Criminals and the african cultural imagination: normative and deviant heroism in pre-colonial and modern narratives

Abstract

Opening ParagraphIn a previous essay (Austen, 1986a) I attempted to trace a particular type of deviant hero in African history and culture: a ‘social bandit’ or criminal figure identified in the popular imagination with resistance against alien or indigenous oppressive elites. The search proved frustrating within its original terms of reference but it did suggest an alternative paradigm for identifying the entire relationship between cultural norms and criminal behaviour in Africa. The present article attempts to develop this paradigm through the analysis of six African narratives dealing with heroic and/or anti-heroic figures in a variety of contexts.

The Bakassi Boys: Vigilantism, Violence, and Political Imagination in Nigeria

“…Specifically, I examine: (1) the centrality of the market in Igbo economic and symbolic life and associated modes of organization to protect public and community interests; (2) a particular imaginary (and curiously inverted) construction of violent criminals along class lines; (3) experiences and collective representations of the deployment of state-controlled means of violence (by the police and the military); and (4) practices that contributed to popular representations of the vigilantes as magically powered superheroes (cf. Austen 1986). Finally, I extend the analysis of the relationship between vigilantism and the state to include an examination of the tactical manipulation by multiple actors in this drama of ideas about ethnicity, democracy, and civil society.…”

Ethics, evaluation, and economies of value amidst illegal practices

“…Indeed, across the special issue, we find that people involved in criminalized forms of work and networks of exchange sometimes come to see the act of defying state authority as an ethical practice in and of itself (Austen, 1986;Cohen, 1986;Hobsbawm, 1981). Especially in places where authoritative claims to rule of law have facilitated the marginalization of certain groups, the exploitation of resources (with regard to the struggle for land tenure, see Gledhill and Schell, 2012), and even violence (Mattei and Nader, 2008), or where state bureaucracies are otherwise felt to produce political and juridical inequality and make life more difficult for citizens, belonging to a criminal organization, ignoring the law and its demands, or positioning oneself at the margins of the legal-bureaucratic landscape are sometimes experienced as forms of resistance, protest, or struggle for political visibility (Englund, 2006;Herzfeld, 2004Herzfeld, , 2009).…”

Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: The Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrialization

“…Instead, economists have pointed to a negative demonstration effect in which a few import-substitution industries fail to close the gap between heightened consumption expectations and limited local productivity (Felix 1974). 21 Moreover, the experience of integration into the world market has not only failed to transplant "modernization" into third world culture but (at least in Africa) directly encouraged an economy of patron-client practices and witchcraft beliefs, based upon zero-sum visions of the material and social world (Berry 1985;Austen 1986).…”

“…A more sophisticated argument, advanced by several contributors at a recent conference dedicated to the "Williams thesis," is to reevaluate the share of the Atlantic triangle(s) in overall British trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Inikori 1987;Richardson 1987). Even more complex is the argument that efforts to maintain large-scale long-distance trade in exotic goods, no matter what its immediate economic value was, created new institutional capacities for lowering transaction costs, which were then adaptable to the more productive undertakings of an industrial economy (Austen 1987: n o ; North forthcoming). At a more basic level, Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) has contended that the caloric content of imported sugar was critical to the labor capacity of early-modern Europe.…”