This article explores the prevalence of high-level political and bureaucratic corruption in postindependence Uganda, with particular focus on the narrow interests it serves and its impact on development and service delivery. It argues that high-level political corruption endures largely because it is situated within the framework of “neo”-patron-clientelism and skewed power relations. The article shows how institutions have not been able to effectively engage the inner-circle ruling elite due to a skewed power structure that serves narrow political interests. Grand bureaucratic and petty forms of corruption are equally extensive and challenging, though only the former have been affected by “zero tolerance” policies. The article concludes, however, that through its interplay of inclusion and exclusion, political corruption has generated contestations which undermine it and challenge the National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime.

The winds of political change have been sweeping across Kenya for the last two decades. However, as many sections of society—the media, the church, civil society, and even ordinary people—take advantage of the unprecedented democratic space in which to engage the political establishment, the country's intelligentsia has remained aloof. The aim of this article is to interrogate discourse patterns in the Kenyan university system. Adopting a historical lens, it argues that the curtailment of intellectual freedom in the postcolonial Kenyan university is a reproduction of the colonial suppression of discourses whose objective was to ensure the political survival of the ruling class. It also argues for the adoption of critical pedagogies that challenge the status quo.

Inspired by Jane Guyer's insights in Marginal Gains (2004) into the distinctive logics and performative repertoires that animate economic life in Africa, this article offers a few reflections on the implications of African economic dynamics for conceptual debates about economic and social meanings of value. In particular, it is suggested that market values may be understood not simply as momentary quantitative indicators or measurements of opportunity costs, but as social processes in which people continually assess present circumstances and options in terms of their understandings of the past. Since history may always be read in more than one way, there is always an element of ambiguity in market values. Rather than a chronicle of exceptional responses to global forces and common human needs, African economic history may be read as an opportunity to reflect on how people and events come together in economically enabling or destructive ways in particular times and places, and what is historically specific about Africans' gains and losses from economic interactions with one another and with other parts of the world.

In recent years, the study of mission history has achieved a remarkable vitality, partly owing to the ready availability of material but deriving more fundamentally from a growing integration with the major thrusts of contemporary African historiography. It would seem appropriate at this point to attempt a “progress report” on these accomplishments and to suggest some possible directions for further investigation.

From its inception, mission history has paralleled rather closely the larger tendencies of African history generally. Formal examination of the subject was initiated by missionaries and their supporters and gave rise to what might be called the metropolitan-ecclesiastical school of mission history. Focused on European strategies for the planting of Christianity in Africa and on the heroic missionary efforts to implement these plans, this literature hardly spoke to the theme of encounter at all. In this respect, it resembled the early colonial history which saw Africa as a stage on which Europeans of all kinds played out their interests and their fantasies.

Taking vigorous exception to this view of the African past was what might loosely be called the nationalist perspective in African historiography, which emerged strongly in the 1950s and the 1960s. In consonance with this new emphasis on African initiative, historians of mission activity began to probe the ways in which African perceptions and reactions conditioned the pattern of mission expansion, the extent to which evangelization was an accomplishment of African catechists rather than European missionaries, and the kinds of protests that were generated against mission policy and attitudes.

The World Bank, in its controversial 1981 report on problems of African development, came down particularly hard on African governments for having inflated the state sector (World Bank, 1981: 40):

The Berg report, as it is known after its principal author, Elliott Berg, praises African governments for their accomplishments in education and health, but otherwise condemns them for following mistaken, state-centered economic policy. This is not to say, however, that the report praised colonial economic policies by comparison. Here is one of the few paragraphs in the report addressing the era before 1960 (World Bank, 1981: 11):

Scholars in African studies often seem to believe that they are lonely, marginal, and misunderstood. They complain frequently about the ignorance and indifference of the public, the media, and the politicians. Whether their complaints are justified or not, their sense of isolation may make them unusually sensitive to questions of professional identity and purpose–a sensitivity sharpened by the facts of Africa's past and present and the emotions both arouse.

These problems are not unique to scholars in African studies. Others in area studies experience them, as do all the millions whose positions in the eyes of the public are unpopular, suspect, or simply insignificant. The symptoms of those in love-starved professions are well known: high suicide rates, chronic introspection, incessant organizational busy-work, and an obsession with titles and qualifications. Yet sociologists (perhaps for fear of infection) have not given much attention to the professional pathology of academia. The applied social sciences, however, are another matter. An especially intriguing case for our present purpose is that of the American planning profession as described by Martin Rein (1972: 426ff). The planners, Rein noted, underwent an extended legitimacy crisis in the course of which they cast about for a formula which would establish their identity, justify their existence, and secure them a clientele. Eventually four such formulas (summarized as expertise, bureaucratic position, consumer preference, and professional values) were defined. Each formula contained answers to such questions as: Whom or what do I serve? What service do I provide? Why is that service useful (and better than that offered by rivals)? And, how should the service be performed and evaluated?

