The human body is a central entity and analytic within African life and Africanist scholarship. The source of perception and the seat of animation, of life, it grounds experience of the world while also providing a rich set of symbols from which humans draw in political, social, and religious life to create and communicate meaning. Livingston reviews approaches to the body as a key concept in Africanist scholarship, tracing regimes of bodily representation ranging from the deployment of bodily symbolism in ancient smelting furnaces to the hypervisibility of the black female body in the European colonial imagination. She discusses a welter of bodily experience, from the pain of childbirth and the vulnerabilities of illness and accident to the sensorium or the kinesthetic power of movement and dance. In the process, Livingston considers developments within the field of African Studies via the body.

The point has been made about the dangers inherent in attempts to analyze the underdeveloped world's problems purely in terms of the experiences or models of the industrialized, developed countries of the world. It is often warned that nations and cultures differ; and that what may have worked for one society may not necessarily work for another. Consequently, these critics caution against a blind transplantation of foreign tools or models to the distinctive conditions of the contemporary developing nations. Akeredolu-Ale (1972: 119-20) put it rather sharply in the Nigerian context:

… economic process cannot be studied in isolation but only in their social, political, and demographic setting…. Purely economic interpretations of the economic development process as it is going on in the less developed countries are bound to be incomplete. One striking feature of economic life in such countries, is the greater role which political factors (domestic and international) are playing in the determination of the process of economic evolution… Any investigation of the economic process in a contemporary underdeveloped country such as Nigeria, if it is to avoid superfidalism, must begin with an analytical framework that is much less restricted than that derived from orthodox Western economic theory. The transfer of Western theories, models and concepts to the study of economic problems… is not harmful per se, but it could be a source of great bias and distortion… when new facts require that they be seriously modified.

Primary among the criticisms that third-world scholars and “radical” social scientists have directed against applied social sciences in general and social anthropology in particular has been their alleged failures to study the colonial context in which much of its field work has been carried out (Cf. Asad, 1975; Lewis, 1973, for examples.) Although these critics usually exaggerate their arguments and typically do not prove that early scholars were either overt or covert racists, it is true, nonetheless, that social scientists have paid relatively little attention to the colonial milieu, Condominas's (1973) preterrain.

A number of scholars, including Pitt (1976) and Stavenhagen (1971), have urged that social scientists “study upwards” in order to discover the social and cultural foundations of the colonizing agency in the contact situation which determine its motivations and constrain its actions. Failure to do so entails serious theoretical and methodological consequences because it both narrows the range of societies among which we are able to make comparisons and masks a course of systematic bias. Although I have been deeply concerned with the problem of systematic bias (Salamone, 1976a, b), in this paper I address the issue of describing and analyzing a colonial society, of “studying up.” The reason is quite simple. It is necessary to know the nature of a systematic source of bias before deciding on whether and how to control it.

This paper offers an empirical study of a weaving enterprise in the southern African nation of Lesotho. The objective of the study was to test the theory and prescriptions of the liberal women in development (or WID) approach within the World Bank model of development as a whole. That is, through the analysis of a real life situation for a specific group of women in a specific Third World context, we sought to determine whether employment “empowers” women (as WID predicts), exploits them (as some of its critics assert), or otherwise affects their lives and consciousness. Throughout the following discussion, we bear in mind that development strategies do not only succeed or fail, but can profoundly affect the political, social and economic structures in developing societies as they unfold, often in unwitting ways (Ferguson 1990, xiv). What effect does a WID-type business actually have in this specific instance, and what can it tell us about the relevance of mainstream development discourse and practice with regard to women's employment throughout Sub-Saharan Africa?

In the 1980s, the World Bank became disillusioned with the African state as a vehicle for development. A World Bank report argued that there was a

…widespread impression of political decline. Corruption, oppression, and nepotism are increasingly evident. These are hardly unique to Africa, but they may have been exacerbated by development strategies that concentrated power and resources in government bureaucracies, without countervailing measures to ensure public accountability or political consensus (IBRD 1989b, 22).

The focus of the Bank then shifted from assisting African governments to foster economic growth, and towards restructuring the governments and economies of Africa.

