Scholar-activists, by virtue of their critical engagement in the central issues of the day and their role in the production and dissemination of knowledge, have a unique opportunity to challenge the inherited orthodoxies in the academy and in the larger world in which we live. Within the field of African studies they have served as powerful critics and have broken new substantive, conceptual, methodological, and epistemological ground. To sustain this thesis, this essay explores three interrelated issues. First, it critically assesses the concept of value-free research—a notion which is commonly used to dismiss engaged scholarship as inherently flawed. Second, it documents how a number of African American scholars, passionately committed to social justice and to an end to racial oppression, produced pioneering work on Africa well before the field of African studies gained academic legitimacy in the post–World War II era. Finally, it highlights some of the critically important contributions that activist scholars have made to the study of Africa. The intellectual biographies of six prominent Africanists—Claude Aké, Basil Davidson, Francis Deng, Susan Geiger, Joseph Harris, and Walter Rodney—illuminate how political commitment can fuel theoretical and methodological innovation.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic had claimed over one million lives globally by late 2020, Africa had avoided a massive outbreak. Patterson and Balogun analyze pandemic responses by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and various states collaborating with civil society. They argue that responses display forms of agency rooted in contextually relevant expertise, pan-African solidarity, and lessons learned about health messaging and community mobilization from previous health crises. Yet collaboration has not always been harmonious, as actors have adopted various approaches in their interactions with global health institutions and civil society partnerships, and they have actively debated the use of traditional medicine as a COVID-19 treatment.

The privileging of representation as a means of securing epistemological or ideological systems has been regarded as a Western phenomenon. The employment of cultural exhibitions, documentaries, and spectacle to advance systems of authority, however, is also characteristic of African political systems in the pre- and postcolonial eras. This article examines cultural exhibitions, documentary films, representations of Nkrumah, and commissioned “national” art in the context of independence-era Ghana. It employs existing archival records to trace the positioning of discursive representations as mechanisms of social indoctrination, and as paradigms of the construction of the political subject in the postcolonial era.

Is there an African Studies establishment in the United States? Of course there is. The academic study of Africa has mushroomed since the end of the Second World War as federal dollars were invested in graduate training programs so that the United States would be able to cope with the challenges posed by the coming to independence of former colonial territories in Africa from 1956 onward. Most of this money went to major research universities. Accordingly, the training in African Studies that evolved at these centers was rooted in the historical development of western academic disciplines, the history of race and power in America, and hegemonic control over the discourse on Africa in America.

International concern with the rights of man is not new. During the 1800s the movement to abolish slavery was an emanation of this concern. In the mid-1800s the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in reaction to the lack of care for wounded soldiers on battlefield. Under its aegis there developed humanitarian law, both the Law of Geneva and the Law of The Hague.

In the post World War I period, civil and political rights were given international protection in a series of “minorities treaties.” In addition, economic and social rights received international recognition with the creation of the International Labor Organization (I.L.O.) in 1919. Refugees received assistance with the establishment of a High Commissioner for Refugees. It has, however, only been in the post World War II period that international human rights, and their protection, have received extensive recognition.

Hard work is a core value among Diola rice cultivators in Guinea-Bissau. This essay explores Diola attitudes toward work in the context of recent changes in their natural and social environment. It asks why Diola maintain a particular work regime even when they admit that it is not actually working for them. The intrinsic characteristics of wet rice cultivation, the tightly woven web of social relations involved in Diola agricultural practices, and the religious ideals with which these practices are linked reinforce one another and serve as powerful drivers of continuity. But given the decreasing viability of wet rice cultivation in this region, Diola work is increasingly detached from the products it is meant to generate. Because Diola farmers remain committed to these work practices in the face of their acknowledged inability to meet subsistence needs, Diola work has become a “paradox of custom.”

