(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.

In this essay, we discuss some differences between professional and popular perceptions concerning the identification and prevention of birthing difficulties among the rural Peul in Guinea. This difference in perceptions is evidenced principally by three key elements having an influence in the progress of the pregnancy and labor as well as in the prevention of birthing difficulties. These include the daily domestic tasks, the fast of Ramadan, and the diet appropriate for the pregnant woman. The analysis shows that the mechanisms of prevention elaborated by the health professionals (medical perceptions) and those of the pregnant woman's personal entourage (popular perceptions) are realistically based but arise from different assumptions. From the popular perspective of those in a pregnant woman's entourage, the fear of labor, based on the generally high elevated rate of maternal mortality—especially elevated among the Peul in rural Guinea—justifies in certain measure the preventative activities centered on diet and the execution of domestic tasks. By contrast, among the health professionals interviewed, the attention is placed on the prevention of anemia which arises in women during pregnancy. In sum, we have here two different logics on the prevention of birthing difficulties.

This article analyzes the historical ambiguity of the “purchase areas” in colonial Zimbabwe. Established under the 1931 Land Apportionment Act that segregated land in the colony along racial lines, the purchase areas were discrete areas of freehold tenure dotted throughout the country. African elites who setded in the area and Europeans who administered them held distinct notions about the value and proper use of purchase area farms. For the African landholders, the small farms expressed their elite status in society. The state expected that educated, elite Africans should maintain modern, efficient farms. However, African landholders remained extensive farmers. They increased production by extending their fields, rather than by adopting labor-saving techniques. When the state confronted Marirangwe purchase area farmers about their “poor farming” techniques, the farmers presented a brash defense of their family values which they connected to their farming methods. This family-centered defense of their farms forced the state to concede certain development patterns to the farmers, foremost being the permanence of family farms, thereby enabling extensive farming.

The challenges ahead for Mozambique as it engages in cultural transformation as well as in other areas of fundamental change are enormous. But the record of conquests and victories over the last 15 years has been equally enormous and remarkable. The Mozambicans are determined and confident in their ability to build a new and revolutionary people’s culture, based on the worker-peasant alliance, transforming antiquated and exploitative culture into one which allows for a rich blossoming of the human personality and potential. In this confidence and determination, there may be lessons for us all.

As the tragic events of Rwanda started unfolding on April 6, 1994, I was in Kigali setting up a Postwar Rehabilitation and Development Program we had developed in collaboration with the Rwandan Ministries of Health and Defense, and ORTPN (the Rwandan Office of Tourism and National Parks). This program, implemented by a local NGO, included four components. The first consisted in the physical rehabilitation of institutions damaged in the war between October 1990 and March 1993, primarily hospitals, health centers and dispensaries in the Prefectures of Byumba and Ruhengeri. The first phase of this component had been completed by March 25, 1994, with funding from the Canadian Government and the EEC. Subsequent phases were intended to be program-oriented and to provide institutional support to these health facilities.

Since Waldemar Nielsen published his generous, unheeded and ultimately wrong prediction, much has happened in southern Africa and in the United States. In southern Africa, with the exception of the situation in Portuguese-speaking Africa, little has changed and American policy has remained largely as Nielsen then described it. Since the April 25, 1974 coup in Lisbon which overthrew the New State dictatorship, remarkable changes have begun to occur in Portugal and in her African territories: Portugal has granted independence to Guinea-Bissau (September 12), and has pledged independence to Angola and to Mozambique at an undetermined future date and in a manner as yet to be clearly explicated. But American policy toward Portugal and toward the territories it still controls in southern Africa maintains extreme caution. Our policy has remained rather passive, unimaginative, in want of innovation and, it seems, replete with compromises. In short, present American policy here appears to lack any clear conceptual basis or purpose.

Before Sir Alec Douglas-Home made his extended visit to Salisbury in November 1971, an advance British team led by a noted lawyer, Lord Goodman, had made at least four trips to Rhodesia to discuss with the Smith regime the general points which would then form the basis for a settlement. With both Britain and Rhodesia eager to settle the six-year old dispute which had caused injury to the former’s international image (particularly within the commonwealth) and had brought Rhodesia to the brink of economic disaster, Goodman’s mission seemed destined to succeed. In fact, during and following his talks, a lot of optimism said to be founded on leaks of information from well-placed sources in both Salisbury and London was expressed.

