Re-thinking the state in Africa through Gabon’s aesthetics of governance

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Gabon’s post-independence state to query prospects for the postcolonial state in Africa. The modernist aspirations of that post-independence era sought to transform Gabonese society through the built environment – architectural design of buildings, layout of roads, landscapes – and attempted to materialise counter-colonial social forms in ways not necessarily reducible to (though certainly in line with) the interests of elites and monopoly capital. As such, the cosmopolitan humanism contained in that that era’s aesthetics of governance lends insights into the possibilities for re-thinking the state in light of subsequent history. Attention to the aesthetics of governance may optimistically open up radical possibilities that transcend governance as mere policy/policing in ways that speak to class, environmentalist, and feminist concerns of past and contemporary political activists.

KEYWORDS:

• State politics
• architecture
• petroleum
• modernity
• aesthetics
• Africa
• Gabon

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank colleagues and friends for their generous comments and feedback for this paper in workshops and writings groups over multiple rounds of drafts and revisions. I am especially grateful to John Comaroff and Joseph Masco in this regard. I would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the journal editor for their very helpful suggestions and edits.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Unlike other countries in Francophone Africa, Gabon never had an independence or separatist movement from France. Independence came about half-heartedly, as the territorial assembly initially favoured remaining a part of France as a department. This is similar to the arrangement of Martinique. The political parties agreed to the understanding that Gabon would maintain close ties with France, in terms of both economic and military “cooperation,” as well as a large number of French nationals living in Gabon.

2. Modernist architecture served as a symbol of the progress and material trace of the nation’s newly acquired wealth in ways distinct from other state expenditures. Although other material acquisitions by Gabonese elites also have served as such symbols (for example the numerous luxury items purchased through conspicuous consumption and prominently displayed on the streets of Libreville), the modernist architectural structures were unique in that they were explicit identifications with the state, i.e., government ministries, offices, and residences with state monikers and names like Palais Rénovation.

3. At US$4.5 million per mile the Transgabonais is one of the world’s most expensive railroads.

4. Dutch disease refers to the deindustrialisation of a nation’s economy that occurs when the discovery of a natural resource raises the value of that nation’s currency, making manufactured goods less competitive with other nations, increasing imports and decreasing exports. The term originated in Holland after the discovery of North Sea gas. In the case of Gabon, however, what occurred was not so much deindustrialisation as hindered industrialisation.

5. Roughly 400,000 inhabitants in a country of a little less than one million.

6. From the 1960s to the year 2000 Libreville’s population doubled every ten years (Martin 2000, 66). From 1954 to 1972, the city grew from a population of 19,500 to over 100,000 residents (Lasserre 1972a, 721–723).

7. The article reads, “Il est à noter que tous ces etablissements bancaires bordent la grande avenue centrale de notre capitale économique, constituant ainsi une sorte de ‘Wall Street’ portegentillais ” (It should be noted that all of these banking establishments line the main central avenue of our economic capital, thus constituting a sort of Wall Street of Port Gentil).

8. Edward Soja (1989) argues the importance of recognising transnational class structures that play out across terrains of uneven geographical development.

9. Although the Central African Franc (CFA) is the local currency, the reference to the US dollar applies nicely as the dollar is the currency for the international trade in petroleum (in dollars per barrel).

10. Hope can be a cruel concept, even absurd in some circumstances. Therefore, I specify that I write of hope using Benjamin’s ([Benjamin [1942] 1969, [1938] 1999) notion of the redeemable. He advocates for re-tracing the past of objects with an orientation towards the redemption of the catastrophic wreckage that is history. To query the meanings of hope more precisely would require posing ethnographic questions regarding ethnographic subjects’ articulations of the past and possible futures.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

LaShandra Sullivan

LaShandra Sullivan is assistant professor of anthropology at Reed College. Her work focuses on social movements, race, gender and sexuality, and environmental politics. She currently conducts research in Rio de Janeiro and Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.