When I presented the first version of this paper at Madison, I was still in the middle of wrestling with many of the elusive and intractable problems it raised. Dealing with some issues led to kicking others into the margins, where they lurked balefully as enormously extended footnotes. The critical comments of my colleagues were extremely helpful in restoring some perspective and bringing some of the marginalized issues back into the center. But what is published here is still far from a finished statement—it merely represents another stage in the continuing struggle with the hydra.

Mary Jo Arnoldi, in particular, addressed herself to the part of the paper that had become most distorted by my struggle: the part that examines the usual distinction between popular, traditional and elite and attempts to rescue something of value from this hackneyed triad. This was the part of the paper that I was most uneasy about and that I have revised most since the presentation. Since Arnoldi did not have the opportunity to see the revised version before her comments were published, some of her very good points have now been pre-empted. But much of what she says still stands and offers me an opportunity both to disagree about certain issues and also to clarify some aspects of my argument.

In the first version of my paper I did not sufficiently acknowledge the existence of unofficial or popular traditions within pre-colonial cultures. As Arnoldi points out, my picture of the “popular” was ahistorical because I located it in only one epoch, the colonial and post-colonial one. Because I was trying to come to grips with the indefinite, shapeless, and fluid area covered by popular in most scholarly writing, I inadvertently reified what was on the margins of this area: the “traditional” and the “elite,” turning the traditional in particular into a monolithic entity. As this picture of the traditional was contradicted by my own research on Yoruba oriki (Barber, 1984b) it is not surprising that I felt uneasy about it even before I read Arnoldi's perceptive comments. But unlike Arnoldi, however, I still think that the colonial/post-colonial popular arts form a distinctive though not boundaried field: they are qualitatively different from the unofficial arts of so-called traditional culture, whether pre-colonial or present-day. It seems to me that Arnoldi's own examples of Iteso and Bamana traditional-popular arts illustrate this brilliantly.

Although the South African state officially collected taxes only from African men, taxes had a number of effects on African women as well. This paper contends that the first tax instituted, the hut tax, although it did little to change women's social, cultural and economic status by itself, did set a precedent for treating African women as legal minors. Later taxes combined with the development of migrant labor and the declining availability of arable land in the reserves to restructure women's roles dramatically. Taxes were by no means the only or the primary cause of this restructuring, but they were an integral part of the foundation.

It is important to consider the effects of taxes on women, particularly rural women, for two reasons. First, what little secondary literature exists on the taxation of the African population concentrates on how taxes affected the supply of male migratory labor (Ramdhani 1986; Cooper 1981, 307; Marks 1970, 15, 132-3). While this is a crucial question, it tends to link taxes to labor migration solely as cause and effect while ignoring the more complex social consequences of taxes. Some of these consequences were long-term as they played themselves out in people's self-definitions, especially with regard to gender and social roles.

Second, a study of tax regulations and tax collection can provide a mirror in which are reflected the attitudes, assumptions and priorities of state officials dealing with the “Native Problem.” The imposition of the hut tax in the early years of the takeover of African societies revealed a particular view of how those societies were constructed and how white officials thought they ought to be altered.

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.

This paper addresses the subject of working class redefinition within the context of production and profit in the iron-ore mines. Sierra Leonean miners, especially laborers, struggled to redefine themselves as a group with similar interests against efforts by state and capital to maximize profit and increase productivity. The maximization of profit and the minimization of labor costs were crucial to, and dependent on, the survival and profitability of the iron-ore mines with its labor intensive system of production.

The central proposition on which the argument hinges relates to the struggle for social reproduction in the economic sphere. By social reproduction is meant “the activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis and intergenerationally. Among other things, it includes how food, clothing and shelter are made available for immediate consumption” (Brenner and Laslett 1976, 117). Between 1935 and 1938, laborers struck twice, demanding better working conditions, increased wages, and an end to draconian discipline. The laborers also organized (without a formal union) and resisted attempts to control time, workplace situation, and leisure. Their protests ranged from refusal to reside in mining compounds to absenteeism from work. The laborers' struggle for social reproduction in the economic sphere constitutes the most significant variable in the development of the miners' consciousness and their transformation into a working class.

This article explores the role of tourism in the development plans of Kenya during the 1960s and 1970s, examining what this reveals about the new opportunities and constrictions that officials encountered as they tried to globally reconfigure the place of their new decolonizing nation in the post-colonial world. These themes are explored by examining the political economy of development and tourism, the marketing infrastructures that Kenyan officials created to shape how Western consumers thought about “Kenya,” and how these factors influenced the kinds of discourses that were promoted globally about this newly-independent African country.

