“Political violence” is seemingly on the rise again in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The violence that began in the 1980s and reached a peak in the transition period resurfaced before the local government elections in August 2016. Krämer provides a processual understanding of local dynamics of violence in the eThekwini Municipality and situates the current episode within the historical trajectory of violent conflict. He examines how exclusionary identities get activated in local elections and argues that underlying the violence between supporters of hostile political parties are conflicting forms of autochthonous belonging and contradictory ideas about what constitutes membership in a community.

While Nigeria has a vibrant press media landscape, freedom of the press is only rated as “partly free” by Freedom House, mostly due to political influences on reporting. Yet the extent to which these influences affect the quality of reporting remains insufficiently investigated. We address this gap by analyzing how three newspapers with different political affiliations report on conflict in the run-up to the 2015 elections. Our analyses indicate that biases in reporting are generally limited, and that while political pressures are real, they are most evident in editorial choices.

The Nigerian military has been engaged in a program of transition to democratic rule since 1985. The country’s military rulers developed “transition politics” into a strategy of transitions without end, a ruse to prevent democratization. Hopefully, Nigeria is now at the crossroads. One of the most important issues posed in the transition has been the ethnoregional one: Would entrenched ethnoregional forces allow political power to shift from the North to the South? It is not a new question in Nigerian transition politics.

Two broad issues surface when ethnoregional domination emerges as a political issue in Nigeria: control of political power and its instruments, such as the armed forces and the judiciary; and control of economic power and resources.

This article explores questions of decolonization, in part through analyzing Belgium’s Africa Museum. Bernal considers the role of academia and knowledge production, as well as the technological developments that may create new concentrations of power faster than decolonial projects can dismantle established hierarchies. She concludes that decolonization must address material questions of reparations and restitution, and that digital media have been transformative in ways that bring northern models of social existence closer to African ones. Having lived under colonizers, despots, and states of exception, Africans bring important knowledge and experience to twenty-first-century global struggles.

The modern human rights movement, as it is known today, is largely the product of the horrors of the mainly European war of 1939-45. Its rise is mostly a direct result of the abominations committed by the Third Reich during that war. Drawing on the Western liberal tradition, the human rights movement arose primarily to control and contain state action against the individual. The two principal documents of the movement—the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)—largely establish negative rights that either limit or prohibit altogether government intrusion into the so-called “private realm.”

Over the past twenty years, South African civil society has engaged in an extended debate over the appropriate role of “custom” in public life, focusing on issues of gender and sexuality. The history of virginity testing in the Eastern Cape region shows that the nostalgia for custom points to the loss of sexual autonomy that accompanied colonialism. While the rhetoric that justified virginity testing in the precolonial and early colonial era was deeply patriarchal, the practice itself protected female sexual autonomy and provided protections that were undermined by the colonial legal regime and have yet to be effectively replaced.

This forum contributes to debates on migration, displacement, and place-making in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. We bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to move the existing literature beyond the dominant focus on the causes of displacement to a rich and granular exploration of its consequences. The forum focuses on Somali refugees and migrants for two reasons. First, Somalia is one of the largest refugee-producing countries in the world. Second, depending on the host states in which they find themselves, Somali migrants and refugees can encounter many different fates, ranging from living in refugee camps to migrating to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa to a small minority being resettled in countries of the global north. These varied circumstances make it possible to study strategies of place-making among Somali communities from several different perspectives. A central theme of this forum is to highlight the agency of migrants and refugees and to emphasize the fact that these groups are more than mere victims of their circumstances. The articles in this volume will be of interest to scholars of African studies, anthropology, comparative politics, migration studies, peace studies, and Somali studies.

During the past three decades Ethiopia has been noted for political turmoil, drought, and famine. The country’s 63 million people, the second largest population in Africa, have a per capita income of $110, one-fourth the average for the continent. At all levels, it has the lowest school attendance rate in the world: 30 percent at primary, 13 percent at secondary, and less than 1 percent at the tertiary level. The country’s health sector, too, is in no better condition: health expenditure between 1990 and 1995 was 1.7 percent of GDP. Life expectancy at birth is 49 years. The country also has one of the highest HIV-AIDS infection rates in the world (9.3 per 100 adults).

