Contenu du sommaire : Études et essais

This paper explores the transgression of religious norms within Revival churches which, following the example of Pentecostalism, have experienced a spectacular success in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as in the Congolese Diaspora over the past few decades. While the boundaries separating the “Christian world” and the “Pagan world” are strongly asserted by the born again and generate huge divisions across the Congolese people worldwide, nevertheless it is sometimes difficult to identify these boundaries apart from the professed life-saving and “civilising” morality claims. A case in point involves the recurrent scandals involving Churches and their leaders around issues of money and sex. Based on studies over the past ten years within the Congolese community, we investigate this apparent ambivalence of sexual morality by considering the fact that the Church itself is a place which supports the ongoing construction of a normative utopia, while at the same time hosting practices that directly contradict Christian norms. We shall see how the notion of heterotopia, proposed by Foucault for considering “other spaces”, allows us to avoid the shortcomings of taking a binary approach (emancipation versus submission) toward the offering of religion. Instead we are able to consider pluralistic identity repertories of the churches stemming in part from their long history. The consideration of these transgressions sheds much needed light on the complexity of the issue of gender inside and outside of the Church.

This research, which proceeds from a two year field survey, aims at questionning the present stakes of the elementary schools in Djibouti. Placing historically the elementary private (catholic) and state school inspired by Occident front to its colonization legacy, this research anthropologically holds it up against the traditional mode of education on the one hand, and relates it to the oriental education mode (coranic schools and madrasa) which coexist on the other hand. Beyond the results from which appear points of differenciation between the four studied types of schools and which highlight the oscillation of the investments of the actors between dedication and renouncement, the comprehensive approach presents a different glance into the phenomenon of school drop-outs and school failure which question the different educational models taking place in Africa.

En Virginie (1901) confirms that the slavery system, as it was put in place in the Southern U. S. during the Civil war, provides an advantageous standpoint for the interstice of different simultaneous oppressions (gender/race/class). This article shows that the literature, understood as a reception device rather than a belief system, provides a suitable framework for a genealogy of domination's crossed arenas. Published in France—when this country was both a Republican and colonial country—by authors with opposing political perspectives. En Virginie justifies sadomasochism under the cover of the abolitionist movement. Although far from new at the time, such strategy allowed the editor of curiosa Charles Carrington to avoid any legal prosecution. Nonetheless, Carrington institutes an industry that will prove successful since he offers a literary space for women's slavery, particularly of white women.

This essay explores the constraints which determine republications of “colonial” literary works in the serie called “Autrement mêmes” (otherwise the same) (Ed. L'Harmattan), and their ambiguous institutional status in the tolerated margins of the field. In particular, it analyses the way discursive support tries to justify this republication and in the same time disqualifies the value it could receive. All this, through a case study: two republished novels of Jean Sermaye. After all, the study asks the question of the politically correcteness in the background, and questions the forced separation between “colonial” and “African” literary domains.

Conflicting views of the Eritrean independence war as a solitary, single-handed struggle against the Ethiopian Empire on the one hand and assertions about Eritrean diplomatic ineptitude on the other abound in the discourse on Northeast Africa. Both positions defy the age-old adage that war and diplomacy are enduring features of human interaction, and overlook African experiences with liberation diplomacy. This article revisits Eritrean nationalists' hydra-like diplomatic dealings with an array of forces in the region and beyond to show that their diplomacy of liberation was indispensable to the heated battles (1961-1991), and that, as a result, they received materiel, political and humanitarian assistance without which their movement would have been hard pressed to succeed. They particularly forged political-military alliances with Ethiopian insurgents to clinch the all-important but elusive international recognition after military victory in Asmara and parallel regime change in Addis Ababa.

These observations are based on field-work in Southern Cameroon I carried out between 2001 and 2007. There I studied the new expressions of traditional healing practices, and in particular the innovative forms of therapeutic imagination. In this paper I analyse current symbolic strategies and the transformations of the sources of therapeutic power. I focus in particular on the role of vision and images in the rituals of the “new ngangas” (healers, pastors, prophets etc.). On the basis of their rhetorical and symbolical strategies, the paper explores also the politics of memory and the forms of subjectivity that emerge inside techniques where the experience of vision and miracle seem to be trivialised. My aim in this work is also to understand the way in which these strategies try to reshape (to “repair”) history and the uncertainties of postcolony.