For political scientists, and particularly scholars and students of Africa, Crawford Young needs litde introduction. However, as he has now achieved an emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, it is time to present his intimate understanding of African politics in the last forty years.

Born in Philadelphia in November 1931, Young received his B.A, from the University of Michigan in 1953. He studied at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London from 1955 to 1956 and at die Institut d'Etudes Politiques, University of Paris, from 1956 to 1957. He dien entered graduate school at Harvard University, completing his doctorate degree in political science in 1964. In 1963 Young was offered an assistant professor position by the Department of Political Science at die University of Wisconsin–Madison. He remained tiiere for his entire career, retiring in January 2001. He has held visiting professorships at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda (1965–66), and at the University of Dakar in Senegal (1987–88). He also served as dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the Université Nationale du Zaire from 1973 to 1975. Among his publications are twelve monographs, over one hundred articles, and chapters in numerous books. Several of Young's works have been translated into different languages.

Young's professional career includes extended field research in Congo-Kinshasa, Senegal, and Uganda. He has received many prestigious awards such as the Herskovits Prize (African Studies Association) and the Ralph Bunche Award (American Political Science Association) for The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Wisconsin, 1976), and the Gregory Luebbert Prize (APSA) for The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (Yale, 1994).

The Kwilu rebellion of 1964 belongs within a little studied species of political violence: the aborted rural revolution.

Political change in Africa marked by violence seems endemic—historically, revolts and resistance to colonial intrusion; international conflict during the two world wars and along borders since independence; civil strife in many countries; a plethora of military coups d'état; anomic violence of several forms, including urban riots, hut burnings, and women's uprisings. Yet one form of political violence appears conspicuous by its absence. Political revolution has been rare in recent African history. To be certain, events in Algeria, Rwanda, and Zanzibar entailed profound social and political transformations, making them revolutionary in import (Humbaraci, 1966; Wolf, 1969; Lemarchand, 1968 and 1970; Lofchie, 1965). These are exceptions. Even a society as polarized as that of the Republic of South Africa appears to negate the standard explanations of revolution (Adam, 1971; Daniel, 1975; Van den Berghe, 1965). Understanding the aborted rural revolution in Kwilu thus will enable us better to grasp the obstacles to sweeping political change in Africa south of the Sahara.

For much of 1964, young maquisards controlled an area nearly the size of Belgium in the Western Congolese province of Kwilu. Leader of the uprising was Pierre Mulele, briefly a cabinet minister under Patrice Lumumba, and later an official of the breakaway Gizengist government. The rapid initial success of the partisan fighters testified to widespread political and social frustration among many Kwilu residents, to popular support for Mulele's efforts at violent and extensive change, to the coercive inadequacies of the national armed forces, and to the mobilizing effects of an ideology that interwove indigenous and Marxist threads. Only with the major reorganization of the Congolese military (including the recruitment of foreign mercenaries) was the uprising quelled and Mulele forced into exile. How the Mulelist fighters gained their popular support and initial military success are questions of great concern to analysts of African politics.

In this essay I offer an interpretation of Wimbum tfu by analyzing Wimbum terms to distinguish it from the English term “witchcraft.” I argue that Wimbum terms bfui, brii, and tfu have multiple meanings, are dynamic, and are often employed to discuss and critique lived experience. I argue that postmodern perspectives help us interpret tfu as power, economic, and religious discourse thus making it possible for us to attempt an ethical critique of the negative aspects of Wimbum tfu.

This article reviews the history of defamation cases involving Africans in Southern Rhodesia. Two precedent-setting cases, one in 1938 and the other in 1946, provided a legal rationale for finding defamation that rested on the ability of litigants to prove they had been shamed. The testimony and evidence of these cases, both of which involved government employees, tracks how colonial rule was altering hierarchy and changing definitions of honor, often to the bewilderment of the litigants themselves. Importantly, both cases concluded that African employees of the state deserved special protection from defamation. The article then traces how the rules and ambiguities resulting from the legal logic of the 1938 and 1946 cases gave a wider group of litigants such as clerks, police, clergy, and teachers room to maneuver in the courtroom where they also claimed their professional honor. Such litigants perfectly understood the expectations of the court and performed accordingly by recounting embarrassing, even painful, experiences, all to validate their personal and professional honor in court. Such performances raise the question of how we might use court records to write a history of the emotional costs to people who used astute strategies that rested on dishonorable revelations to win their cases.

This article addresses the issue of the relationship between contemporary South African politics and the type of socially committed theater that might be capable of mounting a critique of those politics. The author highlights the contradictions between the aspirations of the Freedom Charter and the realities of subscribing to the neoliberal world order. His contention is that any theater form that is seeking cultural intervention must find a way of representing contradiction if it is to remain true to the experiences of its audiences and its participants. Such a representation can be achieved through a combination of Bertolt Brecht's praxis in relation to contradiction and current practices in Theatre for Development, which themselves draw upon aspects of the antiapartheid resistance theater.