Approaching African politics means continually examining one's own questions regarding the explanatory power of the expected answers and reflecting on fundamental political concepts such as state and society, modernity and development, individual and interest, as well as their historical determination, normative and teleological implications. There is hardly any region with a comparably short political development period that has such a wealth of controversial research concepts, typology proposals, explanatory approaches, and also explanatory clichés. Indeed, African societies present political scientists with a challenging analytical situation: the low differentiation of the various levels (political, economic, religious, private, public) and their constant and dynamic interpenetration.