Based on primary sources, including documents obtained from Cameroon’s Ministry of External Relations, oral interviews conducted in Cameroon, and local newspapers, and a variety of secondary sources, this article examines Cameroon’s foreign policy and economic relations with China. It argues that Cameroon’s engagement with China has resulted in short-term benefits for consumers but undermined long-term, sustainable economic development. The article concludes that unless China genuinely pursues its promised policies of “mutual respect” and “win–win gain,” voices of protest will only grow louder in Cameroon and other African nations.

African studies has gone through three well-known phases as a field of study. Up until 1950 or thereabouts, those studying Africa — they were not yet called Africanists — tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the capturing (or recapturing) of a description of Africa eternal: Launcelot the ethnographer in search of a holy grail of the past that was written in the present tense and was undefiled by contact and uncorrupted by civilization. What was once a myth is now a fairy tale and it would be silly to waste time tellling each other the obvious truth that fairy tales are modes of the social control and the education of children.

In 1920s South Africa, white segregationists justified accelerated racially discriminatory legislation by casting blacks as “uncivilized primitive natives” undeserving of full citizenship rights. Africans often countered this discourse by pointing to African Americans as proof of black capacities to modernize and as role models worthy of emulating in antisegregationist activity. Black South African leaders often associated themselves with African Americans to further legitimize their respective political activities. This article explores this phenomenon with the example of James Thaele, the American-educated president of the African National Congress (Cape Western Province), perhaps the most actively militant organization in the late 1920s. Previous scholars have viewed Thaele's flamboyant dress and hyperbolic language as evidence of a curious eccentric. Instead, we show that Thaele's dress and language were important performative tools that subverted, mocked, and reversed white modernity narratives that locked Africans into static “uncivilized native” categories. Black America was an indispensable aspect of Thaele's antisegregationist attacks. At historically black Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), he earned two degrees, attaining an educational level then unavailable in South Africa, and he became enamored of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (U.N.I.A.). Upon his return to South Africa, Thaele legitimized his political organizing, public speeches, and writings by emphasizing his celebrated American background and pointing to the U.N.I.A. as a model for antisegregationist organizing in South Africa.

The passing of the colonial order from much of Africa left a complex geopolitical environment within which to confront the problems of modernization. Since 1960 African states have had to cope with a confused mosaic of competing sovereignties bequeathed by the colonial scramble and the breakup of the colonial federations. In spite of the appeal of pan-Africanism to many African intellectuals, diversity and differentiation rather than unity have been the rule in the post-colonial era, both within most African states and in their international relations. Despite similar legacies and many common problems, African governments have found it difficult to transcend their colonial boundaries either in the name of political ideology or apolitical efficiency.

A number of African leaders have devoted considerable effort to changing this situation. Seme, of whom Kwame Nkrumah is perhaps the most familiar example, have stressed the achievement of continental political unity as the most effective approach to reorganizing the inter-African system. Others, of whom Leopold Senghor is a prime example, have emphasized regional projects based on cooperation in economic and technical domains without regard to political unity. Senghor's approach reflects the functionalist notion that there are relatively noncontroversial matters which provide a foundation for the gradual development of international institutions. Senegal's inter-African diplomacy under Senghor, therefore, provides a framework within which to evaluate functionalism as a strategy of international organization in the context of contemporary Africa.

If the sudden downfall of Mali’s officially democratic system in early 2012 surprised many observers, the failings of the Malian state—including public disaffection with the political process, weak rule of law, and inadequate delivery of basic services—were widely known both at home and abroad. Focusing on activists based in Bamako, this article assesses Malian civil society’s response to these challenges since the March 2012 military coup and considers prospects for wider political engagement by the Malian public.

Following the collapse of many civilian and constitutional governments in postcolonial Africa, most political analysts and commentators drew a dismal conclusion. They decided that democratic representation based upon freedom of speech and association would be abandoned in Africa and they proclaimed the onset of an era of authoritarian rule. Some analysts, in the tradition of colonialist thought, asserted that cultural and social conditions in Africa are simply unsuited to the practice of liberal democracy.

HIV/AIDS is disrupting household livelihood security in Tanzania's rural communities and contributing to rural impoverishment by claiming the lives of the most productive young adults who make up the bulk of the labor force in those areas. This article presents results of a case study based on a survey of 119 households conducted in three villages of Rungwe district in Tanzania. The results reveal that households with HIV/AIDS deaths spend less on food than those without AIDS deaths, and that households with HIV and AIDS-related deaths are more likely to fall below the poverty line.

