This essay examines the cultural symbolism underpinning “Takembeng,” a contemporary, rural-based social movement of female farmers in the Northwest Province of Cameroon. It argues that the power and success of women's activism, in the context of national opposition party politics and the “new struggles” for democracy, are embedded in an institutional history and culturally legitimate etiquette of moral censure. It also suggests that the highly disruptive but mystically charged nature of these mobilizations makes them effective because they open spaces for popular dissent on the national stage. Understanding the “civility” associated with the apparent incivility of activists is indispensable to understanding the dynamism of grassroots political activism.

Scholarship until recently has focused on the reaction to colonialism among African elites, often urban elites. Little attention has been given to the perceptions that rural people had of colonial rule and its many manifestations, including missionary activity. As a result, rural dwellers have often been viewed merely as carry-overs from earlier times, living in static societies. They have rarely been seen as adaptive and innovative peoples, coping with or, indeed, thwarting the colonial/mission intrusion.

This article on the Kikuyu of Kenya seeks to describe what happened among one group of rural people as they confronted changing conditions and new opportunities created by British colonialism and American mission activity. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that a great many ordinary people were involved in grass roots activity, activity that calls into question our common notions of rural, early twentieth century Africa.

When the African Inland Mission (AIM) arrived in 1903, they became part of the flux and motion that had been taking place in Kikuyu society for some time. The close control of leadership positions in the primary descent and territorial group, the mbari, and the age organization, the riika, sent ambitious Kikuyu looking elsewhere for challenge and achievement. Within their society a few were able to find this in the areas of magic and divination, but greater numbers were attracted to the frontier as settlers, where they established a new mbari with themselves as leaders. Others found sources of challenge outside their society, particularly in warfare and trade. This combination provided a lively relationship for some Kikuyu with other Mt. Kenya peoples and the neighboring Maasai.

In contemporary urban Africa, the turbulence of the city requires incessant innovation that is capable of generating new ways of being. Rather than treating popular culture as some distinctive sector, this article attempts to investigate the popular as methods of bringing together activities and actors that on the surface would not seem compatible, and as experimental forms of generating value in the everyday life of urban residents. This investigation, sited largely in Douala, Cameroon, looks at how youth from varying neighborhoods attempt to get by, and at the unexpected forms of contestation that can ensue.

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.

The Sultan of Sokoto, locally known as the chief of Muslims (Sarkin Musulmi), was the most influential traditional ruler in Nigeria during the colonial era. His influence came from his predecessor, the caliph, who was the political head of the Sokoto Caliphate which was comprised of about twenty emirates. Under the colonial administration, however, the sultan and the other emirs of northern Nigeria were powerless.

Many scholars have imputed northern Nigeria's socioeconomic backwardness, when compared to southern Nigeria, to the emirs' “sluggishness, conservatism and egocentricity” (Heussler, 1968: 187-89; Fika, 1978: 273; Ozigi and Ocho, 1981: 40-41; Hubbard, 1973: 192). It is generally assumed that under the indirect rule system which the British allegedly practiced in Nigeria during the colonial period, the emirs had powers to initiate development projects to improve socioeconomic development. It is currently argued that they failed to do this so as not to jeopardize their positions (Heussler, 1968: 119; Ozigi and Ocho, 1981: 41). Such assertions are based on a misconception of the emirs' powers under colonial rule, a misconception that is largely due to a misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the system of indirect rule.

The purpose of this essay is to assess the sultan's performance as an administrator of the Sokoto emirate in his dual role of responsibility toward the colonial regime and duty toward his people during the first forty years of colonial rule. Students of the colonial history of northern Nigeria have ignored this subject, but it is essential for understanding the nature and effects of colonialism in Nigeria.

In April 1994, South Africans of all racial and cultural groups abandoned the dehumanizing experiment in physical, economic and political separation of races, apartheid, by conferring political power and authority on their new democratically elected government. The constitutional, institutional and legal changes to the South African state which brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power constitute the most extensive and closely watched example of the many efforts at democratic reform in Africa in the 1990s. While South Africa's new legal structure and peaceful transition of power via a popular election may encourage many to simply eagerly pronounce South Africa a “democracy,” much Africanist literature encourages caution before such a judgment. Africa's and Latin America's attempts at democratization are replete with abandoned constitutions, resurrected careers of corrupt discredited politicians, political parties which grow authoritarian and chop off their popular roots, military leaders who overthrow civilian regimes and reformist governments which quickly repeat the sins of their predecessors. Consequently, many scholars look skeptically on constitutional reforms (Decalo 1992) and mere “cracks in the edifice of autocracy” (Bratton and van de Walle 1992, 421) to suggest that the institutionalization of legitimate and accountable political leadership requires a vehicle through which citizens can participate in policy-making debates—a vibrant civil society.

