This article focuses on the activities of women smugglers in Cameroon in the 1990s, the period during which the national currency was devalued. Despite the generally negative connotations of smuggling, it argues that this unorthodox form of trade has had certain positive effects on the lives of individual female entrepreneurs, if not on Cameroonian society in general. Usually marginalized economically, women in Cameroon—including, in many cases, former prostitutes—are able through smuggling to support themselves and their children, make up the deficit in the household budget, and attain a respected status in society. Through their contacts with beach worker assistants and government officials, they also have contributed, for better or worse, to the blurring of lines in Cameroon between the formal and informal economy.

The “institutional turn” in contemporary development theory has emphasized the importance of facilitating the emergence of institutions that will improve citizens' abilities to make choices. More important, it has suggested that the effectiveness of these institutions depends upon their ability to “work with the grain” of the local sociocultural environment. This article argues that community-based organizations (CBOs), as one prominent embodiment of institutional blueprints guiding relationships between state and nonstate actors in development efforts, are a poor fit in the context of contemporary urban Tanzania. This is because they are not consonant with the norms that have long governed popular participation in either the development process or associational life. Although the specific conclusions are limited to Dar es Salaam, the study calls for a method of interrogation that is not only historically and sociologically grounded, but also broadly applicable to other development issues.

This article provides a critique of the final stages of Kenya’s land law reform process, which has resulted in the approval of the 2012 Land Act, Land Registration Act, and National Land Commission Act. It argues that in spite of the constitutional and political importance of the new legislation, the process was marked by haste, lack of engagement by legislators, and little participation by citizens. The new laws can be viewed as a deeply disappointing outcome of a decade’s struggle over land policy. The article explores the effects of the constitutional deadlines for new legislation; the contradictory role of civil society in relation to the new laws and the bureaucratic structures they create; and the redistributive intentions and potential of the new land legislation.

This article explores the package of “Agenda item 4” reforms undertaken by the Kenyan government in the mediation process following the 2007–8 postelection violence, including those relating to long-standing issues over constitutional revision. It situates the previous lack of reforms within Kenya's political economy and demonstrates how political and economic interests thwarted progress and produced the postelection crisis. It also examines the more recent attempts to address reforms following the signing of the National Accord and the creation of a power-sharing government, and finds strong public support for constitutional revision. It concludes that these pressures from below, along with a realignment of political interests and institutional change from power-sharing, helped support reform.

For nearly half a century politics in Côte d’Ivoire had been dominated by a single individual, Félix Houphouët-Boigny; a single political party, the Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire (Parti démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire, PDCI); and roughly the same cohort of politicobureaucratic elites. This rare combination of regime longevity and elite cohesion had produced considerable state competence and impressive economic growth which, in turn, fostered relative peace between the different classes, the various ethnic and religious groups, and indigenous Ivorians and foreign residents. Thus, Côte d’Ivoire was heralded as an oasis of peace and prosperity and a haven for immigrants seeking refuge from economic impoverishment and ethnic or civil strife at home.

U.S. involvement in Africa is growing following threats of terrorism and interruptions in oil production and because of desires by foreign corporations to expand their activities on the continent. The response of American policymakers has been to establish a stronger military presence that will engage in counterterrorism initiatives and police oil installations. The goals and extent of this buildup, and the ideology legitimating it, are new. They are departures from Cold War policies. Similarly, the response of American business leaders to weaknesses in the infrastructure and political order of African states leads them to establish their own forms of community development, known as strategic philanthropy, so as to protect and expand local markets. Despite these major developments, the media are not informing the public. This article examines the implications of these military and business initiatives for African nations and the reasons for lack of information about them.

By looking at a number of different commodities and how they are traded, this article shows how informal cross-border trade in West Nile and Panyimur, Uganda, is governed by a locally negotiated system of hybrid governance, in which neither state nor nonstate actors have a regulatory monopoly. Notions such as legality and illegality are secondary to the functioning of these hybrid institutions, which instead are the outcome of perceptions of the legitimacy of regulatory actions and trading practices and the power configurations of the actors involved. There are different “registers” at play about what constitutes legitimate economic action among different moral communities, but the actual impact of this system depends on the power of the strategic groups involved.

