Between 1900 and 1940 the establishment of French colonial administration and the introduction of cash crop agriculture led to far-reaching social and economic changes among the Diola of Boulouf, in southwestern Senegal. Also during this period, the Muslim religion began to attract converts in Boulouf. The growth of urban migration and trade, together with the sale of peanuts as a cash crop, brought a degree of financial autonomy to the young men who participated in these activities. Many of these individuals converted to Islam to achieve status not accessible to them in the traditional social structure.

During the 1930s a series of natural calamities afflicted Diola society. The cumulative effect of these disasters and of continuing social and economic change, was to promote a sense of loss of power over their world among the Diola. This led, in turn, to a great acceleration in the rate of religious conversion. By the beginning of World War II, a majority of the Diola of Boulouf had become Muslim.

The 220 thousand Diola are the largest ethnic group in the Lower Casamance region of southwestern Senegal. Sedentary rice farmers, they have a social organization comprising shallow patrilineages three or four generations deep. The 40 thousand people of Boulouf, the region north of the Casamance River, west of the administrative center of Bignona, and south of the Diouloulou marigot, are a subgroup with distinctive dialect and cultural traits. They inhabit twenty-one villages numbering from six hundred to six thousand persons; each community in turn contains two or more semi-autonomous wards. In southern Boulouf there is a sizeable Catholic population; northern Boulouf is, however, 95 percent Muslim. The Islamic area constitutes the subject of this study.

In the post cold war era, most of the wars in the international community have occurred in Third World countries, and African countries have experienced on the average more years of civil and external wars than other Third World countries. What are the consequences of war on African societies? Do states involved in war tend to fare worse than those not involved in war? In this paper, data on African countries involved in war and those that were not involved in war between 1960 and 1983 were examined for evidence of differences in development patterns after war. In contrast to the few studies on the consequences of war, where war was associated with positive development in the European countries, this study posits that wars in African countries are unlikely to produce similar outcomes.

Conflicts, which exist on a continuum from low to high intensity, range from individual acts of aggression and protest to organized extreme violence perpetuated by institutions, organizations and countries. Conflicts on the low intensity side of the continuum are less violent, involving few, if any deaths, while conflicts on the other end, called wars, involve numerous deaths. The most intensive end of the continuum—war, defined here as violence sponsored by countries which involves at least 1,000 military troops—was selected as the focus of this research because of an interest in the impact of war on the development of the state.

Over the last decade, African regional organizations have gained considerable scope in peacekeeping and peace enforcement. Two subregional organizations in particular, ECOWAS and SADC, have gathered significant experience in military interventions in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Lesotho, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This article assesses the decision-making processes of both organizations ahead of the interventions and concludes that African states participate in military interventions for reasons of national and personal interests rather than humanitarian reasons or out of a primary interest in preserving regional stability. The article draws from extensive fieldwork in four African countries.

Our understanding of the international political economy of Africa is underdeveloped; we have inadequate data and theories about the development of underdevelopment on the continent. Even the orthodox study of international politics and foreign policy in Africa is largely a recent phenomenon, stimulated by the rise of new states in the last twenty years. This essay, then, can be no more than a review of the field and a lament over its deficiencies. In particular, we are concerned about: i) the relative inattention afforded the impact of international politics on the rate and direction of social change in African states; ii) the need for a new conceptual framework to advance our understanding of the linkage politics between African elites and external interests; and iii) the related growth and international inequalities on the continent. This essay proceeds therefore from a critical review of analyses of the international political economy of Africa to a tentative presentation of a new typology of states and regimes, regions and behavior, in Africa which reflects the importance of those variables on which students of political economy focus.

Trying to avoid lending authority to any one culture over others, current advocates of multiculturalism generally emphasize the appreciation of difference among cultures. Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina today provide horrifying evidence that difference can have precisely the opposite impact. On the one hand, difference can be necessary to national self-confidence, but, on the other, it can stir destructive tribal or national pride. Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart represents the cultural roots of the Igbos in order to provide self-confidence, but at the same time he refers them to universal principles which vitiate their destructive potential. Seeing his duty as a writer in a new nation as showing his people the dignity that they lost during the colonial period, he sets out to illustrate that before the European colonial powers entered Africa, the Igbos “had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity” (1973, 8). Achebe, however, cannot achieve his goal merely by representing difference; rather he must depict an Igbo society which moderns can see as having dignity. What is remarkable about his Igbos is the degree to which they have achieved the foundations of what most people seek today—democratic institutions, tolerance of other cultures, a balance of male and female principles, capacity to change for the better or to meet new circumstances, a means of redistributing wealth, a viable system of morality, support for industriousness, an effective system of justice, striking and memorable poetry and art. Achebe apppears to have tested Igbo culture against the goals of modern liberal democracy and to have set out to show how the Igbo meet those standards.

