Probably no two of the scholarly works punctuating the past quarter century better exemplify the intellectual voyage that Africanist political scientists have taken than do Thomas Hodgkin's pioneering classic, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (1956), and Crawford Young's recent admirable comparative study of political economy in Ideology and Development in Africa (1982). These two broadly comparative works reflect the major shift from the study of the processes of African self-assertion and decolonization–the quest for and acquisition of state power–which characterized the concerns of the first decade of that period, to the study of how that power is maintained and in whose interest and with what effectiveness it is exercised, foci which have increasingly become the preoccupations of the last decade.

The intention here is to examine some of the features of this intellectual trek–from first generation conventional studies of nationalism, elections, and constitutions to the current preoccupation with the state, class, and political economy–not by a travelogue of the journey, but by focusing upon an enduring issue, namely, the antinomy of universalism vs. relativism. The antinomy exists at two levels. The first is that of the individual scholarly endeavor and product; namely, does the product reflect (a) a generalizing and scientific mode of inquiry in which the scholar's intent and perspective is to identify uniformities and regularities–as well as differences–through systematic comparison? In short, is it nomothetic? Or is it (b), a mode that is idiographic, i.e., that aims to describe and to understand a phenomenon in all its configurative, situational, and cultural-historical particularity and uniqueness? The antinomy at the second and obviously related level concerns the conceptualization of the discipline by a particular set of practitioners as either (a) a social scientific endeavor aimed at generalization and universality, or (b) an intellectual vocation which is essentially descriptive and interpretive of political phenomena that are inherently historically and culturally relative to a particular human group or situation (cf. Fallers, 1968: 576; Pye, 1975: 6).

Madagascar is often cited as an example of a country with a long history of local institutional strength and stalwart community participation in the decision-making process. This article explores the crisis of community life in southern Madagascar, particularly the changed nature of community involvement. Associational life is in decline—a result not only of challenging economic conditions, but also of eroded social norms, as the rule-making institutions of the past have been replaced by the loose guidelines of the present. This situation, which has the potential of exacerbating economic problems, is also likely to have grievous political and ecological consequences.

Traditions about the foundations of the military kingdom of Dahomey, over which King Gezo reigned from 1818-1858, are well known. Suffice it to say here that this warlike kingdom was founded in the first half of the seventeenth century, probably around 1620, by one Dogbagri Genu (otherwise known as Dako), a fugitive prince from Allada, who had been ousted from the throne of his father by his brother, Te-Agbanlin (Akinjogbin, 1967: 22; Page, 1961: 93). Under its fourth monarch, Agaja Trudo, the nascent kingdom of Dahomey reached the height of its power in the eighteenth century. The glorious reign of Agaja Trudo (1708-1740) saw the expansion of Dahomey in all directions, particularly to the south. An inland West African kingdom, Dahomey, like the nineteenth century Egba state in southwestern Nigeria, needed a direct route to the coast, partly in order to participate in the West African trade with European traders and partly to have free access to gunpowder and arms, a sine qua non for any state that wished to acquire and sustain its greatness. Hence, in 1724, Agaja Trudo attacked Allada and included it in his rapidly growing empire. Three years later, Whydah was forced to become part of the kingdom of Dahomey. The basis of a future powerful state seems to have been laid by Agaja Trudo when Tegbesu, who came to the throne in 1740, pushed the state's frontier still farther, the intermittent incursions of Oyo notwithstanding.

Contemporary Africa's Triple Heritage of indigenous, Islamic, and Western legacies is just the modern culmination of a much older Triple Heritage —the heritage of indigenous, Semitic, and Greco-Roman influences on Africa. The ancient Semitic strand has now narrowed and focused more firmly on Arab and Islamic influences; the ancient Greco-Roman strand has now expanded to encompass wider European and American intrusions.

This article analyzes the relationship between Mande hunters (dozos) and the Ivorian state in the prefecture of Ouangolodougou in northern Côte d’Ivoire. Having adopted a prominent security role during the violent conflict of 2002–2011, dozos have made continuing efforts to maintain their position in the post-conflict state. To negotiate their position, they draw on a performative repertoire, such as the display of powerful attributes in the context of processions. Although they have had to concede some more strategic and profitable activities to the reestablished state, dozo chiefs effectively govern the rural northern borderlands of Côte d’Ivoire.

