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.

The Republic of Kenya is a land of stark contrasts. Its precapitalist policies have long attracted multinational investment and international loans. External capital is apparent to Western tourists in the capital city of Nairobi, an urban area with luxurious hotels, modern corporate and government offices, expensive automobiles, large sports stadiums, and numerous stores. But the modern features of Nairobi do not represent the real Kenya, the Kenya known to the vast majority of those in the country. The average Kenyan is not wealthy and does not possess Western-style amenities. Most Kenyans work in agriculture-related activities which range from subsistence farming to wage labor on large estates or plantations. In fact, recent statistics show that the agricultural sector employs over 81 percent of the labor force, contributes 65 percent to the value of total exports, and accounts for 31 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (World Bank, 1986a).

In addition to an appreciable disparity in income between urban elites and agricultural laborers, there is also an uneven distribution of resources within the agricultural sector. The present structure of agriculture is closely linked to the colonial period, when Europeans controlled large-scale farms in areas with fertile land. Although few Europeans farm in Kenya today, the agricultural system is still inequitable and biased toward Africans with large farms. Inequality is evident in the distribution of farm land, the flow of capital in and out of agriculture, and the class structure that perpetuates this situation. The Kenyan state remains closely aligned with elite interests in both rural and urban areas, thereby maintaining an unproductive agricultural system that contributes to underdevelopment.

Afrobarometer data collected three decades after Joel Barkan’s pioneering survey of rural Kenyans confirm his insights that voters stress MPs’ linkage roles in terms of representation (carrying views upward to the capital) and constituency service (bringing goods downward from national government) over their institutional roles (lawmaking and oversight). And, contrary to conventional wisdom, they prefer collective goods for the constituency over private goods. An African Legislatures Project survey of 822 MPs in seventeen countries revealed, however, that MPs misinterpret this as a demand for material goods and development and underappreciate the demand for representation, prompting—among other things—the adoption of controversial Constituency Development Funds.

Taking its point of departure in the distinction between rebellions and revolutions, this article sheds light on civil war in Guinea-Bissau and West Africa. It builds on prolonged fieldwork among the Aguentas, a militia of urban youth in Bissau, and interrogates their experiences of warfare to further our understanding of some of the dynamics of conflict in the region. It argues that a defining feature of the conflict we have seen in many parts of West Africa is political inertia. Key conflicts, rather than leading to actual sociopolitical change, seem to represent the tremors of chronically unstable political systems: incessant rebellions rather than decisive revolution.

Drawing upon the dynamic interrelationship between human agency and space, this article sheds light on the constitution of and relation between “place” and “path” among the pastoral Pokot of East Pokot District in the Kenyan North Rift Valley. It discusses the transformation from a more mobile pastoralist model of spatialization, which relies on a flexible network approach combining paths and places, toward a more “place-making,” postpastoralist model linked to increasing sedentariness, privatization of land, a clearer definition of external and internal boundaries, and a rapid emergence of schools, churches, and other physical structures.

Balanta farmers of Guinea-Bissau are often regarded by neighboring communities as “backward” and as a people who have refused modern life-worlds. Despite the fact that these farmers played a very important role in the making of Guinea-Bissau, they were progressively removed from power after independence. However, they also developed original forms of contesting marginality. This article portrays the Balanta as complex historical subjects with strategic agendas. It examines the tensions between centrality and marginality in today's Guinea-Bissau and in the Balanta's own ways of imagining their place in the nation.

In this article the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), especially new media technologies such as e-mail and the Internet, by postapartheid South African social movements is explored. Following a discussion of the use of these technologies by activist groupings in international contexts, a typology suggested by Rheingold (2003) is used as a framework for comparing two South African social movements: the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF).

The international aid community presents education and employment programs as the keys to mitigating youth participation in violence. Yet, existing evidence suggests that faith in such programs may be misplaced. This study investigates this disconnect between faith and evidence. It argues that education and employment programs are commonly built on an economically-focused “dominant discourse” that makes presumptions about youth and their interests. Based on qualitative research with youth in Nairobi, Kenya, it further argues that this dominant discourse overlooks self-identity and social connectedness factors that are crucial to youth, as well as the limitations imposed by governance and structural conditions.

With “Unfinished Migrations,” Patterson and Kelley have provided an indispensable overview of the recent resurgence of African diaspora scholarship. Describing this “rebirth” in light of contemporary concerns with globalization and transnationalism, they usefully update the work of scholars such as St. Clair Drake, Joseph Harris, and George Shepperson, who over the past thirty-five years have provided similar catalogues and calls.

