Abstract
This essay is a contribution to a number of related debates on alternative modernities, social imaginaries and cultural transitions in Africa. Drawing inspiration from the cultural materialism of E. P. Thompson and Cornelius Castoriadis, the essay looks at urban folktales and legends to define the concept of the African culture hero. This is in its turn related to the idea of the 'privatization' of the bureaucratic state apparatus, the ways in which ordinary people constantly translate their encounters with the state into the modalities of the gift economy. This implies a conversion of the state into the private sphere of kinship relations, thus suggesting a different set of contradictions from that which would pertain to contradictions deriving from class relations. The essay draws widely on theories of modernity and the state from both Africa and elsewhere and ultimately provides an interdisciplinary research methodology focused on the genres of everyday life.
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