This article examines the gendered relationships of authority that are at the heart of the processes of customary marriage in South Africa, as well as the ways in which colonial political intervention worked to effect social change in nineteenth-century colonial Natal. This analysis reinforces the established historiographical understanding that instigating generational shifts in authority was important to Natal Native Policy, unlike customary regulation elsewhere in colonial Africa in which colonial law worked to shore up the authority of senior men. However, it seeks to underline that while negotiations of colonial power began to shift authority from older to younger men by manipulating Native marriage, and in particular the practice of lobola, the effects of such policies produced profound shifts in the experience and articulation of gendered relationships of marriage and colonial authority. The imbrication of changes in gender and generational norms ultimately reveals the contradictions in both colonial claims of liberal gender reform and African claims that colonial policy provoked the usurpation of male traditional authority.

Twenty years ago, most African countries seemed permanently mired in malgovernance and repression. The end of the Cold War triggered two contrasting developments: governance improvement associated with the end of superpower competition, and deterioration caused by the resurgence of suppressed ethnic conflicts. Based on a variety of evidence, three subperiods can be identified: fragile governance progress from 1989 to 1995; backsliding associated largely with civil conflict between 1996 and 2002; and resumption of progress in recent years. These broad trends mask major intercountry differences—with Ghana the best-known case of improvement and Zimbabwe the worst case of reversal. Overall, African governance is now somewhat better than it was two decades ago. However, the progress is fragile, and improvements in administrative and economic governance have lagged behind those on the political front. Consolidating democracy will thus require institutional capacity building through a combination of appropriate civil society efforts and constructive external pressure to strengthen accountability.

The article focuses on the growing prevalence of radio call-in shows in the Republic of Benin that discuss topics such as sexuality and intimacy that are taboo in other settings. The popularity of this emerging format exemplifies current processes of appropriation of electronic media in West Africa, including its impact on contemporary public communication. The article argues that the current public prominence of these programs corresponds to considerable shifts in the media landscape that are enabled by a variety of factors, including an increasing expertise among presenters and technicians and the influence of mobile phones.

For many years, it was traditional for the outgoing President of a scholarly association to give a formal address, usually on some aspect of his own scholarly interests. That tradition seems to have died, and I see no good reason to revive it. The newer tendency is for the outgoing President to talk about the affairs of the Association, but we have the Newsletter and the business meeting for that. It seems a good time to look just a little further afield to the affairs of the Africanist community at large, whether members of this Association or not--to try for historical perspective on the question of where African studies has been and is going. (if I concentrate on African studies in North America, I also recognize that the African Studies Association is not merely a national association. Its membership is and always has been international, but most members still belong to a North American community of Africanists; this is the community I happen to know best, though I apologize for the parochialism.)

It goes without saying that any assessment of African studies must be a series of personal judgments, based obscurely on the prejudices and the experiences of the individual who makes it. The moment may be especially opportune for subjective judgments, since they will soon be corrected by the Social Science Research Council's survey of foreign area programs--a survey directed by Professor Richard Lambert of the University of Pennsylvania.

The process of narrating and interpreting the African past has long been an intellectual struggle against European assumptions and prejudices about the nature of time and history in Africa. As the historian David William Cohen states, “The major issue in the reconstruction of the African past is the question of how far voices exterior to Africa shape the presentation of Africa's past and present” (1985:198). Many historians, especially those without any background or training in African historiography, have assumed, incorrectly, that prior to European contact with Africa, indigenous “traditions” were ancient, permanent, and reproduced from generation to generation without change. This is the false image of cultural isolation and temporal stagnation that has been assiduously disseminated in many parts of the world.

