This article examines the nature of conflicts over natural resources in the postwar period in Sussundenga district, Mozambique, as contextualized within a broad history of natural resource management in Mozambique from the colonial period through the postindependence and war years to the present day. The evidence suggests that the notion of a simple transition from wartime conflict to postwar sustainable development needs revision. Instead, some patterns and practices of resource use predated the war and have outlasted it, some began and ended with the peace agreement, and others accelerated or were initiated after the end of armed hostility. Throughout these periods, there have been social conflicts between and within different groups of resource users at all levels. Armed conflict did change patterns of resource use in some respects, but the result was not entirely negative for the natural resource base; forest resources in some areas actually regenerated during the war years. These conclusions build on arguments in environmental history and political ecology demonstrating that there is no deterministic relationship between humans and the natural environment. Rather, there is a range of possible interactions depending on locally varying contexts as well as broader social and political structures.

A sense of well-being has been associated in the literature with a wide variety of political phenomena, attitudes, and behavior including stability (Gurr, 1970: 148-54), optimism about future development (Gallup, 1976), satisfaction with government (Hayward, 1974: 184-85), political power (Owusu, 1970: 325-31), and participation (Ross, 1975: 119). Low levels of well-being have been associated with conflict and instability (Gurr, 1970: ch. 2), hostility toward government (Templeton, 1966), and cynicism (Schatzberg, 1977: ch. 4). This paper explores the relationship between sense of well-being and a number of such political phenomena in Ghana in 1970 and 1975. Although there is a sizeable literature on well-being in western nations, there has been very little research on this subject elsewhere. Most of what we know or think is known about well-being and politics in Africa is based on extrapolations from studies of western political systems or on conventional wisdom about the role of well-being in African politics. This study is designed to investigate well-being as perceived by the individual in Ghana. The distribution of perceptions of well-being within the sample population will be looked at, views about the relationship of national government to well-being will be explored, and its relationship to political attitudes, attachments, behavior, and evaluation of government will be examined.

The study is based on two systematic surveys carried out by the author in 1970 and 1975 in six Ghanaian communities (see Appendix for description of the sample). The two surveys are based on random samples carried out in the same sample areas. Although this was not a national survey, a number of characteristics of the sample populations approximate that shown in the national census allowing cautious speculation about the Ghanaian populace. The major focus of this paper is on change over time and in this sense the data are comparable, randomly selected, and based on identical interview schedules (with a few exceptions which are noted). This is, sadly, one of the few cases of replication and of longitudinal analysis in Africa.

Brain drain is a global phenomenon and has always been so. It is a problem confronting and threatening development in Africa and other developing world regions. A study by Carrington and Detragiache concluded that there is an overall tendency for migration rates to be higher for highly educated individuals. Brain drain can therefore be seen as one of the more detrimental implications of organizational decline and crisis. Skilled migration, taking the form of brain drain and movements of professionals and job transfers, has become an important component of contemporary migration.3 Typically, in a historical context highly skilled migration involved the forced movement of professionals as a result of political conflicts, followed by the emergence of the “brain drain” in the 1960s. In the current situation highly skilled migration represents an increasingly large component of global migration streams.

Common wisdom suggests that the migration of people with a high level of human capital is detrimental for the country of emigration. In other words, the loss of skilled human resources will ultimately have a grave effect on the economy and jeopardize development programs of the country experiencing brain drain, as the brain drain is a negative externality on the population left in the source country. However, as Mountford has shown, when educational decisions are endogenous and if successful emigration is not a certainty, a brain drain may increase the productivity of a developing country. There is also sufficient evidence to show that the migration of talent from the South to the North does not always mean that developing countries lose out.

The islands of the Indian Ocean offer a space from which postcolonial scholars might revise African and European metadiscourses. Africa has been looking west and north since the first deportation of Africans. I propose to look east and head south, to the Indian Ocean, the seas and the lands, a site of intercontinental trade and travel, conversion and conquest, migration and creolization. Mapping the Indian Ocean reveals a cartology of transoceanic transactions and exchanges, past and present. Africa meets India, South and East Asia, the Islamic world, and the islands. It is a cartology of trans-South flows: East Asia/Africa, South Asia/Africa, Islands/Africa, and of connections with the Americas and Europe.

