The Statue of Liberty has eloped with Senegalese Muslim prophets.

Through 500 years of foreign domination, Africa has assimilated the world's social, religious, and political waste. But as Africans don't so much defend their traditions as allow them to take their own course, into terrains that are often unpredictable.

Ideological consolidation in Africa is largely deferred, along with effective forms of state governance. But as hardships intensify, so does resilience. These essays respond to an intellectually activist Africa, one learning to turn it predicaments to its own advantage.

Invisible Governance illustrates how Africans may, in the long run, be well prepared to act in a future devoid of national or international cohesiveness - a world of interdependent networks and civil societies which, like the multi-national corporations, blur the meanings of borders and ideologies. Contemporary African cultural practices constitute a new form of political training, one that can respond to the dissolution of the state as a legacy of colonialism.