This article reports findings of a qualitative inquiry on representations of unsafe sexual conduct among female sex workers in Aba, Nigeria. Participating sex workers viewed their work as a form of business, a survival imperative in the face of poverty, and they generally considered it both risky and disgraceful. However, they frequently framed unsafe sexual behavior in terms of poorly remunerated unprotected sex with clients. Sex workers in the study were not only generally willing to grant, but also confirmed regularly granting, unprotected sex to clients offering to pay a premium for it. Receiving “good money” for unprotected sex made higher degrees of risk acceptable to these women and was considered an effective way to avoid clients assumed to be carriers of infections. In their struggle for sexual health, sex workers in Nigeria are hindered by poverty, powerlessness, and marginality. Future programs must aim, inter alia, at supporting sex workers' willingness to insist on condoms no matter what clients offer them to do otherwise.

Thirty-five years ago, Présence Africaine, along with many other institutions, embarked on a path to correct colonialism. In its role as an agent of change, the journal has continued over the years to reflect and inform the values of Black nations. Yet today, when former colonialist oppression has not infrequently given way to control by multinational businesses or inter-governmental consortia, the very term “neo-colonialism” addresses a new problematic for Présence Africaine. It is a problematic whose complexities lead to the following question. Simply stated, who is the oppressor now? This essay will examine that question in light of the journal's own history. How has its editorial policy changed? What writers are represented? What shifts in subject matter and author have captured the readers' attention and imagination? Indeed, has the reading public itself changed, representing new constituencies, both geographically and politically? What, finally, are the implications of its history in an age of neo-colonalism?

The definition of colonialism underlying this study is the following: “Colonialism denotes a relationship of domination and, like other forms of oppression, it is a structural system of hierarchically ordered and ranked relationships between at least two parties (Martin and Cohen, 1980: 21-60). An instance of oppression at work in francophone literature is found in the Pléiade edition of Histoire des littératures (Gallimard, 1958). The sanction of the Pléiade, most will agree, is one of the standards of admission into the privileged canon of French letters.

Une tragédie n'exclut pas l'autre

et il n'existe aucune hiérarchie dans la souffrance.

(One tragedy does not cancel out the other,

and there is no hierarchy in suffering.)

Calixthe Beyala (2005)

There can be no reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi without

justice, and no justice without truth. This proposition holds true

for all three states of former Belgian Africa.

René Lemarchand (1998)

The title of Marie Béatrice Umutesi's book, Fuir ou mourir au Zaïre: Le vécu d'une Réfugiée Rwandaise—or in its English version, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaïre—might prove confusing for some readers on at least two counts. Because the name Rwanda will forever be associated in our memory with the horror of the 1994 genocide, one might surmise that this is the story of a Tutsi survivor taking refuge in neighboring Zaire, as in previous massacres in 1959, 1963, and 1973. But then again, considering the disastrous wars that have raged in that country for the last decade, one might conclude that Umutesi's book tells the story of a Rwandan refugee caught in the crossfire between competing forces, Rwanda versus Uganda and their proxies within the former Zaire. Both assumptions would be only half true. The missing half in both inferences is that the ordeal of this refugee and her cohort originated in the Rwandan conflict that began in 1990 and culminated in the genocide four years later. Shrewdly orchestrated and largely perpetrated by the Tutsi-dominated regime that took power in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide, the slaughter of these Hutu refugees has been concealed behind a curtain of silence on the part of the international community. In the drama that unfolds in Umutesi's book, Zairian territory is the unwitting, albeit highly significant, theater of the cynically suppressed story of the disappearance of nearly a quarter million Hutu refugees from Rwanda at the hands of shadowy “rebels.”

This study focuses on determinants of foreign news coverage different from those entertained by the debate about the New International Information Order (NIIO): national interests and media traditions. It is common knowledge that newspapers devote little space to foreign news; we know even less about what that small space contains. The NIIO discussions suggest that third world newspapers, dependent mostly upon western wire services, have little choice but to print what they get. A newspaper like the New York Times, by contrast, relies on its own foreign correspondents and much less on wire service copy; hence it can choose what it prints. Wire services do help determine published news since they constitute a finite basis from which editorial choices are made. It is far from clear, however, that these agencies are the only sources used by third world newspapers and, more important, that the way they structure the news is necessarily identical with that of the news as it is eventually published.

Although the NIIO debate has been going on for years, it is now reaching western audiences. Horton (1978), Rubin (1977), Sussman (1977), Rosenblum (1977, 1979), and Righter (1978, 1979), among others, have recently described the issues in some detail. Much of the criticism of the present “order” stresses that structural dependence upon western agencies results in imbalanced foreign coverage, at the expense of the third world. Righter (1979: 121) explains that “news is … heavily biased toward the industrialized countries.” Horton (1978: 49) agrees that “the news flow is too heavily weighted widi news about the industrialized countries.”

