ABSTRACT The articles in this special issue of African Studies were selected from papers and presentations presented at a conference on the theme ‘Agency and Violence: An African Philosophical Approach’ the philosophy department at the University of Pretoria hosted in 2023. Thought-provoking discussion and debate on a theme that is controversial but crucial within the African context and more broadly in the Global South characterised the small but lively conference. This special issue aims to engage with varying contexts across the continent where violence is a daily reality. This theme was the brainchild of John Sanni and the regular conversations that he and Charles Villet had in the years preceding the conference. Their academic partnership focuses on themes regarding violence, and it became clear in their own research that violence is not just a passive phenomenon that impacts the livelihood of ordinary citizens on the ground (although this is certainly the case for a great deal of people) but also an active response to oppression and the spectre of colonialism that still exists in society.

ABSTRACT The apparent quotidian violence in Africa today is an undeniable reality that raises important questions about its causes, forms and implications for the life and agency of African people and societies. This article proposes to reflect on these questions by exploring Frantz Fanon’s recently published psychiatric writings, mostly written in North-Africa, which have sparked important reconsideration of his work as a whole in both Fanonian and critical scholarship. The central suggestion advanced is that these writings offers clinical practice-based theoretical insights that are not simply central to Fanon’s revolutionary project of liberation as a whole, but also to the task of critically thinking about violence and agency in the African present. What surfaces from these works is that, while liberation from violence cannot occur without political and material transformations, it also cannot occur unless the psychological dimension is taken seriously, understood, and addressed.

ABSTRACT The article considers how structural violence in African polities has displaced sovereign agency and responsibility for its harmful effects by extending imperial practices of trusteeship in postcolonial governmentality. It explains how, with liberation, decolonisation and political independence, imperial practices of indirect rule and informal empire – legitimised with reference to trusteeship – have resulted in practices of domination, which are instantiated in structural violence. Trusteeship formally displaces the direct agency of coercive imperial colonisation, first, by disguising it as protection and development assistance, and second, by setting up proxy domestic political agents to stand in for absent imperial sovereignty. I analyse these dynamics with reference to Foucault’s account of governmentality and his theories of power to explain African complicity with empire. I then review and critique Mbembe’s analysis of necropolitics in the postcolony to explain a weakness in his account, which leads him to misconstrue these conflicts in terms of sovereign power, thereby misrepresenting the agency of the consequent African victims of postcolonial structural violence, without pointing to any way out. To correct this misunderstanding, and to identify a basis for emancipatory agency in Africa, I turn to Biko’s critical analysis of Black governmentality under apartheid, which points forward to postcolonial empowerment.

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is twofold: first, I aim to establish to what extent Fanon ascribes intrinsic value to violence or whether it would be more accurate to align his position with a constructive and instrumental conceptualisation of violence. From a close reading of his 1960 address ‘Why We Use Violence’ (Fanon [1960] 2018) and the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 2004), a more nuanced understanding emerges that avoids the trap of the Arendtian binary scheme, which validates instrumental violence while dismissing Fanon’s conceptualisation as non-instrumental. Ascribing intrinsic value to violence in Fanon decontextualises violence, which cannot be understood outside of the end it serves in the struggle for decolonisation. The intrinsic necessity of violence in colonial contexts is wrongly conflated with the intrinsic value of violence beyond instrumentality. The necessity of violence upon which Fanon insists is not an unqualified advocation of violence or a call for violence ex nihilo. Instead, he is urging the colonised to make productive use of the violence that is already given to them. Violence as Fanon conceptualises it, it will be shown, is not merely instrumental and reactive, but is also creative and constructive. In the second instance, a critical assessment of Fanon’s creative and liberatory conceptualisation of violence is needed for the question remains, was Fanon right in his belief that violence in the context of the French-Algerian War would purge the African mind of the trauma colonisation inflicted, that violence is not endlessly self-perpetuating but would give rise to newly empowered subjects capable of postcolonial nation-building. To critically assess the effects of revolutionary violence, I confront Fanon’s conceptualisation with the lived wartime experiences of Algerian intellectual Feraoun as documented in his Journal 1955–1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War (2000) in the conclusive part of this paper. Feraoun concurs with Fanon that violent retaliation is a necessary condition to bring about liberation, but his testimonial reveals that revolutionary violence did not cleanse the Algerian subjects of their psychological dehumanisation, but instead spawned violent, inhumane revolutionary subjects who ended up wielding the violence they opposed against their own people.

ABSTRACT Following Jonathan Lear and Frantz Fanon, and disagreeing with both to some extent, I aim to make sense of what happens to a people when the conditions for their continued existence as those people have been radically and irreversibly eroded by colonial violence. I am also interested in understanding how and in what sense culture can be brought back to life once it has been crushed. Following Lear, I explore how Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow nation, managed the transition of his people from hunter-gatherer warrior existence to reservation life. I think Lear’s analysis of what he terms the ‘ontological vulnerability’ of all cultures helps explain what was at stake in this transition. However, I am not entirely satisfied with Lear’s account of how the Crow could continue to be Crow once the conditions for traditional Crow existence are no longer present, but I owe him a debt of gratitude for helping me think through these complex issues. Fanon’s account of culture and mutual recognition can help us better understand what is at stake. However, despite its richness, I am not wholly satisfied with the details of Fanon’s project. I think his revolutionary psychiatry ultimately fails to achieve its emancipatory aims. I conclude by recommending a turn towards the poetic, something both Lear and Fanon recommend.

