Analysts of African business in the 1960s and 1970s stressed the weakness of the local private sector and its subordination to foreign capital and the government. Have economic liberalization and the shrinking of the state changed matters? This paper takes up this question in an analysis of Senegal. Here, relations between the state, foreign capital, and indigenous business interests have changed considerably since 1980, signaling what may be some of the most significant shifts in Senegal's political economy since Abdou Diouf's coming to power in 1981. There has been a shift of commercial control away from the state and foreign interests and toward the Senegalese “informal sector,” and clear moves away from the old pattern of clientelist-style relations between Senegalese business and the regime.

In this paper, we argue that in spite of changes, the political clout and economic ambitions of Senegalese business interests are still limited by their weak hold on productive sectors of the economy. This is clear in the economic policy fights of the 1990s. Much of the contest is a struggle for commercial-sector advantage that pits old-style politician-businessmen against the “informal sector” commercial interests that have been gathering force in Senegal since the 1970s. These changes seem to have less to do with the emergence of “indigenous capitalism” than with diminution of the regime's ability to constrain and canalize the development of indigenous commercial interests.

This paper traces these developments, grounding the analysis of the 1990s in a detailed empirical study of UNACOIS, a sometimes-militant business association that emerged in Dakar in 1990 to represent the Senegalese “informal sector.”

The Cuban Abakuá society—derived from the Èfik Ékpè and Ejagham Úgbè societies of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon—was founded in Havana in the 1830s by captured leaders of Cross River villages. This paper examines the process by which West African Ékpè members were able to understand contemporary Cuban Abakuá chants, and indicates how these texts may be used as historical documents. This methodology involves first recording and interpreting Abakuá chants with Cuban elders, and then interpreting these same chants with the aid of West African Èfik speakers. The correlation of data in these chants with those in documents created by Europeans and Africans from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries indicates a vocabulary that includes many geographic and ethnic names and an occasional historical figure. These examples may lead to a reevaluation of the extent to which African identity and culture were transmitted during the transAtlantic diaspora. Abakuá intellectuals have used commercial recordings to extol their history and ritual lineages. Evidence indicates that Cuban Abakuá identity is based on detailed knowledge of ritual lineages stemming from specific locations in their homelands, and not upon a vague notion of an African “national” or “ethnic” identity. The persistence of the Abakuá society contradicts the official construction of a Cuban national identity.

This article examines the motive behind China's increased activities in Ethiopia in recent years and concludes that it lies in Ethiopia's perceived diplomatic usefulness. If China's relations with many African countries could be described as one of “infrastructure for natural resources,” the Sino-Ethiopian relationship can be described “infrastructure for diplomatic support.” After exploring the nature and scope of Ethiopia's relations with China and highlighting areas of divergence of interest, the article seeks to demonstrate how the convergence of interests between the two countries has ushered in a period of Sino-optimism among Ethiopia's elite and rising expectations among ordinary Ethiopians.

This paper considers implications of the neoliberal shift for forms of national integration that were achieved during the era of state-led development. These national integration strategies (1960s–1980s) helped define and manage regional competition within the juridical boundaries of the territorial state. In today's “open economy” settings, old strategies of national integration are difficult to sustain. What has emerged is a new territorial politics, which revolves around attempts to consolidate power within subunits of the state and reorder relations among them, to enforce political control within communities, and to reorder rural property rights. Cote d'Ivoire provides a case in point.

There is an unbroken continuity in African verbal art forms, from interacting oral genres to such literary productions as the novel and poetry. The strength of the oral tradition seems not to have abated; through three literary periods, a reciprocal linkage has worked these media into a unique art form against which potent influences from East and West have proved unequal. Vital to African literature is the relationship between the oral and written word; in seemingly insignificant interstices have flourished such shadowy literary figures as Egyptian scribes, Hausa and Swahili copyists and memorizers, and contemporary writers of popular novellas, all playing crucial transitional roles in their respective literatures. The oral tale is not “the childhood of fiction” (Macculloch, 1905), but the early literary traditions were beneficiaries of the oral genres, and there is no doubt that the epic and its hero are the predecessors of the African novel and its central characters.

