DE BOECK AND PLISSART ON KINSHASA

De Boeck and Plissart's text evokes a kind of hunting-and-gathering approach, an educated immersion demanding keen attentiveness to the rhythms and images of a hugely complex ecology whose forms of life are fugitive. In part, this reflects the terms that people themselves use, since many of them are in-migrants from one of the largest and most complex of forest ecologies in the world, the Congo River Basin, with one of the most brutal of colonial histories due to the extractive industries of rubber tapping and mineral mining. Realities are fugitive for many reasons, from the skill of evasion to the effacement of murder. Diamonds are ‘captured’; ‘(t)he logic of corporeal dismemberment is also evident at the level of the collective imaginary’ (p. 125); death comes as the result of a curse from an ancestral land chief when he met the white man (p. 82); shape-shifting into animals is attributed to Kinois and foreigners alike (p. 85); and so on. As for twentieth-century history, the stories ripple out from King Leopold's Ghost (Hochschild 1998) and Lumumba's assassination into all corners of this vast territory. One thing we know for sure is that we do not know as much as should be known. Thus do methods based on modernist narrative become not only intellectually unattractive but actually violent, as they effectively silence the real past (Trouillot Reference Trouillot1997) and excise attention to what one Congolese scholar explained to me as the real experience of, in his own case, feeling that the currency and the water supply of Kinshasa were deliberately contaminated.

The book reviews many of these intellectual issues in the preface, and in its first and third chapters. A more classical modernist aspiration to inclusive and comprehensive knowledge is used in these chapters: in part to inform readers, but also in part to make real for them both the limited nature of such knowledge and, more radically, the divergence between this form of knowledge and the experiential terms of Kinshasa's citizens’ own understanding. The dualism of aspiration is explicitly sustained under the image of ‘the mirror’. The two forms run alongside one another, but with increasing emphasis on the latter. It is in the second chapter that an explicitly ethnographic focus takes over, taken up again in the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters, so that the momentum of the argument gradually shifts from the objective history to the lived life. The book's conclusion is, appositely, a conundrum: ‘The Possibilities of the (Im)possible’. It picks up the original theme of mirror and reflection by describing Kinshasa from the vantage point of the water. The land becomes simply a presence in a ‘vast network of waterways’ (p. 226); the view of the water is ‘hardly distinguishable from the watery sky above’ (p. 225). But there is also the ‘break’ between the river's silence and the hubbub of the human presence. The account continues by pointing to the most literal of discontinuities: electronics without electricity, buildings without ‘doors, windows, roofs’, ground that subsides ‘in at least 400 different spots’ (p. 229), water that is supplied only between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. The two forms – material infrastructures based on modern technologies, and social and cultural forms emerging around their discontinuities – coexist and interact to ‘create new forms of sociality and new topographies of propinquity’. The latter depend only symbolically on the architecturally built form. The idea of a garage may be represented by a used tyre with an advertisement attached. The space between two trees, where the newspaper can be hung on a washing line, becomes a ‘public space’. The human body is a site of amazingly precise geometrics, semiotics and cosmologies. Accumulation is best represented by ‘heaps of charcoal, loaves of bread or stacks of cassava roots for sale’ (p. 259). Significantly, the book ends with a long segment from an interview with a Congolese writer, where he avers that cities create, and are created in, ‘voids’ through which ‘streams of energy’ pass in a ‘never ending construction’ (p. 261).

The logical and aesthetic symmetries of this final chapter beckon me back to the previous chapters. What validates this final return to what is, in fact, a tightly logical juxtapositional style? What are the topics and protagonists of the open, exploratory ethnographic chapters that lead the exposition towards the tight interweaving of the conclusion? Quite largely, the descriptive chapters concern domains of religion and artistic expression, by specialists and in the popular mind alike, especially as they mediate disjunctures. They are testimonials and explanations: of conversion from one reality to another, especially between life and death, and of the miraculous processes that mediate transformation. The themes therefore take complete leave of the literal material-immaterial tension of the city here, to take flight into expressions of life and death that are located in the city but also soar into religious and cosmological realms. The connection between city and life/death is thereby set up, but not yet explained or grounded as a plan of research, nor deployed expressly to prefigure the final argument. With long quotations of narrative form, there is a ‘stand-alone’, exemplary quality to these products of ethnographic method.