Readers of Issue know better than to accept the images of tribalism and ancient hatreds propagated in much of the American press during the early days and weeks of the genocide in Rwanda. And the media (or at least some journalists) came around eventually to a recognition that far from mindless tribal violence, this was planned and calculated genocide. Still, in North America it is the deaths and brutality that have most mesmerized public attention; there has been too little discussion of the political, social, and economic context in which the genocide occurred.

This paper acknowledges that states in Africa have contributed to the problems confronting social science research on the continent. It argues, however, that the causes of the problem go beyond the state. The paper undertakes an intensive exercise in introspection within the continental and external Africanist communities to explain the problems confronting social science research on the continent. The study identifies several factors as challenges facing research: intellectual distancing of the disciplines from society, the retrogressive sociopolitical atmosphere that characterizes some African universities, and the negative attitudes of individual academics. It argues further that these problems are compounded by the politics surrounding the hierarchical processes of intellectual validation and propagation at the global level. The paper concludes that without a correction of these internal and external deficiencies, it will be difficult to maintain a respectable and beneficial level of research endeavor, integrity, collaboration, and sustainability.

During the 1996–1997 academic year, students at the University of Ouagadougou went on strike for three months. This strike was the worst in Burkina Faso's history (or in the history of the former “Upper Volta”). The author, who was a visiting American professor at the time of the strike, details what happened at the university and in related incidents in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso. The author suggests that the strike may have resulted from the erosion of democratic rights within Burkinabè society, following the assassination of former President Thomas Sankara and the rise to power of current President Blaise Compaoré. Our attention is drawn to contributing factors behind the strike, including long-standing structural problems at the University of Ouagadougou and the politically motivated killing of popular professors and the former student body president Dabo Boukary, all of whom had spoken out against the Compaoré regime.

In 1970, drought and famine began to afflict Ethiopia (Shepherd, 1975: ix; U.S.Depart. of State, 1974: 41; Wiseburg, 1975: 299). By 1974, almost 8 percent of Ethiopia's people had experienced starvation (Shepherd, 1975: 39) and more than two hundred thousand Ethiopians had perished in the famine's wake. The famine captured an exceptionally high level of public and media attention throughout the world. Considerable public concern arose within Ethiopia and abroad over the vast dimensions of human suffering involved and in reaction to the government's callous attempt to conceal rather than alleviate the consequences of the disaster. Eventually, the famine and unmasking of the moral bankruptcy of the government's response to it became important precipitating factors in the deposition of Emperor Haile Selassie I and termination of monarchical rule by military coup d'etat in 1974.

The central purposes of this article are to show how the pre-coup legal order created conditions which left Ethiopian peasants vulnerable to famine, to describe pertinent changes in the legal order introduced by the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC), and to explore the short- and long-term impact of such changes on food production and famine prospects in Ethiopia.

Recent scholarship on pastoral societies in Africa indicates that qualitative changes are taking place in their economies (Picard 1980; Galaty and Salzman 1981; Swift 1982; Toulmin 1984; Sutter, 1987; Behnke 1984; Little 1985; Rigby 1985; Kelley 1987; Munei 1987). Although this literature shows that these changes are largely induced by urban groups, such as merchants and state bureaucrats who invade the pastoral range, it nevertheless fails to theorize systematically the nature of the transformation. As recent contributions of Berry (1989), Okoth-Ogendo (1989), and Blaikie (1989) indicate, changes in land tenure in rural Africa are part and parcel of larger social and economic processes operating in African economies, which lead to the reorganization of property relations and the restructuring of rights of access to resources. In spite of the warnings by these authors, even the more theoretically informed literature does not follow through with the implications of conceptual insights regarding the nature of pastoral transformation. Fundamentally, the contours of pastoral transformation very much depend on the structure and internal coherence of the pastoral sector and the type and the tendency of the capital impinging on it. This article is a contribution to the debate over the nature of African pastoral transformation and the social forces operating in that process.

In March 1975, the Ethiopian ruling military council, or Derg, proclaimed a sweeping land reform, which aimed at bringing about a complete transformation in the country's complex land tenure system and in its social and political structures. More than a land reform, the measure should be called a land revolution, for there was nothing reformist in the Derg's approach. It simply opened the floodgates of rural discontent, allowing the peasants to take over the land and encouraging them to organize into “peasant associations.” The government did not seriously attempt to control the process, partly for ideological reasons, and partly because it simply could not do it. Rather, the peasant associations were allowed to decide whether to redistribute land among their members, or to enter into collective forms of land cultivation.