In this paper an attempt will be made to provide answers to the following questions: (1) What was the pattern of political values held by members of the Zambian elite soon after independence? (2) How did these values develop out of the experiences of elite members during the struggle for independence? (3) How have the events of subsequent post-independence years influenced these elite values, and specifically, what is the relationship between earlier elite values and the ideology of “Zambian Humanism” which has only recently been articulated in a systematic way? (4) What have been the consequences for the Zambian political system of the interaction among elite values, ideology, and problems of exercising power? The answers given to these questions will be more meaningful and more easily understood if we first present briefly a theoretical framework which includes definitions of the principal concepts employed in the paper and a discussion of the interrelations among them.

The link between resource scarcity and group demands is apparent to many observers. Thus, David Easton (1957: 387) remarks: “The reason why a political system emerges in a society at all … is that demands are being made by persons or groups in the society that cannot all be fully satisfied. In all societies one fact dominates political life: scarcity prevails with regard to most of the valued things.” In modern Ghana, not only are desired resources in short supply generally, but the inherited subregional inequalities add a further dimension to collective demands for the allocation of goods and services by central government authorities. Longstanding subregional inequalities in amenities and services heighten and complicate competition over scarce resources. The resulting demands on the part of the relatively disadvantaged subregions therefore emerge as a dynamic aspect in the process of determining public policy.

In the context of shifting global geographies of labor and political volatility, Nigerian migrant associations play a significant role in organizing diasporic life. Yet, far from being a culturally static feature, Igbo Nigerian associations emerge through diasporic agitations, or dynamic mobilizations around particular events, crises, and projects that deliberately engage the postcolonial state. Lu first reconsiders the significance of 1970s post-civil war reconstruction in southeastern Nigeria before tracing subsequent transformations in flexible diasporic organizations within Global South locations such as China and Dubai. These agile and multi-scalar diasporic mobilizations enable their members to negotiate the nexus of postcolonial politics and transnational capitalism.

Currently, feminist activists are engaged in problematizing and reframing “rights” claims in southern Africa. This article discusses three cases of such activism, all of which show the limitations but also the potential of using rights claims to transform gender cultures and gain economic and gender justice. These cases involve the successful challenge to the gender discriminatory 1982 Botswana Citizenship Act; the policy shift of Women and Law in Southern Africa from a focus on legal rights advocacy to a synthesis of rights and kinship-based claims; and initiatives by South African gender activists to confront the contradiction between the country’s constitutional guarantees of women’s rights and high levels of gender violence.

Despite scant advance publicity, the hot and airless court-room of Malawi's Southern Regional Traditional Court was filled to overflowing on October 19, 1971, to hear the case against Walla Laini Kawisa. Every lawyer and senior civil servant who could possibly arrange it was there. The Police had cordoned off the area surrounding the Court. A huge crowd stood behind the barrier in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the proceedings. On the bench were three elderly chiefs, a legally-qualified magistrate and a young Judge from a lower Traditional Court. Police Superintendent Phuza prosecuted, assisted by the Attorney General and a senior CID officer. Kawisa was unrepresented and pleaded guilty to three counts involving eight murders. The Prosecutor told the Court that the accused had agreed to have other charges taken into account. Kawisa impassively pleaded guilty each time the details of a charge were read, causing a stir in the courtroom. On October 30, 1971, after an arduous presentation of the case by the Prosecutor, Kawisa was found to be solely responsible for thirty-one murders and fifteen attempted murders. Reading the Judgement, Chief Chikumbu said:

This article, part of a historical study of childbirth in the Sahel, draws upon oral interviews, ethnographic materials, and studies of midwifery to explore placenta burial in Niger. In the region the placenta is often referred to as the “traveling companion” that ushers the new human from one world to the next. Only through proper respect toward the placenta by means of careful burial can a woman’s future fertility be protected. The importance of protecting a woman’s future reproductive capacity accounts for both the centrality of this ritual to childbirth and for the appeal of the ritual expertise of elderly “traditional birth attendants” despite access to bio-medically trained midwives. Protecting a vulnerable parturient mother from the envy of those (such as co-wives) who might “tie up” her womb is an integral part of the process of childbirth. Appropriate placenta burial orchestrated by a woman’s therapy management group makes good on the cyclical intergenerational entrustment through which ancestors and descendants endure in a cycle linking birth and death, planting, and burial. “Traditional” rituals bear marks of major shifts in the agricultural economy, rapid urbanization, and ongoing adoption and reinterpretation of Islam. Multi-generational interviews reveal that across a broad range of ethnicities, status groups, and educational profiles, women in Niger share a concern for proper placenta burial. This approach to preserving women’s reproductive health and fertility is shared by adjacent neighbors, generations, and ethnicities.