This article explores recent changes in Kenya's curio or handicrafts industry. In addition to a crisis in access to raw materials and a diversifying tourist market, the rise in the use of cell phones and the Internet during the early 2000s present unique challenges. Nonetheless, innovative Kenyan entrepreneurs are using these challenges to market and brand products in new ways—by representing modern global interconnectedness as “fair trade” or creatively promoting the authenticity of their products in other ways. Kenya's artisans and traders have also adapted to diverse and complex tastes beyond the desire for an invented tradition of ethnic and “tribal” art.

This essay traces the military and diplomatic stalemate in the Sudan from 1955 to the present, with special attention directed to events of the past decade. Today, the Sudan government appears determined to maintain itself in power at whatever cost. Yet the Northern Sudanese opposition has sought a reconciliation with their former enemies from the South who with their experienced military forces now hold the balance of power within the opposition forces. The history of the abortive negotiations during this past decade appears only to lead to a resolution on the field of battle which cannot be accomplished by enemies too weak to vanquish one another.

The first and perhaps the liveliest and most controversial political debate on Nigerian foreign policy arose over the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Agreement. Both the publication and the ratification of the agreement were followed by severe outbursts of public indignation all over the country, particularly in the South. Despite these widespread criticisms and mass protest, the agreement was not without ardent supporters and sympathizers. The purpose of this paper is to examine not only the main lines of division that existed between those organized groups and individuals that supported the Defence Pact and those that opposed it and relentlessly fought for its rejection, but also the rationale behind the various positions taken by these individuals and groups in that foreign policy debate. Some of the ramifications and implications of the Defence Agreement as well as the accuracy and relevance of various opinions held or expressed will also be discussed. Such an overall treatment of the articulate opinion that formed around the issue of the Defence Pact, it is believed, will help us to understand which of the basic factors of Nigerian foreign policy—personality, organizational, societal, political, and environmental—played an important role in the definition and implementation of the post-independence Nigerian foreign policy.

Until Nigeria's independence in 1960, the federal powers over defence and foreign affairs were exercised by the British government. During the Nigerian Constitutional Conference of 1957, however, it was decided that British control over Nigeria's military forces should cease after April 1958.

Wartime causes [of the 1942 agitation] include the hardship caused by…sudden strain to which the workers have been subjected in an effort to increase efficiency and output simultaneously; inescapable privations necessary to satisfy the needs and demands of the Metropolis of the Empire.

Memorandum of the Land and Survey African Technical Workers Union of Nigeria (Great Britain, 1946: 117)

Maybe it would be better to have employees controlled by Mr. Patrick than by Mr. Stalin and to be quite candid I think that is at the bottom of it all. I think that we have got to face the fact that if we don't get labour organised and controlled we shall be up against much bigger problems when they organise themselves.

An elected member of the Kenya Legislature in 1947 (Quoted in Singh, 1969: 194)

A wave of general strikes and urban protest, reaching from Durban to Tunis, and from Dakar to Dar es Salaam, took place in Africa in the years immediately following the Second World War. While each general strike possessed its own specific features, taken together the strikes shared several common characteristics. They were all primarily economically motivated, and African workers initiated and led them. The most salient feature of this unrest was the participation of all segments of the urban population, because its structural causes were economic conditions which deleteriously affected whitecollar civil servants and unskilled laborers alike. Furthermore, railway and dock workers in particular often assumed prominent roles. The strikes demonstrated the existence of contradictions in colonial social formations which required resolution, and authorities throughout British Africa reacted in a similar manner.

In his opening address to the fifty members of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) on 18 October, 1975, the head of Nigeria’s new military government, General Murtala Ramat Muhammed, declared: “It is important that we avoid a reopening of the deep splits which caused trauma in the country.” Those splits, as was made known to the outside world during the civil war, were ethnic, regional, and, to a lesser extent, religious in nature. Of these three modes of overt division, Nigerians have always been most successful in controlling the religious aspect. General Murtala’s statement is instructive on the problem of regional splits: “The fear of the predominance of one Region over another has . . . been removed to a large extent by the simple Constitutional Act of creating more States.” Four months later, following the assassination of Murtala, the successor regime of General Obasanjo declared the creation of seven more states, bringing the number up to nineteen from the twelve established by General Gowon in May 1967. While it is evident that the existence of “regions” has not been obliterated by their subdivision into states, this development has reduced the immediate political visibility and at least some of the salience of regional boundaries.

To state that government policy has been at the heart of the agrarian crisis in Lusophone Africa is not to deny the importance of drought, the depressed state of international commodity markets, and externally-provoked destabilization in contributing to food shortages and declining volumes of agricultural exports. Rather, this essay argues that commercial, fiscal, and exchange rate policies and the response of the majority of rural producers to them were the most important factors determining the conditions of production and trade during the period 1974-1984.

