Contenu du sommaire

A fake resistance fighter? A true prophet? The complex figure of Reverend Pastor Ntumi, who is often reductively considered to be a ‘seer' or a ‘puppet' for those in power, is not easy to understand. This article, without claiming to be an exhaustive analysis of the prophet and his movement, offers a detailed reading of Reverend Pastor Ntumi in the light of Congolese prophetism, the spiritual geography of the Pool region, and the recent historical circumstances that have intersected with Ntumi's ‘warrior prophetism'. The study also uncovers several little-known aspects of the Nsilulu movement (its ritual dimension, its therapeutic and divinatory functions, its symbolic representations, etc.) and discusses its ambiguous relationship with the Protestant prophetic movement Nsikumusu (launched in 1947), walking the fine line between violent and non-violent prophetism.

Based on field surveys and unpublished data, this article offers a socio-political analysis of a hitherto little-studied Congolese prophetic movement. The article discusses the figure of the prophet Lassy Simon Zéphirin and the emergence of the Église du christianisme prophétique en Afrique (Church of Prophetic Christianity in Africa) (CPA), with an emphasis on the important relations it has established since its origins with the Congolese state. We examine this entanglement of the political and the religious, on the fringes of constitutional secularism, in relation to its history from the colonial period to the present day, by documenting various significant episodes in the life of the religious institution that have been characterised by repeated interference from state representatives.

In the context of the overall peace plan launched by the Malian State and its conflict management partners, a huge programme of inter-community dialogue was launched from 2013–2014, restarting the process of ‘reconciliation from below' initiated in the 1990s. This article considers the origins, mechanisms, and limits of a specific tool—inter-community meetings (ICM)—mobilized within the framework of this project for creating dialogue, in order to propose a critical analysis of the issues raised by the normative frameworks involved in this model of conflict resolution.

This article considers the relationship between Central Africa as a whole and the Central African Republic (CAR), which is undergoing a process of military regionalisation and economic isolation. In a context of war, these seemingly opposing developments support and strengthen one another. However, they vary in their spatial deployment: each region of the CAR maintains increasingly exclusive relations with its close foreign neighbour, a development that favours the de facto partition of the country.

In October 2017, a violent conflict broke out in southwestern Burkina Faso, pitting indigenous Lobi people against migrant gold diggers. Blood was spilled and the market of a gold panning site was burned down. Following this tragic event, latent tensions suddenly transpired into open conflict, revealing the precarious status of gold panners in this region and calling into question the foundations of their moral economy. Based on the cross-referencing of ethnographic data collected by the two authors, this article presents the individual and contrasting viewpoints of local actors, shedding light on the underlying logic of this confrontation.

With the increasing complexity of migration control procedures in the North and the globalisation of the South, migration routes now follow sporadic and multipolar patterns. The movement of Africans to Brazil, which began in the 2000s owing to open border policies, illustrates this new situation and marks a new phase in the migratory history of this South American country. The República district, in the heart of São Paulo, plays a key role in these new movements and is a meeting point for African migrants—a place to settle, work, and consume. The modalities of integration in the city, particularly through ethnic trade and the social life that it produces, contribute to the emergence of an African hub that is redefining certain urban fragments of the South American metropolis.

Whether they are students or the wives of students at al-Azhar University in Egypt, or even traders or businesswomen in the metropolis of Cairo, women from sub-Saharan Africa are following trajectories where the desire to succeed comes up against difficulties of integration and relationships with the local society—as well as with their close acquaintances. On the basis of exploratory fieldwork carried out in Cairo, our contribution raises a number of questions concerning the roles they assume in migration and the reconfiguration of their place within a couple or of their relationship with religion. It also considers the differences that these dynamic and entrepreneurial women encounter in a new society and the influence of alternative imaginaries of womanhood.

At the standpipes of rural and semi-rural drinking water supply systems in West Africa, “fontainières” are responsible for charging users for water. These women therefore play a key role in the provision of drinking water, yet they occupy a menial, almost invisible place in water access systems, and remain for the most part mere labourers with tiny incomes. However, in areas where the use of these water supply systems is greater, some of them take a more active role and manage to generate greater income from this activity. The most proactive take various measures to increase their remuneration, but the capacity for them to improve their situation is limited.

The 2019 presidential election was a turning point in Senegal's political history: citizen sponsorship was introduced, the historical parties fielded no candidates, and the vote of the diaspora was considered to have an important impact. Cartographic analysis, conceived of here as a ‘means of discovery' in political science, provides the foundations for an initial analysis of the dynamics that shaped the 2019 presidential election.

Claude-Hélène Perrot passed away on 16 July 2019, at the age of ninety-one. Her career as a historian, which spanned seven decades, was marked by the production of numerous foundational studies on the regions of eastern Côte d'Ivoire. Their exceptional quality earned her several prestigious academic accolades. We pay her a final tribute in this personal account.

This article paints a nuanced portrait of an influential but forgotten figure of the colonial history of Côte d'Ivoire. Obodji Soboa (1886-1952) was the paramount chief of the Abbé people: one of the few traditional chiefs in the country to rise to this highest distinction of ‘indigenous leadership'. This article considers the origins and the transformation of Obodji Soboa's so-called ‘customary' power and maps the limits of his constrained autonomy. It also documents his economic projects and his original Harrist-inspired prophetic church, known as ‘Aké Offo'. The article pays particular attention to the presentation and restitution of the sources of the study, some of which are unpublished, and revisits the question of the boundary between history, memory, and forgetting.

This article aims to contribute to the study of memoranda, which, in the Cameroonian context, constitute a set of ethno-regional grievances submitted to the President of the Republic for consideration by the elites of a region or ethnic group. It sheds light on the dual role of this original and as yet little-studied political object—both as a vector of ethno-regional aspirations and as a strategy of political positioning—by integrating it into the analysis of the Cameroonian political field. The article contextualises the emergence of the memoranda before questioning the instrumentalisation to which they are subjected, and considers the future of this type of mobilisation in a context of popular distrust with regard to the political sphere.