One of the results of the New World Information and Communication Order debate was the invigoration of international communication research on images and coverage of nations in the world media. Specifically, the images of Africa outside the continent became a major research question in Western communication scholarship. The results of these studies contend that several variables such as 1) event characteristics, including deviance, interest, and timeliness; and 2) country characteristics, including economic, political, and cultural significance, proximity and national security, appear to affect the ways one nation is covered by the media of another nation.

A recent review of South African universities concluded that higher education institutions have “in place considerable facilities and a substantial capacity to respond to the reshaping of post-apartheid education. However, in general the historically white institutions (and a number of black institutions) have little moral and political legitimacy. In contrast, the majority of black institutions (and a few white institutions) have little or no academic credibility. Overall, the ‘system’ is seen as one that perpetuates inequality, is hugely wasteful and is not serving the human resource needs of the country. These problems have led to numerous demands for reforms in order to redress inequalities, and to ensure greater relevance, accountability and democracy.”

The debate over who is a “legitimate refugee” involves more than just a quarrel over definitions. Haitians and African refugees, largely Ethiopians, have come to our shores in much the same manner as previous groups. The reaction to the arrival of these groups, however, must be seen in the context of legal and political changes in American society.

The “first asylum” phenomenon of persons fleeing to the United States as their first place of refuge from persecution has become the primary focus of any policy decisions affecting our refugee and immigration laws. Further, the “first asylum” issue has blurred the distinctions between refugees and immigrants.

U.S. policy engagement in Africa has entered a phase of dramatic enlargement, begun during President Bill Clinton’s tenure and expanded—unexpectedly—under the administration of George W. Bush. In the last five years, several Africa-centered U.S. policy initiatives have been launched—in some instances backed by substantial funding increases—in trade and investment, security, development assistance, counterterrorism, and HIV/AIDS. By contrast with the Cold War era, recent initiatives—the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, a counterterrorism task force in Djibouti, President Bush’s $15 billion HTV/AIDS proposal, and the $5 billion Millennium Challenge Account (MCA)—have been largely free of partisan rancor or controversy.

During the last several years “primary care” has come to the fore as the “new” priority in health care. In September, 1978 the World Health Organization and UNICEF jointly sponsored the first International Conference on Primary Health Care. The following general principles were put forward in 1975 by the 28th World Health Assembly as the basis of successful primary care efforts.

1. 1. Primary health care should be shaped around the life patterns of the population it should serve and should meet the needs of the community.

2. 2. Primary health care should be an integral part of the national health system and other echelons of services should be designed in support of the needs of the peripheral level, especially as this pertains to technical supply, supervisory, and referral support.

Addressing the Organization of African Unity (OAU) on December 9, 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright dispelled all possible doubts about the centrality of the Great Lakes region for U.S. African policy. And she left no illusions about the seriousness of the obstacles ahead: “Africa matters, and right now no place matters more in Africa than the Great Lakes. Achieving lasting peace will be as difficult as implementing the Camp David Agreement and as complex as sustaining the Dayton accords.”

After spending one year in the United States, I realize how ignorant Americans are about Africa. For example, a woman felt sorry for me because she thought that everyone in my country, the Ivory Coast, was starving. Of course she was making a direct connection with the starvation problem in Somalia, which was at that time of the year receiving great coverage. She did not know where the Ivory Coast was located, and apparently Somalia and the Ivory Coast meant the same thing to her.

There are some things in life that do yield visible, satisfying results; in building a room, painting a picture, or baking a cake, we are able to control most of the elements that contribute to the desired result. But if we try to restore sanctions against Rhodesia, we will find the effort frustrated by countless factors which concerned citizens are powerless to regulate.

At the outset of our endeavors to strengthen sanctions legislation, we knew that Administration support was critical particularly in the House of Representatives. We have always needed Republican votes. In 1973, Senator McGee (who in 1972 had initiated the attempt to repeal the Byrd Amendment to the Military Procurement Bill), was reluctant to try again unless he could obtain assurances from Secretary of State Kissinger that the Administration meant business this time.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to study and discuss statistics on Ethiopia as related to commission of offenses, treatment of offenses at court, and status of the convicted at prisons; (2) to attempt selective comparisons with American data; and (3) to discuss analytical interpretations of the findings resulting from the foregoing data. However, emphasis here will be upon the Ethiopian aspects studied. At the outset it must be recognized that data on offenses committed as well as on some aspects of prison practices, such as executions, in Ethiopia have been in short supply.

