As agricultural production shifts from traditional methods (where land and labor are the major inputs and seed often is saved by the farmer) to more modern methods in which more of the inputs are produced off the farm, farmers' savings in Third World countries may be insufficient to purchase the needed inputs for cash. Thus credit may have to be provided from some source. Many governments have established agricultural development banks to increase the lending available to the agricultural sector and have experienced low repayment rates [a good summary is found in Donald (1976); also see World Bank (1975)]. Some writers have suggested that loans be made through cooperatives or a similar political group where selection of the borrowers is made by the group and there is group pressure for repayment. This study examines the experience of loans allocated through this type of arrangement to ujamaa villages in Tanzania and to small private farms in Zambia, and it seeks to establish some correlates of repayment ability.

Tanzania established the Tanzanian Rural Development Bank (TRDB) in 1971 and Zambia the Agricultural Finance Company (AFC) in 1970 to provide increased capital to the agricultural sector. Although both organizations make loans to both large and small farmers, this study concentrated on small farmer experience. In each country these organizations replaced predecessors with poor repayment experience (Due, 1978a). In each country lending procedures were reviewed and a determination made to attain high repayment rates. Training and administration were upgraded.

This study of contemporary Hausa literature analyzes a northern Nigerian body of popular fiction currently referred to as Kano market literature and known to Hausa speakers as Littattafan Soyayya (books of love). The popularity of this genre of romance rests firmly upon its subject matter, one that has proven controversial within the conservative Muslim environment of Hausa society. On the surface, the novels are preoccupied with love and marital relationships, depicting the ordeals faced by courting lovers or married couples. However, on a deeper level, the novels have become an explorative territory for the socially, culturally, and religiously loaded issues of polygamy, marriages of coercion, purdah, and the accessibility of female education. In effect, Kano market literature reflects the rapid social change confronting Hausa society and positions itself as a voice offering a new perspective on gender relations. This article examines closely the works of arguably the most celebrated woman writer, Bilkisu Ahmed Funtuwa. Acutely aware of her rigid social and religious milieu, Funtuwa offers suggestions to young women who desire a greater level of control over their familial relationships and educational direction.

The study of African art began in the first decade of this century. In looking back over more than 70 years of research, it is possible to discern a distinctive set of social science concerns, priorities, and modes of analysis. This social perspective depends not so much on disciplinary affiliation as on the kinds of stands taken on the nature of art and on the relative importance of culture as an explanatory principle in understanding its meaning. This paper is concerned with articulating the main models that have been utilized in social research on African art and with tracing their impact on the development of art studies. This historical account will also point out some of the most serious limitations of these models and will suggest studies which may lead to promising new directions.

The focus of this review, then, will be on tracing the development of conceptual models with a social perspective. Studies with a social perspective include those which deal with the relationships among art, society and culture. These relationships can be conceived in a number of different ways, including, as Baxandall (1985: 89) succinctly suggests, “causality or significance or analogy or participation.” Such relationships are always a two-way street: not only do social practices and beliefs illuminate and affect art, but art also illuminates and affects social practice. Two essays will clarify the specific nature of the social perspective. Both classics in the field, both dealing with aesthetics, they are: “Yoruba Artistic Criticism” by Robert Farris Thompson (1973b) and “Principles of Opposition and Vitality in Fang Aesthetics” by James W. Fernandez (1966).

Since independence Cameroon has been a hegemonic state, evidenced by the 1966 introduction of a single party, the Cameroon National Union (CNU), which was purportedly created to foster national integration. This focus on national integration led to a de-emphasis of all other issues such as fundamental human rights. And because a select elite assigned itself the task of imagining the form the nation would take, this process was naturally accompanied by a contraction of the political space. Because the national integration project had paid minimal dividends after more than two decades, Cameroonians refused to legitimize it. They had realized that it simply served as a ruse for the ruling class to convert the state into a patrimonial one. Hence, people sought to regain their voices and participation through the democratic process. Reluctantly, the state capitulated to demands for political pluralism, passing the so-called Liberal Laws of 1990. However, by allowing multiparty politics, the government ruptured the facade of cohesion of the ruling class, which resulted in elites becoming increasingly preoccupied with maintaining their power and losing interest in the national integration project.

