The African press of colonial British West Africa has been recognized for the role it played in moving the area toward independence (Crowder, 1968: 424-25). On the other side of the continent, however, the African press of former British East Africa–Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania–has largely been ignored by scholars. One accepted view has been that the African press of East Africa, while contributing little to the independence movement, thrived on subversive attacks on government and irresponsible publications in general (Hatchen, 1971: 202). Some recent research has suggested that in Kenya and Uganda there was an important African press in the pre-independence period, a press that helped to spread social and political ideas and to mobilize the African population (Scotton, 1973: 1975). Almost totally ignored, however, have been the African newspapers of pre-independence Tanzania, and more specifically those of mainland Tanganyika.

This paper will examine the role of the African press of Tanganyika before that United Nations territory under British administration achieved self-government in 1961. This African press, perhaps on a more limited scale, played a role similar to that of the African newspapers of neighboring Kenya and Uganda. In all three areas, the African press provided an outlet for specific African grievances, challenged accepted social and political patterns, and helped to mobilize the African population in support of proposed new patterns and their African spokesmen.

Early African spokesmen such as Harry Thuku in Kenya, Sefanio Sentongo in Uganda, and Erica Fiah in Tanganyika also saw the need for some kind of news sheet or newspaper to help legitimatize their arguments for equal treatment and eventually even self-government for Africans.

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.

From the onset of the post-World War II international campaign for the development of the Third World, much attention has been paid to the role of various media forms in the process of making Africa modern. In the discourses of many state officials, development agencies, Western economists, sociologists, and political scientists, development was defined in terms of a country's ability to urbanize, industrialize, and democratize. What was needed for development to occur in Africa, and in the rest of the Third World for that matter, was a transformation of societies from traditional to modern.

As channels for the dissemination of modern ideas and practices, mass media were seen as integral to the very process of social transformation. In the view of those working within this dominant modernization paradigm, a modern mass media system—radio, newspapers, television, and cinema—once established, would serve to prepare developing countries for modernity by transforming the values, attitudes, and behaviors of traditional society (Golding 1974; Fair 1989, 131). The mass media's role in the national development process, then, was to act as innovators and mobilizers of transformation, changing old habits and fostering a new ethic.

Essential to the modernization perspective was the assumption that backward societies remained mired in their traditional ways as a result of ignorance of the outside world and of the inarguable benefits of modernity. Sociologist Daniel Lerner, referring to the Middle East expressed the underlying sentiment of the role of the media in the national development process as well as anyone when he wrote, “what is required there to ‘motivate’ the isolated and illiterate peasants and tribesmen who compose the bulk of the area's population is to provide them with clues as to what the better things in life might be” (1958 411).

This paper attempts to explain the manner in which British colonial officials perceived the bases of authority of their subordinate African officials, whom they called chiefs, during the years of colonial rule in Uganda. Many studies have shown how the British used a hierarchy of appointed Africans to carry out day-to-day administration (early studies include Apter, 1961; Beattie, 1971; Burke, 1964; Denoon, 1968; Fallers, 1965; Low and Pratt, 1970; Richards, 1960). The degree of continuity between this imposed colonial structure and precolonial political systems differed greatly from one part of the Protectorate to another, the disjunction being greatest where people had formerly organized their affairs without rulers. The present study focuses on British attitudes as revealed in two such areas of extreme disjunction. Other scholars have noted in passing that officials tended to assume that the wide powers wielded by these appointed chiefs were based on custom, even in formerly acephalous areas. Pratt (1965: 489) refers to this assumption as “a happy and convenient fiction” while Tosh (1978: 246) speaks of self-deception and “the confusion which bedevilled the official mind.” Research among retired officials who had served in the Protectorate administration revealed a widespread perception of these appointed chiefs as in some sense representative of the Africans they ruled (Gartrell, 1979). Some of those interviewed maintained that representativity derived from continuity with precolonial chiefly roles involving mystical ties between chiefs and people. They believed that precolonial chiefs had ruled even in areas where research has found no such precolonial political roles.

This article provides a ground-level view of market taxation in two local government areas in Ghana’s relatively disadvantaged northern region. It describes a system shaped by informal practices that are grounded in social relationships and collective norms, which sometimes foster greater equity and in other cases serve to reinforce existing inequalities. The evidence suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of the highly informal and socially embedded realities of local tax collection, and the possibility that improved outcomes could be achieved by “working with the grain” of these inescapable local realities, while seeking to minimize potential costs of informality.

This article aims to analyze the emergence of the migration-development nexus after decolonization in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. The first section explores the way in which French governmental bodies and NGOs started to frame public policies linking migration and development in the 1960s and 1970s. The second section highlights how developmentalist ideology was mobilized in the 1980s in order to set up return policies in partnership with African governments who were increasingly inclined to control migrants’ monetary remittances. The last section emphasizes how the migration-development nexus was orchestrated to control migratory flows from the late 1980s onwards.

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.

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.

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):

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.

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.

A radical change in an educational system, as well as being the result of a social revolution, is a means of consolidating it. In a developing nation like Ethiopia which is undergoing a social upheaval, education has a vital role to play. It permits the articulation of the aspirations of the masses as a subject fit for knowledge. It helps to associate knowledge with the critique of the oppressive conditions of life and commits it to the transformation of society and the development of human potentialities.

It is a truism that education, as a conveyer belt of human values, skills, ideas, and facts, is an integral aspect of a society's reproduction of itself. The conflicts and tensions that germinate in a given society, the solutions, both functional and dysfunctional, that the political system generates to resolve them find their way into the educational system and condition its structure and content.

The educational system and the education imparted therein could even be in certain situations, the expression, indeed the embodiment of one of society's tensions, and as such, is transformed into a catalyst—if not of social change, at least of social awareness that leads to the development of an action oriented ideology. The study presented here will attempt to elaborate on these different aspects of education through an empirical investigation of the relationship between traditional education and socio-political processes in Ethiopia in the course of this millenium.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.