Development research is often associated with issues of policy. Researchers aim to increase our contextual and theoretical knowledge to enhance the creation of “good” development policies. One way of doing this is to identify and learn from harmful policies of the past. The objective of this article is to examine such policy-choice explanations by looking at the dominant understandings of the modern history of agriculture in Malawi. These perspectives share the view that the high level of rural poverty is, to a great extent, an outcome of the agricultural policies implemented by the colonial and postcolonial governments. Of crucial importance are the mechanisms whereby the state actively tried to transfer resources from the smallholder sector to the state or to the estate sector. This had a negative impact on the production capacity of the smallholder sector. This article notes that the focus on policies alone is not a sufficient approach to understand the dynamics and limitations of the smallholder sector. The article also points to some methodological weaknesses with policy-choice explanations that are relevant for development research in general.

Based on a classroom encounter of the author, this article explores the gendered nature of African university space. It discusses a 2007–8 policy that banned pregnant adult students from living in the student residence halls at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. The policy was implemented despite protests from the university’s students and staff. The article argues that the more visibly reproductive a student’s body became, the more alien it was considered to be in spaces of knowledge production. This alienation was incongruous at a university widely considered as the most politically progressive in South Africa. It was rooted, however, in Western-oriented traditions of masculinist knowledge production in which there is no space for the female, let alone the pregnant, body in intellectual spaces; and in South African traditions of marginalization, exclusion, and “passing” in public space. Exploring ideas of “body language” and “bodies of knowledge,” the article concludes that there is a need for an interdisciplinary politics and epistemology of “seepage” in higher educational institutions that recognizes women’s minds and their bodies.

Attempts to further the study of popular culture in Africa face the difficulty of defining “popular” as distinct from traditional or folk culture on the one hand, and elite or dominant culture on the other. The features that emerge most often from the discussion of these distinctions center on the relative degree of separation between performers and audiences, and on change from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft as a basis for social interaction (Bigsby, 1976: 18). These contrasts have frequently been identified with movement from a rural to an urban social world, where communal, multidimensional relationships give way to associative forms characterized by a segmentation of roles, divided loyalties, and the primacy of hypothetical or contractual relations over categorical and personal ones. Thus we value traditional or rural folk culture for its idealized capacity to give integrated expression to all aspects of human life, and symbolic representation to the essence of the human condition. In contrast, the sociology of urban art forms focuses on the relations between class and culture, the artist and his work, market organization and cultural production (Barbu, 1976: 47, 55). As anyone familiar with its urban scene should recognize, these distinctions are not workable for Southern Africa. Yet their very inapplicability highlights the importance of both the struggle for cultural integration and the flow of people and communication between urban and rural areas in contemporary Africa.

African studies are often characterized as interdisciplinary in nature. One wonders whether, as time passes and specific disciplinary studies become distinguished by ever more technical methodologies, this will be less true. However, since the objects of study are entire cultures that are for the most part alien to the researchers who study them, this interdisciplinary spirit may well endure.

With regard to the inventory of sub-disciplines within the general field of African studies, two relative late-comers are African art history and African philosophy. Previously the fields of interest that constitute their special concern were significantly influenced by anthropology. But when sufficient, relevant, fieldwork studies had accumulated to initiate the type of specialized inter-cultural understanding that is distinctive of these two sub-disciplines, there was reason to license them in their own right.

As African art history and African philosophy labored to accredit themselves these past decades, there are a number of expressed concerns which became common to the two disciplines. The aim of this paper is to reflect upon some of these, as expressed by African art historians, from the standpoint of students of African philosophy in the hope that their respective insights and problems may overlap, coalesce and perhaps prove mutually beneficial.

Between 2020 and 2022, sub-Saharan Africa witnessed a substantial increase in the number of military coups. The military interventions in Guinea (September 2021), Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), Chad (April 2021), Sudan (April 2019 and October 2021), and Burkina Faso (January 2022) contributed to democratic backsliding and authoritarianism on the continent. In addition, Niger (March 2021) and Guinea Bissau (February 2022) saw failed coup attempts. As a result of these five coups and two failed coup attempts, media reports now ask whether coups are making a comeback in Africa. As the extant literature about civil-military relations in Africa reveals, military coups were never absent. But the recent number and frequency of coups has led to a greater awareness of the threat that militaries pose to civilian rulers from the Atlantic coast (Guinea) to the Red Sea (Sudan).

