From Charity to Parity: Constructing Africans as Subjects of History

This book is about African ethnographic examples of processes of bottom-up development that combine the authority of individual leaders with the more dispersed formations of trust-based social networks that control and mobilize vast sums of money. While these processes may involve the gradual ascendancy of new middle class or bourgeois class formations, they also sustain much wider forms of local and regional development that can potentially transform national-scale politics and contribute to building more peaceful and just societies. The central concern of my scholarly work has been to understand the continuing importance of informal ways of creating political order and economic management in sub-Saharan Africa. My work involves a detailed analysis of societal responses to processes of state implosion, yielding fundamental insights into the workings of authority and sovereignty, and the social relations implicated in their (re-)formulation. This book examines the diverse strategies of local actors --including merchants, local politicians, educators, religious officials, and traditional/tribal or ethnic leaders-- for dealing with the debility, incapacitation of the state.

Patience Kabamba is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He holds a bachelor degree in Mathematics in Kikwit (DRC), and in philosophy at the Jesuit School in Paris, a Masters degree in Development in Durban, South Africa, a Masters degree in Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University