Some members of tine African-American community were aware of European activities in the African continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As early as the 1860s, Pan-Africanist Martin R. Delany and Henry Highland Garnet, a US ambassador to Liberia reacted differently to the British annexation of part of Yorubaland. In later years, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner also addressed the issue of the manner in which Europeans were taking over African territory, and chided African-Americans for not going back to re-take and protect the African continent from the European intruders (January 1882, 1). There were more responses from the community on the subject, during tine last stages of European imperial subjugation of Africa (Jacobs 1981, 38, 49, 53 and 75).

Although some African-Americans condemned the European annexation of Africa, they were not physically involved in the resistance effort of the Africans. The Africans' heroic and tenacious defense of their states collapsed in the face of the superior military tactics and warfare technology of the invading European armies (Crowder 1971, 1-16). Thus by the first decade of the 20th century, most of the continent had come under effective European colonial domination, with the two exceptions of Liberia and Ethiopia. The Europeans wished and actually attempted to colonize these two states. Ethiopia saved itself, while Liberia eventually had to rely on the assistance of the United States of America to thwart European designs against the State.

In the preceding essay Janet Ewald has rightly stressed the critical importance of field work in revealing the manifold relations among different factors, institutions, and events in the past as well as those between the past and the present. She has also noted the disparate, eclectic, and even anarchic nature of the data obtained, making interpretation and analysis of the data a second, a perhaps even more difficult, hurdle that African historians must face between overcoming the confusions and complexities of field work and confronting the third hurdle of historical analysis. Having collected the evidence, then, our task shifts to its interpretation.

African history has been called the decathalon of the social sciences as we sought to employ seemingly complementary methodologies, data, and theoretical perspectives of history, archaeology, comparative linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, and oral traditions to overcome the limited amount of documentary material available to us. The move was an audacious assault on disciplinary boundaries, but one that sometimes resulted in naive uses of data and analysis without proper consideration of the complexities of other fields. Wars between historians and anthropologists have been endemic. But we have all become more sophisticated in our use of other disciplinary perspectives in the process, so that today we see emerging both an increasingly sensitive anthropological history as well as a more subtle historical anthropology.

In a general sense, legitimization by the United Nations of African wars of national liberation means the recognition by various UN bodies that the struggle against colonialism and apartheid in southern Africa is a legitimate endeavour as far as the purposes and the principles of the UN Charter and other UN declarations are concerned. This international recognition of the African liberation movements is expressed through the offer of international aid and through the invitation of these movements to take part in deliberations at the conferences sponsored by UN agencies. The process of UN legitimization of the African struggle for freedom has been tangibly in the making since December 1960, when the world organization adopted General Assembly Resolution 1514 [XV] - the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries (or the declaration on decolonization).

In recent times Africa has been a favourite quarry of American social scientists and humanities scholars. It has served Africanist scholars, mostly white, as a springboard for their eminently successful careers, as objects of study, and as cartographic points to which some of them could lay claim as theirs, trespass on which is often the equivalent of a capital offence in African Studies. Many of us have often been lectured, harangued, sometimes nearly insulted, because we dared to suggest that a subject on which a particular Africanist is “expert,” or one that happens to excite her or him has little relevance to the scholarly concerns of African scholars or the lives of Africans! There are variations on this theme: it wasn't so long ago that feminists of different persuasions kept looking to Africa for primal, originary matriarchies.