This essay addresses how recent changes in electronic media may impact upon what the rest of the world sees of Africa on television. Its predictions are disheartening, especially to Africanists and communications scholars who have well documented the longstanding insufficiency of African news coverage. And my conclusions contrast with those of the big television news companies, who, with a “good for business, good for everyone” mentality, like to believe that the new media market and nifty new technologies can only mean more and better coverage of every part of the planet.

The utility of postmodern thinking to the study of Africa continues to be a matter of hot debate. Some authors see postmodernism, particularly colonial discourse analysis, as a threat to well established historical methods for studying African societies. Others draw on postmodern insights while warning of its shortcomings, especially the lack of attention to political and economic structures. This brief discussion cannot fully explore such a complicated subject; rather it is intended as a personal view on some of the key issues at hand.

This article examines the perceptions of Canada by Nigerian youths who have a desire to immigrate to Canada. It explicates why Canada remains an attraction to prospective immigrants in spite of documented accounts of racial discrimination against racial minorities in Canadian society. Based on semistructured and focus group interviews with thirty-five Nigerian youths, the study demonstrates that Nigerian youths chose Canada because the Canadian postsecondary education system can provide them with foreign credentials that will give them access to economic power and social prestige in an unfair and unequal Nigerian society. The youths are also impressed by the transnational lives of their peers and social groups residing in the West. Although the youths criticize the dysfunctions of key institutions of Nigerian society, especially the education institution, they do not deplore social inequality per se.

Compared to political developments in Eastern Europe and Latin America, democratization in sub-Saharan Africa has been more problematic and uneven. Looking at the performance in four subregions—central Africa, East Africa, southern Africa, and West Africa—yields no convincing evidence of a “wave” of democratization; countries next to each other differ considerably with regard to their Freedom House scores. This does not mean that democratization has necessarily stalled, but it does demonstrate that the prevailing vertical cleavages along ethnic, racial, or religious lines can make such a transition volatile, as suggested by the cases of Burundi, Mali, and even Kenya. While political competition in mature democracies, typically divided along horizontal group or class lines, tends to generate positive-sum outcomes, such competition in Africa easily turns into “prisoner’s dilemma” games. The uncertainty about the value of cooperation in such situations usually produces political “truces” that are easily abandoned if the costs of adherence exceed the benefits. Against the background of this prevailing political logic, this article calls for a new approach to conceptualizing notions of “institution” and “power” in the analysis of politics in the region.

This article seeks to examine the sanctions imposed on Eritrea by the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) based on Eritrea’s alleged involvement in Somalia and its border dispute with Djibouti. It argues that the UNSC’s failure to sanction the parties for reneging on their commitment to implement the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s verdict on the border dispute between Eritrea and Ethiopia casts doubt on the morality of the sanctions. It also argues that the decision may have been driven by political motives. These sanctions will hurt the people of Eritrea and the Eritrean nation, and indeed, there is a real risk that the outcome of the sanctions could be the collapse of the Eritrean state.

In many respects, the least important part of the 1999 elections were the elections themselves. From the beginning of General Abdusalam Abubakar’s transition program in mid-1998, most Nigerians who were not part of the wealthy “political class” of elites—which is to say, most Nigerians— adopted their usual politically savvy perspective of siddon look (sit and look). They waited with cautious optimism to see what sort of new arrangement the military would allow the civilian politicians to struggle over, and what in turn the civilians would offer the public. No one had any illusions that anything but high-stakes bargaining within the military and the political class would determine the structures of power in the civilian government. Elections would influence this process to the extent that the crowd influences a soccer match.

This paper reviews the appropriateness of a development intervention celebrated for its direct benefits to the rural poor: small farmer credit. It will focus on the degree of inappropriateness that results from a contradiction between the convenience of directing the credit to discrete compound units and the dependence of small farmers' success on the coordination of production activities among larger groupings. The case to be looked at is from the West African savannah of Central Mali.

The economic posture of Malian savannah farmers develops within the context of these larger groups of producers. Unlike peasant coalitions in Latin America (Ortiz, 1972), the Malian groupings have not arisen to provide mutual security by spreading market risk among a wider group. This occurs where peasants are dependent on returns from a commercial crop the demand for which leaves them uncertain about how much to produce at any given time. If this were the case, subsidized credit inasmuch as it improved the peasant's marketing options might be able to circumvent such coalitions in attracting the small farmer. But the Malian peasant's coalitions are organized to confront production rather than marketing constraints. As long as these production constraints remain, his loyalty will be to his coalitions rather than to a marketing opportunity should these conflict.

