As we all know, the historic African diaspora in the United States is the result of the European slave trade, which resulted in millions of people being taken from Africa. Dei and Asgharzadeh correctly point out in this issue that this population and its descendents constitute a portion of the original African brain drain. Often, consideration of the causes of, problems of, and solutions to the African brain drain ignore this population and place most of the emphasis and research on the contemporary African diaspora. This may have to do with conclusions in some of the research contending that this historic diaspora lost all linkages to Africa. However, there is a vast body of literature that supports the claim that the institution of slavery did not totally sever social, cultural, economic, and political linkages.

When I was first asked to write this paper, I was instructed that the whole field of social history was open to my purview and that my efforts should be directed to future accomplishments and not past glories. My first impulse was to wander over to the library and try to determine in fact what social history was in order to bring some boundaries to my paper. After looking through several of the standard reference works on the social sciences and their definitions of social history, I began to feel that I was not the only person unsure of the boundaries between social/political/economic/intellectual/religious history. Furthermore the request to look only into the future and not the past left me feeling out of sorts given my historian's training. Thus, I decided instead to try to examine several of the many areas of the social history of Africa which are largely unworked or need examination in more depth.

The medical history of Africa is an area in which many fruitful and significant opportunities exist for further research. Work in this field has been done in several different countries and the results are beginning to appear in a growing number of books and articles. Yet there are still a great many important topics and geographic areas which remain to be explored. These range from local issues such as the sleeping sickness epidemic which ravaged the Zaire River basin near the turn of the century, to the regional differences of experiences with epidemic disease in early colonial Africa, especially those differences between East and West Africa (Feierman, 1985).

The myth of Oxford, which echoes and replicates the ideology of an unchanging world of privileged white youth, is a common trope in many films and literary works. This vision is, however, overlaid and underlaid with counter-traditions that decenter Oxford and instead insert Oxford upside down into other epistemologies, geographies, and networks. Some attempts at the transformation of elite institutions such as Oxford inadvertently serve to continue the centering of these same institutions. Coetzee argues that, instead of focusing on the histories of ascendant Black/black excellence and achievement at Oxford University, a more powerful way to relativize and decenter the institution is to document and emphasize histories and accounts of Black marginalization, failure, and disconnection.

In November 2016, Uganda’s armed forces raided the Rwenzururu kingdom palace in Kasese Municipality, arresting and detaining the king and other kingdom officials on treason and other charges. This was the climax to a puzzling wave of violence that was then unfolding in the Rwenzori Region. We consider this violence an unintended consequence of the deepening politics of fragmentation, which takes two forms: “kingdomization” and “districtization.” Through fragmentation, Uganda’s ruling elites seek to weaken subnational concentrations of power, resources, and legitimacy wielded by otherwise coalesced, potentially strong, subnational authority structures and sociopolitical groups. Fragmentation fractures preexisting intra-regional unity, generates new conflicts, and reopens old wounds, leading to violent encounters at the sub-national level, between regional sub-groups, and with the central state. This unfolding of violent encounters involving both state and non-state actors has important ramifications for managing national security within socially fragile contexts and a politically fragmented polity.

Continued clashes between nomadic pastoralists and farmers generate concerns about the capacity of community-based civil society organizations to effectively navigate conflict resolution in Agogo Traditional Area (ATA), Ghana. The Agogo and Fulani associations ostensibly manage farmer-herder conflict but with mixed results. Setrana argues that, unlike foreign or international civil society organizations, community-based associations play important roles in managing conflict because they often have better cultural understanding. The success of such organizations, however, depends on whether they are perceived as indigenous or non-indigenous. This binary framework often leads to a winner-takes-all attitude and rarely results in sustainable conflict resolution.

The sixties will be remembered as the decade of independence for most of Africa, independence won for the most part at the negotiating table. All too frequently the parties negotiating on behalf of African countries were a carefully cultivated elite who simply replaced the colonial administrators and set the stage for the growth of neocolonialism, coups, and counter coups. Unlike Britain and France, Portugal, until its 1974 revolution, refused to relinquish its colonies in Africa–Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola.

Guinea-Bissau, a small country on the west coast of Africa, had been a colony of Portugal for 500 years. For most of this period the relationship was one of trading. Portugal was not interested in political control so long as it had access to slaves and other goods. But with the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the nineteenth century, Portugal changed its attitude. Africa was being greedily divided up by the imperial powers and Portugal realized that unless it entrenched its presence and took political control, it might lose out altogether. With the coming to power of Salazar and a fascist dictatorship in Portugal in 1926, the control became both brutal and complete.

In 1956 the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) was founded by Amilcar Cabral and a few country people. At first PAIGC's goal was to organize workers in the towns, hoping that through demonstrations and strikes they would convince the Portuguese to negotiate for independence. It soon became clear that this was not going to happen. Each demonstration was met with violence, until the 1959 massacre of fifty dockworkers holding a peaceful demonstration at Pidgiguiti. This was a turning point for PAIGC: they realized that independence could not be won without an armed struggle, one that had to be based on the mass participation of the people. They turned their focus to the countryside and to mobilizing the peasants, who represented 95 percent of the population.

