One cannot comprehend the demographic and political maps of contemporary Southern Africa, as well as the cultural-historical dynamics of the region during both the colonial and post-colonial periods, without first studying the changes caused by the Zulu revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and by the accompanying Nguni-Sotho migrations into Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and even Tanzania. Among the Nguni who occupied the present Natal province of South Africa, the revolution essentially was a violent counter-elite overthrow of the traditional political system and a transformation of the social order. The revolution was conducted throughout the reigns of five monarchical leaders: Dingiswayo (c. 1800-1818) who laid the foundations; Shaka (1816-1828) who established the Zulu kingdom and ruled at the peak of the revolution; Dingane (1828-1840) who was the first to encounter European encroachment upon Zululand; Mpande (1840-1872) who became a vassal of the Boers and the British; and Cetshwayo (1872-1884) who died in an armed resistance against British colonialism. The prolonged period of revolutionary warfare and the accompanying deprivations, known as the Mfecane among the Nguni and the Difaqane among the Sotho-Tswana, resulted in widespread migrations of peoples in different directions and destinations.

Regionally, the Nguni-Sotho migrations led to militarization, conquest and nation-building, and to the absorption of alien peoples. The whole process resulted in the intermixing, intermarriage and assimilation of peoples of diverse origins, languages, and cultures and gave them an enduring sense of corporate identity.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 second crisis of the world market economy in this century affected all countries according to their respective position within the international hierarchy (Rosier, Dockes, 1983: 222ff). The weakest economies, classified as Least Developed Countries (LDCs), were hardest hit because their socio-economic profiles showed severe flaws during the preceding boom (Arnaud, 1984:91-100). They exported agrarian raw materials and, lacking an industrial basis, imported manufactured goods. Consequently, the low level of development limited the internal generation of surplus which made foreign assistance imperative and a major feature of the political economy (Hoogvelt, 1982). The share of African economies among the LDC countries is remarkably high (Sánchez Arnau, 1982:15ff). Those countries, however, which maintained close links with the former colonial metropolis suffered less than Tanzania which tried to establish an autonomous way toward social development.

Indebtedness was a characteristic feature of post-colonial reconstruction during the 1960s and 1970s. Foreign capital inflow was the most adequate means to build and to diversify the economy. Internal surplus generation remained severely restricted because of the colonial legacy. Hence, indebtedness was widely accepted among scholars and policy-makers as an unavoidable prerequisite for development. It was the dramatic shift from indebtedness to insolvency in the early 1980s that created alarm and jeopardized the international monetary system. The former commodity exchange lacked the necessary financial resources and a significant segment of the world economic system was about to be suddenly disaggregated.

A corpus on transition to democracy in Africa has been developed. This body of work has different constitutive elements: conceptualization, institutional arrangements, conditions for consolidation and the reasons for its reemergence in the 1980s as an agenda for political change (Ake 1994; Hyden and Bratton 1992; Gibbon, Bangura, and Ofstad 1992). Nigeria's experience of the transition to democracy has received more attention than that of any other country in the continent (Ihonvbere 1994; Campbell 1994; Reno 1993; Agbese 1991; Diamond 1991). However, the current preoccupations and dominant discourses have largely concealed the agencies in the struggle for democracy, even though civil society has received some attention. Likewise, there are very few empirical works. Similarly, the discursive community on transition has also privileged a particular form of democracy, liberalism, without questioning its gender bias. While there is an emerging literature on African women in political transition (Tripp 1994; Abdullah 1993; Campbell 1993; Nzomo 1993; Pepera 1993; Seidman 1993; Beall, Hassim, and Todes, 1989), compared with the dominant literature on the subject, it is inconsequential. Further, much of the literature on African women in political transition has treated women in isolation from the gendered structures of power and society. Moreover, in most of this literature as well as the dominant literature on transition, there is silence on the relationship between political and economic processes despite the similarity in their basic doctrine, liberalism and the linkage of these two issues in the donor community and by African governments (Beckman 1992; Bangura 1992).

This article hopes to fill in some of the gaps noted by including Nigerian women's conceptual challenge to democracy; the traditions from which women draw their discourses; the male-bias of the state; women's participation in democratic struggles both at the level of politics and economics; and the limitations of the women's movement.

This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the popularity of Pentecostalism and the formation of religious identity in an Eritrean city. Examining the penetration of Pentecostal Protestantism into longstanding Christian churches in Asmara during a time of rapid socioeconomic change in Eritrea, it looks at how Pentecostalism discontinues its relation with the past, conceptualizes the present, and generates an autonomous image of itself in the highly competitive religious marketplace of an Eritrean urban space. The article discusses how and why this movement increasingly favors Bible reading and networks of religious meetings as the principal mediums of transmission of its teachings and the expansion of its denomination, breaking deliberately from traditional Christian churches and using local forces and resources.

When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of Africans in America, he was reflecting on the complex identities of the “talented tenth,” the educated minority of a minority like himself who felt alienated because of their awareness that their qualifications meant little in a racist society. Though written in reference to the African American intellectual, this duality, this sense of “two-ness,” is even more acute for African exiles today because they have fewer social and cultural ties to the West than African Europeans and African Americans. The exiles are much closer to the African “soul” Du Bois referred to and are less prepared for the pervasive racism and second-class status that they have to overcome in the West.

