Europe’s immigrant populations are often represented on screen by both European and immigrant filmmakers as marginalized in the violent neighborhoods of peripheral urban areas in Paris, Lyon, London, and elsewhere. The film Les Barons (Nabil Ben Yadir, 2009) seeks to counter such stereotypes. The protagonists of Les Barons are multilingual, multicultural young men with proud ties to their families and the ability, at the same time, to straddle cultural registers and global perspectives as they live their cosmopolitan Dasein, or “Being-in-the-world.”

Farmers, agricultural scientists and politicians have become very aware of the need to increase agricultural productivity in Africa. While there has been a recognition of diverse factors that can contribute to increased productivity, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the need to change farm technology. Although the traditional farming system might have satisfied the needs of peasant society, it has not been able to supply the needs of present day Africa. In most African countries, food production has fallen behind demand (Food and Agricultural Organization, 1974). Thus, there has been a great deal of effort to change the farming practices of the peasants through the introduction of new and/or improved farm technology.

Numerous recommendations have emerged from agricultural research stations, universities and international research institutes in Africa, but the majority of African farming continue to rely on their traditional farming practices. It is therefore not surprising that the Association for the Advancement of Agricultural Sciences in Africa (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1975: iii) has concluded: “The lag between knowledge and practice is usually long, but in some parts of Africa it has seemed to be infinite. The value of research findings, however great, remains potential only until they are transmitted to him who will use them in production practices.” As a result of the failure to improve the farmers practices of African peasants, most African countries continue to spend a substantial amount of their earnings on importation of food (Monu, forthcoming).

This paper takes the view that the non-adoption of recommended farm practices in Africa is attributable in part to the strategy adopted in the introduction of farm practices and the research results which have legitimized this strategy. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to review the strategy commonly practiced in Africa and the research associated with it to point out their shortcomings. In addition, the paper suggests an alternative strategy and research approach.

An examination of personal diaries kept by Mambila people in Somié village, Cameroon, shows that everyday occurrences and small events, whose importance may have been overlooked at the time and which were forgotten soon after they took place, can be understood, in retrospect, as part of a larger struggle for power in a small Cameroonian chieftancy. This article examines the written accounts of some of these events in the context of diary narratives about community disputes, and it provides a model for the use of diaries and other personal records to illuminate the complexity of decision-making processes in the wider African context.

Based on an analysis of original social network data collected from 407 households in an urban community in Northern Nigeria, this article evaluates whether patronage relationships between households have consequences for children's educational attainment. A “social resources” perspective suggests that patronage ties may serve as a form of social capital that activates upward social mobility for entire families, thereby yielding more than simple transitory returns on social connections. An alternative “social constraints” perspective suggests that patronage ties may have no effects (or negative effects) on the schooling of clients' children, since patron-clientage reflects prevailing social inequalities and exists for reasons other than the promotion of dynastic mobility among clients and their families. In the case study reported in this article, the latter pattern holds, and the results are interpreted with reference to the historical record, which shows that a latent function of patron-clientage is the preservation of intergenerational status immobility.

With the increasingly rapid urban growth in Nigeria in recent decades, and with its consequent multiplication and complication of the urban problems of traffic and transport, housing, health, and sanitation, the need for a more purposeful planning and management of cities has come to attract increased public policy attention. The institutional and organizational setting for city planning and management, particularly the role of municipal governments in these activities, still remain colonial and therefore ill-suited to the demands of present urban developments. City planning and management responsibilities are so fragmented among so many institutions and organizations that the municipal local governments have had very little authority over what happens in the city.

The overlapping responsibilities of the various institutions make for conflicts and the net result is general inefficiency in the planning and management of many cities. The recent (1976) Local Government Reforms which aimed at decentralizing some functions from the state and federal governments to local governments do not seem to have altered the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and city management matters.

The aim of this paper is to put the origin of the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and management into political and historical perspective. It also seeks to argue that until city planning and management responsibilities are centralized on strong, autonomous municipal governments, headed by popularly elected urban chief executives, the present chaos in Nigerian cities is likely to continue.

An impressive feature of modern Africa is the rise of many new towns. The problems of urban unemployment, education, planning, development, and social welfare hold the attention of many Africans and Africanists; there is a wide range of urban topics worthy of study. My purpose here, however, is to speculate on the location, the growth, and the modernization of new African cities. To be brief, and to exclude cities like Cairo and Cape Town which have existed for centuries, I shall deal only with middle Africa.

It is well known that there were only a few urban centers in middle Africa in pre-colonial times: Ibadan and other Yoruba towns in Nigeria, Sudanic centers such as Kano and Timbuktu, Aksum and later Ethiopian towns, East Coast trade centers like Mombasa, and vanished cities like Zimbabwe are examples (Steel 1961).

One result of European contact and colonialism was the establishment of small coastal trading centers. Some were temporary trading posts, others surf ports that flourished for decades or centuries before declining. And a few persisted and grew into modern cities. Often a decision as to which would be an administrative center, a starting point for a railway, or the site for an improved harbor started a process of rapid growth for the favored centers and of eventual decline for the others.

In an interview in Sight and Sound John Akomfrah remarks that “there is the myth of African Cinema and there is the reality of it. The myth is that it is largely made by people who live and work in Africa—but my sense is that the thing is much more fluid than that.… African Cinema is a film world in search of both a constituency and a community, and it realises tfiat it is potentially a borderless cinema” (Givanni 1995: 39). Akomfrah's statement underscores the existence of slippage between transnational and continental articulations of Africa, opening the debate around the nature of the relationship between Africa as origin and African diasporic identities.