It has by now been amply demonstrated that involvement of a local region with the world capitalist economy, or “development,” can have disastrous effects upon the economic status of women (Boserup, 1970). These changes are created by the involvement of the labor force in activities related to world markets in commodities, either by working as wage laborers on plantations, mines, and factories, or by cultivating cash crops as tenants or owners of land. In Africa women have been barred from much of the wage labor available, yet have been expected to subsidize low wages paid to men of their families by agricultural work and trading (Hay, 1976; Stichter, n.d.). Where new agricultural techniques have been introduced, men have been trained to use them despite the preponderance of female farmers in much of African traditional agriculture (Boserup, 1970: 53-65).

I had the privilege in 1969-1971 of working as an anthropologist in Ethiopia, a nation at that time marginal to the world economy. Principal exports were cotton and coffee, both unsuitable for cultivation in much of the Ethiopian highland. Indigenous manufacturing firms employed fewer than 50,000 people in a population estimated at 25 million (Ethiopia Statistical Abstract, 1970: 54). The nation had never been part of a real colonial empire; Italian domination in 1938-41 was too brief to set up successful forms of foreign-dominated economic extraction. Various types of subsistence farming and pastoralism supported the bulk of the Ethiopian population.

This Special Issue is the condensation of an author-meets-critics double panel organized for the African Studies Association meeting in Washington, D.C., in November 2005, on Jane Guyer's challenging book Marginal Gains—Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. The book was published in the first half of 2004, and when the three of us met in the fall of that year, we all felt it was a text that lent itself especially well to such a session. One of the elements that makes the book so compelling is Guyer's particular style of theorizing: Starting from a painstaking effort to discover regular patterns in empirical data, she moves to the positing and testing of theoretical notions—but in a way that does not strive to produce closure or systematicity. On the contrary, the book can sometimes be confusing because it leaves so much open. But precisely because Guyer continues to create new openings, it is an inspiring piece of work, constantly offering novel starting points for further research and reflection.

This article begins by tracking how the delineation of “New Cinema” in the recent work of Manthia Diawara differs significantly from the approaches that had been dominant when he published his initial study on African cinema in 1992. The changes lead us to position current filmmaking practices vis-à-vis Nollywood film, and to ask how the formation of the cinematic subject functions in contemporary “new waves” of cinema.

By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century a new nationalist movement had emerged in British West Africa which was significant of a new political awakening in that part of the world. This was the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), which differed in important respects from earlier “nationalist” movements in the area. The NCBWA, unlike previous movements, envisaged a united British West Africa as a political objective to be attained, was organised on a scale that simultaneously embraced all four colonies of British West Africa, and was led almost exclusively by the educated elite of the area.

A study of the background to the emergence of the NCBWA reveals not only that the germ of the movement was rooted in a fairly distant past but also that a variety of interesting forces of a fairly recent occurrence “conspired” to ensure its birth. The incipient nationalism which the movement embodied reflects a line in a chain of reactions to the British advent into and “colonization” of West Africa. British involvement in this area was chiefly the result of her need to safeguard her trading interests. In the establishment of her regime in West Africa, educated Africans were regarded as allies in the task by the colonial master. Consequently from the 1840's to the 1880's Africans rose to high positions in the colonial service. In Sierra Leone, for example, William Ferguson, Afro-West Indian by origin and a medical graduate of Edinburgh, was appointed its governor in 1844, while John Ezzidio, a Nupe ex-slave who had become a wealthy trader and a pillar of the Colony's Wesleyan Church, was appointed a member of the Sierra Leone Legislative Council in 1863 (McIntyre 1966, pp. 155-156; Fyfe 1962, pp. 229-232 et passim).

Among the more pressing and enigmatic challenges for Nigeria’s new civilian regime is the reconstruction of the nation’s benighted economy. The long-standing distortions of the petroleum-led economy have been exacerbated by more than a decade of misrule, international isolation, and economic decline. The current political transition offers Nigeria an opportunity to rejoin the global economy while establishing new foundations for economic revival. The legacy of decay from recent dictatorships weighs heavily on this process. The burdens of political repression and unaccountable governance have been compounded by stagnant economic performance, deepening popular immiseration, widening inequalities, and spiraling corruption.