The African oral tradition distills the essences of human experiences, shaping them into rememberable, readily retrievable images of broad applicability with an extraordinary potential for eliciting emotional responses. These are removed from their historical contexts so that performers may recontextualize them in artistic forms. The oral arts, containing this sensory residue of past cultural life and the wisdom so engendered, constitute a medium for organizing, examining, and interpreting an audience's experiences of the images of the present. The tradition is a venerable one.

Why is African Studies in North America dominated by white scholars? In this reflection piece, the 2018 president of the African Studies Association revisits the organization’s sixty-year history, exposing the processes by which white privilege was hardwired into African Studies at the organization’s founding in 1957 and then secured first by the displacement of the much older tradition of African American scholarship on Africa and second by the “recolonization American-style” of knowledge production on the continent in the postcolonial era.

This article focuses on shifts, or “new waves,” within contemporary African film as sites of struggle and moments of exposure of the divergent forces at work in the struggle. From this perspective, attempts at initiating a new style in commercially oriented storytelling do not so much culminate in a break with previous styles of storytelling as they create a new space for tension over ideological claims and narrative coherence. As illustration, the article considers the competing logics at work in the strategies or rationalities associated with the branch of Nigerian filmmaking described as New Nollywood.

This essay explores ground common to ecology and politics. It addresses the question to what extent and in what ways are ecological ideas political ideas. The discussion, divided into five man sections, endeavors to steer a course between the pitfalls of environmental determinism on the one hand and economic reductionism on the other.

The first section deals with the link between population processes and land use. Explanations stressing population increase as the driving force behind agricultural change are contrasted with arguments in which demographic fluctuations are treated as responses to economic imperatives. An example of the second kind of approach is Meillassoux's attempt to reconstruct the demographic dynamic of a precapitalist, lineage, mode of production. This is but one of a number of attempts to construct models of “natural economy” as starting points for discussions of the penetration of African agriculture by capitalism. Against the assumptions on which such models are based it is argued here, and in later sections of the paper, that the demographic and ecological processes subsumed under the category “natural economy” (or alternatively, “precapitalist subsistence production”) are more plausibly viewed as products of capitalism and colonialism. An example from southern Nigeria in the early colonial period is used to suggest that the kind of evidence on which Meillassoux's reconstruction is based is a complex ideological by-product of factional politics in an economy dominated by merchant capital.

The second section of the paper focuses on the topic of the ecology of disease in Africa. Special attention is paid to John Ford's (1971) work on the ecology of trypanosomiasis. Critical of colonial scientific orthodoxy, and of colonialism itself (properly treated as a factor in the spread of sleeping sickness in Africa in the twentieth century), Ford's book has received some attention from Africanists in the social sciences and humanities. It is probably fair to say, however, that the originality of the book's ecological argument has yet to have its full impact on such readers. This is the justification for substantial summary of one of Ford's case studies. The significance of this case study is that is illustrates the ecological complexity characteristic of trypanosomiasis, and of a number of other African epidemic diseases, and the importance of local knowledge and initiative in adapting to such diseases.

This study analyzes the transformations in the relations among masculinity, sexuality, and femininity for the youth born after independence in Dakar (Senegal), where the constitution of recreational sites and of play have always been controlled by the state and maraboutic Islam. Following the multiform crisis, the youth—boys and girls—have innovated new forms of sexuality, while deconstructing the old forms and opening themselves to cosmopolitan ones

Uganda and Tanzania are two of many African countries with diverse post-colonial experiences that have taken steps towards political liberalization in the 1990s. In both countries, the continued pursuit of political liberalization is threatened by sectarianism. Any consideration of Uganda's political future immediately raises questions of how to resolve the seemingly intractable religious, regional and ethnic differences that have had devastating consequences in its recent history. Concerns voiced by non-Baganda over the recent upsurge in monarchism in Buganda and the resented perceived political advantage of individuals from western Uganda in positions of power are but two examples of the ever present issue of ethnicity in Uganda. Tanzania, which has had a less volatile recent past, was by the early 1990s seeing manifestations of religious sectarianism and undercurrents of ethnic tensions, including tensions between Muslim and Christian communities and between the African and Asian business communities, that were being expressed more openly than at any other time in its post-colonial history.

