New publication on the governance of daily life in Africa

Simon Turner explores everyday politics in the bureaucratic space of a refugee camp

‘The Governance of Daily Life in Africa: Ethnographic explorations of public and collective services’ is the title of a new anthology, edited by Giorgio Blundo and Pierre-Yves Le Meur. As the title shows, this is a collection of studies that approach the state from an ethnographic point of view. They explore the mundane and non-spectacular field of governance and service provision as a site for understanding issues of governance, subject-making and authority in Africa. A merit of the book is to bring Francophone and Anglophone Africanists and anthropologists together – two traditions that most often develop along parallel lines.

Simon Turner contributes with a chapter that focuses on the everyday life of Burundian refugees in a camp in Tanzania. Refugee camps are carefully governed spaces, marked by the humanitarian imperative to help what is conceived as the helpless victims of war. However, if one goes beyond the surface of apparent order and homogenized space, one finds a place that is teeming with conflict, power hierarchies and violence, as refugees seek to recreate political subjectivities. Due to its clandestine nature, political opinion is expressed mainly through rumour mongering and closely linked to criminal activities and violence.

The chapter explores how violent events in the camp are interpreted through rumours that differentiate the camp into hierarchically ordered spaces. In this way, the camp is recaptured and begins to be a place that can be interpreted and understood. Politics creates divisions and ruptures but it also creates order and meaning for the refugees as they attempt to come to terms with life in the bureaucratic non-place that relief agencies have created for them.

The book is published by Brill, Leiden and can be bought at their website and is available for lending at the DCISM Library.

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