In Colonial Transactions Florence Bernault moves beyond the racial divide that dominates colonial studies of Africa. Instead, she illuminates the strange and frightening imaginaries that colonizers and colonized shared on the ground. Bernault looks at Gabon from the late nineteenth century to the present, historicizing the most vivid imaginations and modes of power in Africa today: French obsessions with cannibals, the emergence of vampires and witches in the Gabonese imaginary, and the use of human organs for fetishes. Struggling over objects, bodies, agency, and values, colonizers and colonized entered relations that are better conceptualized as "transactions." Together they also shared an awareness of how the colonial situation broke down moral orders and forced people to use the evil side of power. This foreshadowed the ways in which people exercise agency in contemporary Africa, as well as the proliferation of magical fears and witchcraft anxieties in present-day Gabon. Overturning theories of colonial and postcolonial nativism, this book is essential reading for historians and anthropologists of witchcraft, power, value, and the body.

Florence Bernault is Professor of African History at Sciences Po (Paris); Emerita Professor of African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; author of Démocraties ambigües en Afrique centrale: Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, 1940–1965; and editor of A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa.

-- J. R. Kenyon Choice

-- Amanda Ford International Social Science Review

-- Cheryl Toman Postcolonial Text

-- Marc Mvé Bekale African Studies Review

-- Ndubueze L. Mbah Journal of African History

-- Avenel Rolfsen Gender & History

-- Ruth Ginio Middle Ground Journal