There are two culminating chapters in this progression of logic. The first is devoted to street-children, with an illustrative case study of one child. Here the authors explore most explicitly the notion that what is created in gaps and voids is not necessarily an alternative order but an ‘incapacity to recognize the distinctness between réel and irréel … between life and death’ (p. 157). It is through the witch-child, paedophilia, children's own identification with stories of adolescent self-realization, songs of grandeur and failure, and the instantiation of ‘the gift’ as a seduction into a different world, that the authors argue that ‘the imaginary as such has swallowed and replaced social reality’, as well as the explicitly symbolic realm (p. 208). It is a complex theoretical argument that the sense of symbol has been overtaken by a reality of the imaginary, but the direct evidence is powerful, extensive and cumulative, and the authors are careful not to imply a teleology: ‘today's terminus might really turn out to be tomorrow's starting point’ (p. 209).

The other culminating chapter is entirely in the form of the first-person account of a female diamond smuggler, with hardly any exegetical text at all. It is a story of constant mobility: between places, men, moral framings of life, and inside-outside of prison. The segue from Mado in and out of prison to the possibility/impossibility of the final chapter, starting with its view of the distant horizon over the river, has to be filled in entirely by the reader's imagination. But by now one is accustomed to the switch of focal length, having been called on many times already to exercise a capacity for switchbacks across disjunctures to find identities, connections and vortices.

The ethnography of Kinois individuality and Kinshasa's specificity is first of all focused on cosmology and conversion, then life and death, then the form of mediation between them of which child-witches are exemplary. The close, case-study, verbatim, nature of this evidence is amplified by the photography, which adds a sense of generality by offering many images of ‘the same phenomenon’: many children's faces; many adolescent hair-styles; many store signs; many scenes of invisible and incomplete infrastructures; many piles of things accumulated into heaps. Both ethnography and photography mobilize a very skilful selection from what must surely be a very much larger record. The relative seamlessness of this study of Kinshasa therefore lies in the relationship forged between the sheer largeness and wide diffusion of some phenomena (‘what looms paramount’), the depth of intensity of others, and a theory of ‘gaps’ and ‘voids’ that emerge in the (literal) failures of modernity.

Although they are not rehearsed explicitly, the methodological ‘messages’ would be: first, know the history in detail, from all sources. Then, for the ethnography, return over and over again to the same place; walk around, across entire landscapes; document everything in as close to the original form and as many versions as possible (voices, materials, images, photos), all with respect to the most mundane of repeated phenomena. Then, concentrate closely on the expressive forms around disjunctures, and particularly between life, death and their transformations. Listen for the most powerfully puzzling and disturbing of all these phenomena, and take a multifaceted approach to them, devoting attention to every vibration of their being. Search for resonances between the mundane and the transformational, in the way that the authors juxtapose the ontology of accumulation/aggrandizement and the aesthetics of piling goods for sale in the market. In and of themselves, these bodies of evidence are not argued in the text; they are presented, and finally cumulatively woven together. So this book is clearly not the result of a short or discrete research project, and the crafting of the juxtapositions does not lend itself easily to an organized teamwork. But the approach is, in fact, clear and logical enough in its own terms, sufficiently so that it could be downsized from a mid-career tour de force to an accessible method by careful phasing and sequencing of its components.

Although there is a great deal in common between the terms in De Boeck and Plissart's book – ephemerality, disjuncture, possibility – and those in the other two books, there are also major differences in the phenomena selected for ethnographic attention and the style of exposition.

