxation riotsof the 1930s and 1940s. Nina Mba’s book on women’s political activism inSouthern Nigeria, Nigerian Women Mobilized captures something of thesestrong women.15 In the popular imagination, however, there is a sense in whichthe strong woman is, though admired, often coded as possessing witchcraft.This constitutive ambiguity makes it such that urban stories that circulate aboutwomen are on the one hand highly approving and on the other terrified ofwomen’s power.

In Ghana, a good sign of the terror that strong women invoke can be seen inhow Rawlings reacted to the strength of the women of Makola Market in thecentre of Accra during his first stint in power in 1979. He ruled the country forthree months in 1979 (June to September) and subsequently without inter-ruption from January 1981 to December 2000. Throughout the 1970s theseMakola mammies, as we used to call them, were reputed to have had a deter-mining influence on fiscal and budgetary policy at the highest levels of govern-ment. Their influence was gained not through any direct interventions in thecorridors of power but in their astuteness in managing the dynamics of thesupply and demand of basic consumer goods. They were thought to be good atcreating artificial shortages at will and were reputed to be able to sell anythingin the market from tomatoes to diesel oil and even police uniforms. There werealso terrific stories of their general impunity towards the security agencies. Onestory told is of a particularly terrifying practice they had of storing old urine inpots under their wooden seats to use as a deterrent spray on over-inquisitivepolicemen whenever they found it necessary. These women illustrated some-thing of Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, subverting power through thesheer joy of mocking it and showing its limits. When Rawlings came to powerin 1979, one of the first things he did in his so-called ‘house-cleaning’ exercisewas to evacuate the market and have it bombed from the air. The material siteof women’s power was bombed to the ground and with it a major source ofurban folktales. One thing to note in this regard is that, even as the trope ofculture heroism changes through time, not all dimensions of this socialimaginary change at the same rate. With regard to women, because in realitythey are situated within specific hierarchical structures that work to disempowerthem, the stories about them also tend to refract their often difficult andambivalent position. It is almost as if the stories about them register a recalci-trance towards change, reproducing instead certain ambivalent ideas about theirpower/powerlessness. One might even speak of different rates of change inurban stories about men and women, precisely because these stories are them-selves embedded within larger discursive frameworks that position womendifferently from men. Thus, even within the domain of a single social imaginarysuch as that of culture heroism, fissures and contradictions can be detected andisolated for a historical analysis.

At the same time as the transposition of ideas of culture heroism are takingplace in the domain of urban folktales, politicians also define their own ambit ofcultural heroism and attempt to validate their modes of political action withrecourse to the indigenous sphere. In a fascinating article humorously entitled‘His Eternity, His Eccentricity, or His Exemplarity?’, A. H. M. Kirk-Greeneshows that all these practices relate to a process of the legitimation of the


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African leader’s status that is of a piece with the taking of titles and epithets forthe projection of the leader as a modern culture hero.16 For him the label ofculture hero can be applied to the modern leader who ‘consciously andquite deliberately, reaches back into the history of his people and, by a positivereaffirmation of their cultural dynamic, simultaneously enhances both hisstature and his legitimacy’.17 He names among such leaders Jomo Kenyatta,who expounded a peculiarly Kikuyu vision of Kenya with culturally well-versed leaders like him implicitly at the centre in Facing Mount Kenya;Ahmadu Bello, who reaches well into a Hausa cultural past to forge himself inan identifiable cultural mode; Kwame Nkrumah, who had a predilection forpraise names and epithets transposed from indigenous discourses of praisesinging; and Sekou Touré, in his invocation of Samore as his ancestor.Although all the leaders named were the first crop of post-Independence leadersand therefore might be thought to have been feeling their difficult way towardsauthenticating their power within the heady and bewildering processes ofAfrican nation-state formation, we should also recall Mobutu of Zaire and hispenchant for leopard-skin finishing to the clothes that he wore until his over-throw in 1997. Curiously enough, this object of attire is given a new andstartling inflection by Kabila during his long-drawn out guerrilla war to oustMobutu. As part of the symbolic paraphernalia that surrounded him in hismeetings with the international press, Kabila had a flag on which was embossedthe logo of Simba, the young lion in Disney’s The Lion King.18 This immedi-ately invokes all kinds of narratives, such as those of the globalization ofimages of heroism, the flow of ideas of rite of passage, and the appropriation ofsymbols of masculinity, all of which go to further show that the images thatdefine culture heroism are not always derived wholly from indigenous contexts.In a sense, however, the old forms of political authentication are graduallychanging. Although it is too early to say in full what he represents in thisprocess, one of the main figures in this shift is Nelson Mandela. Mandelarepresents a combination of indigenous culture heroism with the figure of themodern martyr. Already urban myths have started circulating about him (aswitnessed in Arthur Goldstuck’s collection) and it would be interesting toresearch what the implications of him as a characterization of culture heroismare for the political imaginary across the continent.

