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.

Through an analysis of the taxation of business activities in Adamaoua Province, Cameroon, this article aims to provide ethnographic substance to current debates about the “tax effort” in sub-Saharan Africa. Although the current mission of the tax authorities to identify all potential taxpayers and track their locations, movements, and activities is often presented in the context of nationwide reform and a commitment to making all taxable enterprises visible, a close examination of the government's practices reveals other factors at work. The case of cattle traders in particular shows that taxation policies in Adamaoua today are based on an interplay between, on the one hand, modes of state control and levels of administrative ef-ficiency, and on the other, longstanding repertoires of business practice and idioms of documentation.

The relation between philosophy and language in Africa seems to favor the languages of written expression to the detriment of the languages of “oraural” expression. Concretely, this has meant not only the exclusive use of Arabic and European languages in the philosophies in Africa, but also the assumption that philosophy is only possible in, with, and through written languages. This article argues that change is long overdue, and that African languages should play significant roles in both the exploration of the past and in contemporary and future philosophical inquiries in Africa. In other words, the real problem is not so much to determine how far philosophy is compatible or incompatible with specific languages and with language as a whole, or vice versa, as to discern what role African languages should play within the framework of the past, contemporary, and future philosophies in Africa. For if colonial experiences obliged Africans to confront this predicament without success, the contention here is that Africans cannot continue to philosophize sine die in European languages and according to European models of philosophy as if African languages cannot provide and play the same roles. Today more than before, both the lettered and “oraural” traditions of Africa invite Africans to practice self-reliance in such matters.

Many scholars have concluded, perhaps prematurely, that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are inherently empowering for Africans. In order to look more closely at the impact of ICTs on relationships and society, this article focuses on everyday life. Specifically, it uses ethnographic methods and the theory of “affordances” to illuminate the use of cell phones among Bulsa of Ghana’s Upper East Region. While cell phones help users connect with distant loved ones, they also plant seeds of alienation between users and those who remain physically present. These changes are evident in new body habits and in social behaviors that would be culturally unacceptable in face-to-face interactions but are largely excused in the interventions of the virtual world.

The Sahel and Sudan zones are the “harsh lands” of West Africa. These arid and semi-arid lands include parts of present day Senegal, Mali, Northern Ghana, Mauritania, Niger, Northern Benin, Upper Volta, Chad, and Northern Nigeria (Map 1). “Harsh lands” denotes a region of extreme environmental uncertainty, but one in which man has learned to survive by exploiting their inherent qualities and the productive capability of their micro-environments, by forming cooperative relations with people of contrasting, but complementary life styles, and by constructing biologically enriched habitats in which select plants can grow. These survival techniques are commonly employed by farmers and nomads throughout West Africa, and while they may not be highly productive by western standards, they are highly dependable.

The people of these harsh lands never depend entirely on the resource endowment of their region for survival. Inter-ethnic exchange, both within and between territories, is a fundamental strategy for aquiring supplementary food in poor harvest years. Self-sufficiency is a concept foreign to the economic history of West Africans.

Nevertheless, the harsh lands of West Africa are deteriorating at an alarming rate. Rescue and restoration efforts must involve the reinstatement of ancient, but improved, land use practices that stress biological regeneration of the plant cover, and interregional exchange must be expanded to a scale that far exceeds that commonly known to have existed in the past. The purpose of this article is to show how land use practices deliberately employed by West Africans to combine local environmental conditions, and the selection of plants and animals to construct an enriched habitat in which the latter can grow, have been altered in the last 60 years and to analyze the impact of that alteration on the arable land of West Africa. It concludes by arguing for an ecobiological approach to full restoration of the harsh lands of West Africa.

In 1957 a dozen northern Mozambicane living in the Makonde highlands organized the Mozambique African Voluntary Cotton Society. By 1959 membership had increased to almost three thousand and output per grower far exceeded per capita yields of neighboring peasant producers. A year later the colonial state outlawed the cooperative. Portuguese officials claimed that it had become a hotbed of subversive activity. Subsequent efforts by the leaders of the banned organization to form a rice cooperative met a similar fate.

