Between 2020 and 2022, sub-Saharan Africa witnessed a substantial increase in the number of military coups. The military interventions in Guinea (September 2021), Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), Chad (April 2021), Sudan (April 2019 and October 2021), and Burkina Faso (January 2022) contributed to democratic backsliding and authoritarianism on the continent. In addition, Niger (March 2021) and Guinea Bissau (February 2022) saw failed coup attempts. As a result of these five coups and two failed coup attempts, media reports now ask whether coups are making a comeback in Africa. As the extant literature about civil-military relations in Africa reveals, military coups were never absent. But the recent number and frequency of coups has led to a greater awareness of the threat that militaries pose to civilian rulers from the Atlantic coast (Guinea) to the Red Sea (Sudan).

This article explores state/NGO/funder relations in Africa through an ethnographic case study of Malawi’s Readmission Policy. The Policy, which banned the permanent expulsion of pregnant girls from school in 1993, underwent a formal, government-led review in 2016. By focusing attention on the daily work of “middle figures”—the mid-level civil servants, NGO representatives, and consultants who participated in the policy reform process—this article shows how state disempowerment in Malawi was not wholesale, even as aid funding for development policymaking bypassed government. Rather, government actors deployed key strategies, including time (mis)management, to reclaim moral authority over Malawian schools.

Lagos, at present the political capital of Nigeria and the nerve centre of the country's economy, has been the meeting point for the commercial talent of Yorubaland since the opening of the port to trade with Western Europe. From the start, that trade had inspired and depended upon the activities of a large number of middlemen who linked the expatriate merchant firms in the principal coastal market towns with the young but promising Nigerian market in the hinterland. These indigenous traders, the first generation to take advantage of the, new economic opportunities, came from all the main Yoruba subcultural groups. But, as several historical accounts have shown (see among others Johnson 1921, Forde 1951, Bauer 1954), the Ijebu have turned out more prominently in the process and have distinguished themselves as commercial entrepreneurs above other Yoruba subcultural groups.

As the African Studies Association celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, it is a good time to look back at the circumstances of its founding in 1957, and to acknowledge the key role played by the Carnegie Corporation and, in particular, by its President, Dr. Alan Pifer, in facilitating that event. For the Corporation, this was only one of a long series of constructive activities related to Africa, dating back to 1926. For American scholars concerned with that continent, the concept of an American African Studies Association was at first problematic, but in practice it has created new and fruitful opportunities for interaction with colleagues at home and abroad, stimulating the growth and maturity of African studies.

Discussions by an ad hoc committee on the potentialities of an American scholarly body concerned with the study of Africa took place intermittently in Alan Pifer's office from 1955 on. The group involved in these discussions was composed at various times of William Brown, Gwendolen Carter, Gray Cowan, William Hance, Ruth Sloan, Franklin Frazier, and George Carpenter. Pifer felt strongly that there should be a scholarly association concerned with Africa that would be free of government influences such as inevitably were affecting the African-American Institute because of its almost complete dependence on government agencies for support. The ad hoc committee ultimately agreed that it would be appropriate to call a meeting of scholars concerned with Africa in order to decide whether or not there was substantial support for such an association.

It was in the name of the ad hoc committee that the invitations went out to approximately thirty-six individuals from scholarly and other fields to attend what was called The African Studies Association Conference to be held at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York from March 22–24, 1957. The participants were selected with a view to geographical and disciplinary distribution as well as their reputation as Africanists. Their function was to decide whether or not an organization should be formed to promote the serious study of Africa. The cost of the conference was met by a discretionary grant of $6,500 from the Carnegie Corporation, but the management of the conference was left entirely in the hands of the conferees.

In the years following World War I, the black population in Britain's port cities increased as a result of an influx of West Indian and African seamen who had been discharged from His Majesty's Service. Many of these new arrivals, along with long-term residents, suffered as post-World War I economic conditions worsened, causing hostility from the host communities to increase. Blacks in cities such as Liverpool not only had to endure overt racial attacks, but they were also victims of hidden racism.

