As references to the “Evil Empire” on American television recede into memory, sublime images of Africa as a dark continent nevertheless remain an enduring presence. This, despite the debate in foreign policy and media circles about the need to redefine now the role of the press in coverage of global affairs. No doubt, the media, television especially, have provided compelling images of the changing world order: Tiananmen Square, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, Somalia, Bosnia, the Soviet coup and the Berlin Wall. To most Americans, vivid memories of these events are in all likelihood shaped by images gleaned from CNN or one of the three networks.

This article explores Islam, gender, and “proper” Mandinga funerary “custom” in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal, specifically the contradictions and debates between men and women about Mandinga custom and Islam as they play out in the ritual of shaking with the left hand, wailing at funerals, and visiting healers to investigate the nature of particular deaths. It suggests that far from constituting a “crisis of modernity,” these contradictions and debates have long been central to how Mandinga imagine themselves in a changing world. They have become intensified, however, in the transnational era, in which continuity among identity, place, and death has been ruptured.

“I was fed up with my wife, I was not happy at all, because in the four years since I had married her she was not pregnant” (Tutuola, 1981: 21). Thus does the narrator of Amos Tutuola's The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town express his distress at his wife's barrenness. The problem so pained him that he undertook a six-year quest in search of a cure, because to remain childless would be untenable. The issue of fertility and the need to perpetuate the family into future generations inspired Tutuola, whose story examines the singularly important issue of fertility as a social, cultural, and medical concern among the Yoruba of Nigeria and, by extrapolation, the peoples in transition in West Africa.

Amos Tutuola, a clerk in the Nigerian department of labor, has written several quest novels, all of which reflect various aspects of Yoruba culture. A native of Abeokuta in western Nigeria, Tutuola received the equivalent of a Western sixth-grade education. Raised as a Christian, he infuses his works with religious morality coupled with traditional perspectives.

Tutuola's writing career began as a relief from the boredom of his everyday job. He wrote his first novel in a two-day spurt of activity and sent it to what he thought was a publishing house, but which turned out to be a Methodist missionary group. The group forwarded the manuscript to the London publishers Faber and Faber and The Palm-Wine Drinhard was published in 1952 with little revision. Written in a distinct style of nonstandard English, the strange, fantastic story received praise from Western readers and critics, but derision from their African counterparts.

A conventional distinction in the foreign aid literature contrasts relief aid (qua emergency help and charitable giving) with developmental assistance (for sustainable economic growth, capacity building, and equitable distribution). In practice, however, the distinction blurs, and in the field it can lead to micropolitical conflict. This point is illustrated by the ecumenical efforts on the part of a U.S. rabbi to assist a school in southcentral Niger. As illustrated by the history of this project, complexities of local administration, and tensions between the staff and principal of one school, crystallized and demonstrated conflicts between traditional authorities and those of the modern state.

In November 1978 a witch-purge crusade led by Edem Edet Akpan (alias Akpan Ekwong) took place among the Ibibio people of the Cross River State in Nigeria. Edem claimed that all the evils which afflicted the Ibibio were attributable to the malevolent forces of witches and that he possessed supernatural powers to detect witches. Assisted by a few lieutenants, Edem began his crusade to eradicate witches and witchcraft. He would send messengers to a village to inform its residents that on a certain day of the week all were to assemble at the public square. Members of the village were forbidden to leave, and letters were sent out to those who were already out to return.

On the appointed day Edem or one of his lieutenants would arrive and go around picking out those he believed were witches. The suspects had their hands tied together and red pepper (which the villagers referred to as powder) sprayed all over their bodies and into their eyes, ears, and noses. In addition, large quantities of black ants were poured on the suspected witches. Under agonizing pain, they were asked to confess all those they had killed, those whose money or other property they had bewitched, their rank in the witch society, and so on. They were untied after they confessed. There were others, not selected by the crusaders, who voluntarily went to the village council to confess that they were witches and paid the fine stipulated for them. In this way they were able to avoid the ordeal meted out to those accused of witchcraft by the crusaders.

Over the past two decades, attention in the social sciences increasingly has been drawn to the problem of violent civil conflicts, a problem that has disproportionately affected Africa more than any other region. Two approaches to this problem have come to dominate the field: attempts to understand the root causes of civil conflict and attempts to understand the dynamics of its violence. Critics of the former approach have elaborated the ways in which the etiological agenda itself makes, and then politically mobilizes, the reality it claims to find. The goal of this article is to elaborate a similar critique for the latter agenda by examining the productive and destructive interaction between theoretical assumptions and empirical realities that have informed attempts to understand the Algerian massacres of the late 1990s. The overall intention is not to promote a new understanding of those atrocities. Rather, it is to gain a deeper insight into the processes by which episodes of mass civil violence become objects of scientific analysis—and thus objects for political utilization—despite their having emerged from an empirical milieu of contested, ambiguous, and indeterminate realities.

