Popular arts are an effervescent and protean aspect of contemporary culture in Africa. Karin Barber's overview captures the styles, flavor, and general sociological significance of these art forms for both artists and consumers. Noting a lack of theoretical synthesis in the field, the author begins with a critique of the tripartite “European model” of folk, popular, and elite art. She aptly remarks that this model obscures analysis by relegating popular art in Africa to an “undefined and shapeless space” between folk and elite art. Moreover, Barber is concerned with the role that the popular arts play as expressive acts that reflect particular social, political, and economic relationships.

In early October 1967, four months into the Nigerian Civil War, federal troops massacred hundreds in Asaba, a town in southeast Nigeria on the west bank of the Niger. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of Igbo-dominated Biafra. Through the reconstruction of this event, the article fills a significant gap in the historical record and contributes to the discussion on the impact of traumatic memory at the local and national levels. It also suggests that the Asaba massacres speak to larger issues of potential reconciliation that extend beyond Asaba and Nigeria.

This study argues that in technical terms the usual economic models of international trade and development are misspecified because they deal only with market relations and omit important social and political equations (i.e., the social relations of production) which are important variables in the development matrix. This omission has led to development strategies which favor the “modern sector” at the expense of the traditional sector; the agricultural communities are undermined and impoverished. The traditional sector is maintained as a reservoir for cheap labor and as security for the old and the indigent to cushion off crisis in the capitalist modern sector. The traditional sector is undergoing a prolonged crisis without a smooth transition to capitalism or socialism. A more humane and viable process of development of the African economies is suggested: it is argued that Third World policymakers shift from the “dualistic” paradigm of economic development—a post World War II neoclassical paradigm associated with the work of Lewis (1954), Fei and Ranis (1964) and Jorgenson (1970)—to a version of the populist strategies of the Narodniki (Russian) and Maoism in transforming the backward agrarian economies of the Third World (Walicki, 1969; Gurley, 1975).

Most Third World economies may be classified as subsistence economies with industrial enclave sectors. The majority of the world's population live in an agrarian environment. Yet neoclassical and Marxist economists, having preoccupied themselves with the study of the capitalist system, have ignored agrarian economics (Georgescu-Roegen, 1970). Noncapitalist economies have simply not captured the interest of most economists.

A virtual crisis in Algerian agriculture has been experienced since the early 1950s. This crisis, which has its roots in the dislocations created by the seizure of the best lands by the French and the implantation of the colon regime of agriculture since the conquest of 1832, has been primarily a crisis of underproduction. The war of national liberation, which was fought primarily in the rural areas of the nation, the forced “regroupment” by the French army of approximately two million people during the war, and the massive destruction of livestock and of farm and forest lands resulting from the eight year war exacerbated the problem of underproduction. The relative contribution of agriculture to the GNP in 1954 was 34 percent, for example; whereas in 1968 it dropped to 15 percent, declining to less than 10 percent in the early 1970s (Viratelle, 1974: 196). The failure after 1962 of the post-revolutionary governments to stimulate agricultural production adequately or to create new or additional rural jobs helps to explain the constant decline in the peasant contribution to the Algerian GNP and to the development of the country after independence.

A massive rural-urban exodus also continues unabated. Approximately one hundred thousand farmers leave the lands, the villages, and small towns of the Algerian countryside each year swelling the already overcrowded cities of the north. This exodus, though not a recent development, has not been arrested in a sector where unemployment in the early 1970s reached one out of two persons (Ammour et al., 1974: 78).

Contemporary Africa's Triple Heritage of indigenous, Islamic, and Western legacies is just the modern culmination of a much older Triple Heritage —the heritage of indigenous, Semitic, and Greco-Roman influences on Africa. The ancient Semitic strand has now narrowed and focused more firmly on Arab and Islamic influences; the ancient Greco-Roman strand has now expanded to encompass wider European and American intrusions.