Zambia, like all African countries, is experiencing significant political, economic, and social change. The Zambian government and ruling party seek to control change and channel it in certain directions, but many aspects of change are not initiated by them and a substantial proportion of these are not to their liking. Politically initiated changes and government reactions to other changes have inevitably affected the legitimacy of the Zambian political system and its major components in the eyes of a wide variety of Zambians. In his contribution to the Social Science Research Council's volume on the crises of political development, Sidney Verba indicates that all such “crises of development” or problems associated with change “would seem always to involve problems of legitimacy as well as one of the other problem areas” (Verba, 1971: 306). Thus it is important to study the effects of change on legitimacy since they will be crucial in determining whether the Zambian government and ruling party will be successful in directing change into the paths they desire.

Political legitimacy can be defined as a generalized appraisal of the political system as a whole, its various components, and the policy outputs they produce, which indicates that these objects are appropriate in terms of accepted values and norms. To define legitimacy as a generalized appraisal of appropriateness is to differentiate it from specific appraisals of political structures and policies made in terms of perceived interests. These two types of appraisals are empirically interdependent in the long run, but they can be independent of one another in the short run (Easton, 1965: 267-77). They tend, however, to be very closely related in most new political systems, where most diffuse bases of legitimacy have not had time to develop (Binder et. al., 1971: 90-91, 158, 194, 315-16). A complete description of legitimacy in a political system must indicate who grants what degree of legitimacy to what political objects on the basis of which values and norms.

My real interest in Fanon dates from a night in August 1967 when, together with a couple hundred West Indian students in London, we converged on our Students' Center to listen to a lecture delivered by Stokely Carmichael. One or two of us in the audience had even been at primary school with him in Trinidad, though he probably didn't suspect it. “Can't you remember him?” asked an old classmate of mine, trying to jolt my memory. “He was always fighting!”

My recollections from that night are several--the white agent provocateur who entered the building and tried unsuccessfully to incite us to violence against him; the contingent of policemen who, transported in an assortment of vehicles, swooped down on the building from all directions as we stood talking to Stokely after the lecture; the haste with which Stokely was spirited away from the scene by his friends wishing to avoid an “incident”; the anguish with which I watched some of my friends come to within an inch of blowing their cool in the face of the police provocations--yet a riot was avoided, and though the British government still banned Stokely from the country shortly afterwards, their arguments would have looked much more plausible if we had succumbed to the provocations of that night.

The geographical context of this article is the Sudanese Three Town agglomeration embracing Khartoum, Khartoum North, and Omdurman. The main social content is that of the socio-historical process of class formation and urbanization. In an effort to measure effects of this process in this region a focus is made on changing patterns in the institutions of marriage as barometers of wider social change. The basic hypothesis to be tested is that the rise of more complex systems of class stratification is associated with a decline of former patterns of endogamy.

The data presented here are analyzed within the epistemology of dialectical and historical materialism which assumes, inter alia, that (1) there is an integration of the component parts of society, (2) that changes in the material (empirical) basis of the organization of society will have effects in other social spheres, and (3) that the cumulative effects of social change eventually lead to qualitative changes in social relations. Another theoretical assumption unifying this research and analysis is (4) that data must be viewed in a processual rather than in a mechanical, synchronic, or ahistorical functionalist manner. Nevertheless the empirical studies of the urban anthropologist only permit the researcher to segment a portion of social reality for closer scrutiny taking maximum care that the living, changing society is kept in the fertile medium of history and in the context of changing political and economic relations. Finally it is assumed that (5) a measure of class differentiation is essential inasmuch as urban patterns of socio-cultural variation have a class content.

Education in post-colonial African nations has served as the apparatus for sustaining and accelerating overall development, for increasing political and social awareness, and for providing a cadre of highly trained indigenous manpower to implement, manage, and administer ambitious national development strategies. To understand the process and impact of an educational system, however, one must be cognizant of exogenous forces. From a structuralist frame of reference, Apple (1975) asserts that researchers must examine the power and control external to the educational system, thus making political and economic decisions an integral part of an educational investigation. Scribner (1970) argues that researchers cannot avoid the effects of political demands on the changes in the educational system.

