The upsurge of ethnic consciousness in urban America which crested during the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired a sustained academic interest in ethnicity as a social phenomenon. This may partly explain the fact that American scholars over the past two decades have been largely concerned with urban ethnicity and have shown little inclination to carry their investigation into rural areas. Among Africanists, Wallerstein (1965: 477) has gone so far as to suggest that ethnicity is an exclusively urban phenomenon. The present paper argues that, although this generalization is unwarranted, one does tend to find more striking manifestations of ethnicity in urban areas than in the countryside. However, the author's study of Igbo migrants in Cameroon reveals that rural centers often favor the articulation of an ethnic identity which is, in some aspects, more functional and consolidated than in the town.

The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth and his colleagues broke new ground with their provocative analyses of ecological factors which condition the maintenance of ethnic boundaries. They noted that individuals often downplay or transform their ethnic identity in response to the local environmental situation or particular ecological niche that the group comes to occupy. Extreme examples of ethnic transformation are Barth's (1969) southern Pathans who are incorporated into Baluchi tribes as serfs and Haarland's (1969: 61) Fur cultivators who acquire many cattle and ultimately become Baggara Arabs. Less extreme examples of identity manipulation include Eidheim's (1969: 39) Lapp fishing villages and the Mon peasants studied by the American anthropologist Brian Foster (1974).

Currently, feminist activists are engaged in problematizing and reframing “rights” claims in southern Africa. This article discusses three cases of such activism, all of which show the limitations but also the potential of using rights claims to transform gender cultures and gain economic and gender justice. These cases involve the successful challenge to the gender discriminatory 1982 Botswana Citizenship Act; the policy shift of Women and Law in Southern Africa from a focus on legal rights advocacy to a synthesis of rights and kinship-based claims; and initiatives by South African gender activists to confront the contradiction between the country’s constitutional guarantees of women’s rights and high levels of gender violence.

Ali Mazrui's “The Semitic Impact on Black Africa: Arab and Jewish Cultural Influences” is interesting reading. That is perhaps the only kind thing one can say about it. As sheer academic exercise, it is its own justification. However, its purpose is much more obscure, its pontifical pronouncements shaky, and its historical allusions as accurate as often as not. The theme of Africa as a “cultural bazaar” where “a wide variety of ideas and values, drawn from different civilizations compete for the attention of African buyers” has been labored to a nauseating degree. Its hidden premise is the existence of an African cultural vacuum, or near-vacuum, destined to be filled by “universalistic” civilizations such as Greco-Roman (Christian, European, Western, etc.) or Judaeo-Arabic (Semitic, Hebraic, Arabic, etc.), although Judaism has not historically exhibited a proselytizing strain, and insularity, on the contrary, appeared to characterize it.

Since independence Cameroon has been a hegemonic state, evidenced by the 1966 introduction of a single party, the Cameroon National Union (CNU), which was purportedly created to foster national integration. This focus on national integration led to a de-emphasis of all other issues such as fundamental human rights. And because a select elite assigned itself the task of imagining the form the nation would take, this process was naturally accompanied by a contraction of the political space. Because the national integration project had paid minimal dividends after more than two decades, Cameroonians refused to legitimize it. They had realized that it simply served as a ruse for the ruling class to convert the state into a patrimonial one. Hence, people sought to regain their voices and participation through the democratic process. Reluctantly, the state capitulated to demands for political pluralism, passing the so-called Liberal Laws of 1990. However, by allowing multiparty politics, the government ruptured the facade of cohesion of the ruling class, which resulted in elites becoming increasingly preoccupied with maintaining their power and losing interest in the national integration project.

In this paper I will discuss women’s rights regarding marriage, the family, and genital operations in the context of internationally accepted views of the individual rights of women. I focus upon these particular areas partly because the issue of female genital operations in Africa has been the subject of much popular attention in the last three years, but mainly because, given that women’s biological reproductive roles are so much more central to their lives than are the equivalent roles for men, their rights in these areas profoundly affect their ability to exercise their rights in other areas, i.e. in the polity and in the economy. For data I use examples from several English-speaking sub-Saharan countries.

