When travelling across Africa by land, traders and other types of travellers are likely to run into roadblocks. Sometimes these can simply be a piece of rope draped across a road to nominally halt traffic. In other instances, large rocks are lined up to demarcate a roadblock. Roadblocks can be staffed by any number of individuals who represent parts of the state, including police, immigration or customs officials. In regions where there are active conflicts or violent competition over state control, armed groups might staff a checkpoint.
The role of roadblocks in the formal and informal political economies of African countries is simultaneously rich with meaning and deeply overlooked, even though roadblocks themselves are ubiquitous across the continent. This is despite canonical scholarship regularly taught in African studies and history courses that articulates why roads are essential to ‘broadcasting’ state authority.Footnote 1 Likewise, Frederick Cooper’s concept of the ‘gatekeeper state’ captures how authority is typically centralized within African states and hinges on transport routes that ensure exports reach international commodity markets.Footnote 2 In Roadblock Politics, Peer Schouten tackles these and other ideas about the importance of logistics, centring roadblocks as a meaningful subject of inquiry.
With this text, Schouten has the well-earned distinction of being the first Cambridge University Press author to capture Africanists’ attention with a manuscript devoted to checkpoints. The penultimate chapter on the hypocrisies of international initiatives to improve the ethics of mining, which a range of diverse communities, authorities and national and multinational businesses conduct in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), is especially persuasive. This chapter should be embraced within classrooms and multinational boardrooms alike for its well-articulated case for how contemporary extractive industry actors maintain the economic and political subjugation of the DRC and other African countries through well-meaning but deleterious policy choices.
However, the more Roadblock Politics strays from the present into the past (as it often does in its first four chapters), the more uneven the text becomes, which ensures that it will not be the final word on the subject. This may trouble historians of Africa, as chapters rely heavily on secondary literature rather than the copious volumes of primary sources available in African and European archives, which Schouten could have used to enrich the text and his argument. When Schouten does cite written sources within these chapters, he frequently invokes European travelogues, overlooking other kinds of primary sources, despite evincing the capacity to identify and read archival texts ‘against the grain’ to find the missing African voices within them.Footnote 3
Unlike Jan Vansina, whose work he often references, Schouten does not engage in the kind of meticulous research that would enable him to trace the longstanding impacts of roadblocks on the continent, at times turning instead to tropes about the region. This is at its most glaring when Schouten describes contemporary trade routes in the Central African Republic (CAR), which are dominated by what are likely to be Sudanese merchant networks, as ‘ancient trade routes’. When this kind of ahistorical summation is combined with his own regular field research anecdotes that uncritically examine his positionality as a Northern traveller-researcher, Schouten falls prey to similar descriptive fumbles as the European colonial-era excursionists he cites in the first few chapters, detracting readers from his main arguments.
All of this is distracting, because Schouten’s main thesis – that roadblocks need to become a topic of inquiry in themselves – is deeply compelling. But this argument is undermined by two separate empirical and analytical shortcomings. The first is that the text often lacks conceptual clarity and is not adequately evidenced. This is most pronounced at the text’s outset, when Schouten neglects to define what he means by ‘Central Africa’. For instance, Schouten’s empirical chapters focus on the DRC and the CAR, but in the first few chapters he heavily draws on literature from what is now Tanzania. The text also relies on only a handful of surveys, which the author undertook with in-country research teams at various points over the past decade. Schouten subsequently makes grand assertions about a region that, depending on how he defines it, is likely the size of the USA. Consequently, many readers may conclude that the text is impressionistic and patchy.
Second, rather than derive theory from what is an incredibly fecund and much-needed topic of academic inquiry, Schouten regularly leaves the intellectual heavy lifting to others, most notably James C. Scott and other canonical thinkers. Even with regular homages to what are now classic scholars, close readers of the text will nevertheless be dismayed to find that Sara Berry’s seminal ideas on colonial ‘hegemony on a shoestring’ are not referenced, even though Schouten dedicates the title of his introductory chapter to ‘shoestring’ politics. When the paucity of evidence is combined with the text’s weak theoretical engagement and conceptualization, the reader is left uncertain as to why or how checkpoints are in fact the ‘origins of violence’, as the title misleadingly suggests, which is a missed opportunity. Instead, the author asserts that roadblocks are evidence of contested public authorities ‘keeping the build-up of centralized control over logistical space at bay’ (p. 264). Fortunately, these kinds of oversights blaze the way for future scholarship, which Schouten and his contemporaries will hopefully redress collaboratively in future work.