Recent studies of development in Africa reflect the broad ideological gulf between the perspectives of classical capitalist developmentalists and neo-Marxist dependency theorists. In the capitalist view, development is seen as a problem of modernization (i.e., westernization). Marxists, on the other hand, perceive the underdevelopment of the third world as a product of western development and the emergence of the world capitalist system. In an effort to inject an empirical element into this ideological debate several analysts have undertaken comparative examinations of the merits of the alternative approaches (Kaufman et al., 1975; McGowan, 1975; 1976; Vengroff, 1975; 1976; Walleri, 1975; Stallings, 1973; Chase-Dunn, 1975).

A general examination of the relative merits of the developmental and dependency approaches is beyond the scope of this brief paper. Here die author will attempt to assess the utility of these conflicting approaches as explanations of the particular phenomenon of domestic inequality in black Africa. The question of domestic inequality and development in Africa has unfortunately received only limited empirical consideration (Vengroff, 1976) and then usually from a national rather than a cross-national perspective (Leys, 1973; Harris, 1975).

Proponents of capitalist theory suggest that inequality is a natural, short run outcome of the development process. As the level of development increases, there is a broad expansion of the middle class, and hence a decline in inequality (Adelman and Morris, 1973; Paukert, 1973).

Although philosophers do not accept that education has intrinsic values or that it serves instrumental ends (Dewey, 1966; Peters, 1967; Gribble, 1969), most people would readily agree that it can be put to several uses and that it fulfills diverse functions. If by education we mean the aggregate of skills, values, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for the self-perpetuation of a society, it is easy to see its instrumental extensions, philosophers notwithstanding. Hence in every society that we know of today—under whatever form of government—much faith is placed on education as a panacea of all social evils. One of the tasks that education has been assigned in Africa is to forge national consciousness out of a myriad of ethnic particularities. From all indications, it has not been a success.

Statistical studies of the relationship between formal education and political integration in Africa have generally painted a grim picture. In their study of six nations—involving university students from Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and Zaire (then the Congo)—Klineberg and Zavalloni (1965) found that national consciousness was very low, particularly in Nigeria. To the question “What are you?” 56 percent of the Igbos and 60 percent of the Yorubas replied in terms of ethnic references. The Yorubas disliked the Igbos more than the Igbos disliked them (74 percent Yorubas as opposed to 59 percent Igbos), and a Yoruba in Nigeria felt closer to a Yoruba in Benin (then Dahomey) than to a non-Yoruba in Nigeria.

Adventure stories are favorites among children in many parts of the world. Africa has been the locale of hundreds of children's adventure stories written by African and non-African authors for over a century. These adventure stories, along with other fiction, are just as powerful teachers about Africa as are professional educators.

This essay will compare the adventure stories of three wellknown and popular authors (as judged by literary critics and child readers) who based their stories on extensive firsthand experience in Africa. The writers belong to three different generations, and their adventure stories are typical of those of many other writers of their time. Representing the Victorian Age is George Alfred Henty, whose name is “probably identified above all others with the Victorian adventure story” (Townsend, 1975: 63) and whose books were so popular with children that in 1894 some British teachers limited the number that students could read (Welsch, n.d.). The early twentieth century is represented by Rene Guillot, the initiator of the exotic novel for children (Jan and Patte, 1973: 360) and winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Prize of the International Board on Books for Young People—a prize which has been awarded only three times since 1958. Although Guillot wrote all of his children's books in French, almost all of them have been translated into English. Barbara Kimenye (a journalist from Uganda, short story writer, and one of East Africa's most prolific children's writers) represents the mid-twentieth century. She writes about ordinary people “who live outside the pale of ordinary society” and makes their lives interesting (Nazareth, 1974: 167).