As agricultural production shifts from traditional methods (where land and labor are the major inputs and seed often is saved by the farmer) to more modern methods in which more of the inputs are produced off the farm, farmers' savings in Third World countries may be insufficient to purchase the needed inputs for cash. Thus credit may have to be provided from some source. Many governments have established agricultural development banks to increase the lending available to the agricultural sector and have experienced low repayment rates [a good summary is found in Donald (1976); also see World Bank (1975)]. Some writers have suggested that loans be made through cooperatives or a similar political group where selection of the borrowers is made by the group and there is group pressure for repayment. This study examines the experience of loans allocated through this type of arrangement to ujamaa villages in Tanzania and to small private farms in Zambia, and it seeks to establish some correlates of repayment ability.

Tanzania established the Tanzanian Rural Development Bank (TRDB) in 1971 and Zambia the Agricultural Finance Company (AFC) in 1970 to provide increased capital to the agricultural sector. Although both organizations make loans to both large and small farmers, this study concentrated on small farmer experience. In each country these organizations replaced predecessors with poor repayment experience (Due, 1978a). In each country lending procedures were reviewed and a determination made to attain high repayment rates. Training and administration were upgraded.

In Japan, as in the United States, African studies is relatively new, gaining respectability only after World War II. African studies in Japan is considerably less prominent than its counterpart in the US although Africanist scholars from Japan have nonetheless made notable contributions. The increasing importance of Japan in Africa, both as a source of investment and as a source of foreign aid, is leading to an increased importance cf Japanese knowledge of Africa. In the increasingly interdependent world of the 21st century the quality of African studies in Japan will have an impact not only on Africa itself but on Africanists in other non-African countries as well.

The strengths and weaknesses of African studies in Japan are quite complementary to those of African Studies in the United States. Thus we as Africanists can learn important lessons from the Japanese experience in African Studies, and our Japanese counterparts can learn from us. This article is intended as an introduction to the nature of African studies in Japan for American (and other) Africanists in the hope that cooperation between American (and other) Africanists and their Japanese counterparts can be increased.

(Readers of the Summer 1975 issue of ISSUE — entirely devoted to a discussion of the 1972 killings in Burundi — had the opportunity to take the full measure of the tragedy then visited upon the country, 18 years before the latest outburst of ethnic violence. As René Lemarchand noted at the time, “anyone for whom the name Burundi evokes more than a Lilliputian entity in the heart of Africa must look back to the events of 1972 with a sense of horror and consternation: in a matter of weeks tens of thousands of human beings were systematically slaughtered in what, in retrospect, can only be described as the nearest equivalent offered by Africa of a ‘final solution.’”

This essay examines the roles that Ogun, Yoruba god of iron and war, plays in communication and in the construction of boundaries in the systems in which he is worshipped in an attempt to gain some additional understanding about the nature of Yoruba religion.

The idea of Ogun, both in symbolic and practical expressions, is indigeneous to the Yoruba, most of whom live in the southwestern part of Nigeria. In the New World as well as Benin (Dahomey) where Ogun is also worshipped, the practice is associated with people of Yoruba descent. The god has taken, within syncretic formations, a new name in the Americas (Herskovits, 1971; Lewis, 1978; Gordon, 1979). It is St. George in Rio de Janeiro and St. Anthony in Bahia, Brazil. For those in Trinidad it is St. Michael. The Yoruba themselves have seven variants of the god (Idowu, 1962; Ibigbami, 1977). The elevation of one variant above others raises the issue of religious identity: whereas Ogun is not immune from the variety of conflicting traditions in the Old and New Worlds, it is clear that, even in the New World, Ogun's affiliation to any community is expressed in action—in the common performance of the prescribed practice and the adoption of a way of life. World writers have emphasized the syncretic adaptations of the African indigeneous cultural forms in line with Catholic dogmas and symbols the African slaves met or interacted with in their new settings (Herskovits, 1937, 1971; Mischel, 1967; Hamilton, 1970; Gordon, 1979). Their theoretical orientation is informed by a search for African retentions or survivals.

In the last four decades, transnational movements of both skilled and unskilled labor from developing countries to the advanced industrial economies have witnessed an unprecedented growth. Motivated largely by deteriorating livelihood conditions in the developing world and increasing demand for wealthy and highly skilled professionals in the developed economies, these movements have attracted a great deal of research attention and inspired public policy debates on their implications and results. Like other countries, Ghana has had a long history of movement of her nationals to various parts of the world for various reasons. However, in terms of the goal of enhancing the benefits of such emigration for Ghana, there appears to be a policy void. This article contributes to filling this gap. It discusses the merits and problems associated with the transnational movements of Ghanaian health and educational professionals and proposes ways to enhance the benefits. It also suggests pathways for aiding future migration policy formulation in Ghana.