There was no legal segregation in Liverpool, and just as many whites as blacks lived within Toxteth, an area in the city's south end near the docks. Blacks and whites mixed freely in the area's numerous pubs, and black men often married white women. Despite the city's historical relationship with the slave trade and slavery, many of those who lived in Liverpool during the 1920s and 1930s accepted the pervasive myth of racial harmony in the city. However, some blacks who were more observant recognized that they were being denied adequate economic and social opportunities. Indeed, the city was not free of racial prejudice. In reality, the legacy of the slave trade and slavery and the negative stereotypes of blacks which had been developed over many years were so ingrained in the minds, hearts, attitudes and actions of many Liverpudlians that, wittingly and unwittingly, racism adversely affected the quality of life for black people in the city.

Based on a classroom encounter of the author, this article explores the gendered nature of African university space. It discusses a 2007–8 policy that banned pregnant adult students from living in the student residence halls at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. The policy was implemented despite protests from the university’s students and staff. The article argues that the more visibly reproductive a student’s body became, the more alien it was considered to be in spaces of knowledge production. This alienation was incongruous at a university widely considered as the most politically progressive in South Africa. It was rooted, however, in Western-oriented traditions of masculinist knowledge production in which there is no space for the female, let alone the pregnant, body in intellectual spaces; and in South African traditions of marginalization, exclusion, and “passing” in public space. Exploring ideas of “body language” and “bodies of knowledge,” the article concludes that there is a need for an interdisciplinary politics and epistemology of “seepage” in higher educational institutions that recognizes women’s minds and their bodies.

The human body is a central entity and analytic within African life and Africanist scholarship. The source of perception and the seat of animation, of life, it grounds experience of the world while also providing a rich set of symbols from which humans draw in political, social, and religious life to create and communicate meaning. Livingston reviews approaches to the body as a key concept in Africanist scholarship, tracing regimes of bodily representation ranging from the deployment of bodily symbolism in ancient smelting furnaces to the hypervisibility of the black female body in the European colonial imagination. She discusses a welter of bodily experience, from the pain of childbirth and the vulnerabilities of illness and accident to the sensorium or the kinesthetic power of movement and dance. In the process, Livingston considers developments within the field of African Studies via the body.

Development research is often associated with issues of policy. Researchers aim to increase our contextual and theoretical knowledge to enhance the creation of “good” development policies. One way of doing this is to identify and learn from harmful policies of the past. The objective of this article is to examine such policy-choice explanations by looking at the dominant understandings of the modern history of agriculture in Malawi. These perspectives share the view that the high level of rural poverty is, to a great extent, an outcome of the agricultural policies implemented by the colonial and postcolonial governments. Of crucial importance are the mechanisms whereby the state actively tried to transfer resources from the smallholder sector to the state or to the estate sector. This had a negative impact on the production capacity of the smallholder sector. This article notes that the focus on policies alone is not a sufficient approach to understand the dynamics and limitations of the smallholder sector. The article also points to some methodological weaknesses with policy-choice explanations that are relevant for development research in general.

African studies are often characterized as interdisciplinary in nature. One wonders whether, as time passes and specific disciplinary studies become distinguished by ever more technical methodologies, this will be less true. However, since the objects of study are entire cultures that are for the most part alien to the researchers who study them, this interdisciplinary spirit may well endure.

With regard to the inventory of sub-disciplines within the general field of African studies, two relative late-comers are African art history and African philosophy. Previously the fields of interest that constitute their special concern were significantly influenced by anthropology. But when sufficient, relevant, fieldwork studies had accumulated to initiate the type of specialized inter-cultural understanding that is distinctive of these two sub-disciplines, there was reason to license them in their own right.

As African art history and African philosophy labored to accredit themselves these past decades, there are a number of expressed concerns which became common to the two disciplines. The aim of this paper is to reflect upon some of these, as expressed by African art historians, from the standpoint of students of African philosophy in the hope that their respective insights and problems may overlap, coalesce and perhaps prove mutually beneficial.

This article examines the perceptions of Canada by Nigerian youths who have a desire to immigrate to Canada. It explicates why Canada remains an attraction to prospective immigrants in spite of documented accounts of racial discrimination against racial minorities in Canadian society. Based on semistructured and focus group interviews with thirty-five Nigerian youths, the study demonstrates that Nigerian youths chose Canada because the Canadian postsecondary education system can provide them with foreign credentials that will give them access to economic power and social prestige in an unfair and unequal Nigerian society. The youths are also impressed by the transnational lives of their peers and social groups residing in the West. Although the youths criticize the dysfunctions of key institutions of Nigerian society, especially the education institution, they do not deplore social inequality per se.

