The Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) missionaries equated urbanity with moral contagion, to which those with slave status were especially vulnerable. To the former slaves who came into contact with the mission, the growing commercial center of Zanzibar, and the coastal cultures it was associated with, were not only enticing, but also crucial to social and economic mobility. The mission’s ex-slaves rarely enjoyed a special advantage though their connection to missionaries. Even for the missionaries’ most treasured dependents, the advantages were ambiguous. However, the mission did facilitate the making of strong cohorts and ease the transition to town living.

In the early 1960s when the South African Government outlawed the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the South African trade union movement was an almost unnoticed casualty. The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), affiliated with the ANC in the Congress Alliance since 1955, had become the leading trade union movement based on non-racial principles in direct competition with the racialist Trade Union Congress of South Africa (TUCSA). Although not completely outlawed, SACTU's leadership was driven into exile or underground and a decade after its founding SACTU was moribund and union organizing within the country was at a virtual standstill (Luckhardt and Wall, 1980; Feit, 1975).

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, what little international support was generated for the South African working class was funneled through the exiled SACTU organization and its ANC ally. This was a small but important part of the general campaign against Apartheid South Africa, which like the campaign against apartheid sport, sought the total isolation of the regime and all apartheid institutions. As with the sports movement, statements of support by international bodies and the exclusion of internal Soulh African bodies from international forums was the key to the SACTU/ANC policy on South African labor (Luckhardt and Wall, 1980: 470-91).

In the early 1970s, a spontaneous revival of trade union activity within South Africa challenged the racialist principles of TUCSA and the authority of the South African state. The independent black trade union movement which dates from the Durban strikes of 1973 represented a new phenomenon among South African workers (Macshane et al., 1984).

Rural development projects involve the application of bureaucratic systems of consciousness to traditional areas where there have never been such normative systems applied before. This means that the values, norms, and ideals of bureaucratic institutions are implicit to how traditionally oriented rural villages are approached by outside development agencies and also how relationships develop between them.

It is currently assumed by many scholars that the British ruled northern Nigeria through the indirect rule system. The essence of this system, according to our authorities, was to maintain the cultural and religious status quo (Perham, 1960; Temple, [1918] 1968; Crowder and Ikime, 1970). This assumption has fostered the belief that the British administration in northern Nigeria had very little impact on the traditional political system and society. Hence, many writers who have written on the British administration in northern Nigeria have tended to ignore the traditional political system and society. Thus, while we have scholarly works on the relationship between the British officials and the chiefs of northern Nigeria (Heussler, 1968), little work has been done on the relationship between the chiefs and their subjects.

Yet we cannot adequately assess the impact of the British administration on the status of the Hausa-Fulani feudal aristocrats by simply examining the aristocrats' relationship with the British officials. We also need to examine the extent to which the British administration affected the relationship between the chiefs and their subjects. British rule in northern Nigeria, like any other alien rule in Africa, whether it was French or Portuguese, was a culturalizing agent which affected every fiber of the society. The British as colonizers had to create a sequacious society, which would be conducive to the chief aim of their rule, i.e., economic exploitation, from the restive communities of the precolonial days (Last, 1970: 345-57).

Ten years after the exile of Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana, Ghanaians find themselves celebrating a renaissance of Nkrumahism. This is happening after flirtations with two military regimes, an intervening civilian regime, and a current interest in constructing a future Union Government allowing for more political participation by including more civilian groups into the decisional process. There are few programmatic indications that Nkrumah's notions of “scientific socialism” have been incorporated by recent regimes. Yet Nkrumah himself is revered as a hero in Ghanaian culture.

For ten years following Ghana's independence in 1957, Ghanaians were subject to Nkrumah's prolific verbal output concerning “scientific socialism,” consciencism, and Pan-Africanism. The meanings attached to these concepts by Nkrumah, and by his followers, however, remain somewhat ambiguous. This ambiguity is understandable given the fact that Nkrumah's often contradictory writings on the subject of socialism were devoid of the rigor which scholars often associate with the ideology. As derived from Engels, socialism is scientific in the sense that there are laws of history which move the proletariat to challenge the bourgeois order and instigate a successful revolution. Moreover, the forces of production and distribution should ultimately rest with the state which orders the economy in such a way that the profits of industrial enterprise are reinvested in state enterprises, and do not accrue to individuals.