Politics and the nervous conditions of the state form

All these urban myths and political appropriations of tropes of culture heroismcirculate within a particular regime of incoherence. This is both social andpolitical. As has been noted by several commentators, the promise held out byIndependence has by no means been delivered in postcolonial Africa. Certainconstitutive ambiguities define the postcolonial African nation-state. Theseambiguities date from the colonial foundations of the state form, something thatAchille Mbembe argues in On the Postcolony to derive from the absence of acontract between the rulers and the ruled.19 In his chapter on governmentalrationality, which he terms ‘commandement’, he points out how both before andafter colonization, ‘state power enhanced its value by establishing specificrelations of subjection’ (p 24). The colonial government gave to itself the


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supreme power to ‘provide a self-interpreting language and models for colonialorder, to give this order meaning, [and] to justify its necessity and universal-izing mission’ (p 25). The violence of colonial authority was thus both tangibleand intangible, forming as a whole a particular political imaginary for thecolonized. What is most significant about this phase of governmentality,however, is the degree to which the unconditionality and arbitrariness ofcolonial power were established and taken for granted. These features of thecolonial commandement then led to the progressive evolution of particularrituals of legitimation, many of which came together to shape a culture ofimpunity. Worryingly, as Mbembe shows, this colonial governmentality wasbequeathed almost intact to the postcolony, the situation becoming even moreaggravated under African totalitarian regimes because the postcolonial com-mandement was articulated within the full glare of what, following Appaduraiwe might term the transnational ideoscapes of political ideology.20 A subject nomore, the postcolonial citizen is still under the domination of an unaccountablepolitical order, yet at the same time fully cognizant of what citizenship mightmean in a globalized and transnational world.

The state is composed of various bodies and authorities forming the centralpower—the administrative, military, police and judicial apparatus (tribunals,prisons). A pertinent implication of what Mbembe describes as the absence ofthe social contract in the African postcolony is the fact that the political domaincan be said to engender a set of nervous conditions of political and socialexistence. This is not merely because civil society and the state are inextricablylinked, but because the form and direction of civil society and, indeed, of theprivate sphere are often ruptured by the state. A story from Ghana in the late1970s serves to illustrate this. During the last days of General Kutu Acheam-pong, when the country was grinding to a halt through civil and politicaldisobedience, the story was told of a civil servant who got back home to findthat his wife, also a civil servant, had burnt the evening meal to cinders. A bigrow ensued, and after a series of heated insults and counter-insults, the mansought to silence his wife with an accusation that he knew she had no answerto: ‘It is because of Kutu that you burnt the food,’ he declared with finality,‘you have been thinking about politics too much these days.’ For me the interestin this apocryphal tale is precisely the degree to which the intimate privatesphere of marital relations is ‘interrupted’ by the incoherence of the politicalsphere. Of course, such interruptions also had a more violent face, with people‘disappeared’ from their homes and ‘accidentalized’ on their way to work. Butit is the laugh-and-cry quality of the story, its ability to encapsulate anessentially tragic contextualization of the domestic within the domain of thepolitical that shows the force of the social imaginary in coping with what was inthe period a highly confusing set of sociopolitical conditions. The African post-colony makes itself existentially ‘unforgettable’, invading all spheres of socialexistence to the degree of rendering itself a constant horizon for the inter-pretation of sociocultural phenomena. It is almost as if the African post-colony creates its own peculiar phenomenology, its own ability to make itselfremembered as farce, in the terms outlined by Achille Mbembe and Jean-François Bayart,21 or as nightmare, in those laid out by some of its writers.Quite often, its unforgettability is closely tied to the issue of the legitimation of


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governments. To put matters schematically, one could say that illegitimatepower is the most important obstacle to the achievement of indiv idualautonomy in Africa. It is thus not for nothing that this lack of autonomy isthematized in African literature in terms of individuals who are alienated fromtheir societies, and once recognizing the inexorable direction of their alienation,go mad.22

Social imaginary as process

If, as I am trying to argue, the social imaginary of culture heroism is a means ofmediating the nervous conditions of existence via particular stories, in whatways does it relate to the political domain? What does it reveal of the relationbetween people, civil society and the nation-state form?