Rural development in parts of Nigeria is a function of two comparable, if not, coordinate variables: the government and the townsmen residing in the urban areas. The government provides the access roads, runs schools and health clinics or hospitals built by the townsmen. These urban migrants, as we shall henceforth refer to them for reasons to be explained later, in addition to providing other infrastructural facilities, are the political and economic backbone of the rural communities as well as their source of modernization.

Smock (1971) dwelt upon the political and modernity role of ethnic unions in Nigerian cities. She showed how these unions “facilitated the accommodation between tradition and modernity in the Eastern political system…,” linked “traditional commitments with the modern political and administrative structures,” and prevented discontinuities, a characteristic feature of transitional political systems. For Smock, urban migrants, successfully manipulated tradition to politically modernize their rural villages. Little (1970) reasoned slightly differently. He saw the major functions of urban associations as the adaptation of traditional institutions and the integration of institutions whose raison d'etre is alien to traditional culture. These associations nurtured political leaders and the formation of political parties resulting in modernist ambition and nationalist aspirations for self-government. Meillassoux (1968) perceived urban migrants associations, or voluntary associations as he referred to them, as the mechanism by which the migrants approached the problems of social security and created new social networks. Meillassoux also saw a clear nexus between the norms of these associations and their rural origins in terms of their derivation, their roots, and their purposes.

It is mainly from this rural-urban link that we shall approach our present discussion. This paper shall also show that the psychological and sociophysical condition in the urban area, the acceptance that the city is a place for austere living and endurance of rough conditions all combine to prepare psychically urban migrants for their role in the economic maintenance and improvement of their home rural communities.

Modeled after the U.S. presidency, the office of the president of Nigeria is easily the most powerful position in the land. The president is both the chief of state and the head of government. The authority of the nation’s chief executive expanded greatly during the patrimonial regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sani Abacha. Indeed, not only was power concentrated in the hands of these despots, its exercise was also marked by massive corruption, brazen nepotism, and sustained brutality. Against this background, it was perhaps natural that the presidential election of February 27, 1999, would excite keen interest among the Nigerian populace, elite groups, ethnoregional blocs, and the international community. This article highlights some of the ethnoregional forces and elite interests that influenced the election and examines their possible implications for the sustenance of democracy and good governance in Nigeria.

Leadership succession and regime change lie at the center of two perennial problems of governance: (1) how to ensure the political continuity of any regime without endangering the political stability of the political community; (2) how to protect both the regime and the political community against the natural disposition of those in power to manipulate their office so that they could extend their terms of office or succeed themselves against the provisions of written or unwritten rules of managing political power and succession rights. There can be little doubt, then, that the political acts that surround leadership succession and regime change constitute a most serious aspect of political life in any society. In all political systems in general, and in African politics in particular, such acts constitute an important index of the development or deterioration of politics.

The renewed focus on Africa since the middle 1950s as a subject of political inquiry and theorizing has contributed greatly to the existing body of literature on political development, modernization and related subfields of Comparative Politics. Unfortunately, this rather extensive body of literature has not provided us with a definitive knowledge of the dynamics of social and political change. In this regard, major events in African politics have continued to cast doubts on the validity of many an earlier theoretical formulation and expectation.

The concept of Pan-Africanism has been around for a long time in spite of great historical events. Beginning as the nationalist thought of more or less detribalized Africans in the New World during the era of slavery, Pan-Africanism has survived the impact of such developments as the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction era, the rise and fall of the Garvey movement, European colonialism in Africa, the Russian and other socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, and the black freedom movements in Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean since 1945.

How should one relate culture to the modernization process in Africa? This paper will attempt to indicate how one might go about answering this important question, probably raising more questions in the process than providing substantive answers. A point of departure, in doing so, is to offer a critical exposition of the uses to which certain African political thinkers, principally Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, have put the culture concept.