This article explores the characteristics of Nairobi underground hip hop that fit under a common theme of what I term as the music’s “political seriousness,” which is the common notion that the music must be substantive, thought-provoking, socially critical, and never vacuous. This political seriousness is composed of four characteristics: Mau Mau gendered legacies, political love, a reliance on neoliberalism, and a critique of the state. Hip hop’s goal is to make a political space that both proves its worth and remedies Kenya’s flawed polity. This is an imperfect endeavor, as its dependence on late capitalism, normative gender constructions, and conventional understandings of the Mau Mau war contribute to rap’s troubling tendencies. Nonetheless, these artists regard hip hop as authentic or real music because it advocates for the economically disenfranchised, contributes to Kenyan social commentary, and participates in an imagined global hip hop culture.

Interest in voluntary associations in Subsaharan Africa has risen as disillusionment has increased with massive aid programs for upgrading material standards of living. Increasingly it has become evident that programs planned and executed from the top down seldom result in significant change at the local level. When, however, people participate in the planning and creation of local level norms in voluntary associations, they take responsibility for inaugurating change. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the conditions necessary for establishment and the limits of usefulness of associations. Voluntary associations will be defined and followed by a brief analysis of the historical background of age sets, secret societies, and fraternities as precursors of modern self-help and cooperative movements.

There is a consensus that associations are essentially shared interest groups established independently of ascribed membership in kinship or territorially based groups (Anderson, 1971: 219; Bradfield, 1973: 492; Norbeck, 1967). Hoebel notes that such groups form an exclusive membership in the larger society, are formally structured, and produce a sense of cohesiveness among the members (1972: 468). Indeed, in his pioneer work on secret societies, Webster considered such groups as arising out of a “natural grouping together of men of the same age who have similar duties and interests in life” (1932: 130). Schurtz professed to find the origin of such groups in the antagonism between generations, leading to classification on the basis of age (Lowie, 1947: 298). Though evolutionary schemes such as Schurz's and Webster's have been heavily criticized, these two authors laid the descriptive groundwork for later anthropological studies of age sets, secret societies, and fraternal organizations.

A considerable amount of attention has recently been focused upon the performance of military governments. (See, for example, Bienen 1971, Feit 1973, Welch and Smith forthcoming, Decalo 1973, Pinkney 1973.) The brief period in which military regimes have been in power in Africa has precluded the accumulation of sufficient data to verify some of the hypotheses presented in this literature. This article analyses the performance of the Amin regime in Uganda in its first thirty months in power. It suggests that the failure of the regime to make progress towards the economic and political development of the country is the result of (1) the disintegration of the government into a personal dictatorship, (2) the increasing reliance by the government upon coercive and diversive policies to maintain itself in power, and (3) actions of the government, particularly within the military itself, which have exacerbated ethnic divisions within Ugandan society in general.

The Amin coup of January 1971 was achieved with surprising ease given the deep divisions existing within the military subsystem in Uganda. After only a few hours of fighting, troops announced over Radio Uganda at 3.45 p.m., 25 January 1971 that Obote's government had been overthrown and that they had invited Idi Amin to head the new government. Amin's followers had outmanoeuvred troops loyal to Obote and presented them with a fait accompli. However, this relatively smooth transfer of power was to prove deceptive—Amin's government subsequently faced greater resistance to its acceptance, both internally and internationally, than was anticipated.

This article explores the movement to decriminalize sex work in the Gauteng province of Johannesburg from 1994 to 2002. In particular, I examine the actions and statements of the provincial Ministry of Safety and Security and other ministries in the decision to de facto decriminalize prostitution using the international language of human rights. This article illustrates that the movement to decriminalize sex work in the postapartheid period is not a sharp departure from the past. Rather, as early as the 1970s there were minority contingents that advocated a legalization or decriminalization of sex work, arguing for the public health or policy benefits that would follow. What is new in the postapartheid period is the justification for decriminalization, which now is based on the international language of human rights. Also new in the postapartheid period is the inclusion in the debate of voices that were not heard during apartheid, when the media was dominated by white South Africans. There is now a counterdiscourse opposing decriminalization, based on religion and on the argument that sex work is “un-African.”

