The search for meaning in today's African politics involves a dual exercise: an understanding of the nature of power and an exploration of the ways and byways of resistance to power. The former entails a reconsideration of the manner in which power is understood and exercised on the continent. The latter implies the use of methodologies capable of making sense of the behaviour of political actors. The standard approach to these questions has conceptualised power in terms of the state and resistance in terms of civil society – the one being the converse of the other. Much energy has thus been devoted to an analysis of the post-colonial state and to an investigation of the specific texture of civil society in Africa. This conceptual journey has yielded useful conclusions but it has suffered from one fundamental defect: the propensity to define state and civil society with reference to the politics of the West. Yet the analytical limits of this Western bias in the political analysis of post-independence Africa have all too often been exposed. As a result, the most recent scholarship has suggested that the state should be approached from a different, more local, angle and has conceded that the concept of civil society extant fails to explain the workings of societal resistance to the social, political and economic pressure under which Africans live and work.