Agentive Capacities, Democratic Possibilities, and the Urban Poor: Rethinking Recent Popular Protests in West Africa

• DOI: 10.1007/s10767-016-9222-x
• Publication Date: 2016-06-30T06:20:04Z
• Authors: Ruchi Chaturvedi
• Keywords: Proletariat; Everyday Life

This article revolves around the role of the urban poor or the “informal proletariat” in popular political protests in West Africa. It critically surveys instructive accounts of their participation in the 1990s movement for democracy in Lagos, youth politics in Dakar, and a recent insightful analysis of popular uprisings in various parts of the continent in the 2000s. Various aspirations for change anchor these accounts. Against this backdrop, I turn to everyday life and politics in zones of urban informality and juxtapose it to a discussion of the acclaimed Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku’s street performance towards the end of the Occupy Nigeria movement as a generative figure of protest. The scripts in which we read dispositions of the informal proletariat, their protest actions, relationship to state and power, and hopes for the coming community are central here. At stake I believe is our own ability to grasp agentive democratic possibilities for the future, which the protests and Atiku’s performance illuminate.