Reading Paul Richards's excellent paper and, most particularly, the set of international commentaries has been something of a salutary experience and, as I have now discovered, has made my task wholly unenviable. There is, of course, something here for everyone as one might anticipate in any state of the art paper of this scope. The respondents' remarks alone cover a huge intellectual terrain from epistemology to animal traction, from bibliographic style to Shakespearean metaphor, and a good deal more. It is difficult to know what to make of all this let alone to weave these heterogeneous threads into a pleasing, coherent tapestry. Yet, beneath this patina of diversity, lie much more deep seated interpretative and theoretical differences that are intriguing in their own right. For example, Richards's plea for the “honest face” of particularism in relation to what he posits as a congenital drift toward arid and sterile global abstractions and grand universal theory was lent wildly different interpretations by his erstwhile critics. For some this was a glorious new mandate to return to Gluckman and some forms of nineteenth century anthropology; for others it was a disastrous slide into the primal cess-poll of crude empiricism, Boasian salmon recipes, and rampant particularism. For others it represented a healthy appraisal of “the great range of specificities that one should be prepared to confront within a (Marxist) framework” (Henry Bernstein). And all this is wrapped in the almost inevitable empirical provincialism of “my village” or “my region” which provide the basis of individual scepticism and conceptual disproof. Because this is the case, my remarks make no pretense to be either a grand synthesis of highly contradictory contributions or a Herculean effort to locate a "common ground" as some of the comments at the panel discussion opined. In my opinion neither are possible.

The number, behavior, and attitudes of the Dahamean modern elite, of the 1930's have been outstanding among the French-speaking African elites and have earned for Dahomey fame as the Latin Quarter of West Africa. What does this complimentary title suggest? It suggests that Dahomey has a concentration of educated people as does the quarter in the environs of the Sorbonne and also, perhaps, that Dahomeans are generally intelligent and educated. It also seems to imply that Dahomeans are more intensely motivated to secure an education and acquire knowledge than other Africans. Some of these qualifications are beyond our capabilities to evaluate; others, such as the intellectual activities of this sizeable group are an historical fact. During the colonial period more than forty newspapers appeared in Dahomey written and published by Dahomeans, who were also active in the organization of schools and constantly attempted to influence the content of education. After the Second World War, when new political institutions were introduced into Dahomey, the writers and editors of the 1930's, practically without exception, either associated with them, participated in them, or founded them. From being the cultural elite of the 1930's they became a decade later the political elite in their country. It is interesting, then, to inquire into the composition of this elite and into their attitudes as they are expressed on the pages of their newspapers.

Postwar development discourse has been governed by two principal preoccupations. First, the will to knowledge, that is, a concern with expanding scientific understanding of the social structures and processes of so-called third world societies and the extrapolation of generalizable rules of the dynamics of their transformation. Second, the will to change, that is, a powerful impulse to engage accumulated knowledge to transform for the better the material conditions of “the wretched of the earth.” Together, these concerns account for the social engineering ethos of development discourse and the penchant for prescriptive, problem-solving theory. As a result, the contending post-war paradigms (modernization and dependency) have functioned as models of analysis and ideologies—normatively ordered proclamations of preferred pathways to social systems that are congruent with western-style modernity (Banuri 1990; Berman 1994, 235-36; Grendzier 1985, 1–21; Ferguson 1990; Manor 1991, 2-3).

Mirroring these attributes of development discourse, the study of political development has been guided by a preoccupation with two projects that are considered emblematic of political modernity: The nurturing of political communities coincident with the territorial boundaries inherited from colonialism (nation-building), and the elaboration of institutions and technologies for the effective governance of evolving political communities (state-building). For both dominant postwar paradigms, ruling elites who inherited colonial states were the primary “enablers” of these projects (Doornbos 1990, 180). Analysis of politics in developing societies has therefore been foremost concerned with explication of how the unfolding of both projects was determined by the political practices of these ruling elites.

