This article examines two films by Raoul Peck—Lumumba: La mort du prophèle (1992) and Lumumba (2000) that offer vastly divergent methods for remembering, memorializing, and meditating on the life and death of Patrice Lumumba. Peck succeeds in creating films that do more than preserve or resuscitate a historical record. The earlier film in particular performs analytic historical work as it delves into the conflicted historical record in which Lumumba is remembered. Peck uses an experimental and confrontational approach to reveal the ongoing forms of cultural censorship that have attempted to erase Lumumba and his legacy.

An interesting if not unique aspect of Kenya's attainment of independence was the peaceful displacement of European settlers from central positions of political power. Explanations for their political demise lie chiefly in various political and economic trends in Kenya colony eroding settler dominance. These trends accelerated the separation of the interests of the colonizers (European settler-farmers) from those of colonialism (authoritative ties and political economy) down to Kenyan independence in the early 1960s.

The demise of colonial rule in Kenya was not the same as the erosion of European farmer domination; nor were they necessarily interdependent. English colonialism in Kenya dealt both with the attempt to colonize Kenya with European settlers and with the maintenance of a system of authority called colonialism in the country. Regarding the latter, more important aspect of the term, the European settlers were an important link — perhaps at times the most important — but certainly not the sole one. Colonial officials, commercial interests, tribal authorities, the Asian community and missionaries, were all vital supports to the system. The separability of the two aspects of the colonial system can be seen in a Rhodesia where the settler-dominated political system could survive without colonial authority, and in a Ghana where colonial authority existed without the settler presence.

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.”

“Queer” is a relatively recent and somewhat controversial term in African studies. Yet it is proving to be productive, not only for understanding African subjectivities of sexuality and gender, but also for situating Africa’s position in the larger economy of knowledge. Otu and van Klinken explore the productive tensions between “queer” and “Africa,” and aim to read Africa as queer and to read queer from Africa. Thus, rather than imagining Africa and queer as polar opposites, the authors seek to harness the critical, productive, and creative affinities between these two terms that are vital for the project of decolonizing and queering queer Africa.

In this article it shall be argued that the Zambian government's decision to nationalize its only major industry—large international copper companies—undermined the government's major development objectives toward the mining industry. By taking majority ownership of the copper corporations, the government inadvertently modified its original policy objectives and shifted toward the policy objectives of the copper companies. The force behind the government's impetus for change in its policy orientation did not come from Zambian administrators who supposedly became bourgeois, nor did it develop as a result of an increase in the power of the mining companies. Rather the government's participation in the companies institutionally linked governmental policy criteria with the criteria in use by the mining corporations, measured more by profit margins and less by the social criteria of development and public welfare.

Political leaders apparently thought that they could achieve their developmental goals through their control of the copper companies and could thus avoid making major public investments to achieve those goals. Leaders appeared to see the government's ownership of the copper companies as being a relatively cost free way to develop the country. Not only did this prove impossible, however, but when the copper industry experienced a financial crisis after 1975, the government as the major owner had to bear the financial burden of supporting the multinational corporations. One consequence of Zambia's nationalization of the copper industry, therefore, was to place the country deeply into debt simply to sustain the operations of a financially troubled international industry. This had the effect of forcing the government to suspend all major new development projects and to postpone its development plans for the country.

For observers of U.S. policy toward Africa, this has been the fall of the "Nissem."

Newspaper and magazine articles by Tad Szulc and Jack Anderson, based on the text of National Security Study Memorandum 39 of 1969 (NSSM 39), have popularized an alleged Nixon " tilt " toward Southern Africa's white regimes, stemming from a preference for protection of U.S. economic interests over ideals of democracy and decency. The State Department, embarrassed and flustered by the leak of another secret document, has tried to downplay its significance (calling it merely a preliminary study), and has disclaimed any change in policy.

The debate concerning whether the West should impose sanctions against the Republic of South Africa has been mostly political in nature. Moreover, much of the discussion has concerned the morality of sanctions; less, especially by advocates of sanctions, has dealt with the effectiveness of proposed measures. The economics literature has been particularly sparse, and most detailed analyses are inaccessible other than to professional economists.

