The United Nations Women's Conference in Nairobi was the high point of official and unofficial attention to women in Africa in the entire International Decade for Women. The conference seemingly had a profound capacity to influence subsequent policies, programs, and organizational efforts to empower women. Yet the internationally derived economic crisis has had an even more profound effect on Tanzanian women's work and politics. Since independence, but particularly since the 1967 Arusha Declaration, Tanzania has made remarkable progress in extending access to education and health care facilities. As a result of crisis and structural adjustment policies, however, state budgetary investments have moved from social to productive sectors; budget redirection looms large in explanations of women's work and politics.

This paper is both a personal and an academic reflection on my work as a U.S.-trained Kenyan anthropologist directing a study-abroad program for American undergraduate students in Kenya. It is an attempt to address three main issues: First is to understand why students choose to come to Kenya and what they hope to achieve by studying here. Second is to get a sense of what kind of prior images and information these students have of Kenya and Africa and how this influences their interaction with Kenya. Third is to understand how I as a Kenyan anthropologist trained in America balance the tasks of cultural broker and teacher of students in Kenya as is demanded of my position as director of a study-abroad program.

All of us when we go to Africa acquire, sometimes systematically, more often haphazardly, mimeographed and printed documents which we store, often unused, hopefully to be used in the future. Scattered issues of journals, when added together, can make nearly complete collections.

Since the late 1970s, scholars, organizations, pressure groups, conferences, and governments have examined the brain drain phenomenon in Africa. More recently, brain gain, the antithesis of brain drain, has also attracted considerable attention. The focal point of the brain gain across the continent has been postapartheid South Africa, which has witnessed a large influx of professionals from other regions. Considering Africa as a whole, except for South Africa, the extant literature has overemphasized the debit side of the brain drain.

The National Consortium for Study in Africa (NCSA) was founded in 1994 by the then 15 National Resource Centers for African Language and Area Studies. The primary agenda of the NCSA is to promote high-quality and accessible study-abroad programs for North American students in Africa. In addressing this agenda the NCSA initial membership had a particular, but not exclusive, interest in programs at African universities for North American students. This particular bias develops out of a long-standing commitment on the part of National Resource Centers to work with peer institutions in Africa. African universities, their faculty, and their students are essential partners in collaborative initiatives in research, teaching, and project work, and in the continuing process of generating knowledge on Africa across the disciplines. Consequently, from its inception the NCSA has viewed its goal of expanding high-quality programming in Africa as a natural outgrowth and expansion of its members’ linkages with African universities.

A striking aspect of the on-going revolution in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau is the insistence on the need for the liberation of women to be an explicit and integral part of that process. “Liberation of women,” reads an oft-quoted statement of Samora Machel, FRELIMO president, “is a fundamental necessity for our revolution; a guarantee of its continuity and a precondition for victory.” In a similar vein, Amilcar Cabral, assassinated leader of PAIGC, used to state firmly that their revolution could not be successful unless it ensured the full participation of women, or, “In Guinea-Bissau we say that women are fighting two colonialisms; one against the Portuguese and the other against men.”

Post-war Sierra Leone has experienced a population explosion that has raised questions among rural farmers about the relationship between family size and poverty. Agricultural decline and the high cost of schooling are not prompting parents to articulate a desire for smaller families; rather, they highlight that the uncertainty around articulating the “right” number of children is unresolvable because the ability to send children to school is predicated on increasing agricultural outputs that decline precisely because population pressure has reduced soil fertility. Bolten and Marcantonio conclude that this renders family size the heart of a paradox, where there is no optimal number of children.

Studies of fake news have historically suffered from being primarily Western-centric and focusing on “news” emanating from formal media outlets. The Sahel has generated its own unique version of fake news, the authors refer to as Afrancaux News. Using nationwide public opinion surveys in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, open-source online forum ethnographic research, and postcolonial epistemological predispositions, the authors suggest that although other historical instantiations exist, the most prominent contemporary example of Afrancaux News can be seen in the fake news stories related to the French counterterrorism presence in the Sahel.

Mr. Chairman, I wish to express appreciation for the invitation to appear before the Committee. It is Congress that must take the lead to end what is essentially a “cover-up” of U.S. policy on southern Africa. The Congress must insist on

1. (1) a frank statement of the facts on the situation in South Africa,

2. (2) an open analysis of U.S. interests in that area,

3. (3) progress towards a therapeutic confrontation, discussion, debate, and analysis of what U.S. policy should be,

4. (4) change with a view towards developing an honest, sensible and rational U.S. policy—consistent with U.S. interests—towards South Africa.

Doing Western-type studies of Africa will always be problematic until we are able to wrest control of the paradigm from narrow Western objectives in order to satisfy the fundamental needs of Africa and not of the West. The late Cheikh Anta Diop, the greatest African scholar of the twentieth century, put forth the idea that Western scholars as a whole would find themselves unable to extricate their research from the intellectual interests of the West in order to serve the social and cultural aims of knowledge for Africa. Whether Cheikh Anta Diop was correct or not remains to be seen. However, from what we have already witnessed the most anti-African elements, whether in terms of the research priorities, projects, careers and programmatic orientations, structures, and objectives in the field, continue to have the most awesome hold on studies of Africa. The travesty is that it has lasted for so long.