I have been asked to comment on the implications of a sector of culture being examined as popular within the typology adopted by Karin Barber to describe cultural strata in contemporary African societies. In order to face her enormous and daunting task (an intellectual call to arms which few other scholars would have had the courage, or the wide ranging intellectual ability, to meet so successfully) Barber adopted the standard cultural typology from European models, a typology which she finds discomforting, but never actually rejects:

I contend that this typology emerges again and again because it is innate—not in African societies, but in us. For whatever Indo-European archetypal, psychosexual, or categorically imperative reasons, Western scholars and scholarships are doomed to threes. Aside from our own cultural compulsions, and the attractive contrastive model that this tripartite division of African societies provides, I do not believe that there is any inherent reason why contemporary African culture should be so tri-sected in order to examine a phenomenon which appears to be unitary. I would argue that popular art is better understood as the product of a seamless web spun by the world market place which entangles every class in Africa to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the accessibility of that class to that market. Just as the cultural influences extending from the world market are pervasive, so the response to those influences is essentially the same, whether the respondent/artist is a village gin distiller, an urban bicycle repairer, or a university trained novelist. But this argument grows out of the aesthetic nature of popular art, and it is to that commodity as described by Barber that this argument must turn.

A wealth of excellent films from Africa is readily available for classroom use, even if much of Anglophone Africa remains poorly represented. African films can serve to challenge students' assumptions and to foster a critical examination of Western films set in Africa. Extending the scope of conventional “African” courses to North Africa adds a substantial body of notable productions, some of which address current concerns such as Islamic fundamentalism. African films have to be contextualized; even when they are examined as works of art and as examples of world cinema, full appreciation requires that they be considered in their historical and cultural contexts. When films are used to introduce students to Africa, critical examination is imperative—audiences that have little factual information about Africa all too readily assume that fiction and fact coincide.

This study of contemporary Hausa literature analyzes a northern Nigerian body of popular fiction currently referred to as Kano market literature and known to Hausa speakers as Littattafan Soyayya (books of love). The popularity of this genre of romance rests firmly upon its subject matter, one that has proven controversial within the conservative Muslim environment of Hausa society. On the surface, the novels are preoccupied with love and marital relationships, depicting the ordeals faced by courting lovers or married couples. However, on a deeper level, the novels have become an explorative territory for the socially, culturally, and religiously loaded issues of polygamy, marriages of coercion, purdah, and the accessibility of female education. In effect, Kano market literature reflects the rapid social change confronting Hausa society and positions itself as a voice offering a new perspective on gender relations. This article examines closely the works of arguably the most celebrated woman writer, Bilkisu Ahmed Funtuwa. Acutely aware of her rigid social and religious milieu, Funtuwa offers suggestions to young women who desire a greater level of control over their familial relationships and educational direction.

The study of African art began in the first decade of this century. In looking back over more than 70 years of research, it is possible to discern a distinctive set of social science concerns, priorities, and modes of analysis. This social perspective depends not so much on disciplinary affiliation as on the kinds of stands taken on the nature of art and on the relative importance of culture as an explanatory principle in understanding its meaning. This paper is concerned with articulating the main models that have been utilized in social research on African art and with tracing their impact on the development of art studies. This historical account will also point out some of the most serious limitations of these models and will suggest studies which may lead to promising new directions.

The focus of this review, then, will be on tracing the development of conceptual models with a social perspective. Studies with a social perspective include those which deal with the relationships among art, society and culture. These relationships can be conceived in a number of different ways, including, as Baxandall (1985: 89) succinctly suggests, “causality or significance or analogy or participation.” Such relationships are always a two-way street: not only do social practices and beliefs illuminate and affect art, but art also illuminates and affects social practice. Two essays will clarify the specific nature of the social perspective. Both classics in the field, both dealing with aesthetics, they are: “Yoruba Artistic Criticism” by Robert Farris Thompson (1973b) and “Principles of Opposition and Vitality in Fang Aesthetics” by James W. Fernandez (1966).

The psychology of colonialism is a subject which has received mostly speculative treatment in the form of large generalizations derived from suggestive but unsystematic observations. Stimulating as such contributions can be, there is a need for close empirical studies, conducted so far as possible without theoretical bias, of the reactions of European colonialists to those who were being colonized. It will undoubtedly happen that in the course of such detailed studies many easy assumptions will have to be discarded and grand theories dismantled. What follows is offered as a tentative contribution to a more complex appreciation of what went on in the minds of Europeans when they found themselves in intimate contact with an African people.