Rather than contest any particular element of their overview, I will focus briefly on what I consider to be some crucial issues of epistemological strategy raised by their salutary attempt to conceptualize a “theoretical framework… that treats the African diaspora as a unit of analysis.” The first is that we need to consider in more detail the genealogy of the term diaspora itself. Patterson and Kelley are correct to note that “attempts to identify and make sense of the African diaspora are almost as old as the diaspora itself,” but surely it is also significant that the term diaspora has been appropriated so recently in black intellectual discourse. Writers and activists including Equiano, Blyden, Delany, Du Bois, and Nardal proposed varying visions of internationalism over the past two centuries, but only in the past three decades have black intellectuals turned to an explicit discourse of an “African diaspora.” It seems to me that we need to be able to explain why this term arises, as Patterson and Kelley point out, only in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

This article examines the troubled course of attempts to modernize and control pastoral production in Kenya over the last hundred years. It begins with an overview of changes in pastoralism to provide context and then gives more detailed consideration to the failure of colonial attempts to manage livestock resources. Finally, it discusses recent developments in relation to the past. It argues that study of pastoralism's past offers valuable lessons and provides insights into its present and possible future.

On the basis of a historical and ethnographic analysis, this article shows how the concept of hybridity can be used analytically to explore the emergence of paramount and lesser chiefs in Sierra Leone and their role as figures of authority at the local level and in national politics. At the same time, it critiques the ahistorical applications of the concept that are prevalent in peace and conflict studies. The article offers insight into the processes of hybridization that chiefs constitute, and are constituted by, as they draw on multiple sources of authority, including what one scholar calls their “extremely localized” sense of belonging, as well as the legislation of a centrally governed bureaucracy.

This article examines an environmental experiment in northern Kenya that went badly amiss. Focusing on the introduction of an invasive plant, prosopis juliflora, it explores wider issues of scientific hegemony, political identity, and land conflicts. Two legal cases pitting a small pastoralist community against the Kenyan state are discussed, which reveal a new but generally unsuccessful strategy by indigenous groups of utilizing courts to address injustices. The research draws on ethnographic, archival, and visual materials collected over a thirty-five-year period to demonstrate the violence and impoverishment that can be associated with technical interventions aimed at “greening” the environment.

Kenya's current constitutional moment has included both the first pop ularly ratified constitution and its first postindependence comprehensive land reform policy. The roughly temporally parallel processes that brought about these two signal achievements have inserted the interests of ordinary Kenyans into this constitutional moment in a way that elections and constitutional ratification alone would not have, reflecting more than two decades of civil society pressure. The new democratized land tenure policy removes land allocation decisions from pervasive executive branch abuse and vests them in a democratically elected Parliament. In this fundamental respect, the Kenya constitutional implementation process appears to privilege procedural and deliberative democracy as the source of substantive democratic land tenure outcomes, and by extension, the terms on which Kenyans relate to each other and their leaders. Upon the outcomes of these deliberations may well hinge the future stability as well as the democratic quality of the Kenyan state.

During the period between the two world wars, a principal theme underlying African education was a belief that the black school system of the American South constituted a suitable model for Africa. Thinking along these lines was prevalent throughout the continent (especially in the English-ruled colonies and Liberia), but nowhere was it stronger than in South Africa. This was mainly due to the Union's unique position of having a large settler population that was steadily augmenting its political sovereignty. White South Africans could readily view their positions as akin to that of white southerners in the United States, while Africans could easily draw parallels between their situation and that of black Americans. Certain individuals, institutions, and organizations in the United States believed that American answers to problems of race relations (which encompassed education) were applicable to other countries—they thus stood ready to aid South Africans in transferring and adapting a generalized American model of black schooling to the South African environment.

In fact, more than one model of black American education for South Africans existed. Africans viewed what was for them a progressive education system that emphasized black initiative and educational advancement. For example, while only 25 percent of their children attended school and 88 percent of their community were illiterate, 70 percent of black American schoolage children were in school, and black illiteracy had dropped from 90 percent in 1866 to 23 percent in 1926 (Huss, 1931: 2). White South Africans (those not totally opposed to some form of schooling for Africans) saw a system that seemed to train blacks sufficiently for living in a modern society yet served to limit any challenge they might pose to white control.