Long-distance radio broadcasting might have become a very important and successful tool of colonial administration had it been invented thirty years before its time. As it was, international short wave broadcasting began only a few years before the onset of the immediate forces that led to dissolution of empire. Ad hoc solutions to problems of colonial broadcasting were thus just beginning to give way to conscious policy when the end of the era came. The subject of this paper, therefore, is limited to the years between 1927 and about 1957, that is from the start of the British Broadcasting Corporation's experiments that led to establishing its Empire Service to the onset of postwar colonial devolution.

The very year that the British Broadcasting Corporation was organized it began experiments with short wave transmissions to the colonies. Such long-distance short wave broadcasts involved an untried technology, new concepts of programming, and innovative financial arrangements. The BBC experimented for five years before it was ready to inaugurate the Empire Service formally in 1932.

During that 1927-1932 gestation period of the Empire Service, the Colonial Office had explored the acceptability in the dominions and the colonies of such broadcasts from home. At the 1930 Colonial Conference, the secretary of state for the colonies spoke of “the possibility of creating a new and intimate bond of connection between the different British communities … and also possibly its utilization for the purposes of the natives” (Great Britain, 1930:9. Emphasis added). The priorities were thus clearly set forth. The Empire Service had as its primary role the maintenance of home ties with British expatriates overseas and with the dominions.

On Friday, September 22, 2006, Gambians voted in the third presidential election since soldier-turned-civilian-president Yahya Jammeh came to power in a bloodless 1994 coup d'état. President Jammeh's ruling party defeated two separate, though ideologically and programmatically similar, political/party alliances. Notwithstanding, the 2006 presidential election has not appreciably moved The Gambia any closer to a more democratic political culture. The election resulted instead in the consolidation of authoritarian rule under Jammeh. Clearly, disunity within the opposition eroded both its popularity and credibility and irreversibly changed the dynamics of the election in Jammeh's favor. Jammeh is in a position to use his “mandate” and “victory” to widen political participation, undertake genuine reconciliation, root out corruption, investigate mounting deaths, protect press freedoms, and put the economy on a course to mend itself. But this seems unlikely, given his proclivity for press repression and a lack of commitment to bettering the lives of ordinary Gambians.

The Fulbright Program, initiated in 1945, is one of the oldest U.S. overseas exchange programs. The overall goal of the program, since its inception, has been to increase mutual understanding among peoples through the living and working experiences of the scholars and students involved. In Africa the most important subsidiary goal is to strengthen African universities through provision of training and research opportunities for Africans and through the American Fulbright professors who work at those universities (Huff, 1986).

Of all the components of the program, the American Fulbright Senior Scholar, the key element in the program, has been an unstudied aspect. A mystique has surrounded the scholars selected for the program. It has been assumed that with purposeful selection of scholars and careful matching of overseas sites, program goals will be accomplished abroad and in the United States and that the appropriate motivational elements are in place to accomplish and sustain the changes made. Occasionally, the consequences abroad have been documented and evaluated, but little is known of the professional and personal effects of the Fulbright experience on the returned American Fulbrighter.

As an individual, the American Fulbrighter participates in an intensive experience, lengthy enough to produce potentially fundamental changes in the participant. Teaching and being involved in other academic duties overseas has generally been assumed to be a very positive experience. However, what evidence demonstrates the extent the goals of the program were accomplished with regard to the U.S. participant?

While African literature in European languages is well-studied, ʿajamī and its significance in the intellectual history of Africa remains one of the least investigated areas in African studies. Yet ʿajamī is one of the oldest and most widespread forms of literature in Africa. This article draws scholars' attention to this unmapped terrain of knowledge. First, it provides a survey of major West African ʿajamī literary traditions and examines the nexus between the pedagogy of Aḥmadu Bamba and the development of Wolofal (Wolof ʿajamī). Then, with reference to excerpts from Sëriñ Masoxna Ló's 1954 eulogy, it discusses the role of Wolofal in the diffusion of the Murīd ethos.

