Rural-urban migration tends to play a central role in analyses of Zambian society. Zambia is, by African standards, a highly urbanized country and has experienced an explosive urbanization since independence. Migration from the rural areas is seen as a major cause for rural stagnation. Consequently it is a major policy goal of the Zambian government to reverse this trend towards more urbanization. The political and academic discussion about this policy is mostly in terms of large aggregates of people; rural versus urban, or peasants and capitalist penetration. For example migration from rural areas to urban centers is seen as a logical consequence of maximizing benefits in individual choices given the market situation (Fry and Maimbo, 1971; Bates, 1976). Another view sees this migration as logical in the interests of international capitalism. Rural-urban migration provides cheap labor of benefit to an export oriented enclave economy. The role of rural areas is limited to the reproduction of labor and this conflicts with a possible role of rural people as commodity producers (Cliffe, 1978).

The danger of such reasoning is that it casts rural people in a passive role, determined by the logic of rural-urban terms of trade or the workings of an all encompassing capitalist system. It implies a centralist view of development (Long, 1977) and overlooks the fact that diverse reactions of peasants are possible, given the influence of a Southern African capitalist system on their economies (Ranger, 1978). This is illuminated by this study of Mwase Lundazi, a chieftainship in Lundazi district, Eastern Province.

Why discuss women's role in development? The reason is quite simple, and it forms the underlying premise of this paper: If all of the persons who are involved in the human tasks of survival and creation of a better life are allowed to share the opportunities available to apply scientific knowledge and technological advances, development will be achieved at the most rapid rate possible. Conversely, if some persons are left outside the stream of this knowledge, the pace of development will be slowed down for the whole society. And the latter is particularly true if those left out play a major part in economic production and are at the same time the persons who bear the chief responsibility for the health and well-being of all the people.

Whether one holds a pragmatic or a humanistic view of development, the participation of women is necessary. From the pragmatic approach, one sees that the most serious problems of development defy solution without the active participation of women. Can hunger be banished without the women, who grow most of Africa's food, and who breastfeed the babies and prepare the meals for the whole family? Can illiteracy be abolished without the women who are the first teachers of children, and whose own level of education affects the progress in schooling of both boys and girls? The pragmatic approach to development also dictates that all available human resources must be mobilized to reach the goal.

The humanistic approach to development is expressed in the definition of development formulated by the President of Tanzania: “Development is development of people toward their greater freedom and well-being” (Nyerere, 1968). All must participate in the tasks of nation-building and share in its fruits.

For all the academic and policy interest in Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency, the coping strategies of civilians who survive amid everyday violence have received relatively little attention. Focusing on the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a pro-government militia fighting Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, Agbiboa explores how and why the group emerged, the nature of its relationship with the state and local communities, and how counterinsurgent vigilantism affects the prospects for peace. A focus on vigilantes and civil militias vis-à-vis the state points to the vital role of civil-military cooperation for effective counterinsurgency campaigns and for reducing state violence against civilians. At the same time, it underscores the precariousness of protection both in terms of increasing the targeting of civilians by vengeful insurgents as well as the tendency for civilian defense groups to “turn bad” and become threats to the communities they were expected to protect.

Media privatization, commercial growth, and new concern in the popular culture about changing patterns of marriage, love, and sexuality led to a sudden embrace during the 1990s by upwardly mobile urban Ghanaians of a previously minor element of globally circulating mass culture, Valentine's Day. Far from a story of cultural imperialism, the rise of Valentine's Day in present-day Accra shows that local adoption of global consumerist preferences is best understood as a local process imbued with local meanings and values, deliberately and rationally pursued.

In the latter 1940s, a growing number of American intellectuals, including scholars in various academic disciplines, were attracted to the study of Africa by two powerful incentives. First, African nationalism created a new horizon for the advancement of democracy, the twentieth century's preeminent political ideal. Second, many intellectuals were anxious to reconstruct the prevailing theories of society so that they would fairly represent the aspirations and problems of people everywhere on earth. From this perspective, due regard for the contributions of Africa was deemed to be a scientific, as well as a moral, imperative. These goals, democracy and universalism, were embraced and combined by the theorists of modernization.

