The publication of an English translation of Joseph Tonda’s major work Le Souverain modern: le corps du pouvoir en Afrique centrale (The Modern Sovereign: the body of power in Central Africa) finally makes at least a part of his corpus accessible to anglophone readers. In this review article, we discuss this book in relation to Tonda’s three other major titles, thus highlighting how his work continues to pose challenges to African studies and the social sciences in general. Tonda’s great merit is to try to understand the difficulties and confusions of living the everyday in African contexts by creatively reinterpreting established notions – older and more recent – from the Western social sciences. Marx, Freud, Bourdieu, Derrida, Spivak, Žižek and the Comaroffs are all present, but they take on new appearances in the surprises of African city life. Thus, Tonda argues that central notions – such as fetishization, symbolic violence, the imaginary, and indeed power itself – need to be overhauled to make them relevant to (Central) Africa. Indeed, his analytic creativity shows that an African reading can breathe new life into social scientific concepts and make them better suited for exploring the future of the West itself.

Anglophone readers have had to wait for quite some time to read Tonda. The Modern Sovereign, his only book translated thus far, was originally published in 2005, attracting much attention among francophone audiences. It took the commitment and courage of Naveen Kishore, the creative editor of Seagull Books, and a genial translator like Chris Turner (well known for his translations of Barthes, Sartre, Duras and others) to produce an English translation that does full justice to the vibrancy of Tonda’s prose. It is striking that, sixteen years later, the book has lost little of its topicality. In (Central) Africa, the ‘body of power’, which refers not only to the postcolonial state but also to power relations in general, remains an enigma to most observers – both Africans and outsiders – as it constantly takes unexpected turns, mostly marked by ever more violence. As in his other books, Tonda’s intensive experience of such confusion, which he observes with a clear ethnographic eye and not without humour, allows him to open up new perspectives at the crossroads of the social sciences.

Joseph Tonda, originating from both Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon, studied sociology in France in the early 1980s and obtained a chair at Université Marien Ngouabi in Brazzaville in 1984. In 1997, the civil war in the city forced him to flee to Gabon, a terrifying episode that plays a central role in his work. There, he obtained a chair at Université Omar Bongo in Libreville and, despite many affiliations with French academia (including at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), he chose to remain in Gabon. Tonda’s ongoing presence and immersion in the postcolonial everyday of the African city has deeply shaped his work, all the more so since contemporary debates in sociology/anthropology. In some respects, Modern Sovereign builds on the main theme of Tonda’s eye-opening first book, La Guérison divine en Afrique centrale: Congo, Gabon (Divine Healing in Central Africa: Congo, Gabon): namely, his impatience with the idea of a ‘Great Divide’ (Grand Partage), which Tonda finds cropping up explicitly or implicitly in many Africanist writings. This ‘Divide’ – observers’ tendency to oppose outside elements (such as the market, Christianity, the state or technology) with l’esprit sorcellaire (the spirit of witchcraft), deemed the very quintessence of the local – invariably leads to depicting witchcraft’s stubborn resistance as the root cause of Africa’s present-day crisis. For Tonda, this is a basic misunderstanding. Instead, he emphasizes the contemporaneity of ‘local’ and external processes, using the image of steaming ‘magma’ that amalgamates all these elements. This is graphically illustrated in La Guérison divine by a rich ethnography of healing practices in Congo and Gabon: Pentecostal prophets hinting at their access to local cults, nganga (healers) using images from the Bible and Western pop magazines, and Catholic priests who exorcise evil spirits with the help of the ancestors.

All these fascinating examples from Congo and Gabon make La Guérison divine Tonda’s most approachable book, although it also proposes several innovative sociological concepts. The first is the idea of ‘God’s work’ (le travail de Dieu). Constructed from a popular expression in Central Africa, this concept underlines the forms of agency brought by missionaries and Europeans to Africa (p. 54). In submitting to and diffusing God’s work, people are individualized, separated from lineages and family networks. (Another favourite concept of Tonda is déparentalisation or ‘deparenting’, elaborated upon in a later article.Footnote ¹ ) Driven by material struggles against witchcraft and fetishes, people further accumulate what Tonda calls ‘God’s capital’ (La Guérison divine, p. 59). By seeking to be cured of misfortune through the church and thus break away from ‘traditional’ ways of life, patients and healers seek to partake in God’s capital and in God’s puissance (power), hoping to thus acquire status, health and charisma. However, Tonda is careful to emphasize that the idea of the Christian God should not be opposed to the génie du paganisme (animist systems), as too many scholars have claimed in the name of cultural difference. Instead of seeing the ongoing force of sorcery and pagan beliefs as the opposite of Christianity and rational thinking, Tonda shows that the Christian God has been equally magical all along, structurally linked to the power of witchcraft and fetishes, the modern commodity system and pagan beliefs (p. 27, pp. 226–7). All these figures of power and violence, healing and therapy belong in the same system, marked by ambivalence and hybridity. For Tonda, the result is that Africans have frenetically invested in the ‘God of civilization’, repeating European injunctions to find a cure against paganism and witchcraft.