The publication of Michael Crowder's “Whose Dream Was It Anyway?” in January 1987 marked the opening of what promises to be a challenging era of revision and re-evaluation in African historiography. With the benefit of three decades of historical hindsight and armed with recently declassified colonial documentation, historians are beginning to grapple with the complexities of national struggle in late colonial society, beginning with Ghana's march to freedom in 1957. It is as a part of this process of revision and re-evaluation that the following examination of the Muslim Association Party [MAP] of the Gold Coast is offered. The MAP was a comparatively small organization which was and is easily overshadowed by the turbulence of mass nationalist politics in the years 1950 thru 1957. Yet its unique blend of religious, class, and ethnic appeals—appeals too often misunderstood or dismissed outright as vestiges of tribalism, traditionalism, or religious fanaticism—reveals much about the antinomies of nationalist struggle in the Gold Coast.

Political scientists concerned with the dynamic rise of Gold Coast nationalism in the decade after World War II (and those few historians who dared venture into the recent past) focused primarily on Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party [CPP], its early split from the United Gold Coast Convention [UGCC] and its ultimate domination of nationalist politics from 1951 to 1957 (Apter, 1955; Austin, 1964; Bourret, 1960; Bretton, 1966; Fitch and Oppenheimer, 1968).

Using the University of Malawi as an example, this article analyzes the opportunities and constraints faced by African intellectuals. It argues that during the anticolonial struggle, young nationalists conceived the University of Malawi as a potential engine for the transformation and development of the state. After independence President Banda, who established a repressive one-party state, severely restricted the university's intellectual autonomy through modalities of censorship. Some academics and students went into exile; others conformed to the dominant ideology; others resisted it furtively. Global pressures on both the university and the entire political economy of Malawi contributed to the triumph of prodemocracy movements in overthrowing the Banda regime. After the victory of the United Democratic Front government in 1994, many restrictions on intellectual freedom were lifted. Global socioeconomic forces, however, in complicity with the new government, continued to marginalize the university community. It is suggested that a productive regeneration of intellectuals' contributions to Malawi's development will be possible only through a major realignment of its intellectual capital.

This article is driven by an empirical paradox over where Somalia came from (pre-colonial clan-states) and where it ended up (return to pre-colonial clano-territorial conflicts). Existing academic studies on contemporary Somalia, which were supposed to provide critical analysis, continue to applaud the creation of clan-states within the failed state of Somalia. Based on a variety of unique primary sources, this article offers a new perspective on the current state formation processes occurring in the purview of the Somali State. Somali clans are determined to come to terms with the state collapse by averting the return to political power of the detested military regime, which was led by one clan-based leadership that tended to terrorize other rival clans and denied any equal power- and resource-sharing framework. Conceptualizing the contemporary Somali state as similar to pre-colonial clan-sultanates, this article argues that contemporary Somalis are reverting to a pre-colonial realm where each clan had its clan sultan seeking for a clan-state of its own right. Where else do clan-states compete against each other in entering into “treaties” with external entities intent on exploiting war-torn Somalia as tabula rasa? It is towards the objective of answering this question and of providing a better understanding of the Somali conflict that this article is offered to add a comparative empirical understanding of the different trajectories of state formations in Somalia.

Kenya has served as a model of rural development, to be praised and lambasted, for three decades. As early as 1964 Clayton hailed it as an “agrarian revolution” (1964). As recently as 1989, Lofchie argued that it is an “agricultural ‘success story’” that has dramatically raised the real incomes of smallholder farmers while achieving one of the highest agricultural growth rates on the continent (1989, 15). Equally common are those condemning it as the archetypical example of capitalist development, impoverishing the rural poor to provide benefits to a small and internationally dependent bourgeoisie. Neither perspective is completely accurate; both need to be re-examined in light of Kenya's recent political unrest and shift to a multi-party political system. If a more open political system is sustained, rural political demands can only be understood and predicted if we understand the effects of Kenya's development model on the bulk of the population: Kenya's peasants.

The Kenyan agrarian debate has produced an unusually rich literature on the effects of capitalist development on an African peasantry. At its heart is the question of whether the emergence of a rural market economy preserves a relatively homogeneous peasantry or dissolves it into landed and landless classes. This article reappraises and contributes to the debate by arguing that directly examining the historical process of social transformation brought about by capitalist development, rather than deducing the process from cross-sectional data, suggests a single, uniform explanation of seemingly conflicting empirical material.