Despite its short life, the Mozambique African Voluntary Cotton Society played a significant role in the economic and political history of the colony. It was among the first independently organized African agricultural cooperatives in the country. Whereas its counterparts in neighboring colonies were almost exclusively formed to combat the exploitative marketing practices of foreign middlemen, the Mozambique African Voluntary Cotton Society also sought to protect its members from labor abuses inherent in the system of forced cotton production. As a grassroots movement, firmly implanted among Makonde peasants, the cooperative provided a hospitable terrain for covert anti-colonial activities while serving as a training ground for some of Mozambique's future nationalist leaders. Finally, its links to the cooperative movement in neighboring Tanganyika and to TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) suggest the significant, though generally overlooked, impact the British colony had on the growth of nationalism in northern Mozambique.

The significance of the Mozambique African Voluntary Cotton Society transcends the details of its own history. Like cooperatives in other parts of Africa, it permitted peasants free space in which to operate while simultaneously binding them firmly to the colonial-capitalist system.

Late in the 1980s, several major U.S. private foundations concluded that the concern for Africa in the country was weak. This weakness was reflected in the faint focus on U.S. foreign policy toward Africa in all three branches of government, in the halting voice for Africa or for U.S. interests there in the non-governmental organizations (think-tanks, religious organizations, lobbies), and in the small concern for U.S. policy or for affecting it in the African studies scholarly community. Indeed, the voice for Africa in the United States was neither strong nor effective.

An important feature of African village economies in the 1980s and 1990s has been the initiatives of local people in responding to the severe contraction in national economies and the structural changes introduced as part of the World Bank/IMF-inspired structural adjustment programs (SAPs) (Elabor-Idemudia 1993; Gladwin 1991; Taylor and MacKenzie 1992). This paper discusses the ongoing strategies of the women of a Ghanaian village to fluctuations in the domestic economy over the past decade, including responses to structural adjustment measures of the past few years emanating from the national center. Testimonies of women about contemporary economic changes and the impact on their households are presented to highlight women's culturally constructed ways of reflecting on their daily lives.

The ways in which changing economic situations have affected female roles in rural production and women's position in society have significant implications for national development. Moock (1986), Amadiume (1987), Beneria (1981) and Stamp (1989), among others, have pointed to the explanatory power of gender as a primary organizing principle of rural production and society. The significance of gender is twofold: first, as a means of categorizing labor and household headship; and secondly, as “fundamental to understanding structures and actions, including production relationships within and across households, the setting of goals and priorities, the mobilization of resources, risk-taking and the rights to benefits derived from increased agricultural productivity (Moock 1986, 7; see also Berry, 1985). In African rural economies, men and women have different cycles of rights and responsibilities. Through food production, women control their own cycles of rights and responsibilities. They are primarily responsible for and are concerned with the means by which the household is provisioned (Guyer 1984, 1986, 101; Henn 1983, 1984, 1; Bryson 1981). Most men earn their primary income from cash (export) cropping and the sale of their labor.

This article considers the private diary not just as a historical source or literary text, but mainly as a symbolic cultural creation with sociological and psychological dimensions. The multiple identities of Akinpelu Obisesan, a member of the colonial intelligentsia in Ibadan, are analyzed, giving us insight into the transformations in Yoruba masculinity in the colonial period and his own attempts at self-invention. The article also emphasizes the overlap between the personal and the general: between the private and the public domains and how the diarist straddles, and is in turn affected by, sociocultural currents reverberating from these two sites.

