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.

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.

Despite gains in national income, Ethiopia’s cities have seen a steady increase of homeless women and children. This study focuses on the lives of twenty-five adult women and twenty-seven children living on the streets of Hawassa, Ethiopia. Nearly all were driven to the streets by poverty compounded by abuse and violence and/or loss of supporting family members, illness, and lack of social supports. The Ethiopian government offers a food-for-work program, but this is an inadequate social safety net. Recommendations include government provision of long-term shelter, food assistance, school supplies for children, legal and economic assistance, and access to medical care.

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.

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.

Modern African literature has gained recognition worldwide with such classics as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiongo's Weep Not Child, and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. This recognition was reinforced by Soyinka's winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Modern African literature is written in indigenous African languages and in European languages used in Africa. Written African literature is very new compared to the indigenous oral tradition of literature which has been there and is still very much alive. While there are literary works in Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu and Sotho, among others, this literature in African indigenous languages is hardly known outside its specific linguistic frontiers. Writers such as Mazisi Kunene, Ngugi wa Thiongo and the late Okot p'Bitek first wrote some of their works in African languages before translating them into English. Most African writers, however, write in English, French, and Portuguese. There is the Eurocentric temptation to see modern African literature written in these European languages as an extension of European literature. However, after modern imperialism, language alone cannot be the sole definer of a people's literature.

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).

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 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.

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.”

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.

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.

This article examines the ways in which childhood and youth experiences of living in polygynous households shape the aspirations of middle-class Muslim Senegalese women to companionate marriage. Increasingly, such aspirations are fulfilled through marriage with European men. In contrast to an enduring popular discourse according to which women live happily with polygyny throughout the Senegambian region, this article shows how some middle-class women’s choice to “marry out” is explicitly linked to family narratives and personal experiences of suffering. In a context in which many of these women face strong familial opposition to marriage with non-Muslim European men, this article suggests that the women’s narratives provide moral legitimacy to their “alternative” choices.

This paper explores both the plight of the vanquished Hutu refugees who have returned to Rwanda under a cloud of suspicion, or outright condemnation (for their presumed roles in carrying out the 1994 genocide against Tutsis) and the legal mechanisms that could foster the reconstruction of a more inclusive political community. The author uses the term “social memory,” rather than “culture” or “tradition,” to elucidate the idea that social hatreds and inclusions arise and fall historically in conditions where political power is consolidated and deployed. Thus the re-integration of the Hutu into Rwanda civil society rests more on political will rather than foundering on implacable mystical or primal antagonisms. The author outlines several legal steps that might be followed to implement that political will.

Political analysts, both liberal and historicist, point to the quality of associational life in civil society as an important factor affecting the installation and consolidation of democratic regimes. For de Tocqueville (1966), democracy hinges on the creation of voluntary associations through which citizens learn to act politically and to demand accountability from the state. For Gramsci, organizations in civil society—such as schools, churches, unions, and interest groups—can help to legitimate the prevailing political regime by either reinforcing or challenging the way power is exercised (Femia 1981). People therefore apparently get the governments they deserve: where they associate readily, govern themselves democratically, and assert independent opinions, they can contribute to the construction of sustainable democratic institutions, even at the macro-political level; where people eschew self-organization in favor of establishing personal ties to powerful patrons and by deferring to entrenched authority, they help to reproduce at all levels of the polity the patterns of rule that already prevail within the state and the broader society.

Africanists cannot comment definitively on the character of associational life in Africa because the contemporary literature is thin in several respects. We currently lack a theoretical framework to account adequately for the development and status of voluntary associations and the relationships of such groups to the state. The available conceptual models of group formation and interest representation—such as pluralism, neo-Marxism or corporatism—were designed to account for politics in parts of the world distant from Africa. When Africanists borrow these models, we too often do so unselectively and uncritically, failing to recognize that “the goal is not to recycle theory but to reinterpret it” (Bianchi 1989, 10).

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.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century witnessed expanded digital connectivity, with important political implications, evident in the way activists used Facebook and Twitter to mobilize for political change in North Africa and beyond in 2010/2011, and in Sudan, including in 2018 and 2019. These platforms are also often sites where women may articulate narratives on the body and the body politic. Through digital ethnographic research, this study explores social and cultural narratives on everyday body aesthetics that Sudanese women articulate in selected groups on Facebook. I argue that the role some of these groups played in organizing civil disobedience in Sudan in November 2016 disrupts the binary inherent in the question: Nairat or Thairat?

Research on the socioeconomic position of rural African women has been hampered by a lack of appropriate data. Indeed, macro-level data are not ideal to gain understanding of how the social and familial realities experienced by rural African women might limit their access to limited resources (Bryceson 1994; International Labour Office, 1984, 57; Whitehead 1994). Furthermore, a male head of household may not be able or willing to accurately evaluate women's economic contribution to the household. Therefore, it is necessary to interview or survey rural African women about their lives (Russell 1984). In this paper, we present Kaguru women's own opinions of how social and familial realities affect their access to resources.

In rural African societies, women are typically engaged in agricultural, household and income-earning work. Although African women often have a heavier workload than do men in these three spheres of their daily work, they typically do not experience equal access to resources, both educational and economic (Boserup 1970,1985; Goody 1976; Meena 1992; Staudt 1988). The fact that husbands and wives do not fully cooperate, and may even compete for economic resources, is problematic for many development programs.

The main thesis of this paper is that the apparent failures of bureaucracies in the new and developing states of Africa, far from being concomitants of dismaying negligence and outright incompetence, are, in fact, glaring manifestations of the dilemma of premature bureaucratization.

It is impossible to speak of bureaucratization in African states without reference to those gradual, often times painful, but sustained and systematic separations of administrative processes from the Royal Households and personal loyalties of the nineteenth century Western Europe consequent upon tremendous societal changes that were occurring at the time. It was a process of injecting rationality and efficiency into administrative activities (Bendix, 1968: 208). This process was accentuated with the advent of the Scientific Management School of Organizational Theory, which appeared early in the twentieth century.

From then onward, the prescriptions for modern administrative organizations have been oriented toward a classical conception of rationality. The scientific management school, led by Frederick W. Taylor (1911), was concerned among other things with the motivations of workers, whereas the administrative management school, led by Luther Gulick and L. Urwick (1937), made organization structure their central theme. Following the examples of these two schools of organizational theory, the literature on organization management has tended to emphasize a high degree of control and efficiency, achieved by means of an elaborate network of impersonal rules and order. Organization men are seen as possessing high instrumental capabilities for goal attainment. In other words, the organization men possess all the relevant information and knowledge as regards causes and effects. This element of perfect knowledge discounts possibilities of errors and uncertainties resulting from the indeterminate environment of the organization. Organizational rules, orders, and structures are both necessary and sufficient conditions for organizational efficiency.