In The Politics of Distinction, Mattia Fumanti analyses the moral agency of elites. Taking the case of Rundu, a town on the border between Namibia and Angola, Fumanti argues that the members of both the current political elite and the aspiring younger elite are engaged in an ongoing negotiation of civility and distinction in public life. Both elites can be defined by their concern over professional, personal and communal ethics, and this subjective – moral and emotional – dimension is precisely what the book focuses on. By concentrating on the ethics of distinction, Fumanti offers a powerful antidote to the rather common Afropessimist approaches that depict African states as failing and kleptocratic bureaucracies and that reduce African political life to clientelism and patronage.
The Politics of Distinction is divided into two main parts. The first part, on the educational or liberation elite, opens with a chapter on the social history of Rundu. It starts from the observation that anthropology has long neglected the study of small- and middle-range towns as crucial nodes between the state and its (rural) hinterland. It also documents how education, even when under apartheid's infamous Bantu education system, became an avenue for upward social mobility. (Here, Fumanti, though not explicitly, touches upon the work of Gregor Dobler on elite formation under indirect rule and apartheid in Ovamboland (Traders and Trade in Colonial Ovamboland, 1925–1990: elite formation and the politics of consumption under indirect rule and apartheid, 2014) – the two works are very complementary.) Having set the scene, Fumanti then analyses the rise of the liberation elite, for whom education represents not just a means or strategy but also implies strong moral and emotional values. Backed by the Ministry of Education, its members invested heavily in Rundu's associational life that expanded accordingly into a rich and diversified public space understood as both the space of officialdom and ‘the performative spaces of everyday sociality’ (p. 5) in the market, in the street, or during events and rituals such as church gatherings or sports events. Through life histories and an engaging ethnography, the author demonstrates that before independence in 1990 – and especially after it – the educational elite built on existing notions of leadership and authority as vested in a morality of accomplishment and achievement. Fumanti shows how its members straddle their various official and public positions to mobilize people and resources in order to augment their reputation. Thus, Fumanti opposes himself against, first, the common myth that authority in Africa is given and self-evident and that it depends solely on kinship, age or gender. Second, he demonstrates that the Rundu educational elite is motivated by moral concerns relating to civility, merit and officialdom; and third, he shows that the Namibian state was heavily involved in the creation of Rundu's civil society and associational life, thus debunking the idea that state and civil society in Africa are weak and incompatible.
The second part shifts attention to the youth elite. Again by means of a number of portraits, Fumanti introduces the unease of the younger elite towards the educational elite. Basing themselves on local concepts of leadership inherited from the generation of their grandparents, members of the youth elite hold the educational elite accountable for the Namibian government's failure to deliver on the promises made, and for blocking the younger generation's climb to the top. Fumanti, however, uses the metaphor of the reverse palindrome to underline that this emphasis on civility, respect and achievement also leaves room for irony, playfulness and creativity, as evidenced in the author's colourful account of the Shinyewile Club in which he was involved. Fumanti argues that received dichotomies such as hegemony and counter-hegemony, resistance and accommodation, or rural and urban simply do not suffice to understand the moral and political landscape in, for instance, Rundu: his participants continuously straddle the divide between state and civil society, irony and sérieux. They navigate a public space that is not confined to the town but that also includes the village precisely because it is, first and foremost, a moral space.
Fumanti's ethnography is at its strongest in the second part – his accounts of the Shinyewile mocking the officialese of public performance are both hilarious and compelling – and throughout the book he never ceases to reflect on his own positionality. On a more critical note, in my opinion, The Politics of Distinction could have profited from a more elaborate theorizing of central notions such as Pareto's sentimento or of the subjunctive mood that characterizes the activities of both elites, as I take these aspirations and hopes (and disappointments and frustrations) to be the most promising avenue for contemporary research on elites and politics in Africa in general. The Politics of Distinction is nevertheless an indispensable contribution to the political anthropology of Southern Africa; it belongs on the bookshelf of anyone even slightly interested in the relationship between state and civil society.
