In 1998, the American Association of Colleges and Universities raised the question of what higher education could do to prepare graduates to address “the legacies of racism and the opportunities for racial reconciliation in the United States.” One of the most powerful and pedagogically rich approaches to facilitate learning about race, racial identity, and the impact of racism in America today is study abroad in Africa. With a history that includes dynasties and empires; the capture and enslavement of Africans and the transatlantic slave trade; and the structures of colonialism, neocolonialism, and apartheid (which have often been conceptualized as parallel to the institutionalized racism of America), the continent of Africa can be a wonderful classroom for this type of learning. This is particularly the case when the location of study is West Africa, by most accounts where the majority of people of African descent living in the United States have ancestral ties. Visits to and interactions around the monuments to and symbols and physical remnants of the complex historical relationships between Europeans and Africans can be a catalyst for stimulating challenging but ultimately rewarding discussions and growth with regard to issues of race and racism.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

Coleridge

A contradiction hitherto not adequately examined exists between historical research and policy analysis in modern African studies. The more familiar difficulty between policy-makers, who want answers, and historians and social scientists, who find instead complexity and uncertainty, has been much discussed and is not pursued here. Rather, a more subtle tension operates in the work of those policy analysts who use historical research in their work, particularly when these analysts are government advisors in Africa.

History has always had an equivocal role in policy analysis. On one side, an important part of the profession embraces project evaluation and implementation analysis, both of which can involve historical research. In the former, the analyst tries to understand the impact of a project in terms of its past performance, while the latter uses past performance as the basis for improved design of future projects. On the other side, historical research is not considered an essential part of the analyst's graduate training, at least in the United States. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to find an American public policy school that required history alongside core courses in statistics, microeconomics, law, and political science. This ambivalence over the role of historical research is best illustrated by the unheeded calls analysts themselves have made and continue to make for more historical research in their own profession. In an essay on policy analysis familiar to many U.S.-trained analysts, the author opines “historical genesis is a much underplayed aspect of the analysis of social programs” and recommends that a more overtly historical perspective should inform policy analysis generally (Nelson, 1977: 152; Chapter 8).

This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the victim of various forms of violence, the most devastating of which is the violence of cultural and political conversion: externally and internally driven initiatives and processes intended to domesticate, harness, transform, alter, remodel, adapt, or reconstruct Africa and Africans through schools and universities to suit new ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking. As a result of such violence, educational systems have privileged mimicry and transformed epistemologies informed by partial theories to metanarratives of arrogance, superiority, and intolerance of creative differences. Even when clear alternatives are imagined to the current irrelevance in education, economic difficulties render their realization extremely difficult. Repressive states have perpetuated and capitalized upon this predicament by manipulating desperate academics into compliance and complicity with mediocrity. This article examines some epistemological consequences of such alienation and irrelevance and looks at their implications for theorizing Africa. It calls for a global conversation of universities and scholars in which Africa participates on its own terms, with the interests and concerns of ordinary Africans as its guiding principle.

Military mutinies are a serious threat to peace in Africa, as they may be a catalyst for large-scale civil violence. Unlike most studies that solely focus on the causes of military revolts, this article explores both cause and government response by examining a 1992 military sedition in Benin. Relying on interviews and government archives, Codjo uncovers the sources of the revolt and compares two consecutive administrations in their management of the crisis. The main takeaway is that presidential leadership style and antecedents of elite consensus on governance rules are sometimes critical in rallying support for a lasting solution to mutinies.

Lamenting the proliferation of factionalism in the Zimbabwe liberation movement during the 1970s, an observer once commented, “If you were to put two Zimbabweans on the moon and visited them the next day, you would find that they have formed three parties.” This observation was a criticism of splits and divisions that tended, some believed, to weaken the liberation movement.

Jane Guyer has clearly demonstrated in Marginal Gains (2004) that the ranking of people historically was linked to quantitative scales of money. Guyer's study focuses on the Igbo and Ibibio, two societies in which ranking was by achievement rather than ascription. How do ranking and money interface in other African societies with strong monarchical or centralized social systems? What impact does currency instability have on rank in such societies? This paper examines these questions. Focusing on the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Akan of Ghana, it evaluates the degree to which ranking has been affected by currency devaluation and economic instability since the mid-1980s.

With the onset of the twenty-first century, power distribution has become a key factor in African security. In western and southern Africa, power has become more concentrated and hierarchical, especially with the growing assertiveness of three regional powers, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and organizations (ECOWAS and SADC) which have the authority, salience and capability to mount and lead security operations. In contrast, in central and eastern Africa, anarchy remains prevalent and helps to explain the failure to enforce peace in both Rwanda and Somalia. The indigenization of peace enforcement in western and southern Africa has been accompanied by high levels of salience, as regional forces have struggled to prevent spillover of conflicts into their home countries. African forces have been more willing than the United Nations and other outsiders to accept the costs of “crossing the line,” taking sides, and enforcing peace. The record of peace enforcement and interventionism for humanitarian purposes has been mixed. For example, ECOMOG peace enforcement in Liberia and Sierra Leone prevented seizures of power and retribution and allowed peace-making to begin in which agreements were reached and implemented and in which elected governments came to power. On the other hand, ECOMOG committed its share of abuses and prolonged conflicts and humanitarian crises that could have been ended fairly quickly by force.