Claims of sexual violence against female conscripts by military commanders abound in the Eritrean National Service (ENS), but hitherto there has been no attempt to subject these claims to rigorous empirical scrutiny. This article is a partial attempt to fill the gap. Based on data collected through snowball sampling from 190 former conscripts in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, South Africa, Kenya, and Sweden who fled from the ENS, supplemented by data from systematically selected key informants who were interviewed in depth, it examines the extent to which female conscripts serving in the ENS were subjected to sexual violence and harassment by their commanders, including at the Sawa military training camp. The extensive data, based on the perceptions and experiences of respondents who served on average about six years, suggest that sexual abuse is rampant throughout the ENS, particularly among female conscripts who are assigned to work at the camp subsequent to the six months of military training.

Research on Somali mobility and migration has predominantly focused on forced migration from Somalia and diaspora communities in Western Europe and North America, neglecting other experiences and destinations. This article traces the journeys of Somali traders from East Africa to China, mapping the growth of a transnational trading economy that has offered a stable career path to a few but a chance to scrape by for many others. Understandings of migration and mobility must encompass these precarious terrains, allowing for a richer examination of how individuals have navigated war, displacement, and political and economic change by investing in transnational livelihoods, not just via ties to the West, but through the myriad connections linking African economies to the Gulf and Asia.

Uganda’s touring orphan choirs engage in a form of charity that is dependent on the mobility not only of money, but also of people and sentiments. Boyd considers the moral economies that underlie this ongoing project of compassionate “circulation.” If a key finding of the work on humanitarian affect has been how such “affective surpluses” mask inequalities between donors and recipients, this article considers how participants in charitable relationships conceive of dependency and indebtedness differently. These differences compel us to understand how moral and religious sentiments give shape to the inequalities inherent in dominant forms of global humanitarian “care.”

In this day and age, Marxism-Leninism is the leading and least parochial theory of social revolution in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It strongly appeals to intellectuals who believe that capitalist imperialism in “neocolonial” forms perpetuates social injustice on a world scale; and that a “conscious minority’ ‘ or vanguard of the downtrodden should establish a “developmental dictatorship” dedicated to the pursuit of economic and social progress. Since the death of Mao Zedong and the subsequent repudiation of his economic theories in China, collectivism as an economic strategy has been reassessed and found wanting in other countries whose leaders are disposed to learn from China. For example, in the People’s Republic of the Congo, where collectivist methods, inspired by Marxism-Leninism have been discarded in favor of entrepreneurial methods, the minister of agriculture has said simply, “Marxism without revenue is Marxism without a future.”

The phenomenon popularly known as brain drain has attracted growing concern in the United States and abroad (Tulsa Daily World, 1967; Committee on Manpower... 1967; Asian Student, 1968a: 3; 1968b: 1; 1969: 3; Institute of Applied Manpower . . . 1968; U. S. Congress, 1968; Gardiner, 1968: 194-202; Bechhofer, 1969: 1-71; Committee on the International Migration . . . 1970). The notion has been expressed that the poor countries of the world are being deprived of their talent and robbed of their human resources by the exchange of scholars and students which goes on between nations (U.S. Congress, 1968: 16-25; Mondale, 1967a: 24-6; 1967b: 67-9). Implicit is the idea that many students from these less developed countries go to the more highly developed and industrialized countries for study and decide not to return to their homeland.

African farmers vary in their access to the basic resources of agricultural production: land, labor, and capital. The availability of these resources affects farmer decisions about choice of crops, crop mixes, and strategies to optimize agricultural production. Understanding the variation in resource availability among farmers and the consequences of that variation for production is one necessary step in understanding the production strategies of contemporary farmers. Understanding their present strategies is a necessary step in transforming African agriculture to better meet the continent's needs.

This paper looks at Malinke farmers in Kita in Western Mali in light of these issues. After some background information on the area and the study, the paper delineates three strata of farmers with different access to basic production resources, the most important of which is labor. The remainder of the paper looks at the consequences of those differing resource availabilities by examining different strategies pursued by affluent, middle, and poor farmers in one crop important in the region, peanuts.