Although Africa has gained a reputation as one of the world’s most homophobic areas, there are cross-national differences in the extent and intensity of antigay laws. This article assesses the factors that have been advanced in the literature —albeit unsystematically and often mostly implicitly—to explain the observed patterns of homophobia: conservative religious beliefs, delayed political and economic development and resistance to globalization, political leadership strategies, and the legacy of colonialism. It argues that a more robust analysis suggests that a British colonial past, a large Muslim population, and the absence of economic freedom and openness explain at least one-third of the variance in sodomy laws. This finding has implications for efforts to fight African homophobia.

The physical appearance of Africa's marginal semi-arid lands shows evidence of eroding hillsides, denuded plains, large erosion shelves, and deep sheer-sided gulleys. These features manifest an imbalance between humans and the resources which support them or what some scholars have termed rural population pressure (Anzagi and Bernard, 1977; Steel, 1970). A decade ago, an International Labor Office mission to Kenya (1972: 405, hereafter ILO) noted that surface soil degradation and erosion in marginal semi-arid areas were chronic. Other symptoms of the physical destruction of the land included the drying up of streams, cultivating on river banks leading to silting of streams and dams, unchecked gullying of cultivated slopes, and sheet erosion following bad grazing practices. More recently, the World Bank (1980: 53) noted that increasing population growth in the drier areas of Kenya has led to a pressure exceeding the carrying capacity of the land, which in turn has led to lower income per capita, and even to famine.

In general Kenya's rangelands are densely populated relative to pastoral areas in other African countries (von Kaufmann, 1976: 255). The government itself (Kenya, 1979a: 211) notes the urgency of dealing with social problems related to the rapid population expansion in medium and low potential areas of the country where crop production is feasible but very risky.

This overview assesses the study of sub-Saharan art by art historians in the United States, as a complement to the earlier examination by Paula Ben-Amos (1987) of African art studies from an anthropological perspective. Academic status for African art history, focused on sub-Saharan Africa, began in the 1950s, when a small group of scholars assigned style categories and broad social functions to works of West and Central African sculpture. With the expansion and development of the field, linked to the use of anthropological methods, the emphasis in research has shifted towards adopting multiple perspectives of analysis and seeking African categories in relation to varied artistic production. Nevertheless, study of sub-Saharan art has achieved only a marginal status in the disciplines of art history and anthropology. This essay examines the problems of these relationships, the types of changing scholarly activities that have characterized the field of sub-Saharan art, and considers options for the future.

This paper seeks to demonstrate how the fissiparous tendencies bearing on the Nigerian national polity make the policy of using state creation to achieve national integration a failed strategy. The paper shows how the outcomes of state creation exercises in Nigeria have failed to assuage the very forces that instigate new state demands. It contends that the prospects for national integration and local autonomy depend on the emergence of a purposeful national leadership and proper political restructuring of the federation designed to generate a national image that has more appeal than the regional ones.

This article analyzes the growth of autochthony in Belgium as an example of the increasing popularity of autochthony discourses in Western Europe. Autochthony discourses, which try to reserve the benefits of the welfare state to those who are said to really belong, tend to thrive in prosperous Western European welfare states with a strong Social-Democratic tradition that refuse to accept that they have become immigrant countries. In federalized Belgium, however, autochthony has a much stronger appeal in Flanders, which historically was dominated by Christian-Democratic parties, than in Wallonia, which remains a Social-Democratic bulwark. Analyzing Western European autochthony in terms of welfare chauvinism helps explain the ways in which prosperous Flemings, unlike impoverished Walloons, can afford to buy into the neoliberal rhetoric of choice and thus create themselves as autochthons.