This essay investigates the symbolic politics of three witch-hunts in a chiefdom of the South African lowveld during the 1990s. In the last years of apartheid young men, known as Comrades, assumed the forefront of political struggles. Comrades embarked upon witch-hunting campaigns to banish evil and misfortune, and thereby to attain legitimacy as a political movement. Since the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, a situation of pluralistic political structures emerged. Branches of the ANC and ANC Women's League were launched, Civic Associations were established, and chiefship was gradually reconstituted. As adults assumed positions of political leadership, the influence of the Comrades diminished. Witch-hunts of the 1990s are multifaceted social dramas, which involve different modes of participation and bear a variety of different meanings for political audiences. As such they reveal changing relations of alliance and opposition between the different political structures. I argue that through time, growing schisms have developed between the ANC and the Comrades, who have continued to be the most vociferous participants in witch-hunting. Local ANC leaders have been unsuccessful in resolving the conflicting demands of villagers (who demand their assistance in the eradication of witchcraft) and those of their political superiors (who require that they oppose witch-hunting).

In postcolonial Africa, the military has become an actor in politics, often in ways that can be described as unprofessional. This paper focuses on the manner in which the Zimbabwean National Army (ZNA) has become heavily politicized since independence, directly supporting the regime of President Robert Mugabe while denigrating the opposition political party. The military metamorphosed, to all intents, into an extension of President Mugabe’s political party, the ZANU-PF. I argue that even though the military is expected to subordinate itself to a civilian government, the ZNA is highly unprofessional, in- and outside the army barracks. The ways in which politics came to be mediated by army generals, as “war veterans” serving in the military, directly influenced not only how soldiers who joined the army in postindependence Zimbabwe were promoted and demoted, but how they lived their lives as soldiers in the army barracks. This article is based on fifty-eight life histories of army deserters living in exile in South Africa.

There have been a number of attempts by social scientists to discuss the economic significance of the land issue on the politics of Southern Rhodesia. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, the cornerstone of segregationist policy, has been discussed at length in many treatises on Rhodesia, the most notable being those of Malcolm Rifkind (1968), Robin Palmer (1968), and Lewis Gann (1963). The important Land Husbandry Act of 1951 has been analyzed by Kingsley Garbett (1963), Ken Brown (1959), and J.F. Holleman (1969). Little has, however, been written on the changing distribution of land resources between Black and White, except for an analysis by Roder (1964) which covers aspects of the period up to the early 1960s.

This paper will attempt to illustrate how the process of capital accumulation and discrimination against Blacks in capital markets, through land policy, has worked to impair Black economic advancement. This will be done by demonstrating how the broad trends in racial land distribution in the 1946-69 period have fostered African underdevelopment. The importance of the racial division of land assets on the distribution of income will also be highlighted.

In his introduction to the 1978 Conference papers on Small Urban Centers in Rural Development in Africa, Southall (1979: 1-2) suggests that the relations between these centers and their hinterlands are largely oppressive and exploitative, and, in the absence of fundamental social transformation, unlikely to change. The Zambian rural centers studied by this author (Siegel, 1979) strayed some from this general pattern. Nearly all were relatively recent extensions of the national and provincial governmental agencies. And given Zambia's foreign exchange crisis at that time, and the consequent shortage of goods and services of every kind, the influence of these peripheral centers was far more ineffectual than exploitative.

Exploitative relations did exist, but these were focused upon the continuing political, economic, and social domination by the neighboring “primate” cities of Ndola and Luanshya, both of which were colonially created administrative, commercial, and industrial centers in Zambia's historically dual and increasingly polarized economy (Baldwin, 1966: 40-57, 214-21; Barber, 1967; Southall, 1979: 14). When combined with the foreign exchange crisis, the producer's price structure then in effect had so limited rural livelihood opportunities in central Ndola Rural District that nearly half of the able-bodied males had left their homes to single women, the very old, and the very young (Siegel, 1984: 104-8). Zambians in general disparage the drudgery and poverty of “sleepy” village life, and this is especially true in the Copperbelt, where there is an 80-year-old history of derogatory stereotypes about the “backward,” “weak,” and “lazy” Lamba villagers (Siegel, 1984: 54-85, & n.d.).

The notion that urban centers are oppressive and exploitative of their hinterlands has a history of its own, as reflected in the various theories concerning the origin of the state (Service 1978).

I would like to thank the Subcommittee for inviting me to testify before it on the subject of Angola.