The paper assumes that contemporary African political thought, especially since the 1950s, has been preoccupied chiefly with explaining the modernization process in cultural terms. A thesis, deriving from this basic assumption, is that the culture concept provides a useful focus for interpreting and assigning meaning to contemporary African political thought. This paper will illustrate this thesis with respect to aspects of the political thought of Fanon, Cabral, and some others.

Students of contemporary African political thought have tended to ignore and, therefore, have not explored the implications of the strong connection between the concepts of culture and modernization in contemporary African political thought. Hopefully this paper will correct this situation. In doing so, the paper will point to the explanatory dimension and force of contemporary African political thought. This is because the interpretation offered here looks upon African political thinkers as using the culture concept to explicate the consequences of colonial rule and the colonial inheritance for the modernization process.

The upsurge of ethnic consciousness in urban America which crested during the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired a sustained academic interest in ethnicity as a social phenomenon. This may partly explain the fact that American scholars over the past two decades have been largely concerned with urban ethnicity and have shown little inclination to carry their investigation into rural areas. Among Africanists, Wallerstein (1965: 477) has gone so far as to suggest that ethnicity is an exclusively urban phenomenon. The present paper argues that, although this generalization is unwarranted, one does tend to find more striking manifestations of ethnicity in urban areas than in the countryside. However, the author's study of Igbo migrants in Cameroon reveals that rural centers often favor the articulation of an ethnic identity which is, in some aspects, more functional and consolidated than in the town.

The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth and his colleagues broke new ground with their provocative analyses of ecological factors which condition the maintenance of ethnic boundaries. They noted that individuals often downplay or transform their ethnic identity in response to the local environmental situation or particular ecological niche that the group comes to occupy. Extreme examples of ethnic transformation are Barth's (1969) southern Pathans who are incorporated into Baluchi tribes as serfs and Haarland's (1969: 61) Fur cultivators who acquire many cattle and ultimately become Baggara Arabs. Less extreme examples of identity manipulation include Eidheim's (1969: 39) Lapp fishing villages and the Mon peasants studied by the American anthropologist Brian Foster (1974).

Since the middle of the 1970s Sub-Saharan African states have focused increasingly on their severe economic and fiscal crises. These involve wrestling with the burdens of debt service and the rigors of rescheduling, conducting difficult negotiations with bilateral and private creditors, bargaining over conditionality packages with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank or fending them off, distributing the painful costs of adjustment, coping with import strangulation and devising new development policies and strategies. Already highly dependent on the outside world, the intensity, stakes and levels of conditionality of these relations with external actors have increased substantially.

The question, “Which language for literacy?” is often asked in contexts where a number of languages are used in a given community or state (Bhola, 1983; Carron and Bordia, 1985; Fordham, 1985). Although pragmatic reasons for the choice of language—availability of materials and of teachers, and economic considerations—are sometimes adduced, it is generally agreed that the question is above all a political one.

The problem of language choice is acute in many developing countries, particularly in Africa, where a nation-state may be comprised of a large number of linguistically heterogeneous groups (Nigeria, for example, has 413. See Grimes 1988: 295). While the merits and demerits of developing and using such small languages are ardently debated (Fasold, 1984; Pattanayak, 1985; Skuttnabb-Kangas, 1981), it is rare to find studies of particular situations where attempts have been made to develop and use such languages for the purpose of rural development. This paper will present such a study.

Cameroon is a country of 10.5 million people where 238 languages are spoken (Dieu and Renaud, 1983). The bulk of the population (80 percent) live in rural areas where they are engaged in subsistence and cash crop farming (Biya, 1986). National development policy has emphasized the rural areas under the official banner of the “revitalization of village communities”; this policy has been adopted partly to seek to stem the rural exodus to the towns, and partly because of a recognition that Cameroon's main resource in the long term is agriculture.

Often, for many analysts theorizing the brain drain, producing macrolevel statistics is considered enough to demonstrate the significance of the concept. Furthermore, nationalist and internationalist theories and perspectives have shaped the discussion of the brain drain, each seeking to determine whether the brain drain generates an economic loss for the country of origin or a gain for the welcoming country.