This article examines discourses and cinematic representations of modernity in two documentary films by the Cameroonian director Jean-Marie Teno. In the first of these films, A Trip to the Country (2000), Teno investigates how ideals and aspirations of modernity as a state-sponsored project in Cameroon have their roots in the colonial period, and his film is characterized by a strong sense of anxiety linked to the turn of the millennium. In the second, Sacred Places (2009), modernity is given a different affective resonance and is linked to the pleasure of cinematic consumption in Ouagadougou as Teno situates African cinema in relation to its “brother,” the djembe drum. I argue here that a shift occurs between these two films and their affective engagements with modernity; this is a transition from a sense of millennial anxiety to a thematics of what I call “cinematic kinship.” I ultimately suggest that this shift allows Teno to outline new social roles for the African filmmaker as well as new relationships between African cinema and local publics.

The recent racial reckoning has challenged scholars to recover Black voices that have been erased from historical accounts. This essay is my reflections on the challenges I faced in conducting research on African voices in politically and racially charged settings in Lesotho and South Africa over the past half century. After the political atmosphere began changing in South Africa in 1990, I served the individuals and communities I write about by rectifying historical injustices such as returning a holy relic to a religious group, the Israelites, and facilitating the return of remains of Nontetha Nkwenkwe from a pauper’s grave in Pretoria to her home.

Nature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus on the tropes of “lady nature,” nostalgia, and dystopia in Zulu writer Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s Imvunge Yemvelo to explore the complex ways in which these tropes test the normative epistemes of ecological crises. Beyond rejecting imperial distortions of indigenous environmentalism, Ntuli’s poems re-center local knowledge of nature in understanding its relationship with humans. That knowledge subverts epistemic structures of colonial conservation, revising and re-visioning racially geo-politicized knowledge hierarchies.

Few would dispute the claim that traditional medical practitioners provide most of the health care in Africa today. The reasons for this are several and include the availability and accessibility of traditional practitioners to the mass of people and faith in their skills. In recent years much discussion has centered on the issue of integrating traditional practitioners into the modern health care delivery system (Good, 1977). Strong arguments have been mustered on either side of this question, and they are often presented with heated emotion. The degree and level of integration is also hotly disputed, and shades of opinion range from advocating dialogue between the two systems to proposing that traditional practitioners be “legitimized” and integrated into the modern health care delivery system. Most opinions on this broad subject area have been publicly voiced or written by those whose culture reference is western. We know very little about how traditional practitioners feel about the matter.

The year 1977 was a good one for Marxism-Leninism in Africa, for in the space of a few months, three important countries officially embraced that ideology. Ethiopia did so after three years of revolutionary upheaval, and in the wake of a shoot-out in the old imperial palace, during which Mengistu Haile Mariam managed to eliminate the more moderate members of the ruling military committee. In Angola and Mozambique, which had gained independence from Portugal less than two years earlier, Marxism-Leninism was officially adopted at party congresses which decided to transform the pre-independence liberation movements into orthodox vanguard parties.

The end of the cold war has made democratization, and its barest essential component elections, imperative for all nondemocratic forms of government. This is to be expected, given the dismal failure of the socialist alternative even in the first socialist country, the former Soviet Union. The United States, which is not only the foremost democracy in the world but also the only superpower, has been in the vanguard of democracy salesmanship. Africa, the continent with the least democratic space, has not been left out, as witnessed by President Bill Clinton’s unprecedented tour of the continent in March 1998.

Understandably, Nigeria, arguably the most important country in Africa, was left out of the tour, since it was then under the obnoxious, undemocratic, and oppressive military regime of the late General Sani Abacha.

Dr. Ezekiel Mphahlele spoke at the end of the session yesterday, and since there is considerable misunderstanding about at least one of the points he made, he has offered to make a clarification this morning.

Yesterday I got the impression that people left the meeting under the impression that I was trying to be an iconoclast and trying to bust things up. I am always considered to be a bull in a china shop. But far be it from me to want to bust people’s games up. Just before I spoke, my longstanding friend from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Donatus Nwoga, said the same things in so many words, expressing a wish that he could be back home.

Since the enforcement of 1983 constitution, several years have passed. The 1983 constitution is the third constitution since the founding of the Union of South Africa in 1910. By observing the history of the constitutional development in more than seventy years in South Africa and the content of the current South African constitution, it is not difficult to find out that the constitution, as a fundamental state law, is an important weapon of racism. South Africa's white regime consistandy upholds and consolidates its racist rule by adopting and implementing constitutions. The aim of this article is to analyze and expose the essence of the South African racist system in mis aspect.

An Arab leadership within the Third World has been emerging since 1973. Since that year, major diplomatic initiatives on a wide range of issues relevant to the third World have in fact originated from the Arabs. Countries of the Third World are basically producers of raw materials and other primary commodities. The whole struggle for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) has to some extent been led by the Arabs. Some Third World causes have been championed by some Arab countries, and have been pushed by them into the main arenas of international diplomacy. Algeria virtually initiated the raw materials debate at the United Nations in 1974. This was followed by the special session of the General Assembly in 1975. The 1970s witnessed the beginning of a serious consideration of the issue of restructuring the world economy.