Older people in sub-Saharan Africa are growing more rapidly in number than any other age group and at the fastest rate of all the main world regions, against a backdrop of major trends and events impacting Africa including poverty, urbanization, migration, conflict, and climate change. Aging is a biological and sociocultural phenomenon. In Africa being “old” is not determined simply by chronological age but by criteria such as when one’s children are ready to marry, with aging largely characterized as a social rather than individual experience. Gender, race, class, and place intersect in ways that help or hinder aging. This, coupled with ubiquitous societal change, ensures that aging is not homogeneous and is sometimes experienced in unexpected ways. Aging Africans encounter substantial changes in their lives, including in their health, social roles, and access to different forms of capital. Health, financial circumstances, and religious and secular forms of social involvement are key predictors of life satisfaction among older Africans. Respect for the elderly, widely held to be a defining African collective value, has always been contingent upon the resources, including property, networks, cultural knowledge, and supernatural power, that an older person has accumulated during their life. Few elderly Africans possess the resilience to withstand all the challenges that they face, including men, who in the past sometimes faced situations of vulnerability less frequently than women. Multi-sectoral policies and actions are imperative to address the multifaceted impacts of aging on the whole of society, including on health, labor markets, social security, and housing. The inadequacy of basic public services, let alone elderly-focused services, is among the reasons why sub-Saharan Africa struggles to meet these challenges. Few formal systems of care exist. Caregiving is typically physically, emotionally, and financially demanding. Nuanced emotions and values are often more significant reasons for giving care than the sense of obligation encapsulated in the “intergenerational contract.” Filial support in old age cannot be assumed. Even when support from families is available its adequacy has widely declined. Attributing this to modernization downplays a multitude of factors reducing the number of people who might have provided care, reduced resource capacity of adult children to care for aged parents, and shifting normative ideas giving greater priority to the needs of the young. Notwithstanding, wisdom, skills, and resourcefulness enable older Africans to continue to make substantial social and economic contributions to family and community life. Some aging-focused interventions that are innovative and adapted to cultural values show promise. However, the geographic and thematic coverage of publications on aging in sub-Saharan Africa remains very uneven.

ABSTRACT This study focuses on Black South African families and views the non-resident father as a member of a larger non-resident-father family system. Subsequently, rather than taking an individualistic approach that often blames fathers, father provision is approached as a family system issue. Informed by this approach, we individually interviewed four members of ten Black South African non-resident-father families about father involvement. Fathers’ financial provision featured prominently in participants’ accounts, and, in this article, we present two themes that shed light on this issue. The first theme illustrates how the various family members’ privileging of fathers’ financial contributions, rather than other contributions fathers could offer, led to discord and animosity between family members. The second theme, however, is encouraging, as it indicates that although all the participating family members prioritised financial provision, they also valued other father contributions. This emphasises the importance of continued efforts to challenge mainstream conceptions of fathers as primarily financial providers, and to encourage families to directly communicate expectations about non-resident-father provision and other forms of involvement.

ABSTRACT This paper examines traumatic memories of survivors of the Gukurahundi genocide in Zimbabwe as seen through film documentaries. While there has been a plethora of research on the Gukurahundi genocide, few studies have looked at trauma. The power of film documentaries in communicating trauma comes in that visuals can communicate a full spectrum of emotions: joy, anger, fear, disgusts, sadness, trust, surprise and anticipation. This qualitative study focuses on two documentaries the Centre for Innovation and Technology produced: I Want My Virginity Back and One Night in 1985. Findings demonstrate that these documentary films use the body as a ‘geography of pain’ and ‘site of memory’ where trauma is evoked and transmitted to the generation after. Furthermore, the next generation inherited the pain their ancestors experienced, and for that, they will pass on the information to the other generations, leading to the entrenchment of collective trauma. This study concludes by arguing that visuals, in this case being those in documentary films, give evidence of the trauma and suffering that Gukurahundi victims are experiencing. More so, the study notes that documentaries participate in the construction of trauma.

ABSTRACT How do marginalised categories archive and narrate the self in contexts of carceral discipline? Drawing from an analysis of police crime diaries, court records and interviews from Lagos, Nigeria, this article explores the way gang members narrate the gang self while in detention. It asks how an autobiographic crafting that legislates the performance of vulnerability encounters a parallel process of self-making that incites the performance of masculine hardness. In short, how do gangsters seek to signal their masculinity when, in the context of arbitrary use of police power, being able to perform vulnerability and deception is so central to their chances of evading carceral discipline? The paper identifies three key narrative strategies – proximate distance, invisible man, and occult obscurities – as central to the nuanced and delicate autobiographical formulations that gang members deploy in order to satisfy the two seemingly contradictory urges. The article highlights the important role that vulnerability and its performance plays in the gang personae and demonstrates the need to recognise what this means for how we think of masculinity.

ABSTRACT Despite being members of closely knit indigenous groups and sharing a common passport, transnational herbal practitioners along the transport corridors of Nigeria and Niger rely on several social interactions to ensure safe passage and negotiate trading spaces within their host communities. With a qualitative research method through a border study approach with some of these discourses, we explore the processes and challenges transnational herbal practitioners encounter as they navigate border crossings and negotiate trade within host communities. Our paper also examines the implications of these processes for the circulation of herbal medicine goods and services between Nigeria and Niger.