This article examines the troubled course of attempts to modernize and control pastoral production in Kenya over the last hundred years. It begins with an overview of changes in pastoralism to provide context and then gives more detailed consideration to the failure of colonial attempts to manage livestock resources. Finally, it discusses recent developments in relation to the past. It argues that study of pastoralism's past offers valuable lessons and provides insights into its present and possible future.

This article examines how the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) sought to inscribe a nationalist monologic history in Zimbabwe in order prop up its claim to be the progenitor and guardian of the postcolonial nation. Since its formation in 1963, it has worked tirelessly to claim to be the only authentic force with a sacred historic mission to deliver the colonized people from settler colonial rule. To achieve this objective, ZANU-PF has deployed the ideology of chimurenga in combination with the strategy of gukurahundi as well as a politics of memorialization to install a particular nationalist historical monologue of the nation. After attaining power in 1980, it proceeded to claim ownership of the birth of the nation. While the ideology of chimurenga situates the birth of the nation within a series of nationalist revolutions dating back to the primary resistance of the 1890s, the strategy of gukurahundi entails violent and physical elimination of enemies and opponents. But this hegemonic drive has always encountered an array of problems, including lack of internal unity in ZANU-PF itself, counternarratives deriving from political formations like the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU); labor movements; and critical voices from the Matebeleland region, which fell victim to gukurahundi strategy in the 1980s. With the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999, which soon deployed democracy and human rights discourse to critique the ideology of chimurenga and the strategy of gukurahundi, ZANU-PF hegemony became extremely shaky and it eventually agreed to share power with the MDC in February 2009.

This special ASR forum, “The Case of Gender-Based Violence: Assessing the Impact of International Human Rights Rhetoric on African Lives,” grounds itself in the notion that gender relations (and, indeed, gendered social norms) can undergo significant transformation in zones of conflict or in other contexts of extreme socioeconomic and political instability. Individuals actively reconfigure moral landscapes of power and sexuality amidst the everyday chaos, violence, and deprivation that constitutes the experience of war for most people, thereby formulating new normative frame-works of appropriately gendered norms for social interaction and sexual expression. These norms, of course, are rather dramatically cross-cut, for all actors involved, by an extensive list of factors that include one's ethnolinguistic or religious affiliation, citizenship status, gender, and myriad other allegiances that are all too frequently brought to the fore by conflict or other forms of instability. War and instability, it seems, force individuals to think of themselves, and others, in ways that might not otherwise have seemed imaginable.

The case studies in this issue are based upon research in Rwanda, Congo, Uganda, South Africa, and Liberia. One unifying theme is the frequency with which human rights rhetoric divorces conflict-related gender based violence from the peacetime normative framework. The authors illustrate the cultural restrictions and patriarchal oppression that encourage violence within different dimensions of the socioeconomic and political context (home, culture, political authority, economy, and military), and they analyze gender-based violence as a form of structural violence. Nonetheless, as Sharon Abramowitz and Mary Moran caution us, gender-based violence in conflict and postconflict zones is not simply an enhanced version of “traditional” gender oppression. We would be severely remiss, the authors remind us, to read conflict and crisis as culture.

In this paper I attempt to connect several dots, specifically my research on African women's activism, environmental justice, and climate change. The book on which I am currently working is tentatively entided “‘The Great Upheaval’: Women, Taxes and Nationalist Politics in Abeokuta (Nigeria), 1945–1951.” The study examines the struggles of Nigerian women to shape the nationalist agenda and their setbacks as the country moved decisively toward independence. At its core lies an analysis of a tax revolt launched by women in Abeokuta in 1947. The Abeokuta Women's Union (AWU), under the leadership of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (the mother of the late musician Fela Kuti), began a protracted protest against a tax increase. This revolt is well known in Nigerian popular history, and many people outside of Nigeria were introduced to it in Wole Soyinka's memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981:164–218).

Since September 11, 2001, the aid component of American foreign policy toward Africa has undergone a significant evolution: U.S. security has come to rival development as an increasingly explicit rationale. Development programming and project implementation now contain a security dimension that is underpinned by Pentagon strategists working through AFRICOM as much as by USAID officers partnering with the State Department. This article argues that given the potential of terrorism for undermining development in Africa itself, soft counterterrorism should be envisioned as a strategic developmental defense activity. Making use of unpublished country risk assessments and the author's participant observation during USAID field mission consultancies in the Sahel, as well as the scholarly literature and relevant policy documents of the Bush and Obama administrations, this article explores the new agenda and grassroots dynamics of development projects as tools for terrorism prevention. It contends that policy and institutional responses to 9/11 have resulted in a greater convergence of operational goals among U.S. government agencies that in the past, at least according to publicly stated goals, had pursued distinctly different missions in Africa. Normative implications of this change are mixed. Because of differing expectations with respect to separation of powers, African public opinion, paradoxically, may be more sympathetic to U.S. military engagement with civilians for developmental purposes than American public opinion is.