The ambitious scope of the reform, and the suddenness with which it was announced and implemented, led most observers, including many radical Ethiopians and most diplomats from socialist countries, to forecast economic disaster and social breakdown. Such dark predictions did not come true. The economic consequences of the land reform were some increase in production, due mostly to good weather conditions (Dalton, 1975), and a tangible improvement in the peasants' living conditions. The urban population, though, suffered because of the sharp price increases that resulted from the disruption of the marketing system and an increase in on-farm consumption (Holmberg, 1976). Social turmoil undoubtedly was part of the land reform process, and thousands of people lost their lives in it.

This article explores the impact of gender quotas on sustainable representation in Africa. Sustainable representation is broadly defined as viable and substantial political representation secured for the long run. The research draws on evidence from cross-national election data and two case studies, Uganda and Kenya, which demonstrate that women rarely exceed the minimum thresholds set by gender quotas. This suggests that these quotas may have a ceiling effect on women’s representation. For gender quotas to generate long-term representational outcomes, they must be designed to account for other characteristics of the electoral context that affect women’s participation outside the quota mandate.

Recognizing limitations associated with past reforms, and taking account of current efforts at democratization, this article suggests that public administration in contemporary African society should be conceptualized more broadly than it has been in the past, and that it should include building relationships and bridging gaps among public administrators, citizens, and communities. Drawing from Ghana's experience, it argues that over-reliance on a restrictive notion of administrative reform—one that emphasizes structures and material welfare—overlooks the normative public purposes central to the field of public administration. The paper concludes by suggesting ways to ground public administration reform in the concrete, lived experiences of the people in Ghana.

The Zenzele clubs of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, which date from the late 1920s, were founded by mission-educated African women who sought to improve the lives of rural African women by enhancing their subsistence farming and cooking skills and educating them about household cleanliness, basic child care, and health care. Unlike associations for African women in British colonial Africa, Zenzele clubs did not evolve into political organizations. In the white-run segregated and apartheid states that persisted through 1994, Zenzele women did not engage in direct political action; rather, they sought to unite African women across class and ethnic lines and focused their efforts on community development.

Wọle Ṣoyinka in his recent Myth, Literature and the African World (1976) attempts to divest himself of the reputation that some of his earlier pronouncements have earned him as a denier of the existence of a distinctive Africanity, and to shake off the foreign sympathizers who have unfairly, he claims, exploited those early positions to bolster their racist denial of an “African world.” His intention in this book is to demonstrate his belief in the “African world,” to show how it is “self-apprehended” by the true African, and to “call attention to it in living works of the imagination, placing them in the context of primal systems of apprehension of the race” (ibid.: xi-xii). The first illustration he uses for this “apprehension of the race” is “The Imprisonment of Obatala,” a play by Obotunde Ijimere (1966). This choice is startling and baffling because Obotunde Ijimere is actually Ulli Beier, a German who was actively involved with Nigerian and especially Yoruba culture from 1950 until 1967.

First Ṣoyinka's use of the play to illustrate the Yoruba world-view will be summarized. The myth of Obàtálá (the creator arch-divinity) is that while he was engaged in the creative task entrusted to him by the Supreme Deity, Olódùmarè, he became thirsty and drank some palm wine to slake his thirst. Unfortunately the effect of the wine put him to sleep. The Supreme Deity, observing the cessation in the creative process, sent Odùduwà (the ancestor of the Yoruba) to complete the task. Odùduwà did and, before Obàtálá woke up, he installed himself on the throne as the ruler of the people. Obàtálá did not forgive Odùduwà for supplanting him. Therefore, both he and his progency engaged Odùduwà and his progeny in a long contest aimed at regaining the ascendency (see Idowu, 1963: 71 ff; Adedeji, 1972). The annual observance of Obàtálá's festival at Ẹdẹ includes a mock battle recreating an aspect of Obàtálá's contest with Odùduwà, and in which the former is captured, incarcerated, and later released after the payment of a ransom (Beier, 1956; Rotimi, 1968).