Afro-Americans have always had more than academic interest in the study of Africa; it was inevitable therefore that they would come into conflict with Euro-Americans who (through myopia or cunning) insisted that they had no unique relationship to Africa. Viewed in historical perspective, it is quite understandable why in the 1960s blacks would challenge those whites who had arrogated to themselves the control of African Studies in the United States. For blacks, parity (if not dominance), in the study of Africa is inextricably part of their struggle for full equality in America. The reasons for this are quite simple: the whites who conquered and settled America decided quite early that the people of African descent who were brought to these shores as captives could not and (later) should not be permitted to live on a plane of equality with them.

The debate about the state in the Third World has led to the emergence of different paradigms. Although still in use, the bureaucratic-authoritarian and the inherited postcolonial state theses have been superseded in recent years by new models. There has been a resurgence of Weberian analyses of the state in third world studies, especially those dealing with Africa. The African state has been referred to as weak, soft, declined, absent, decayed, juridical, or normative. Many of the writings define and explain the problem the same way. One can say these studies are based on the soft state or declined state paradigm, even though some of them rely more explicitly on Max Weber's notion of patrimonialism. Even those writings in which soft state terminology is not explicit are, in fact, linked to the soft state paradigm (see Osaghae 1989). As Robert Fatten, Jr. correctly points out, since the 1950s, all the different ideological currents in African studies have been unable to “move beyond the talismatic concept of the ‘soft’ or non-institutionalized state” (1989, 170). In the 1980s and 1990s, the concept has been even more closely identified with Africa. Although Gunnar Myrdal was the first to use the term soft state to characterize the states in South Asia (Myrdal 1968, 66, 277, 895-900) and others have recently applied it to the state in the Third World in general (see Migdal, 1988), the concept has been given a particularly African flavor by those writing about Africa. Consistent with the prevailing view that Asian and Latin American countries are different and better off than African countries, Myrdal's initial use of the concept—questionable as it was even in his hands—has been removed from Asia and almost exclusively applied to Africa. Even those writers who attempt to apply the concept to the Third World in general acknowledge this almost exclusive use of the term but still tend to reinforce it. Because of its pervasive influence through modernization theory's notion of institutionalization, the soft state paradigm and its sui generis, particularistic assumptions and explanations about Africa frame the debate on today's democratization process in Africa.

This article uses the lens of disciplinary power to analyze the North–South relationships in efforts to govern drug trafficking in Senegal. Disciplinary surveillance shapes the activities of anti-trafficking units through repetitive examination, correction, and persuasion. These practices produce forms of resistance to the ways in which interdiction occurs, which implicate elites in the country. The result of constant international correction, and subsidiary actor resistance, is a frustrated law enforcement team. The argument deepens the literature on police reform in Africa, acknowledging the effects of international discipline on policing agents, while maintaining that immediate political settings heavily constrain disciplinary techniques and their internalizing effects.

We start with a fundamental duality in the paradigm of Pan-Africanism, the distinction between Pan-Africanism of liberation and Pan-Africanism of integration. Under both headings the name of Ghana's founder-president, Kwame Nkrumah, is immortalized.

The purpose of this article is to stress the neglected aspects of the inter-war educational policy in British tropical Africa which was generally referred to as Adaptation. It is not unusual to find gaps between theory and practice in various systems of education, but stated policy and educational practice in British Africa were so divergent as to merit special attention. Although a concerted effort was made to introduce Adaptation in 1923, the policy did not remain rigid; in fact it evolved in three distinct yet overlapping phases. Adaptation in tropical Africa was a transplant of an educational policy which grew gradually in New Zealand and India and crystallized during the era of New Imperialism in the 1890s in South Africa and in the south of the United States. The discussion which follows is therefore at once historical and comparative. An attempt will also be made to show that adaptation was linked to the political fortunes of the West.

