Over ten years have now elapsed since the then Government of Northern Nigeria, in what has since been represented as a major attack on the institution of Chieftancy per se (Dudley, 1968, and Whittaker, 1970), set in motion the procedure for a Commission of Enquiry into the financial affairs of the Kano Native Authority which resulted in the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Sir Muhammadu Sanusi, K.B.E., abdicating and going into voluntary exile at Azare, leaving his Emirate entirely and withdrawing to a life of religious seclusion.

Nothing has been published heretofore concerning the motives or the origins of this enquiry, other than the speculation of some scholars which have been based on only the most scanty corpus of material, but it would seem that, ten years after the event, and after so much water has flowed under the bridge, there would now be no impropriety in disclosing at least some of the broader aspects of the Enquiry as the Commissioner became aware of them. In particular, what has not been appreciated to date is that the fundamental element of the crisis when it occurred was really one of legitimacy.

When Felix Eboue made the observation quoted, it was already too late for France to effect any meaningful shift in colonial policy. When Charles Temple made his, British administration theory had already crystallized along the rigid lines for which Lugard had opted, and, in fact, it was against this very rigidity that Temple was inveighing when he wrote the book from which the quotation has been taken. The problem which each of these authorities was addressing, however, is not one that is applicable to the colonial context alone, or even, necessarily, at all. It is much more generally concerned with modernization and modernism, and especially with the dislocation of the traditional process which the unthinking application of modernistic norms invariably entails.

Studies on African sculpture serve as point of reference in this paper. Since a full analysis of African sculpture cannot easily be separated from its sociological, technological, and ideational contexts, and since sculpture itself presents only one aspect of wide-ranging but ill-defined artistic activities and aesthetic concepts, however, these other features obviously also need mention.

There is no attempt to review the recent work of individual scholars or to characterize particular models of approach or schools of thought; this would require a badly needed but much longer and circumstantial study. Rather the paper is limited to some general observations about the kinds of works students of African art have produced and some of the needs that seem to emerge from this inventory.

In the last twenty-five years a large quantity of studies on African art, written in English and several other European languages, have been published by ever-increasing numbers of anthropologists, art historians, critics, artists, musicologists, connoisseurs, collectors, and dealers. There are many reasons to be satisfied with the achievements. Students of African art now have specialized associations and exclusive journals besides the many journals that have always been receptive to articles on African art. There is now a book series specifically on African art (Indiana University Press, Traditional Arts of Africa) in addition to many other serials and museum publications that regularly include relevant inventories, surveys, and stylistic and cultural analyses. Specialists on African art have achieved tenured positions not only in museums but also in anthropology, art, and history of art departments. There is an endless succession of exhibitions, and major art museums have deigned to organize some of them. In brief, there is an international boom of African art studies. After decades of relative obscurity and neglect, the new importance of the field has now led to a kind of euphoria and complacency among many specialists. This is evidenced, for example, in book reviews, which are either excessively eulogistic or severe and overcritical, and also in the proliferation of generalizations and in the widespread acceptance of assumptions and working hypotheses as proven facts.

The transformation of peasant agriculture is a central concern of many African leaders. Since the population of most African countries is predominantly peasant, rural change is considered a requisite of national development. Several leaders have turned to the socialistic experiences of the Soviet Union and China for models of rural transformation. Some have seen in the idea of establishing rural socialist communities, a notion similar to that of the nineteenth century Russian Narodniki, an appropriate strategy for such transformation. They believe that such communities will involve the peasantry in new political and economic relationships of a sort which will improve the way of life of both rural and urban inhabitants. Among African adaptations are such entities as the Algerian socialist villages and the Tanzanian Ujamaa villages.

Tanzania's efforts to establish Ujamaa villages, in turn, have attracted attention throughout Africa and the Third World. The country formally committed itself to building a socialist state in the Arusha Declaration of early 1967. Major private industries were immediately taken over by the government. Leaders, however, realized that the key to their efforts would be the establishment of socialism in rural areas. In September of 1967 President Nyerere issued a policy paper titled “Socialism and Rural Development,” which proposed the creation of Ujamaa villages where people “lived and worked together for the good of all” (Nyerere, 1967b: 337-66). Since the majority of the peasants lived scattered on individual plots of land outside villages, people had to be moved together.