As I was writing this introduction, Guinea-Bissau was rocked by yet another “political crisis.” On the night of March 1 and 2, 2009, the army chief of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Waie, and the president of Guinea-Bissau, João Bernardino “Nino” Vieira, were killed in the space of a few hours. As was to be expected, articles mushroomed in the international press in the following days, sporting headlines that we have long since become accustomed to, such as “Guinea-Bissau Collapse Deepens after Leader Killed” (Pitman 2009) or “Guinea-Bissau Threatens Return to Bad Old Days in Africa” (George 2009). An article by the Economist Intelligence Unit was entitled—with a literary touch reminiscent of Conrad's Heart of Darkness—“Edge of the Abyss.” These days Guinea-Bissau, particularly since the 1998–99 civil war, seems to be the poster child for all the negativity generally attributed to African countries, an overlapping of political, economic, and humanitarian crises, in blatant confirmation of the picture of “shadowy Africa” that James Ferguson pinpoints as one of the features of international discourse on Africa today (2006:15,190).

Despite these clichéd articles (identical in tone to those that have appeared during the various crises that have characterized the last decade of Guinea-Bissau's history) and pessimistic forecasts from international experts, these violent events have not triggered any real political or civil turmoil. The following morning the capital city, Bissau, was calm. The army leaders declared that they had no intention of intervening in the upcoming elections.

The third day after leaving Tingi-Tingi we began to pass the bodies of the dead and the dying.… My eye fell on a teenager hardly sixteen years old. Like the others she was lying at the side of the road, her large eyes open.… A cloud of flies swarmed around her. Ants and other forest insects crawled around her mouth, nose, eyes and ears. They began to devour her before she had taken her last breath. The death rattle that from time to time escaped her lips showed that she was not yet dead. All who passed by glanced at her and then took up their conversation where they had left off. I stood in a daze in front of this sixteen-year-old girl, lying in agony by the side of the road in die middle of the equatorial forest more than five hundred kilometers from home. As in 1993, when I heard about the extermination of my mother's family, as in 1994, when I saw the burned houses, the fear in the eyes of the fleeing Tutsi, and the arrogance and the hate in the faces of their executioners, as in 1995 when I saw pictures of women and children assassinated by the RPF in the camps at Birava, I was overcome by revulsion. What crime had all these victims committed to deserve such a death?

Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter

In the “witness literature” on the Great Lakes, Marie Béatrice Umutesi's wrenching narrative surpasses all others by its searing, intensely personal quality. She bears testimony to an almost forgotten tragedy: Between October 1996 and September 1997, hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees lost their lives in the course of a massive manhunt carried out by Rwandan-backed rebels and units of the Rwandan army.

Democracy is one of the most contested words in the English language. In Africa, these complexities are compounded by the question of whether democracy is a colonial imposition. Cheeseman and Sishuwa provide a historiography of debates around democracy, track how these narratives have developed over time, and argue that there is widespread public support for a form of what they call “consensual democracy.” This is not to say that democracy is universally loved, but despite the controversy it remains one of the most compelling ideals in political life, even in countries in which it is has yet to be realized.

This essay integrates ethnographic data collected between Mombasa and the Lamu archipelago in Kenya into the growing body of scholarship on Swahili music and dance (ngoma) traditions. The analysis underscores how the Swahili have used ngoma events to stake claims to higher positions on the social ladder, negotiate difference, create socioeconomic security networks, establish and mark group identity, connect to the spirit world, and pass through various stages of the life cycle. Through a rich array of historical accounts by visitors to the coast, whose texts complement oral histories of coastal residents, the importance of ngoma in the Swahili-ization of the East African coast becomes apparent. A comprehensive understanding of the part ngoma organizations have played in the recreation and re-creation of Swahili society is possible only when one factors in the contributions made by residents of the northernmost portion of the “Swahili coast.”

In a recent essay reviewing the literature on modes of production and the transition to capitalism in underdeveloped countries, Aiden Foster-Carter (1978: 72) criticizes the growing volume of Marxist works on development for their lack of theoretical rigor and cohesion:

Separate small scale debates, moreover, are taking place on various topics, including the postcolonial state, the capitalist world system, the development of underdevelopment, the national bourgeoisie, and articulation of modes of production, without their respective protagonists taking note that “each of these mini-debates almost inevitably takes as ceteris paribus matters which are themselves variables at issue in the other debates” (Foster-Carter, 1978: 72). Foster-Carter concludes that there is a need for a broader theoretical synthesis that will help illuminate the processes of development and underdevelopment and, we might add, the various situations of dependency that exist in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The objectives of the present study are modest in view of Foster-Carter's challenge. It is our intention to draw from the contributions made to three mini-debates—underdevelopment and dependency, the articulation of modes of production, and the colonial state—in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the nature and meaning of underdevelopment in Ghana. By themselves, none is sufficient to illuminate the process of underdevelopment in Ghana.