Rather than explore the new manifestations of sectarianism in Tanzania and Uganda, which remains an important task, this essay asks what are the countervailing forces within society that challenge these new or revived sectarian tendencies? Are there concurrent developments that provide bases for institutional change that might serve as alternatives to a political, economic and social order based on sectarianism? While there are no simple answers to these questions, research on the informal economy in Tanzania and its related organizations (1987-88) and currently on women's associations in Uganda (1992 to the present) suggests one arena where one finds such cross-cutting tendencies: in the emergence of new women's urban associations in the late 1980s.

This work focuses on the production of discourse on witchcraft in relation to colonial and postcolonial statecraft in coastal Kenya. It distinguishes between two sets of terms for magical harm, the Mijikenda term utsai and the term witchcraft, and uses this analytical distinction to draw attention to the different worlds from which utsai and witchcraft emerge, and to frame each discourse on magical harm in terms of the political conditions of its production and use. It presents “witchcraft” as a disciplinary technology with five component practices identified as “witchcraft technologies of power.” These technologies have wide general applicability to other colonial and postcolonial situations in Africa and can be used to illuminate both processes of state formation and the emergence of new forms of magic and the occult.

The image of Rwanda conveyed by the media is that of a society gone amok. How else to explain the collective insanity that led to the butchering of half a million civilians, men, women and children? As much as the scale of the killings, the visual impact of the atrocities numbs the mind and makes the quest for rational motives singularly irrelevant. Tribal savagery suggests itself as the most plausible subtext for the scenes of apocalypse captured by television crews and photojournalists.

Ironically, just as “tribalism” is being reaffirmed by the media as the bane of the continent, Rwanda’s descent into hell makes it a society not unlike others in Europe and Asia where genocide has been intrinsic to their recent historical experience.

Postcolonial authorities see the belief in witchcraft and other occult forces as creating a basic impediment to development initiatives in Africa. Consequently, the state in Cameroon has sought to use all sorts of instruments—including legal instruments—to contain, if not eradicate, witchcraft. However, the institutionalization of the crimes of witchcraft, magic, and divination has been fraught with evidential problems of proof. The vigorous pursuit of witches by the postcolonial courts has led to rather perverse outcomes whereby the witch-doctors, witches par excellence, have emerged as expert witnesses in the courts. By relying on these expert witnesses, the courts are caught in the witchcraft logic, blurring the line between the accused and the accuser. The standard of proof in the courts has become that of the “L'intime conviction du judge,” at best a subjective standard.

The study of African technological history cannot bt pursued without first considering two fundamental problems. The most fundamental of all is the relationship between technology and the broader social process. It is quite obvious that the two are linked but it is not at all clear, even in a study focused on technology, where to begin the explanation of this relationship. Second, there is the more specific question of African “backwardness”: why are certain kinds of technology which spread throughout Europe and Asia not found south of the Sahara before the colonial era? How can we relate this apparent lag to changes which did take place in African technology? What are the consequences of such a technological differential for the eventual integration of Africa into economic and political systems which include these external societies.

In dealing with the first problem, Africanists can draw upon the practice and debate within the well-established sub-discipline of European and American technological history. Within this work (as well as some of the more general writings on African technological history) three approaches to the relationship between technology and society have been developed: an internalist approach which studies technology in isolation from society; a technological determinist approach which uses certain inventions or innovations to explain major social changes; and a dialectical approach which explains technological and social changes as mutually interacting.

