ABSTRACT

The rise, in the Western academia of the second half of the twentieth century, of “social movements” as a distinct object of disciplinary expertise has largely ignored or sidestepped the politics of contention and conflict in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Even attempts at providing comprehensive scholarly overviews of African social movements have been few and far between, reflecting the uneasy discrepancy between social movement studies as a field aiming at conceptual and methodological coherence and the exceeding complexity of African contentious politics. Black thought is challenging the study of African social movements to reject the mechanical internalization of concepts and theories that are not accountable to, again in Fanon’s terms, “the lived experience of Blackness.” Placing Africa in relation to global Blackness and Black theory highlights the limitations of such approaches when confronted to power that ordinarily takes the form of lethal and gratuitous violence rather than the hegemonic solicitation of consent or even the capitalistically enforced necessity of producing surplus.