The afterword explains why Louis Bieral’s life matters. He had an almost unique set of experiences. He illustrates the importance of violence to the operation of nineteenth-century American society. He also suggests the difficulty of establishing the rule of law, replacing the veneration of physical might with the celebration of persuasion.

This chapter centers on Bieral’s role in the 1854 Anthony Burns fugitive slave case, where he organized armed guards to prevent Burns’s rescue. Bieral’s participation reveals his alignment with pro-slavery Democrats and his complex racial identity. The chapter interrogates his motivations – political loyalty, racial self-interest, and personal pride – while contrasting his actions with abolitionist efforts. Bieral’s subsequent assault on attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr., exemplifies the violent enforcement of political power. The narrative situates Bieral within the broader context of antebellum racial politics, highlighting the paradox of a possibly mixed-race man defending slavery to assert his whiteness and authority.

Bieral’s relocation to New York and integration into Tammany Hall’s Empire Club mark his rise as a political enforcer. The chapter details his involvement in pedestrianism, prizefighting, and Democratic factionalism, including the violent 1859 Syracuse convention. Bieral’s alignment with pro-slavery “Hards” and his role in suppressing abolitionist dissent reflect the entwinement of sport, politics, and violence. His involvement in the Heenan–Sayers fight and other high-profile events solidified his status as a cultural figure. The narrative emphasizes the performative nature of masculinity and the strategic deployment of physicality in political contests.

Chapters 2 and 3 form the ethnographic heart of the book, exploring the economic niches that form an informal welfare system largely reserved for disabled people. Chapter 2 considers brokering at the Kinshasa-Brazzaville border, an activity viewed by some as ‘given’ by the state as a form of compensation for the lack of social welfare. Examining in detail the dynamics of community and the activities performed at the border, the chapter shows how the social values underpinning personal relationships were tested in the moral dilemmas over a common rhetoric of individualism: ‘fending-for-yourself’ rather than caring for mutually dependent relationships. A moral emphasis on the value and nature of professional relationships was shaped by the knowledge that life and work at the border might only ever be a temporary arrangement, as the most dramatic incarnations of ’crisis’ (mpiaka) drew attention to the temporal frame in which these value debates took place.

No act better distilled the two faces of independence – its aspirations and disappointments – than the act of going to school. This chapter examines the expansion of schooling, and its inherent precarity, in the first decades after independence. Relying heavily on local sources and oral histories, this chapter focuses on the lived and affective experiences of students. It argues that repeated assurances by the state that schooling held the key to a better future consistently jarred with the experience of most school-goers. So palpable were these schooling pressures, that in the early 1960s, Western psychiatrists identified a new, regionally specific mental disorder, Brain Fag [fatigue] Syndrome, to account for the stress students experienced. The rapid, but uneven, expansion of schooling indicated who was excluded from the larger development project of the nation.

This chapter examines ‘supernatural politics ’as practised most consciously by the Cultural Revolution Group during the Cultural Revolution, which used supernatural imagery to communicate the demonic dangers of ‘revisionism’, to exploit popular belief that surface appearances are innately deceptive (compare Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao), and to deploy modes of magical thinking (e.g. that like begets like; that things that have been in contact with one another continue to act on one another). Notwithstanding its highly ideologized content – capitalist roaders, line struggles, revisionism – Cultural Revolution discourse ‘worked’ by playing on the turbid world of yin forces.

Between World War II and independence, roughly 1945 to 1960, anticolonial activists successfully elucidated a link between the spread of Europhone education and freedom from colonial rule. This chapter frames African decolonization as also a Black Atlantic emancipation to reveal why educational aspirations were so central to mid twentieth-century anticolonial imaginings.

The Conclusion first reiterates the three main arguments of the book. It then surveys changes and continuities in global education and development policies since the 1960s, while also touching on the present state of public education in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. It closes by reflecting on education’s double-edged nature as it relates to the problem of freedom: Does education emancipate, or oppress?

Chapter 7 looks at the role of officials in carrying out religious policy. It begins with an analysis of their social profile from the 1950s to the Cultural Revolution and shows that despite officials’ rising literacy and improved political education, they found it hard to carry out a policy that demanded respect for religious freedom, on the one hand, and the elimination of folk religion, coded as ‘feudal superstition’. The chapter looks at four dimensions of officials’ involvement in implementing religious policy: their response to the destruction of lineages and to the persistence of lineage sentiment; their involvement in the levelling of gravesites during collectivization; their relationship to the popular upsurge to restore the ‘sacred village’ in the aftermath of the famine; and the support of a significant minority in sustaining folk religion. It shows grassroots officials displayed a variety of responses to folk religion, which affected the experiences of believers.

This chapter examines the foreign teacher recruitment strategies mobilized by Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Economists and politicians agreed that secondary schools were crucial for producing the skilled workers essential to development. But new nations faced an intractable roadblock as they sought to expand secondary schools: a deficit of local teachers. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire found different solutions to the crisis of teacher scarcity, although both relied on foreigners. Ghana turned to plural sources of generally inexperienced educators. Côte d’Ivoire, instead, leaned on French teachers available through technical assistance (or coopération). Both strategies responded to the maddening paradox of the postcolonial teacher: a role that West Africans agreed was essential, but which few opted to pursue. Ultimately, the reliance on foreign teachers contributed to the corrosion of the emancipatory project of public education.

Chapter 4 examines local concepts of right(s), dissecting the ways in which brokering and begging were viewed as charitable compensations for the lack of government protection for disabled people, but claimed by the recipients as forms of work. Aspiring to have their activities recognised as rights, they spoke a local language of entitlement that conflated the value of independent work with the ethical and political right to care, asserting obligatory rights or taxes, against the donors’ perception of gifts. The language of ‘rights’ is a space of mutual evaluation, a rich and powerful language for discussing issues of inequality, membership, personhood, welfare, and power in Kinshasa today. It is perhaps most significant as a claim for distribution than as a legal premise of entitlements. Here, the question of a rightful share becomes pertinent, as givers and receivers evoked differing views on the same transaction that expressed contradictory aspirations and values. In the absence of formal institutions to enforce informal disability privileges, people had to recognise the right to be beggars or brokers on an interpersonal level, requiring constant value tests on whether claims to assistance were legitimate. The chapter thus disrupts the classic Maussian focus on giving and production to consider the moral and political controversies associated with asking and distribution.

The redemptive religious societies represented a form of religiosity that spread rapidly in the disturbed conditions of the 1920s and 1930s. Most societies had a semi-Buddhist, millennial character, offering members the prospect of surviving the third kalpa, or cosmic cycle, which they associated with the arrival of the Maitreya Buddha. Most were non-political, but certain leaders of the largest of the societies, the Yiguandao, collaborated with the Japanese during the war and later with the Guomindang. The chapter looks at the beliefs and forms of these societies and the reasons for the CCP’s animus against them. It recounts the suppression of the societies from 1950 but shows that they were never completely eliminated. Subsequent sections examine the social profile of the societies and the nature of their appeal, including to some CCP members, and asks how and why the societies survived repression.