The historiographic question that this article asks is: How can historians uncover actual social and economic practices without imposing anachronistic standards and terminologies on the available evidence? The analysis focuses on the relationship between landlords and zégoch—a hitherto unrecognized and socially subservient class of peasants—in the context of social, economic, and cultural realities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ethiopia. The thesis is that during this period the Ethiopian ruling classes gained their power and income primarily from ownership of rim land—a form of private property—and the labor of zégoch.

Discussions of church weddings are not standard in accounts of African marriage in South Africa in the early twentieth century. However, from the 1890s onward, church weddings were becoming more common, and by the 1930s more Africans married in church than elsewhere. Indeed, these wedding ceremonies provide insight into how black families experienced and created their own social status in a context in which white South Africans viewed black weddings as a symbol of racial misappropriation. Via weddings and their associated commodification, families held on to and proclaimed the value of family life, and importantly, broader social networks as well as status-based associational life in an era of familial disintegration. At the same time weddings were often a double-edged indicator of status through their reference to sexual purity by means of white frocks.

One of the most consequential recent developments in Africa is its rapid rate of urbanization. Over much of the continent, there is a movement from rural areas to urban centers and towns (Hanna and Hanna, 1971). There has been some social science research on this process (Caldwell, 1969; Mabogunje, 1968; Ross, 1975). Additional case studies reflecting original empirical research are essential to social scientists attempting to interpret the nature of the concomitant social and political change. Data generated by such empirical research are also needed by policy makers struggling to fashion policy strategies responsive to the changing urban needs.

On this most rapidly urbanizing continent, one of the countries with the highest rates of rural to urban migration is Botswana. Between 1971 and 1975, its capital, Gaborone, experienced an annual population growth rate of almost 15 percent. In December 1975, the Department of Statistics of the University College of Botswana conducted a major survey of migrants in Gaborone. In this article, we will report and discuss significant survey findings concerning the demographic and social characteristics of migrants, their motives for migrating, places of origin, the disposition of new arrivals in town, and the continuing pattern of rural urban linkages.

In 1966, at the time of independence, Botswana, about the size of France or Kenya, had only three “modern” towns with a combined population of around twenty thousand people. Gaborone, a small tribal village and colonial administrative center, was selected in 1964 as the site for the new capital which previously had been Mafeking, South Africa. Nearly all of the present population are migrants to the new town.

This article explores the care that husbands in Accra, Ghana, provide for wives who have been diagnosed with cancer. Making use of an inductive, qualitative approach, the study analyzes observations of and in-depth ethnographic interviews conducted with five married female cancer patients and their husbands over a ten-month period. The results suggest a strong association among husbands’ care, wives’ responses to husbands’ care, and cultural ideals of femininity and masculinity. The findings suggest that husbands’ selective and often limited gender-based investments in unpaid care work make their sick wives exceedingly vulnerable in a context in which care for the terminally ill takes place predominately in familial settings.

Every ethnic group in Mali has at least one social category of specialists in conflict mediation and resolution. These are casted groups whose duties include the maintenance of a moral as well as structural social order, even in times of great turmoil. Recent research on the activities of these actors shows that the role of traditional mediator has not vanished, but it has evolved through bureaucratic institutionalization. A thickly described case study of the formation of RECOTRADE, the largest nongovernmental organization of traditional communicators in West Africa, demonstrates how this traditional institution is keeping pace with the political and civil development of the country.

The 1980s has been described as Africa's “lost decade.” After the largely positive economic and social developments of the 1960s and 1970s, Africa began to lose ground in the 1980s: economic progress turned into economic decline; social development into social decay. The assumption in leading circles has been that this downturn was necessary because of the costs incurred by a largely state-centered approach to development. Economic liberalization would help bring back growth. Few tangible improvements, however, were recorded in the 1980s. Since 1990, calls for political democratization have been added to the armory of policy prescriptions for Africa. Faith in the significance of democratization among Africans and friends of Africa alike provided the continent with new breathing-space but half way through the 1990s, there is little evidence that Africa has begun turning a corner.

Although per capita GNP income is in itself a measure of neither economic welfare nor success in development and measures for countries with a balmy climate always are lower than those for colder countries —something that the World Bank is the first to admit—the statistical trend for African economies that can be gleaned from studying its World Development Report for the past ten years indicates that in comparison with the rest of the world Africa continues losing ground. Although quite a few countries have registered at least a modest economic recovery in the 1990s, the number of African countries that have dropped into the bottom category of least developed countries has increased. In 1980, the number of African low-income countries (under $700 GNP per capita) was eighteen. In 1995 it had gone up to 27 or half of those listed in this category (World Development Report 1995, 162). The debt burden continues to plague the continent. Although total debt service as percentage of exports has improved for some African countries since 1980, repayment obligations are still beyond what African governments can typically afford. The result is that African countries find themselves locked out from international credit other than that provided by the publicly owned international finance institutions. The little private capital that comes to Africa is usually provided by individuals or companies interested only in a “quick buck.”

