The Coda outlines ways that actors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have continued with the work of preventing disability through polio vaccinations campaigns and promoting disability rights since the end of the primary fieldwork undertaken for this book. Remarkable progress has been reported in the fight against polio, while news from the disability rights front has been momentous, with a national law on disability rights passed on 3 May 2022. My interlocutors were hopeful about these developments, while expressing vigilance on the potential disadvantages of articles in the law that could be used to discourage, prohibit or punish the informal livelihoods described in this book.

This chapter explores the influence of Confucian culture on the political culture of the CCP, with a particular focus on the latter’s attempt to establish a revolutionary morality. Having analysed different views of Confucius within the Party leadership, it reviews the debate among intellectuals about Confucianism, which reached its peak in the early 1960s. By the Cultural Revolution, Confucian values had come under fierce attack. It explores the CCP’s relation to specific Confucian values, such as loyalty, family relations, filial piety, benevolence, ‘conscience’, hard work, and the pursuit of wealth. It rejects the idea of the CCP as a ‘Confucian Leninist party’, concluding that its appropriation of elements in the Confucian tradition was often unconscious and always fraught with tension.

This chapter examines the regulation of Protestantism through the Three-Self Movement. Liberal Protestants, like progressive Buddhists, tended to view the Communist accession to power fairly positively, even though it meant that foreign missionaries were expelled. Indigenous denominations were more hostile to the CCP. Things were considerably worse for Roman Catholics, at least for those who were unwilling to break their tie with the Vatican. The Patriotic Catholic Church proved difficult to establish, and no sooner had it been set up in 1957 than its priests and bishops found themselves caught up in the surge of anti-religious leftism. The chapter shows how the Socialist Education Movement tried to use techniques honed during land reform, such as ‘speaking bitterness’, to split insular Catholic villages along class lines. The chapter shows how at the grassroots both Protestant and Catholics fell back on informal networks as churches were closed and clerics arrested. In the case of the Protestant houses, the grassroots movement actually grew during Cultural Revolution.

During Reconstruction, Bieral navigated shifting political landscapes, aligning with Republicans while maintaining ties to Democratic vice networks. His role in the Fisk–Stokes–Mansfield triangle and the Erie Railroad conflicts exemplifies the entanglement of personal vendettas, corporate power, and political violence. Bieral’s marriage to a Black woman suggests he embraced his ambiguous racial identity and repudiated his former support for white supremacy. The chapter explores the limits of reform and the endurance of patronage, highlighting Bieral’s ability to adapt and survive amid institutional change. His career reflects the uneasy coexistence of legality and lawlessness in Gilded Age America.

Chapter 6 explores supernatural rumours as a form of supernatural politics, a means whereby the uneducated put their fears and concerns about the accession of the CCP to power into the public domain. The chapter focuses on two particular ‘epidemics’ of rumour, the first of which told how the Soviet government had asked Mao Zedong for the hearts, livers, eyes, testicles, and breasts of 20,000 Chinese people in order to make an atom bomb; the second of which occurred in the wake of the famine and told of a conversation that had been heard between two toads which predicted that the elderly would not survive unless the young baked them buns in the shape of toads. The chapter explores the meanings of both rumours, analyses their disseminators, evaluates the effectiveness of the CCP’s response, and asks how far they were acts of resistance.

Bieral’s service in the Civil War, particularly at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, transformed his public image from thug to hero. The chapter chronicles his bravery, injuries, and subsequent court martial, revealing tensions between his violent past and military discipline. Bieral’s postwar activities – supporting Reconstruction, working in customs, and engaging in political violence – illustrate the persistence of private coercion in public life. His association with figures such as Boss Tweed and involvement in the Erie Railroad wars underscore the continuity of corruption and brutality. The chapter situates Bieral within the contested terrain of postbellum governance and reform.

The introduction justifies telling the story of the forgotten bully Louis Bieral. His life was extraordinary not only because of his interactions with famous people, but also because of his wide range of adventures. Moreover, his brutal career helps us understand the importance of private, nonlethal violence to the operation of nineteenth-century America.

Completing the arc from the desire to assert membership and rights as an handicapé, the final chapter considers how disabled Kinois turned away from this identity to pursue one of becoming a responsable, someone ‘responsible [for others]’. While controversial, begging and brokering gave access to hard-won economic resources that made it possible to have and care for children. Aspiring to such responsibilities, disabled people showed that integrating economic and social values was both means and ends. By successfully fulfilling the responsibilities of parenthood – the comparatively stable, higher value of social respectability that was once considered impossible for disabled people to achieve – they sought to become ‘valuable people’ (batu ya valeur). Claiming full adult personhood, they both conformed to and transformed the measurement of this highest regime of personhood, enjoining a debate over whether it is good to have many or fewer, well-supported children. Between action and aspiration, a testing and critiquing disposition towards value demonstrates how the extraordinary livelihood strategies of disabled people in the margins of urban society may be a most productive stage from which to examine the emerging debates about what is, or should be, good in society.

The Introduction defines the paradigm of anticolonial development, acquaints the reader with the scope of the book, and situates its main contributions in the literatures on education, decolonization, race, and development in Africa. It argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling’s essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. The second part of the Introduction details the book’s unique methodological approach of comparison in global perspective. Such comparison allows for dialogue across two different colonial and postcolonial histories (Ghana/British empire and Côte d’Ivoire/French empire), in the process offering a regional history of the global spread of public schooling during the twentieth century.