In this interview with the Nigerian filmmaker, Tunde Kelani, film scholar Tunde Onikoyi explores the universe of Kelani’s cinematic vision, particularly as it relates to Thunderbolt (2002) and Dazzling Mirage (2014). Although produced twelve years apart, what binds them is a common humanitarian narrative temperament. Onikoyi and Kelani discuss his films in broader terms, exploring literary references, Kelani’s interest in health, and how cinema convey his creative tendencies. The interlocutors investigate the effects of “magun,” male chauvinism, and patriarchal idiosyncrasies in contemporary Nigeria. Kelani shares his filmmaking vision, and reflects on the future of Nigerian cinema in framing African story-telling.

Sierra Leone is one of the more important rice-producing and consuming countries in West Africa. Sierra Leone was an exporter of rice in the early 1950's. Since 1955 the agricultural sector has not been able to meet domestic needs; Imports from 1960 to 1970 averaged $2.7 million annually (USDA 1968, p. 18). The need to import rice has continued in spite of governmental efforts to increase domestic production through a price-support program, fertilizer subsidization, land clearing, a heavily subsidized mechanical-plowing scheme, and the development of the Rice Corporation, which is legally responsible for controlling imports, providing for adequate distribution of rice throughout the country, establishing centers for collection, purchase, storage, and sale of rice, and setting the price for imported rice.

Self-sufficiency in rice production has become the central focus of the national agricultural policy as established by the Government of Sierra Leone. With this as a policy framework, this paper first summarizes recent research related to the economics of rice production in Sierra Leone. Second, it outlines four possible strategies to increase rice output, in the context of both micro and macro costs. The four strategies examined include (1) improved extensive cultivation with existing levels of capital inputs, especially tools and equipment; (2) extensive cultivation based upon the broader development of rice lands suitable for partial mechanical cultivation; (3) intensive cultivation of inland-valley swamps developed primarily with family labor; and (4) intensive cultivation of mangrove and associated swamps requiring external expenditures for land development.

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.

When I became Assistant Secretary for Africa nearly four and a half years ago it was my hope that, if I could do nothing else, I could help to sustain and increase America's effort in the development of Africa. We cannot be meaningful to Africa unless we respond to its great needs for economic development. That hope has not been fully realized. I have had to say “no” to African requests far more than I have been able to say “yes”. I want to explore with you today why I think this has been so and to suggest some approaches to reverse the present trend.

The major legislative attention of Congress in 1974 with respect to Africa focused on aspects of U.S. aid policy and an effort to repeal the Byrd amendment, which permits the importation of strategic materials in contravention of U.N. sanctions.

In the area of U.S. aid policy, the Congress adopted several pieces of legislation with implications for Africa. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 (Public Law 93-559) requested the President to increase Africa’s share of the Agency for International Development (AID) loans and grants and to provide the developing nations of Africa with an equitable share of United States economic assistance (sec. 49).

On November 2, 1983, white voters in South Africa decided by a two-thirds majority in a nation-wide referendum to approve a new South African constitution. The new political dispensation still excludes the 70 percent African population from participation in central political decision making but includes symbolically the 10 percent so-called coloureds and 3 percent Indians in separate Parliaments. White control has been streamlined into a more technocratic, expanded executive state with greater powers for the ruling Nationalist Party and the office of the state president. The “coloureds” and Indians now play the minor role of educating whites in non-racialism.

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.

This article addresses the issue of the relationship between contemporary South African politics and the type of socially committed theater that might be capable of mounting a critique of those politics. The author highlights the contradictions between the aspirations of the Freedom Charter and the realities of subscribing to the neoliberal world order. His contention is that any theater form that is seeking cultural intervention must find a way of representing contradiction if it is to remain true to the experiences of its audiences and its participants. Such a representation can be achieved through a combination of Bertolt Brecht's praxis in relation to contradiction and current practices in Theatre for Development, which themselves draw upon aspects of the antiapartheid resistance theater.

(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.

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!