David Pratten

Introduction the Politics of Protection: Perspectives on Vigilantism in Nigeria

Vigilantism has become an endemic feature of the Nigerian social and political landscape. The emergence of night guards and vigilante groups as popular responses to theft and armed robbery has a long and varied history in Nigeria. Since the return to democracy in 1999, however, Nigeria has witnessed a proliferation of vigilantism: vigilante groups have organized at a variety of levels from lineage to ethnic group, in a variety of locations from village ward to city street, and for a variety of reasons from crime fighting to political lobbying. Indeed, vigilantism has captured such a range of local, national and international dynamics that it provides a sharply focused lens for students of Nigerias political economy and its most intractable issues – the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion. Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice.

Local Institutional Development and Relief in Ethiopia: A Kire–based Seed Distribution Programme in North Wollo

Highlighted here is the important role played by community-based organisations in relief supply operations. In the context of an emergency seed supply project in northern Ethiopia in 1995, it examines the participation of burial societies, known as kires, in targeting, distribution and management. The paper illustrates that factors of local institutional legitimacy, transparency and accountability are central, both to the effective representation of community views and to long-term partnerships between local institutions and non-governmental organisations.

Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa: An Introduction

The starting point of this collection is to understand the positive and productive potential of uncertainty in Africa. The relevance of the focus on uncertainty in Africa is not only that contemporary life is objectively risky and unpredictable (since it is so everywhere and in every period), but that uncertainty has become a dominant trope, an ‘inevitable force’ (Johnson-Hanks 2005: 366), in the subjective experience of life in contemporary African societies. This routinized perception of uncertainty is sometimes coined as ‘the crisis’ — the conjunction of economic depression, instabilities, fluctuations, and ruptures — giving rise to experiences lived by people at all levels of society defined by physical and mental violence (Mbembe & Roitman 1995: 324). It is against this context of ‘incoherence, uncertainty, and instability’ that we may better account for the ways in which people weave their existence. Indeed, by foregrounding ‘crisis as context’ (Vigh 2006) we begin to see how uncertainty critically shapes ways of knowing and being on the continent. Hence, the analysis of radical, routinized uncertainty offers a productive conceptual apparatus to describe Africa’s complexity and to account for ‘the power of the unforeseen and of the unfolding…[and] people’s relentless determination to negotiate conditions of turbulence to introduce order and predictability into their lives’ (Mbembe & Nuttall 2004: 349).

Masking Youth: Transformation and Transgression in Annang Performance

David Pratten Browse most museum or African art gallery catalogues and you would be forgiven for thinking that Annang and Ibibio wooden mask carving is not only buoyant but that it serves a thriving masking culture. The masks of initiatory societies sell for thousands of dollars on the international market, and seem to have become synonymous with, even iconic of Ibibio and Annang artistic and performative traditions. Annang and Ibibio masking is also a classic theme in ethnographic traditions that have similarly tended to fix or suspend masking in time. From Talbot (1926), Jeffreys (1931), Messenger (1957, 1971, 1973, 1984), Jones (1963, 1984, 1988, 1989), Nicklin (1982, 1989, 1999), Salmons (1985), Offiong (1984), and Akpan (1994) we have learned how Annang masks articulate with social structure and function, with cosmology and aesthetic, with initiation and generation, and with colonial state and the Christian missions. However, we have yet to learn about the historical trajectory of Annang masking traditions, nor how these performative traditions are inflected and appropriated in a postcolonial setting. In the following I examine the question of what has happened to Annang masking traditions and trace a narrative of criminalization and diabolization during and after missionary and colonial encounters. Contemporary continuities are then traced through genealogical lines and to ways in which cultural performance has been captured by religious specialists. Turning to other instances of appropriation, I focus on the apparently contradictory ways in which Annang youth code themselves within and against masked identities. The conclusion that emerges is that we have yet to examine those features of Annang masquerade in spite, or perhaps because of which masking has proved such a persistent feature of social life (Figs. 1–2). Indeed, to explain the effect and persistence of Annang masking we must return to the classic question of “what’s in a mask?” (Picton 1990). Here we need to move beyond structural-functionalist political interpretations which highlight the role of masking in cross-cutting otherwise fissiparous lineages (Horton 1967), and beyond the role of masks in life-cycle events (Turner 1967). More helpful to our task is the “paradox-making” role of masks. Here I attempt to historicize Elizabeth Tonkin’s (1979) insights into masking as an “embodied paradox” in which it is not disguise, but transformation that is key to understanding. Masking concerns transformations which mark a movement all photos bY the author

The Precariousness of Prebendalism

A critical aspect of Richard Joseph’s argument in Democracy and Prebendal Politicsis easily overlooked. His analysis of the short-lived Second Republic (1979–1983) is well-known for identifying access to public office as the dominant political imperative in Nigeria, and that ethnic and regional identities became entrenched as a result of this quest for state resources. Less evident, however, is the basic, taken-for-granted motivation that sustains this prebendal system—insecurity.