This article describes a legal thread running from the commission of massive sexual violence in the eastern provinces of the Congo since 1996 to the enactment of liberal legislation in 2006 to combat sexual violence throughout the country, especially in eastern Congo. In doing so, the article fills a gap in the nascent legal literature on systematic sexual violence. It finds that the new rape law is progressive, liberal, gender-neutral, and in keeping with international law. However, an unfortunate lapse in legislative drafting puts in doubt the authority of the courts to use the new rape law to prosecute systematic sexual violence. Despite this weakness, as well as harsh realities such as resource limitations and institutionalized corruption, the new sexual violence law, “the law of shameful acts,” nonetheless provides a framework on the basis of which the state and rape survivors can prosecute perpetrators. It is a necessary step in upholding accountability and preparing for the more daunting task of healing communities affected by a devastating regional war.

Following a successful armed resistance against a dictatorial state regime, a new government of former rebels took control of the national state in Ethiopia in 1991. Prompted partly by unfolding sea changes in global politics in the early 1990s, the new Ethiopian government pledged to undertake radical governance reform. More than twenty years after the new government took office, contested assessments of its record vis-à-vis its human and minority rights pledge, among other issues, have generated waves of debate, criticism, controversy, and global protests. Based on observations from southern Ethiopia, this article takes an ethnographic look at both the process and the outcome of Ethiopia's experiment with ethnic self-government, with a special focus on understanding the value of minority rights as an ideological construct. Conceptually, the paper attempts to explain a disjuncture between the globally prescribed ideal of human/minority group rights and the realities of governance on the ground.

Kenya's long quest for democratic reform since the first multiparty elections in 1991 has been inextricably enmeshed in a parallel struggle for fundamental socioeconomic reform. The essays in this special ASR Focus originated with a roundtable at the 2009 annual meetings of the African Studies Association in New Orleans that centered on the problems of and prospects for reform in Kenya-specifically, the efforts to forestall a repetition of the violence that took place in the aftermath of the 2007 elections and posed the most serious threat to the county's stability since independence in 1963. The speakers at the roundtable, whose presentations appear here in slighdy edited form, joined other students of Kenya politics to contemplate the underlying issues and challenges confronting the country in its effort to achieve that goal before the next national elections scheduled for late 2012 or early 2013.

Kenya's current constitutional moment has included both the first pop ularly ratified constitution and its first postindependence comprehensive land reform policy. The roughly temporally parallel processes that brought about these two signal achievements have inserted the interests of ordinary Kenyans into this constitutional moment in a way that elections and constitutional ratification alone would not have, reflecting more than two decades of civil society pressure. The new democratized land tenure policy removes land allocation decisions from pervasive executive branch abuse and vests them in a democratically elected Parliament. In this fundamental respect, the Kenya constitutional implementation process appears to privilege procedural and deliberative democracy as the source of substantive democratic land tenure outcomes, and by extension, the terms on which Kenyans relate to each other and their leaders. Upon the outcomes of these deliberations may well hinge the future stability as well as the democratic quality of the Kenyan state.

In 2007 South Africa's Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act, which had been debated since 1999. The law includes a statutory provision with new legal definitions of rape and consent. Influenced by Western human rights ideology and vocabulary, the Sexual Offences Act represents one form of discourse in South Africa about sexual coercion and consent. By using ethnographic methods, this article examines the wide disparity between some of the state discourses about coercion and consent and local beliefs and practices about the meanings of these terms in the Zulu township of Mpophomeni. Proponents of South Africa's new democracy often ignore poor young women's and men's local understandings of rape and of the violence they encounter on a daily basis. Against this background, the article offers recommendations to improve the current law and its effectiveness.

This article argues that Ethiopia's agricultural extension program, which received more government funding and donor support than other similar programs in Africa, reinforced the rural presence and authoritarian powers of the ruling party while largely failing to improve smallholder agriculture. The principal reason for this outcome has to do with the systematic entanglement of the Green Revolution package delivery system with the immediate goal of guaranteeing the party's political security. In one Amharic-speaking community that provided ethnographic information for this article, overzealous party leaders rewarded supporters at the expense of imagined opponents. This distortion, coupled with a culturally embedded concept of success (defined as upward mobility), caused pervasive fear, insecurity, suspicion, and rivalry among farmers. Not surprisingly, this insecurity has a deleterious effect on hardworking farmers. The article suggests that any meaningful attempt at improving the program must recognize the centrality of politics, especially at the community and household levels, where parochial interests interface with cultural expectations.