SIMONE: FOR THE CITY YET TO COME

Simone's book has also been compiled from years of experience, in his own case from working with NGO projects and living in neighbourhoods in several places rather than years of imbibing the sensate world in one place. Simone introduces his approach in explicit terms. His invocation of possibilities comes at the beginning and the history towards the end: ‘the city is the conjunction of seemingly endless possibilities of remaking’ (p. 9), ‘efforts to piece together viable forms of urban life’ (p. 13), ‘the ways in which African cities are productive’ (p. 15), and the means by which their citizens ‘endeavour to maintain a sense of urban cohesion while seeking opportunities’ (p. 22). Going ‘beyond conventional methods’ (p. 16), pulling together varied research and activist experiences in four widely different cities over fifteen years – this becomes the basis for moving into their self-creative processes, in which he identifies his main subject matter as associational forms and livelihood dynamics. The next four chapters, about half of the book, are devoted to ethnographies of the four cities, each tailored to illustrate one of four dimensions of reality that conventional methods cannot reach: the informal, the invisible, the spectral and movement. The informal is defined as ‘a process of interconnections in the gaps … the heterogeneity of social collaborations’; the ‘invisible’ refers to ‘diffuse yet forceful mechanisms of collective resistance … to specific rationalities of development’; the spectral evokes the haunting sense of incompletion, projects imagined but unrealized; movement indicates the valorization of mobility, of re-spatialization. These are not mutually exclusive; the respective cities simply realize them more or less sharply. Ideation figures in the analytical terminology but considerably less in the ethnography.

MBEMBE AND NUTTALL

Johannesburg: one city again, but a multiplicity of authors, from several disciplines. Breadth of coverage, then, is ensured by a different technique than either of the other books. Like them, it is centrally concerned with ‘forms and processes in the service of one's own making’ (p. 1). Unlike them, there is no real attempt to corral or craft coherence in the empirical approach or the literary exposition. There is a certain freedom in this; each chapter goes so far and no further, not hazarding a summary. The book takes its vocation as ‘to write an African metropolis into the world’ but it follows no particular template: not the fictional Dickens, nor the massively empirical Mayhew or Booth, as they wrote modern nineteenth-century London into the world; nor Victor Hugo, as he wrote the Paris of Les Misérables into 150 years of consciousness. Although the most consistently mentioned theorists are European and twentieth-century – Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze – the form and content of the works in the book are ethnographic in the sense of staying very close to the African ground in the twenty-first century. It is a specifically African modernity that the authors and editors want to bring into play. They invoke the same disjunctures, multiplicities, peripheries and ‘scapes’ (p. 3) as the other two works reviewed here: as in some sense novel, characteristic of Africa in the twenty-first century, and likely to become more and more widespread elsewhere in the future. Like Simone's subtitle, this collection immerses in the present, avoiding all metanarratives, in order to orient towards the possible vistas emerging in the cracks. The difference lies in the composition. By continually emphasizing ‘reading the city’ and ‘writing the city’ in the introduction, the editors can encompass any kind of analytic and expressive genre that tracks its way through the written word. From there emerges another and different approach.

The first part of the collection is made up of chapters in one or another of the disciplinary modes. They all concern people rather than landscapes: people as ‘infrastructure’ (Simone), as expressers of style (Nuttall), as named symbolic individuals (Hyslop), as creators of art (Bunn), as suffering bodies (Le Marcis) and as writers (Nuttall). The second part is called ‘Voice Lines’, and takes a creative writing form: an interview about township life, an e-mail conversation between two African in-migrants, stories of experienced ‘situations’, an account of the night-time geography and electrical circuits, a visit to a megamall, a ‘walking conversation’ with an adviser to a museum project on the apartheid past, a review of art works, and so on.

Several of these are brilliantly evocative; it would require more space to do justice to each contributor than it took to appreciate each chapter of the other two books. What I want to foreground, for methodological purposes, is that this strategy of ‘writing a city’ makes the most, as method, of the individual and idiosyncratic, the episodic, the perceptive, the immediate, the event. In brief, the format privileges the impression and the impressiveness of things, as experienced by different participants, in different places, from different angles and with different interests. It is not fragmented so much as multifaceted, since all the chapters refract in some way the powerful reality of the racial history of the city, now blurred by border-crossings and fading memories. Given the understood nature of the past, there is no specific effort at ‘cohesion’ in either theory or exposition. In that sense it is quite different from the repeated sedimentations of De Boeck and Plissart and the multiple short narratives of Simone. There do seem to me to be two method-concept complexes that all three books share, that I will discuss later. But how is this multiple immediacy introduced and interpreted in the synoptic pieces of the Johannesburg collection?