This paper reviews the appropriateness of a development intervention celebrated for its direct benefits to the rural poor: small farmer credit. It will focus on the degree of inappropriateness that results from a contradiction between the convenience of directing the credit to discrete compound units and the dependence of small farmers' success on the coordination of production activities among larger groupings. The case to be looked at is from the West African savannah of Central Mali.

The economic posture of Malian savannah farmers develops within the context of these larger groups of producers. Unlike peasant coalitions in Latin America (Ortiz, 1972), the Malian groupings have not arisen to provide mutual security by spreading market risk among a wider group. This occurs where peasants are dependent on returns from a commercial crop the demand for which leaves them uncertain about how much to produce at any given time. If this were the case, subsidized credit inasmuch as it improved the peasant's marketing options might be able to circumvent such coalitions in attracting the small farmer. But the Malian peasant's coalitions are organized to confront production rather than marketing constraints. As long as these production constraints remain, his loyalty will be to his coalitions rather than to a marketing opportunity should these conflict.

The Malian peasant is not limited by land scarcity in the amount he cultivates. Therefore, he is not dependent on income from commercial crops to buy food; he will increase cash crop production only when its marketing situation is stable. Dry season migrant labor opportunities have long been available to him as an alternative for raising money for the colonial and post-colonial head taxes. Migrant laborers come home to grow unmarketed, subsistence crops. The money uses of their labor are often better served elsewhere.

The utility of postmodern thinking to the study of Africa continues to be a matter of hot debate. Some authors see postmodernism, particularly colonial discourse analysis, as a threat to well established historical methods for studying African societies. Others draw on postmodern insights while warning of its shortcomings, especially the lack of attention to political and economic structures. This brief discussion cannot fully explore such a complicated subject; rather it is intended as a personal view on some of the key issues at hand.

For decades in many African countries, pragmatism and politics have dictated that the choice of language for literacy and primary education should be the colonial languages—French, English or Portuguese. In some settings, certain African languages of wider communication have been selected, including Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania, and Hausa in Nigeria. However, for the vast majority of African languages, educational materials have never been developed. Millions of African children find their first days at school bewildering as they adjust to not only the strange environment of school but also to a teacher who cannot speak their language.

In August 1989, a UNESCO seminar was convened in Lagos, Nigeria, focusing on the role of languages of minority groups as languages of instruction. This was followed by a consultation on the related challenge to provide grassroots teacher training for mothertongue education. Representatives came from approximately fifteen countries and five continents, with the majority being from within Africa. The stated purpose of the seminar, according to the prospectus, was:

This essay addresses how recent changes in electronic media may impact upon what the rest of the world sees of Africa on television. Its predictions are disheartening, especially to Africanists and communications scholars who have well documented the longstanding insufficiency of African news coverage. And my conclusions contrast with those of the big television news companies, who, with a “good for business, good for everyone” mentality, like to believe that the new media market and nifty new technologies can only mean more and better coverage of every part of the planet.

This article posits that a new and important transformation is occurring in Sahelian society. Westerners have tended to see the rise of “Islamism” as just another rejection of globalization and modernization. This article argues that another interpretation is possible, one that looks at the rise of movements like Izala as an attempt of embryonic Hausa capitalists to become part of globalization by substituting a much more individualized set of beliefs and behaviors for the older social and normative constructs of “traditional” Hausa society that obliged them to limit their accumulation of capital.

This article examines a complex dispute over the jurisdictions of traditional and statutory institutions that traversed shifts in forms of government in Ghana for nearly a decade following the ousting of Kwame Nkrumah in February 1966. The analysis emphasizes underlying processes of continuity and seeks to add nuance to familiar conceptualizations that view this period in terms of state weakness, crisis, and rupture. The article explores, in particular, a powerful category of chieftaincy defined in opposition to state logics that have escaped empirical investigation. It therefore invites a rethinking of the notion that the post-Nkrumah era heralded a state-initiated revival of traditional institutions.