This paper attempts to fill the gap. The discussion is non-mathematical, although the propositions put forth can be derived from formal models. The arguments are generally straightforward and intuitive, though, so that the absence of technical details obscures little. In particular, this paper will seek to outline which sorts of sanctions will be most effective in achieving the dismantling of the economic (and possibly political) aspects of apartheid, and which are likely to harm southern Africa's black population least.

The analysis suggests two central points. First, effective sanctions may exist that do not greatly hurt poor South African blacks. Second, effective sanctions must be accompanied by a generous policy of infrastructural aid to South Africa's neighbors if these countries are to remain stable.

The next section briefly describes current sanctions, while the following section outlines salient features of the southern African economies. The paper then discusses the impact of specific trade and investment sanctions. The final section summarizes desirable sanction strategies, considers the apartheid government's ability to shift the consequences of such measures, and presents a positive strategy for developing the rest of southern Africa that will be useful even in the absence of effective sanctions.

The Holy Ghost Fathers have been in Kastern Nigeria for about eighty-five years. Not until after the recent Nigeria-Biafra War has their influence been somewhat minimized. Arriving originally from France in 1885, the Roman Catholic missionaries, as we shall see later in this essay, exerted a considerable influence far out of proportion to their number. But despite that they had become a factor to be reckoned with ever since, their missionary activity has scarcely been studied systematically. One principal reason for this has been the reluctance of the Roman Catholic authorities to permit scholars to use their private archives in Paris.

In the last few years, however, the Roman Catholic authorities seem to have relaxed their one-hundred-year rule which has often been invoked to deny bone fide researchers access to the archival source materials. I am not sure, however, that this is yet an official policy, but I was permitted in 1968 and again in 1970 to use the archives. It is perhaps important to point out that the archival materials are still jealously guarded. During my research, for example, I was not permitted to examine certain dossiers perceived by the Archivist as “sensitive” and “not proper for public use.” The study that follows is partly based on the materials collected from the archives and partly from other sources, especially from the archives of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in London.

The dominant trend in the literature on civil society in Africa, particularly in the context of undemocratic regimes, assumes that civil society activists (including progressive, radical, or guerrilla journalists) are committed only to counteracting the preeminence of a repressive state. Within such a paradigm, evidence of collaborations between agents of the state and elements within civil society—particularly in the interest of advancing political liberation, democracy, justice, and equity—tend to be understated, if not erased altogether. Based on ethnographic details of secret collaborations between the Nigerian security agencies and radical journalists in the fight against military fascism, this article argues that the commonly assumed division between the state and the media is in fact breached regularly in practice. Such evidence should draw scholarly attention to a largely neglected area of research on state–media relations in Africa: the penetration of the apparatuses of power and repression by their targets and victims.

Obviously an adequate food base is an essential prerequisite for development. Unless this need can be met there can be little hope for successful economic, social and political development. Agricultural development in most countries is a necessary precondition for economic development unless they are fortunate enough to have other resources which can be exported to finance food imports. Even in the latter case such imports would detract from the accumulation of capital necessary for industrialization and would be unwise from a developmental standpoint, unless the country did not have suitable conditions for agriculture. Comparative economic advantage may dictate the utilization of cropland for the production of non-food agricultural products such as cotton, jute or rubber, but this practice is economically sound only if the country has sufficient food cropland to meet local needs or if the export of non-food agricultural products generates sufficient earnings to offset the cost of food imports. Thus the food question is inextricably entwined with the general problems of agricultural and economic development.

The importance of agriculture to development is not disputed in the developmental literature. Opposing views, however, have emerged as to its proper role in development. Perhaps the most prevalent approach in older, developed countries might be called the integrative view. Agriculture is seen as a more or less equal partner with industry and other sectors of society. As agricultural efficiency and production increase, a release of labor from the agricultural sector requires a reciprocal ability on the part of the industrial sector to absorb such labor. If this release-absorption interaction is not coordinated developmental problems are experienced (Reynolds, 1975: Ch. 1). In countries with the integrative view, agriculture often foots the major burden for the capitalization of industrialization as in the case of the United States and Japan.

