For all the academic and policy interest in Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency, the coping strategies of civilians who survive amid everyday violence have received relatively little attention. Focusing on the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a pro-government militia fighting Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, Agbiboa explores how and why the group emerged, the nature of its relationship with the state and local communities, and how counterinsurgent vigilantism affects the prospects for peace. A focus on vigilantes and civil militias vis-à-vis the state points to the vital role of civil-military cooperation for effective counterinsurgency campaigns and for reducing state violence against civilians. At the same time, it underscores the precariousness of protection both in terms of increasing the targeting of civilians by vengeful insurgents as well as the tendency for civilian defense groups to “turn bad” and become threats to the communities they were expected to protect.

Mali’s 2012 coup d’état and subsequent rebellion created much hardship for those living in the northern and southern parts of the country. This article explores the changes that occurred during the period of uncertainty in the country, the role of the minimalist state, and the implications of these conditions for future development initiatives. The way in which Mali muddled through the 2012–2013 period has left two distinct aid landscapes: a heavily militarized northern region where aid from donors is focused on antiterrorism, and a southern zone of free-market intervention facilitated by donors.

The African Studies Association (ASA) was born in a blaze of anthropological glory with Melville Herskovits, the celebrated anthropologist and “universally recognized dean of American Africanists in the United States” (Greenberg, 1963: 3) as its Founder President in 1957. In all, six ASA presidents have been anthropologists, a number exceeded only by political science. Of the forty-eight founding Fellows, ten were anthropologists, eight were political scientists, and four were geographers, while history, economics, and sociology had three each. This numerical predominance of anthropological membership continued until 1963 when political science equalized and then drew ahead. Other possible indicators, such as membership of the Executive Board, winners of the Herskovits prize, recipients of travel awards, and numbers of Ph.D. dissertations, are in conformity with this general picture of early anthropological prominence and later eclipse. When the ASA commissioned a comprehensive survey of African research (The African World, published in 1965), the editor (Lystad) was an anthropologist and over one-third of the chapters were by anthropologists. It was the most ambitious single publication ever produced by the ASA.

Such quantitative indicators are crude, and we must ask what lies behind them. There are some problems in the fact that the disciplines are not clear cut. This paper includes public administration with political science and archaeology with anthropology. Some linguists and ethnomusicologists, especially in the early period, definitely identified themselves as anthropologists, whereas at the present time most would not. Some anthropologists have acquired the identity of sociologists for circumstantial reasons. Generally speaking, social anthropologists who have taught in African universities from the 1950s until now have had to do so in departments of sociology and frequently as heads of such departments.

Why discuss women's role in development? The reason is quite simple, and it forms the underlying premise of this paper: If all of the persons who are involved in the human tasks of survival and creation of a better life are allowed to share the opportunities available to apply scientific knowledge and technological advances, development will be achieved at the most rapid rate possible. Conversely, if some persons are left outside the stream of this knowledge, the pace of development will be slowed down for the whole society. And the latter is particularly true if those left out play a major part in economic production and are at the same time the persons who bear the chief responsibility for the health and well-being of all the people.

Whether one holds a pragmatic or a humanistic view of development, the participation of women is necessary. From the pragmatic approach, one sees that the most serious problems of development defy solution without the active participation of women. Can hunger be banished without the women, who grow most of Africa's food, and who breastfeed the babies and prepare the meals for the whole family? Can illiteracy be abolished without the women who are the first teachers of children, and whose own level of education affects the progress in schooling of both boys and girls? The pragmatic approach to development also dictates that all available human resources must be mobilized to reach the goal.

The humanistic approach to development is expressed in the definition of development formulated by the President of Tanzania: “Development is development of people toward their greater freedom and well-being” (Nyerere, 1968). All must participate in the tasks of nation-building and share in its fruits.

