Violence is a murky issue to research and to theorize: this introduction suggests that it has also often been approached differently by anthropologists and historians. In the pages that follow, we reflect on the ways in which both disciplines have worked to interpret violent events in Africa, whether in the deep past, during the colonial era or in more recent periods. To better contextualize these disciplinary advances, we intersperse them with brief reviews of general theories on violence. The three articles featured in this special section, while dealing with very dissimilar case studies, provide common insights on three main themes. The first engages with the paradox of the contingency and continuity of violence, and with the unevenness of perpetrators, victims and targets. The second deals with the refractive meanings attached to violent events. The third probes, underneath the apparent turmoil of violent acts, the deep moral and cultural frameworks of action that underwrite them. We have composed this introduction around these main questions.

Based on a historical study of older and newer visual regimes in Gabon, Equatorial Africa, this paper examines spectacles as world-manufacturing processes that produce and circulate assets. Visual and aesthetic strategies have often been analyzed as technologies of the self that transform and manifest people's identities. I show here that they also work as a means to create resources and put them into motion. The notion of “aesthetics of acquisition” helps to capture the dynamic energy of visual events and reinsert them into the realms of economic production and material exchange. If spectacles allow people to acquire riches, produce new statuses, and circulate resources, I argue, the process through which this occurs cannot be analytically reduced to a mere commodification of the person. Instead, I explain how aesthetics of acquisition enable institutional and social actors to assume temporary commodity status, a moment and a strategy that I call “transactional life.”

I argue here against two things: fetishizing the power and wholesomeness of colonial archives, and equating the scarcity of post-1960 repositories with new difficulties to write the past of Africa. Instead, I suggest the productive power of odd findings, and the necessity for historians to trust the energy of heterodox pieces to create original and meaningful historical narratives.

Les Etats coloniaux, en dépit de leur origine extérieure et de leur imposition brutale en Afrique, développèrent des liens organiques avec les sociétés colonisées. C'est ce qu'ont montré en particulier Bruce Berman et John Lonsdale dans leur analyse sur la ‘formation’ de l'Etat colonial, c'est-à-dire la capacité de celui-ci à être en partie modelé par les sociétés dominées afin de survivre. L'Etat colonial tardif (late colonial state) en Afrique équato-riale française obéit comme d'autres à ce principe, et l'on ne peut découvrir savraie nature qu'en se détournant d'une approche strictement chronologique occupée à découvrir le moment et les causes de son déclin, au profit d'un questionnement sur les conséquences locales et à long terme de cette période. C'est la raison pour laquelle, à parcourir la trajectoire classique des décennies terminales de l'empire français dans cette zone, on préfèrera sonder la mise en place dans cette région d'une culture du politique dont les effets de continuité modèlent encore aujourd'hui les comportements publics.

This article revisits the trope of the traffic in body parts in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Africa. Current analyses, mostly written by anthropologists and sociologists, explain these rumors by the destructive integration of Africa in the world's economy and the commodification of the human body. While acknowledging their fertility, I argue that these approaches fail to understand how, during the colonial era, Europeans and Africans participated in the re-enchanting of the human body. The first part of the article examines Equatorial African conceptions of the body as central in the crafting of power and social reproduction, and reconstructs how these views were disturbed by colonial intrusion. The second part turns to European discourses and suggests that the colonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of a modern disconnect between the body and power. The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans themselves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body-fetish. The third section puts these ideas to the test of funeral practices to show how, in the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized as political resources. Building on these findings, the conclusion questions anthropologists' and historians' tendency to draw epistemic boundaries between western and African imaginaries.

THE Anglophone literature has conceptualized the history of the African ‘space’ through two major approaches. Fine-grained reconstructions of land disputes have helped to illuminate colonial changes in the political and economic control over residential and productive units, and to assess the local (im)possibilities for Africans of accumulating landed property and/or penetrating the new plantation and market economy. More recently, environmental studies have encouraged historians to uncover how fundamental alterations in the relationships between communities and their physical environment have been shaping ancient and recent struggles for identities and socio-political resources. Meanwhile, renewed attention to cognitive notions of space by anthropologists on the one hand, and literary critics on the other, has delineated deep structuring principles in the ideological construction of space among Africans and colonizers. Few historians have followed through, however, and historicized such imaginaries. Among those who have done so, and have traced people's conceptual, commemorative and moral visions of land, fewer still have ventured beyond the boundaries of specific locales and societies. By reconstructing a longue durée history of the disruptions in both the physical and cognitive spaces of the Gabonese rainforest, Chris Gray's book stands as a major attempt to bridge these gaps.

Randall Fegley's bibliographical compilation is clearly not among the best of the World Bibliographical Series. The objective of the collection is to present a solid guide of the country to the non-specialist, and compared to other volumes in the series, Fegley's work lacks polish and perspective. The volume is marked by spelling errors. Accents in French names and titles are most often ignored. Important authors' names are misspelled: Gilles Sautter becomes ‘Giles’ in the text and ‘Sautte’ in the index; Jean-Claude Willame becomes ‘Willaure’. Ironically, the listing of the latter's book, Patrimonialism and Change in the Congo, a political science essay on Zaïre, illustrates the mistake Fegley denounces in his preface (p. xiii) : most English-speaking readers confuse Zaïre and Congo. The well-known collection of essays edited by P. Gifford and W. R. Louis is wrongly entitled by Fegley as Transfers of Power in Africa, and presented as a single volume (p. 68). Some titles are also poorly categorized, like René Gauze's The Politics of Congo-Brazzaville. Gauze's 150-page text is devoted to Congolese politics during the colonial period, with a 50-page supplement on the decade 1962 to 1972 written by Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff. It is nevertheless classified only under ‘Post-colonial politics’ (p. 71). Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforest, best classified in pre-colonial history, is listed just once under ‘Politics, General’.