I appreciate very much this opportunity to present our views on what the United States should do to encourage political progress in Rhodesia.

Since the establishment of the Washington Office on Africa in the fall of 1972, we have devoted much of our efforts to working with sympathetic members of Congress and citizens across the country to improve United States policy toward Rhodesia and specifically to repeal the Byrd Amendment, which three-and-a-half years ago created a statutory violation of this country’s treaty obligation to comply with the United Nations sanctions program. So we are pleased to participate in hearings on southern Africa and especially this one on Rhodesia.

Prophecy is one of the simplest ways for an historian to destroy his credit and reputation. Having been persuaded to take this risk, I shall partly cover it with one small insurance policy: I shall set forth what seem to me to be the relevant facts, but not be too dogmatic about the conclusions to be drawn from them.

Where will South Africa stand twenty-five years from now? What will have happened during those years? In theory there are, I think, only four possibilities: (i) that the status quo will remain essentially unchanged; (ii) that radical changes, involving or at least leading to the abolition of all racial discrimination, will come about peacefully, by constitutional means; (iii) that the regime will be overthrown by invading foreign forces; and (iv) that it will be overthrown by revolution within the country, with or without foreign support. As there are strong reasons for believing that none of these alternatives is really possible, some factor seems to have been overlooked. Perhaps it will appear as the four alternatives are examined.

[Note: This interview was conducted on September 22, 1976 by the Mozambican Information Agency. Mr. Machingura is a political commissar in the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA) and provides the first major statement for the Western public of the goals and policies of ZIPA. The failure of the Western press to provide information about ZIPA has left the field to the propaganda efforts of the Rhodesián Smith regime, which defines the ZIPA soldiers as “terrs” (terrorists). An opposing understanding of the ZIPA movement has been proffered by the frontline African presidents. In their first public response to the Smith announcement of agreement with the Kissinger terms of settlement, the five presidents began with a statement of congratulation to the Zimbabwean soldiers who had brought the white regime to the point of seeking a settlement publically, even though this too may have been another Smith ploy to gain time by avoiding substantive changes.

Examination of the black reaction to apartheid during the period 1948-1973 is topical and should help us to understand what is now happening in South Africa. The black reaction is not merely to apartheid; it is to the whole social system imposed on the black people of South Africa from the moment the white man landed there in 1652. There has been a reaction over the succeeding centuries which has manifested itself in a variety of ways. For a long time this reaction assumed the form of armed resistance. When that was defeated, it took the form of political opposition.

There are few parallels to the human holocaust that took place in Burundi in 1972 in the wake of a tortuous competitive struggle between the country’s two major ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. Scarcely noticed (let alone understood) by public opinion anywhere, the killings are conservatively estimated to have caused between 80,000 and 100,000 deaths. Approximately 3.5 percent of the country’s total population (3.5 million) were physically wiped out in a period of a few weeks. In comparative terms this is as if England had suffered a loss of 2 million or the United States about 8 million people. To speak of “selective genocide” in describing the outcome of such large-scale political violence seems scarcely an exaggeration.

At the NGO African Women's Task Force Meeting in Nairobi in April 1988, Sara Longwe suggested that the “main problem in Africa is to shift women's development above the welfare level in the face of resistance from male dominated government bureaucracies.” She also maintained that ”… women's welfare is not likely to be much improved until the affected women themselves achieve control in such areas as control over factors of production and distribution of income and benefits… This dimension is concerned with women's power to control their own lives and become independent and self-reliant — both individually and collectively — on equal terms with men. Equality in control is the ultimate objective of the process of empowerment.“

Thinking about the African Studies Association – what it could do, ought to be doing, or should have done – brings to mind the suggestion once offered by some prominent academic group that the priority of their university African studies program should be Phonetics.

To make a case for greater American involvement in Africa is to take cognizance of what has gone before — eclectic embrace followed by selective disengagement. The Nixon Administration has opted for a policy of designating certain target countries for bilateral assistance and political cultivation. The itineraries of American public figures from the Vice President and Secretary of State to the astronauts and Mrs. Nixon tell us where the emphases are being placed: on the two long-standing areas of concern, Liberia and Ethiopia; on Africa's most populous state, Nigeria; on one of its larger states, Zaire, and on the home of one of Africa's senior pragmatic statesmen, Kenya. Somewhat more peripheral interest is maintained in Ghana, which has moved into the column of “reasonable” regimes. Most recently the situation in Sudan has dazzled U.S. policymakers with visions of picking up chips from the Soviets and conjuring up the type of Cold War determinant of involvement popular in the 1960s.

Jan Vansina's history of the Nyiginya kingdom joins the long list of works, both essays and novels, that have proliferated since the Rwanda Patriotic Front gained power in 1994. The rigorous application of historical criticism distinguishes this from other works that give voice primarily to passions and speculations. Vansina's work is remarkable for the author's ability to bridge past and present by placing himself downstream rather than upstream in the flow of history. This important emphasis on ancient Rwanda contributes to the understanding of today's events. Vansina was ahead of those whose project it was to reread the history of Rwanda, which began in Butare in December 1998. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that it is up to Rwandan historians themselves to compile, on the basis of the facts accepted by everyone, a history that is as impartial as possible and that might offer some guidelines for the future.

In 1962, when Vansina was writing L'évolution du royaume rwanda des origines à 1900 (The Evolution of the Rwandan Kingdom from Its Origins to 1900), his work was already marked by a rigorous exploration of historical facts. In Le Rwanda ancien (Ancient Rwanda), he proposes a new chronology of the Nyiginya kingdom, whose foundation he places around the middle of the seventeenth century. In so doing, Vansina definitively separates himself from Alexis Kagame—who situates its beginnings six centuries earlier—and thereby puts to rest the argument of historians and anthropologists, and challenges those politicians who, in the pursuit of legitimacy, have based their ideologies of the Rwandan reconquest and territorial revindication on the writings of Kagame.

Ga proverbial wisdom holds that “hate has no medicine,” but there is a sacred court in Accra where people can calm the animosity that emerges from social conflicts. A unique form of vernacular jurisprudence has emerged at the Nae We Shrine Tribunal, which manages the consequences of civil, criminal, and supernatural crimes without raising the ire of human rights activists. Using records from this shrine court, the authors of this article demonstrate how the Tribunal offers social and spiritual wellbeing in a manner that cannot be provided by the chiefly and state judicial systems.

During Africa’s anti-colonial movements, women in French colonies were less politically active than women in British colonies. Hern examines how differences in British and French education policies in the Gold Coast and Senegal between the 1920s and the 1950s shaped women’s opportunities for participating in nationalist activity and becoming involved in early-independence politics. Compared to girls’ education in Senegal, girls’ education in the Gold Coast was more widespread, came from a variety of providers, and was less focused on domesticity. Women in the Gold Coast were thus more likely to be mobilized as political agents during the nationalist movement and integrated into Ghana’s new independent government.