La Guérison divine offers many other innovative ideas, in particular that of the ‘business of the body’ (les affaires du corps) and of the ‘body sex’ (corps-sexe). Tonda coins these terms, playing with vernacular repertoires to talk about the human body, its local meanings, and embodied practices of healing and sorcery. La Guérison divine also analyses in detail many famous movements and figures in Central Africa: Mami Wata, the prophetic ‘Mademoiselle’ movement. He also devotes an entire chapter to the ways in which healers deal with HIV and AIDS. As a disease that cannot be cured through biomedicine, HIV and AIDS prompt patients to consult various ‘doctors’, priests and prophets, and leaders of Pentecostal churches, who are all invested in God’s work while partaking in local forms of knowledge and expertise.

In The Modern Sovereign, Tonda tries to further understand who is the uniting figure behind this amalgamation of market, state and ‘God’s work’. And this is where the demonic figure of The Modern Sovereign emerges. On the cover of the English book, he compares this ‘sovereign’ to Hobbes’ Leviathan and Marx’s Capital. Yet the main effort of the book is to understand how the particular historical context of colonization and postcoloniality in Africa gave shape to such a frightening condensation of power. Crucial for Tonda, this figure is a ‘social relation’ and therefore invisible. Yet the relation shapes its subjects in such a way that it can capture both ordinary people and their leaders inside this network. To suggest that the demonic power of this relation is a product of the colonial encounter, Tonda presents an original and heavily charged understanding of this encounter as a sacrifice gratuit (sacrifice for nothing) by Africans. To unduly simplify a complex argument, in Tonda’s view, Africans had to sacrifice everything (wealth in people, polygyny, etc.) to be acceptable to whites and their God, while the value of what they received for this primordial loss remained precarious at best (The Modern Sovereign, p. 164, 187). The consequence of this fatal exchange is a general obsession in Africa with the White Man’s things as a colonial ‘debt’ that has yet to be paid. It is this explosive mix of disappointed entitlement and restless materialism that produces the ‘modern sovereign’.

Contrary to contemporary historians’ insistence on African resilience and agency, Tonda argues that Central Africans are still deeply invested in the power of colonial domination, an inherited power that is both structuring and alienating. Because of this, he argues, they still desire to ‘become’ a white person, even if only by procuration. Similarly, crime, whatever its nature, continues to be an accepted determinant of power (p. 214). This combination of power and violence remains an inescapable legacy of colonialism. Indeed, for Tonda, contemporary Africans are caught in a double system of oppression: on the one hand, white people continue to produce Africans as savages and ‘Others’; on the other, there is a regime of submission (soumission) created by Africans themselves. This incites already oppressed and violated people to exercise even more violence upon themselves. In Tonda’s extremely original if radically pessimistic view, both forces connive to oppress contemporary Africans.

In such a context, fetishization is everywhere, and this leads Tonda to invoke theories from Freud, Marx and other Western thinkers. Yet Tonda reveals a cardinal difference: in Africa, the concept of the fetish is always pregnant with a charge of reality, making it almost impossible to separate the ‘object’ from the added meaning attributed to it. This is evident even in the early reports of Western explorers on the West African coast and in everyday life in the postcolony; everything remains fetishized – things, bodies, authority, and the modern sovereign himself.

Crucial for Tonda is that the ‘modern sovereign’, as a structure of power, is articulated through a particularly rich and oppressive system of beliefs. It works on people’s everyday lives through figures such as Capital, God, Satan, the State, Science, Mami Wata, night husbands (maris de nuit), witchcraft and ritual murders. These ever changing figures and beliefs keep the African subject in slavery, tied to a morbid fascination with power (p. 220). For instance, people may accuse others of having stolen organs from young victims to enrich themselves or win elections (p. 212). Or a rumour may circulate about a man who goes to his girlfriend’s house only to transform into a snake, penetrate her and steal her energy (p. 235). These figures are imaginary yetall too real, leading to implacable violence on African subjects themselves.

