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.

This article argues that Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down (2001) may be seen with the benefit of historical hindsight as a portrait of the fear of imperial overreach and failure as written through the psyche of elite U.S. soldiers. In Black Hawk Down, Mogadishu and its denizens are made to stand in for the worst fears of the American military and the civilian policymaking establishment: the city, and, by extension, urban Africa, is represented as a feral zone in which the U.S. military's unmatched firepower and technology are overwhelmed in densely populated slums. The Mog, as the film's Special Forces troops call the city, is a ramshackle megacity whose residents are armed to the teeth with the military detritus of the Cold War. Mogadishu thus embodies the new Heart of Darkness, a stateless urban world of vicious Hobbesian war of all against all. This view of Africa as the vanguard of anarchy is shared by a significant segment of the elite in the global North, who see the criminalization of the state in Africa as a direct threat to U.S. interests. If, as these analysts hold, it is from such feral zones that future threats to American society are likely to originate, then potent new weapons systems must be developed to deal with this racialized new world disorder. This article unpacks the ahistorical character of such selfserving representations of urban Africa, underlining the extent to which policies pursued during the Cold War and neoliberal era by powers such as the U.S. have helped to create the conditions that Black Hawk Down represents in such spectacular excess.

Why does collective resistance to democratic backsliding emerge in some contexts and not others? The experience of Malawi in 2011–2012 offers an opportunity to explore this question. In the face of attacks on democratic rights and institutions, large-scale popular and civil society mobilization challenged the government’s authoritarian tendencies. Drawing on collective action theories and comparing Malawi’s experience to that of Zambia, VonDoepp argues that Malawi’s resistance arose in an environment that was favorable to its emergence. Economic conditions had generated grievances against government, polarization remained modest, and civil society organizations benefitted from credibility and the presence of allies that facilitated activism.

At the important forum for debate of the current state of African-American relations provided by the African-American Institute meetings in Harare, Zimbabwe, in January 1983, two apparently contradictory themes emerged in the public and private assessments of American-African policy by the African delegates. On the one hand, they observed—to their disappointment and dismay—that American policy appeared to remain essentially unchanged over the last quarter-century. On the other, and in the next breath, they angrily denounced the theory of “constructive engagement” in southern Africa, and in particular its corollary of “linkage” of Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola to South African acquiescence in a Namibia settlement.

Is it possible that Chester Crocker is simply Richard Moose by another name? Senator Jesse Helms evidently thinks so, but should we? Or, to put the matter more graphically, is it plausible that, despite the apparent rhetorical contrasts, United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick holds essentially the same views concerning Africa as did her predecessors Andrew Young and Donald McHenry? Perhaps this is a timely moment to explore this seeming paradox. Within the foreign policy machinery of the United States government, Africa was accorded bureaucratic recognition in 1958, a quarter-century ago, through the creation of the Bureau of African Affairs. This organizational innovation symbolized the birth of an African policy, even though episodic connections with sundry African states extend far back to the early days of the Republic: Liberia, Morocco, Zanzibar, Egypt, Ethiopia.

Many observers and analysts of the Zimbabwe nationalist movement have noted factionalism and suggested ethnicity as a dominant factor (Dumbuchena, 1975; Breytenbach, 1977; Nyangoni, 1978; Ranger, 1979). This author (Sithole, 1979; 1980) has made a similar argument elsewhere. Yet, others have observed the same factionalism but suggested a different explanation—the class factor.

The purpose of this paper is not to repeat nor repent from the ethnic factor argument but rather to examine and assess the class factor argument. The task for this paper is twofold. The first is to examine the frequent argument of Marxist colleagues engaged in the profession of analyzing society that factionalism and its ethnic manifestations are caused by “petty-bourgeois” politicians in the nationalist movement. The second task is to attempt to show that, to date, there is no clearly denned class basis for the factionalization in the Zimbabwe nationalist movement.

There has been a proliferation of factionalism in Zimbabwe politics from 1963 to the present. While some analysts have suggested ethnicity as the explaining factor, others sought to employ class analysis to explain the same phenomenon. Ostensibly, most of these analyses were the work of intellectuals and activists external to Zimbabwe but sympathetic to the cause of liberation. More recently, interest in this analytic tool seems to be gaining momentum among locals.

The international system is becoming increasingly characterized by the evolutionary development of integrated subordinate regional systems (see Masters 1961; Haas 1949, 1965; Miller 1967; Segal 1967; Herz 1959; Yalen 1965). The leading scholars in the field have responded to this change by formulating new analytical concepts. Indeed, several preliminary studies have already been published on the developing subordinate regional systems of the Middle East, southern Asia and Africa (Binder 1958, Brecher 1963ab, Zartman 1967, Saenz 1968bc).