University cultures in the Global North generate powerful definitions of what constitutes “knowledge” and “good research.” When we ask who gets to represent the “African perspective,” we find it is decreasingly an African. This article argues that resource inequalities alone cannot explain this exclusion of African scholarship. Hegemonic academic standards undervalue the more positivist research orientation found in southern African universities. The struggle is not over the validity of that orientation, but over who has the power to validate it. This analysis is based upon interviews with senior university research managers in Zimbabwe and on a public roundtable on Structural Inequalities in Global Academic Publishing.

Following the attacks in Timbuktu in 2012, the ICC’s Al Mahdi case became the first instance where one perpetrator was solely charged with the war crime of destruction of cultural heritage. The ICC prioritized the crimes against cultural heritage at the expense of other types of atrocities in Northern Mali for two reasons: expediency, and the convergence of interests between the Court, the Malian state, and the international community. This study finds that the international community, the state, and the local community do not have the same conceptions and approaches regarding cultural heritage, its protection, or its value.

This article draws on newspaper commentary, Nyaturu hunger lore, and ethnographic research to describe how central Tanzanian villagers accessed food aid from the state during the East African food crisis of 2006. Through leveraging their political support and their participation in national development agendas, rural inhabitants claimed their rights. Yet it was through these exchanges that the state converted food aid into political power. The article argues that the highly ritualized gift of food aid naturalizes a contemporary political and economic order in which, counterintuitively, it is rural farmers who go hungry.

Perhaps as a result of the persistent developmental difficulties African economies have faced, a substantial amount has been written on the nature of African capitalism (Berman and Leys 1994; Iliffe 1983; Kennedy 1988; Sandbrook 1985; 1993). While this literature spans the ideological spectrum from advocacy of the free market to Marxian socialism, there seems to be a consensus on two points: first, that some form of capitalism has emerged in most African countries, and second, that this capitalism is flawed in fundamental ways that render its ability to promote growth problematic. One of the questions suggested by this literature is whether the social forces exist to support a more productive economic system. In other words, is there evidence of a social movement for African capitalism?

To date most analyses of the advance and/or stagnation of African capitalism have employed a structural and/or systemic framework, emphasizing factors such as class relations, role in the world economy, degree of proletarianization/peasantization and the emergence of a capitalist state. In this paper, we use a social movements approach to examine aspects of the development, consolidation and reform of capitalism in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Kano, Nigeria. We hope to illustrate that the business communities in both these cities can be viewed as coalitions of class, ethnic and sectoral interest groups with a shared common goal to facilitate political and economic reforms conducive to the advancement of a capitalist system. As opposed to structural approaches, a social movements framework highlights the role of ideas and human agency.

“Mandingization,” the gradual process of cultural change whereby Jola peoples of the Casamance region of southern Senegal are becoming more like their Mandinka neighbors, is analyzed in this article as comprising four distinguishable processes: ethnogenesis, ethnocultural drift, ethnic osmosis, and ethnic strategizing. By distinguishing among these four processes and analyzing their interaction, we can understand the dynamics of Mandingization more clearly and also derive insights for understanding ethnic change generally. The current moment of ethnic change in The Gambia includes a resurgence in Karon Jola ethnic identity, but we need to view this process as contingent, not yet accomplished, and a challenge to the pattern of Mandinka dominance in a time of broader social change.

The system of comprehensive price controls in Tanzania was established under the Regulation of Prices Act of 1973. Prior to that, price controls applied to a few urban consumer staples including beer, matches, sugar, beans, rice, wheat and maize flour, bread, grey sheeting and khanga, a popular dressing material. By May, 1973, four hundred items had been put on the price control list. The timing of the act was due to several possible influences. As a result of the Arusha Declaration in 1967, the early 1970s had seen an increasing regulation of the economy with the nationalization of rental housing, the enactment of a drastically progressive income tax, and the nucleation of the rural population in villages. In 1967 the government adopted a wages, incomes and prices policy which placed restraints on the growth of wages. The control of prices was, therefore, a logical consequence of this policy. On the economic front, there had been drastic price increases in late 1972 and early 1973 partly arising from a worldwide spurt in inflation.

In the subsequent period, starting mid-1970s, inflation increased even faster. Using 1976/77 as the base year, the National Consumer Price Index (hereafter, NCPI) increased from 42.4 in 1970 to 52.8 in 1973, 156.7 in 1980 and 775.2 in 1986. The minimum wage earners' price index in the principal city of Dar es Salaam which was 33.4 in 1970, rose to 41.7 in 1973, 165.2 in 1980 and hit 787.9 in 1986. For the same sub periods, the middle-grade civil servants' price indices were 42.3, 50.7, 176.6, and 911.5. Increasingly, the response of the government to these developments was to resort to price controls for the management of inflation.