Apprehending King Leopold's Ghosts

This chapter outlines the significations of the concepts at the heart of the volume—King Leopold’s ghosts—and, by ricochet, how they should be apprehended by readers. Magic is mythologized social facts and people. It conjoins extraordinariness, enchantment, and taboo. Anything or anyone attributed with these features is, ipso facto , magical, therefore, a potential source of social power. Religion is the rationalization (bureaucratization) of myths, which often originate in personalized magic (charisma). The state is a centralized authority divided into specialized agencies with a monopoly over the means of legitimate violence and exclusive rights to rule a territory and the people therein. It reflects the mythological cosmology of power of a community regarding who has the right to govern, the proper way of governing, the relationship between ruler and ruled, and that between earthly rulers and immaterial forces. Democracy is “people rule.” However, its processes (elections, secret ballots, multiparty competition) are shaped by cultural frames and elite agency, which sometimes turn it into demoncracy in the African context. To avoid providing little more than a laundry list of tedious definitions, the chapter sets forth a theoretical framework for studying the four expressions of power in Africa.