The common ground: African notions of power

Wouter van Beek is Professor of Anthropology at the Utrecht University and a senior research fellow at the African Studies Centre. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in Mali and Cameroon on the topics of religion, ecology and tourism.

ASC Research Seminar. First in a series of four on 'Secular States and Religious Societies’.

Most African states, as a legacy of their colonial past, have inherited a secular constitution derived from Enlightenment views on the role of the state, society and the individual. These views marked a separation of the Trias politica and a separation of state and religion. Together with theological developments, a course was set on which the secularization of society followed in the footsteps of the secularization of the state. In Europe this resulted in changing notions of legitimacy of realm, sovereignty and power. In Africa the pathway of secularisation, both of state power and society, has been different. Theologically, Africa has been dubbed ‘the most religious of all continents’ and though secularization is definitely on the agenda, its characteristics are different. Africa has never known one dominant creed, and was always divided between a multitude of local religions plus incoming proselyting religions. Politically, the separation between state powers has never been effected in the Enlightenment fashion, and the connection between state power and religious issues has never been severed. Despite their variety, African notions of power seem to harbour commonalities that explain why states operate as they do in the political and in the religious realm, and why religious notions are never far away from political discourse. It seems as though the notions of power in Africa have a religious grounding that makes it easy for the ‘powers that be’ to utilize a font of shared collective representations and harness the force of religious elements in worldly endeavours. These notions of power are rooted in local power definitions and the problem of transforming the kinship idiom that is dominant at the local level into a national or supranational discourse. A variety of African states will be compared, ranging from Mali to Congo and from Namibia to Cameroon.