The introduction, entitled ‘Afropolis’, was written after the two previously reviewed books, and incorporates a discussion of them. Like them, it embraces paradox and identifies gaps, disruptions and superfluities. It starts with Johannesburg as the ‘symbol par excellence of the “African modern’’ ’, so in some sense general or metonymic, and ends with its originality and singularity. In between, it reaffirms (in a passage on Bunn's article) the importance of realism: ‘the actual existing life of the metropolis’ (p. 2). The authors call for a focus on ‘the gap between the way things actually are and the way they appear in theory and discourse’ (p. 25). So far, they are following the same terms, using the same vocabulary.

I find, however, a certain difference of emphasis when we enter the realm of an imagined methodology. The approach advocated in the introduction pauses in slow motion over gaps. It draws attention not only to ‘social black holes’ as existing phenomena (p. 5) but also – more attentively – to their sensate properties, their exits and entrances, surfaces and underneaths. Mbembe and Nuttall point out how the rigid line of demarcation between the races in the apartheid era, which fixed ‘racial enclaves … regulated according to the principle of proximity and social distance’ (p. 21), also created complex in-between spaces. Taken at a slow enough pace, the walk across the real landscape from white to black residential areas took you through ecologies of waste-lands and night-soil treatment centres. Post-apartheid, there are other spaces, all with their own contours and properties. Don't walk too fast! is the methodological instruction here. Take in all the zones of transition (they seem to say): in their own right, their own materiality and their own imaginary. ‘(B)oundaries are permeable and stretched. They can be mapped only if we take seriously nonconventional urban itineraries’ (p. 29). The sheer clarity of the demarcations in Johannesburg's past gives their present blurring and repositioning a simpler historical story-line than in the other cities. There would be a common theoretical relevance, however, to highlighting exactly how borders are made and maintained: whether between races, or at the edge of an electrical network, or in ‘vocabularies of separation and connectedness’ (p. 30), or even at the threshold of a shopping mall or in the temporal space between one kind of dance music and the next in a performance. Johannesburg seems to pause us right on those lines, to describe and account for them in a way that the other cities do not demand with the same insistence.

The idea of ‘line’ is usefully ambiguous here. Mbembe and Nuttall invoke the Deleuzian concept of ‘lines of flight’, and even move into French to express that the city is perpetually ‘en fuite’. ‘Fuite’ can be an escape or a loss; a line can indicate a path or a barrier. It depends on where one is positioned or whether one is participant or observer. With these ambiguities, Johannesburg is a ‘place of uncertainty and disintegration’ on the one hand, but on the other hand ‘a place that stimulated the search for the possibilities of freedom’ (p. 28).

WALKING THE CITY

Reading across all three works for their methodological implications, I find that the imperative to ‘walk the city’ precedes the imperative to ‘write the city’. Those lines may connect totally unforeseen entities; they may fall off the edge of cliffs, only to reappear on the other side of the chasm (or the swamp, or the hallway of the apartment building). And this is not only a ‘mapping’ exercise (as Mbembe puts it); walking is a temporal process as well as a geographical one. The temporal sequence in our own narratives of discovery may turn out to be as important as the geographical or aesthetic juxtapositions that we traverse. And so on. (I think a motor-cycle – okada – ride could work as well, depending on who is driving). The main imperative is to keep moving, as slowly and attentively, or as hectically, as suits the city, the topic and – most importantly and rather downplayed here – one's compagnons de voyage. Who are we ethnographers navigating these cities with, and what language are we speaking as we do so? Are we essentially alone with a topic (from literature to livelihood): perceiving, thinking, taking each sidetrack that beckons, bumping into people whose linear trajectories happen to cross our own, and benchmarking our thoughts and records to past acquaintances of the journey and other unseen intellectual companions? Or have we thrown in our lot, even temporarily, with a local crowd or person, whose own lines of flight we are trying to follow, crashing into the barriers they face, feeling the threats of imminent suffering, learning their own terminologies of danger, the curse-words that vent their frustrations, and the charged terms by which the ‘possibility of freedom’ or other ‘lines of flight’ are recognized, depicted and acted on? From whom do we learn to tell the difference between the sense of ‘freedom’ as we navigate onwards and ‘a set of fantasies’ (Mbembe p. 63)? We may be ‘wanderers among (the) ruins’ (p. 63) of the racial city, ‘track(ing) the visible marks of the passage of time’ (p. 64), but do we do this as individual historians and ethnographers, as members of a generation that can actually remember segregation and can therefore see its erosion, or are we walking along with a companion, a kind of divining rod in human form, for that other spectre haunting these books, the future that city dwellers themselves imagine, hope for, and work – whether cruelly or generously – to bring into being? What we actually do in fieldwork – what we wear (fancy sneakers?), how we travel around (kind of car? on foot?), who we are with, what notes we take and how we pack our research tools (bags, notebooks, cameras, recorders), where we make for (the market? the movies? the mosque?), indeed who we are as fieldworkers – emanates from our answers to these questions.