In the latter 1940s, a growing number of American intellectuals, including scholars in various academic disciplines, were attracted to the study of Africa by two powerful incentives. First, African nationalism created a new horizon for the advancement of democracy, the twentieth century's preeminent political ideal. Second, many intellectuals were anxious to reconstruct the prevailing theories of society so that they would fairly represent the aspirations and problems of people everywhere on earth. From this perspective, due regard for the contributions of Africa was deemed to be a scientific, as well as a moral, imperative. These goals, democracy and universalism, were embraced and combined by the theorists of modernization.

Afro-Americans have always had more than academic interest in the study of Africa; it was inevitable therefore that they would come into conflict with Euro-Americans who (through myopia or cunning) insisted that they had no unique relationship to Africa. Viewed in historical perspective, it is quite understandable why in the 1960s blacks would challenge those whites who had arrogated to themselves the control of African Studies in the United States. For blacks, parity (if not dominance), in the study of Africa is inextricably part of their struggle for full equality in America. The reasons for this are quite simple: the whites who conquered and settled America decided quite early that the people of African descent who were brought to these shores as captives could not and (later) should not be permitted to live on a plane of equality with them.

We start with a fundamental duality in the paradigm of Pan-Africanism, the distinction between Pan-Africanism of liberation and Pan-Africanism of integration. Under both headings the name of Ghana's founder-president, Kwame Nkrumah, is immortalized.

This article uses the lens of disciplinary power to analyze the North–South relationships in efforts to govern drug trafficking in Senegal. Disciplinary surveillance shapes the activities of anti-trafficking units through repetitive examination, correction, and persuasion. These practices produce forms of resistance to the ways in which interdiction occurs, which implicate elites in the country. The result of constant international correction, and subsidiary actor resistance, is a frustrated law enforcement team. The argument deepens the literature on police reform in Africa, acknowledging the effects of international discipline on policing agents, while maintaining that immediate political settings heavily constrain disciplinary techniques and their internalizing effects.

The debate about the state in the Third World has led to the emergence of different paradigms. Although still in use, the bureaucratic-authoritarian and the inherited postcolonial state theses have been superseded in recent years by new models. There has been a resurgence of Weberian analyses of the state in third world studies, especially those dealing with Africa. The African state has been referred to as weak, soft, declined, absent, decayed, juridical, or normative. Many of the writings define and explain the problem the same way. One can say these studies are based on the soft state or declined state paradigm, even though some of them rely more explicitly on Max Weber's notion of patrimonialism. Even those writings in which soft state terminology is not explicit are, in fact, linked to the soft state paradigm (see Osaghae 1989). As Robert Fatten, Jr. correctly points out, since the 1950s, all the different ideological currents in African studies have been unable to “move beyond the talismatic concept of the ‘soft’ or non-institutionalized state” (1989, 170). In the 1980s and 1990s, the concept has been even more closely identified with Africa. Although Gunnar Myrdal was the first to use the term soft state to characterize the states in South Asia (Myrdal 1968, 66, 277, 895-900) and others have recently applied it to the state in the Third World in general (see Migdal, 1988), the concept has been given a particularly African flavor by those writing about Africa. Consistent with the prevailing view that Asian and Latin American countries are different and better off than African countries, Myrdal's initial use of the concept—questionable as it was even in his hands—has been removed from Asia and almost exclusively applied to Africa. Even those writers who attempt to apply the concept to the Third World in general acknowledge this almost exclusive use of the term but still tend to reinforce it. Because of its pervasive influence through modernization theory's notion of institutionalization, the soft state paradigm and its sui generis, particularistic assumptions and explanations about Africa frame the debate on today's democratization process in Africa.

The role of Islam in West African politics goes back to the beginnings of the encounter between Islamic culture and traditional African political leadership in the medieval period. When Arabo-Berber culture arrived in the West Soudan, African rulers in Ghana, Soudan, and other smaller kingdoms of the time were very much influenced by their traditional African world view. According to this world view, rulers were thought to be a link between the living and the dead, on the one hand, and between the temporal and the spiritual on the other. Indeed, it is because of this fusion of politics and primordial religion in the old Africa that the well-known American student of African religions, James W. Fernandez, wrote in the early 1960s that the “African, it can be argued, inherited a traditional disposition to shift back and forth from a political to a religious mode of address.”

