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.

In October 1986, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, a series of panels was convened to commemorate the founding of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin twenty-five years previously. By many criteria this had been a successful program in promoting African studies as an academic field in the United States, in part because from the earliest years the program had looked to the future development of the discipline. It was fitting, therefore, that this “commemoration” not simply be an exercise in recalling the “glorious past” but instead be given to reviewing the development of the field over that period, and to looking ahead to likely trends in the academic understanding of Africa in the coming years.

The articles included in this symposium were first presented at panels organized as part of this commemoration. As befitting the occasion, they were intended to be reflective rather than critical, exploratory rather than definitive, ranging freely over the themes and features that have characterized the study of African history at the University of Wisconsin over that period. But it was also felt that despite the occasion that engendered them, these papers all had the potential of a wider audience, in part because they addressed issues characteristic of African historical studies in this country in general, with both their strengths and drawbacks.

These papers were presented at two panels of very different orientation, and that organization has been maintained here. One category, consisting of articles by Ewald, Spear, and Harms, dealt with “The Craft of the Historian.” These papers examined three related dimensions to historical inquiry in Africa: historians' relations to their sources, the analytic skills needed to assess the data, and the conceptual issues involved in historical understanding. Another panel dealt with the theme “Future Trends and Perspectives in African History.” This set of papers addressed the recent development of certain fields of inquiry and projected the likely trends of such studies over the coming years.

On the afternoon of 15 September 1864 John Hanning Speke, discoverer of the Source of the Nile, accidentally shot himself in a field at Neston Park, near Box, Wiltshire. In the hundred years since there have been numerous biographies of other explorers of Africa—shelves of books record the achievements of Livingstone, Stanley and Burton—but Speke has been accorded nothing longer than periodical articles or sections in books. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that any extensive papers exist, but there is a good deal of scattered information in print, and this note is an attempt to relate this to an outline of his life.

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 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.

New York, N.Y., February 12, 1982. The Emergency Committee for African Refugees, in a joint press conference with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), announced a campaign to block the deportation of nearly 5,000 Ethiopian refugees. These Ethiopians have had their Voluntary Departure Status cancelled by the United States Department of State.

Informality is growing with Africa’s rapid urbanization. Much like residents of other types of informal housing, backyard dwellers face overall poor living conditions and political marginalization. However, backyard residents are in an ambiguous legal area and have been far less politically active and organized to pursue their rights to adequate housing. Using a qualitative case study of backyard residents in three Cape Town neighborhoods, Harris, Scheba, and Rice bridge theories of infrastructural citizenship and collective action to shed light on how informality may undermine collective action, and they identify four factors influencing collective action.

The concept of the organic serves as a keyword capturing emerging practices and epistemologies through which Africans navigate increasingly toxic lifeworlds. Noting a growing preoccupation with this term, the authors unpack its meaning based on their ethnographic fieldwork concerning two East African idioms: kienyeji and kiasili. What it means to be(come) organic is tied to older notions such as life flow, tradition, and the natural. Tracing how this concept engages with central themes in Africanist debates, the authors demonstrate that an Africanist theorizing about it foregrounds critical claims about the vitality of bodies and the viability of environments.