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.

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 argues that Ethiopia's agricultural extension program, which received more government funding and donor support than other similar programs in Africa, reinforced the rural presence and authoritarian powers of the ruling party while largely failing to improve smallholder agriculture. The principal reason for this outcome has to do with the systematic entanglement of the Green Revolution package delivery system with the immediate goal of guaranteeing the party's political security. In one Amharic-speaking community that provided ethnographic information for this article, overzealous party leaders rewarded supporters at the expense of imagined opponents. This distortion, coupled with a culturally embedded concept of success (defined as upward mobility), caused pervasive fear, insecurity, suspicion, and rivalry among farmers. Not surprisingly, this insecurity has a deleterious effect on hardworking farmers. The article suggests that any meaningful attempt at improving the program must recognize the centrality of politics, especially at the community and household levels, where parochial interests interface with cultural expectations.

The largest women's voluntary association in Kenya and the only one with a countrywide network of clubs is Maendeleo ya Wanawake (Swahili for “women's progress”). It was organized by a small group of European women in the early 1950s under the auspices of the colonial government's Department of Community Development and Rehabilitation, to promote “the advancement of African women” and to raise African living standards.

This paper will argue that although Maendeleo was founded to improve rural living standards through self-help, and although its national leadership in the early years of independence took a critical position towards the government, in the last few years the leadership has tended to accept the status quo and accomodate itself to the political elite. Moroever the gap between rural and urban women has grown wider and the development projects that have been implemented have been the results of local level initiative. The paper suggests that unless there is a greater commitment of resources from the national executive and from the government, Maendeleo ya Wanawake (MyW) will likely lose its extensive rural base. To support this proposition, the paper contends that:

(1) the national executive and its urban supporters engage in the “patrons' round” of activities, and in the urban context MyW bears more resemblance to a western women's philanthropic organization than to an African self-help organization;

(2) the national executive, though voicing support for women's rights, enjoys essentially an accomodative relationship with the government, and makes little attempt to secure equal rights or more resources for women;

This article explores stories that some central Africans in the middle Sangha River basin and in northern Gabon have told about gorillas and chimpanzees. Such tales have provided opportunities for Africans to debate the consequences of their engagements with outside people, resources, and processes. But their meanings have proliferated in different social, cultural, and historical contexts. Central Africans have used such stories to make claims about access to and control over human productive and reproductive labor, forest resources and spaces, and other forms of wealth; racial and ethnic relations; and human existence and death. These stories provide critical insights into the reasons people hunt or protect great apes, and they illuminate the complex social and political tensions generated by conservation interventions. Great ape tales thus offer conservationists insights into the challenges and promise of managing an important game population, as well as the potential social consequences of their interventions.

This article is a literary analysis of the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. It examines Equiano’s use of multiple discursive and rhetorical strategies in order to move the self of his slave narrator from “marginal” to “central” status in the international debate over slavery. The essay focuses on Equiano’s understanding of morality as a multicultural framework and his application of Christian rhetoric in explaining it. The main argument is that his search for religious understanding and his experiential knowledge allowed him to move between cultural “centers” and cultural “margins” while speaking with an authoritative voice against slavery.

What allocation strategy do hegemonic party regimes pursue in order to increase their level of electoral support? Although the literature has established that targeting resources to marginally supportive districts is the most effective distributive strategy for competitive democracies, it has not been possible to make a clear prediction about the best strategy for hegemonic party regimes. This article seeks to address this puzzle by examining the patterns by which expenditures were distributed by the Tanzanian ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), across the country's 114 mainland districts from 1999 through 2007. Overall, this study finds that CCM targeted expenditures toward those districts that elected the party with the highest margin of victory.

In Nigeria, state creation was originally conceived as a solution to the problems of ethnic minority groups.

Louis Wirth (Hepburn 1978, 1) defined an ethnic minority group as a group of people who because of their physical or cultural characteristics, “are singled out from the others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination.” Stavenhagen (1983, 122) pointed out that the exploitative relationship, which often characterize the interaction between the minority and the dominant group can take the form of “unequal regional development (when ethnic groups are geographically localized) or of differential access to positions of privilege or power, or different forms of segregation and discrimination in social, economic and political life.” The inferior status imputed to ethnic minority groups explains the conflict potential in minority/dominant relationship.

The experience of ethnic minorities world wide has shown that several approaches can be adopted to eliminate or reduce minority situations. They include assimilation, ethnocide, genocide, constitutional safeguards, reversal of status and territorial solution.

Assimilation permits ethnic minorities to adopt the values of the dominant group at their own pace. This policy could be adopted where the minority situation resulted from immigration and where the minorities accept the authority of the dominant groups as legitimate. The approach has been adopted to some advantage in the United States.