Radical social scientists and third-world scholars have accused traditional social scientists, especially social anthropologists, of failing to study the colonial milieu in which a majority of its field studies have been conducted (cf. Asad, 1975; Lewis, 1973 for examples). There are notable exceptions to that neglect, examples which partisan radicals fail to cite. Among those exceptions are Morris's (1968) study of Asians in East Africa, Ajayi's (1965) study of missionaries in Nigeria, Beidelman's (1974) call to study up in which he uses a Weberian framework in order to understand expatriates in Africa, and Heussler's (1968) study of the British in Northern Nigeria (cf. also Oberg, 1972; Pitt, 1976; Jones, 1974; Reining, 1966; Salamone, 1974, 1977, and 1978; Savishinsky, 1972; Schapera, 1958; Stavenhagen, 1977; and Tonkinson, 1974 for a few such works).

Still, it remains true that social scientists have tended, by and large, to neglect the study of colonial society. This relative neglect entails both serious theoretical and methodological consequences for the social sciences, for it both narrows the range of societies in its comparative repertoire and masks a source of systematic bias. After all, expatriate societies are but one transform of plural societies, one possible manifestation of deeper underlying structural principles. Unfortunately, as Beidelman (1974: 235-36) correctly indicates, those segments of society closest to the anthropologist did not capture his wonder. Neither were they perceived as fit subjects for analysis.

Since the passage in 1969 of congressional legislation intended to regulate the activities of tax free philanthropic foundations, a spate of works dealing with the role of foundations in American life has been published (Cuninggim, 1972; Heimann, 1973; Nielsen, 1972; Peterson, 1972). Most of these works have dealt in a general way with the responsibilities of philanthropic organizations in a period of rapid change. Several were commissioned by the larger foundations themselves, perhaps to indicate to a potentially hostile legislative branch the foundations' willingness to evaluate their performances to date and to establish socially “responsible” goals for themselves. None of these studies has analyzed specific policy issues in which the foundations have been involved or themselves have helped to create. The central role played by foundations in the growth of American institutional life has been seriously neglected by scholars, more specifically by political scientists, whom, one would think, would have an especial interest in studying these institutional pillars of American society. If the role of American foundations in the evolution of institutions at home has been neglected, the significant role of American foundations as institution builders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and as implementors of American foreign policy is hardly even known. It is with the role of American foundations overseas, particularly in Africa, that I am concerned at this juncture.

One fact that has emerged from a study of the existing literature on the techniques for recording the oral histories of African societies since the last decade is that these societies, even where they possessed similar structural models, still exhibit several complex variables. This raises the question as to whether or not the available methodological studies can suffice to provide a generally acceptable model for interpreting the totality of African history. The answer is, of course, that historians ought to be encouraged to publish descriptive, analytic, or reflective materials arising from their specialized research interests. Such studies would not only prove invaluable for comparative analysis but would also be useful as working tools for the graduate student or the beginner in research. Indeed, anyone with field experience is aware that the art of collecting oral data is acquired mainly through trial and error. The technique that has proved successful for Vansina (1960) in dealing with Bakuba, for example, may prove disastrous in dealing with Banyoro. The importance of the existing studies is that they enable the young researcher to minimize the number of his errors and maximize the use of time available to him. In the final analysis, however, he learns by experience. And his experiences, if put down in print, may prove of significance for other researchers.

Collecting oral traditions in the field is like learning to drive a car. No amount of lectures and films can make a nondriver into a driver. He must attempt to drive it himself and learn from his mistakes. And when eventually he becomes a driver, his technique, efficiency, or inefficiency will be determined by many personal considerations: courage, physical condition, public relations, courtesy, temperament, integrity, alertness. So with the field worker. He is constantly adjusting to new situations and to different personalities. And he ought to be a person capable of responding to these situations without losing his equanimity.

Historical writing about Africa in the last decade has undergone a quantitative, if not always qualitative, boom. This is particularly true in the realm of political and, to a lesser extent, economic history. But little work has been completed in the area of African intellectual history, surely one of the most fascinating and ultimately rewarding fields into which history can be divided.

One obvious reason for this dearth of work is the elusiveness of intellectual history in general--the immense difficulty involved in researching and writing about it well. Intellectual history, according to its broadest definition, deals with the history of thought. But thought, unlike so-called “hard,” verifiable evidence used by social scientists--such as statistics, carbon dating, chronologies--is a nebulous phenomenon to isolate and define. Thought can be nonverbal as well as verbal. It can be symbolic or “unmethodical,” as in poetry, fiction, art, or music, or quite definite and “methodical,” as in science and philosophy.