Liberation is not necessarily at hand in South Africa. The government still has the means to, and to all appearances still intends to, enforce apartheid. Yet, the process of change has become so great that many have begun to consider questions related to the nature of the post-apartheid state. The purpose of this paper, then, is to capture at a point in time the two primary competing images of what shape that state will be.

First, there are those who support a federal state and capitalism. This position is represented, in one form or another, by the so-called left wing of the Nationalist Party (NP), the opposition Progressive Federal Party (PFP), and the country's major business interests. Various so-called homeland leaders, most respectably Phatudi (who recently died) of Lebowa and Buthelezi of Kwazulu, have also spoken in support of federalism. But one is inclined to believe that their opinion will prove of little account. In order to portray the capitalist and federalist image there is reference to Lijphart (1985); the views of the PFP which both represent those of the country's major business interests and often precede policy shifts of the NP: and a recent federal blueprint suggested by members of the left wing of the NP, Lombard and Du Pisanie (1985).

Next, there are those who support a unitary state and economic arrangements which range from a mixed economy to socialism. While one might include here the Azanian People's Organization and the Azanian Congress of Trade Unions, they are generally held to be eclipsed by the African National Congress (ANC) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Land and land shortage lie at the center of Kenyan political history throughout the colonial period and beyond. Land alienation created a keen sense of loss among Africans and attempts by the colonial government to assuage this, such as the Kenya Land Commission of the 1930s, did little to meet the problem of growing African land shortage. The land problem was most strongly felt and expressed by many Kikuyu, especially in the south.

There were many issues relating to land alienation and resulting shortage: legal definitions, questions of occupancy, political constraints, and moral concerns. The origins of the Kikuyu land problem need further investigation, however, for they lie not simply in a blatant and bloody land grab, nor in the possession of vacant land by settlers and the colonial state. Rather, there was a complex mesh of haphazard appropriation, bureaucratic chaos, fitful economic growth (by settlers and Africans), economic co-operation and conflict, and frontier readjustment. This paper examines the dynamics of land alienation, land use and mounting land shortage in the Kiambu District of Kenya during the first twenty-five years of colonial rule.

Kiambu was, and is, an area of transition (Figure 1). In an environmental sense it lies between the cool, fertile, densely populated and, formerly, thickly forested Kikuyu Uplands and the lower, warmer grassland of the south and east. Before 1900, the area also marked a fluid boundary between the pastoral Maasai and the predominantly agriculturalist Kikuyu. There was no firm frontier: trade in stock, grain and brides was important to both and their spheres of settlement and economic activity not only met but overlapped.

In this paper I attempt to connect several dots, specifically my research on African women's activism, environmental justice, and climate change. The book on which I am currently working is tentatively entided “‘The Great Upheaval’: Women, Taxes and Nationalist Politics in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1945–1951.” The study examines the struggles of Nigerian women to shape the nationalist agenda and their setbacks as the country moved decisively toward independence. At its core lies an analysis of a tax revolt launched by women in Abeokuta in 1947. The Abeokuta Women's Union (AWU), under the leadership of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (the mother of the late musician Fela Kuti), began a protracted protest against a tax increase. This revolt is well known in Nigerian popular history, and many people outside of Nigeria were introduced to it in Wole Soyinka's memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981:164–218).

Studies of drama and other performing arts in Africa suffer from what Andrew Horn (1981: 181) in a recent article terms “an unnecessary imprecision of nomenclature.” Horn has in mind the tendency among certain scholars, African and non-African, to apply the name “drama” to African traditional performances of every description. Convincing corroboration for his point comes from the entries (among which his article is one) in Yemi Ogunbiyi's (1981) recent collection of scholarly discussions on drama and theater in Nigeria. The essays in the volume embrace such diverse activities as religious rituals, spirit mediumship, one-man comic shows, puppetry, various forms of masquerades, and others that more closely resemble conventional drama.

What Horn describes as a “curious refusal to acknowledge generic distinctions” confronts any scholar who attempts to pursue precise dialogues on this supposedly wellestablished art form, because of the stubborn difficulty of establishing any precise delimitations for it, at least in its African manifestation. An illustration of the confusion might begin with Peter Nazareth's (1978: 91) statement that “dramatic forms” existed in Africa well before the arrival of the colonialists. “We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets,” he quotes Olaudah Equiano as saying, adding: “Equiano is describing a peculiarly African phenomenon, part ballet, part drama, part opera in which the entire community is the cast and the village square the stage.” From these examples of “pre-drama,” he observes further, drama has developed in West Africa in contrast to East Africa, which suffered in this regard from a more unfortunate colonial experience than did West Africa.

