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9 | 2025
Varia

This issue invites us to follow empirical approaches and the collection of material leading to original research on African societies. Carlos Rocha and Hama Thieni describe immersion surveys carried out in places that are not usually very accessible: a Guinean hospital and the juvenile section of the Ouagadougou prison and correctional facility, respectively. Combining questionnaires, interviews, observations and reflections on their participation in institutional arrangements, these two articles echo each other while presenting contrasting material. Oumarou Hamani goes behind the scenes of ethnographic surveys carried out in the so-called “three borders” zone, a cross-border area between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger that is currently the epicentre of intense armed violence, forcing local research teams to renegotiate their access to the field. The articles by Felix Oludare Ajiola, Gabriel André and Vincent Foucher examine the making of collective historiographies. Ajiola looks back at his collection of oral and written sources, which enabled him to rigorously reexamine the founding mythologies of two Yorúbà sub-groups, the Idanre and the Ondo, in south-western Nigeria. André and Foucher take a close look at a speech made in 2023 by Aboubacar Sidi Camara, Guinea's Minister of Defence and a retired general. The authors reveal the speech’s underlying references and deliberate silences, and show how this kind of historiography, described as “vernacular,” can contribute to an ethnicisation of politics with concrete social consequences.

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