Beneath the surface politics: Review of African Political Systems Revisited

Abstract

Terence Corrigan reviews African Political Systems Revisited: Changing Perspectives on Statehood and Power (2022), edited by Aleksandar Bošković and Günther Schlee. This scholarly text revisits African Political Systems, a collection of essays published in 1940 and edited by eminent anthropologists Meyer Fortes and Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and reprinted intermittently since then. African Political Systems was an attempt to interrogate African societies in search of commonalities among and difference between them. It also recognised that social change was taking place and that the chance to understand some important questions was moving out of reach. Some seven decades later, the current volume reveiws the issues raised in the original volume. It comprises 10 chapters, with a foreword and afterword. The foreword, by Adam Kuper, and the first and second chapters (by Aleksandar Bošković and Herbert S. Lewis respectively) as well as Chapter 5 (by Peter Skalník) engage with the place of African Political Systems in the progression of Africanist studies, calling particular attention to the areas in which it has been challenged by later work. Working through them is necessary for a proper appreciation of the work that comes in the remaining chapters. Corigan finds that these present a series of accessibly written case studies that reflect and to some extent build on the work produced in the earlier volume.