The subject of this paper is British attitudes toward the Masai as they were expressed in the context of administration. The Masai were chosen because there is a large body of conventional wisdom on the subject of British attitudes toward them which invites critical analysis. Stated crudely, the conventional belief, which has been pressed into service many times to explain why the Masai hardly changed at all during the half century of British rule, is that the British were so charmed by them that they hated to see them enter the twentieth century. A number of social scientists have considered the phenomenon of Masai resistance to change (Merrill, 1960; Gulliver, 1969; Tignor, 1976) and they have all concluded that there are more powerful reasons for it than the attitudes of administrators; but no one has investigated systematically what these attitudes were and how they were related to administrative behavior. It is simply assumed that the Masai were favorites of the British, and the relation of attitudes to action seems to require no further elucidation. A glance at the evidence shows that things were not so simple. A range of attitudes toward the Masai existed among administrators—though the modal response was certainly positive rather than negative—and the relation of attitudes to the policies recommended or pursued was not straightforward. Without making exaggerated claims for the kind of exercise which follows, it can be argued that closer scrutiny is warranted, at the very least to clear away accumulated misconceptions. At this local level, where the human characteristics of administrators stand out against a rather remote background of metropolitan policymaking, a social psychologist can perhaps contribute a useful perspective on the written records and oral traditions of those involved.

Scholars of Africa have long expressed dissatisfaction with theoretical models that attempt to explain the political, economic and social dynamics of the continent. According to Chazan, Mortimer, Ravenhill and Rothchild (1988, 13), this situation means that “social scientists have had little alternative but to undertake a search for new conceptual frameworks that would afford a fuller insight into the dynamic processes unfolding on the continent.” Others, such as Hyden (1983, 193), argue directly that “Africa needs a new paradigm, or set of paradigms” to explain the continent's development processes. Although there often is a call to combine or integrate various paradigms, it seldom is accompanied by specific suggestions or guidelines about how to create a new theoretical approach for the study of Africa. Moreover, theoretical discussions are not normally accompanied by a call to use appropriate and innovative methodological strategies. Failure to utilize such strategies severely limits theoretical advancement, however. We introduce a relatively new strategy in social-science methodology that is ideally suited for advancing new theoretical approaches for the study of Africa.

Before introducing this strategy, we argue that current theoretical approaches to the continent are plagued by a fundamental problem. Specifically, most previous research has failed to examine how events are shaped by the interaction between phenomena at the global, national and local levels. The majority of studies focus on one or perhaps two levels, ignoring the fact that development processes are complex and depend on interaction between factors at different levels. This situation is further complicated by the fact that each level of analysis also contains a number of different categories or sub-levels.

The history of industrial education in the European-initiated educational systems of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Africa has been and remains controversial. Some scholars maintain that in the late 1800s both the government and missionaries favored, and indeed established, industrial training (Berman, 1974: 530; Foster, 1965). Others insist that, contrary to government wishes, missionaries resisted the establishment of industrial education until the beginning of the twentieth century, when industrial training came into vogue only as a result of “doubts regarding the mental ability of the Black African.” (Lyons, 1975: 148-49).

These conflicting observations about industrial education (here meaning both pre-industrial and industrial skills taught for personal as well as occupational use) are based primarily upon the British Protestant experience in West Africa. Experience in Belgian Africa was quite different. This paper will argue that there were two distinct phases in the development of industrial education in the Congo during the Leopoldian era: (1) the late nineteenth century, characterized by the training of a limited few highly skilled craftsmen for missionary service and (2) the early twentieth century, when the skill component of industrial education declined to the teaching of a bit of carpentry as an adjunct to general education, especially for prospective evangelists and catechists. In the second phase, even those missions which originally had prepared skilled craftsmen for their own use now eagerly accepted the watered-down version of industrial education.

This article explores the intersections of violence, morality, and place to theorize the notion of moral violence. Using narratives collected during ethnographic research in a highway town in Kenya, it suggests that when people offer moralizing sentiments about this locality they are pointing to (and sometimes reproducing) the effects of and anxieties about the decades of violence and inequalities that have engulfed the lives of the residents. Particular attention is paid to the way in which narratives about political/ethnic violence and HIV/AIDS have blended to create and sustain moral violence as a chronic and particular, historically embedded variant of structural violence.