In his article “Language and the Media in Zambia,” Graham Mytton (1978) points out that: “Radio is the supreme medium of communication in Zambia, and the only one reaching a majority of the population.” The Zambia Broadcasting Services provides two groups of programs, the “Home Service,” in English and the seven national Zambian languages, and the “General Service,” which is mostly in English, with a bit of programming in Bemba, Nyanja, and, until 1980, Shona and Ndebele, the latter two languages being directed at listeners in Zimbabwe. The first station in Central Africa to broadcast programs directed almost exclusively towards African listeners, this Lusaka-based operation was from the beginning embroiled in the controversy over which Zambian languages should be used in programming. Each of the seven national Zambian languages actually represent larger linguistic groupings, often consisting of fifteen or even twenty distinct languages or dialects (depending on the way language is defined in a given context). Nearly each of these subgroups represent ethnic identities, with their own cultures and philosophies. The clamor for greater representation on the airwaves has historically come from such smaller groups who feel passed over, or neglected, by official news and cultural programming. The radio service, as well as government officials, counter such demands by stating the nationalistic and nationalizing goals of unifying, rather than fragmenting, the country's numerous ethnic groups.

Migration debates tend to focus on the numbers of people moving, whether they are economic migrants or asylum seekers, deserving or not of protection. This categorization usually rests on national identity, necessitating simplified one-dimensional representations. Ndlovu uses a case study of Zimbabwean migrants memorializing Gukurahundi in Johannesburg to highlight the ways in which migration narratives can be more complex and how they may shift over time. She presents Gukurahundi and the formation of the MDC in Zimbabwe, along with xenophobic violence in South Africa, as examples of the ways that the meanings of national and ethnic identities are contested by the migrants and influenced by political events across time and space.

Africanist scholars continue to debate how best to frame Christian-Muslim encounters. Examining literary fiction that portrays interreligious conflict and dialogue in northern Nigeria, Suhr-Sytsma opens up an exchange between social scientists and Nigerian writers including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Uwem Akpan, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, and E. E. Sule. Suhr-Sytsma argues that, as social thinkers, Nigerian writers explore interreligious solidarity through forms of doubling and critique forms of sacrifice that authorize scapegoating. Consequently, contemporary Nigerian fiction raises fundamental questions not only about the relation of text to reality but also about the making and crossing of boundaries identified as religious.

Increasing attention has been paid to population growth in the Third World. Although it is commonly held that mortality decline has been responsible for the population increases that have occurred, in many instances fertility has contributed significantly to the population increases as well. Many traditional societies have relatively high fertility rates, but they are still often below the potential maximum. Fertility in these pre-modern societies has been held in check by health conditions of the society, by prolonged breastfeeding, and by sexual restraint, particularly after the birth of a child (Lesthaeghe, 1981: 3–23). The move from a traditional to a more modern society can mean increased health care and better nutritional status, both of which may improve the health of the mother and child and lead to increased fecundity and higher fertility. In addition, the relaxation of postnatal sexual abstinence and the decrease in the length of lactation which usually accompanies this transition can lead to shorter birth intervals and higher fertility levels. The time lag between the effects of fertility-increasing factors and the changes in values and norms which favor smaller family size allows rapid population growth to occur.

Evidence for this pattern of fertility increase can be found in many Third World countries (Nag, 1981). In Africa, for example, a rise in fertility during the beginning stages of modernization has been documented in Zaire (Romaniuk, 1980), Nigeria (Olusanya, 1969), and Sudan (Henin, 1969). In each case, the rise has been accounted for through the spread of social and economic change.

The passage of legislation late in 1971 which in effect caused the United States unilaterally to breach the United Nations sanctions against Southern Rhodesia surely constitutes one of the most shameful episodes in the recent conduct of our country's international affairs. One commentator quite correctly did not mince words in describing the action as a “chrome-plated treaty violation.” And yet, even today, it is doubtful whether any great numbers of American citizens realize that their government has broken its treaty obligations to an international institution which our country did most to initiate and to promote until very recent times. An especially saddening aspect of the affair is the fact that an Administration which rightly has condemned and often contested growing neo-isolationist sentiment in our society's outlook on the world scarcely lifted a finger to prevent precisely the kind of result it decried.

This is a Liberian perspective on the unique initiative by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to resolve the Liberian conflict by organizing and deploying a Peace Monitoring Group in Liberia. It considers whether ECOWAS’ initiative can become a self-reliant security system that can end a civil war and institutionalize deterrence to subregional inter-state and internal conflicts. Can this self-generated, West African initiative set the stage for democratization? Is the initiative the start of an inter-African cooperative security system? Is the model of Nigerian leadership a harbinger of a regional hegemony in the making? Is the modest role of the USA constructive in resolving the conflict, in light of the fact that Liberia is a country with which the USA has had an historic relationship?

Serious consideration of ideology and economic progress is singularly appropriate at this stage in East Africa's history, in relation to the Uganda coup and the current difficulties between Tanzania and Uganda. Both events have a crucial ideological dimension and have already had deep repercussions on the economy of the two countries and of the East African Community as a whole. That the subject is appropriate, however, does not render it any easier to deal with adequately. At the outset, I encountered four basic problems.

First, the very definition of “economic performance” is itself an ideological decision, in that ultimately it requires a value-judgment on the relative importance of various possible indices of achievement. Whether rapid expansion in per capita income is more significant than the creation of a slower-growing but more regionally and sectorally balanced economy; what division is appropriate between current consumption and investment for future consumption; what economic value is attached to a certain pattern of ownership of the means of production, or to a particular policy of distribution of the economic surplus--all of these basic questions about the economic objectives of a society can only be answered ultimately by reference to ideological values. This interdependence between the terms of the topic is an index of its complexity.