In what we term ‘classic ethnography’, we submit to everyday life with particular people as they move about in various directions (on ocean voyages, back and forth to coral gardens, morning to evening) or to particular sites, as various people move through them (ritual or healing centres, markets). So the tangible analogous question here is: how would I do ethnography along the ‘lines’ of these three works? Is there a collective thrust here? One can look for this within the texts, between them for theoretical resonances, then into other related works, and finally into the kind of topic it would inspire oneself to pursue.

IMPLICATIONS

First the texts themselves. There seems to be a link between ‘lines’ and the meaning given to that other, even-less-examined, term that occurs throughout all three books: the concept of ‘possibility’. I have tried to tease out the term's ubiquity already in this review, but now ask: is it really as key to the authors’ own ideas as it is in my reading? Having recently published a paper on the centrality of the concept of ‘possibility’ in the theoretical history of anthropology over at least ninety years, starting with Malinowski (see Guyer Reference Guyer2009), I am fascinated by its resurgence here. Possibility has not always meant the same thing. It can go from a surprise illumination, to a specific outcome already seen on the horizon, to an open vista of ‘freedom’, to a terrain on which to struggle courageously for goals or for one's own sense of human value. If we really identify such a quality in African cities, even if only in ephemeral sparks of redemptive inspiration, it could be that the linking of ‘possibility’ and ‘reality’ should guide our ethnographies. Simone is focused on ‘keep(ing) open the possibilities of some kind of common future’ (p. 93), hence on whatever domains frame people's sense of mutual implication. De Boeck focuses on the topics where people work the transformations of possibility and impossibility most powerfully. Mbembe and Nuttall foster the freedom of personal understanding and expression, as represented in the ‘Voice Lines’ section of the book. These are different emphases, that would identify differently the compelling topics on which to train the ethnographic method. Commonality; transformation; freedom.

Second, in spite of this difference of emphasis, there is a certain convergence here. The three books under review set themselves up as departures from other urban studies in Africa, so their arguments from established literatures are not crafted in detail and their references are not comprehensive. Simone comes closest to tracing out both the sources and his own tangents from them. The work on Johannesburg simply departs from the literature, in part to reflect the more radical rupture in the history of the city itself and in part to prioritize connections to cities in the rest of the world: their intellectual life as well as their experience. This makes sense, even if it also may make for some readers’ impatience and regret at the implication of the obsolescence of other works. More intriguing is that, even though these three books move in complementary directions, their reference sections overlap with each other quite minimally: all three reference each other, Appadurai, Roitman and myself (although different works) but they do not share explicit recourse to Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler, Benjamin, Deleuze nor the city classics such as Weber or Braudel, nor any other large recent stream of theoretical work. There are times when the combination of parsimony with respect to references to urban African history, selectivity and difference with respect to theoretical foundations, and convergence amongst themselves creates a sense of this being its own conversation. It is a very interesting one, in my own view, although it thereby faces a very large challenge to match vision with a focus and method of the kind I have tried to tease out here, one that others can work with and expand upon.

We can try to extend the references to other works that might be considered similar in theoretical orientation. My best Africa source here is a collection in which three of our authors are grouped with nine others whose work is exemplary of ‘Ethnographies of the Modern in Africa’ (Geschiere, Meyer and Pels Reference Geschiere, Meyer and Pels2008). Every other excerpt is about improbable movements of one sort or another: surprising transformations and conversions, journeys and vehicles, switchbacks in time and in meaning. One common ethnographic form here is ‘the event’ and its surprising dynamics: an election (Ferme), a confrontation with car mechanics (Verrips and Meyer), the eruption of a witchhunt (Niehaus). Another is the shadow system, the functional or formal analogue that falls outside direct control, such as pirated media (Larkin). A third strategy is to submit transformations to slow-motion scrutiny, such as a representation of a single episode of religious conversion (Nyamnjoh). A fourth identifies powerful and persistent apparent anomalies and bridgers-of-worlds: the Sufi saint of Dakar (Roberts and Nooter Roberts), the sapeurs (dandies) of the Congo (Gandoulou), the feymen (swindlers) of Cameroon (Ndjio), and smugglers of the Chad Basin (Roitman).