The recent moral panic in Cameroon about a supposed proliferation of “homosexuality” is related to a special image of “the” homosexual as un Grand who submits younger persons, eager to get a job, to anal penetration, and are thus corrupting the nation. This image stems from the popular conviction that the national elite is deeply involved in secret societies like Freemasonry or Rosicrucianism. The tendency to thus relate the supposed proliferation of homosexuality in the postcolony to colonial impositions is balanced by other lines in its genealogy—for instance, the notion of “wealth medicine,” which Günther Tessmann, the German ethnographer of the Fang, linked already in 1913 to same-sex intercourse. This complex knot of ideas and practices coming from different backgrounds can help us explore the urgent challenges that same-sex practices raise to African studies in general. The Cameroonian examples confuse current Western notions about heteronormativity, GLBTQI+ identities, and the relation between gender and sex. Taking everyday assemblages emerging from African contexts as our starting point can help not only to queer African studies, but also to Africanize queer studies. It can also help to overcome unproductive tendencies to oppose Western/colonial and local/ traditional elements. Present-day notions and practices of homosexuality and homophobia are products of long and tortuous histories at the interface of Africa and the West.

This article argues for a departure from theories of new cinema “waves” and proposes the notion of cinema “winds” as a more compelling conceptual framework for studies of African film movements. Building on the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Manthia Diawara, Ken Harrow, and Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, in addition to commentaries by various African film directors, this article looks at various dimensions of global visibility and the elusive movements of African cinemas. It also explores how African directors challenge habits of seeing and interpreting world cinema.

This article considers a burgeoning literature on Johannesburg from the perspective of the sorts of questions it asks about the city. There is a substantial and lively literature on questions of poverty and equality, class and race. These studies are strongly informed by the idea that the mechanisms that produce such inequalities are key to understanding the nature of Johannesburg as a city: in terms of how its economy works and how political institutions function, but also in terms of what sort of city Johannesburg is and can be. I consider sociological and economic studies of the inner city that try to account for demographic shifts in the inner city and for processes of social and physical degeneration. I review urban anthropologies of inner-city society, considering in particular new forms of social and economic organization among inner-city residents. Related to these, I discuss debates among scholars about the prospects for governing the city, paying special attention to the consequences for such readings on partnerships. I also discuss an emerging literature, critical of that above, which seeks to shift analysis of the city toward studies of culture and identity. These literatures do not simply approach the city through different disciplinary lenses (sociology or economy or anthropology or cultural studies) . They come to their studies from different normative perspectives. For some, the key political question of the day is one about social and political equality in its various forms. For others, it is about the degree to which Johannesburg (or Africa) is different from or the same as other places in the world. This paper has tried to bring to the fore the political (and not simply policy) consequences of these different views. It concludes not by seeking to reconcile these perspectives, but by suggesting a way of retaining a commitment to equality and justice while not reducing them simply to questions of economy. At stake, I argue, are questions of democratic culture and of sociability.

This article begins by exploring the efforts of African women’s movements from the 1990s onward to end violent civil conflicts and to insist on guarantees of gender equity in newly formed governments. It attempts to explain these recent successes first by examining the complex relationships between international women’s movements and African women’s groups from the Second World War onward, particularly from the era of the U.N. Decade for Women beginning in 1975. The article then turns to a broader problem: exploring the connections between contemporary women’s activism and deeper currents in African history that link the precolonial period with the more recent past. By examining a variety of twentieth-century women’s protests, it argues that cloaked in the language of political, economic, and environmental grievances, these movements also reflect a hidden history of women’s influence as public healers, empowered not only to cure individuals, but also to mend broader relationships in the community.

The debate over the severity of problems associated with rural food production and rural development in Africa has come to dominate much of the current public discussion of the continent. It is an area where Africanists can be legitimately expected to respond. Food shortages should be an anomaly in a continent where more than seventy percent of the population works in the rural sector. At the same time, with all of the reported economic difficulties, the last decade and a half has witnessed a significant acceleration in population growth (Faruquee and Gulhati, 1983:25). There are more mouths to feed at the same time as most studies are reporting that there is a decline in per capita production (Berg et al., 1981, 1984). These studies indicate that population is growing at somewhere between two and three percent or more per annum while the corresponding increase in food production is running between one and two percent or less. Increasing numbers of people each year reach maturity, making greater demands on fragile tropical soil resources and bringing ever-more marginal land into production (Riddell, 1982). It is a situation where dramatic changes, good or bad, will occur.