This article explores the recent emergence of a new subfield within African Studies: not just the study of sexuality in African contexts, but the study of “homosexuality,” or same-sex erotics and identities. I will outline some of the events that herald this new era of African Studies, and review some of the current research topics and debates. In the end, I hope to convince readers that this research deserves the support of all activist scholars within African Studies.

While interest in conducting fieldwork in conflict and postconflict societies continues to grow, literature addressing the specific challenges and dilemmas of this kind of research remains scarce. Based on four months of fieldwork and approximately seventy interviews, this article explores the complexities of conducting research in postgenocide Rwanda. I argue that what at first may appear to be data problems can also be important data points; problems such as historical memory, selective telling, and skewed participant demographics illuminate political structures, group relations, and societal cleavages. This article then illustrates this argument by examining how these challenges/opportunities help explain the difficulties involved in teaching history in postgenocide schools. These reflections on research in Rwanda suggest valuable lessons for fieldwork and data analysis in a number of settings by providing examples of pitfalls, dilemmas, and often unseen opportunities that are likely to present themselves in other divided societies.

Academic discussions of development continue to grow, yet critical engagements with communities affected by development interventions remain limited. Drawing from life history interviews conducted in southern Tanzania, this article details the varied experiences of development interventions among older people and how these affect broader understandings of progress. Many juxtapose their negative views of ujamaa villagization with more positive recollections of previous interventions (especially the Groundnut Scheme), which are infused with what is described here as “development nostalgia.” Perceptions of the past clearly inform the social, political, and economic aspirations forwarded today, with the richness of the constructed narratives adding further nuance to existing depictions of Tanzanian historiography.

Since its independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has emerged as one of the principal forces in African international relations. Harare, the capital, has emerged as a major diplomatic center and Zimbabwe has served in major leadership positions, both at the United Nations, where, only two years after independence it was unanimously elected to the Security Council, and in the Non-Aligned Movement, which Zimbabwe was selected to chair in 1986. In this capacity, and as a member of the Commonwealth, Zimbabwe actively participated in the decolonization of Namibia and has actively lobbied the international community for comprehensive sanctions against South Africa.

Unlike other newly independent states in Africa, the government of Robert Mugabe brought with it a long heritage of activity in international affairs. This pattern of international activity by Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front)— commonly referred to as ZANU(PF)—grew out of its pursuit of a protracted, mass-based, and internationally supported armed struggle for independence. Thus, to understand the foreign policy of Zimbabwe, it is necessary to examine the international activities of ZANU prior to independence, when it was a liberation movement. It is precisely this link between liberation movements, sovereignty and foreign policy which is the focus of this study. Such an approach not only enables us to expand our notion of sovereignty, but also enables us to develop new approaches to the comparative study of African and third world foreign policy.

This article explores contemporary manifestations of the politicization of culture by the Christian clergy in the determination and resolution of political conflicts in Nigeria in general and Yonibaland in particular—against die backdrop of what has been called “the civilizational hegemony of Christianity.” The article approaches religion and the practices it enables as part of a cultural system through which we can capture the specific ways in which religious audiorities pursue political and ethnocultural interests to justify a particular social order.

The Bambatha Revolt in South Africa is one of the most often cited rebellions against taxation in colonial Africa. Most discussions of the revolt have emphasized its material and political causes: the added costs of the new tax and the difficulty African farmers had in finding the cash to pay it; long-standing grievances between white settlers and Africans over control of the best farm and grazing land in Natal and Zululand; and generalized unrest among the African population caused by colonial policies and by social and economic circumstances. This article underlines that these were all real concerns for Africans and predisposed at least some of the population to act violently when the new poll tax was first collected in 1906. However, material grievances alone do not supply a complete explanation for the revolt, and there were additional causes linked to spiritual beliefs held by many Africans at the time of the rebellion. Africans resisted the poll tax in part because they feared that the state had acquired more potentially destructive power over them via the census that preceded the tax. Based on rumors that reportedly circulated prior to the rebellion, many Africans attributed their misfortune at the hands of the colonial state to their ancestors' having turned their backs on them; and people fully expected a coming thunderstorm to punish them severely for their neglect. One way of placating the ancestors and of undermining the power of the colonial state was through active participation in the rebellion. Moreover, rebels were not merely reacting to state actions; they were acting in accordance with their own belief systems that suggested that the ancestors strongly supported their resistance and would allow them to prevail. Thus, the Bambatha revolt was not, as other historians have suggested, a last-ditch, hopeless attempt to strike a blow against the colonial state and die; rather, it was an armed revolt that was seriously intended to overthrow the colonial state both by force of arms and by the power of supernatural actors.