Africa’s brain drain to the North is part of a much larger story of the capacity-building challenges facing the continent. During the past 20 years African economies struggled through what are often referred to as the “lost decades.” The region’s economies have been characterized by dependence on economic aid and technical assistance. It is surmised that there are more expatriate “experts” in Africa now than at any time since independence. Technical assistance rose from US$1 billion in 1971 to US$4 billion in 1995. Africans themselves have, as the epigram suggests, taken the back seat, and the skilled ones among them have increasingly migrated abroad.

In the study of African sexuality, cultural studies and theories abound with examples of limited, unilinear approaches which tend to reinforce basic assumptions about the nature of social categories, often in a self-perpetuating dynamic that undergirds the social and material bases of their construction and hence solidifies their alterity. Even the most well-intentioned scholars writing historically on Africans and homosexuality (or blacks and homosexuality) tend to commit such acts of logical fallacy, most often by resorting to a circular cluster of arguments to refute the ahistorical without questioning either the manner in which such arguments are invoked and used, or the inherent ahistoricisms that determine them. This paper will attempt a reassessment of past arguments about African sexuality. Scholars and persons of African descent have a good deal invested in the affirmative acts both of reclaiming and of making history; however, these can never be achieved on the terms of unquestioned, false ideas of the ahistorical. Using a postcolonialist critique of writings on Africa and homosexuality, I use the excavatory tools of contradiction, denial, and reversal to examine the tropes that most often have been deployed in discourses on race, Africa, and the sexual in the writing of culture.

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 compares the democratization process in Benin and Niger in the decade from 1989 to 1999 and emphasizes the influence of external donors with regard to their economic support of democratization. The task is twofold. First, I try to understand why, though these two aid-dependent countries share many initial similarities, the former received more external financial assistance than the latter. I build upon New Institutionalist concepts such as timing, sequence, and path dependency to demonstrate that the probability and continuity of foreign aid depend both on the timing and on sequences of the transition—a combination that may or may not produce a path-dependent phenomenon with regard to the donors. Second, I argue that the capacity of foreign aid to foster democratization depends largely on its timing, particularly in critical moments of the democratic process.

Architecture functions as a powerful tool in the construction of political power. So, too, can it play an important role in resistance to such power. The following essay explores uses of the built environment, of topography, building methodology, and approaches to the landscape by different sectors of the Bamileke community over a period of ninety years (1906–1996). Its principal focus is architecture and architectural practices associated with an institution imposed by the German and French colonial regimes: the Christian church. How, it asks, and why, primarily through the medium of architecture, did different factions within the Bamileke community (chiefs and their allies, priests and pastors, untided men, youths, women) make use of Christian institutions to further their goals and enhance their position within the social order?

This article examines the construction and use of a diasporan framework for analyzing Afro-Atlantic history during the postabolition era. It summarizes the findings of the author's research on the first fifty years after the end of slavery in Brazil (1888–1938). The use of a diasporan framework illuminates patterns, otherwise obscured by traditional monographic approaches, that can be compared with other Afro-Atlantic communities.

There is considerable evidence that induced abortions account for a great deal of the decline in birth rate or slowing down of the growth in birth rate in a number of countries such as Japan, the USSR, Hungary, the other East European countries, Korea, Taiwan, Chile, and Uruguay. Tietze and Lewit (1969: 21) wrote: “Abortion is still the most wide-spread, and the most clandestine method of fertility control in the modern world.” In Ghana public opinion also suggests that induced abortion is the most widespread method of fertility control. Whether this is true is difficult to ascertain, because induced abortion in Ghana is certainly, as Tietze and Lewit wrote, “the most clandestine method.” It is forbidden by law and is generally condemned by the people. Usually, therefore, abortions are performed in secret, which renders research extremely difficult. Ironically, however, the secret character of abortion makes the need of investigation even more urgent, because illegally performed abortions tend to cause the gravest medical complications.

To my knowledge, no one has yet made a scientific estimate concerning how often and under what circumstances induced abortion occurs in Ghana, and what its consequences are. I do not intend to make such an attempt either. My sole intention is to look at induced abortion in the context of a single Akan matrilineage in order to gain a more realistic insight into the conditions that lead to abortion, the ways it is practiced, and the reaction to it by the people concerned. This paper will, therefore, have little value for demographers who require statistical evidence. At best it may suggest a number of hypotheses about the incidence of induced abortion in Ghana and thus encourage further research.

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.

Africans interested in reparations from the West frequently ask why the Jewish movement for reparations for the Holocaust was successful, whereas Africans have been unable to obtain reparations for the slave trade, colonialism, and post-colonial relations with the West. This article addresses this question using social movement theory and argues that success depends to a large extent on how the claim for reparations is framed. Past treatment of Africans by the West violated key contemporary norms of bodily integrity, equality, and private property. Yet the victims are no longer living, the perpetrators are diffuse, some of the harms were legal when they were committed, and the causal chain of harm is long and complex.