As in the books under review, much of the evidence here is verbatim, as recorded by a listener; or in narratives, as recounted by an observer; or in sounds and images as witnessed by a participant; or in the writer's own version of the interaction of multiple voices. In all cases, the fragment, the moment, the crack-of-light is both empirically real and disruptive of a conventionally coherent approach. One eventual question to ask is: do people themselves, then, not search for some sort of coherence? Or, in other words, whose puzzlements and illuminations do these analyses trace out, ours or the actors’ or both? Such a question can pause us on two other facets of the ethnographic enterprise that are less in evidence here. One is language itself. There is attention here to terms, names and depictions, but less to genre, poetics, the literal languages of expression and conversation than in, for example, the collection in the same James Currey series on African Popular Culture (Barber Reference Barber1997). The other question concerns people's plans, however short-run or performative rather than strategic: whether in dejection, as in Ferguson's (Reference Ferguson1999) persuasive interpretation of two styles of life in urban Zambia, or in insurgent political movements, as in Mbembe's own extraordinary account of the culture and politics of the anti-colonial maquis in Cameroon (Mbembe Reference Mbembe1996) or in his attempt to capture particular forms of ‘indocility’ emanating from Christianity's meeting with indigenous spiritual imaginaries (Mbembe Reference Mbembe1988). The rejection of modernist method clearly entails a new and profound reticence – or perhaps postponement – with respect to duration, connection and system, even as an experimental heuristic and even with respect to people's own visions. I wonder, however, whether we are missing something, such as newly crafted cosmologies (see Fernandez Reference Fernandez1986), or simply people's acute attentiveness to how the contingencies of life might be made to fall together rather than just happening. The diviner, the shaman (Humphrey Reference Humphrey1999) and the preacher need their space here. In much of West Africa in the distant past, people had regular recourse to divination for configuring and acting on what was understood as an intrinsically uncertain life, where the gods could be capricious. In many places divination is alive and well, but is it so in the city?

Finally, a brief foray seems apposite here into another, broader work towards ‘an ethnography of the contemporary’ (Rabinow and Marcus Reference Rabinow and Marcus2008). Does the theoretical direction of this work on Africa converge with experiments in method elsewhere? In another review article, I compared particular emphases in the sense of what is compelling that emerges from different area studies (Guyer Reference Guyer2004). Beyond ‘gatekeeper concepts’ or topics, these themes and approaches reflect scholars’ engagements with regional histories and locally based scholarship. Rabinow and Marcus bring forward concepts that are clearly being instantiated in the Africa work: multi-sitedness, ‘found imaginaries’ and an experimental approach. ‘(T)he contemporary is a moving image of modernity, moving through the recent past and the near future in a space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical’ (Rabinow and Marcus Reference Rabinow and Marcus2008: 58). They also suggest a mode of research – on the lines of a ‘design studio’ – that resonates with the Nuttall-Mbembe collection, where the participants were clearly in longer-term interaction than the classic conference or workshop. So there are intellectual resonances. The interesting thing is that, again, the overlap of references to the literature are few. Except for Arjun Appadurai, Jean and John Comaroff, and a briefer invocation of Michael Taussig, one could think that the two endeavours followed quite different intellectual conversations: one African and the other relative to North American issues and populations. From a regional studies angle, I am struck by the non-controversial, low-key way in which history and political economy are sidelined in the Rabinow-Marcus discussion in favour of ‘emergence’ ‘contingency’, and ‘expertise’ (as if the latter were generally of the professional rather than life-smart sort), differing in kind, between migrant workers and scientists. By comparison, in Africa, history is much less containable; it permeates or haunts the ethnography even when set to one side in the explicit section of the exposition. Political economy's containment in these urban works is purposive and explicit. Here, it is seen as so dominant a conventional framing for Africa that its muscularity risks strangling all else. So my inference would be that some ethnographic approaches have become so generalized that they no longer demand regular invocation. On the other hand, their nuanced application to different regional experiences and problematics, with different collaborators in the ‘design workshop’ and as compagnons de route, has not yet been grasped as a general theoretical or pragmatic challenge. I suspect that different regional research cultures would find some quite different plausible models for a research ‘design workshop’: from a guru-expert kind of grouping, to a ‘collective’, to a loosely articulated network, to an action-oriented people-professional collaboration, and so on.

