Hégémonie et coercition en Afrique subsaharienne : la « politique de la chicotte »

Abstract : Hegemony and coercion in Sub-Saharan Africa - Since the colonial era, in certain regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, a distinctive hegemonic process has been afoot. Coercion, intimately linked to practices of subjectivation, is one of this process’s key vectors. It is tightly linked to hegemony, particularly where bodies – flesh, bone, blood – are concerned. In social and political interactions, flagellation has functioned as a recurrent form of hegemonic transaction ; it has acted to set the limits of and to citizenship and has played an active role in the administration of labour. This coercion is a composite entity and stems, in part, from the violence of the colonial moment and in part from the economic and political sphere of the slave trade. The whip must be understood as a tool of governmentality, and a very particular governmentality at that : one of the « belly ». It is positioned at a crossroads, where techniques deployed to dominate human beings meet techniques of the self. As such, it bears intimate links both to state formation and to the elaboration of economic worth in contexts of labor production.