The analysis of popular songs in post-independence Zimbabwe has received little attention. The few analyses that have been attempted remain fragmentary and notoriously insist on a uniform worldview for the singers. This tends to blur ideological differences in the sensibilities of the singer's response to the realities of independence. Moreover, an overemphasis on a homogenous perspective on independence by the singers also tends to underestimate the contradictory response in the songs of an individual singer. This article analyzes popular songs of Zimbabwe in the Shona, Ndebele, and English languages. It argues that although the popular songs occur within the context of celebrating independence, the state sought to control the extent to which singers could define the meaning of independence. But the plurality of the singers' responses, their refusal to conform to a single definition of the idea of independence, indicates what is distinctively “popular” in the songs.

This article explores the links between autochthony discourses and physical violence through a case study of a Mai-Mai group in the eastern DR Congo. While this group garners support by employing such discourses and related tropes of autodéfense (self-defense), there are clear limits to the capacity of these narratives to mobilize for and legitimize violent action. Furthermore, much of the violence committed by the Mai-Mai is not informed directly by notions of autochthony, but is rather geared toward the consolidation of power. This observation should act as a caution against the a priori coding of violence according to the ways it is discursively framed by its protagonists.

A group of African American and Dalit scholars are at work on a project on the similarities in the histories and lives of African and Dalit peoples. Scholars such as Ivan van Sertima, Runoko Rashidi, V. T. Rajshekar, and others form this submerged network of Afro-Dalit literature. The Afro-Dalit project seeks to posit a common origin for Africans and Dalits as a means to call for political solidarity in the present. “Afro-Dalits of the Earth, Unite!” explores the framework of Afro-Dalit scholarship, critiques it, and then offers an alternative approach to the interconnections in African and Indian life. Rather than endorsing epidermal determinism, this article calls for a polycultural approach to the cosmopolitanism of our lives.

Population growth and the high levels of fertility in sub-Saharan Africa remain a significant impediment to development in the region. After nearly three decades of family planning programming in the region, fertility levels remain, for the most part, unchanged although substantial numbers of women continue to indicate a preference toward lowering their levels of childbearing. Some estimates indicate that almost 30 percent of married women in sub-Saharan Africa do not use family planning although they express a desire to stop, or delay, having children (Bongaarts 1994; Westoff and Bankole 1995).

Most African countries now have explicit population targets, a response to the exacerbating effect population growth has had on social, economic, and environmental resources. Population should not be held solely responsible for the economic quagmire in which many developing countries find themselves, although it is widely acknowledged that lower rates of population growth would ease the development burden in these societies.

Beyond the concern with sheer numbers and rates of growth, another perspective on population as a problem in the region relates to the gap between reproductive preferences and actual fertility, alluded to earlier, which affects one-half of the population's (the female half) inability to determine what happens to, or issues from, their own bodies.

This gap, referred to variously as the KAP-gap, or unmet need (Westoff 1988; Bongaarts 1991) has constituted the cornerstone of, or basis for, family planning programming. After all, if women say they want no more children, but are not using contraception (the fundamental conditions for inclusion in the KAP-gap/unmet need measure), then providing family planning services should serve to satisfy this apparent unmet need for contraception. Conceptually, then, unmet need can be represented as a demand for contraception which can be “met” by family planning programs.

An attack on Liberian government forces in Nimba County, Liberia, on Christmas Eve, 1989, ignited a full-scale civil war. It was carried out by the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) and consisted of Libyan-trained dissidents, headed by Charles Taylor, a former employee of President Samuel Doe's government. After six months of fighting, the NPFL controlled 90 percent of Liberia and was ready to launch a final assault on the capital, Monrovia. Eight months from the start of the war, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) sent a Nigerian-led peace-keeping force, ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) to put an end to the civil war. ECOWAS' military intervention failed to stop the war or to bring peace. Almost half of the Liberian population of two-and-a-half million was displaced, hundreds of thousands were killed or wounded, the economic and administrative infrastructures were destroyed, and law and order ceased to exist.

After more than a year of fighting in Liberia, the war spilled over into neighboring Sierra Leone. A force headed by Foday Saybana Sankoh, consisting of Sierra Leone dissidents of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), launched a military attack backed by NPFL units. After gaining control over the resource-rich area of Kailahun, the RUF fought its way to the capital, Freetown. The war in Sierra Leone appeared to follow the Liberian experience: with many casualties, displacement of population, destruction of economic and administrative structures and anarchy replacing the rule of law and order.