In a report released on September 16, 1993, Amnesty International came up with an apt description of the current human rights situation in Zaire as consisting of “violence against democracy.” In a violent backlash against the democratization process, the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko has plunged the country into “its worst human rights crisis since the end of the civil war in the early 1960s.” More than 5,000 people have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced in ethnic cleansing in the Shaba and North Kivu provinces. Moreover, repeated looting, extortion, and other acts of violence by Mobutu’s army have endangered the lives of millions of people all over the country, particularly in the major cities.

A social scientist once described Nigerian political behavior and culture in terms of a continual ability to move dangerously closest to the edge of disaster before pulling back just in time to avoid falling into the deep. Nigerians in high and low places have a passion for insisting on the absolute rightness of their positions and claims sometimes with little regard to the consequences for others as well as for themselves. Sometimes groups in the nation act as if they will rather be dead right than heed the political necessity of mutual accommodation and prudent compromise. The Daily Times Opinion of April 29, recalls Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher (1588-1679) when it declared that “Nigerians are brutish and nasty. They are contentious and cantankerous. They are irreverent. And they are ungovernable. . . . [They] are an intensely political people, the more so today, when the promise of a return to civilian government has understandably led to the flexing of muscles by all manner of interest groups.” This is national high-wire politics at its best! But it is also dangerous politics at its worst. It reflects an ingrained political attitude about which more should be learned.

South Africa’s system of apartheid and policy of separate development is unique among nations. Apartheid is the pervasive institutionalization of discrimination by law on the basis of race; separate development would deny South African citizenship to the blacks of South Africa. A central goal of U.S. policy with respect to South Africa is to encourage that country to end apartheid and grant full political participation to all its peoples. This key policy is diametrically opposed to the position of the government of South Africa.

Support for academic African language programs (ALPs) in the US began at the national level with the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (renamed the Higher Education Act of 1965). The goal of this legislation was to establish a world-wide language and area studies knowledge base that could be called upon in the event of conflict, but in addition it has provided generations of students a wealth of knowledge about the less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) and the communities where they are spoken. Although the Africa region’s share of this support has hovered around 12%, its effect has been substantial. For example, based on a world-wide listing of Africanist linguists, approximately half of these specialists live in Africa, with the remainder being equally divided between the countries of Europe and the US, a remarkable fact given that the US has no colonial legacy in Africa. Title VI of this legislation supports a set of National Resource Centers (NRCs) that promote language and area study of a specific region including Africa.

The imbalance in the sizes of the former regions of Nigeria (Table 1) had been frequently cited as one of the main reasons for political instability of the federation. For example, the Premier of the Eastern Region and leader of one of the political parties which contested the federal elections of 1964 declared during the election campaigns that

For political scientists, and particularly scholars and students of Africa, Crawford Young needs litde introduction. However, as he has now achieved an emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, it is time to present his intimate understanding of African politics in the last forty years.

Born in Philadelphia in November 1931, Young received his B.A, from the University of Michigan in 1953. He studied at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London from 1955 to 1956 and at die Institut d'Etudes Politiques, University of Paris, from 1956 to 1957. He dien entered graduate school at Harvard University, completing his doctorate degree in political science in 1964. In 1963 Young was offered an assistant professor position by the Department of Political Science at die University of Wisconsin–Madison. He remained tiiere for his entire career, retiring in January 2001. He has held visiting professorships at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda (1965–66), and at the University of Dakar in Senegal (1987–88). He also served as dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the Université Nationale du Zaire from 1973 to 1975. Among his publications are twelve monographs, over one hundred articles, and chapters in numerous books. Several of Young's works have been translated into different languages.

Young's professional career includes extended field research in Congo-Kinshasa, Senegal, and Uganda. He has received many prestigious awards such as the Herskovits Prize (African Studies Association) and the Ralph Bunche Award (American Political Science Association) for The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Wisconsin, 1976), and the Gregory Luebbert Prize (APSA) for The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (Yale, 1994).