Across Africa in the early twenty-first century, autonomous women's movements have transformed the political landscape. With their support, African women are lobbying for constitutional reforms, entering political office in unprecedented numbers, and initiating legislation to expand women's rights. African women's movements have been emboldened by changes in international and regional norms concerning women's rights and representation, a new availability of resources to enhance women's status, and in many places, an end to conflict. In Botswana, the 1980s and 1990s were a period of heightened women's mobilization. Led by the women's organization Emang Basadi, the women's movement accomplished many significant victories, including winning a landmark citizenship case, prompting a comprehensive review of laws to identify instances of gender discrimination, issuing the first women's manifesto in Africa, and organizing workshops for political parties and women candidates. Some scholars have suggested that Emang Basadi's work was responsible not just for increasing women's representation in parliament, but also for broadening democracy in Botswana. Since 2010, however, a once vibrant women's movement has gone quiet. This article seeks to understand this development and to explore how the movement might be revitalized. The article concludes by drawing comparisons with other women's movements in the region and suggesting that the women's movement in Botswana, like others in the region, may be, in the words of one scholar, “in abeyance.”

Kenyan politics have long been among the most “ethnic” in Africa. From the battles over the constitutional formula for independence to the waning days of the one-party regime in the late 1980s, Kenyan politicians sought support from their ethnic or subethnic groups, and citizens perceived most political battles to be about dividing the “national cake” among the constituent ethnic groups. Political liberalization since 1991 has not fundamentally changed this atmosphere. Most obviously, it has allowed ethnic politics to reemerge into open, public debate. Ruling and opposition parties represent primarily all, some, or coalitions of ethnic groups. Ethnically marked electoral violence, largely instigated by the ruling regime, has come to be expected, though not accepted, as part of the campaign season. Leaders are far more prone to make appeals to the state for resources in openly ethnic terms than they dared to do in the one-party era.

Patron/client relationships have fascinated scholars and students of the Third World for more than a generation. These relationships have emerged as an important paradigm in the literature on development and underdevelopment, to the point that there has recendy been a boom of work in this area (Schmidt et al., 1977). Patron/client relationships are usually conceived of as symbols of a persistent “tradition” impinging on, and/or retarding the transition to “modernity.” They are also presented as evidence of the limited theoretical and explanatory usefulness of class analysis. I shall seek to demonstrate, however, that while patron/client relationships are a useful heuristic tool to understand the politics of underdeveloped societies, they are neither a substitute for class analysis, nor should they be construed as an independent paradigm of their own. They should be used as complementary and not as contradictory variables to class, as a close examination of clientelism and patronage in Senegal shows.

The pre-colonial African culture of the Muslim brotherhoods (Foltz, 1977) and the rather liberal electoral patterns established by French colonialism in the eighteenth century (Johnson, 1971) imparted to Senegal patron/client relationships which have permeated its politics since independence (Schumacher, 1975). These relationships, which many scholars have considered to be part of the transitional mode of behavior characteristic of modernizing societies (Foltz, 1977; Lemarchand, 1977; Barker, 1973), represent serious road blocks to Senegalese development (Foltz, 1977; Schumacher, 1975; Cottingham, 1970; O'Brien, 1975).

This article argues that one way in which internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees from Timbuktu, Mali, negotiated and made sense of the occupation of northern Mali in 2012 and the hardships of displacement was through joking. A genre of unofficial communication, joking asserted local truths and produced counternarratives. Sharing in this humorous reproduction helped to alleviate some of the anxieties of displacement and strengthen interpersonal relationships. The result was a communitas that reproduced the local Timbuktian community in exile.

This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which we are tracking the progress of twenty students as they pursue their undergraduate degrees at the University of Cape Town. In this paper we trace two first-generation university students' changing constructions of who they are and the concomitant changes in their relationship to home and university over the course of three years. We describe their struggles to present coherent “home” identities and the ways in which these identities are challenged by both the dominant discourses of the institution and by rejection by their home communities. The research questions conventional notions that students from marginalized communities are either alienated from, or uncritically assimilated into, dominant institutional discourses.

Since the discovery of the Jubilee oil field in the Gulf of Guinea in 2007, Ghana has emerged as an oil-rich nation and emerging exporter of high-quality crude oil. Simultaneously the energy supplies available to Ghanaian citizens in everyday life have become increasingly unreliable, marked by persistent rolling blackouts. This article seeks to understand the complex relationship that has developed between Ghana and China, to illuminate Ghanaian perspectives on their energy needs, and to investigate how energy has become entangled in national politics and bilateral relations between Ghana and China.