I am often asked to explain what possessed me, a white American political scientist, to undertake African studies. Usually, I reflect upon my state of mind in the mid-1950s and mention the allure of a new horizon for democracy, limned by the doctrine of self-determination for subject peoples. Even then, however, realists warned that democracy in Africa, as in Asia, would bleed and die on the altars of national consolidation and social reconstruction. But democracy dies hard. Its vital force is the accountability of rulers to their subjects. Democracy stirs and wakens from the deepest slumber whenever the principle of accountability is asserted by members of a community or conceded by those who rule. Democracy cannot be destroyed by a coup d'etat; it will survive every legal assault upon political liberty. The true executioner of democracy has neither sword nor scepter, but a baneful idea. Ironically, the deadly agent is an idea about freedom.

In Africa today, freedom from want is a universal goal. Millions of lives are blighted by the effects of poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, untended illness, and inadequate education. In all countries, political leaders dedicate themselves to the cause of economic and social development. Most leaders also claim to respect the principle of accountability to the people. However, the imperatives of development are far more demanding than the claims of democracy. Appalled by the human condition and waste of resources in Africa and other nonindustrial regions, many intellectuals proclaim the validity of an antidemocratic idea, to which the term “developmental dictatorship” is aptly applied.

Since the military coup d'état of October 21, 1993 Burundi is experiencing a genocide, albeit at a slow pace, while the leaders engage in a series of ‘dialogue of the deaf.’ Meanwhile, half-truths are being told about the causes of the crisis and inappropriate solutions are being proposed for an incorrectly diagnosed structural social malaise. This paper examines the causes of ethnic violence by emphasizing the impact of institutional failure. The ‘privatization’ of key institutions such as the military, the judiciary, and the education system by ethnic and regional entities, has resulted in a divorce between state institutions and the population. Violence is created and maintained in a vicious cycle of frustration–claims and counterclaims–and repression as the rulers try to hold on to power while the oppressed categories of the population claim for their fair share in national resources. Restoration of peace and stability will require an extensive reform of key institutions to ensure equity and protection of rights and property for all citizens.

As a new field and analytical category, the African diaspora promises to remap the histories of Africans and their dispersed descendants. In what ways has the promise of diaspora been confounded by a preceding intellectual legacy? By focusing on the nation-state and its genesis in nineteenth-century German Romantic thought and that of its critics, this article questions the unproblematic relationship that now exists between history and the African diaspora. Specifically, the audior suggests that the nation continues to inform the very meaning of diaspora despite the intentions of some scholars to challenge the conventional framework (history: the narrative of the nation). By drawing on a vast body of literature from various disciplines, this heuristic article explores, among other themes, specific reading and writing strategies that inform the work of scholars on the African diaspora.

The end of the Cold War and the crisis of socialism (statism) have ushered in the emergence of a “new” cycle of capitalism, which is characterized by wide ranging deregulation, privatization and vigorous globalization of capital (Cox 1994; Bienefeld 1994; Barber 1995). With this unfolding order, the role of the state in economic activity, including its protection of the vulnerable segments of society either through direct redistributive welfare mechanisms or by encouraging poverty-reducing and labor-absorbing economic activities, has come under serious attack. An ideology of free market and open global competition that increasingly limits the role of the state in economic activity has risen to prominence. According to some, a unified global economy has emerged and the global system has already entered a postnational stage (Barber 1995). While recognizing the intensification of interdependence among countries, many disagree that such a transformation has already taken place in the global system (Underhill 1994; Holm and Sorensen 1995; Boyer and Drache 1996). In most developing countries, however, the role of the state has been reduced to essentially adjusting national economies to the global economy instead of autonomously charting its own development strategy.

Under the new global order, development in Africa and in the rest of the countries of the South is widely viewed to rest largely on integration with the global economy. Policy measures that are believed to advance integration with the global economy, including promotion of exports, attraction of foreign investments, correction of macroeconomic imbalances and decontrols of prices, exchange rates and imports are almost universally promoted in these countries.