Kuduro, meaning “hard-ass” or “in a hard place,” is a contemporary genre of music and dance produced and consumed in Angola, especially in Luanda. This article maps kuduro historically and assesses it in its current moment. While the dance is full of invention and the genre has thrived in the informal economy, this alternative expression and the infrastructure it produces cannot be considered politically or economically liberatory. But the international “os Kuduristas” campaign promoted by two of the Angolan president’s children and companies they own shows the dangers of a culturally conservative discourse that dismisses kuduro as a vulgar popular phenomenon while hegemonic political and commercial forces embrace it.

The early scholarship on post-independence Africa contained a decided focus on and preoccupation with political leadership. This emphasis was due in part to the fact that political leaders were particularly visible embodiments of the state and that the institutions of the state were much more amorphous and elusive of analysis than the leadership. Even political parties, which were the focus of a great deal of research in the late fifties and early sixties, were examined much more in the context of political leadership than of institutional structures or their relationship to the state. This focus on political leaders was based on the expectation by both writers and political leaders themselves that the new political elites of Africa were going to transform the political, economic, and social life of these states in the very near future. These views were not just functions of the romanticism of the sixties, but were expectations grounded in beliefs about self-government, freedom, participation, self-determination, and development.

Political leaders were seen as the key to mobilization of the masses (Apter, 1963: xv, 303-5; Pye, 1962: 27-28), the driving force for development (Apter, 1967: 378-79), the architects of institution building (Huntington and Moore, 1970: esp. 32; Huntington, 1968), and the focus of national integration (Coleman and Rosberg, 1964). They were to provide a new moral leadership, a short-cut to political and economic development, and the drive and charisma to move the post-colonial state from its period of suspended animation into the twentieth century.

Autoethnography—a methodology that foregrounds personal experience both during research and in writing about it—is a useful keyword for scholars working in Africa and the diaspora. Mara and Thompson argue that by exploring new forms of writing and engaging in critical self-reflexivity regarding (shifting) positionalities, autoethnography—particularly collaborative approaches—is vital to ongoing efforts to decolonize African Studies. Mara and Thompson propose changes necessary for the development of Africanist autoethnography as a Keyword, and some hopeful indicators that these changes are already underway, including a small but growing body of Africanist autoethnographic work.

Students of government quite often argue that citizen participation leads to a more equal sharing of economic resources in society. Most empirical support for this proposition comes from analyses of western European societies. In the third world literature, scholars advance this thesis mostly with regard to a village or community context. They assert that participation in key decisions of social change is a critical if not sufficient condition for insuring that the local populace's resources are mobilized and its needs served (Charlick, 1980; Huntington and Nelson, 1976; International Labour Office, 1977; and Nelson, 1979). At the nation-state level, particularly in Africa, there has been little opportunity because of the one-party states and military regimes to establish the character of the relationship between participation and the distribution of economic resources. One prominent study of elections in Kenya's one-party state (Bienen, 1978: 90) concludes that competition for elected office has created a government “responsive to popular pressure” and able to “deliver goods and services which are highly valued.” This study, however, did not attempt to establish that the poorer segments of the public actually benefited. For participation to result in any substantial equalization of wealth those who are most disadvantaged should receive some benefit. This paper seeks to explore this issue: Does a liberal democratic electoral system at the national level induce politicians of an African state to improve the economic existence of the poorer segments of the population? The empirical data for this analysis comes from Botswana. Since most of the poor in Botswana live in the rural areas, the paper will concentrate on rural development.

This article concerns Dr. Remmy Ongala, a Congolese-Tanzanian musician, and the making of postcolonial cosmopolitan music in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It argues that Dr. Remmy's music is shaped by the postcolonial consciousness and conditions of contemporary Tanzania. It also shows Dr. Remmy's cosmopolitan citizenship in his songs that address political and social issues. Focusing on his involvement in worldbeat festivals, it argues that he, like other musicians, enters into the worldbeat system not as a fully autonomous individual but as a constituted postcolonial subject, compelled to shape his music in accordance with the demands of the worldbeat system.

This article argues for the continued merits of research with rural, long-marginalized peoples, including those whose fervent invocations of ethnic difference—such as Maasai—make many scholars and politicians nervous. Their perspectives “from the margins” offer key theoretical and political insights into this complicated place we call “Africa” by challenging grand narratives of modernization, “Africa rising,” and supposedly “universal” ideas of progress and justice. They also defy enduring stereotypes about the passivity and ignorance of rural peoples. I argue, in other words, for the value of both seeing and theorizing Africa from the margins.