In 1913, a Special Commission Court in Sierra Leone saw a series of trials concerning members of the Human Leopard Society, and conflated this society with the regional Poro Society. This article examines one of those trials and unearths motivations for murder and questions of bias. With the reinvention of identity in the shadow of slavery, a nuanced and complicated picture emerges of the situation. Though more questions than answers are offered by the details of the case, this article problematizes Sierra Leone under British authority, and shows a nuanced snapshot of power struggles playing out in a murder trial.

Diabate examines images and news reports about rampant sexual permissiveness in Abidjan and its online environs. Attention to the visual dimension of this pleasure explosion highlights the presence of homines economici. Considering buyers of aphrodisiacs or butt/breast-enhancing products not as uninformed agents, but instead as rational actors who are sensitive to images leads makers and retailers to invest in branding and marketing. Thus, these images and products of pleasure have evolved in an economy of producing, promising, purchasing, and satisfying needs. Analyzing the entanglement of visuality and economic calculus enables a move beyond the moralizing tendency in discussions of pleasure.

Bulambuli district in eastern Uganda suffered chronic insecurity arising from cattle rustling since the 1960s and recently became awash with escalating land conflicts. Focusing on the disputed ownership over Plot 94 in Bunambutye, Khanakwa examines the intersection between cattle rustling, land conflicts, and peace-building. While scholarship often overlooks the relationship between livestock theft and social conflict, evidence from Bulambuli highlights the efforts of affected communities vis-à-vis the failures of local political leadership to resolve tensions. The Ugandan government’s failure to enforce recommendations in a timely manner speaks to the urgency of arbitration and cancellation of fraudulent land titles.

The notion of a subordinate African international system is widely posited and accepted. Political scientists have debated the means to, requirements for, and amount of political development in African states but have left largely unstudied the question of whether or not the African international system is developing--by which we mean developing a capacity to cope, by adapting to internal and external challenges. Our purpose in this essay is to study the development of the African system by examining the Organization of African Unity (OAU), with particular reference to its early years.

The focus on the OAU is easily justified. As the sole continental body to which each black African state belongs, its own development is a necessary, and almost sufficient, precondition of the system's development, if this system is also to be construed as subordinate in world politics. The possibility that an African system could develop through the creation of some other body seems remote, although it is not logically precluded. One could, of course, argue that an African system would be developing, were the states to continue the present trend of advancing their interests through more or less cohesive subregional or subpolitical groupings, such as the East African community or OCAM; but it would not be an African international system that was developing.

We see the failure of Pan-Africanism all across the continent in the face of crude nationalism. We see wide division between the mass of the poor and the high-consumption elites who are in control everywhere (Dumont 1969, pp. 80-83; Hunter 1967, p. 33). We see the continually expanding administrative structures. And we see the desperate passion for education at every level and in every country throughout sub-Saharan Africa (Ostheimer 1970, p. 103). Are these conditions not intimately linked in a single system which determines the common pattern? In this study we will suggest that they are, and we will set forth the chain of causality which leads inevitably from the last condition to the first.

In present-day Africa wealth consists primarily in the holding of the results of human investment. Those who have benefited from the largest amount of human investment, through the education system, for example, are the ones who derive the highest returns. The fact that we call their returns “salaries and perquisites” instead of something else is quite beside the point. The new elites who rule in Africa are usually identifiable as having had the largest amount of formal education in society. This high return on educational investment amounts to a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a system where education is state-financed on the basis of a regressive tax system.

The Seventh Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly Devoted to Development and International Co-operation, which ended on September 16, 1975, after round-the-clock negotiations between developing and developed nations, succeeded in producing a resolution which was adopted unanimously. The preamble of the resolution reaffirmed the General Assembly's intention “to eliminate injustice and inequality which afflict vast sections of humanity and to accelerate the development of developing countries” (U.N. General Assembly, 1975: 1). The resolution identified measures the international community could take to accelerate the pace of development. The Seventh Special Session is another indication of the developing world's determination to create a “New International Economic Order.” This article will discuss what is meant by this increasingly invoked phrase and examine the changing political realities which account for international economic issues becoming the dominant concern of bodies such as the United Nations. We will then analyze the decisions taken at the Seventh Special Session and discuss some of their possible implications for development in Africa.

The Seventh Special Session, which had been planned for almost two years, came only eighteen months after the General Assembly had convened in a Sixth Special Session to consider problems of raw materials and development. Two extraordinary sessions in such a short period of time (the first special sessions ever convened to discuss economic issues) demonstrate the seriousness of the economic crisis confronting the world.

The Sixth Special Session, convened in April 1974 on the initiative of President Houari Boumédienne of Algeria, met at a time of deepening economic turmoil.

Between the 1950s and the 1990s, Chinese enamelware products dominated kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms in the northern part of Nigeria. These were initially imported from China by European trading firms but later manufactured in Nigeria by Chinese-owned factories. Liu concludes that it was not only the immediately obvious “modern” advantages of the enamelware that enabled it to dominate northern Nigeria’s market, but it was also its integration into local, socio-cultural networks of meaning that granted it a significance far beyond its practical use. Such processes of integration further enabled enamelware to become an important component of local marriage customs and an essential possession for Hausa women.

When the phenomenon of military rule in Africa first attracted the attention of researchers, the thrust of inquiry was the explanation of the apparent anomaly of the coup d’etat. After years of effort, epitomized by Samuel Decalo’s work on Coups and Army Rule in Africa, a consensus seemed to have emerged that a general theory explaining military intervention could not be found. Scholarship thus turned its focus to the military as policymakers. This essay shall seek to do both — explain military intervention; and evaluate the performance of the military as policymakers. Nigeria, which is into its second epoch of military rule, provides an appropriate case study.