Compared to political developments in Eastern Europe and Latin America, democratization in sub-Saharan Africa has been more problematic and uneven. Looking at the performance in four subregions—central Africa, East Africa, southern Africa, and West Africa—yields no convincing evidence of a “wave” of democratization; countries next to each other differ considerably with regard to their Freedom House scores. This does not mean that democratization has necessarily stalled, but it does demonstrate that the prevailing vertical cleavages along ethnic, racial, or religious lines can make such a transition volatile, as suggested by the cases of Burundi, Mali, and even Kenya. While political competition in mature democracies, typically divided along horizontal group or class lines, tends to generate positive-sum outcomes, such competition in Africa easily turns into “prisoner’s dilemma” games. The uncertainty about the value of cooperation in such situations usually produces political “truces” that are easily abandoned if the costs of adherence exceed the benefits. Against the background of this prevailing political logic, this article calls for a new approach to conceptualizing notions of “institution” and “power” in the analysis of politics in the region.

The election of Barack Obama as the first African-descended president of the United States in 2008 was greeted with euphoria in the U.S. and around the world, including Africa. Little, however, changed in the substance of U.S.–Africa relations. This underscores the limits of the symbolic politics of race and presidential personalities in the face of the structural imperatives of U.S. power and foreign policy in which African interests remain marginal and subordinate to U.S. interests. The article explores the structural contexts of foreign policy-making in the United States and what might be expected from the second Obama administration.

Kwasi Wiredu, a prominent African philosopher from Ghana, recently published an essay entitled “How Not To Compare African Thought to Western Thought” (1984) in which he criticized the prevalent method of comparing what is regarded as African philosophy with Western philosophy. Wiredu begins the essay with the assertion that all cultures are characterized by two levels of thought, namely, the traditional non-scientific and the theoretical or scientific thought (p. 149-50). He also notes, although without examples, that some contemporary philosophers both in Africa and the West are in the habit of comparing the traditional non-scientific thought of the African people with the highly theoretical and scientific thought of the Western world. He sees this type of comparison as improper and argues that since there is traditional folk thought in Africa as well as in the West, if there is to be any comparison at all, it must be with folk thought to folk thought and scientific thought to scientific thought (p. 157).

Wiredu's essay is an excellent academic treatise in its own right, but as an African who is attempting to reflect philosophically and possibly attempting to provide leadership for the thrust of African philosophical search, there are some pitfalls in the essay which need to be pointed out. The purpose of this commentary is to highlight and hopefully clarify some of the misleading innuendoes in contemporary literature about African philosophy and the role of an African philosopher within the world of philosophy.

The first problem in Wiredu's essay is that it is sympathetic to the misconceived view that Africans have no thought process except the non-scientific. Assertions like “African Societies are among the closest approximations in modern world to societies in the pre-scientific stage of intellectual development,” betray Wiredu's presupposition. This position creates a problem for Wiredu's project. If, as he has stated, the West is basically scientific in its thought process and Africans are basically folk-like in their thinking, then there is no basis for comparison. His argument that it is wrong to compare African folk thought to Western scientific thought is the arbitrator.

In his novels and essays and most recently in the pages of The New York Times, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has repeatedly claimed that the “trouble with Nigeria” lies with its leaders (1982, 1993)—and few of those who followed the pronouncements of General Babangida would say that the actions of the Nigerian head of state were without import for the political future of the country. Achebe finds an intellectual ally in social scientist Giuseppe de Palma (1992), who argues that the actions of decision makers at critical junctures in the process of political opening shape the range of choices and the kinds of risks they and their successors face subsequently. Although the conditions that make democratic consolidation more or less difficult may be a function of levels of socioeconomic development, the presence or absence of a civic culture, or the existence of a middle class, the decisions of leaders matter. Democracies are crafted, not born whole.

This essay tries to identify the sources of difference in leadership style during a period of political reform. It proceeds from two observations. First, tactical and strategic choices of leaders are partly a function of the incentive structures political and economic institutions offer. Electoral rules, the amount of central control over important electoral resources such as the media, participation in regional monetary agreements—all of these institutions shape the options available for building coalitions.