African socialism is the ideology of Africa. The purposes of this paper are to examine the meanings attached to this ideology by Africans and Africanists alike, to analyze and compare any perceptual differences which may exist among competing viewpoints, and, finally, to indicate areas of consensus or agreement emerging from such an analysis. The ideology of African socialism is investigated here under experimental circumstances. Employing Q technique, 53 Africans and Africanists were asked to sort 75 statements pertinent to African socialism made by African leaders along an opinion continuum. Data were inter-correlated and factor-analyzed, producing three factors or patterns of perceptions toward African socialism, respectively described as pragmatic, scientific, and internationalist. Respondents aligned with all three viewpoints mention Julius Nyerere of Tanzania as their ideal type of African socialist leader. The inference is that Nyerere serves as a condensation symbol for persons of differing ideological persuasions.

Ideology is an important aspect of any political culture. Political culture is part of the general cultural system, and according to Parsons (1964: 57-58), the individual is involved in three possible ways: by his interest in it, by his participation in it, and by his individual value orientation or political beliefs. Verba (1966: 513) observes that the political culture

consists of the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which defines the situation in which political action takes place. It provides the subjective orientation to politics.

At a general level of analysis, ideologies embody issues of importance to individuals or groups. As a working definition of political ideology, Dion (1959: 49) has suggested that it may be regarded as a “more or less integrated system of values and norms noted in society, which individuals and groups project on the political plane in order to promote the aspirations they have come to value in social life.”

This is an essay offering some random thoughts on the progress that has been made on research in African history since the early 1960s and what the writer sees as the research tasks that must still be addressed in future. In this introductory portion, a number of general issues are raised about the current state of the craft. It is a section in which the ground is cleared, as it were, for the main task of the paper which is dealt with in the subsequent three sections. There, an attempt will be made to come to grips with the most topical findings of the research that has gone on, and to point out the gaps that have yet to be filled, in the main sub-disciplines of political, economic, and social history. The examples used to illustrate the argument have been largely drawn from east, central, and southern Africa, this being the part of the continent with whose history the writer is most familiar. Furthermore, being neither original nor empirically based, this essay is essentially a review of work others have done on various facets of African history. While assessing that work, it should nonetheless also serve as a pointer to areas of investigation that seem not to have received adequate attention, areas to which effort might well be directed in future.

It should be noted, to begin with, that historians of Africa have been extremely good at asking new questions of their discipline and its sources. The result is that African historiography has been characterized by different traditions of historical inquiry and knowledge (Zeleza, 1983:9-42). In other words, in a bid to enhance our conceptual understanding of past African experience, historians have had recourse to one paradigm or framework of analysis or another, to the extent of making possibilities seem endless. All this has been generally viewed as a healthy development, but it is one which poses a serious challenge to one called upon to identify and offer informed opinion on the research tasks to which future attention should be directed.

In their study of the process of individual modernity in six less developed countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Inkeles and Smith (1974) reported that urbanization was of little or no consequence as a predictor variable. McClelland (1976: 161) has described this finding as “a shock to some sociologists … who have argued that it is the city above all which makes men modern.” Lerner (1965) and Hoselitz (1962) were among such sociologists who assigned a preeminent position to urbanization among factors accounting for modernization in the less developed countries. Lerner (1965), in particular, argued that in a system of causal indicators, the developmental sequence was from urbanization to literacy to communication and thence to political participation. Support for this conception of the national development process has been reported by McCrone and Cnudde (1967), Akler (1966), Smith (1969), and Sigelman (1971), among others.

Several other researchers have, however, reported, as did Inkeles and Smith (1974), that urbanization no longer holds such an important position in the national development process, if in fact it ever did hold such a position in the past (Schramm and Ruggels, 1967; Golding, 1974; Edeani, 1977) and Lerner (1976) himself has conceded that these empirical challenges to his once influential findings may well be valid. Schramm and Ruggels (1967) argue that the spread of transistor radios, roads, and rapid transportation have eroded any influences which urbanization might have had on the growth of literacy and the mass media as Lerner contended, since the data which formed the basis of Lerner's conclusions were collected as far back as September 1950 when these media and transportation developments in the Third World had not become so important. Golding (1974) states that Lerner's research and others like it disregarded the influences of colonialism, international news and media organizations, and the relationship between traditional communication channels and the new media on the development of the Third World. Also, Edeani (1977) reports that, contrary to Lerner's stand, urbanization is a function of economic development and mass communication development.

This article discusses the traditional amd modern literary influences in Okot p'Bitek's poetry. It must be borne in mind, however, that the question of influences is very complicated because it is difficult to pin down an influence to a particular source. If those sources have become assimilated into an integral whole, it is difficult to sort them out—to know where the modern ends and the traditional begins, or where the Western ends and the African begins. Therefore, no attempt will be made to show that the modern and traditional influences are mutually exclusive. As with all aspects of life, there are bound to be overlaps, and this kind of overlap cannot be any more expected than in the work of a poet with the diverse kinds of experiences of p'Bitek.

