Competition and mis/trust in Africa and beyond

Competition has rarely been an explicit theme in ethnographies of African settings, despite being a familiar dynamic to ethnographers in the field. Trust and mistrust, although prominent themes, tend to feature in discussions of their relationship to cooperation. Re-reading ethnographic and historical accounts of diverse competitive practices on the continent invites a closer attention to the subtle ways in which competition – as a specific genre of collective action – shapes and is reshaped by relations of trust and mistrust. This article begins by drawing this lead out from extant literature, before pursuing it in conversation with the ethnographic materials presented across this part issue. We show that competition gives rise to particular acts and dispositions of trust and mistrust. These, in turn, prompt people to reimagine the competitive structures and practices they engage in. Competition, trust and mistrust are thus mutually implicated. This insight demonstrates how ethnographies of African settings can continue to strengthen conceptual understandings of both competition and trust in anthropological and social theory while challenging representations of African societies as historically uncompetitive at a time when assumptions about the relationship between competition and trust continue to inform macro-economic modelling and policymaking that shape millions of lives, in Africa and beyond.