Adaptation was based on the Colonial Office document issued in 1925, though the Derby Day Meeting which officially conceived this policy was held two years earlier on 6 June 1923. The policy displayed noble intentions: the major effort was directed towards literacy of the masses. The education of girls and adults was not to be neglected. The curriculum was to be geared to the agricultural economy that sustained tropical Africa. Government departments other than Education in each colony were to assist in training artisans and technicians with machine tools. In non-Muslim areas the school would be encouraged to have a Christian bias. Since the colonial government could not finance school expansion on its own, expansion would be through government-assisted schools run by the missions. Circumstances permitting, higher education would be provided.

The role of Islam in West African politics goes back to the beginnings of the encounter between Islamic culture and traditional African political leadership in the medieval period. When Arabo-Berber culture arrived in the West Soudan, African rulers in Ghana, Soudan, and other smaller kingdoms of the time were very much influenced by their traditional African world view. According to this world view, rulers were thought to be a link between the living and the dead, on the one hand, and between the temporal and the spiritual on the other. Indeed, it is because of this fusion of politics and primordial religion in the old Africa that the well-known American student of African religions, James W. Fernandez, wrote in the early 1960s that the “African, it can be argued, inherited a traditional disposition to shift back and forth from a political to a religious mode of address.”

This article, based on fieldwork in Western Kenya from 2012 to 2016, describes how life cycle rituals collect and distribute different forms of money, including land, property, personhood, animals, cash, and digital moneys. It specifically examines a ritual coming of age for adolescent boys. By organizing multiple forms of money relative to the phases of a human life, the past, and the future, these rituals serve to manage and transfer wealth across generations and to give these transfers social and moral dimensions. The study provokes a critique of financial initiatives in the Global South that often assume that the financial goals of the poor are short-term.

This article examines the puzzle of the nonescalation of electoral violence. Drawing on evidence from Kenya’s Coast and Rift Valley regions, the article argues that land narratives along the coast create few motives for people to participate in electoral violence because residents do not link their land rights with electoral outcomes. Politicians thus have far less power to use land narratives to organize violence. Two factors help account for this regional variation between the Rift Valley and the Coast: the strength of the political patron and the proportion of “outsiders” relative to “insiders.”

This paper addresses the issue of the state of education today in French-speaking Africa, with specific reference to literacy, post-literacy, and their perspectives for the year 2000. While a very pessimistic overall picture is presented in the literature, both by educational researchers and development and funding agencies, new approaches to the matter are emerging. First, from the previous linear relationship of education to other economic, social, and environmental factors, more and more authors now perceive education as an interdependent variable which mutually reinforces other economic, social, and cultural development factors. Education, it is realized, should not be restricted to the achievement of objectives such as employability and isolated from the global evolution of economic sectors (Hugon, 1988; Dave, Ouane, and Sutton, 1989). Hence, a new sort of applied economics of education is needed (Easton, 1989: 440). Linked to this notion, and no less important, is the perception that education should be constructed as a global system which offers combinations of approaches of equal potential value—formal, nonformal and even informal.

Second, the notion of development itself is questioned as well as its impact on education. The call is for humanization of development. The concept of development has long departed from narrow economic growth to include both a more equitable distribution of the wealth generated by and access to the supporting political structures. The failure of development policies in developing countries, and specifically in Africa, has aroused new interest in culture as an essential dimension for social change if not as the central dimension of development (Amin, 1989; Thompson, 1981, UNESCO, 1982).

Non-western peoples are often portrayed as extremely conservative, tradition-bound, and either apathetic or hostile toward change agents and their efforts. This picture of the conservative peasant appears in both social scientific analyses and journalistic accounts, and springs in part from the frustrations that many external change agents have felt when confronted with what seemed to be implacable resistance.