A brief survey of his background is illumniating. Okot p'Bitek is an Acholi from Uganda. His father, Opii Jebedyo, was a teacher from the pa-Cua clan of the Patiko chiefdom and his mother, Lacwaa Cerina, came from the Palaro chiefdom. p'Bitek (1973: 21) has repeatedly testified to his early interest in oral literature and his mother's influence in forming that interest:

…my interest in African literature…[was] sparked by my mother's songs and the stories that my father performed around the evening fire.

The title, Song of Lawino, is derived from his mother's name and confirms that his mother, as a composer and singer, taught him many of the songs that he enjoyed throughout his life and used in many aspects of his varied career.

Like most West African countries, Nigeria abounds in traditional associations or societies often referred to erroneously as “secret” societies. Secret societies (according to a dictionary of social science [Gould and Kolb, 1964: 642]) are those associations in which secret rituals, symbols, signs, medicines, as well as other material paraphernalia make up the main part of their raison d'être and gain psychological significance through being concealed. In the same vein, Hammond (1971: 193) notes that membership in secret societies is limited to only a segment of the total eligible population; members focally protect the secrecy surrounding their rituals, secret rites that are believed to increase the supernatural powers of their members; and that non-initiates are usually permitted to learn just enough about them to be frightened, impressed, and, therefore, enticed to join them.

A closer examination, however, shows that, more than nuisance value, secret societies fulfill economic, social, and political functions similar to those of associations based primarily on age and sex. For example, Robert Lowie (1927) was fascinated by functional resemblances between West African secret societies and certain men's organizations among the Plains Indians in America. This led him to suspect that the state might be found latent in sodalities or “associations.”

In the particular case of most Nigerian associations, the esoteric basis of their activities sets them apart from others like medicine societies, that is, societies concerned with the practice of traditional methods of diagnosis and healing.

It has been said that, given the proper incentives, farmers in the developing world would “turn sand into gold” (Schultz, 1976: 5). This paper describes and discusses an instance which approximates just such a transformation. It examines the relationships between a shift in the economic base and concomitant social and institutional changes among the Anlo Ewe people of southeastern Ghana. Specifically, it examines changes in the organization of labor and access to resources that developed in response to agricultural intensification.

The data for this paper were gathered between 1970 and 1979 in the vicinity of Anloga (see map), a town of approximately 15,000 people in coastal southeastern Ghana. Anlo Ewe people have been settled in this area since about the mid-1600s. It is an area of sandy soil and sparse rainfall located on a narrow strip of coastal land between the ocean and a large saltwater lagoon. In their season, drought and flood have created difficulties for the Anlo for as long as they have been settled here.

Oral tradition indicates that the first representatives of what were ultimately to become patrilineal clans moved into the area from the east bringing with them an economy based on horticulture and hunting. Cattle, pigs and fowl were kept. Once settled, people began to fish in both the lagoon and the sea. Extensive trade with areas north of the lagoon has apparently always been a significant factor in the economy, with the Anlos trading fish, salt collected from the lagoon, and woven fabrics and mats for vegetable foods.

In traditional Africa stories belong to everyone. The story-tellers, griot or grandparent, repositories of wisdom, speak to the village. Children are there. Children participate. Furthermore, the art of storytelling is not confined to specialists. Although a griot may study for years to leam long, complicated epics and extensive genealogies, the villagers will know from childhood their tribal legends, and they can follow their own lines in family traditions. They can interact spontaneously with the song, dance, or dramatic recitation of the singer-narrator.

It was natural that when Western literary genres featuring the imposed European languages were integrated with the African oral tradition the narrative took on new form and expression. Some of today's internationally known African writers have created new forms of novels and short stories (not tales). In doing so they have used their own linguistic creations: “Nigerian” or “Ghanaian” English and “Negritude” French. Although Western readers were reluctant to accept such variation, many readers today find excellence in literature from Africa.

Nigeria's anglophone writers led the way in gaining international acclaim for their prose fiction. Chinua Achebe's landmark Things Fall Apart (1958) is still predominant, often the only novel written by a contemporary African novelist familiar to a general readership. Cyprian Ekwensi, a prolific writer of all varieties of prose fiction, got his start with Onitsha market literature. He wrote People of the City in 1954 and it was reissued in Britain in 1963. Hans Zell (Zell, Bundy and Coulon, 1983:383) considers it to be “the first contemporary African novel.”