The Malian peasant is not limited by land scarcity in the amount he cultivates. Therefore, he is not dependent on income from commercial crops to buy food; he will increase cash crop production only when its marketing situation is stable. Dry season migrant labor opportunities have long been available to him as an alternative for raising money for the colonial and post-colonial head taxes. Migrant laborers come home to grow unmarketed, subsistence crops. The money uses of their labor are often better served elsewhere.

This article examines debates about how to manage elephants in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park as a jumping off point for exploring the relationships among the local, national, and global constituencies that converged in the formulation of wildlife policy in Kenya during the 1950s and 1960s. Bridging the colonial and postcolonial years, the so-called Elephant Problem in Tsavo, while leveraging different international constituencies, pitted different administrative philosophies against one another and drew out different understandings of the application of ecological sciences in national parks. The result was a paralysis of policymaking which sparked an overhaul of the wildlife departments in the 1970s.

Few would dispute that the Africanization of the civil service was one of the more emotional and divisive issues in the Gold Coast during the inter-war years. While it is true that the attainment of equal status with the Europeans might not have been a subject of mass concern and popular regret, nevertheless it did animate the vocal and articulate elite who resented the unfair distinctions perpetuated by the colonial authorities. Thus repeatedly in debates of the Legislative Council, in sessions of the Provincial Councils, in newspaper editorials, and in petitions carried to Whitehall, protests were lodged against the pattern of discrimination in high-level government appointments. The extent to which this matter influenced the political dialogue of the colony and in time became an “important nationalist grievance,” has been noted by a number of scholars (Kimble, 1963; Crowder, 1968; Wight, 1947). My intention therefore is not to detail every disagreement nor to summarize every report but rather to view individual cases which shed light on the debate and to focus upon the prejudices and perspectives of the participants in the dialogue.

Following a period of time during which Africans had largely been excluded from the senior, or European, appointments in the civil service, Governor Frederick Gordon Guggisberg (1921-1927) charted a new course in February 22, 1926. He remarked that the policy of employing Africans in responsible positions commended itself to the Government for two reasons:

As demands for democracy have swept across the continent since 1989, dramatic change has affected states in sub-Saharan Africa. Frustrated by declining economies and the failures of incumbent governments, people from many different social strata have called for an end to authoritarian rule. Events in Eastern Europe have served as a catalyst, and donor pressures have sometimes acted to facilitate such movements; but the real impetus for change arises from internal struggles which have been incubating for several decades. In response, authoritarian states have moved to liberalize repressive structures, allow multiparty competition and move towards competitive elections. To many analysts such trends represent an important new departure that holds out promise for a more hopeful future. But others are less optimistic, noting the legacies of authoritarian systems and other structural obstacles to sustainable democratic rule. Whatever the outcome, the struggle for the future is now hotly contested.

Meanwhile, these processes present a potent challenge for political and social analysis. Why are these demands for change occurring now? What is the role of institutional arrangements and groups in “civil society” in transitions from single-party authoritarian regimes towards multiparty systems? Who are the key actors and which groups are excluded? Do multiparty elections lead to greater tolerance, expanded participation, respect for the rule of law and more accountability? What is required to sustain democratic rule? These and other questions have spawned a lively debate among Africanists, a debate with important theoretical and practical implications.

In his novels and essays and most recently in the pages of The New York Times, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has repeatedly claimed that the “trouble with Nigeria” lies with its leaders (1982, 1993)—and few of those who followed the pronouncements of General Babangida would say that the actions of the Nigerian head of state were without import for the political future of the country. Achebe finds an intellectual ally in social scientist Giuseppe de Palma (1992), who argues that the actions of decision makers at critical junctures in the process of political opening shape the range of choices and the kinds of risks they and their successors face subsequently. Although the conditions that make democratic consolidation more or less difficult may be a function of levels of socioeconomic development, the presence or absence of a civic culture, or the existence of a middle class, the decisions of leaders matter. Democracies are crafted, not born whole.

This essay tries to identify the sources of difference in leadership style during a period of political reform. It proceeds from two observations. First, tactical and strategic choices of leaders are partly a function of the incentive structures political and economic institutions offer. Electoral rules, the amount of central control over important electoral resources such as the media, participation in regional monetary agreements—all of these institutions shape the options available for building coalitions.