Competing Norms: State Regulations and Local Praxis in Sub-Sahara Africa

The idea for this volume emerged in the context of the project "Western norms and local media in Africa" within the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders", Goethe University Frankfurt. This topic inspired a good number of master's and doctoral students to write their theses on related subjects, some of which are assembled in this volume. The projects selected for this volume have in common the study of the question of how state norms influence local actors in sub-Saharan Africa and how local actors confronted with these norms deal with them in their daily lives. The contributions here examine these questions in the context of media, land, development, health, and the environment.

All contributors to this volume participated in a workshop organized by Mamadou Diawara, Ute Röschenthaler and Moussa Sissoko (the co-director of Point Sud), at the Goethe University Frankfurt in July 2014. Their participation provided the African participants with access to the libraries of the Goethe University for a period of three weeks in order to complete the literature research necessary for their research projects. This workshop and the subsequent phase of exploration were generously supported by the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders".

The volume contains contributions of young researchers from Germany and Africa. The African contributors were able to carry out the research for their theses with the help of fellowships from the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders" at the Goethe University Frankfurt in collaboration with their home universities where they have submitted and defended their PhD theses or will do so in the near future.

The editors are grateful to the managing board of the Cluster of Excellence, namely Rebecca Schmidt, for their moral support throughout the project and to the German Research Council and The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt for the financial support. This volume has been completed during the stay of Mamadou Diawara as fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies of Nantes (2015-2016) who expresses his sincere gratitude to its director and its entire staff for their generous support. We also wish to thank Maria Way and especially Patricia Phillips-Batoma for their help in translating some of the contributions from French and making the manuscripts publishable.

Frankfurt/Main, March 2016, Mamadou Diawara and Ute Röschenthaler

Introduction: What do people do when states are working?

Mamadou Diawara and Ute Röschenthaler

What is a farmer from Ekondo Kondo living in the middle of a forest in Cameroon supposed to say and do when the government, or someone more powerful than he, such as the manager of a development project, orders him to start living according to norms that are dictated to him instead of norms that have been built up throughout history? What is a journalist or radio presenter supposed to say and do when the government begins to make laws that impose on them a code that is not their own? These cases allow us to ask questions about the relationships that governments and their agents have with local actors, whoever they may be. This question should immediately bring to mind two works, specifically Seeing Like a State (1998) and States at Work in West Africa (2014). In the first, James C. Scott questions in vivid terms how it is that a state, by imposing its schemes on local actors, ends up failing, which makes the human quagmire even worse. He illustrates this by drawing on examples from both Europe (real socialism), and from Africa (the ujama of Tanzania). The second is a fascinating collection of essays edited by Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan which deals accurately with the way in which the state operates on a daily basis. The different authors place a lot of emphasis on the workings of the African administrative machine, whether we call this police officer, teacher or judge. They compare them to realities that are prevalent elsewhere, notably in Europe, and systematically reject any tendency towards exoticism. The rich bibliography situates African reality very simply at the heart of human action (Bierschenk 2010; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014). We will return to this issue. It is not the goal of the present volume to do a better job than our eminent predecessors by providing either a more general or a more specific description of the functioning of the state. Apart from its aims, our approach is different.

Central to our theme is not the state per se, but rather, the actors, the men and women who cope with it, or who sometimes get involved with its agents for reasons that may or may not be insidious. What matters here are the actions of the protagonists confronted by the state: inhabitants of a forest in Cameroon, journalists, media professionals, gold miners in Mali, and farmers in southern Kenya. The complex relationship that links the state's agents to ordinary actors deserves special attention in order to bring to light the error committed each time we view these two entities as two completely autonomous ones. The choice of this perspective in no way indicates that these actions should be seen as a simple reaction to official norms. The actors go much further than simply reacting. They can sometimes predict norms by appropriating for themselves those very norms that they claim to dismiss at the outset. Both simultaneously and over time they play it both ways, depending on their own interests, by either disregarding or acknowledging official norms.

Moreover, the actors in the field understand better than anyone else the relationships between them and the people the government has put in charge of implementing norms and laws. It is up to the actors to play on the dual social, economic, and political allegiances of those who are responsible for applying the law. This constant interplay is certainly nothing new. The consequences that arise from it are what some might call corruption (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006; Smith 2007). Others, such as Mirko Göpfert (2014) have demonstrated just how complex this is by emphasizing the extent to which both of them, state bureaucrats as well as farmers, are dependent on one another to maintain social peace. The main focus of this work is to understand how this action originates, gets expressed, and evolves on a daily basis.

In order to do this, we have looked closely at the actors and their actions, their Handlung. In his introductory article to the research project, States at Work, Thomas Bierschenk (2010: 2) rightly draws attention to Lorenz von Stein's willingness to surpass Hegel's idealism, which was limited to the notion of speech acts by the state, which he called Tat. Von Stein rather preferred the notion of work (Arbeit) which for him meant the transformation of these speech acts into actual events. Stein heralds Migdal and Schlichte (2005), who distinguish between state-idea and state-practices, concludes Bierschenk. Along the same lines, our objective here is to prioritize the Handlung. To this end, there is no better reference than Gerd Spittler's valuable reflection on this concept in his study, appropriately devoted to the Anthropology of work (2008, 2016). As he writes, work (Arbeit) requires action (Handlung). Spittler identifies two key factors within the "capacity" or "potential" for work (Arbeitsvermögen). First, work as factual act, then work as performance. The capacity for work is synonymous with competence, which means implementation. Central to this reflection are both the competence and the performance of the actors in the field as they deal with the norms and the laws dictated by the government and by the development agencies. Factual competence and its...