The Sokoto caliphate in nineteenth-century northern Nigeria was an astonishing episode in the history of Africa: a huge, prosperous polity that created unity where none had existed before. Yet today its history is underexplored, sometimes ignored or even disparaged, both within Nigeria and in Europe and the U.S. Yet that history is extraordinary. Sokoto town was, and still is, an anomaly within Hausaland; built speedily on a “green-field” site as both a trading and a political center for the caliphate, it is a site of pilgrimage that to this day remains a rural town with no monumental buildings or fine edifices. As a by-product of a religious movement (jihad), Sokoto thus represents many of the dilemmas that faced and still face radically reforming Islamic groups if they expand rapidly and go to war. Thus Sokoto history remains deeply significant for modern Nigeria.

The technocrat, a supposedly apolitical figure who joins government on the basis of technical expertise, looms large in discussions of governance. The empowerment of technocrats has sometimes been taken as a barometer for Africa’s economic and democratic progress. Rejecting this conventional wisdom, this article argues that technocrats are inevitably trapped in a web of politics—politicians leverage the apolitical image of technocrats for political gain, and public debates implicate technocrats as targets of protest. This article pursues this argument through a case study of Nigeria, where technocrats were both politicized and politicizing figures during the rule of the People’s Democratic Party between 1999 and 2015.

Anthropologists working in a number of regions in the world have noted the existence of a positive relationship between population density and state formation (R. Stevenson, 1968: 1-7). The only area to which this generalization has not been applied is Africa south of the Sahara. In writing about African societies, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard assert that

Furthermore, they base this conclusion not only on evidence from the eight societies included in African Political Systems but also on data from other African societies which “prove that a large population in a political unit and a high degree of political centralization do not necessarily go together with great density” (1940: 8).

In his interesting and insightful book, Population and Political Systems in Tropical Africa, Robert Stevenson implies that the seemingly anomalous assertions by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard have gone unchallenged for decades because of the stature of the two anthropologists rather than the weight of the evidence (1968: 5). Only Eisenstadt clearly states that this is an empirical question which requires further systematic analysis (1959: 204). Stevenson cites a number of instances in which Africanists noted a relation between population density and political organization, but none in which the relationship was systematically examined (1968: 5-6).

The Kingdom of Swaziland currently possesses one of the world's highest rates of HIV/AIDS infection. This research discusses some reasons for the rapid spread of the epidemic in Swaziland, and recent actions of Swazi officials to mitigate the pain and suffering of the Swazi people over the next quarter century. It also suggests some policy initiatives for the future.

Most discussions of African women as rural producers have either underscored African women's traditional roles in production, focused on female exclusion from the development process and the need for female inclusion, or they have documented the failure of agricultural development projects because of oversight of the female dimension (Hafkin and Bay, 1976; Etienne and Leacock, 1980; Bay, 1982; Burfisher and Horenstein, 1985). Observation of the intense involvement of Ghanaian women in both cocoa and food production, as well as their plight during the more recent crises in the Ghanaian economy, leads one to new insights into African economic relationships. This case raises some interesting questions about the exploitation of women in agricultural production, the relationship between declining cash crop and food production and the national economy, as well as the national consequences which flow from the failure to give women a proper role in the rural economy.

The present analysis uses historical, ethnographic case-study, survey, statistical, and political data from cocoa farming areas of Ghana (especially the Sunyani area) to examine the changing relationship of rural women to economic and national stability. It is argued that in the recent difficult political and economic climate in some African countries, pressures exerted on rural areas have contributed to a heavy reliance upon female producers. Over time these pressures further contribute to an unstable rural economy, because this exploitation of the female labor force, while itself a reaction to socioeconomic trauma, further discourages male involvement in agricultural production.

In Meru, Tanzania, technological and institutional change has turned milk into one of the most reliable and important sources of income for smallholder households. Decades of increased population density have caused land scarcity, leading smallholders to intensity their fanning methods and land use, including introducing stall-fed exotic breeds of dairy cows. Meanwhile, a growing urban and rural demand has resulted in a significant market expansion for milk and increasing cash incomes for smallholders. Both farm intensification and market expansion are bottom-up processes of change driven primarily by smallholders. These factors make the livestock sector in Meru an interesting example of broad-based agricultural development.