To answer these questions, I want to elaborate the notion of ‘privatization’ Ihinted at earlier. One thing that all the stories we pointed out share in commonis that they are essentially elaborations not merely of a characterologicalschema, but of a process of abstraction, (1) of forms of social relations, and (2)of the relation that these have to the shape of the postcolony. Often the form ofsocial relations and the form of the postcolony are collapsed one into the other.Even though urban folktales are not exclusively about relations within thepublic sphere, their characters are often presented as exhibiting responses towhat lies ‘outside’ the domestic sphere, whether this outside is the urbanlandscape itself, the state or the globalized world. This is not to suggest anyeasy opposition between public and private but to highlight the specificinterests of urban folktales in suggesting attitudes to social and politicalexistence. Specifically, many urban folktales have to do with the ways in whichthe nation-state form is rendered comprehensible for private use. Thus thesocial imaginary revealed in urban folktales is part of an ensemble of responsesto the central authority and its bureaucratic state apparatus. This reveals somecomplex dimensions.

Privatization first of all involves ordinary people’s primary impulses in theirencounters with the bureaucratic state apparatus. Anyone who has beenin Africa and has had to deal with the bureaucracy will attest to the greatdifficulties that are often put in their way. Africans, innovative as always, havedevised means by which to deal with these problems. It is not uncommon tofind that, when Africans want to deal with officialdom at any level, their firstimpulse is to find someone they know. Finding someone you know sometimesinvolves elaborate circuits of contacts, normally starting from extended kinshipties: ‘I have a cousin who has a friend who has an aunt whose second son ismarried to a lady whose former school mate works in that office.’ This form of‘networking’ in reality entails the translation of the bureaucratic state apparatusfirst into the modalities of the gift economy and, second, into the relations ofreciprocity that regulate social behaviour at various levels of society. In Ghana,this has been called kalabule, a term whose provenance, though unclear,remains popular to this day. However, the difficulty with kalabule as a term isthat it is translated directly as ‘corruption’. I would hesitate to place such anormative label on the proceedings, as it often turns out that ordinary people aredeeply affronted by the behaviour of corrupt politicians and yet do not hesitate


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to translate the state into the domain of the gift economy themselves wheneverthe opportunity presents itself. There is a moral economy to these translationsof the bureaucratic state apparatus into the sphere of private gift exchangewhich allows ord inary people to be ab le to pass judgement on corruptpoliticians while suspending moral judgement on what they do themselves.

Along with the subversive actions of the Makola mammies of the 1970s inGhana, these privatization processes could reasonably be interpreted inBakhtinian terms as the popular subversion of the grand recits of the modernstate by carnivalesque forms of social imaginaries and practices. Attractivethough this interpretation appears, it seems to me to appeal to too great a senseof coherence in the ways in which the state is interpreted by ordinary people.The picture is more confused. The social imaginary of culture heroism, whenjoined to the ritual ‘privatization’ of the state, also signifies a progressivereplacement of the state within the social imaginary by an ensemble of partialfeatures selected in terms of a system that ends and with reference to a pseudo-conceptualization that is somewhat arbitrary even if efficacious in helpingpeople to negotiate their encounters with the bureaucratic state apparatus. It is aprocess of abstraction, which, to echo Castoriadis, is in a sense a ‘systematicdelirium’23 and seems to me to be co-extensive with the nervous conditionsproduced by the incoherence of the nation-state form itself. A pertinentcomparison of the nature of this pseudo-conceptualization and assemblages ofpartial features is provided by the discourse of witchcraft, arguably anotherconjunctural concept that overlaps with that of culture heroism. The discourseshows a process of abstraction that relates the different scale of social relationsto those of kinship ties: ‘It is striking, however, that this discourse, so closelylinked to the domestic realities of the home and the family, is used at the sametime to address modern changes and the increase in the scale they imply. Inmany African societies, witchcraft beliefs seem to be the obvious discourse forattempts to relate to new inequalities, which requires a dynamic use of thenotions of both witchcraft and kinship.’24 This assimilation of the ‘increase inscale’ represented by new political and social relations into an idiom of kinshipties represents its conversion into a sphere of comprehensibility. Taken togetherwith the strategic giving of gifts and the cultivating of obligations, it is a sign ofthe privatization of the state, its incoherent abstraction out of kinship relations.However, for the nation-state form and its bureaucratic apparatuses to operateproperly as an abstractable totality they have to be seen together as an objectiveorder completely separable from kinship relations. This does not mean thatin practice the postcolonial nation-state form will remain completely un-assimilated to the interests of certain social groups. However, it is arguable thatan assimilation of the bureaucratic apparatus to the interests of a classrepresents a different process of abstraction from its assimilation to the idiom ofkinship relations. Class relations provide a different ground of contradictionfrom that pertaining in kinship relations. Whereas class relations denote contra-dictions within relations of production, kinship relations connote contradictionswithin largely organic arrangements that are supported by rituals of exchangeand reciprocity. It is perhaps for this reason that totalitarianism and democracyin Africa often fade into each other. This is simply because the expressivesocial imaginary by which the two opposing forms of political arrangements are