It is here that the space opens up for intellectual ingenuity: between the immediate realism of localized ethnography, the analytical and comparative meaning to be made of ‘lines’ of experiment and discovery, and the social means of doing the research. Having just returned from Nigeria, I find that these initiatives on lines, disjunctures and contingencies suggest many topics to study, although they might be different kinds of topics from any of the works discussed so far. For example, experience over decades could persuade me that we need an urban ethnography of the people's relationship to the electrical power company and its ‘fantastic’ spaghetti network of poles, wires and cables, workshops and generators, surges and blackouts, multiple gaps and failures, Gordian knots and loose ends all over the place. The electric grid affects everyone: in work, in leisure, in artistic expression and, of course, in scholarship. The famous NEPA (National Electric Power Authority, or popularly, Never Expect Power Always) has successfully escaped any and every government's half-hearted attempt to fix it. Its problems are ubiquitous, so we need no special theoretical effort to define the compagnons de voyage for this ‘walk with a line’ out into the city. We are all in it together, zig-zagging back and forth across the unrealized possibilities that have left their ruins and their spectral presences across the African urban landscape. The topic I choose from the inspiration of these three books would take me from De Boeck's workshop under the lamp-post through the video boom to the NEPA budget and its fate. Following Rabinow and Marcus on working with experts, I would spend a lot of time in the electricity plants and the halls of budget committees in Abuja. It would certainly end up being a history and political economy as well an attentive series of insights into events, transformative interfaces, shadow systems and marooned islands where people go back to diesel, kerosene, flashlights and just making do. This is far too large a set of issues for a ‘design workshop’ format, but it is provocative to think about. The great enrichment from these new approaches to cities, and to theory, is that, for the moment, they open the space to walk along these urban lines in some intellectually different ways, while keeping an eye on each other's trajectories. The question of our plan for their possible convergences remains.

It may seem a little random to bring this review to an end with some personal thoughts from the experience of NEPA. But it is in the spirit of these three books, which point to paradox-upon-paradox, even in our own realm. The volumes are unusually heavy, in the literal sense. It is partly the fine artistic reproductions and many photographs that account for this, but also the very heavy paper and rather small print. Trying to read them at night in a Nigerian town, with NEPA on the blink, I began feeling nostalgia for the early populist publishers – Everyman, Penguin, Pelican – who produced books that were easy to put in a pocket, light to carry while standing in a crowded bus, readable while holding with one hand under a dim light, and manifesting other thoughtful concessions to the material means by which ‘the uses of literacy’ (Hoggart Reference Hoggart1957) can radiate outwards from libraries to the world. These books deserve that kind of dissemination, as they deserve to be dissected for their apparent reaching back to ethnographic realism. They remind us that we study ‘presence’, what is there. We collect texts. We follow narratives and sequences wherever they lead, into obscurity if that is where they go. We imprint images. We think. We take a line for a walk: the A-train line to Harlem, a boogie-woogie on Broadway, the electrical line from pole to pole, or the now-blurred line between township and city, between spaces and times where ‘everybody knows everybody else’ and ‘no-man's land’ (Grace Khunou, in Mbembe and Nuttall, p. 240).

So it seems to me that the single largest challenge for the future stemming from these books is to identify the topics that call for specifically ethnographic attention, as distinct from any other method, and to re-address explicitly how some form of concerted realism might do justice to them. We cannot wait the fifteen years during which a single brilliant scholar builds up a vision. If more rapid-response exposition is to create momentum, then there need to be platforms for linking together these experimental forays into the study of amplifying diffuseness, disjuncture and surprise, and, above all, to rethinking their qualities as examples for pedagogy and for instantiations in the lived lives of the world. And, finally, at least some of the products cannot be too heavy to take on that long walk across interrupted landscapes, or too small-print to read in the half-dark.