In her review of the literature on the food crisis in Africa, Sara Berry (1983) singles out the secular struggle over access to resources as motivating African governments in their policy-making. The crisis in Lusophone Africa can be viewed as a struggle between state officials and peasants over the amount and disposition of marketable surpluses. In each of the countries, politicians and bureaucrats sought control over the marketing and pricing of agricultural products and over the importation of basic consumer goods more as a means of securing state revenues and personal gain than as an instrument for promoting rural development Resistance to exploitative policies by food and export crop producers has been the main reason for the agricultural decline until at least 1984. This resistance manifested itself in various ways: diminished production, parallel markets, smuggling, emigration and support for anti-government forces.

Such behavior has been described before, notably by Robert Bates in his work Markets and States in Tropical Africa (1981). Bates examined how the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, the Sudan and the Ivory Coast squeezed the incomes of small rural cultivators through taxation, overvalued exchange rates, and monosoponistic marketing boards. Bates explained that governments were attempting to extract revenues and export commodities for financing the state apparatus as well as cheap food and raw materials in the interests of urban industrialists and workers.

The Ethiopian experiment stands out among the burgeoning Afro-Marxist states which have sprung up since about 1976. Its uniqueness does not lie in the fact that the revolution which spawned it had its roots in historic feudalism (although this has given it a somewhat unique character), nor does its uniqueness result from being an uncommon example of an attempt to build a state socialist society in the Third World. There are others-among them Viet Nam, Cuba, Benin, Angola, and Mozambique (Young, 1982; Ottaway and Ottaway, 1981). In fact with the decline of the Soviet Union's ability to impose ideological conformity on its clients and allies in the post-World War II era, Third World states have found it increasingly easy to adapt the Marxist-Leninist model devised by the Soviets to fit their own countries' objective conditions as they interpret them. Furthermore, the Ethiopia experiment is not any more successful than other such experiments in the Third World.

Ethiopia's efforts to build a new socialist society are primarily of interest because it seems to be moving toward state socialism despite the architects of this transformation viewing this process more as a means to an end than as an end in itself. The higher goal is clearly the legitimation of the vanguard role of the “men in uniform.” The priority assigned to maintaining a central role in the revolution for elements of the military is evidenced in the manner in which the long-promised vanguard party of workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals was formed between 1979 and 1984.

The government of Zimbabwe has publicly committed itself to a development strategy which it terms “Growth With Equity.” At least two official policy documents articulate the strategy: Growth With Equity (1981) and The Transitional National Development Plan: 1982/83-1984/85 (1982; hereafter TNDP). The theme appears frequently as well in the semi-official press and in Zimbabwe News, a publication of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) party. In each, the government claims that Growth With Equity will move the country away from the capitalist socio-economic system it inherited to a socialist order better able to redress the extreme racial and class inequities which were Rhodesia. Transformation is the watchword.

The degree to which the strategy will transform Zimbabwe-indeed, the degree to which it is even intended to do so-draws increasingly skeptical commentary. From the ranks of neoclassical economists comes the critique that Growth With Equity sets over-high standards and is technically unfeasible (EIU Special Report, 1981). Mainstream development theorists call attention to the moderate-reformist aspects of the strategy which predict a Fabian socialist future (Bratton, 1981). Radicals, once quite willing to give the Mugabe government the benefit of doubt, are becoming disillusioned; the most promising aspect of Growth With Equity, some say, is its Gramscian logic (Saul, 1980; The Review of African Political Economy, 1980; Bush and Cliff, 1984).

There is no dearth of Zimbabwe-watching and no shortage of opinion on the country's development prospects.

During the period of the slave trade (1650-1830), people were brought from the whole West Coast of Africa to Suriname. The majority had a Fante-Akan (Ghana), Ewe-Fon (Togo and Benin), or a western Bantu (Congo, Zaire and Angola) background, while the Mandingo (Senegal, Sierra Leone and Liberia) formed a minor fraction (Wooding 1972: ch. II). In the course of time they amalgamated into the Afrosurinamese population group, which is subdivided into two main groups: the coastal Creoles and the inland Bushnegroes.

During the colonial era, women in Ugogo in central Tanzania, like most of Africa, became increasingly marginalized as producers in a rural economy. A colonially imposed sexual division of labor saw men forced into a cash economy while women were officially regulated to subordinate subsistence activities. Women became the victims of a version of the “cult of domesticity” that limited their ability to control resources both within and outside the household. The marginalization of women came about as a result of an alliance between the colonial state and male elders yet it was also part of the marginalization of communities in Ugogo generally in which elders and all males also saw their economic autonomy destroyed. Ironically, by the end of the colonial era this process led to many men scapegoating women as the cause of their loss of autonomy and to many women seeing empowerment only in escaping the confines of the local community.