Over the nine years since the overthrow of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s regime in February 1966, Ghana has come under three different governments: that of the National Liberation Council (February 1966 to October 1969), the Progress government (late 1969 to January 1972), and the government of the National Redemption Council (1972– ). Various views have been expressed in journals and magazines where writers have tried to depict the country’s foreign policy under the different regimes. For instance, Ruth First said that the government of the National Liberation Council (NLC) pursued a pro-West policy, and the Times (London) said a day after the coup d’etat of 24 February 1966 that Ghana had “swung back to reliance on the West.” William Gutteridge, however, maintained that the NLC government had restored a degree of neutralism to the country’s foreign policy rather than abandon the policy of nonalignment and neutralism in entirety. He added that the NLC had opted for more modest pan-African policies following Nkrumah’s pan-African excesses. Other people accused the NLC government of supporting the colonialists in Africa by refusing to allow freedom fighters the opportunity to meet and organize from within Ghana.

– “One of the most pressing problems of the world today–the plight of over 5 million refugees in Africa”

– “Every other refugee in the world is an African”

– “The refugee tragedy in Africa is a human tragedy”

– “The largest refugee problem on the continent is in the Horn of Africa”

The quotations above succinctly describe the refugee situation in Africa, in general, and especially in the Horn of Africa. In recent years, the Horn of Africa has been experiencing a rapidly worsening refugee situation. In 1979, the Organization of African United indicated that Africa, apart from “becoming the continent with the largest number of least developed countries and harbouring the largest number of the most economically backward regions in the world–constituting the periphery of the periphery in the international economic system, Africa is ... becoming the continent with largest number of refugees who constitute more than 40 per cent of the world refugee population.” The situation has since worsened as the number of refugees has reached, perhaps passed, the 5 million mark.

Gengenbach, Comé, and Nhabinde historicize women’s responses to an agricultural “value chain” in Zavala, Mozambique. Inspired by the Green Revolution for Africa (GR4A), the initiative aims to reduce hunger by converting cassava to industrial use for SABMiller’s Impala beer. Women chafed at the proposed remaking of an agrarian foodway long anchored by this edible commodity. Cassava’s inseparable dietary and market value in precolonial times intensified under Portuguese rule even as colonizers disdained it as a feminine “subsistence” crop and then claimed its commercial potential. Weaponizing this gendered binary yet needing women’s support, the Impala scheme has struggled to achieve GR4A food security goals.

In spite of the growing recognition of the agency of youths in volatile societies, youths continue to be an under-utilized resource in conflict management. Thus, drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Nigeria, Adzande examines how youths are contributing to the management of farmer-herder conflicts. This study shows that youths are involved in informal policing as community vigilantes, as well as participating in mediation and the enforcement of restorative justice. A new initiative which is yet to be evaluated is the community-based security architecture in which youths can work with other actors to facilitate early warning, prevention, and resolution of conflicts between farmers and herders.

It is a time-worn cliché that music is an important constituent element of African culture closely associated and integrated with the daily living of the African—a cliché that would not merit repetition here were it not for the fact that this statement has rarely been applied to political activities in African societies. Ethnographers and ethnomusicologists have reported the music and the music making of various tribes in relation to religion, the “rites de passage,” agriculture, work, and social life, but the use of music as an agent of political expression has received scant attention.

In a pioneer study of African music von Hornbostel wrote: “In the life of so-called primitive man, and especially of the African Negroes, music and dance have quite different and incomparably greater significance than with us. … Music is neither reproduction (of a ‘piece of music’ as an existing object) nor production (of a new object), it is the life of a living spirit working within those who dance and sing” (Hornbostel 1928: 32). The spirit animating all Africans today is one of independence from colonialism, freedom, and nationalism. In a paper pregnant with ideas and suggestions for new approaches in the study of African music, William Bascom has written: “It is my belief that we would better understand change in political beliefs if we knew more about the way in which music, the dance, or any other forms of traditional behavior develop, and of how they are modified by the outside influences with which they are brought in contact.” (Bascom 1959: 7) It is the purpose of this paper to examine and assess the function and role of African music in contemporary political movements with special attention to the repertory of songs.

I remember that it was a Monday. I had been running with my partner over lunch time and we had just returned to my office in town. The doorbell rang and standing outside were about nine policemen and women. Demanding entry, one of the senior officers brandished a search warrant for “pornographic material.”

I was so angry I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had been targeted simply because I worked for the national Zimbabwean lesbian and gay organization. Furthermore, the police had no broader agenda other than to intimidate and harass me under the pretext of searching for pornography.

Before analysing the success or failure of the single-party state in Africa, it is necessary to define the terms of success and failure of a political system. First, it must be emphasized that the prolonged existence of a regime does not prove its success nor that its overthrow is necessarily a result of its failure. Sometimes cruel, corrupt, and inefficient governments survive for decades while reform-minded, popular governments are overthrown within months. Franco's Spain, for example, has achieved little success in the realm of social and economic progress, although it has succeeded in surviving for more than thirty years. Dubcek's Czechoslovakia, although of short duration, is not necessarily a failure when viewed in historical perspective. If, then, the longevity of a regime has no bearing on its success or failure, what criteria can be employed in making an evaluation of one-party states in Africa? The three criteria which seem relevant for such an evaluation are those of stability, economic development, and nation-building. This paper, therefore, will be devoted to a comparison of the single-party state with Western-style multiparty systems and with military dictatorships , focusing on the three criteria mentioned above. At the same time, the paper will attempt to answer the question: does a single-party state succeed or fail in its performance because of its single-party structure?