In such a context, Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic violence’ loses its resonance. Tonda here surpasses Western social science in showing that violence in Central Africa is not just symbolic, but physical; it is not a structuring force but a dissolving one, which is exercised both by the dominant and the oppressed. Tonda focuses on what he calls ‘the violence of the imaginary’ as one of the main weapons of the modern sovereign. What makes reading this book a conceptual adventure is the author’s depiction of the unbridled power of popular imaginaries in contemporary Africa – ‘as such they shatter the … classical oppositions’ of Western thinking (p. 345). Readers who are less familiar with the overwhelming qualities of African imaginaries might benefit from starting with Chapter 4, which offers a vivid overview of the magical appearances of power in Gabon. This chapter describes former President Omar Bongo mixing Freemasonry with local cults in his quest for special powers. It also discusses the public’s obsession with the lugubrious trade in ‘spare parts’: elites having children ritually killed by ‘fetishists’ who then use their victims’ genitals as charms that ensure riches or political success. It is only after such an imaginative ethnography that Tonda raises his central question about the relevance of social scientific concepts to African imaginaries. This chapter can thus provide context for the longer and more theoretical first chapter, highlighting the urgency of the author’s general reflections.

This rapid overview may also give an idea of the variegated background of Tonda’s theoretical inspiration. Like so many French Africanists he was inspired by Georges Balandier, whose seminal article ‘La situation coloniale: approche théorique’ offered (as early as 1951) a probing analysis of the ambiguities of the colonial situation.Footnote ² Also, the Marxizing trend among several of Balandier’s followers around the Institut des Études Africaines at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris – Emmanuel Terray and also Claude Meillassoux – left its mark on Tonda’s thinking. But the great originality of Tonda’s work is that he combined this, especially from the 1990s, with increasing interest in the power of popular imaginaries in postcolonial Africa. In this respect, his work increasingly converged with approaches by the group around Politique Africaine (Jean-François Bayart, Achille Mbembe and others). It is especially this mix of a keen interest in material circumstances and the power of imaginaries that made Tonda’s Le Souverain moderne – from 2005 – a forerunner in the struggle for decolonizing African studies. Like Valentin Mudimbe, Tonda emphasizes that Africa was a colonial invention, but he goes on to analyse the great weight of the legacy of colonialism for Africans in their everyday life.

For Tonda, decolonizing not only means reframing Western notions through bold self-reflection on the challenges of living in a postcolonial city. In his last two books especially, he gives his reflections wider relevance – an almost prophetic quality – for situations elsewhere in the world, including the West, which is increasingly marked by forms of precarity that have such a long history in African contexts. As such, these books can be read as good examples of the ‘theory from the South’ in which Jean and John Comaroff vested their hopes for the future of social sciences.Footnote ³ Like Achille Mbembe, Tonda is able to illuminate African situations from the standpoint of global cultural criticism and back, and to do so in new and exciting ways. But Tonda’s work is more grounded in the field, offering the reader a uniquely rich tapestry of case studies, stories and patterns that allows the reader to approach, if only temporarily, the terrible constraints and dead ends in which contemporary Africans find themselves caught.

Tonda’s 2015 book L’Impérialisme postcolonial: critique de la société des éblouissements (Postcolonial Imperialism: critique of a dazzled society) tackles the agency of images in local and global context. Alongside Bwiti (the well-known healing cult from Gabon) and other African examples, famous global pop stars such as Trinidadian singer Nicki Minaj take centre stage. For Tonda, postcolonial imperialism is spectral. An illustration of what he means by ‘spectral imperialism’ is provided by the first seuil (threshold) of this book: a gripping first-hand description of a frightening encounter with the child soldier Johnny-Chien-Méchant (Johnny Mad Dog) while fleeing from the violence of the civil war in Brazzaville in 1997. The idea of a seuil plays a key role in L’Impérialisme postcolonial; indeed, the book is structured around a series of eight seuils preceded and followed by a more general chapter. For Tonda, the ‘threshold’ is a zone of transition, ‘a meeting of light and shadow’, which creates a state of ‘being dazzled’ (éblouissement) (p. 44). Indeed, the first of such ‘meetings’ unfolded in dazzling terror.

By starting his book with the horror story of meeting Johnny Mad Dog, Tonda stresses that his theoretical explorations are triggered by personal experience, rather than being an anthropological reflection on a ‘field of study’ by an ‘external observer’ (p. 44). And, indeed, personal experience figures large. Travelling in a small group of civil servants, teachers and other urbanites, harassed and exhausted after a long journey, Tonda and his companions stop at a bar near the border with Gabon. In marches Johnny-Chien-Méchant, a child soldier with a terrifying reputation. Tonda focuses on the autonomous reactions of his own body, the tremors and ticks that threaten to give him away, and on his state of blindness in the face of imminent danger. Fortunately for Tonda, Johnny’s aggression turns towards some market women and to the commander of a local roadblock, whom he shoots on the spot before marching off with his entourage.