Evan Mawarire’s poetic video “This Flag,” first posted on Facebook on April 20, 2016, mobilized an international protest movement against then-president of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe between April and September of 2016. In the video, Mawarire built on the poetics of anti-colonial resistance and nationalization to create a rallying cry. The piece’s remediation through the hashtag channel #ThisFlag created rhetorical links between digital organizing and grounded action. This literary perspective on contemporary discussions of social media and collective identity formation shows how the poetic elements of the video enabled Mawarire’s claim to spread and motivate a grounded movement.

I had the pleasure of commenting on the articles in this issue when they were first presented as papers at the 2006 annual meeting of the African Studies Association, and the remarks that follow remain true to the character of those comments while acknowledging that the original papers have been reworked and updated. These provocative articles, coupled with my experiences doing ethnographic research in Guinea-Bissau—first among Manjaco in the village-cluster of Bassarel more than twenty years ago, and more recently (and briefly) among immigrant Manjaco in Lisbon—have led me to reflect upon anthropology's relationship to recent history, and to what anthropologists can contribute to an understanding of Guinea-Bissau: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Anthropology has a peculiar relationship to events, especially events that affect whole nations or regions. Anthropologists wish to be current, and we want to illuminate the big picture. And yet we have to acknowledge that there are inherent constraints in our work: the investigations we engage in are usually time consuming, our reports are therefore always belated, and our conclusions are the product of an intimate engagement with relatively few people who are, moreover, often situated on the periphery or at the margins of the state. Thus, even when the articles in this issue were first presented, “today” was already history because their focus was on the period after the war of 1998–99, which began as an attempt by the military to oust President Vieira and ended up as a protracted conflict (largely restricted to the capital, Bissau) that destroyed important infrastructure, caused NGOs to cease operations throughout the country, and led to the mass exodus of at least a quarter-million people from the capital city to seek refuge as “guests” in rural villages (see Vigh 2006).

This is an account of how artists and cultural workers have striven to gain and maintain the freedom to produce art in a milieu that threatened to either exploit their labors for political ends or to marginalize them as unimportant and unworthy of public and private patronage and support. It also seeks to explain how they have organized and sought to expand their influence and independence. Cultural politics has many dimensions, including the larger issues of defining and enriching the values and purposes of a community, establishing the identity and parameters of the community and its culture, and locating the bounds of social and political discourse. Such a perspective takes culture in its most expansive sense—the concepts, habits, arts, skills, languages and institutions of a people.

This article will focus on a more narrow view of cultural politics—the struggle over who represents the communities of cultural workers and practitioners, particularly in their dealings with the state and other dominant institutions, and how those communities have coalesced to pursue their perceived interests. Thus, culture is a synonym for those fine and popular arts that reproduce and reinforce systemic values, and those that corrode and undermine the social regime. And it is the battle for the control of the arts and those who create and disseminate the arts that will be examined here.

Addressing the issue of the extent to which the government of a country poor in economic and human resources for development can put into practice pluralist language policies for education. The discussion is limited to policy and practice in post-revolution Ethiopia, drawing on data collected in the mid-1980s (McNab, 1989). It is also limited to the literacy campaigns which, carried out in fifteen languages, have become a regular feature of the education system since their inauguration in 1979. The term literacy campaign as used in this paper includes the initial, remedial, and post-literacy classes which in Ethiopia are the basis of an integrated approach to literacy education.

The People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (PDRE) is a developing country of socialist orientation. The population of Ethiopia is about 45 million. It is one of the poorest countries in the world; in 1984, the estimated GNP per capita was around $110 (World Bank, 1987). The population is predominantly (89 percent) rural, with agriculture accounting for about 50 percent of GDP, 90 percent of exports and 85 percent of employment (World Bank, 1987). Agriculture is the country's main potential resource for development but development is hindered by cycles of drought and famine and by the fighting in Northern Ethiopia and previously also in the Ogaden. Trading is well established, and a small modern sector has developed in the urban areas. There are, however, vast distances, rugged terrain, and wide variations in topography which make internal transport and communications difficult and thereby pose major obstacles to administration and economic development.

