Traditional social theory holds that modernization leads to an improvement in the status of women. Until recently, specialists on Africa did not challenge this view (Southall, 1961: 653; Cotran, 1969: 22). This was so because the status of women was not considered a significantly important topic for research. As part of the growing interest in women, the position of women in African society has become a focus of serious study (Paulme, 1963; Little, 1973; Iglitzin and Ross, 1976; Hafkin and Bay, 1976; Canadian Journal of African Studies, 1972). The results of this research, mostly carried out by women, challenge the conventional wisdom that the status of women improves with modernization (Van Allen, 1976; Callaway, 1976; Mbilinyi, 1972; Boserup, 1970). These investigators also indicate that with modernization the position of women has declined both absolutely and relatively in comparison with the improved position of men.

Divorce law and practice is an important barometer of the social status of women in a society. The research upon which this paper is based focused on divorce law and practice in Bobodioulasso, Upper Volta. Its conclusions support the findings of others, such as those noted above, about the negative effect of modernization on women.

Bobodioulasso is the second largest city in Upper Volta. A recent estimate put its population at 118,000 (Rapport Politique, 1975: 9). Like many other African cities, the population is growing rapidly, primarily because of rural-urban migration (Gregory, 1971; Boserup, 1972: 207). This migration in part accounts for the tremendous ethnic diversity of Bobodioulasso, one of the reasons it was selected as the site for this study. The latest available statistics show no fewer than twenty-four different groups represented in the urban area, eleven of these having more than 1,500 members (Rapport Politique, 1975: 9). Although Bobodioulasso is within the predominantly Muslim part of the Sahel, it is not primarily a Muslim area and not, therefore, totally dominated by Muslim attitudes to women. However, Muslims, as well as Christians, are well represented in the city. The area around Bobodioulasso has also retained pre-Muslim and pre-Christian religions and those practising animism still account for the largest percentage of the city's population. They ensure its religious diversity.

The bulk of research on African political institutions has been conducted by political scientists trained in the precepts of Western culture, and thus an appreciation for the uniqueness of the contributions of African society is lost. Many Western scholars even go so far as to insist that Africa offers no new theoretical problems since human beings are the same and political problems similar the world over. This is false for two reasons. First, man is a direct product of his environment and his problems are defined meaningfully in terms of that environment. Second, environmental and procedural conditions in Africa differ significantly from those in Europe and, by extension, the United States. In Africa social processes do not represent, as they do in Europe, static, readily identifiable forces and interests. They tend rather to defy neat and convenient type-casting and classification.

Let me cite three examples. The average Western scholar looks for institutions in discussing governments. He normally asks, what type of government is this? Unitary, federal, or confederal? Yet the African government is personal, not institutional. To the African, what matters is not the formal function assigned to an institution by its name, but the phases of the flow of policy to which the institution and its personnel contribute. If we look first for institutions and then ask what functions they perform, we may see a less comprehensive picture of the African world than we would by first identifying the political process and then asking which sub-systems contribute to its various branches.

There are few parallels to the human holocaust that took place in Burundi in 1972 in the wake of a tortuous competitive struggle between the country’s two major ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. Scarcely noticed (let alone understood) by public opinion anywhere, the killings are conservatively estimated to have caused between 80,000 and 100,000 deaths. Approximately 3.5 percent of the country’s total population (3.5 million) were physically wiped out in a period of a few weeks. In comparative terms this is as if England had suffered a loss of 2 million or the United States about 8 million people. To speak of “selective genocide” in describing the outcome of such large-scale political violence seems scarcely an exaggeration.

In the history of the cooperative movement in anglophone Cameroon, women's cooperatives have played a particularly small role. Although the first cooperatives opened in the anglophone portion of the country in the 1920s and a small-scale women's project was attempted in the 1950s, the currently existing cooperatives for women began only in 1970. Today, in terms of number of members, amount of capitalization, scale of economic transactions, number of viable (or even operating) organizations, or any other measure, the women's cooperatives account for only a small portion of the total cooperative movement.

In early 1970, beginning in the southern, coastal portions of the then West Cameroon state (the anglophone state in the bilingual Federal Republic of Cameroon) several governmental bodies and the women's wing of the Cameroon National Union (WCNU) began to organize women in urban areas in palm oil cooperatives. A number of societies came into being in a short period of time and the idea soon spread from its original site in the Southwest Province to the Northwest Province. Most of the original structures established in the coastal area have failed, but those in the Northwest Province continue to exist, though with a mixed record of success. Although in many respects the experiments in the Southwest and Northwest were similar, there are differences in purpose, governmental involvement, and social situation that may be related to the differences in success. Interviews with Cameroon officials and foreign assistance workers, archival and documentary material, and personal observations during two periods of research in Cameroon (1975-76 and 1980-81) have provided the data upon which to compare and analyze these two experiences.

Two articles in the last Issue (Winter 1990) and an accompanying article in this Issue examine the relationships between U.S. Africanists and U.S. policy-makers from the perspective of “players” in the policy process. All these articles are based mainly upon interviews with current and former U.S. government officials and with experienced scholars who regularly participate in policy affairs.