In one of the most thorough works on changing gender relations, Karen Sacks has explained this process in terms of the underdevelopment of African communities during the colonial era (1982). Majorie Mbilinyi has argued that in many parts of Tanzania colonial and post-colonial labor policies regulated women to the informal sector and even then often drove them out of the money economy entirely.

From the outside, northern Chad has long been seen as an area of lawlessness, defined primarily by its inhabitants’ alleged propensity for raiding and thieving. From the inside, northern Chad indeed appears as an area that thrives on a rhetoric of predation. This, however, is perhaps best understood not in terms of “crime,” but rather as a striving for personal autonomy, as a public denial of reciprocity in a context where notions of bounded moral community and indeed of long-term social strategies of exchange are not much in evidence.

The significance of the informal sector in the economy of developing countries is a recurring theme in the literature on urban and regional development planning in Africa south of the Sahara. This is of particular importance in Nigeria where it has been estimated that enterprises within this sector provide about seven times as much employment as those of the formal sector (Callaway, 1967: 163). Although economists such as Kilby (1963: 18) view small-scale enterprises in the informal sector merely as a “quasi-sponge for urban employment,” their persistent survival and expansion has led to recent investigations into the conditions which have made this survival possible (Lewis, 1972, 1973, 1974; Aluko, 1972; Bray, 1969).

In spite of the fact that the dualistic nature of the urban economy in many developing countries has been recognized by researchers for some years now, there is still some controversy about the most appropriate terminology which can be used to describe the pattern. McGee (1973: 138), for example, has suggested that most cities of the third world can be seen as “consisting of two juxtaposed systems of production—one derived from capitalist forms of production, the other from the peasant system of production.” On the other hand, Geertz (1963) described the two systems respectively as the “firm-centered economy” and the “bazaar-type economy.” These definitions emphasize the distinctive organization of production activities, whereas the usual “modern-traditional” dichotomy refers to the technology used. Hart's (1973) study in Accra introduced the concept of formal and informal income opportunities. He based the distinction between formal and informal urban economic activities on that between wage-earning and self-employment.

William Foltz (1978) has argued that the vital economic and strategic interests of the United States are so limited in scope that the making of an American policy toward South Africa is freed from any serious constraints. As such, South Africa represents “in political terms, something of a ‘freeplay area’ for American political leaders,” and an area where the “most prudent and cost-effective policy to protect American economic and strategic interests would be to work with, rather than against, the indigenous African forces of change” (Foltz, 1978: 267–68). While Foltz's argument may indeed be empirically and objectively correct it has certainly been rejected by the Reagan administration. This rejection stems in large measure from the administration's ideological world view which has contributed to the development of the policy of “constructive engagement” toward South Africa.

Constructive engagement holds that U.S. interests are best served by developing stronger economic and cultural ties with white South Africa. The conviction is that such ties will contribute to the gradual liberalization and ultimately to the demise of apartheid. These ties, it is argued, will support and encourage the political ascendancy of a modernizing autocracy of enlightened white elites. The latter's commitment to change, so the argument goes, will transform South Africa into a multiracial democracy and consequently into an acceptable and trusted partner in the overall Western system of defense. This line of argument rests on a particular set of intellectual constructs derived from a general system of beliefs.

The relationship between urbanization and mining is a precarious one; the latter often expands at the expense of the former. The incautious urban planning of a mining city in southeastern DR Congo, however, has opened up opportunities for residents with artisanal mining skills. Since the city is constructed on top of mineral deposits, the residents are able to dig ore in their own backyards to draw their subsistence. Based upon archival and ethnographic research, Geenen argues that, by self-generating the livelihoods they expected their resource-rich soil to bring forth, these artisanal diggers take advantage of the urbanized mineral deposits and write their own narrative of capitalism.

After at least five years of international isolation— almost 10 years in Belgium’s case—the Congo (formerly Zaire) is once again “visitable.” The “friends of the Congo” conference sponsored by the World Bank last December 3-4 sanctioned the beginning of normalization. Those attending were cautious since the meeting did not take place at the ministerial level and since the only help considered urgent concerned currency, transportation, and health. The Congolese government obtained a total of $120 million, the majority from the European Union (E.U.). This represents only about 10 percent of Kinshasa’s assessed reconstruction needs. For the rest, there will be another meeting in six months.