I am man of the transition [because] of my age and my ideas.… I have one foot in with the elders because I have learned from them, and the other with the young.…The massive entry of young people [into the party] symbolizes the success of continuity.

Laurent Dona Fologo, Fraternité Matin, 19 April 1991

The theme of the Ninth Congress of the PDCI, which opened 1 October 1990 in the president's village of Yamoussoukro, was “renovation and continuity” (Fraternité Hebdo, 4 October 1990). With three thousand activists taking part, it was the most widely attended congress ever held. Earlier that year, the leader of the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire, President Félix Houphouët-Boigny (deceased 7 December 1994), had announced an end to one-party rule. The goal of the congress, then, was to revamp the PDCI so that it could compete effectively against the electoral challenge it would now face from opposition parties. Ten commissions were organized to restructure the PDCI and formulate a platform to deal with the political and economic problems plaguing the nation. When the delegates emerged, five days later, the party had been reorganized. Among other things, it now included a broader representation of generations, professions and interest groups in each of the party organs and committees.

Not surprisingly, differences of opinion have emerged within PDCI ranks as to how an open, efficient, “new and improved” party should function. Far from entering this new era of Ivoirian politics as a monolithic entity, as victorious election figures might suggest, the PDCI came rife with tensions between loyal members.

To probe the changing roles and responsibilities of intellectuals, this article explores the world of Ali Mazrui, one of Africa’s best-known scholars. Mazrui’s lifelong work spans the entire postcolonial period, and offers a prism for viewing African studies. Methodologically, this intellectual ethnography stages dialogues between Mazrui and other leading thinkers who have examined the nexus of knowledge and power. More specifically, Mazrui engages in controversies on complex issues such as Afrocentrism, religiosity, gender, and youth. Debates with his critics address fundamental questions facing Africa: grappling with social transformation, expanding policy space, and building ladders of development.

This article explores the question of how well South African defense policies and investments during the apartheid and postapartheid era have supported the country's overall political objectives. Perhaps not surprisingly, the single-mindedness of mission during apartheid contributed, in many ways, to a defense strategy that was more cohesive than that of the postapartheid era. In the postapartheid era, opportunities for using the country's defense assets to achieve political objectives and overall national priorities have not been fully exploited.

Based on an original dataset of university students, this article investigates Ghanaian collective memories of past events that are sources of national pride or shame. On average, young elite Ghanaians express more pride than shame in their national history, and they report shame mostly over actions that caused some physical, material, or symbolic harm. Such actions include not only historic events and the actions of national leaders, but also mundane social practices of average Ghanaians. Respondents also report more “active” than "receptive" shame; that is, they are more ashamed of events or practices that caused harm to others and less ashamed about events in which they were the “victims.” We advance the idea of a standard of “reasonableness” that Ghanaians apply in their evaluation of events, behaviors, or circumstances: they apply contemporary standards of morality to past events, but they temper their judgment based on considerations of whether past actions were “reasonable” given the power and material imbalances at that time. Ghanaian students identify strongly with both national and pan-African identities, and they frequently evoke their international image to judge a national event as either honorable or shameful. Ethnicity can be one factor in an individual's judgment of precolonial events, whereas political party affiliation is the stronger predictor of attitudes toward postindependence events.

According to the latest figures, Uganda has 6.5 billion barrels of oil deposits, which makes it the third-largest oil holder in sub-Saharan Africa. Currently the country is preparing its legal and institutional framework for proper management of the oil revenues. However, developing an effective oil sector in any of the SSA states has so far proved to be a futile task. To ensure that Uganda is not going to repeat the mistakes of Nigeria, the country’s leaders have requested Norway’s assistance in preparing Uganda’s oil sector for the upcoming production phase. The major objective of this article is to determine whether the Norwegian model of oil extraction and revenues management is transplantable to the Ugandan political, economic, and social conditions.