The advocates of regionalism and integration theory generally agree that developing subordinate regional systems have basic characteristics in common. These systems are considered to be autonomous, but not entirely independent of the overall international system. The subordinate systems are usually limited to a general geographical identification area. The nature of the system is reflected in a regional organization designed to foster mutual coordination and cooperation on matters of common interest to its members. As is usually the case in the development of new analytical concepts, however, there are several issues of contention concerning the utility of the subordinate regional systems concept (Hanson 1969, Rye 1968, Saenz 1969).

This article will not attempt to deal with all the unanswered questions relating to regional integration. It will, however, attempt to formulate some tentative and exploratory conclusions about those issues that relate specifically to the role of the Organization of African Unity in the developing subordinate African regional system.

In at least one respect the mid and late 1970s have been similar to the mid and late 1960s, namely in the amount of attention devoted to the problem of world hunger. From a variety of popular and professional media the message is broadcast clearly that millions of people are starving and malnourished and that the future will be even more bleak than the present unless population growth is slowed, food production increased, and wealth redistributed. Africa, in particular, has become a source of much concern. The recent highly publicized famines in the Sahel and Ethiopia, and recurrent food shortages in such places as Senegal, Tanzania, Zaire, Zambia, and Botswana have given the impression of widespread precarious food-population balances. Additionally, it is stated that numerous deficiency diseases are virtually endemic, especially among young children.

The exact dimensions of food deprivation in Africa are not well know, however. This is because most food related investigations traditionally have focused on production rather than consumption, and when they have been concerned with consumption they have dealt either with selected, localized populations, or with highly aggregated data, usually at the national scale. The many volumes by Jacques May (1965, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971) on the ecology of malnutrition provide examples of both of these approaches. Generally missing are middle range comparative analyses that attempt to delineate and explain patterns of similarities and differences from place to place and culture to culture. Yet as Whitehead (1977) has noted, there is considerable variability with regard to who is malnourished and why, and thus it is precisely these investigations that are needed in order to avoid the “blanket approaches” to remedial policies which he rightly condemns.

This article offers a historical perspective on the concept of voluntarism in modern Africa. It does so by exploring the ways in which postcolonial states grappled with the legacies of colonial-era concepts of voluntarism, using Tanzania as a case study. It argues that the postcolonial state sought to combine two strands of colonial thinking about voluntarism in a new conception of “virtuous citizenship.” But this was a fragile construction, and the language of voluntarism could bring to light divisions in society that many would have preferred to keep hidden.

In June 2019, Google announced plans to connect Africa to Europe through an undersea internet cable project named Equiano. As a techno-commercial platform, Google’s gesture warrants scrutiny and propels this essay’s analyses of the political connections of Internet spaces that also enable a visual turn in the scholarship of African history. Using the Google search engine and Facebook, Yékú and Ojebode stress the embeddedness of digital technologies in cultural meanings that include visual narratives that visibilize government’s ahistoricism. They conclude by foregrounding the digital labors of Nigerian digital subjects who deploy historical photographs on Facebook as expressions of performative nostalgia.

The article focuses on disputes and protests around the inauguration of Niger’s first oil refinery in late 2011. Drawing on theory of the resource curse and the literature on African politics and the state, it analyzes the transformative potential of oil in Nigerien politics and society, showing how oil was received in an already well-structured political arena, sparking political conflicts rather than conflicts about oil. With the start of oil production adding fuel to these conflicts, it argues that in oil’s immediate presence, historically sedimented politics were played out through the idiom of oil, through which not only is oil-age Niger made a social and political reality, but political difference is also reconstructed, and patterns of domination are reinforced.

In the early 1950s when the American Committee on Africa was formed, American interest in and knowledge about Africa was something of a joke. There was a Tarzan mentality in the US about the continent. Few books about Africa were known even by the reading public. Gunther’s Inside Africa, when it came out in 1956, served as a reference book for years for those Americans who wanted to get a perspective on the continent. I remember listening to Chester Bowles, who served as under secretary of state briefly in the Kennedy administration, speak about his own attempt to find relevant material about Africa in a Connecticut town. He told about his visit to the town public library, where he culled through the card catalogue. To find books on the Congo he said he had to search under “B” for “Belgium.” In searching for material on Ghana (then the Gold Coast) or Nigeria, he had to look under “Great Britain.” He found books about Liberia and Ethiopia under “Miscellaneous.” Knowledge of Africa was minimal, and the continent was on the whole looked upon as an extension of Europe.

Scholars working in Africa through the years have been faced with the problem of how to identify and differentiate one group of people from another. One of the bases for classification has been to establish linguistic boundaries, a method which has been part of the traditional anthropological means of distinguishing one “tribe” from the next. Recently others have pointed out the dangers of compartmentalizing peoples purely on linguistic grounds, as many individuals are multilingual.