Burundi politics is still preoccupied with the maintenance of Tutsi supremacy and therefore necessarily the continued subjection of the Hutu. There would seem to be substantial evidence for this view. Government spending on “national security” has risen from 13.2 percent of the total budget in 1971 to 22.6 percent in 1974; it is now the largest single item, having passed education for the first time; despite considerable recruitment to the army since 1972 there are no Hutu soldiers at any level of real responsibility; the army’s tactical priority is the waging of small-scale guerrilla-type operations in the border areas.

During the 1950s, and particularly after the 1964 military takeover, industrialization produced a transformation of Brazil — a nation of continental proportions occupying half of South America. Modernization affected every facet of Brazilian society, altering the economy and influencing the development of political and educational institutions. Such internal change had considerable impact on Brazil's foreign policy. Brazilians no longer viewed their national interest in traditional and restrictive terms but in a revisionist, expansive and expansionist manner. Populist politicians and writers of the late 1950s, riding on a wave of nationalism, argued that Brazil should become an active participant, a new and aggressive force in world affairs.

Over 300,000 Sudanese perished primarily from hunger during 1988-89 in one of the most avoidable human tragedies in recent history. Mostly from the war-torn southern part of the country, these civilians were deliberately starved by central government, and to a lesser extent the insurgent Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which used the deprivation of food as a tactic of war. The threat of further genocidal actions by the Islamic fundamentalist junta in Khartoum and the private militias allied with the government continue to daily threaten the lives of millions of internally displaced people. Due to these man-made causes and nature’s lack of rain, up to ten million Sudanese are at risk of malnutrition, hunger and starvation in 1991.

A century ago, Cecil Rhodes told a Dutch Reformed missionary’s mother that “your son among the natives is worth as much to me as a hundred policemen.” He was referring, of course, to the role many missionaries played in turning Christianity into an ideology which could be used to convince Africans not to resist white domination.

Rhodes’ modern-day successors—South Africa’s white rulers and their allies—have gone one dangerous step further. For them, it is not enough to use the church as a kind of ideological cheering section for white domination. Instead they are quite literally using pastors and missionaries as soldiers and policemen.

The remarkable yet untold story of the straggles to democratize African political systems is that they owe much of their recent success to the pivotal role played by university student groups and faculty associations as animateurs of protest demonstrations, debates about issues deemed taboo by the state, and as organizers of militant campus movements. At a time when most associational groups were banned or rendered politically impotent by being incorporated into existing state structures in order for them to serve state interests, secondary and university student groups and faculties remained virtually the only sources of pressure and protest against authoritarian regimes on the continent. Thus, from Dakar to Nairobi, from Addis Ababa to Harare, student movements and demonstrations, fought pitched battles with state security personnel and stimulated civilian opposition movements.

At the risk of being called unscholarly, or unnecessarily pedantic, I would like to revive an old issue: the role of Africanists vis-à-vis Africa. In most intellectual circles, this issue is shunned. Generally, criticism of Africanists has been presented in terms of the relevance and/or nature of African/ non-African, Black/White involvement in Africa. The defense of the Africanist community, however, has been based on the impartiality of scientific investigation and the cumulative nature of all knowledge– without regard to cultural bias. My purpose here is to take a slightly different route and to interweave the two views in an effort to restate the case against Africanists.

There are many prevailing notions and myths about the strategy and objectives of the Socialist powers and their associated socialist states in Southern Africa. A great deal of them are based upon the fears of rival powers and the propaganda of those ruling interests and minorities who suddenly now find themselves face to face, not with the in-effectual guerrilla movements they have discounted, but with real and basic international power.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi is arguably one of the most famous contemporary Mauritanians worldwide. This is largely owed to his Guantánamo Diary, a bestseller that he penned while he was an inmate in Guantánamo prison. The memoir appeared in January of 2015, reflecting on Slahi’s plight as a wrongly incarcerated detainee in the (in)famous jail. Prosaic and sincere, the book, so far the only voice of a Guantánamo detainee, depicts the wretched life within a Kafkaesque oubliette, an impersonal, yet rationalized and inhumane, castle where legality is suspended in a state of exception. Slahi’s story is about the inside humane oscillations of a homo sacer, struggling to come to terms with his difficult situation. Ever since the book appeared, and after Slahi’s release and return to his home country of Mauritania in October 2016, Slahi’s post-Guantánamo life has attracted attention from communities of readers worldwide. This aggregate interest is now accumulating in a forthcoming Hollywood movie based on Slahi’s story. Various factors conspire to encourage this interest, much of which involves the politics of reading, imagination, and hermeneutics of the respective readers. Yet I will argue that the story should interest Africanists as well. First, Slahi’s is a Mauritanian story, telling us numerous facts about African culture and politics in the region and how they coalesce in Slahi’s story. Second, even from a theological perspective Slahi’s intellectual and personal profile reflects a story of African post-Islamism, a theology of forgiveness rarely outlined in the literature. Third, Slahi is also a public intellectual, contributing to the debates in Mauritania, which gives his story a reflexive dimension and an agency lacking in other obscure Guantánamo detainees. In short, Slahi tells a story that is distinct from the typical Guantánamo and terrorism-linked profiles, a story that is situated in a specific African context.