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The Comaroffs, drawing on their field experience in South Africa, have recently written about the impact of globalization, neo-liberalisrn, and Western-style democracy in indigenous cultures (2004: 188-204). Using one aspect of the changing situation, they focus upon the widespread problem of witchcraft accusations as related to modern jurisprudence in the attempt to join the many forms of African cultural beliefs with the post-apartheid South African nation state. The situation involves the dilemma of combining Western presumptions of universal jurisprudence rights with diverse African imaginings and beliefs which cannot easily be reduced to a homogeneous whole in keeping with a newly established 'freedom reduced to choice: choice of commodities, of life ways, and, most of all, of identities' (2004: 190). As they so aptly express it, the modern state exists to protect 'new forms of property, possession, consumption, exchange, and jurisdictional boundaries' (2004: 192). They propose to solve the problem of widespread accusations of witchcraft by ignoring the belief in supernatural forces and the criminal aspects of its practice by embedding the accusations in civil rather than criminal law (2004: 198-9). This becomes a partial solution to the problem of imposing an external cultural institution on an African way of responding to disruptive community beliefs and behaviour.
In this article I seek to deal with the broader politico-moral issue of the imposition of the neo-liberal nation state upon varying cultural groups in sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than simply grafting the modern to quite differing cultural entities, I am going to propose a more radical form of change: this I refer to as the 'indirect state'. To illustrate the failure of the nation state I take as an example a people with whom I have done field research, the Sidama, who were incorporated into the Ethiopian nation state at the end of the nineteenth century.1
This is not to imply that the problem of the failing nation state is confined to Africa, for, as Geertz has shown recently in his examples of failure in Indonesia and Morocco, it is of worldwide concern (2004: 577-93). Attempts to instil inclusive loyalty have not been successful and there is a need to develop means for 'containing' and 'stabilizing' cultural diversity (2004: 583-4). Nor do I mean to imply that the...