The ‘real’ Johnny dies in Congo soon after this chance meeting. But Tonda continues encountering him: Johnny becomes the subject of a novel (by Emmanuel Dongala), a movie, and then finally turns up when Tonda attends a seminar in 2014 by Andrea Ceriana Mayneri on child soldiers in the Central African Republic. Tonda concludes that Johnny must have existed long before he was born, as a hero figure from the postcolonial imaginary on the border of the real and unreal, akin to figures such as Osama Bin Laden or popstar Nicki Minaj. For Tonda, the agency of this empire des éblouissements (spectral empire of endazzlement) creates its own forms of violence. To deal with such processes, a sociology in terms of ‘roles’ or ‘interactionism’ will no longer suffice. Instead, Tonda proposes a focus on the imaginary violence of impérialisme postcolonial: illusions and abstractions that acquire an all too real agency (p. 55, 57).

In doing so, Tonda signals a worrying gap in postcolonial studies. He speaks of une bévue (a blunder), a strong term borrowed from Althusser and Balibar (p. 71). According to Tonda, postcolonial studies highlight how white colonizers create images of black people reflecting the former’s self-hatred, yet neglect to consider how these images ‘colonize’ Western imaginaries in turn. Indeed, Tonda speaks of a ‘black colonialism’ over the white mind (p. 72). In his fourth seuil, which has the eloquent title ‘Corps-sexes, seins obus, DVD et VCD Footnote ⁴ éblouissants’ (‘Sexual bodies, breast bombs, and dazzling clothing’), he provides telling examples of this tendency on a global scale. The power of such (post)colonial imaginaries makes Tonda quite pessimistic about a possible decolonizing of anthropology and the role of African anthropologists in this endeavour. Since anthropology was originally about human beings deemed ‘the Others’ of modern Europe, what is the position of an African anthropologist writing about his own community (p. 201)? Again, Tonda draws from his own experiences to elaborate on this question.

Tonda describes how, at the roadblocks that made life so terribly dangerous during the civil war in Brazzaville, militiamen (among whom were students of sociology and anthropology) used ethnolinguistics and anthroponomy as anthropological interrogation techniques to determine the ‘real’ ethnic origin of township dwellers, who had until then lived peacefully together. In the process, brand new ethnicities emerged with artificial names such as NibolekFootnote ⁵ and Tchek, triggering genocidal tendencies within what were once seen as single ethnic groups. The neighbourhood of Bacongo also came to be known as Sarajevo. For Tonda, this nickname expresses the force and violence of postcolonial imperialism: imagining the ‘Other’ as Bosnian encouraged genocide. The impossibility of African anthropologists breaking away from colonial frameworks such as ethnic identifications – in fact, the whole organization of the discipline seems to push in this very direction – gives one little faith in anthropology’s future. For Tonda, it is a discipline that remains haunted by ‘a frame of absence, invisibility, shadowing and forgetting’ (p. 214).

Yet Tonda’s focus on the agency of éblouissement and the dazzling qualities of images opens up interesting perspectives for an anthropology, in Africa or elsewhere, that seeks to go beyond ethnic frameworks and issues of identity in general. His fascinating examples highlight the proliferation of new social media and techniques in Africa, which make people barely able to cope with the wild production of images that circulate with ever increasing intensity. This is a global phenomenon taking on pregnant forms in the West as well. Tonda’s emphasis on the reality of images and the agency they thus acquire offers a particularly cogent demonstration of Baudrillard’s maxim about the image no longer being a reflection but the reality itself. Even more inspiring is the fact that, as the intensity of Tonda’s own experiences shows, issues of truth and falsity are no longer relevant for understanding the reality and power assumed by images. He concludes the chapter (Seuil 1) with his meeting with the fearsome child soldier: ‘in the empire of Johnny Mad Dog there is no “true” or “false”’ (p. 56). Tonda’s book was published before Donald Trump became president, but the link with ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ is clear. Again, there is the strong suggestion that Africa, with its long habitus of living with the invisible as a capricious reality, in a certain sense prefigures the West.