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grasped remain practically the same whichever political order is instituted. It isthis which suggests that only a partial ensemble of features of the state havebeen made to stand for it as a whole within the social imaginary, thereforeslowing down its transition into another form of politico-social order. This doesnot mean that effective rebellion does not periodically break out (something forwhich there is ample historical evidence) but that it is rarely the case that suchrevolutions give birth to completely new responses to the state.

The problems inherent in the privatization of the state also manifest them-selves at the level of the political appropriations of social imaginaries. Onemight say that the ways in which political figures appropriate characterizationsof culture heroism are not just the result of legitimation anxieties but also of thefact that African leaders perceive the bureaucratic state apparatus as anextension of themselves. This parallels and extends the issue of organicrelations that we suggested as operating in the various popular translations ofthe state. In the political sphere the ‘elongation’ of the political self can bedemonstrated directly from the speed with which some heads of state proliferatetheir images in public places. Streets are named after the leader and members ofhis immediate family, and the ordinary citizen is often required to make someform of obeisance to the public image. The elongation of the politician’s selfthrough appropriations of tropes of culture heroism can also be understood interms of ideas of organicity that reside in concepts of culture heroism in theindigenous sphere. As can be shown from studies of different African cultures,in the traditional world-view the culture hero(ine) was organic to the culture.25

This organic relationship meant that, even as they were expressions of thegreatest aspirations of their societies, they also had certain obligations to thosesocieties. The organic relation between the culture hero and the society defineda circuit of responsibility for the society and the hero(ine). When Africanleaders transpose these tropes into the domain of postcolonial governmentality,one wonders whether this is not ultimately the expression of an ideal of anorganic relationship between the leader and the led. Of course this is a completefiction as the tropes that are deployed are often completely synthetic. Very fewAfrican leaders draw on heroic characterizations from single cultures. Often,through codes of dress, the use of proverbs, and the strategic deployment ofcertain recognizable traditional rituals during important state functions, theleaders wish to define themselves comprehensively as representing allthe different ethnic groups and peoples. However, the deployment of suchcharacterizations is not to be separated from the desire to elongate the reach ofthe ruler. This is a significant dimension of the contradictory privatization ofthe state through the appropriations of the politicians.

Within the operations of the central power, the implications of organicityinherent in the political appropriations of culture heroism reveal anotherworrying dimension. This is the will-to-transcendence, what is ultimately thedesire to provide particular frameworks within which contradictions areabolished or subsumed under the impress of a supervening general good. It isgenerally the desire to transcend contradiction and to provide discursive andmaterial contexts in which the dangerous energies of social and political contra-dictions can be channelled in particular directions. At the same time as the post-colonial African state is engendering a set of nervous conditions, it is also keen