This article probes one vital feature of South Africa's civil society—the relationship between the ANC and the Civic Association Movement, which was one social movement central to the insurrectionary liberation struggle carried out within South Africa. The ANC owes its current political power, in large part, to the sacrifices and dedicated efforts of members of the Civic Association Movement who mobilized black township residents to demand political reform and rectification of the misdeeds perpetrated against them by the white administration.

Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, has continued to offer—perhaps much more than his third novel, Arrow of God—the most vivid account of the process of early colonial penetration in Africa. This study examines Things Fall Apart through an analytical and conceptual framework that illuminates the five stages of colonialism in Africa. These five stages (exploration, expropriation, appropriation, exploitation, and justification) were necessary in order for colonialism to become both an effective tool for domination and a successful tool of domination; as such, they provide powerful glimpses into Achebe’s fictional representation of the cataclysm embodied by colonial intrusion, not only within the confines of the fictional Igbo universe that he depicts, but also throughout a sub-Saharan African world whose cultural and sociopolitical ethos were shaken to their core. An analysis of these stages, therefore, leads to an understanding of colonialism that defines it not as a series of specific historical events, spaces, and places, but rather as a process or a series of psycho-historical processes with a certain number of inescapable features that conspired to make it an effective tool of and for sustained political, cultural, and economic domination in sub-Saharan Africa. Achebe’s novel can be used as a tool that can help to decipher and foreground the psycho-historical processes inherent in what, ultimately, may be called “the psychology of colonialism.”

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.

In many societies, especially those where individual and collective memory are marked by the trauma that can accompany authoritarian rule, people attempt to come to terms with the past by finding ways of making it relevant to the present. One way to understand this complex relationship with history is through a careful examination of the practice of mourning. Mourning constitutes, above all, a framework from which the deceased's relationship with the living is collectively inventoried, evaluated, and debated so that the social work of memory may graft the experiences of yesterday onto a horizon of expectations. Defining the status of the deceased means making important decisions about how to “move on,” since the moment of mourning is not only a moment for weighing the acts and deeds of the deceased, but also a way of testing more generally the criteria for becoming recognized as an ancestor. As death seems increasingly present in the lives of people in many parts of Africa, emerging forms of social mourning echo the need for new political futures, and mourning shows itself as an important terrain for the social production of meaning. The primary objective of this collection of articles is to look at how the process of mourning mediates between the past and the future, and how the practices and perceptions of mourning are linked to real and imagined divisions in political time. Mourning, in other words, is a way of rethinking time.

Mission-African relations in Gbebe and Lokoja between 1858 and 1880 were different from what obtains in the literature for other precolonial Nigeria mission towns. Missionary practice was as intransigent, culturally imposing, and conflictual in these communities as in other mission towns, but local opposition and aversion to the missionaries and converts were not the defining character of their relationship. This difference is due both to certain peculiarities in the corporate character of Gbebe and Lokoja CMS missions and die particular sociopolitical and cultural milieu in the host communities. These factors attenuated die force of missionary ideological and religious assault and demoted religious conflicts between them to a secondary position. Thus, other critical nonconflictual contexts of mission-African relations assumed predominance in these communities. The character of the missions beclouded much of their patently adversarial aspects in the sight of their hosts. It also compelled the missionaries to engage in close secular interactions with the people. Moreover, exigent conditions of internal sociopolitical instability and external dangers of wars forced on the two sides faith-blind informal encounters. Furthermore, a heritage of integrative management of diverse immigrant founding groups in the young communities equipped them to be accommodative of the latterly arrived missionaries.

What I would like to present is a broad theoretical framework which could account for the significance of present-day African culture, particularly of African art, as a result of a process of “aesthetization.” I use this concept in the precise sense defined and illustrated by J. Baudrillard (1972) in his Pour une Critique de l'Economie politique du Signe. As a preliminary to the analysis of this concept, I would emphasize F. Fanon's (1967) statement about the ethnocentrism of European culture: “the unilaterally decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves our careful attention. One of the paradoxes immediately encountered is the rebound of egocentric, sociocentric definitions.”

African culture, and more visibly African art, are historical products of a complex process: the metamorphosis of concrete realities into abstract categories and, complementarily, the possible transformation of those realities into cultural objects with a financial value. In other words, African realities become, within anthropological frameworks, objects of knowledge; they are understood, classified, and defined as cultural signs from the perspective of the Western cultural and epistemological tradition. Subsequently, according to the socio-cultural rules of this new perspective and its matrix of cultural values or, more generally, from what is considered as a general and universal set of cultural values, some of these realities are given a financial value and, thus, become part of an economic process.