Although Africans are very concerned about food production, it is still important to look at cropping decisions in regard to crops that, like peanuts, are grown primarily for cash. In many places like Kita, these crops are the primary means by which farmers earn money, and they are reluctant to change to crops with unknown earning potential. National governments, too, are hesitant to eliminate export crops totally, for they still need the foreign exchange that they earn.

The electoral process in Sierra Leone has changed substantially over the last twenty years from one operating in the context of a competitive multi-party system to one defined by the formal establishment of a one-party state in 1978 with elections under those rules in 1982. The former was often cited as a model of democratic competition; the latter was established to overcome problems the political elite felt resided in multi-party competition. In this sense, Sierra Leone was not unlike many other African states (including Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Ivory Coast) which had moved to de facto or de jure single-party systems. The earlier effectiveness of the multi-party system in Sierra Leone, which saw the opposition party defeat the party in power, makes this a particularly interesting case for examining the electoral process in a singleparty context in general.

This study focuses on the 1982 election in Sierra Leone and its implications for the political process. Of particular importance are the changes which occurred as the country moved from a political system which fostered competition between parties to one in which electoral competition was to be within the framework of the single-party system. The move to a one-party state had obvious consequences for the electoral process. Less obvious are the implications for electoral competition, campaign strategy, the legitimacy of the government, and the nature of participation in elections. The creation of a one-party state is often seen as an exercise in elite control of the masses (Hermet et al., 1978: vii) with elections functioning as part of the process of manipulation and control (Edelman, 1971; Collier, 1982).

An ethnographic analysis of two interconnected cities for the Somali diaspora—Nairobi and Johannesburg—helps to uncover alternative narratives about the lives of Somali women and the ways they renegotiate their cultural and religious identities in diasporic contexts, moving beyond the widespread representation of Somali women in the global imagination as helpless victims. Using the domains of marriage and female circumcision, Ripero-Muñiz analyzes how these women exercise their agency while at the same time negotiating the cultural and religious practices of their community. By focusing on the ways in which Somali women re-negotiate their identities, this article helps to locate the agency of women in refugee and migrant communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

This article contextualizes Ugandan urban–rural relations through urban children's knowledge, imaginations, and experiences, which are affected by the present sociohistoric moment in Uganda. Influenced by urban–rural migration, changing notions of family and kinship, and the national government's prolific “development-through-education” campaign, urban schoolchildren imagine “the village” both as an integral imaginary space of ethnic identity origination and a location for fulfillment of national citizenship through development.

A dialectic running through the literature on agricultural development in Africa is between coercion and incentives, between the necessity of compelling peasants to produce certain crops or employ particular technology and the possibility of motivating peasants to opt for specific production strategies through rewards. Coercion presumes peasants lack the capacity and or will to develop agriculture and must be forced. Incentives assume peasants will choose development if given the opportunity. Recent examples of coercionist approaches include Hyden (both 1980 and 1983), La-Anyane (1985), and Hart (1982:156-157). Recent examples of incentive-based approaches include Bates(1981), World Bank (1981), Brown and Wolf (1985), and Lele (1984).

Both sides of this debate are seriously flawed. Policies based on them are unlikely to break the pattern of underdevelopment in African agriculture. In fact, past policies of coercion and incentives have contributed to present conditions. Current frameworks lack an appreciation of the ways in which African agriculture has already been transformed. They therefore underestimate the structural impediments to progress.

This article calls for greater attention to the conditions and relations of production in African agriculture. Specifically, we must examine three factors. The first is the degree to which subsistence production has been undermined. This includes considering how dependent producers are on the market, to what extent out-migration has taken place and how far landlessness has spread. Second, we must look at the degree of control farmers have over production decisions. They may be restricted by such factors as competition for land with commercial growers, sharecropping and other land-tenure relations, lack of resources to provide inputs to agriculture, regulations of development projects or cooperatives, and/or by pressure to allocate resources to off-farm strategies (such as wage-labor) to meet household needs.