The concept of aesthetics is a “red herring” in the study of contemporary art. Often aesthetics is equated with technique (cf. Henri, 1960: 88) or with adherence to the dominant themes of a particular school of art. In the case of “tourist” and “folk” art, the concept of aesthetics is generally salvaged by introducing the notion that artistic preferences are culturally relative and are influenced by the conditions under which the particular art form is produced. Warren d'Azevedo (1973: 7) thus qualifies: “The apparent absence of these factors [i.e., formal aesthetic standards], as well as the lack of clearly explicated concepts equivalent to art or aesthetics in most non-Western cultures, has caused us to suspect that the expression of artistry may be somehow fundamentally different from our own.”

This and similar assertions have led to the development of the approach of “ethnoaesthetics” based upon the internal standards of judgement and criticism generated by the values of the artists and the audience in non-Western cultures. Here I shall argue that neither the conventional notion of aesthetics nor the new concept of “ethnoaesthetics” (cf. Crowley, 1966; Thompson, 1968; Silver, 1979: 289-292) adequately explains the complex relationship between the production and reception of tourist art. Moreover, I shall introduce an analysis of aesthetics which defines tourist art objects as media of communication between the new art producers and their audience. Therefore, it is necessary to begin with a basic definition of tourist art in Africa.

Deliberate British support for the supremacy of the Basotho monarchy and the prerogatives of chieftainship after 1884 assured that those traditional institutions would adapt to changing socioeconomic conditions within a relatively narrow, increasingly rigid format not conducive to popular participation. Despite strong official discouragement of overt challenges to the existing structures of rule, various new channels of popular expression began to emerge as potential alternative outlets for political agitation. The expansion of mission education, cash cropping, the money economy, and labor migration along with other similar innovations unleashed forces for reform which could not be entirely contained and quickly became, in Lord Hailey's words, “much stronger than the Administration realized” (1953: 136).

Hailey recognized that the diverse groups generating such social and political pressures included not only the educated, incipient “middle class,” but also certain dissatisfied segments of the chieftainship. Together with most observers, he devoted major attention to the all-important development of the Basutoland National Council, which had evolved in part as a product of colonial inspiration, encouragement, and guidance. However, Hailey, like virtually all other analysts, gave minimal attention to the equally crucial and highly controversial roles of emergent interest aggregations such as the Progressive Association and Lekhotla la Bafo (The Council of Commoners). Nevertheless, these groups established a heritage of political ideas and of interaction with both colonial and chiefly administrations that is vital in understanding the policies, values, and behavior of subsequent Basotho political parties.

In the last decade, the rapes (of women) in, and the metaphoric raping (of natural resources) of, the Democratic Republic of Congo have received unprecedented attention from media, donors, and advocacy groups. Beginning in the early 2000s, these two narratives (the involvement of armed groups and state forces in illegal resource exploitation and the widespread prevalence of sexual violence in eastern DRC) merged to form a direct cause-consequence relationship, in which rape is framed as a tool for accessing mineral wealth. Through an analysis of media articles and reports of human rights organizations, this study traces the making of this rape-resources narrative, juxtaposing it with wider academic debates and critical scholarship. The narrative effectively focuses attention on a narrow set of actors and spaces in Congo’s conflicts, highlighting each of those actors/spaces in particular ways while obscuring the role of others. Because of this, key dynamics are missing from the narrative, such as historical context, gendered conflict dynamics, and armed group/civilian activity and mobilization, which are critical to understanding the scale and scope of violence in the region more broadly and the perpetration of instances of rape more specifically. The unraveling of the rape-resources narrative reveals its toxicity in limiting effective interventions and in closing down alternative narratives.

In January 2012 a broad spectrum of popular groups staged an unprecedented protest against the removal of what has been termed a “subsidy” on fuel prices by the Nigerian government. The participation of tailors in this national political event suggests that self-employed artisans were prepared to transcend their narrow nonpolitical agenda to promote their interests and demands for decent social and economic conditions. Interviews with participating organization representatives in Lagos indicate the supportive role of alliances with labor unions and organized informal workers at large. We see current global developments in the textile industry as conducive to this outcome.

Between 1967 and 1970 the number of squatter settlements in Zambia's capital, Lusaka, increased from 9 to 32, accounting for more than one-third of the city's population (Simmance, 1974: 503). In 1973, one in every two persons in Lusaka was a squatter (Andrews, Christie and Martin, 1973: 17). Today, people continue to squat in Lusaka despite a four year upgrading project (1976-80) sponsored by the World Bank. Although they certainly grew in density and number after independence in 1964, such settlements were not new phenomena. Rather, they have been part of Lusaka's socio-economic map ever since the town began to grow. The persistence of squatting exemplifies grassroots involvement by an urban work force that takes possession of vacant land and uses its own resources to create living space. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the processes at work in creating and maintaining Lusaka's squatter settlements.