The majority of East African pastoralists, unlike the pastoral societies of the Middle East which have been exposed to and have dealt with central state organizations for millennia, have fallen sway to centralized governments only at the beginning of this century. The process of integration and encapsulation of nomadic pastoralists in centralized polities and economies is now well under way in Africa and is given much attention by the local African governments.

Historical evidence is showing that, prior to colonial encroachment, East African pastoral societies, commonly depicted as highly resistant to change and strictly bound to tradition and culture, have at times undergone drastic and swift transformations in response to altered ecological conditions and/or to new opportunities. The Turkana, for instance, separated from the Jie to become nearly pure pastoralists; the Maasai, at Njiemps and Arusha, settled down to become farmers; the Pokot and Kamba developed a dual economic sector with heavy reliance on both agriculture and pastoralism (Goldschmidt, 1974: 298). The Nilo-Hamitic Samburu entered an intimate symbiotic (socio-political and economic) relationship with the contiguous Cushitic Rendille (Spencer, 1973).

From the beginning of this century, colonial powers by elaborating particular policies and measures and introducing certain development projects have often struck at the very core of pastoral subsistence without regard to or appreciation of the pastoralists' mode of life. In so doing, they have laid down the foundation of far reaching changes in the economic sector, in the social fabric and in the political organization of East African pastoralists.

Within African studies, one of the few generalizations that may be hazarded—without qualification—is that no area has been more deliberately, consistently, indeed agonizingly self-critical than African philosophy. “Western” academic philosophy is supposedly well-known for identifying, evaluating and defending the presuppositions upon which it grounds itself. With respect to African philosophy, however, a clear consensus has yet to be reached—after more than twenty years of intensive discussion—about what its presuppositions should be, much less whether they are plausible. The wrangling has been incessant and, at some points, counter-productive.

What is meant by “presuppositions”? Let us take, as one example, the cultural data-base in Africa from which such philosophy might be expected to arise, or with reference to which it might orient itself. There is still serious controversy within the ranks of African philosophers over the intellectual status, and therefore philosophical potential, of that amorphous corpus of oral literature: divination verses, lyrics, myths, maxims, tales, proverbs—indeed virtually everything in traditional African culture that can be classified as verbalized knowledge or belief—that came to be characterized as African Traditional Thought.

From the epistemological standpoint of philosophy in Africa, if ever there has been an unknown known, its perimeters are defined by this corpus. Initially most Anglophone African philosophers were predisposed (by their own overseas university training) to treat things that had already been labelled proverbs and myths—literature generally-as un-reasoned, non-critical raw data better fit for the maws of religious studies or cultural anthropology than philosophy. A supposedly “scientific” ideology of modernization dictated that knowledge that was in any sense non-critical and therefore unreasoned had to be rigorously expunged from academia before anything that would receive credibility as African philosophy could emerge (Bodunrin 1981).

An interesting if not unique aspect of Kenya's attainment of independence was the peaceful displacement of European settlers from central positions of political power. Explanations for their political demise lie chiefly in various political and economic trends in Kenya colony eroding settler dominance. These trends accelerated the separation of the interests of the colonizers (European settler-farmers) from those of colonialism (authoritative ties and political economy) down to Kenyan independence in the early 1960s.

The demise of colonial rule in Kenya was not the same as the erosion of European farmer domination; nor were they necessarily interdependent. English colonialism in Kenya dealt both with the attempt to colonize Kenya with European settlers and with the maintenance of a system of authority called colonialism in the country. Regarding the latter, more important aspect of the term, the European settlers were an important link — perhaps at times the most important — but certainly not the sole one. Colonial officials, commercial interests, tribal authorities, the Asian community and missionaries, were all vital supports to the system. The separability of the two aspects of the colonial system can be seen in a Rhodesia where the settler-dominated political system could survive without colonial authority, and in a Ghana where colonial authority existed without the settler presence.