I would like to begin by expressing my deep gratitude and humility to the board of directors of the African Studies Association for inviting me to deliver the 2007 Bashorun M. K. O. Abiola Lecture on the momentous occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the ASA. This singular honor makes me conscious that I follow in the hallowed footsteps of several giants of African politics and studies including Ali A. Mazrui, Gertrude Mongella, and Thandika Mkandawire, among other distinguished thinkers who preceded me on this podium. As most of you know, I am trained as a legal scholar, but my work has benefited tremendously from the support of several senior students of Africa in the audience, including Joel D. Barkan, John W. Harbeson, Frank Holmquist, and Ali A. Mazrui. Nor would I forget to thank Athena Mutua, my spouse, who is here with me. But I know that this meeting would not have been possible without the indefatigable work of Pearl Robinson, the president of the ASA; Carol L. Martin, the executive director of the ASA; Kimme Carlos, the program manager of the annual meeting; and Stanlie James, the program chair.

This is a special occasion for all those who study and love Africa. The ASA is fifty, which is a historic milestone by any count. Ghana, one of the first African countries to free itself from the yoke of colonialism, is also fifty. We thus take stock of the continent after the first half century of decolonization with an appropriate theme—“Twenty-First Century Africa: Evolving Conceptions of Human Rights.”

The aim of this article is threefold: to interrogate the crises that have afflicted public universities in Kenya over a period of thirty years, starting in the 1970s and intensifying in the 1980s and 1990s; to examine the impact of student activism and protest on education policy; and to investigate the role of current and former university students in national leadership and the democratization process in Kenya. University students are destined to be the intelligentsia who one day will take over the reigns of power. Students also constitute the largest reservoir of technocrats in Kenya's development milieu, providing highly trained manpower in many sectors. To many they are also the vehicles of ideological dissemination and are often regarded as the representatives of the left and sympathetic to the cause of the common man. As such, to engage the students is to engage the common man. Yet there are lacunae in the research and academic knowledge in this area. Commentators have largely ignored student protest in Kenya despite the fact that universities have a long history of student activism in which students often have engaged authorities in running battles, some of them violent. In the national political arena, university students often rally behind radical politicians and former university students. The political course in Kenya would not be the same today without university students. This article seeks to interrogate their multiple roles.

In Ghana, regional and local cultural festivals that recently have been created or “modernized” provide an interface between local communities and the state. At these festivals, local political elites formulate demands on the government, and conversely, the government attempts to popularize its policies. At the same time, cultural festivals function as public arenas where local cultural identities are articulated within a framework negotiated by the state and the media. The staging of local culture thus always has a national dimension, even when the material is of local origin. Public self-representation at cultural festivals can also be an important factor in internal integration of local societies. The article examines these themes with reference to cultural festivals in northwestern Ghana which the author has observed and whose organizers and participants she has interviewed since 1989.

There is strong evidence that labor is highly mobile in many developing countries, especially in Africa. The history of the African continent is rich in accounts of various forms of movement across and within national boundaries—promoted by trade, warfare, pastoralism, slaving, natural disasters, and evangelization. Evidence, of fact and in myth and legend, indicates the occurrence of large-scale migrations in the past. The dispersion of Fulani-speaking peoples throughout the northern parts of West Africa is well documented. In addition to such movements, there are the age-old seasonal wanderings of herders seeking water and pasture for livestock. During the present century, the migration of labor to centers of mineral, oil, and industrial production has become one of the most important demographic features of West Africa and the continent as a whole (Adepoju, 1977, 1978; Zachariah and Conde, 1981; Addo, 1974; Little, 1974; Mabogunje, 1972, 1980). The migratory movement of population in Africa is very dynamic and complex; its general features are not well understood, and hence are rarely studied.

This paper is an attempt to understand the economic and sociocultural factors that have influenced the character of the international migratory flow of labor in West Africa. The hub of the investigation is to provide an understanding of the patterns of labor migration in West Africa and evaluate the models utilized in the explanation of international migratory trends in the region.