The “special relationship” between Israel and Ghana that began with the latter's attainment of independence in March 1957 endured only three years. At the January 1961 Casablanca Conference, Ghana joined in a sharp condemnation of Israel, marking the end of Israel's brief but extraordinary influence in Accra. Despite this downturn, Israel continued to fund aid and assistance projects in Ghana and to conduct civilian training programs. This article reviews the policy origins of Israel's entry into Ghana, demonstrates how both countries exploited a brief “honeymoon period,” analyzes their diverging paths, and explains why Israel did not use the fall of Nkrumah in 1966 as an opportunity to reestablish the special relationship.

Although scholars have noted the rising potentials for democracy in Africa as a result of increased use of digital media and mobile technologies, there seems to be a disregard or disavowal of queerness as part of that growing democratic space, as well as a related tendency to regard African culture solely in terms of mainstream writing and journalism. This article seeks to bridge this gap in the scholarship by means of a discourse analysis of comments about queer identities that can be found in the digital media (Facebook, chat rooms, blogs, YouTube comments, and online newspaper feedback) in contemporary Kenya. Following work on queer arts and “low” theory, the article explores the possibilities offered by the Internet to challenge homophobia in Kenya. While acknowledging that digital-media venues contain more homophobia than mainstream media (books, television, newspapers) in terms of intensity and quantity, the article demonstrates that they also offer a unique platform in which gay people can respond to homophobic representations of their experiences and desires.

In China, Tanzania, and Zambia, state officials participate in an ongoing articulation of official memory of the TAZARA railway project of the 1970s. In high-level diplomatic relations, the TAZARA project and its construction workers are continually held up as a foundational legacy for China–African development cooperation and friendship. However, the now-retired workers who built the railway tell very different kinds of stories about their experiences. In the context of recent economic liberalization policies, retired TAZARA workers draw on individual and collective memories of railway building to achieve both recognition and material security in a world in which they feel forgotten. They seek resolution of their grievances in old age through the telling and retelling of narratives of their youth. By doing so, they claim their own right to remember in the face of ongoing official efforts to reinvent heroic pasts.

Parts of northern Nigeria are becoming enclaves of banditry for gangs of cattle rustlers who maraud largely ungoverned forests. Extant studies of banditry shy away from serious interrogation of cattle rustling and ungoverned forest spaces in northern Nigeria. Onwuzuruigbo investigates the connection between cattle rustling and ungoverned forest spaces, highlighting the role of criminal groups in creating their own governance structures. The upswing in cattle rustling may thus be attributed to poor forest governance, which effectively keeps the government and its agents away from forests. Inclusive forest governance is one path toward addressing cattle rustling in northern Nigeria.

Conflict and change in precolonial African societies excite considerable scholarly interest, but historians have yet to produce a very useful theoretical framework for analyzing them. This is certainly true of the study of conflict in Asante, one of the best known kingdoms in precolonial Africa.

Beginning around 1700 as a small confederation of segmentary, matrilineal chiefdoms, Asante rapidly expanded in the eighteenth century along lines of economic, political, and strategic advantage. Through conquest and various processes of differential incorporation, it succeeded in establishing its control over all its neighbors. A smashing defeat of a British-led army of coastal Fante and allied states in 1824 crowned the long imperial enterprise. To Thomas Bowdich, a British commercial agent and visitor to Kumase in 1817, Asante was “indisputably the greatest and the rising power of western Africa” (1819: 341) By 1820 the asantehene's power and influence extended over an area perhaps one and a half times the size of modern Ghana, with a population of some three to four million.

Without any doubt, one of the most impressive aspects of Asante history is the systematic development of a national ideology and the elaboration of complex social and political institutions for the management of the society's affairs. Outstanding early rulers like Osei Tutu (ca. 1695-1717), Opoku Ware I (1717-1750), Osei Kwadwo (1764-1777), and Osei Bonsu (1801-1824) created an elaborate military organization and a sophisticated centralized bureaucracy to ensure order, stability, and effective administration in the huge empire.