Squatting was a response on the part of ordinary people to the changing structure of Zambia's economy, beginning with the colonial era when Zambia became a subordinate part of a system of capitalist production. The administrative framework of ordinances and policies that structured rural-urban migration first impelled men to seek wage labor and gradually brought whole families to the cities. This affected the housing situation in Lusaka, colonial social policy and labor employment. Government and private industry interests were instrumental in shaping the urban policy which formed the background to the development of squatting.

Through their wedding celebrations, women from all strata of Mombasa society have participated in the evolution of a variegated Swahili culture. An historical analysis of wedding ceremonies illuminates two important questions: first, the pattern of interaction between people of slave and free ancestry after the abolition of slavery in 1907, and second, the role women have played in integrating into Swahili culture elements drawn from both slave and free peoples.

An awareness of the interplay of ethnicity and social stratification is crucial to understanding Swahili society. Historians have traced successive migrations of people from different parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean, bringing disparate ways of life. But despite the well-known formulation that Swahili culture grew from the mingling of African and Persian or Arab peoples, little attempt has been made to analyze specifically the contributions of African slaves to the mixture. The failure to distinguish different strata in the African component of Swahili culture obscures the class dynamic in coastal society. Scholars do not ignore social stratification, but few describe adequately the interaction between various strata. Still fewer writers analyze cultural artifacts as the expression of different, and often competing, strata. For example, James De Vere Allen, in his excellent guide to the Lamu museum, argues persuasively that “Swahili culture … is an African culture,” not an Arab import, as early British writers assumed. But having exposed the colonialist assumptions behind the earlier idea and having established the indigenous roots of Swahili culture, Allen (n.d.: 1-2) does not attempt to describe the impact of the lower strata on the material culture of the elite, whose articles dominate the museum. Allen is handicapped by the fact that poor people tend to create fewer and less substantial artifacts. In order to analyze the contributions of slaves and other people from the lower strata of society, one must turn to customs, particularly dances, which did not depend upon wealth or power for their creation.

Kenya has been going through a period of political reform since 1991, when section 2A of the constitution, which had made Kenya a de jure one-party state, was repealed. This reform followed a prolonged struggle on the part of citizens both inside and outside the country, and their call for democracy was one that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was embraced by Western countries. Via diplomatic pressure and conditionality on aid, Western donors played an important role in the repeal of section 2A, the return of multiparty elections, and the creation and reform of a number of political institutions and offices via a separation of powers. But although these changes were supported by the political opposition and much of civil society in Kenya, they did not rise organically from the national struggle over political power. Nor did these reforms lead to a determination in the country to hold the political elite accountable for their transgressions. This article argues that modern Kenya's history of economic and political inequality has resulted in a population whose very divisions make it difficult for politicians to be disciplined. Accountability has two dimensions: the horizontal accountability among branches of government that is assured by checks and balances, and the vertical accountability of the state to its citizens. Vertical accountability depends on a constituency of like-minded citizens defending broad national interests, or an electorate with a collective identity or set of identities attached to the Kenyan nation. But in the absence of such shared goals and demands, narrow personal and local interests prevail, and politicians remain unaccountable to the nation as a whole.

This article examines processes of community-building in the immigrant quarter of New Bell, Douala, during the interwar years. Historians of Douala have overlooked the history of New Bell, focusing instead on the political and economic activity of Duala's Westernized elite during this period. This historiographic oversight reflects a preoccupation with elite politics identified as the seeds of nationalism in Cameroon. An examination of the community of immigrants provides us with an alternative conceptualization of a multiethnic collective. By tracing the construction and evolution of public space in interwar New Bell, we can uncover elements of group solidarity binding together this highly diverse population.

Although the presence of foreign capital has been quite evident in most sectors of the Nigerian economy, only a handful of studies have attempted to analyze some aspects of direct foreign investment in the country. Even then, these studies (Hakam, 1966; May, 1965; Edozien, 1968; Langley, 1968; Central Bank of Nigeria, 1964-79) have tended to be descriptive, especially with respect to analyzing trends, incentives, motivations, linkage aspects, and distribution of foreign investment.

Thus, there has been virtually no empirical work aimed at statistically evaluating the determinants of direct foreign investment in Nigeria. Consequently, this study has the object of going beyond intuitive and descriptive analysis by providing a comprehensive empirical estimate of determinants of direct foreign investment, using the least squares regression approach. In order to provide the theoretical framework, a number of direct investment hypotheses proposed or considered in the literature are first reviewed.

The analysis focuses on direct foreign investment in all industries combined. Apart from possible specification problems connected with separate models for different industries which a disaggregated approach entails, such an attempt is further complicated by the absence or the poor quality of data relating to the larger number of variables which would have to be considered. Taking cognizance of this kind of problem in a developing country such as Nigeria, the only disaggregation to be done is in respect to sources of foreign investment. In this direction, the study analyzes total direct investment as well as direct foreign investment from the United Kingdom and the United States of America. These two countries accounted for over 62 percent of direct foreign investment in Nigeria in 1974.