While sparsity of data existed and still exists, commendations are due the Ethiopian National Police for the positive step of gathering and arranging such statistics systematically. It is my understanding this was begun in 1967. That there may be some deficiencies in accuracy of figures may be laid to relative recency of concern over them on a wide-scale basis. The reader should be aware also that problems of accuracy were not limited to Ethiopia. Perusal of almost any American text on crime and/or delinquency reveals this fact (for example, see Haskell and Yablonsky 1970, pp. 38, 47-50; Cavan 1962, pp. 20-22). I wish to extend my appreciation to the Ethiopian National Police for releasing to me these statistics for use, for, to my knowledge, very little has appeared in Western literature on this phase of Ethiopian culture.

This special ASR forum, “The Case of Gender-Based Violence: Assessing the Impact of International Human Rights Rhetoric on African Lives,” grounds itself in the notion that gender relations (and, indeed, gendered social norms) can undergo significant transformation in zones of conflict or in other contexts of extreme socioeconomic and political instability. Individuals actively reconfigure moral landscapes of power and sexuality amidst the everyday chaos, violence, and deprivation that constitutes the experience of war for most people, thereby formulating new normative frame-works of appropriately gendered norms for social interaction and sexual expression. These norms, of course, are rather dramatically cross-cut, for all actors involved, by an extensive list of factors that include one's ethnolinguistic or religious affiliation, citizenship status, gender, and myriad other allegiances that are all too frequently brought to the fore by conflict or other forms of instability. War and instability, it seems, force individuals to think of themselves, and others, in ways that might not otherwise have seemed imaginable.

The case studies in this issue are based upon research in Rwanda, Congo, Uganda, South Africa, and Liberia. One unifying theme is the frequency with which human rights rhetoric divorces conflict-related gender based violence from the peacetime normative framework. The authors illustrate the cultural restrictions and patriarchal oppression that encourage violence within different dimensions of the socioeconomic and political context (home, culture, political authority, economy, and military), and they analyze gender-based violence as a form of structural violence. Nonetheless, as Sharon Abramowitz and Mary Moran caution us, gender-based violence in conflict and postconflict zones is not simply an enhanced version of “traditional” gender oppression. We would be severely remiss, the authors remind us, to read conflict and crisis as culture.

The idea to convene a special forum on “Islamism in West Africa” occurred to me while attending an African Studies Association Roundtable at our meeting in Washington, D.C., in 2002. A full year had elapsed since September 11, 2001, and the onset of the U.S.-led campaign to rout the Taliban from Afghanistan. Personal post-9/11 experience in Africa, as well as the writings and communications of other colleagues, had convinced me that in certain circles throughout the continent bin Laden had unexpectedly emerged as a kind of folk hero. Just how widely the Osama rage had taken hold—whether it was a fleeting Afro-pop phenomenon or a serious political challenge—began to loom as a pressing affaire d'état. Suddenly, black Africa was being reexamined by U.S. intelligence and media alike through the prism of potential apologists for “Islamic terrorism,” or worse. What, I wondered, would the African Muslim landscape look like by the time the African Studies Association was to reconvene in 2003? More important, what was the true state of Islamism in sub-Saharan Africa?

Ever since Raúl Prebisch, UNCTAD's first Secretary General, called attention to it in his famous 1964 report (UNCTAD, 1964), the commodities problem has been a priority item on the international agenda in the various forums where the North-South dialogue has been taking place. When the First Lomé Convention was signed on 28 February 1975 between the nine countries of the European Economic Community (EEC) and forty-six African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) states, it was hailed as a major achievement, exemplary of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) then emerging within the wider framework of the North-South dialogue.

In particular, much was made of the EEC countries' attempt to come to grips with the commodities problem by agreeing to set up a scheme (known as “Stabex” in Lomé parlance) for the stabilization of export earnings from commodities exported by the ACP states to the EEC. This system, generally held as the most innovative feature of the Lomée Convention, seemed to meet some, if not all, of the demands voiced by the developing countries in the context of the NIEO on the problem of commodities.

Yet, this was by no means a gratuitous gesture on the part of the EEC. In the first place, the Community's acute awareness of its dependence on raw materials imports from the ACP states, as well as of the latter's dependence on raw materials exports to the EEC, tended to make it responsive to the ACP states' demands in the area of commodities.

The population of Africa in 1977 is estimated to be 423 million, which is about 10.3 percent of the world population. For a quarter of the world’s land area, that is a small population.

Sources: Willcox, Durand, United Nations, PRB.

Africa’s share of world population declined between 1650 and 1920, partly because the population of Europe and the Americas was increasing gradually through factors associated with the Industrial Revolution, and partly because of the ravages of the slave trade and the European colonial pacification measures. Since the 1920s, however, Africa’s population has been growing fast, and its share of world population could reach 13 percent by the year 2000.