The relationship among educational systems and variables in the social, economic, and political systems in which education exists have been well studied in the comparative education literature (Apple, 1975; Arrighi and Saul, 1973; Dasgupta, 1974; Jolly, 1969; Mazrui, 1978; Morrison, 1976; Simmons, 1974; Simmons and Alexander, 1975). However, the outcomes of the relationship between politics and higher education in post-colonial Africa have not been documented extensively. This paper helps to remedy this deficiency by examining the functional relationship between the national level of leadership in Tanzania and the nation's only university, the University of Dar es Salaam. Julius K. Nyerere, the President of Tanzania since its inception, and the ruling party have attempted to accomplish decolonization, restructure the educational system, and promote rural development

Idi Amin's brutal regime in Uganda presented a series of unique and complicated dilemmas for American policymakers. Despite its stated commitment to the cause of human rights, the administration of President Jimmy Carter opposed the imposition of economic sanctions against Uganda. Congress, however, determined that the levels of atrocity and repression which marked Amin's dictatorship warranted a new foreign policy approach. In addition, by providing another example of changing executive-legislative relations in foreign policy, the October 10, 1978, embargo of United States' trade with Uganda established new precedents in America's commitment to human rights.

Amin came to power in Uganda as a result of a 1971 coup against President Milton Obote. During his eight-year regime, over 100,000 people were murdered and thousands of others were expelled (U.S. Congress, House, Subcommittee on Africa [hereafter U.S. Congress, House], 1978: 5; International Commission of Jurists, 1977). A number of Amin's victims received worldwide press attention. Two Americans, Nicholas Stroh, a thirty-three year old journalist, and Robert Siedele, a forty-six year old lecturer, were brutally killed in 1971. The expulsion of the Asians from Uganda in 1972 attracted international attention. An El Al jetliner hijacked in July 4, 1976, again thrust Uganda into the headlines. In the aftermath of the daring Israeli raid to rescue the hostages at Entebbe airport in Kampala, the Ugandan authorities murdered Mrs. Dora Bloch, a seventy year old passenger who had been removed to a hospital. The 1977 murder of Ugandan Anglican Archbishop Janai Luwuum, together with two government officials, was condemned throughout the world. This event prompted Senator Clifford Case (R-NJ) to introduce Senate Resolution 175, expressing the sense of the Senate that the regime in Uganda should be condemned.

The Chinese presence in Black Africa has grown enormously in the last five years and is triggering a dangerous new Great Power scramble for strategic positions.

In the long run, its effect may be to repartition the continent into new ideological and economic spheres of influence. It is forcing the Great Powers to focus aid on areas of strategic value rather than on regions of greatest human need. It is also compelling communist and capitalist powers to overlook racial and social injustice in order to preserve their strategic stakes.

Although the United States agreed to honor both the 1963 UN embargo on arms deliveries to South Africa and the 1966 arms embargo on Rhodesia, vast quantities of U.S. arms have been supplied to the two countries through a variety of clandestine and semi-legal channels. These deliveries have enabled the minority governments of Pretoria and Salisbury to intensify their control over the black majority and resist what they perceive as half-hearted calls for change on the part of U.S. officials.

Alice Walker and former Democratic Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado have something in common. Both advocate the cessation of female circumcision in African countries, and both tout themselves as feminists, though Walker, borrowing from African American culture, prefers to be labeled as a womanist. What the elders had in mind when they described young African American women as “womanish,” or as “omanish,” the eclipsed form of that same word, was that such girls were too fast, or that they obtruded upon areas that were not their business. While Schroeder cannot properly be called a womanist (to do so would be to misapply the term), one can say that, similar to Alice Walker, Schroeder is putting herself into other people’s business, specifically the business of female circumcision in African communities.

Throughout nearly twenty years of often tumultuous post-colonial history, Nigerian foreign policy has been surprisingly consistent. It may be too early to judge the capabilities and determination of the new civilian government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, but if the past is any guide, the basic concerns of Nigerian foreign policy are not likely to change.

Future decisions will probably continue to reflect the pursuit of three vital and interrelated domestic objectives: to build greater national unity by overcoming deep regional, ethnic, and religious differences; to achieve rapid economic development for a nation that, despite great oil wealth, has a per-capita income of less than $400; and to complete the process of full self-determination which has yet to encompass all sectors of the modern economy. Among the three, the quest for national integration has been of paramount concern.

With few exceptions, economic development in the African states has generally been elusive and the people in sub-Saharan Africa remain among the poorest in the world. From 1970 to 1990, GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa grew in real terms by only US$80 and the region’s aggregate GNP per capita was only US$340 in 1990. In terms of annual percentage change, the region registered a 1.8 percent annual growth from 1970-77, an annual decline of 3.0 percent from 1978-84, and an annual increase of 2.4 percent from 1985-90. However, for the entire period of 1970-90, growth was statistically insignificant. During the period 1980-92 the annual growth rate of GNP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa was recorded as -1.83.

This paper represents an essay into Africanist social history and experimental biography. Thirteen years ago the pages of this journal carried a debate between Ali Mazrui and Hailu Habtu concerning Western and Semitic (Arab and Jewish) cultural influences in subsaharan Africa. In response to Professor Mazrui’s argument on the Jewish religious, metaphorical, economic, and political impact on Black Africa (foreshadowing Greco-Roman and Islamic influences), Professor Habtu vigorously rejected the “hidden premise...of an African cultural vacuum, or near-vacuum, destined to be filled by ‘universalistic’ civilizations.”