Several recent studies have cited the tremendous cost involved if African agricultural systems were to be modernized along Euro-American lines (FAO 1978; Berg et al., 1981; Christensen et al., 1981). For example, the International Food Policy Research Institute's (IFPRI) figures indicate that for twenty-four selected countries, mechanization and fertilizer costs alone would total more than $7.5 billion (US$ of 1975; figures cited in Nair, 1982).

Migrations from the South to the North are sometimes seen as representing civilizational counterpenetration, revolutionary cosmopolitanism, and cultural transnationalism. The culturalist biases of these perspectives tend to ignore a fundamental feature of international migration, that more often than not people migrate to sell their labor power and that the patterns of migration, labor procurement, and utilization are conditioned by the dynamics of capitalist development, expansion, and accumulation. Not only is international migration tied to the changing dynamics of capitalism as a world system, it constitutes a critical element of the international division of labor.

The comparative literature on regime change offers a range of plausible explanations for the democratic ferment that began spreading across Africa in 1989 (Joseph 1991; Bratton and van de Walle 1992a). Theorists of democratization in general focus on three areas of conceptual concern: structural and contingent factors that precipitate openings in authoritarian rule (Moore 1967; O'Donnell et al. 1986), the relative importance of elite behavior versus mass mobilization strategies of reform (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Karl 1986, 1990; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992), and diffusionist explanations of change (Huntington 1991). Within these broad rubrics, regional variations come into play. While many analysts readily assert that glasnost in the Soviet Union and the collapse of dictatorships in Eastern Europe influenced the rise of pro-democracy movements in Africa, leading theorists of democratic transitions have downplayed the relevance of external factors and the international context to political liberalization in Latin America during the 1980s (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Whitehead 1986; Lowenthal 1991). What this variance suggests is that theories of regime change must be historicized and contextualized in order to incorporate local conditions and circumstances.

Historian Achille Mbembe cautions against overemphasizing the specificity of Africa (1990)—but my point is different. Indeed, inasmuch as key theoretical propositions derived from the Latin American, Southern and Eastern European experiences have oriented a great deal of the recent conceptual and empirical work on democratization in Africa, the cultural dynamics of transitions bear closer scrutiny. The argument to be advanced here is that the efficacy of theories of democratic transition for analyzing political processes in any region of the world is hampered by a failure to problematize the relationship between regime change and the culture of politics.

Efforts to transform the lives of colonized women and girls were integral to Christian missionary efforts throughout the world. This study of the attempts by a Quaker mission, in what is now Western Province, Kenya, to remake African womanhood indicates the limited success missionaries had in this effort. As with most evangelical missions, “women's work for women” involved domesticating African women and girls. According to one missionary, the purpose of the Girls' Boarding School (GBS) was to teach girls to be “better wives and mothers.” This goal, however, was subverted by both the missionaries and the schoolgirls. While the curriculum was designed to teach girls to submit to male authority, the female missionary in charge of the school refused to do so herself. Furthermore, the schoolgirls manipulated missionaries and mission institutions to delay marriage and to control their choice of marriage partners. Graduates also used the skills learned at the GBS to cross gender and class boundaries, and contributed to the restructuring of Luhya society. Thus, while missionaries undoubtedly caused many dramatic changes in the lives of Luhya women and girls and in Luhya culture, we see that they were manifestly unsuccessful in controlling the nature of these changes.

