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This episode reviews how the structures of power visible at the top of African States are reproduced on a small scale within administrations, businesses, families, communities and every day social relationships.
African power is often analyzed through the figure of the president, the minister, the party leader or the senior official. Yet domination does not exist only at the top. It is reproduced throughout society according to a fractal logic: the same structure repeats at every level.
Political leaders reproduce their practices within the administration; directors reproduces them in companies; managers impose them on employees; local notable apply them within communities; and family heads recreate them in domestic life. At each level, authority tends to become personalized, theoretical and dependent on loyalty.
This structure is closedly linked to the "politics of the belly," in which access to employment, contracts, promotion, protection and public resources depend less on international rules than on proximity to those who control power.
The episode argues that authoritarianism is not necessarily an institutional problem. It is also embedded in ordinary social behaviour, in the cult of the leader, patronage, dependence, social hierarchy and the daily reproduction of domination.
Africa It requires a needer cultural and institutional change in the relationship to authority, accountability, individual dignity and collective responsibility.