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to produce a mode of political transcendence. What this means in effect is thatthe African postcolony has often concealed an essentially totalitarian impulse.This political impulse has a number of features. The primary one is that of theproliferation of binarisms such as those of good vs evil, us vs them, dissentagainst the state vs support for the state, with the governed being invited to takesides in this Manichean allegory. This is of course directly tied to questions oflegitimation. Being undemocratic, there is always a need to present starkchoices to the citizenry as a means of enforcing allegiance. And even when‘democratic’, as can be seen in the recent political problems in Zimbabwe, thedemocratic procedures are framed around stark options, this time on the basis ofthe particularly fraught subject of white-owned lands. In other words, strictbinaristic thinking is symptomatic of a desperate and urgent desire for legiti-mation which is never fully satisfied. Thus the political domain proliferatesbinarisms in the public sphere and encourages people to take sides at all timeseither for or against particular options. Often, of course, the means of coercionare frequently brought to bear on the area of choices, so that it is not merely amatter of making a decision at one’s leisure.

Conclusion

What we have seen in this brief discussion is the degree to which certainconjunctural concepts such as that of the culture hero allow us to follow theradiating points of a social imaginary that is itself intricately connected to avariety of spheres from the private to the sociopolitical and the historical.Second, we also note that there is no straightforward unilinear way of analysingthese concepts. Rather, their complexity calls for a rigorously interdisciplinaryperspective. In this way, we might be able to conjoin a cultural analysis to theexposition of interconnected changes in related spheres of African life. It is herethat the value of the study of social imaginaries lies, in allowing us, as the Igboswould put it, to keep moving in response to the dancing of the world itself.

Notes and references

1 James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Lifeon the Zambian Copperbelt, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1999.

2 Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption andCleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe, Leicester University Press, London, 1996.

3 Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-colonial Africa, translated by Janet Roitman and Peter Geschiere, University ofVirginia Press, Charlottesville, VA, 1997.

4 Edmond Cros, Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism, translated by JeromeSchwartz, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1988, pp 14, 16.

5 E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the crowd in the eighteenth century’,Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, Merlin Press,London, 1991; and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford Uni-versity Press, Oxford, 1977.

6 Indeed, in an earlier attempt at thinking about this, I linked the concept of cultureheroism mainly to literature and the political sphere. At that time the idea of asocial imaginary was not fully articulated in my work and the analysis of the


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connection between the literary–aesthetic domain and the political spherecompletely dominated the discussion. For this early tentative account, seePostcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process?, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 2000.

7 On popular novels in West Africa, see Stephanie Newell, Ghanaian PopularFiction, James Currey, Oxford, 2000.

8 Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History ofAlcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times, James Currey, Oxford, 1996.

9 Amadou Hampaté Bâ, The Fortunes of Wangrin, translated by Aina PavoliniTaylor, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1999.

10 Ropo Sekoni, ‘Politics and urban folklore in Nigeria’, in Karin Barber (ed),Readings in African Popular Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN,p 142.

11 Ibid, pp 143–145.12 Ibid, p 144.13 Arthur Goldstuck, The Leopard in the Luggage: Urban Legends from Southern

Africa, Penguin, London, 1993; and Goldstuck, The Ink in the Porridge: UrbanLegends from the South African Election, Penguin, Johannesburg, 1994.

14 I heard the story in August 2000 on an evening music show hosted by Fiifi Bansonon Peace FM in Accra.

15 Nina Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in SouthernNigeria, 1900–1965, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1982.

16 A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘His Eternity, His Eccentricity, or His Exemplarity?’,African Affairs, Vol 90, pp 163–188.

17 Ibid, p 174.18 See a report on Kabila in The Times, London, 12 March 1997.19 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, University of California Press, Berkeley,

CA, 2001.20 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis,

MN, 1996, pp 27–47.21 Mbembe, op cit, Ref 19; and Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The

Politics of the Belly, Longman, London, 1993.22 A classic example of this would be Kofi Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother,

Heinemann, London, 1972; also Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments, Heinemann,London, 1974, and Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger, Heinemann,London, 1978. Bu t see also Chinua Achebe’s Anthi lls of the Savannah ,Heinemann, London, 1987, Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name, Baobab Books,Harare, 1994 and Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, Oxford University Press, CapeTown, 1995 for different perspectives on the nightmare of social existence.

23 Castoriadis, 1991, p 157.24 Geschiere, op cit, Ref 3.25 For a historical account of such an organic relationship, see Carolyn Hamilton’s

Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention(1998). For a more general theoretical discussion, chapter 3 of Walter Ong’sOrality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Methuen, London,provides useful terms.


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social imaginaries: the culture hero as conjunctural concept in africa

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