One of the important factors that influences the successful implementation of decentralization is the support of, and commitment to, decentralization by the bureaucracy (Cheema and Rondinelli 1983; Rondinelli 1981). In other words, decentralization may be undermined if the bureaucracy opposes arrangements that threaten its power and control. In the Ghanaian case, for instance, the bureaucracy (made up of line Ministries in Accra and their deconcentrated offices in 10 regions and 110 districts) had been blamed by the government of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) that ruled the country from 31 December 1981 to 6 January 1993, as the main stumbling block to the implementation of the government's decentralization program launched in 1987. In the words of the Minister of Local Government:

By deconcentration, the Minister was referring to the delegation authority for the discharge of specified functions to the staff of a central government ministry or department at the local level to make administrative decisions on behalf of the central government or authority. In such a case, the delegated power continues to be subject to the central authority's supervision.

This paper makes a very preliminary and provisional attempt to relate the discussion in Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004) of disjunction, thresholds, and multiple scales of value characteristic of economies in the Atlantic zone with the disjunction, profusion, and fragmentation characteristic of artistic genres of the region, especially praise poetry. It suggests that their underlying common property is an intense focus on the making and unmaking of persons. In a region where social and political self-realization is open-ended and depends upon acquiring people, and where people are transactable, transitions between multiple conditions of personhood can take place, but some thresholds cannot be crossed. One of the key ethnographic examples in Marginal Gains—the Niger Delta—is revisited to suggest possible lines of further inquiry into this aspect of the originality of cultural production in the zone of the Atlantic trade.

Sacred groves figure prominently in efforts to create community-based conservation in Africa. Although they are often conceptualized in functionalist terms as relics of climax forest and peak cultural florescence, attention to the intersections of ecological and social dynamics offers a framework for understanding African sacred groves that avoids assumptions of steady states of habitat and culture. This article, based on a case study from the North Pare Mountains of northeastern Tanzania, demonstrates that the sacredness of these groves is embedded in social institutions, and that the deeply contested nature of these meanings produces African landscapes. It concludes that sacred groves, as examples of cultural and ecological co-evolution, require research based on hybrid social and natural scientific methods. The implication for conservation policy is that sacred groves are not simply local forms of conservation, and that their management demands cooperation among local, national, and global institutions.

Are apparently successful “grassroots” conservation programs in Africa paradoxically a boon for the extension of central state authority? Can decentralization actually serve to bring about recentralization, giving governments not only new sources of revenue, but also more legitimacy in marginal rural areas? By exploring the current and historical relationships between Zimbabwean rural people and the wildlife that surrounds them, one can hopefully gain insights into why Zimbabwe's wildlife population is among one of the most diverse and thriving in Africa. The cases explored in this article clearly indicate that, in theory, the more rural people are allowed and encouraged to participate in the management of big game, and the more material benefits they accrue, the higher their stake will become in conserving those living resources. This seems to be the case as far as receiving financial benefits are concerned. Still, the implications of such sustainable utilization for the furtherance of the state's power have been unclear in scholarship to date. Zimbabwe's environmental programs have been hailed by scholars and the media alike as pathbreaking ventures into grassroots control over natural resources. This study proposes the following hypothesis, using Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) as an empirical test case: the establishment of wildlife utilization programs in agriculturally marginal rural areas also serves the interests of the Zimbabwean government to extend its authority in these otherwise neglected areas.

This article utilizes a newly available dataset on the geographical distribution of development projects in Zambia to test whether electoral incentives shape aid allocation at the subnational level. Based on this dataset, it argues that when political elites have limited information to target distributive goods specifically to swing voters, they allocate more donor projects to districts where opposition to the incumbent is strong, as opposed to districts where the incumbent enjoys greater popularity.

The majority of young people in Africa are today living in “waithood,” a prolonged, difficult, and dynamic transition into adult life. This experience is shared with an increasing number of young people in the developed North who are also grappling with issues of joblessness and political exclusion. This waithood generation is increasingly losing faith in the ability of its leaders to address young people’s needs and expectations, and it is rebelling against the status quo. From the youth uprisings that led to the Arab Spring and the ousting of Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal and Campaore in Burkina Faso, to political protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the U.S. and Los Indignados in Spain, young people have been at the forefront of political change. However, they have not yet been able to effect systemic change. While profound social transformation takes time, this generation is still wrestling with how to move beyond street protest and have a lasting impact on politics and governance.