In the early 1990s, democratization dominated discourse on African politics. However fraught with contradictions, processes of political liberalization held out hope for more responsive, accountable government—and some African countries achieved impressive gains. But in many parts of the continent the outlook at the beginning of the twenty-first century is decidedly more somber. An increase in violence and war has had devastating consequences for people and their communities. This presidential address examines several approaches to confronting these conflicts and highlights three lessons that emerge. In some situations international involvement is essential to end a war, and doing this successfully requires enormous resources. But external assistance cannot follow a single template; it must be adapted to different local dynamics and coordinated with efforts of peace-builders within. Finally, greater support is needed for efforts to alleviate the conditions that spawn wars and violence.

This article highlights and interrogates the recent resurgence of the view, both in the academy and in international financial institutions, that African culture has been a stumbling block to development. It argues, instead, for a development perspective that is informed by the realities of Africa today. The views of African humanists and philosophers on development are highlighted. The case is made for a return to building on the indigenous roots of African culture as a way forward.

This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the victim of various forms of violence, the most devastating of which is the violence of cultural and political conversion: externally and internally driven initiatives and processes intended to domesticate, harness, transform, alter, remodel, adapt, or reconstruct Africa and Africans through schools and universities to suit new ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking. As a result of such violence, educational systems have privileged mimicry and transformed epistemologies informed by partial theories to metanarratives of arrogance, superiority, and intolerance of creative differences. Even when clear alternatives are imagined to the current irrelevance in education, economic difficulties render their realization extremely difficult. Repressive states have perpetuated and capitalized upon this predicament by manipulating desperate academics into compliance and complicity with mediocrity. This article examines some epistemological consequences of such alienation and irrelevance and looks at their implications for theorizing Africa. It calls for a global conversation of universities and scholars in which Africa participates on its own terms, with the interests and concerns of ordinary Africans as its guiding principle.

Most rural–urban migrants maintain significant ties with their communities of origin in Africa south of the Sahara. Contrary to “modernist” assumptions that these ties would fade away, they often continue to be strong. This urban–rural connection has important consequences for rural–urban migration, for urban–rural return migration, for the rural economy, and for the political process. To understand the processes underpinning the urban–rural connection we need to distinguish different migration strategies and to deconstruct the notion of “rural.” Depending on their migration strategies, urban residents connect with a range of actors at the rural end: more or less closely related kin, kinship groups, non-kin groups, villages, larger political entities. These connections play out differently for men and women.

In this article the author relates the crisis of African universities to their idiosyncratic birth during the colonial period. The African universities were, to a large extent, conceptualized according to the Western template and its inherent epistemology This Western university originates from a local knowledge system that gained a hegemonic position culminating in the colonial period. The author argues for another conceptualization of African universities, based on a diversity of knowledge systems, and refers to processes of (re-)appropriation as seen in the domain of African Independent Churches.

In many parts of Africa, university systems are in crisis; squalid conditions, student strife, and increasing state violence have turned many campuses into battlegrounds. Through an in-depth look at the Kenyan case, this paper examines some of the deep political dynamics of the current desperate situation. We demonstrate how in Kenya, state–university links involve attempts by higher-level government officials to control campuses through patronage, surveillance, and violence and how institutional configurations facilitate this. As the burden of repression falls on student activists who challenge current power configurations, we examine the current crisis through a student lens. By presenting and analyzing the historical narrative of student activism on campus, we show the inadequacy of overly structural, economic approaches to the crisis favored by the World Bank and some of its critics. Instead, we show the critical importance of understanding how the university crisis is organically linked to wider political processes, including local struggle over democratization of the state and economy.

Elite, top-down models of democratic transition commonly miss key popular challenges and opportunities for institutionalizing stable, representative regimes. Civil society theorists often mistakenly assume that civil society organizations will support the creation and strengthening of a democratic regime. This article argues that in order to understand the process of regime change, we must look at both macro- and micro-level institutions and practices, as well as at the practical and ideological struggles over democracy that will define the regime. In South Africa, this struggle is seen most clearly in the interactions between popular organizations, such as the civics, and the African National Congress (ANC). How popular organizations make demands and how these demands are met will determine not only the form of the new regime, but also the stability of the most basic rights associated with democracy.

Cameroonians saw a positive correlation between the enactment of the Liberty Laws in the early 1990s, the increase in the number of tertiary institutions, and the contribution of its universities to worldwide intellectual endeavors. Nevertheless, as the history of the University of Buea shows, the university space, instead of becoming free, became instead a space of domination. Universities discourage critical scholarship and collaboration, harass politically suspect instructors, and put barriers in the way of professional advancement. For most faculty members, energy in the university space has become focused on survival, with many individuals more concerned with promoting their upward mobility than with the production of knowledge. One particularly unfortunate result is the continued marginalization or silencing of the African voice on the global stage.

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).

Using the University of Malawi as an example, this article analyzes the opportunities and constraints faced by African intellectuals. It argues that during the anticolonial struggle, young nationalists conceived the University of Malawi as a potential engine for the transformation and development of the state. After independence President Banda, who established a repressive one-party state, severely restricted the university's intellectual autonomy through modalities of censorship. Some academics and students went into exile; others conformed to the dominant ideology; others resisted it furtively. Global pressures on both the university and the entire political economy of Malawi contributed to the triumph of prodemocracy movements in overthrowing the Banda regime. After the victory of the United Democratic Front government in 1994, many restrictions on intellectual freedom were lifted. Global socioeconomic forces, however, in complicity with the new government, continued to marginalize the university community. It is suggested that a productive regeneration of intellectuals' contributions to Malawi's development will be possible only through a major realignment of its intellectual capital.

The academic political scientists—mainly professors—who were hired by the Babangida military government in Nigeria between 1985 and 1993, ostensibly to theorize and articulate a new political culture and morality through the political transition program (PTP), have been objects, both then and ever since, of serious criticism concerning their role and contribution to a program that promised much but delivered little or nothing. The major criticism is that the political scientists, despite an initial commitment to help the military fashion a new political order, lost their “science” by providing an intellectual cover for the general's schemes and enriched the “political,” including the politics of corruption and self-enrichment. We examine this critique and show that these individuals, by choosing to remain in office—if not in power—even after witnessing so many broken promises by the regime, tarnished their intellectual integrity and moral credibility. Appointed to serve as an instrument of legitimization for the regime, they contained, constricted, and shrank the political and intellectual space rather than facilitating intellectual and democratic empowerment.