This article is an historical analysis of West Africa’s first coup. Starting from contemporary accounts of the 1963 assassination of president Sylvanus Olympio of the Republic of Togo, and the overthrow of his government, the article identifies three competing explanations of events. It follows these three explanations through Togo’s “shadow archives,” asking how and why each of them was taken up or disregarded by particular people at particular moments in time. The article develops a new interpretation of West Africa’s first coup, and outlines its implications for the study of national sovereignty, neo-colonialism, and pan-African solidarity in postcolonial Africa.

Political change in Burundi has been influenced by a number of factors that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. In this paper, the impact of folklore on national unity and division is examined in the hope of shedding light on the cultural complexities—as expressed folkloristically—that have affected the formation of rigid ethnic identities and ultimately the violent political landscape of Burundi. This research builds on Liisa Malkki's work on identity construction among Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania (1989; 1990; 1995) and René Lemarchand's analysis of “political discourse as a system of possible definition of ethnic selves and on how, through such discursive techniques, ethnicity is transformed, mobilized and ultimately incorporated into the horrors and irrationality of genocide violence” (Lemarchand 1994, xxii).

The political and social manipulation of folklore has the potential to exacerbate conflict along ethnic and sub-ethnic lines while it can also facilitate national and sub-national unity. Both of these processes often occur simultaneously, thus complicating the academic quest for parsimonious explanation of complex social and political phenomena. We contend that the folkloric foundation of the long-term, transformative process of identity creation needs to be factored into analyses of political change in the multi-ethnic terrain of Burundi society.

Folklore is defined in this paper as a process of narration and interpretation, which serves as an “integrated framework that comprehends narrated event and narrative event within a unified frame of reference” (Bauman 1986, 6).

Many sub-Saharan African countries find themselves engulfed in chronic ethnic tensions that often erupt into violent conflicts. In addition to the human costs, these conflicts have contributed to the further depletion of the meager financial resources of African countries. They have also disrupted economic activity and contributed to the region’s growing marginalization in the global economic system by discouraging the flow of foreign capital into the continent.

The African Studies Association in 1984 gave Paulin Hountondji a share in the Melville Herskovits award for the most significant Africanist publication for the previous year. The selection of Hountondji's book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983), suggests, logically, that the Association believes the book to be a significant contribution to African Studies. One might go even a step further and conclude that it indicates the Association's concurrence with the main premises and the general philosophical orientation of the author's arguments. This paper outlines some serious questions Hountondji and his fellow philosophers raise about what one's attitude to the African past should be and what criteria should dictate the course of development on the African continent.

Hountondji is perhaps the best known of the “professional philosophers.” As one would expect, each of the philosophers perceives the issues that will be raised in this discussion from a different perspective, even when they agree broadly on the critique of ethnophilosophy; Hountondji has nevertheless emerged as the most articulate and representative in this regard, to the extent that his book has earned the title, “the ‘bible’ of anti—ethnophilosophers” (Mudimbe, 1985: 199). The focus of this essay will accordingly be on this important work, with occasional references, of course, to those of others, in particular the Ghanaian Kwasi Wiredu. This strategy has the attraction of straddling the divide between Anglophone and Francophone manifestations of the new philosophical attitudes.

To best understand what grounds there might be for objections to certain of the philosophers' positions, it is expedient that one isolate the several targets of their disparagement. Chief of these is ethnophilosophy, which Hountondji (1983: 34) defines as “an ethnological work with philosophical pretensions.” This includes the works of all those who like Placide Tempels, Alexis Kagame, John Mbiti, and other ethnologists have attempted to articulate African philosophies or systems of thought. Another target is African cultures or traditions themselves, as distinct from whatever the ethnophilosophers or ethnologists might correctly or mistakenly have made of them.