During 1939 a political crisis developed in Sierra Leone which had far reaching implications for colonial policy in British Africa. At the end of January workers struck the War Department defense works and the Mabella Coaling Company. Simultaneously some gunners in the West African Frontier Force (WAFF) stationed in Murray Town refused to go on parade, in army eyes an act of mutiny. In the midst of these events an intense campaign to rouse working-class consciousness began in the African Standard, the newly founded weekly published by the West African Youth Leagus (WAYL). This campaign focused on the wage-earning sector of Freetown, particularly the police and laborers engaged in essential works like defense construction. Editorial warnings published at the same times that Sierra Leoneans should not support the coming world war sounded a more ominous note as far as the authorities were concerned.

The colonial administration responded to these developments by initiating legislation, six bills in all, designed to suppress anticolonial opposition and contain the labor movement. While these bills were still under preparation, miners in the Marampa iron mines conducted the largest and best organized strike to occur before 1940, thus increasing the urgency of the situation. The administration hastened the drafting of its repressive ordinances and presenting them to the Legislative Council for enactment. In the meantime the Sierra Leonean community combined in a massive effort to oppose the bills, culminating in the largest mass demonstration against the government to occur in Freetown up to that time.

The ruling class has lost its consensus … this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies. … The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

—Antonio Gramsci (1973: 276)

The notion of a general crisis in African agriculture has entered the current African development lexicon with great rapidity. In spite of the questionable quality of some of the most basic agricultural production statistics (see Berry, 1984), critics of quite different political and theoretical persuasion have promoted the view of widespread structural stagnation (World Bank, 1981; Eicher, 1982; Lofchie and Commins, 1982). Sustained by the realities of starving peasants in the Horn of Africa, of a meteoric growth in food imports during the 1970s, and the persistence of high fertility regimes across the continent, this identification of an agricultural collapse in more than twenty African states raises the spectre of a Malthusian crisis of terrifying proportions (Africa News, Feb. 6, 1984). The plausibility of a widespread agrarian crisis is lent further credence when it is painted on the much larger canvas of national economic performance. The quadrupling of oil prices, stagnant or falling primary commodity prices, high interest rates and debilitating debt repayments, and periodic recession in the world economy have all contributed to the unfavorable current account balance and the economic austerity across the continent as a whole.

Gradually, feminist historians are building up a formidable challenge to androcentric studies of Africa; new thinking about the personal and public lives of men and women is beginning to reflect the breadth and depth of gender structures in African societies. This article focuses on the dynamics of one such structure in the society of colonial Zimbabwe (Ranger 1985; Phimister 1988; Sylvester 1991; Schmidt 1992). This was a construction at the intersection of nationality, gender, identity, and citizenship known as the pass laws. The pass laws were developed and used in complex, gendered ways. Sharing with neighboring South Africa a concern with enforcing racially exclusive definitions of nationality, identity and citizenship, the Southern Rhodesian preoccupation with reducing labor mobility meant that the pass laws transcended the merely bureaucratic. In combination with disenfranchisement, a severely discriminatory land tenure system and crippling labor legislation, the pass laws were used for nothing less than control of the economic options of working African people. For example, passes (generally known as chitupa or plural, zvitupa) stipulated for whom and for what level of payment an African man could work; where he could travel; where and with whom he could live. They were the linchpins in a system which routinely paid workers at levels below subsistence (Ibbotson 1943; Howman 1945; Plewman 1958).

Taking the Oromo as historical actors, the emergent Oromo studies identify some deficiencies of “Ethiopian studies” that primarily focus on the Amhara and Tigray ethnic groups and their rulers, and ignore the history of the Oromo people. Many Ethiopian and Ethiopianist scholars do not recognize the positive cultural achievements of this people. As Shack (1994, 642) notes, “The lack of critical scholarship has inadvertently distorted the human achievements of conquered peoples like the Oromo, including transformations of their social, cultural, and political institutions.” Although the Oromo have no political power, they are the largest ethnonation in the Ethiopian Empire, comprising about half of the 52 million Ethiopian population. Ethiopia (former Abyssinia), with the help of the European colonial powers, colonized and annexed the Oromo people during the last decades of the 19th century, when Africa was partitioned among the European colonial powers (Jalata 1995a). Since then they have been treated as colonial subjects and second-class citizens. With their colonization and incorporation into Ethiopia (Jalata 1991, 1993a; Holcomb and Ibssa 1990), the Oromo could not develop independent institutions that would allow them to produce and disseminate their historical knowledge freely. Currently, they are fighting for national self-determination: to regain their political freedom and rebuild independent institutions.