In his last book, published in 2021, Afrodystopie: la vie dans le rêve d’autrui (Afrodystopia: living in the Other’s dream), Tonda elaborates on his idea of African elements such as l’esprit sorcellaire being allied with the capitalist market, the colonial state, and ‘the work of God’ to form one steaming ‘magma’, but now in relation to two audacious starting points. One is the idea, developed earlier together with Florence Bernault,Footnote ⁶ of Central Africa as ‘a tropical dystopia’. The other is that Africans (both on the continent and in the diaspora) are living in the dream of ‘the Other’ without knowing so and therefore with all the more paralyzing effects. In theorizing the concept of dystopia, Tonda returns to both Thomas More, who coined the term ‘utopia’, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as the most haunting examples of its inverse. As in Tonda’s earlier books, using quotes from a Western author such as Orwell to explain everyday life in postcolonial Libreville and Brazzaville produces striking convergences while blowing new life into Orwell’s strange inversions. The same applies to Tonda’s use of the social scientific classics: Marx, Freud and Durkheim. To give just one example, Tonda quotes Marx and Lyotard to demonstrate that money brings incommensurable things into relation (Afrodystopie, p. 64). However, as Tonda notes, in the Central African context, la sorcellerie (witchcraft), a supremely resilient imaginary, is similarly able to produce impossible links and in popular conceptions, moreover, is closely intertwined with money.

Yet it is the concept of ‘living in the Other’s dream’ that raises the most original questions in Afrodystopie. Tonda develops this idea from the commonplace Central African notion of le mari de nuit (the night husband), about whose regular and exhausting visits so many people in Gabon complain.Footnote ⁷ Such complaints are dramatic: the nightly visitor – unnamed and faceless – puts his sexual ‘slaves’ through such intensive ecstasy that they are left exhausted during the day and estranged from their spouses. One obvious interpretation is that le mari is merely a figment of the victim’s dream. But for Tonda (pp. 213–15), the reverse is true: the victim lives in the dream of its master, who is not even a person but rather an abstraction, a ‘thing’ without intentions, a force following its own momentum. Precisely because of this, le mari can personify all the elements of Tonda’s ‘magma’: l’esprit sorcellaire as well as the laws of money and the market introduced in colonial times and now represented by invasive forms of neoliberal capitalism. The postcolonial state elites are themselves trapped in the dream of the Other, and the same is true for evangelical priests and prophets. Ultimately, this Other stands for all the riches – tantalizing but elusive – that the confrontation with whites had promised. In this sense, this Other is, again, a fetish. Yet, as Tonda stresses time and again, in Africa such a fetish has always been most real and material; it is a thing with powerful agency. In everyday life, the mix of material greed, sexual desire and the search for revelation seems to spin out of control and, much like the destructive lust offered by the night husband, leads only to death.

Despite Tonda’s rich references to Freud, the idea of ‘living in the Other’s dream’ remains a bit vague. What does this mean in practice for people in their everyday lives, and how does it relate to their perceptions of the everyday maelstrom they are drawn into? Another problem is that, despite all of Tonda’s emphasis on flux and hybridity, binary oppositions sometimes seem to come in through the back door. This is the case, for instance, when Tonda suggests an absolute discontinuity between ‘traditional’ and present-day arrangements (for example, when he describes the belly, the seat of witchcraft, no longer being filled by consumption for the ‘traditional’ lineage but rather by individual ambition (p. 248, 251)). Indeed, especially for Gabon, where European trade had strong impacts long before colonial conquest, one wonders whether the colonial ‘moment’ should not be studied as a long process of articulation. After all, this fits very well with Tonda’s major idea of studying postcolonial confusion in terms of a ‘magma’, an amalgamation in which elements from very different backgrounds coalesce and take on new meaning. However, a major merit of Tonda’s powerful idea of ‘living in the Other’s dream’ is that it allows him to connect local preoccupations – from mystical issues such as people’s obsession with le mari de nuit to more mundane complaints about the state of the city’s roads – with general queries that both the social sciences and people in general have been wrestling with for quite some time now. These include the balance between agency and control, the ambiguity of the subject as actor and acted upon, and the agency of images. Striking also is the practical relevance of his sophisticated interpretations. For Tonda, even the recent popular anger about the devaluation of the francophone CFA currency, which was tied to the French franc, now to the euro, is also a manifestation of what ‘living in the Other’s dream’ can mean: the human capital that was expropriated from black people during the slave trade and colonialism is now coming back to haunt them in the form of global, inextinguishable debts imposed by a dreamlike figure called the ‘market’ (p. 244).

The great strength of Tonda’s books is to convey so vividly the sheer force of African imaginaries, and hence their destabilizing impact on established conceptions in the social sciences. Tonda has a true talent for conveying the turns and challenges of everyday African city life. His ethnography – sometimes startling, often mixed with irony – inspires a most creative re-reading (sometimes also tinged with irony) of social scientific theory. It is this combination that makes reading The Modern Sovereign and his other books – hopefully soon to be translated into English as well – a true voyage of discovery into new interpretations of basic human concerns.