I wish to center my analysis less on the evolution of the so-called major paradigms dealing with change in Africa then with the evolution of the role of the specialized student of change in Africa. One cannot dissociate the two, and I do not intend to do so. But in discussions on theorizing, there occurs too often a neglect of the theorizers, which in turn may lead to misinterpretations of what is and was going on.

As we all know, before circa 1950 the study of Africa was confined very largely to the domain of anthropology. True, there were some partial exceptions. In the case of South Africa, the large white population and the relative importance of its participation in the world-economy meant that some economists studied it as well. And in the case of North Africa, what might be called “Islamics” also played a role.

Nonetheless, anthropology dominated the scene. The fact that the study of Africa was thus limited of course reflected the division of intellectual labour that had been carved out in the late nineteenth century, among whose features was the division of the world into three geographical zones: modern European and European-settler states, which were studied by economists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists; non-Western areas with a long-standing written culture and preferable a so-called “world religion,” which were studied by so-called Orientalists; and backward peoples, which were studied by anthropologists.

On January 25th, 1971, after approximately eight hours of continuous nondescript music which accompanied the stacatto of rifle, machine gun, and anti-tank fire that even seemed to threaten us in our Makerere University preserve, the voice of Warrant Officer Sam Wilfred Aswa was heard on Radio Uganda announcing that elements of the Army had deposed President Apolo Milton Obote. Aswa listed eighteen grievances which had led the Army to take this action. The eighteen points included a number which related directly to Obote's economic ideology and policies (Uganda Argus and The People, January 26, 1971). Beginning in October 1969 Obote, a friend and disciple of Nkrumah and Nyerere, a man whose personal dedication to socialism was widely accepted in Africa, began to define a strategy which would move Uganda to the left. Whether or not a causal relationship can be shown to exist between the Obote government's attempt to embark on a socialist program and the January 1971 coup, it is instructive to examine this program. This may serve to reveal pitfalls to be avoided if a viable socialist system is to be constructed in Africa.

In relating ideology to economic performance, it might be noted that an official statement that sets forth the ideology to be followed in developing and directing a given society can have a significant impact on economic performance, or it may simply be another example of bureaucratic rhetoric. The content, the degree to which specific policy proposals are enunciated as well as the ability and dedication on the part of those charged with translating documents into action programs will determine the significance of the ideological statement.

One of the stated aims of the coup of 13 January 1972 was the restoration of a consultative democracy responsive to the needs of the people of Ghana. Thus the NRC (and later the SMC) government led by Colonel (now General) I. K. Acheampong from its inception was committed to a return to some form of democratic government at an unspecified future date. Demands for a return to civilian government started being voiced again in 1974 when it became apparent that, despite its initial appearance of decisive action (particularly in the matter of foreign debts), the NRC government was no more able to solve pressing economic problems than any other post-independence government had been. In the face of demands from the professional sector that civilian rule be restored by 1 July 1977, in January 1977, General Acheampong established a council to discuss what form a new civilian government should take. On 1 July 1977, faced with a strike by several professional groups, General Acheampong pledged to return Ghana to civilian rule on 1 July 1979, the format of civilian government to be determined on the basis of a referendum fixed for 30 March 1978, to be followed by a constitutional commission that would work out the details of the constitutional form chosen by the people in the referendum.

In 1976 Nigeria committed itself to the provision of universal primary education (UPE) to its children. A basic, six-year level of education was seen as a means of creating unity between the many disparate groups making up Nigeria's citizenry. It was also seen as a means of working towards the equalization of educational opportunities throughout the nation by providing a minimum level to which all children would be educated (Ozigi and Ocho 1981; Adesina 1982). The national commitment to UPE was endorsed by many, although not all, Nigerians (Casapo 1981, 1983).

A large commitment of money and the endorsement of many Nigerians were not enough to prevent a multitude of problems as UPE was put in place. The program has been a success in that many millions of children have received a primary education. However, a low quality of education was noted as an accompaniment to quantity education (Bray 1981). A survey of inspectors responsible for primary schools completed a decade after the initiation of UPE suggested that conditions in primary education were continuing to be such that quality education was difficult to obtain (Sunal, Osa, Gaba and Saleemi 1989). While some data are available describing primary schooling under the UPE program, little data are available from the teachers involved in it. The experience of primary school teachers as they perceive and report it has not been documented.