Increasingly in the literature on underdevelopment, there is growing recognition of colonialism's pernicious effects on women's status in Africa, as elsewhere. Colonialism, it is argued, destroyed the traditional sex role balance both through underestimating and undermining women's economic role, as well as through the havoc colonialists raised in the social sphere by such varied means as forced labor and cash cropping (cf. Seidman, 1975; Diarra, 1971; Tinker, 1975). And yet there is a highly visible elite of African women—women well-traveled, usually professionally trained and/or university educated. If indeed colonialism did have such negative effects on women's status as are now being claimed, how then do we account for the rise of this female elite?

On the basis of data gathered through interviews in Senegal during the autumn and winter of 1974, we will argue that these women are indeed exceptions, that elite women sampled came from highly privileged family backgrounds in which the father was already involved in the colonial order. We will also examine their motivations for acquiring higher education and professional training and their opinions on topics related to colonialism, development, and women's status. From this data we can then better evaluate both their evolution as an elite and their relationship to other women within the particular developing society.

Dakar was chosen as a research site both for the availability of archival records from the colonial era and for its significant population of highly educated women. Dakar, as the former capital of French West Africa, was a center for education, with the Section des Sage Femmes of the Medical School (opened in 1922) and the Ecole Normole des Jeunes Filles at Rifisque (opened in 1938), both located within the greater urban area. These two schools served as the major secondary training schools for girls from all over French West Africa during the colonial era: their graduates were among the first women professionals, and many have since obtained high positions in many sectors of their societies.

This article highlights and interrogates the recent resurgence of the view, both in the academy and in international financial institutions, that African culture has been a stumbling block to development. It argues, instead, for a development perspective that is informed by the realities of Africa today. The views of African humanists and philosophers on development are highlighted. The case is made for a return to building on the indigenous roots of African culture as a way forward.

During the colonial era, pre-capitalist social and economic institutions in Nyasaland (now Malawi) underwent profound change as the result of the incorporation of the country's societies into the world capitalist economy. This essay explores the change in the day-to-day relationships between men and women and between the elders and the youth in the Tchiri valley of colonial Nyasaland from 1906 to 1940. The development of cotton as a cash crop was the focus of these changing relationships. This study locates the principal dynamics of the cotton economy in local adaptation to the ecosystem, a process which accounts for the success of cotton agriculture before the mid-1930s and its subsequent decline. The peasantry which developed before the mid-1930s was later reincorporated into the world system mainly as wage earners. This altered all earlier gender and intergenerational relationships.

The history of peasant (or Crown Land) cotton production in the Tchiri valley falls into three distinct periods. The first phase lasted from 1906 to 1923, when it struggled for survival vis-a-vis the state sponsored plantations. The second extended from 1924 to 1935 and represents the prosperous period when peasants triumphed and the plantations failed. The third phase, 1936-1940, was the collapse of peasant production in large parts of the Lower Tchiri valley.

The principal dynamics of the peasant cotton economy were ecological. The Tchiri valley is bounded by a range of hills on the north, west and north-east and cut in a north-south direction by the Tchiri River which has its source in Lake Malawi. It is divided into two broad ecological zones: the rain-fed or mphala and the river-fed or dimba subsystems.

During South Africa's first decade of democracy, policies of social inclusion and social citizenship have emphasized productive employment and the work ethic in a context of fiscal discipline and public spending thrift. The government's institutional discourse contrasts, however, with a social reality in which most black workers have confronted growing economic precariousness and the inability of waged occupations to provide stable livelihoods above poverty levels. The article discusses workers' responses to these conditions with case studies of private and public employment. It finds that official rhetoric about the centrality of productive employment does not reflect the diversity of practices and discourses with which workers address the crisis facing wage labor.

Although over the last decade there has been a considerable growth in African theater research, the majority of such work has confined itself to the analysis of traditional theater practices or to that of contemporary literary theater. While acknowledging the functional dimensions of African theater, this research has focused on the aesthetics of African performance. When the social dimensions of theater have been evoked, they have been asserted mainly in terms of the propositional value of theatrical content. Playscripts have been analyzed for propositional claims and thematic concerns, and social critiques have then been constructed on such analyses.

This essay presents an analysis distinct from that critical trend. It examines neither traditional theatrical practices nor contemporary literary theater but rather an ambiguous theatrical practice that can be labeled popular theater. The first section of the paper discusses the concept of the popular and suggests that it is best understood as a functional discourse which can legitimate or subvert the existing power structures of society. The second section focuses on the ideas of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian adult educator whose work provides the theoretical basis for most popular theater projects in Africa. The essay then analyzes the discursive construction of popular theater in various African contexts including Botswana, Zambia, and Nigeria. Through the history of popular theater in Africa, the paper shows the growth of popular theater theory. The last section, on the Kamiriithu production of Ngaahika Ndeenda, illustrates some of these theoretical claims.