From nearly any perspective and metric, the effects of malaria on the African continent have been persistent and deep. By focusing on the malady of malaria and the last century of biomedical interventions, Graboyes and Alidina raise critical historical, ethical, and scientific questions related to truth telling, African autonomy, and the obligations of foreign researchers. They provide a condensed history of malaria activities on the continent over the past 120 years, highlighting the overall history of failures to eliminate or control the disease. A case study of the risks of rebound malaria illustrates the practical and moral problems that abound when historical knowledge is ignored. In light of current calls for renewed global eradication efforts, Graboyes and Alidina provide evidence for why historical knowledge must be better integrated into global health epistemic realms.

French policy in Africa is at a crossroads. Forced to consider among choices that appeared entrenched in the past, France now hesitates to implement essential reforms. The reluctance to carve out a new conception of French-African relations is in part tied to the magnitude of the changes which have affected African states south of the Sahara since 1989, but it is also tied to the generalized failure of French aid policies since the Second World War. The result has been a conceptual vacuum in French policy towards Africa, reflected in the oscillation between the old practices, including very controversial ones, and the structural adjustments in which France is little more than an interested observer.

Territorial reforms in South Africa, undertaken in order to address the legacy of apartheid, have proven to be a contested terrain. This article considers three case studies and argues that in order to understand these territorial disputes, it is important to pay attention to the material conditions of the affected communities, disparities between provinces in terms of resources and governance efficiency, and perceptions that the preferred province is better positioned to serve the interests of the community. The article highlights the role of party political interests and also reflects on the relevance of the South African experience to other African countries.

In this study I hope to deconstruct dominant and popular homophobic discourses in Cameroon to offer a deeper analysis of the common association made between homosexuality, witchcraft, and cults. Through a closer engagement with rumors that suggest homosexuality, witches, and cults are working collectively and covertly to destroy Cameroonian society important issues of power, morality, and inequality emerge, providing a more complex understanding of homophobic violence. I argue that in order to address homophobic concerns in Cameroon, activists must contend with the complexity of epistemological differences and speak to the root causes of an emerging ressentiment.

Human experience is more visual and visualized than ever before. This has been obvious in Africa since the 1990s, when democratization, media liberalization, proliferation of small technology, and religious reform movements introduced new ways of meaning-making. Ibrahim’s ethnographic research shows how sharia implementation and cinema as cultural production in northern Nigeria are embedded within the implicit and explicit visual regime of influencing what and how people see, think, and perform. The strategic replacement of cinemas with religious or other “neutral” objects is a visual regime that shifts people’s vision or encounter from one means of cultural production to another.

In only four years, Nigeria has experienced two successive transition-to-civil-rule programs. The first, implemented with shocking inconsistency by the regime of General Sani Abacha, came to an abrupt anticlimax with the late despot’s unexpected death. The second appears to have been, judging by the country’s recent political history, unusually successful, culminating in the election of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) aspirant, General Olusegun Obasanjo, as presidentelect. While various reasons have been adduced for the apparent failure of one and the relative success of the other, political analysts in the country seem to agree that the main reason has to do with the fact that the programs differed profoundly in terms of motives, methodologies, and even ends.

What is called the “conflict” seems to be very old right now, in view of all that has happened between 1968, when the conflict began to surface at the Eleventh Annual Convention of the African Studies Association in Los Angeles, and the present. The conflict is older than its formal beginning, and we are no closer to a solution now than we were in 1968. The conflict is over who will interpret African history. White scholars, more than blacks, have always understood the importance of controlling history and social thought. The best way to control a people is to control what they think about themselves.

This article engages with Jane Guyer's assessment (in Marginal Gains, 2004) of contemporary forms of capitalism from outside the bounds of two opposing logics: the universalization of capitalist arrangements versus the specificity of local forms of economic arrangement. Guyer's rejection of a priori definitions of economic categories leads to fertile analysis of measures and mediations as poly-semic modes of valuation. The author asks: what is the theory that would account for or accommodate this polysemy? Corollary questions of epistemology arise regarding distinctions between local conventions and formal procedures and about the criteria that establish such distinctions. Conceding that we attest to the efficacy of economic concepts through practice, the author questions whether these concepts are institutionalized through “experience.” Such concepts (e.g., equivalence) are not merely “economic” in nature; their genealogies disclose the extent to which their efficacy derives from their placement in many domains of life, as artifacts of a general epistemology.