In the African context, particularly in East Africa, the “conservative native” par excellence has been the pastoralist. Ogling tourists are fascinated by the “noble savagery” of the Maasai, the Karimojong, and the Samburu, while African governments pass laws prohibiting the carrying of spears, requiring school attendance, banning transhumance, setting minimum quotas for livestock sales, establishing destocking policies and programs, and demanding increased agricultural production.

From the government's point of view, this pastoral conservatism has been particularly annoying and costly in its manifestations in economic behavior. Pastoralists are said to be emotionally attached to their livestock to a degree that makes it impossible for them to operate as rational economic actors. They are accused of being both lazy and spend-thrifts. A European economist, who was chiefly responsible for the creation of a development plan for Karamoja District, Uganda, told me that the Karimojong “don't have the sagacity of a squirrel.”

Countering this stereotyping is a growing awareness among some social scientists that the label of “conservatism” applied by analysts is myopic and ethnocentric (Ortiz, 1971) or, in the case of some officials, self-serving (Erasmus, 1968).

Seemingly oblivious to outside pressure and censure, the present-day Nationalist government of South Africa remains firmly wedded to a policy of separate development, known as apartheid, for its white and nonwhite populations. Criticism from abroad is inevitably parried with the assertion that South Africa has its own means of dealing with questions of race, based on more than 300 years of historical experience. Traditionally this attitude has been upheld and shared by South African historians, particularly by those of Dutch extraction, who comb South Africa's past in search of material to justify the prejudices and policies of today. “History,” writes a contemporary South African historian, “has become a tool to perpetuate the laager mentality of a minority group embattled forever against British imperialists, missionaries, Kaffirs, Communists, liberals, and the world in general” (Patterson 1957, p. 37).

More specifically, South Africa's current inflexible position on apartheid may be related to events that took place in the early part of the nineteenth century. During this period, British efforts to bring about the “equalization” of the native peoples led to the “first clash of significance” between the British and the Afrikaners (Van Jaarsveld 1964, p. 8), as the descendants of the Dutch Boers call themselves; and because the agents of the London Missionary Society at the Cape and in England agitated for many of the reforms introduced by the home government in its South African colony, the Afrikaners have held them responsible for setting in motion the events leading to the Great Trek of 1836.

The majority of East African pastoralists, unlike the pastoral societies of the Middle East which have been exposed to and have dealt with central state organizations for millennia, have fallen sway to centralized governments only at the beginning of this century. The process of integration and encapsulation of nomadic pastoralists in centralized polities and economies is now well under way in Africa and is given much attention by the local African governments.

Historical evidence is showing that, prior to colonial encroachment, East African pastoral societies, commonly depicted as highly resistant to change and strictly bound to tradition and culture, have at times undergone drastic and swift transformations in response to altered ecological conditions and/or to new opportunities. The Turkana, for instance, separated from the Jie to become nearly pure pastoralists; the Maasai, at Njiemps and Arusha, settled down to become farmers; the Pokot and Kamba developed a dual economic sector with heavy reliance on both agriculture and pastoralism (Goldschmidt, 1974: 298). The Nilo-Hamitic Samburu entered an intimate symbiotic (socio-political and economic) relationship with the contiguous Cushitic Rendille (Spencer, 1973).

From the beginning of this century, colonial powers by elaborating particular policies and measures and introducing certain development projects have often struck at the very core of pastoral subsistence without regard to or appreciation of the pastoralists' mode of life. In so doing, they have laid down the foundation of far reaching changes in the economic sector, in the social fabric and in the political organization of East African pastoralists.

It is generally recognized that rural constituents are critical for winning elections. Development economists also recognize the importance of pro-agricultural policies to economic growth. Yet, little attention has been paid to the effect of rural politics on regime stability. Against conventional wisdom, this article argues that leaders who support rural areas and suppress urban demands are better able to stabilize the state and avoid coups. Because Ghana was able to politically stabilize after a period of state decay and five coups, the article presents an in-depth analysis of the tactical decisions made by the Ghanaian head of state who presided over these changes, John Jerry Rawlings. Using process-tracing, the study illustrates the importance of rural coalitions to stability and regime success.