(The following article on the forthcoming First International Congress of Africanists is reprinted from the Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, No. 2, 1962, pp. 88-9. Previous accounts of planning for the Congress, by Conrad Reining and William O. Jones, may be found in this Bulletin, October I960 and December 1961.)

African Studies until very recent times were developed as a part of Oriental Studies. To some extent this is explained by the fact that the northern, most developed areas of Africa are populated by Arabic-speaking peoples, and there are not a few reasons for regarding them in historical, cultural, and political aspects as part of the general Arab world. Northern Africa was usually included in the rather vague concept of “the Orient,” and then, this time without any reason for it, the whole continent began to be included in “the Orient.”

But the main reason for including African Studies in Oriental Studies is that the study of the countries of Asia and Africa was pursued primarily by the scientists of the colonial powers, and inasmuch as their work fundamentally served the aims of ruling enslaved countries in the interests of imperialist monopolies, both the great continents were regarded as one single colonial complex.

La communication politique conventionnelle occulte l’usage des symboles culturels de l’apparence que sont les vêtements lors des campagnes électorales. Or le vêtement est incorporé à l’œuvre de conquête et de conservation du pouvoir politique du fait de son potentiel de séduction. En prenant pour site d’observation la campagne pour l’élection présidentielle camerounaise d’octobre 2018, cet article entreprend de rendre intelligible le comportement vestimentaire des candidats. Les données de cette étude sont issues d’une observation participante lors de meetings et de l’analyse des affiches de campagnes de cette élection. Il en ressort que le vêtement est un média de l’expression de la personnalité et des stratégies de séduction des candidats qui agit davantage comme un stimuli de la mobilisation que comme un déterminant du vote.

Independent tropical African regimes face essentially the same dilemma that increasingly occupied the European colonial governments during their last years: to achieve rapid and widespread techno-economic development by using as a principal instrument the subsistence farmer. African elites, to a far greater extent than their colonial predecessors, are also subject to the immediate demands of political legitimacy. The occupational survival of bureaucrats, technocrats, and politicians depends significantly upon their ability to produce expanding social and economic benefits for the mass of their clienteles at costs in human effort and other deprivations which the majority of local minorities does not consider prohibitive. An eloquent expression is given to this dual challenge by the Tanzanian statesman and intellectual, Amir Jamal (1965, p. 5):

The relationship between the leaders and the

masses requires to be recast fundamentally so

that the dialogue between them becomes continuous

as well as politically and economically

productive. Once the sanctions.… in support

of colonial rule are withdrawn, a government

can only govern…if it…undertakes immediately

the critical task, of building up an almost

monolithic dialogue with the masses. This is

a task of a real magnitude, demanding as it

does a two-way communication between the technological,

social and administrative sophistication

of the executive at the centre on the one

hand and the realities of the amorphous or

tribally conditioned eager and aspiring masses

in the country still contending with age-old

environment and equipment, on the other hand.…

This…in effect means the bridging of the gap

on a day-to-day basis, not between technology

and subsistence economy but between those

leaders who become compulsively aware of

their total dependence on technology which

would take some generations' efforts to

become home-based and the masses who inevitably

simplify brutally by asking in

constant refrain--why can't we have the

hospitals, the schools, and roads and the tractors today!

This article reviews the history of defamation cases involving Africans in Southern Rhodesia. Two precedent-setting cases, one in 1938 and the other in 1946, provided a legal rationale for finding defamation that rested on the ability of litigants to prove they had been shamed. The testimony and evidence of these cases, both of which involved government employees, tracks how colonial rule was altering hierarchy and changing definitions of honor, often to the bewilderment of the litigants themselves. Importantly, both cases concluded that African employees of the state deserved special protection from defamation. The article then traces how the rules and ambiguities resulting from the legal logic of the 1938 and 1946 cases gave a wider group of litigants such as clerks, police, clergy, and teachers room to maneuver in the courtroom where they also claimed their professional honor. Such litigants perfectly understood the expectations of the court and performed accordingly by recounting embarrassing, even painful, experiences, all to validate their personal and professional honor in court. Such performances raise the question of how we might use court records to write a history of the emotional costs to people who used astute strategies that rested on dishonorable revelations to win their cases.

The study of Africa south of the Sahara in American secondary schools has traditionally been most conspicuous by its absence. In fact, the secondary-school social studies curriculum, oriented as it has always been to the study of western civilization, has rarely allowed for the study of any nonwestern region or culture, least of all that of the “Dark Continent.” Now, however, this situation is changing, and changing rapidly. Considerable efforts are being made today to introduce the study of the Non-West into the curricula of many secondary schools. And, for a variety of reasons, an increasing number of schools are making special efforts to include Africa south of the Sahara in this study.

These efforts, however, are proving a difficult, if not insurmountable, challenge for most teachers and curriculum builders. Few, indeed, are the social studies teachers and supervisors with the academic training or extended living experience in the lands below the Sahara required to provide the insights upon which a worthwhile study of this region can be structured. Most schools do not have ready access to the advice of Africaniste on this subject. Even worthwhile printed guidelines for designing a study of this region are sorely lacking; with the exception of Leonard Kenworthy's Studying Africa in Elementary and Secondary Schools (10), there is not a single book, pamphlet, handbook, or curriculum guide to which teachers may profitably turn for help.

If the unvarnished power of the state has a face, then it is the prison. When the mask of cultural hegemony slips, we encounter the walls of the penal institution, its barbed wire, and its blankly functional architecture, mute and unseeing. A prison is one of the most concentrated modalities of state power. By definition, a prison is a zone of exclusion; it defines the normal, everyday civic sphere by defining a site of exception. A prison has its own distinctive logic and temporality, in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s words, “dull, mundane, monotonous, tortuous in its intended animal rhythm of eating, defecating, sleeping, eating, defecating, sleeping” (1981:116). It is a world of boredom, isolation, and fear. Nonetheless, because of its close proximity to state power, the prison also offers a sharp-edged reflection of the operation of power in a society. As Michael Hardt observes, “Those who are free, outside of prison looking in, might imagine their own freedom defined and reinforced in opposition to prison time. When you get close to prison, however, you realize that it is not really a site of exclusion, separate from society, but rather a focal point, the site of the highest concentration of a logic of power that is generally diffused throughout the world” (1997:66). Or as Robben Island prisoner Michael Dingake remarked in his 1987 autobiography, “Prison is the heart of oppression in any oppressive society” (1987:228).

In this essay I offer an interpretation of Wimbum tfu by analyzing Wimbum terms to distinguish it from the English term “witchcraft.” I argue that Wimbum terms bfui, brii, and tfu have multiple meanings, are dynamic, and are often employed to discuss and critique lived experience. I argue that postmodern perspectives help us interpret tfu as power, economic, and religious discourse thus making it possible for us to attempt an ethical critique of the negative aspects of Wimbum tfu.