We also have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussions, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful.

In a rather loose, personal way I would like to address myself to the problems of the extremely tenuous position that African literature holds in the American university, and to a step that has recently been taken towards ameliorating the situation. As much of what I will present is admittedly subjective, I hope to raise questions and precipitate discussion, having no desire to pre-empt debate with an airtight argument.

African writers in English have done much to enlarge the image of Africa in the world. The novelists among them have contributed most to the understanding of the African points of view and perspectives on life, politics, culture and history. In their roles as chroniclers, custodians of the collective heritage, social critics, teachers and visionaries of their people, the novelists have illuminated the African situation and the forces that have kept the continent in an endemic state of crisis.

Zambia’s contemporary experience of recession without resolution is, alas, quite typical of the majority of African states over the decade; for since the celebration of ten years of independence in 1974, its national income has been in almost continuous decline. But this economic decay has had an uneven impact, between both time periods and social groups: occasional injections of foreign aid or loans have been permissive of relative affluence for elements in the bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy along the line-of-rail. The full impact of negative growth has been felt in the more distant rural areas and among the peasantry and the unemployed.

This article argues that the roots of the Malawian medical brain drain lie in colonial and postcolonial historical, economic, medical, political, social, racial, and class factors. Also involved are the image and expectations of doctors themselves and the culture of medicine in Malawi. Reversing this brain drain, therefore, requires tackling factors in all these domains.

The adoption of the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies at the Third World Conference on Women in 1985 provided a framework for action at all levels, to promote peace, equality and development opportunities for women, particularly those in the developing countries. Since then, these strategies have served as a basis for evaluating the actions of government and non-government organisations (NGOs) towards empowering women. In some respects, Uganda can be looked upon as a model African country where women have made remarkable progress. Women constitute more than half of the national population. Of the total population of about 19 million in 1996, 10 million were female, over 4 million who are over 18 years and eligible to vote. Uganda’s Affirmative Action policy has provided women with significant opportunity to participate in both the parliament and other decision making bodies.

Relationships between U.S. government officials and academic specialists working on national security and foreign policy issues with respect to Africa are many and complex. They can be as informal as a phone call or passing conversation or as formalized as a consulting arrangement or research contract. Many contacts exist and there is no doubt that many in both government and the academy value these ties. There have been, however, ongoing controversies about what settings and what topics are appropriate to the government/academic interchange. National security and foreign policy-making in the U.S. is an extremely diffuse process.

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.

Many developing countries share the difficult problem of attempting to provide aid to the large sectors of their population living at or near a minimal subsistence level. These subsistence sectors are often characterized by their traditional orientation and their relative isolation from the commercial or modern sectors of the developing nation's economy. This isolation does not always entail physical remoteness of traditional enclaves, although spatial imbalances and disparities are frequent concomitants of functional dislocation within the economy. The maintenance of separate institutions governing social and economic relationships, and the persistence of patterns of motivation and behavior at variance with modern modes of reasoning, are frequently sufficient to impede contact between closely contiguous groups of traditional and commercially oriented peoples.

Thus although development may be theoretically possible for any group, and is often conceptualized as a continuum between low and high states of productivity and welfare, in some countries a pronounced dichotomy arises between traditional and modern groups. Economies in which functional separation of subsistence and commercial sectors has become acute are referred to as dual economies.

In this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe’s Abiola lecture, the idea that there is a relationship between the plasticity of digital technology and African cosmologies of the deuxième monde. One case concerns the viral YouTube video #sciencemustfall, in which students at the University of Cape Town criticize “Western” science and demand that African forms of knowledge such as witchcraft be incorporated into the meaning of science. The second case considers fieldwork among the brouteurs of Côte d’Ivoire, internet scammers who build intimate relationships on false premises using social media. They acquire shocking amounts of wealth in this way which they display on their own social media accounts. However, they are said to use occult means to seduce and persuade their virtual lovers, trapping their prey in the sticky allure of the world wide web. Newell uses both examples to highlight the overlaps between the transformational efficacies embedded in both occult ontologies and digital worldings, calling for the possibility of using African cosmologies of the second world to produce a ‘theory from the south’ of virtual sociality.

In the 2016 Abiola Lecture, Mbembe argued that “the plasticity of digital forms speaks powerfully to the plasticity of African precolonial cultures and to ancient ways of working with representation and mediation, of folding reality.” In her commentary, Pype tries to understand what “speaking powerfully to” can mean. She first situates the Abiola Lecture within a wide range of exciting and ongoing scholarship that attempts to understand social transformations on the continent since the ubiquitous uptake of the mobile phone, and its most recent incarnation, the smartphone. She then analyzes the aesthetics of artistic projects by Alexandre Kyungu, Yves Sambu, and Hilaire Kuyangiko Balu, where wooden doors, tattoos, beads, saliva, and nails correlate with the Internet, pixels, and keys of keyboards and remote controls. Finally, Pype asks to whom the congruence between the aesthetics of a “precolonial” Congo and the digital speaks. In a society where “the past” is quickly demonized, though expats and the commercial and political elite pay thousands of dollars for the discussed art works, Pype argues that this congruence might be one more manifestation of capitalism’s cannibalization of a stereotypical image of “Africa.”

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.

The introduction of indigenous languages to Kenyan media, following pre- and post-independence realities, opened the floodgate of communications within the country, with both positive and negative consequences. Indigenous languages found expression in creative works, civic communication, and other areas previously reserved solely for English and Kiswahili. Kanana and Kinyua discuss this trajectory within the context of media liberalization, digital migration, and gains from the period of state crackdown on media to the promulgation of the 2010 Kenyan Constitution and devolution of government units reflecting traditional boundaries. Employing secondary research methodologies, they argue the advantages of indigenous languages in the media over the disadvantages highlighted in the literature.