Ideally, an intellectual historian would study all of these types of thought, not for their accuracy or logical consistency (as would a, scientist or mathematician), not for their value or aesthetic satisfaction (as would a critic or philosopher), but for their relation to each other in time, how and why they appear and spread at a particular time, and their effect on concrete historical situations. In other words, it is the intellectual historian's job to delineate or describe thought in a given historical epoch and to explain the changes which this thought undergoes from epoch to epoch.

When I went to live and learn among the Alur for the very first time in 1947, the great linguist Archie Tucker described them to me mysteriously as “very wild and woolly.” What anthropologist could resist? Indeed, although part of the colonial state, no one in Southern Uganda really knew who they were. The refined BaGanda referred to them in lilting labials as Balulu, uncouth northerners, who came to do the unskilled work, and grow cotton on the Ganda landowners' estates. The Alur reciprocated by not really considering themselves in Uganda, despite the legal facts. When they crossed the Nile to go “down country” they spoke of going across to Uganda.

In the then Belgian Congo, where many Alur also lived, they were very differently regarded. The Belgian District Commissioner of Mahagi wrote of them as “civilizers of the hordes” (Quix, 1940). In the vast ethnic wilderness of eastern Zaire, the white administrators saw the Alur as a ray of hope, an intelligent and progressive people with the capacity to rule over others and bring them to order—the fundamental requirement of development then (as now) when “Toe the line!” was the requirement of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Agency for Development (AID), Overseas Development Agency (ODA), and so on, however deceptively camouflaged.

For some centuries the Nilotic Lwo immigrants had been establishing themselves and incorporating more and more people from the surrounding ethnic groups into their evolving system, thus creating a new entity: Alur society. When I tried to find out how and why it was that the Alur were able to exercise this domination and why the other peoples submitted to it—since it did not seem to be a simple matter of military conquest—the symbolic answer always was “we brought them rain.”

This article explores the health service provided by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) during the Eritrean Liberation War, and its political dimensions and implications. The EPLF used healthcare to define itself politically against its rivals and to penetrate communities. It aimed to incorporate population groups into the struggle, to inculcate EPLF ideology, and to transform the national community. EPLF practitioners were most successful when they cooperated with existing structures of power. The progressive, dynamic, and transformative nature of the healthcare system is inextricable from the coercion sometimes used to achieve the ideals of the EPLF, and the way in which healthcare became an instrument of biopolitical control.

Two good goals are in collision in African Studies in the United States--the fostering of certain black interests and the untrammeled pursuit of scholarship. I think that neither needs to give way before the other, provided a division of labor can be devised which secures the autonomy of scholarship from politics. This is the gist of the remarks that follow. In proceeding with these remarks, I shall refer to the governance of the African Studies Association and the disproportionately small number of black inquirers in a field concerned with an area with which blacks have a special tie, only as these matters seem to me to have implications for the autonomy of scholarship.

The view has been expressed that the conduct of inquiry about Africa needs to be radically revised so that black people will have control over their own history and its interpretation (Clarke 1969, p. 9). Adherents of this view, in elaboration, say they wish to have “the study of African life…undertaken from a Pan-Africanist perspective,” which “defines that all black people are African people and rejects the division of African peoples by geographical locations based on colonial spheres of influence” (Clarke 1969, p. 11). I think this view is representative of thinking sufficiently widespread to warrant considering it with the utmost seriousness in any effort to deal with the future of African studies in the United States.

Four theories are used to explain the causes and dynamics of violent conflict along the Oromia–Somali Border in eastern Ethiopia. Of these, political economy (greed versus grievance) and political ecology theories are instrumental in understanding the main drivers of violence. Politicization of ethnicity and the self-centered behavior of political elites have increased the complexity of the conflict. Fekadu Kenee demonstrates that peacebuilding efforts require respect for the outcomes of referendums on the disputed territorial units and revitalization of customary systems, among others. While customary institutions can resolve conflicts at least temporarily, sustained community dialogue needs to be part of the political reform to build lasting inter-regional peace.

In the past decade Cape Verde has seen an unexpected outburst of gang-related urban violence. The state has reacted mainly by means of a repressive securitization policy, which has not been able to offer more than temporary solutions. In public discourses, “broken” families, youth drug consumption, and a supposed lack of education and sufficiently severe punishment are often referred to as the main causes for the rise in crime. The article discusses such discourses, contrasting them with the experiences and narratives of inmates from the country’s two central prisons. It suggests that extrajudicial punishment of suspects and offenders by police officers, as reported by many juvenile convicts, is part of the dynamics of violence manifest in different spheres of Cape Verdean society and may be a possible factor influencing the decision of young citizens to “opt” for, or stick to, careers of marginality and delinquency.