Africa has considerable potential for developing its fishery resources. Some of the world's richest fishing grounds lie off the coasts of Mauritania, Angola, Morocco, Nigeria, and Senegal. At present, these fisheries are exploited mostly (sometimes almost exclusively) by foreign fishing fleets from Japan, South Korea, the USSR, and several European countries. Official statistics indicate that foreign fishing off West Africa accounted for 1.2 million metric tons in 1976, or roughly 2 percent of the total worldwide marine catch. A Senegalese official claimed (quite plausibly) that those figures were too conservative and that foreign fishing amounted to “at least three times” the official foreign catch (United States Department of Commerce [hereafter USDOC], 1976). In response to this dependence on foreign fishing, several African countries are attempting to develop their own fishing fleets. Nigeria, in particular, has been rapidly expanding its fleet during the last decade (Marine Fisheries Review, 1982). The Organization of African Unity emphasized fisheries development in its 1980 Plan of Action (South, 1983a: 68). African nations are attempting to challenge the Foreign fishing companies' dominant position. As this paper will show, these efforts are likely to increase indigenous participation in the fishing industry.

The issue of economic nationalism in the Third World has been widely discussed. It is frequently noted that Third World countries are now adopting aggressive policies toward foreign investors. Many countries require foreign investors to establish joint ventures in certain industries, to employ indigenous personnel, to share technology, and to construct local manufacturing and processing facilities.

Throughout his career, Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo has been searching for cinema; not African cinema, just Cinema. In order to explain properly this claim, the essay will first consider Bekolo’s work within the context of the ever-ongoing conversation regarding the framing and aesthetics of African and Third Cinemas. Second, for a closer perspective on what will be termed “neurotic cinema,” the essay will key on Bekolo’s latest effort, Naked Reality (2016), a purposely unfinished work that echoes absurdist theater, mimics frantic contemporary thought, and proposes that cinema should not yield finalized products because that may go against its very nature.

Historially two salient features characterized the educational system. It was racially segregated and education for the African majority was largely for exploitation. In this paper, I will review the main features of the educational system in colonial Zimbabwe; the legacy of that system and what the new African Government proposes to do to change it to fit the needs of the new Zimbabwe. The 1899 Education Ordinance had set up two separate systems of education, one for Whites and the other for Blacks. The Ordinance left African education entirely in the hands of Christian missionaries with the government giving small grants to mission schools, provided that these schools were kept open for a minimum of four hours a day, of which not less than two hours were to be devoted to industrial training.

The word “black,” referring to Africans and people of African descent, is essentially a social and political construction, historically articulated and contemporarily invented and reinvented. As a social and political category, the meaning of “black” varies through contestation over the term. Yet, in its dominant use in white American and European culture, “black” refers to a static set of trans-cultural and essentialized racial characteristics. What is “black” is “not white.” As Frantz Fanon reminds us, “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” Thus, “black” in relation to “white” is made different.

The Rhodesian settlement proposals of 1971 have been described by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as a just and honorable settlement, conferring advantages on Rhodesian Africans, measuring them not against an ideal solution, but against an indefinite continuation of the status quo in Rhodesia, and leading by a steady addition of Africans to the Rhodesian Parliament to majority rule.

Over the years, studies of materials about Africa, especially in the fields of religion, history, anthropology, culture, and sociology, have contributed to the reconstruction of the predominant modes of thought and reason that led to the rise of the people’s belief systems, values, and religious doctrines. Though limited in many ways and still in the most rudimentary stage, the study of African religion has helped in some ways in the understanding of the basis of thought and action which determine African cognitions and total experience, in other words, African consciousness of his universe, feeling, and understanding of the state of being. It is important that interest in the study of African religion should be sustained, for one is still confronted today–often by those who should know–with derisively cynical questions such as: Is there an African religion? What in fact is it if there is one? Isn’t it really the worship of ancestors? Is not African healing merely the practice of magic and mumbo-jumbo?

African agriculture needs to be transformed because of the persistent low productivity of the sector. Women play a major role in agriculture but are prevented from optimizing their performance due to socioeconomic factors such as lack of access to productive resources, deforestation, and air and water pollution. But the lack of women extension workers stands out as a major limitation. This paper highlights the plight of women farmers in Africa, using research results from Nigeria. Suggestions are made for improving female participation. These suggestions, the paper stresses, are viable only if the conditions of African women’s lives are improved. A careful implementation of these suggestions will hopefully transform African agriculture.

This paper addresses itself to the history of pluralistic medical systems in Ghana. Case studies of the systems (traditional and modern-scientific) as evolving traditions with unique premises and techniques will be discussed. Modes of medical institutionalization, recruitment, training, and allocation of resources will be explained. Finally, this paper will attempt to explain the nature of the interrelationship between the two medical orientations in terms of their consequences in health care. The essay will focus on how medical systems are used by consumers and how medical systems are created, maintained, and reformed by professional authorities.