In Africa, as in other parts of the world, most people have traditionally acquired their skills, knowledge, and attitudes from institutions other than formal schools. Even where formal school systems have been established (a relatively recent phenomenon), it is still difficult to separate the impact of schooling from that of one's family, community, cultural and social institutions, and training on the job. But it has increasingly become apparent in all countries that learning acquired in a. life-long process, both before and after school, is of far greater importance than the more specific knowledge transmitted in schools.

The modernization process, however, has continued to place a heavy emphasis on formal school systems, by defining for them a set of demanding tasks. These educational systems are expected to create useful citizens, to teach literacy, and to prepare young people for the lives they must lead in adult societies by providing them with basic minimum skills. Demands by parents for publicly-supported schooling as the principal means of escape from poverty have led to dramatic increases in the provision of educational opportunity throughout the world. These demands are reinforced, and the growth of schooling accelerated, by the recognition on the part of governments and private industry of a pressing need for higher levels of trained manpower. Economists often disagree as to whether education is a prerequisite for development, or vice-versa. Yet the close relationship between education and human resource development leaves little doubt that one cannot proceed very far without the other. (For a useful treatment of these issues, see Anderson and Bowman 1965. See also Harbison and Myers 1964.)

This article examines Muslim involvement, or lack of it, in AIDS services provision in Tanzania. It argues that Muslims find it harder than Christians to work with Western donors whose conceptions of civil society and volunteering do not accurately reflect the institutional practices of Muslims. Many Muslims also mistrust the role played by the state in brokering cooperation. Nevertheless, Muslims seek to engage with the volunteering discourse and have established some organizations that are visible to aid institutions. The complexity of this process reveals the political tensions and unstated agendas on the part of donors that are usually obscured by the notion of “volunteering.”

Some scholars feel that an African, or, more properly, Pan-African literature is developing in Africa. This literature is seen as continent wide and is written in the various colonial languages. It is seen as a unified literature responsive to a simultaneously emerging African society (Roscoe 1971: 252; Joyaux 1972: 313-14). Adrian Roscoe, who holds this view, feels that given such a continental literature, it is unlikely that Africa will see the development of independent national literatures (1971: 252). Whether or not one subscribes to this view, it is the thesis of this paper that there is another kind of literature emerging in Africa—an East African regional literature. East African literature in Swahili, as it is developing, appears to differ from what is being referred to as African literature in both non-vernacular and other vernacular languages. It is a regional literature in an African language with a character which is neither tribal, national, nor continental.

In East Africa, unlike the rest of the continent, literature in the colonial languages has never flourished as much as that in Swahili. Swahili has been spoken and written on the coast since the thirteenth century. At first, Swahili literature was written in the Arabic script employing Arabic genres and now it employs the Roman script adapting and modifying western genres.

The emerging regional Swahili literature is receiving added impetus from conscious efforts being made in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya to promote Swahili literacy in the Roman script and to encourage Swahili as a national and and official language.

Fieldwork fascinates us, at least those of us who have done fieldwork. Whenever two or more fieldworkers gather, they begin to exchange fieldwork stories. But as those of us who have worked with oral narratives know, people tell stories for reasons. Our stories are more than “just stories.” By telling stories, we try to come to terms with an experience and to convey to others what it was like. Why do memories of fieldwork preoccupy fieldworkers so? If fieldwork stories belong to a genre, they are bildungsroman. Fieldwork allowed fieldworkers to reexperience the intense education of childhood, but with an adult consciousness. They entered the field as children and were educated by the people with whom they lived. Even the most basic skills that our parents taught us when were toddlers — eating and personal hygiene — had to be relearned in the field. The education of fieldwork is such a powerful experience because it is a total experience: physical, social, and cognitive. Here I address the cognitive or intellectual aspect of fieldwork. But, even as I focus on fieldwork as an intellectual experience, I must note that the cognitions acquired during the fieldwork take on special power because they derive energy from those physical and social experiences.

