Contenu du sommaire : Enjeux de l'autochtonie

« Les hommes de terrain »The life and work of Georges Niangoran-Bouah (1935-2002) is situated in the postcolonial history of autochthony in Côte d'Ivoire. To that end he is presented as one of the « hommes de terrain » – a generation of Ivoirian scholars who sought to ground their efforts to Africanize academia as well as their political project of anti-neocolonialism (and anti-Houphouëtism) in a double move of « going underground » as far as political activism is concerned and of « going native » (or « into the field ») in order to retrieve and revalue national cultural heritage. While observing the exclusivist nature of autochthony, this article proposes an alternative analytics of nativism in terms of a moral economy of scale.

Funerals for a friend : contests over citizenship in the Liberian civil war
Revisiting the Liberian civil war through the lenses of autochthony, the warlords, the grand plans, the elites and the international connections become less important. What we are left with is the intertwining of a series of local conflicts into a larger pattern. Around Voinjama, the Liberian civil war has been a step in the longer history of conflict and cooperation between the Loma and the Mandingo, as well as in the ethnogenesis of these groups.

The land issue in conflicts of autochthony in Southwestern Burkina Faso
In Southwestern Burkina Faso, the coexistence of a customary law giving the upper hand in land tenure to the autochthonous population and of a national law giving the usufruct of land to those who cultivate it creates a big insecurity. Autochthonous people fear to lose the control of ancestral land while migrants fear to lose access to the land they cultivate. The « gestion des terroirs » approach, by transferring the control of some land from autochthonous to migrants, exacerbates xenophobic feelings. The contractual approach, on the contrary, endorse existing inequalities but builds on a wide-ranging consensus and is more susceptible to maintain social peace.

In the name of development : ethnicity, autochthony and the promotion of the private sector in Northern Cameroon. The Chad-Cameroon petroleum development and pipeline project is one of the largest infrastructural projects undertaken in recent years in Africa. The oil consortium's variations on the theme of development rely on an aseptic notion of the local, devoid of history and politics. The access to the global within the reach of those « locals » who benefited from pipeline subcontracts entailed embracing their representation as rooted in an imaginary space, which was largely recreated for the sake of an international audience.

Guinea's political transition seems never ending. In 2008, strikes, riots and clashes affected country and state. In the light of the events of 2006 and 2007, it is a question of interpretation whether the « revolution » finally came to a close in 2008 or if it is still going on. Within and beyond these interpretations, the Guinean military play an important but hardly predictable role. However described, the political scene looks like a paltry theatre and Guinean citizens, tired of political and economic difficulties, are more and more impatient.

Xenophobic violence in South Africa : return on a disaster foretold
South Africa's migratory situation is changing fast, but its public policies are largely obsolete. In this context, the country has known in 2008 a series of unprecedentedly violent and widespread riots whose targets have primarily been African non-nationals. Rooted as it is in a deep history of violence as an instrument in the management of social and political conflicts, the phenomenon is nevertheless peculiar in both its ideological terrain and its processes. The state's uneasy management of these riots has launched a repositioning of the main players in the field of immigration in South Africa, and new actors have emerged. A long-differed reflection has finally been opened on the integration of migrants to South African society.

The Lord's Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M) in Uganda is now world infamous for its violence. As most observers, including academics, have dismissed the LRA/M on moral grounds, they have disqualified the movement as non-political, rebels without a cause other than their allegedly bizarre syncretic beliefs. This article indicates an alternative or perhaps complementary direction. In presenting something of a rarity in the academic literature on the war in Northern Uganda, the article examines actual LRA/M documents, arguing that there is a continuity in the claims and political grievances put forward by the LRA/M throughout the years.

Sources of (mis)understanding
For more than 20 years, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has resisted both the Ugandan government forces and thorough scholarly analysis. This article assesses the generation and circulation of knowledge about the LRA, revealing the dead angles in contemporary research. It underlines the major modifications in the environment of the LRA over the years. It underlines the importance of focusing on the subsequent transformations of its objectives, motivations, strategic alliances but also of its cosmological and spiritual referents, political and warlike representations, and of its relation to violence and self-representations.

Looking for defeat
Mozambique has long attracted much sympathy because of its political peculiarities and the attacks of the apartheid regime and much of the Western academic literature has been positive towards the Mozambican regime. A critique of this historiography remains indispensable, and must be based on the reality of social relations, the structuring role of ideologies, and the processes of marginalization. Political discourse has dominated approaches to the Mozambican brand of non-aligned « Marxism-Leninism », and this overemphasis has blurred both the sixteen-year civil war which the country has been through and the fantastic turn-around of the ruling party.