Most contemporary historians of the colonial period in Kenya emphasize the importance of the state. The colonial state, it is argued, ensures the conditions of settler capitalism, provides the infrastructure of transport, credit, marketing and agricultural research, creates by administrative action a supply of African labor, and generally ensures the interests of settler capital against those of an emerging African class of landed capital (Brett, 1973; Leys, 1975; Swainson, 1980). Equally, the theme of tension between the colonial and metropolitan states is a classic one in colonial history, and one which in much of the Kenya debate is seen as refracting tensions and conflicts between the interests of settler capital and the interests of international capital (Swainson, 1980; Cowen, 1982). Yet, despite this emphasis on the colonial state, very little discussion of its distinctive political features has occurred. The economic functions of the colonial state are stressed to the exclusion of questions about the basis of its legitimacy, of its citizenship principles and of its authority. Gavin Kitching (1985) recently pointed out that we have no really adequate theory of the post-colonial state. We are constrained instead to making negative statements to the effect that it is not simply the agency of one particular class force in Kenya, nor is it a unified force but die site of contending and fractured forces. The argument could well be extended to the colonial state.

Africa is the second largest continent in the world. Partitioned into what is now fiftyone or more territorial units at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the continent presently has the largest number of states represented at the United Nations. This numerical strength has advantages and disadvantages for Africans. It is advantageous because it gives Africa greater visibility in the international voting process. It is disadvantageous because it turns this vast continent into a highly fragmented sector of the international community. Yet Africa's size and fragmentation have great significance for Africanists because together these factors make the continent a major laboratory for research on human society. Africa's numerous political and socio-economic units provide many examples of political and social engineering for students of underdeveloped world societies.

My presidential address tonight deals with Africa and its role and position in world history between two ages. The two ages addressed are the ancient/medieval and the modern/contemporary. As a historian, I see ancient African history as going back to the appearance of Homo Sapiens whose origins are now conclusively identified with East Africa. In tracing the historical past of Africa, I do not wish to travel so far back as to link up with those early Homo Sapiens, rather I wish to go only as far back on the world continuum as ancient Egypt to show in time how this magnificent civilization served as the birthplace of many cultural ideas that later travelled in all directions from the Nile Valley.

African studies has gone through three well-known phases as a field of study. Up until 1950 or thereabouts, those studying Africa — they were not yet called Africanists — tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the capturing (or recapturing) of a description of Africa eternal: Launcelot the ethnographer in search of a holy grail of the past that was written in the present tense and was undefiled by contact and uncorrupted by civilization. What was once a myth is now a fairy tale and it would be silly to waste time tellling each other the obvious truth that fairy tales are modes of the social control and the education of children.

Anthropologists have long been interested in the sources and consequences of material inequality among African peoples. Societies in which such inequality existed during pre-colonial times have been investigated (cf. Maquet, 1970; Cohen, 1970; Hoben, 1970) but, especially since the close of the colonial era, attention has been directed toward societies originally without significant material wealth differences that have become internally differentiated due to exogenous social and economic forces. Emergent wealth differences have been related to a number of causes, including differential participation in labor migration (Mitchell, 1970; Watson, 1970; Wilson, 1977), differential incorporation into trade networks (Levine, 1962; Cohen, 1966; Mascarenhas and Mbilinyi, 1971), differential participation in ideological systems (Allan et el., 1948; Long, 1968; Barrett, 1974), and, especially, differential control over the factors of production (representative are: Ruthenberg, 1968; Vincent, 1971; Hill, 1972; Parkin, 1972; Feldman, 1974; Raid and Raid, 1975).

In East Africa today there is cause for particular concern regarding the extent to which differential access to land, labor and capital is generating patterns of rural inequality in which a few fortunate households are elevated while the majority remain poor. The concern exists not only because maldistribution of wealth and material well-being implies widespread suffering in rural areas, but because concomitant circumstances such as unequal educational opportunities (Sheffield, 1967; Court and Ghai, 1974), unequal access to development funds (Hyden et al., 1970; Heyer et al., 1971), and unequal nutritional intake (Gerlach, 1961, 1964; Dema, 1969; Kraut and Cremer, 1969), can lead to social, economic and physiological polarization of the rural population.