This article situates the sexual violence associated with the Rwandan civil war and 1994 genocide within a local cultural history and political economy in which institutionalized gender violence shaped the choices of Rwandan women and girls. Based on ethnographic research, it argues that Western notions of sexual consent are not applicable to a culture in which colonialism, government policy, war, and scarcity of resources have limited women's access to land ownership, economic security, and other means of survival. It examines emic cultural models of sexual consent and female sexual agency and proposes that sexual slavery, forced marriage, prostitution, transactional sex, nonmarital sex, informal marriage or cohabitation, and customary (bridewealth) marriages exist on a continuum on which female sexual agency becomes more and more constrained by material circumstance. Even when women's choices are limited, women still exercise their agency to survive. Conflating all forms of sex in conflict zones under the rubric of harm undermines women's and children's rights because it reinforces gendered hierarchies and diverts attention from the structural conditions of poverty in postconflict societies.

In January 2012, six months after the declaration of independence, South Sudan introduced a state-of-the-art biometric identity management system to handle its citizenship and passport databases. Scholars have shown that despite the remarkable failures of biometric schemes, states maintain their belief in high-modernist technologies. This article argues that South Sudan introduced biometrics to convey an image of a “non-failed” state to the international community, while effectively doubling the bureaucracy to keep all important decisions about inclusion and exclusion in the hands of the military elites. This duplication of the office reveals a great deal about the fundamental nature of the South Sudanese state. Citizens of any state tend to imagine the nation through their relations to bureaucracy, and identity documents act as a new kind of evidence of a successful negotiation between them and state agents. This situation creates a constant state of citizenship limbo for the South Sudanese.

After an Eritrea nationalist movement gained Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia in 1991, the newly formed government introduced a national educational policy based on the use of mother languages as the medium of instruction in all public schools. The stated purpose of the policy was to foster national unity, identity, and development while respecting cultural diversity. Nine different languages are spoken in Eritrea, among a population that consists equally of Christians and Muslims. The government has shown considerable flexibility in applying its language policy, particularly in its response to resistance from some predominantly Muslim segments of the population. Yet the implementation of the educational policy shows that three languages—English, Arabic, and Tigrinya—have come to dominate the majority of schools in Eritrea. This article examines how the state carried out its language policy from 1991 to 1997 and explores the problems it confronted in implementing the policy.

Ethnic groups living in the Mandara Mountains are assumed to be segmentary in structure, which is why scholarly literature portrays them as egalitarian societies. The configuration of the architectural landscape reveals a different reality. This article shows how the architectural landscapes of the Mandara Highlands are ideologically constructed to represent and legitimize hierarchies between clans and individuals. Physical entities appear as particular elements of social space, and as places socially constructed and tinged with ideologies. These fieldwork-based observations provide the foundation for interrogating the meaning of egalitarianism in African society.

This article assesses how the District Assemblies in Ghana’s Fourth Republic have exercised political, administrative, and fiscal powers transferred to them by the central government. It notes that the creation of the assemblies has promoted popular participation and boosted the autonomy of front-line officials in terms of decision-making and the allocation of financial resources at the local level. However, the central government retains the authority to appoint the District Chief Executive and 30 percent of the assembly members. Local governments experience delays in the transfer of funds, an inability to absorb civil servants of decentralized departments into the local culture, and a lack of capacity to raise revenue for development. The article argues that local election of the District Chief Executive and increased allocation of funds to the rural districts would attract entrepreneurs and skilled civil servants who would be able to implement effective decentralization.

Among Africanists, one of the remarkable events of 1957 was the founding of the African Studies Association. Commentaries on the association's history are slight and understandably celebratory. Exploration of archival and related sources, however, reveals considerable uncertainty and struggle over the construction of the field in the 1950s and 1960s. Those sources range across changing continental, colonial, and racial boundaries and reveal racialized relationships among U.S. scholars and especially foundation officials, British scholars and colonial officials, and, in unexpected ways, scholars in Africa and particularly South Africa. This essay traces the interplay of these forces and the demise of the transnational study of Africa in this period—and points briefly toward today's uncertain future for the study of Africa.

There is nothing more fundamental to Africans who are concerned with the future of the African continent than the issues of democracy, human rights, good governance, and the rule of law. These basic human liberties, among other concerns, constitute the central driving force behind what is often referred to as Africa’s “second liberation.” The primary purpose of this article is to assess the Clinton administration’s role in this second liberation, particularly in terms of its involvement in issues of democracy and human rights. This assessment is offered from the perspective of an individual who has been directly involved in the prodemocracy and human rights movement in Kenya. This article focuses on whether the Clinton administration’s policies are still heavily influenced by classic U.S. conceptions of realpolitik, or if enlightened leadership more in line with a neo-Wilsonian idealpolitik—as official rhetoric suggests—has permitted a fundamental departure in favor of a more coherent and tangible democracy and human rights foreign policy stance in the post-Cold War era.

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).