In Praise of Disorder

The Tubu of northern Chad have long been described as ‘anarchic’, in colonial sources and the (scarce) academic literature. They have maintained this reputation until the present day, among outsiders as well as among their fellow Chadians, despite (or perhaps because of) their undeniable influence on Chadian state-institutions. Yet the category of ‘anarchy’, used throughout the literature, is of little use analytically, as it tends to conflate an absence of centralized political power with a general unpredictability of social relations, or even with something glossed as ‘extreme individualism’. Leaving aside questions of power, this chapter approaches the particular texture of contemporary Tubu social and political life through a focus on rules, explicit and implicit. It argues that it is not so much the relative absence of hierarchical power-relations that makes northern Chad distinctive as a reticence towards generalization and predictability—in other words, an avoidance of (explicit) categories.

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