Madagascar is often cited as an example of a country with a long history of local institutional strength and stalwart community participation in the decision-making process. This article explores the crisis of community life in southern Madagascar, particularly the changed nature of community involvement. Associational life is in decline—a result not only of challenging economic conditions, but also of eroded social norms, as the rule-making institutions of the past have been replaced by the loose guidelines of the present. This situation, which has the potential of exacerbating economic problems, is also likely to have grievous political and ecological consequences.

This article is a tentative incursion into the making and workings of collective memory in the recent Nigerian elections. The crisis of memory—construction, distortion, exploitation, and suppression—is evident in the Nigerian “transmutation” process—the perpetuation in power, through civilianization, of a military regime. The term “transmutation” is used here to convey the sense of a political mutation, a process of uncertain nature or progeny, certainly a transition, but one emanating from an unlikely parentage, a brutal and militarized past.

In December, 1980, John Block, the Illinois farmer selected by Ronald Reagan as his new Secretary of Agriculture, told reporters: “I believe food is the greatest weapon we have for keeping peace in the world.” Mr. Block envisioned America shipping its agricultural surpluses to hungry nations in return for “more stability in the world.”

This article analyzes the relationship between Mande hunters (dozos) and the Ivorian state in the prefecture of Ouangolodougou in northern Côte d’Ivoire. Having adopted a prominent security role during the violent conflict of 2002–2011, dozos have made continuing efforts to maintain their position in the post-conflict state. To negotiate their position, they draw on a performative repertoire, such as the display of powerful attributes in the context of processions. Although they have had to concede some more strategic and profitable activities to the reestablished state, dozo chiefs effectively govern the rural northern borderlands of Côte d’Ivoire.

In this paper an attempt will be made to provide answers to the following questions: (1) What was the pattern of political values held by members of the Zambian elite soon after independence? (2) How did these values develop out of the experiences of elite members during the struggle for independence? (3) How have the events of subsequent post-independence years influenced these elite values, and specifically, what is the relationship between earlier elite values and the ideology of “Zambian Humanism” which has only recently been articulated in a systematic way? (4) What have been the consequences for the Zambian political system of the interaction among elite values, ideology, and problems of exercising power? The answers given to these questions will be more meaningful and more easily understood if we first present briefly a theoretical framework which includes definitions of the principal concepts employed in the paper and a discussion of the interrelations among them.

Probably no two of the scholarly works punctuating the past quarter century better exemplify the intellectual voyage that Africanist political scientists have taken than do Thomas Hodgkin's pioneering classic, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (1956), and Crawford Young's recent admirable comparative study of political economy in Ideology and Development in Africa (1982). These two broadly comparative works reflect the major shift from the study of the processes of African self-assertion and decolonization–the quest for and acquisition of state power–which characterized the concerns of the first decade of that period, to the study of how that power is maintained and in whose interest and with what effectiveness it is exercised, foci which have increasingly become the preoccupations of the last decade.

The intention here is to examine some of the features of this intellectual trek–from first generation conventional studies of nationalism, elections, and constitutions to the current preoccupation with the state, class, and political economy–not by a travelogue of the journey, but by focusing upon an enduring issue, namely, the antinomy of universalism vs. relativism. The antinomy exists at two levels. The first is that of the individual scholarly endeavor and product; namely, does the product reflect (a) a generalizing and scientific mode of inquiry in which the scholar's intent and perspective is to identify uniformities and regularities–as well as differences–through systematic comparison? In short, is it nomothetic? Or is it (b), a mode that is idiographic, i.e., that aims to describe and to understand a phenomenon in all its configurative, situational, and cultural-historical particularity and uniqueness? The antinomy at the second and obviously related level concerns the conceptualization of the discipline by a particular set of practitioners as either (a) a social scientific endeavor aimed at generalization and universality, or (b) an intellectual vocation which is essentially descriptive and interpretive of political phenomena that are inherently historically and culturally relative to a particular human group or situation (cf. Fallers, 1968: 576; Pye, 1975: 6).