In the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Senegalese musicians produced a large body of songs addressing the coronavirus. These songs engage with prophylaxes, symptoms, instructions in case of infection, and metaphysical conceptions about the origin and meaning of the pandemic. These songs are part of a national strategy aimed at containing and eradicating the coronavirus by developing “COVID-literacy”: knowledge about the pandemic which is spread through music. In this article, we examine a socio-local history of music’s use during health crises, its place in local religious communities, and how its use interlaces linguistic, traditional, and metaphysical tenets.

This article examines the puzzle of the nonescalation of electoral violence. Drawing on evidence from Kenya’s Coast and Rift Valley regions, the article argues that land narratives along the coast create few motives for people to participate in electoral violence because residents do not link their land rights with electoral outcomes. Politicians thus have far less power to use land narratives to organize violence. Two factors help account for this regional variation between the Rift Valley and the Coast: the strength of the political patron and the proportion of “outsiders” relative to “insiders.”

This article examines two films by Raoul Peck—Lumumba: La mort du prophèle (1992) and Lumumba (2000) that offer vastly divergent methods for remembering, memorializing, and meditating on the life and death of Patrice Lumumba. Peck succeeds in creating films that do more than preserve or resuscitate a historical record. The earlier film in particular performs analytic historical work as it delves into the conflicted historical record in which Lumumba is remembered. Peck uses an experimental and confrontational approach to reveal the ongoing forms of cultural censorship that have attempted to erase Lumumba and his legacy.

Seemingly oblivious to outside pressure and censure, the present-day Nationalist government of South Africa remains firmly wedded to a policy of separate development, known as apartheid, for its white and nonwhite populations. Criticism from abroad is inevitably parried with the assertion that South Africa has its own means of dealing with questions of race, based on more than 300 years of historical experience. Traditionally this attitude has been upheld and shared by South African historians, particularly by those of Dutch extraction, who comb South Africa's past in search of material to justify the prejudices and policies of today. “History,” writes a contemporary South African historian, “has become a tool to perpetuate the laager mentality of a minority group embattled forever against British imperialists, missionaries, Kaffirs, Communists, liberals, and the world in general” (Patterson 1957, p. 37).

More specifically, South Africa's current inflexible position on apartheid may be related to events that took place in the early part of the nineteenth century. During this period, British efforts to bring about the “equalization” of the native peoples led to the “first clash of significance” between the British and the Afrikaners (Van Jaarsveld 1964, p. 8), as the descendants of the Dutch Boers call themselves; and because the agents of the London Missionary Society at the Cape and in England agitated for many of the reforms introduced by the home government in its South African colony, the Afrikaners have held them responsible for setting in motion the events leading to the Great Trek of 1836.

This paper addresses the issue of the state of education today in French-speaking Africa, with specific reference to literacy, post-literacy, and their perspectives for the year 2000. While a very pessimistic overall picture is presented in the literature, both by educational researchers and development and funding agencies, new approaches to the matter are emerging. First, from the previous linear relationship of education to other economic, social, and environmental factors, more and more authors now perceive education as an interdependent variable which mutually reinforces other economic, social, and cultural development factors. Education, it is realized, should not be restricted to the achievement of objectives such as employability and isolated from the global evolution of economic sectors (Hugon, 1988; Dave, Ouane, and Sutton, 1989). Hence, a new sort of applied economics of education is needed (Easton, 1989: 440). Linked to this notion, and no less important, is the perception that education should be constructed as a global system which offers combinations of approaches of equal potential value—formal, nonformal and even informal.

Second, the notion of development itself is questioned as well as its impact on education. The call is for humanization of development. The concept of development has long departed from narrow economic growth to include both a more equitable distribution of the wealth generated by and access to the supporting political structures. The failure of development policies in developing countries, and specifically in Africa, has aroused new interest in culture as an essential dimension for social change if not as the central dimension of development (Amin, 1989; Thompson, 1981, UNESCO, 1982).