The recent (2000) reenactment of the Shari'a legal code in twelve states of Northern Nigeria and the other expressions of Islam in public affairs in the region have been preceded by a long history that should also be understood as determined by the social and political conditions of specific stages in the evolution of the Nigerian social formation. This article attempts to explain Islamism in the region through such factors as Islamic identity for many Muslims, the competition over interpretation and representation of Islam, the nature of the Nigerian state and society, Muslim organizations and leadership, as well as the activities of other religious organizations (especially Christian evangelicals). In this regard, Islamism is driven essentially by internal (Nigerian) forces, even though external forces may have had an effect. The article argues that while Islamism poses major challenges to the Nigerian state and society, it has also exposed itself to challenges from both Muslims and Nigerian society as a whole.

Since gaining independence in the mid 1970s, the economies of many Third World countries have been worsened by a number of external and internal causes such as the oil crisis, political strife and economic mismanagement, coupled with droughts, increased populations, distorted industrialization and lack of job creation. These and other factors have led to an attrition of civil servants' efficiency, a decline in real incomes, increased balance of payment problems and low productivity, both in rural and urban areas (World Bank 1995, 1994; Bukuku 1993; Nyang'oro and Shaw 1992; African Development Bank 1992). In an attempt to address the continuing decline of their economies, Third World governments have pursued a variety of policies and practices collectively designed to encourage the involvement of the labor force in informal sector economic activities. The principal objectives of such activities include subsidizing individuals' incomes and increasing food production. One of these activities has been urban agriculture that emerged as a major urban sector activity during the 1980s (Rakodi 1988; Yeung 1988; Tricaud 1987; Sanyal 1985). Urban agriculture in Tanzania, and especially in the city of Dar es Salaam, involves the raising of livestock and growing of crops (cash, food) both for earning extra money and nutritional purposes.

In spite of its perceived beneficial impact on individuals and society, urban agriculture is generally associated with serious problems relating to environmental degradation. Ironically, Third World countries have largely ignored this problem even though the environmental degradation that urban agriculture causes is rampant.

The study of Malawi's colonial history has been dominated by the establishment of British rule, the spread of Christian mission influence, and the development of nationalism, among other themes. Perhaps due to the Whiggish approach to history which has influenced many historians of colonial Malawi, critical issues such as ethnic awareness–which was developing in a pronounced way at the same time as the expansion of mission schools and the evolution of national feelings-have been neglected until recently (Vail, 1983: White, 1983). It appears that ethnic awareness has been taken for granted and accepted without a proper understanding of it. This article discusses ethnicity in the old North Nyasa district in the period 1891-1938. It demonstrates how the economic and political changes which took place in the region in the first three decades of the establishment of colonial rule promoted ethnic tension, and it argues that the indirect rule system (which assumed that the African was a tribal man, inward-looking, with a primary loyalty to so-called traditional authority) was not only divisive, but also a major catalyst for greater ethnicity. It also argues that through certain educational practices which tended to discriminate against some peoples of the region, a number of Karonga-based missionaries of the Livingstonia Synod encouraged the growth of this phenomenon. The article, like some recent studies (Ilifte, 1979: 318–41; Ranger, 1979) pays particular attention to the role played by the elites of North Nyasa in the heightening of ethnicity in the district.

In the fall of 1972 the International Labor Organization published Employment, Incomes and Equality: A Strategy for Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya. While this study has general implications for employment policies in underdeveloped countries, it is especially relevant for urban problems. We will here examine the extent to which the ILO's proposals for handling problems arising in the “informal sector,” within which hawkers and squatters are considered the most troublesome, are likely to be accepted by the Kenya government and the Nairobi City Council.

According to the ILO, the gap between the growth of the Kenya population (3.3 per cent annually) and wage-earning employment (less than 2 per cent) makes rising unemployment inevitable, particularly in the major towns, where the African population expanded during the 1960's at a rate of over 10 per cent per annum. To stem urban migration, or to expel nonwage earners from the towns, is impossible because of the scarcity of arable agricultural land. Likewise, the government cannot provide enough jobs for the unemployed without seriously overburdening the economy due to the country's inadequate industrial potential. Therefore, it is proposed by the ILO that the government should primarily concern itself with increasing employment opportunity by encouraging self-employment rather than wage earning.

The self-employed in Nairobi earn about $240 annually (L90) and provide real services for the low-income segment of the population—selling, exchanging, repairing, transporting, and even making or assembling much of what is needed by those unable to afford the amenities enjoyed by the elite.