Visions of Africa created by filmmakers on the shores of the Black Atlantic undeniably challenge monolithic constructions of origin and authenticity. This paper examines the nature of this challenge through an investigation of the aesthetic and ideological projects of three films: Soleil O (Med Hondo, Mauritania/France, 1970); Testament (John Akomfrah, Ghana/UK, 1988) and Ye Wonz Maibel/Deluge (Salem Mekuria, Ethiopia, 1997). Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that although each film possesses a divergent connection to Africa, all three probe the slippage between personal and national histories as a restorative force in redefining contexts of origin and identity.

This article examines the effects of the post-2002 sociopolitical crisis in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, on urban and peri-urban agriculture. Based on the case study of Abidjan, it argues for a conceptualization of sustainability that includes social as well as environmental dimensions and focuses on coping strategies of producers and merchants. In Abidjan, these strategies included internal migration within the city and its periphery, the use of organic fertilizers, and changes in market structure. The study illustrates how such strategies allowed producers to continue to supply produce to the market, despite the difficulties of war.

This article documents some of the forms of sociality engendered by the massive and growing presence of private security guards around Nairobi, Kenya. A focus on violence and the logic of an ideal of the use of violence in critical security studies literature obfuscates these networks in a similar way to idealizations of public space and the public sphere in anthropological literature on private security and residential enclaves. By looking at the close ties guards maintain with their homes in rural areas of Nairobi and the associations they make with people such as hawkers, it becomes clear that their presence in the city is creating new sets of valuations and obligations all the time. These forms of sociality are not galvanized by the threat of violence that the guards evoke; rather, they are engendered alongside and at cross-currents to the idealized, securitized landscape.

While salsa dance is popularly, and now globally, understood to be a symbol and expression of Latin identity, its adoption in non-Latin contexts has produced new meanings and cultural configurations. This is particularly the case in West Africa, where salsa is not only catching on among urban youth, but is becoming understood and approached from an African perspective. This article explores the ways in which salsa dance in Ghana serves as an innovative, embodied expression of a contemporary, pan-African identity. This is seen in Ghanaian dancers’ ideological reinvigoration of salsa’s African history and in the physical incorporation of local styles and presentations. Salsa in Ghana is recast through global networks, which in turn contributes to its global character while refashioning it to better suit local motives and desires. Thus, rather than emphasizing salsa’s African roots alone, dancers in Ghana equally engage with the complex routes of the dance.

Introduction

While independence negotiations in the Congo were succinct, decolonization was a long and tortuous process. Indeed, in some respects it continues today, at least in the eyes of many people in eastern Congo, who feel that the formal demands of the colonial state are reflected in the informal impositions of the current state—and of neighboring states. Certainly many Congolese today feel that they have no adequate state structure to address their collective needs as a people, or to represent them on an international stage, or even to protect them from invasion, extraction, and occupation. Lacking effective state structures to protect their interests is not new: the colonial state in the Congo was marked by its intrusive presence in mobilizing labor, requiring crop production, and imposing taxes, among many other demands. But the character of life in the Congo today does not reflect anyone's vision of what independence would bring. At best, the last fifty years can be seen as a process of an aborted decolonization, and in some ways the violence now present in the Congo can be seen as the result of the unfulfilled aspirations of decolonization—or as the deferred violence of a decolonization gone awry (see Newbury 2009).

Set in a context where material accumulation is valorized, this article analyzes narratives of sika bone (bad money) as expressions of economic uncertainty by market women operating in an era of increased financialization. The ethnographic evidence supports previous arguments about the impact of economic change in this millennium, a change that fosters both rationality and superstition in equal measure. Salifu proposes that sika bone indicates a sense of uncertainty fostered by economic change in the supply of cash and formal credit, a sentiment that is expressed by applying old notions about occultic means of accumulation to new and equally enigmatic circumstances.

In their study of personal rule in black Africa, Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg maintain that the most important factors shaping contemporary African politics are the political skills, orientations, and leadership styles of African heads of state. They assert that African nations as yet lack well-developed political institutions and hold that in the absence of such institutions, the politics of personal rule are much more decisive in shaping the character and continuity of African regimes than any economic, social, or cultural factors. As a logical outcome of these contentions, Jackson and Rosberg assert that, far from being aberrations, succession crises are an integral feature of personalistic politics. Because of the decisive influence of the leader’s abilities and orientations, his death or removal may very well bring about fundamental changes in the regime over which he presided.

Over the years, literary scholars have engaged in heated debates on the role literary artists should play in society. In the African context, this debate has been championed by scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, and Okot p’ Bitek, among others. The central bone of contention has always been the question of self-narration. How should African writers narrate the African story (-ies) against the backdrop of slavery, colonialism, and neoliberal imperialism? In the context of these debates, this article seeks to read A Fine Madness by the Zimbabwean writer Mashingaidze Gomo (2010) as a socially and politically engaged text.

This paper focuses primarily on current debates regarding the place of female circumcision in Third World and western feminist discourse. In examining these debates, I will also draw from its fictional and autobiographical depictions as presented and discussed in contemporary African literature. While female circumcision (FC) is not practiced solely in Africa, I will be limiting my analysis to the effects of the practice within the continent. The paper is divided into three sections. Part one places the discussion on FC within current feminist discourse. Part two provides a historical and cultural background on the practice. The final section wades into the debate on FC and African Feminism.

Chandra Mohanty, in her article “Under Western Eyes,” presents a rather intriguing “Third World Woman’s” argument, reflecting as well something of the debate on African feminism.