The Ethiopian knowledge elites have treated the Oromo as historical objects or have ignored them because of their subordination and powerlessness. Current publications on Oromo cultural and social history challenge a top-down paradigm to historiography and make the Oromo subjects rather than objects of history. Studying people as subjects or agents helps scholars avoid producing false knowledge. As Haraway (1991, 198) expounds, “Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of ‘Objective’ knowledge.” The emergent Oromo studies attempt to replace colonial history by a history of liberation, and to refute historical myths that have been produced to justify Ethiopian colonialism. This essay explores how the emergent Oromo studies have identified some deficiencies of Ethiopian studies, and how many Ethiopian and Ethiopianist knowledge elites have reacted to these fields of study.

The political liberalization process in Cameroon was marked by protracted strike actions on the campus of the University of Yaounde during the period 1990–96. Political liberalization provided space for students to organize and voice their multiple grievances about the poor living and study conditions on campus as well as the process of “institutional liberalization,” which blocked their pursuit of upward mobility. The unprecedented degree of violence that accompanied the protracted strikes may be attributed not only to the persistent refusal of the university authorities and the regime to enter into any meaningful form of dialogue with the students, but also to the internal divisions among the students along party and ethnoregional lines. The mayor lines of division were between two groups: the “stranger” students organized in the Students' Parliament and closely allied to the radical opposition; and the “autochthonous” Beti students organized in the Committee for Self-Defense and the Beti milida and closely allied to the regime in power. In their fight with Parliament, the latter groups resorted to violent forms of ethnic exclusion to reestablish control over what they considered to be their university and to maintain their regime in power.

This article situates the shooting of white Kenyan landowner Kuki Gallmann within recent critiques of community-based conservation and the politics of whiteness in Kenya. I discuss how conservation has enabled white landowners to consolidate their influence over Laikipia County, as well as neighboring regions of Kenya via an organization called the Northern Rangelands Trust. The NRT is feared to be undermining regional livestock economies, while contributing to land shortages that have precipitated violence in Laikipia. I argue that the pastoralists implicated in these conflicts are subject to a maelstrom of livelihood stressors, some of which are aggravated by the efforts of white Kenyans to expand conservation throughout northern Kenya.

The lush wetlands and rich pastures of the Lower Jubba Region, replenished annually by the flooding of the Jubba River and nearby streams, define some of the finest livestock-producing areas of Somalia and of eastern Africa generally. Blessed with relatively good access to water and blanketed with perennial grasses and other vegetation, the area is home to literally hundreds of thousands of domestic animals, particularly cattle. Some of the more important seasonally flooded rangelands and water points, such as those around Afmadow town, figure strongly in local myths and oral historical accounts, and for any herder traveling across the dry, barren lands west of the region they seem like “the promised land” (Schlee 1989; Chevenix-Trench 1907). It is little wonder, therefore, that the conflict and turmoil recently characterizing this region stems in part from struggles over these lands and over the valuable commodities that they produce. A focus on the cattle trade and the social relationships in which it is embedded helps to explain 1) how the pastoral sector operated prior to the recent tragedy, and 2) how recent alliances and conflicts in the area are based at least partly on this commerce. It also provides an excellent lens for exploring some of the relationships that have so tragically exploded, pitting clan against clan and herder against merchant.

This article furthers our understanding of how state and citizens interact to produce local institutions and examines the effects of these processes. It brings critical institutional theory into engagement with ideas about everyday governance to analyze how hybrid arrangements are formed through bricolage. Such a perspective helps us to understand governance arrangements as both negotiated and structured, benefiting some and disadvantaging others. To explore these points the article tracks the evolution of the Sungusungu, a hybrid pastoralist security institution in the Usangu Plains, Tanzania. It also considers the wider implications of such hybrid arrangements for livelihoods, social inclusion, distributive justice, and citizenship.

This article discusses the role of the media in Nigeria's Fourth Republic between 1999 and 2003. Employing a case study approach, it highlights as well as analyzes the media's role in insisting on accountability and decency in Nigeria's notoriously corrupt public life. The media's crusade ran against the country's geopolitical divisions and revived the debate on the national question as well as the media's own morality. The article draws on both primary and secondary data to examine the media's role in an emergent democracy.