Generational tensions are one of the many forms that land conflicts take in northern Uganda. The convention in Acholiland was that young men gained land-use rights through their fathers and young women gained them through their husbands. This pattern of generational governance has become complicated in the wake of the civil war and decades of internment in IDP camps. Lacking husbands, young women are using land of their patrilateral kin, while young men who grew up with their mothers may use that of their matrilateral relatives. This article, based on fieldwork in the Acholi subregion between 2014 and 2016, explores classic anthropological concerns about gerontocracy and patriliny in a contemporary postconflict situation. It describes the discreet land access strategies of young men and women and the ways in which they seek to complement dependence on relatives by renting or buying land. The image of the “war generation” as morally spoiled is countered by an examination of the consequences of war and internment for young people’s claims to use land.

Reluctantly and sporadically college and university instructors of African history surveys are discovering that effective teaching is not guaranteed solely by the excellence of our research. Like historians in other specialties we are also discovering that student and administrator evaluation of our teaching, particularly at the lower division survey level, is growing more critical. Unfortunately few of us are prepared to bridge the gap between the specialized approach engendered by our graduate school training and the pedagogical needs of the increasingly heterogeneous audiences we meet in our undergraduate history surveys. This essay is directed toward bridging this gap. Rather than simply presenting a theoretical discussion on the relative merits of this particular approach to undergraduate education, a single sample unit is offered for critical evaluation.

There is a danger that PSI, like many other classroom innovations, might be rejected as simply another fad. Therefore it is necessary to define clearly this teaching/learning technique before demonstrating its direct applicability to undergraduate instruction in African history. PSI applies the principles of behavioral psychology to the college academic environment. This new method of teaching was originally developed in the 1960s by Fred S. Keller, a creative and innovative teacher and researcher in the psychology of learning. Retired from Columbia University, Keller and some colleagues created the system in response to specific needs at the University of Brazilia. Later at Arizona State University and the Center for Personalized Instruction at Georgetown University, Keller continued, enlarged, and improved the system.

The steady beating of the war-drums grows stronger. An exotically painted black face peers out behind a bush. The African porters drop their packs and cower in fear, but the tall, courageous white hunter forces them on. Suddenly a spear flies out of the bush and hits a porter in the chest. The rest of the porters, screaming, disperse into the jungle, only to be cut down by the savages. With his trusty gun, the white man fends off the brutes and retreats to a nearby cliff. As the tension mounts, the audience sits spellbound.

Such images became the staple for “jungle” movies in the early part of this century. During the Depression era, the economic importance of the West's African colonies greatly increased. What these celluloid images suggest is that, consciously or not, the filmmakers were acting as cultural colonialists by reinforcing and legitimizing Western political practices in Africa. These images contributed to the viewing audiences' misperception of Africa and Africans and helped to perpetuate and strengthen racist and colonialist modes of thinking.

For this study, I have chosen nine films from the United States and Great Britain that can be considered “popular” films based on their box office success and wide distribution: Trader Horn (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Sanders of the River (1935), Tarzan and his Mate (1934), King Solomon's Mines (1937), Tarzan Escapes (1936), Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939), Four Feathers (1939) and Stanley and Livingstone (1939).

To run through the chronological repertory of works of African philosophy for the period 1950–1980 (Mudimbe, 1982a; Smet, 1978b), one fact strikes the eye immediately: the large number of books of “philosophy” published in Central Africa, mainly in Zaire. This quantity is due to the influence of Catholic missionaries during the colonial era. In the terms of the 1906 Convention between the Holy See and the Congro Free State they had a quasi monopoly in education. And also, at a very early stage, they had developed an elaborate structure of religious education leading to “major seminaries” in which candidates to the priesthood were introduced to Thomist philosophy before they undertook studies in theology.

In this century the first Africans to publish works claiming to be philosophical have been churchmen: Kagame (1956), Makarakiza (1959), Lufuluabo (1964), and Mulago (1965). They are spiritually disciples of Placide Tempels, refer to and use his Bantu Philosophy (1945). Their status and the special order of their mission have prepared them to receive sympathetically the basic hypotheses of Tempels as well as they way he advocated them. This submission to one perspective has, however, never meant a mere repetition of Tempels' ideas, as shown by Kagame's reservation (1956) and the widening of his investigation (1976).