Let me begin with a caveat: when the topic of this paper was first broached to me by Professor Vansina, I was excited but at a loss as to what exactly it meant or entailed. Not being formally trained in the history of ideas, otherwise known as intellectual history, I wrote back requesting some explanation. Even though this was kindly provided, it did very little to relieve my uneasiness, especially as I recalled H. Stuart Hughes' (1961: 7) caution about writing the history of ideas: “The commonest error of the intellectual historian is to write about things he does not really understand — things he has not ‘internalized’ and thought through for himself.”

Equally disconcerting was the futurity aspect of the topic which, in traditional African terms, would have prompted a visit to the oracle or diviner. For in times of trouble, that is, when an African is confronted with a seemingly insoluble problem, the tendency would be to seek supernatural intervention. But alas, this is America! Thus I am left to rely so.

More seriously, let me emphasize the point that the task at hand is a difficult and ambitious one, at least from a conceptual standpoint. For our purposes, therefore, the approach to the subject is from the “bottom up” instead of from “above,” in marked contrast to the conventional practice in this field. As a result, we have posed some fundamental questions, not for the purpose of producing definitive answers but to use as the framework for our discussion. Accordingly: (1) What, exactly, do we mean by the history of ideas? (2) Whose ideas should we be concerned with? (3) What are the possible sources from which our data will be drawn? (4) What is the scope and objective of this historical exercise?

In the wake of revelations concerning the activities of foreign lobbyists in the United States, and especially the Koreagate scandal, increasing attention has been given in the press and on Capitol Hill to the effect on American policy-making. The most explosive instance of foreign influence peddling is the massive campaign of South African officials to improve that country's image in the western world. The most recent phase of South Africa's propaganda war, unleashed in 1972, has not only raised questions about official U.S. relations with South Africa but has provoked the worst political scandal in South African history. For several years there had been assertions by investigative journalists that the South African government was behind a variety of schemes designed to win friends and influence policy among its western allies. By 1979 it had become clear that many of the allegations were true. The South African Department of Information had spent $100 million on unconventional methods for this purpose in a seven year period.

The man at the center of the scandal was Dr. Eschel Rhoodie, former secretary of the Department of Information, who revealed in some detail the secret projects his government had undertaken to buy influence. In an interview with BBC television in March 1979, Rhoodie made no pretense about the ruthlessness of the methods employed by his department to assure South Africa's survival in a world hostile to its apartheid policies. The intellectual underpinnings of the propaganda campaign are found in the book written by Rhoodie in 1969 entitled The Paper Curtain, a kind of Afrikaner version of Mein Kampf. The book has subsequently been withdrawn from circulation. The Paper Curtain told how a curtain of lies and communist propaganda had isolated South Africa from the west and argued the necessity of mounting a counterattack through unorthodox methods. The book attracted the attention of the Minister of Information, Connie Mulder, who appointed Rhoodie to his post and gave him responsibility for telling the country's story abroad. In that capacity Rhoodie was the architect of an ambitious program which ranged from engaging the services of legal and public relations firms to wooing black African heads of state and subsidizing various publications. In all, Rhoodie claimed that his department financed over one hundred secret projects.

Our thesis may be simply stated: There is a specter hanging over African studies: the specter of irrelevance both within and outside the academy. Indeed, African studies, as constructed in the North American academy over the past four decades, is dying.

According to endogenous growth theories, human capital is a major determinant of economic growth and development. Human capital refers to the educational qualifications, skills, and experience that individuals possess. Educational institutions, in general, and universities, in particular, are most instrumental in developing and enhancing the quality of human capital through capacity building involving training, research, information dissemination, and knowledge management. These institutions should be not only firmly established and maintained but also continuously empowered to meet the current and evolving needs of their countries.

The primary goal of this article is to examine why Ali A. Mazrui is a relatively obscure figure in postcolonial theory despite the outstanding contributions he has made to it. It argues that the explanation can be found in the nature of postcolonial theory itself, and in Mazrui’s perceived ideology and cultural identity. The article, then, introduces Mazrui’s theory of the “triple heritage,” his most innovative and, possibly, most enduring contribution to scholarship. It also explains the specificity of Mazrui’s brand of postcolonial theory as well as the complexity and breadth of his thinking about Africa in general.