The dichotomy between the hedgehog and the fox lies at the core of this essay. Isaiah Berlin translates the Greek poet Archilocus: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (Berlin, 1978: 22). The fieldworker's knowledge is the knowledge of the fox. Berlin elaborates: “There exists a great chasm between those who relate everything to a single central vision” — the hedgehogs — and those whose “thought moves on many levels,” who “seize upon a vast variety of experience” without seeking to fit it into any “unitary inner vision” (Berlin, 1978: 22). This is the fox's perspective, and it is this perspective that gives fieldwork its value and its future.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, nationalists and colonial officials in French Soudan (Mali) shared a language of development centered on the concepts of tradition, modernity, community, and individualism. This shared language permitted collaboration but also masked important differences in nationalist and colonial analyses of social change and the direction of rural development. Particular areas of contention were social evolutionary models of change, the likelihood of rising individualism, and the potential of communitarian development. The patterns of interaction in this debate reveal that intellectual exchanges between and among officials and nationalists were multidirectional and characterized not by borrowing but by exchange, adaptation, and reformulation.

This article explores the intellectual traditions of African studies, focusing on the central principles of interdisciplinarity and commitment to social and racial justice. Tracing the origins of the field to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African is t intellectuals such as Edward Blyden, it investigates these traditions historically and in the context of contemporary practice. Against the backdrop of concerns for the future of area studies, the author finds a vibrant field—both inside and beyond its traditional boundaries.

The death of a colonial official in the early days of colonial rule in Africa was always a matter of grave concern to the imperial powers. Trained manpower was scarce and the sense of isolation and vulnerability must have been intense when the entire white establishment numbered a few dozen men. When that death was not from disease or accident, but was the result of an act of violence by an African subject, the concern felt by the colonial authorities was comparable to that caused by a local rebellion or armed insurrection. Such was clearly the case when a senior officer was murdered in the Ankole District of Uganda in 1905, only six years after the first British officer took up a post in the district. The result of the murder was a political crisis and a far reaching probe into the crime and its circumstances which serves to lay bare the political intrigues, divisions and motives of the entire collaborating elite of the Ankole Kingdom.

Like a rebellion, the crime of assassination offers us not only a story of intrigue and drama, but an avenue into the workings of the colonial regime and the African political systems which it encompassed. The complicated new structures of factional competition which were uncovered in the course of the murder investigation were fundamentally the same political structures that persisted during the entire colonial era in Ankole. It is for this reason that the murder of a single colonial officer deserves careful scrutiny.

When COVID-19 reached Sierra Leone, the government responded by implementing strict containment measures. While the effectiveness of such actions has been debated, the socioeconomic and political implications were undeniable. This qualitative study reveals that people suffered tremendously from economic insecurity, strains on social relationships, and civil rights violations, prompting many to perceive the COVID-19 pandemic as worse than the 2014–15 Ebola epidemic. These hardships have driven distrust of the government, which threatens continuing mitigation efforts. Using a feminist global health security frame, which recenters the protection of vulnerable individuals in relation to the state, we call for more contextually-relevant, civil society-informed pandemic responses.

Based on an extended study of Zimbabwean women migrants in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, this article focuses on these women both as mothers and as labor migrants, seeking to understand their migration intentions in relation to changing policy and law in South Africa. It also focuses on their responses to the changes in policy as they seek to renegotiate the border. The strategies adopted by the women in negotiating the border not only demonstrate their agency, but are also intricately linked to their migration intentions. Their responses are critical to our understanding of contemporary migration in the region.

In addition to our discussions today of the current situation in Angola, I would like to direct my remarks to the question of what role, if any, the United States should play with regard to Angola, and concretely, how the Congress can assist in the formulation and execution of a responsible American policy toward Angola. We have all learned a number of important lessons from recent revelations about the conduct of American policy in Southeast Asia, about Government coverups such as Watergate, corporate bribery of foreign officials and political parties, and about the illegal and unacceptable activities of the CIA as described in the Rockefeller Commission report and elsewhere. Certainly we can apply some of these lessons to our present consideration of U.S. policy toward Angola; hopefully we will learn the vital facts and ask the necessary questions now, rather than, as has too often been the case, after the fact.