Editorial

Abstract

The relationship between agency, resistance and power remains central to academic and political debates on the position and role of Africans and Africa on the local and global stage. In recent years, historical and contemporary analyses have devoted great attention to this complex relationship. This emerging scholarship has become more attentive to the necessity for more nuanced analysis of the ways in which African citizens, their leaders and their institutions contribute, and have contributed in the past, to wider socio-economic and political transformations at both local and global level. By focusing on both individual and institutional agency, the first four articles in this issue offer finely grained accounts of the relationship between agency, resistance, and power in different southern African countries. In South Africa, the history of the consolidation of colonial bureaucratic control and African responses to it continues to be an important entry point to understand the relationship between colonial power and colonial subjects and its contemporary legacies, especially in relation to traditional rule, culture and custom. In the first article in this issue, ‘Faku’s Tusks: Colonialism, Resistance and Accommodation in Early Twentieth Century South Africa’, Denver Webb demonstrates how the colonial government’s attempts to consolidate power through their own interpretation of culture and customary law was countered by Mpondo leader efforts to reassert their authority through their own countervailing arguments on what constituted culture and custom. Webb does this by showing how the leadership of Mpondo in early-20th century-Transkei was punctuated by complex strategies of negotiation, resistance, compromise, acquiescence and assertion of cultural identities. The article admirably shows how the differing approaches to dealing with colonial government and contestations for power within Mpondo society impacted on Mpondo relations with the colonial state. The theme of agency, power and resistance in colonial South Africa is also central to the next paper in this special issue. In the article, ‘“If you belong to my generation and you never read James Hadley Chase, then you are not educated”: Everyday Reading of High School Students in Soweto, 1968–1976’, Kasonde Thomas Mukonde demonstrates the ways in which literature was central to the experience of Soweto’s students and their emergence in the public sphere as political actors. In drawing from extensive interviews with student activists from the 1960s and 1970s, Mukonde underlines how their reading became central to the making of a youth political consciousness in South African schools. This article shows how, despite its repressive nature, Apartheid education unwittingly allowed for the emergence of spaces of subversion and resistance which African students and teachers exploited to their own advantage. Ultimately, as the author poetically concludes, ‘when put to use the imaginations of young people can overcome repression and achieve great things – and can even set in motion the process of overthrowing a powerful oppressive state’. The next two sets of papers continue to explore the role of African agency, resistance, and the complex interweaving of power relations with a particular focus on Malawi. Moving