In this presentation I shall make six major points. Briefly, and in summary, they are the following: one, the historical record in Angola, both remote and recent, suggests that there are deep roots to the current political fragmentation and conflict in that country and that, even under good conditions, political unity and stable government will be difficult to establish. Two, the Alvor Agreement, signed on January 15, 1975, between Portugal and the three major Angolan nationalist parties is, on paper, a masterful piece of diplomacy and compromise; its provisions should be studied and enforced.

The classical realist school exemplified by Morgenthau, Kennan, and Kissinger has long dominated the study of international politics. In conceptualizing national interest, this school thinks predominantly in geopolitical, military/strategic terms. Economic power constitutes a source of military capability, but it is a subsidiary variable in analyzing the balance of power, which stands as the central concept in this mode of analysis.

Africanists have increasingly questioned the utility of this approach for the analysis of African foreign policy. Economic power is not a subsidiary factor in the diplomacy of African states—on the contrary, it is a central but yet essentially negative variable. African states themselves lack economic power. In other words, they must function in a world system dominated by the economic power of others. Global economic structures, elaborated during the colonial era, greatly affect the options open to African states. In the context of an established international division of labor, there are enormous constraints on African choices. Foreign policy is shaped by, but is also potentially an instrument to shape, the external economic environment. In studying African foreign policy, scholars must take into consideration international economic structures. How are states in practice confronting or accommodating, the external economic environment? Case studies that seek to answer this question are now beginning to appear.

In this paper a simple model is proposed by which the relationship between slave prices in Africa and the number of slaves exported in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Atlantic slave trade is investigated. Statistical evidence indicating a high degree of correlation between fluctuations in prices and in slave exports shall be presented which, in conjunction with a priori theoretical expectations as well as collateral historical evidence, supports the hypothesis that economic motives were one of the major determinants of the African slave supply process.

The statistical analysis also permits an estimation of the “elasticity” of the African slave traders' response to changes in coastal slave prices; such an estimate answers the question, “How much must the economic incentives (in terms of price changes) be increased to bring about a given increase in the numbers of slaves brought to the coast for exports?” Since the price responsiveness of African traders was itself influenced by the conditions they faced in the enslavement, transportation, bulking, and other components of the African supply process, the elasticity analysis permits an investigation into more than the simple issue of whether or not African traders were profit motivated. The analysis provides an indirect view of a wide variety of phenomena occurring within African societies. Some of the possible uses to which the elasticity estimate may be put are examined in the final section of the paper.

The concept of “brain drain” is in its origins a nationalistic concept, by which is meant a concept that visualizes economic and cultural welfare in terms of the welfare of the residents of a national state or region, viewed as a totality, and excludes from consideration both the welfare of people born in that region who choose to leave it, and the welfare of the outside world in general. Moreover, though the available statistics are far from adequate on this point, there is generally assumed to be a net flow of trained professional people from the former colonial territories to the ex-imperial European nations, and from Europe and elsewhere to North America and particularly the United States. The concept thus lends itself easily to the expression of anti-colonial sentiments on the one hand, and anti-American sentiments on the other. The expression of such sentiments can be dignified by the presentation of brain drain as a serious economic and cultural problem, by relying on nationalistic sentiments and assumptions and ignoring the principles of economics—especially the principle that in every transaction there is both a demand and a supply—or by elevating certain theoretical economic possibilities into presumed hard facts.

To the casual observer, social communication across linguistic boundaries in Nigeria appears impossible as an indisputable consequence of the country's linguistic diversity. But this bird's-eye view of the language situation could be misleading. A more realistic picture emerges when this multilingual situation is studied in relation to the interaction among people within and across linguistic or administrative boundaries. As William Mackey has adequately put it,

In view of the importance of historical and administrative factors in the Nigerian social situation, language function will be discussed in terms of interaction within and across administrative units. Consequently, the problem of linguistic diversity and language function will be dealt with at the following levels of social interaction: (1) the district level, (2) the divisional level, (3) the provincial level, (4) the state level, (5) the regional level, and (6) the national level.