With scholars even today disagreeing over what constitutes a proper basis for classification (Biebuyck, 1966: 500-515; Helm, 1968), it is not surprising that there remain some areas of the African continent in which a consensus has not yet been achieved. As a case in point, there are two groups of people living in the eastern part of Liberia and the western part of the Ivory Coast who have been referred to in the literature by a variety of names.

It would seem that the problem is particularly acute among African art experts. The terms most commonly observed in English publications for those groups which live in eastern Liberia are Dan and Ngere (Fagg, 1953: 17-18). However, there is no consistency in the names used by other art historians, so that Dan N'gere, referring to a general art style of both of these peoples, is used by Sieber, Rubin (1968: 54), and Bravmann (1970: 32). The names Gio, Yacouba, Kran, and Tien also can be found used by other scholars to refer to the very same peoples (Harley, 1950; Girard, 1967: 7; Bascom, 1967: 78; Himmelheber, 1960: 192).

Without minimizing the horrors of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the book by Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Fuir ou mourir au Zaïre (“Running Away or Dying in Zaïre,” L'Harmattan, 2000), published under the English title Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire” throws a much needed light on the plight of Rwandan refugees in Kivu from the time they fled Rwanda, many of them as ordinary, peaceful citizens. If we want to understand the events that continue to unfold in the region, and if we want to improve the aid humanitarian agencies provide, we need to consider Umutesi's story—a story in which distant international organizations, with their own views and objectives, took actions that had deleterious consequences for ordinary people.

While some refugees pursued dubious policies in the camps, people of good will went on helping others while they all were in exile. Their collective support systems helped them retain their dignity under the worst of circumstances and, when their fragile safe haven came under attack, helped them endure a hell that seemed at times unendurable. Telling the complete history, as Jan Vansina helped to do in his recent book (2004), and putting ordinary people back into the picture, are the surest ways to avoid lethal stereotypes and quick categorizations that hinder our understanding of complex situations and produce simplifications that contribute to more injustice.

This article reviews the challenges and opportunities posed by the rapid growth of private universities in Uganda since 1988 and tries to identify areas of the private university system in which the state can play a positive role. It argues that the state should not leave the operation of the system entirely to market forces but should positively regulate their activities without control. Seven challenges are identified. These include the management challenge, the financing of these institutions, meeting the ever increasing demand for higher education, the devising of relevant curricula, addressing the dearth of qualified academic staff, the formation of a comprehensive national higher education policy, and the maintenance of institutional autonomy tempered by accountability of each of tfiese new university institutions. At the same time, the article identifies a number of opportunities that these institutions could take advantage of. These include the positive economic development the country has been registering for the last decade and half, the resilience of the lower educational system, the social need for higher education, the policy of Universal Primary Education (UPE), the interest of the current government in education development, and the positive international attitude toward Uganda.

Since Mali’s independence in 1960, the Tuareg, a minority ethnic group, have staged successive rebellions, with the major ones occurring in 1963, 1990, 2006, and 2012. While discussions of “the Tuareg issue” have sometimes led both the Malian and the international press, as well as scholars, to make inaccurate generalizations, it is true that almost all the armed conflicts of the past fifty years in Mali were originated by people of the Tuareg group. Therefore, many of their Malian compatriots hold the Tuareg people responsible for the destruction of life and human rights violations that have taken place since the beginning of 2012. This article focuses on the events of 2012 and their aftermath and explores some social, cultural, and political differences between northern Tuareg and southern Bamana peoples in particular. It asks two specific questions: Is there something about Tuareg society, culture, and politics (i.e., Tuareg identity) that causes an incompatibility with the Mali Republic? And if not, where has the Malian government failed through the successive regimes since independence?

The philosophy of African medical practice is rooted in the African world view. Those locating the cause and cure of sickness in traditional practice ask about the ultimate who, rather than what. The answers given are in terms of the cosmological beliefs of the people. I shall deal with the philosophical issues in African medicine with particular reference to causes and cures of sickness in the traditional practice, the human person in this practice, the Christian, the colonial, and modern impact on this view, and a look towards the future. In doing this, I shall show that African traditional medical practice has important contributions to make in technologically oriented medicine.

Farmland investments have attracted numerous entrepreneurs and companies to Africa in the past two decades. However, acquiring, retaining, and exploiting large-scale landholdings is more complicated than it seems. Investors need to persuade governments and populations of their anticipated benefits and limit dissenting voices when they emerge. Focusing on a contested land project in Senegal, Gagné develops the concept of “repertoires of control” to analyze the different performances of power that companies deploy to assert and legitimize their land claims. She argues that to survive, companies must continually adapt these performances to changes in the political environment of their host countries.