This article explores the package of “Agenda item 4” reforms undertaken by the Kenyan government in the mediation process following the 2007–8 postelection violence, including those relating to long-standing issues over constitutional revision. It situates the previous lack of reforms within Kenya's political economy and demonstrates how political and economic interests thwarted progress and produced the postelection crisis. It also examines the more recent attempts to address reforms following the signing of the National Accord and the creation of a power-sharing government, and finds strong public support for constitutional revision. It concludes that these pressures from below, along with a realignment of political interests and institutional change from power-sharing, helped support reform.

In 2009, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill introduced in Uganda's Parliament reignited homophobic sentiment across Africa. Despite a well-documented history of sexual diversity in Africa, claims that homosexuality is “un-African” are being used to justify violence and exclusion. This article, based primarily on a discursive analysis of public media sources, delves into various cultural logics that reveal the tensions and contradictions in Ugandans' widespread opposition to homosexuality. U.S. evangelical influence, postcolonial amnesia in regard to “tradition,” fertility concerns, and human rights exceptionalism drive this moral panic over issues of sexual diversity. Such sentiments must be addressed by confronting neocolonial religious influence and cultivating renewed respect for human rights and Africa's history of sexual diversity.

This article examines the early history of disability rights activism in Kenya. The transitional years from colonialism to independence were a period of great expectations. For persons with disabilities in particular, decolonization held additional possibilities and potential. National independence promised not just majority rule but also an all-inclusive citizenship and the commitment to social justice. Among the visually impaired of Kenya, such collective aspirations led to the birth of the Kenya Union of the Blind in 1959. In 1964, after years of futile correspondence with government officials, the Union organized a street march to the prime minister's office to attract attention to its grievances. The result was a government panel, the Mwendwa Committee for the Care and Rehabilitation of the Disabled, whose published report became the blueprint for social and rehabilitation programs. The government possessed limited resources, and the reforms that ensued were long overdue. Yet the sociohistorical dynamics behind the march are of particular significance. From the social historian's point of view, they affirm not only the historical agency of persons with disabilities, but also the need to recast and broaden the scope of African social history.

This article explores the representation of Africa in director Edward Zwick's 2006 film Blood Diamond, examining in particular the ways in which the film's liberal-humanitarian orientation works to demonize black African communities, nationalisms, and governments while constituting a white and largely American subject as the center of ethical value. The article also examines the film's account of diamond consumption as a global phenomenon, and considers the ways in which sound and vision operate to devalue black diasporic as well as black continental African subjects.

Kenya has been going through a period of political reform since 1991, when section 2A of the constitution, which had made Kenya a de jure one-party state, was repealed. This reform followed a prolonged struggle on the part of citizens both inside and outside the country, and their call for democracy was one that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was embraced by Western countries. Via diplomatic pressure and conditionality on aid, Western donors played an important role in the repeal of section 2A, the return of multiparty elections, and the creation and reform of a number of political institutions and offices via a separation of powers. But although these changes were supported by the political opposition and much of civil society in Kenya, they did not rise organically from the national struggle over political power. Nor did these reforms lead to a determination in the country to hold the political elite accountable for their transgressions. This article argues that modern Kenya's history of economic and political inequality has resulted in a population whose very divisions make it difficult for politicians to be disciplined. Accountability has two dimensions: the horizontal accountability among branches of government that is assured by checks and balances, and the vertical accountability of the state to its citizens. Vertical accountability depends on a constituency of like-minded citizens defending broad national interests, or an electorate with a collective identity or set of identities attached to the Kenyan nation. But in the absence of such shared goals and demands, narrow personal and local interests prevail, and politicians remain unaccountable to the nation as a whole.

This article situates the sexual violence associated with the Rwandan civil war and 1994 genocide within a local cultural history and political economy in which institutionalized gender violence shaped the choices of Rwandan women and girls. Based on ethnographic research, it argues that Western notions of sexual consent are not applicable to a culture in which colonialism, government policy, war, and scarcity of resources have limited women's access to land ownership, economic security, and other means of survival. It examines emic cultural models of sexual consent and female sexual agency and proposes that sexual slavery, forced marriage, prostitution, transactional sex, nonmarital sex, informal marriage or cohabitation, and customary (bridewealth) marriages exist on a continuum on which female sexual agency becomes more and more constrained by material circumstance. Even when women's choices are limited, women still exercise their agency to survive. Conflating all forms of sex in conflict zones under the rubric of harm undermines women's and children's rights because it reinforces gendered hierarchies and diverts attention from the structural conditions of poverty in postconflict societies.

This paper argues that even with the incorporation of land policy provisions into Kenya's new constitution, there is every reason to believe that in the near future, highly politicized land conflict will continue. This is because land politics in Kenya is a redistributive game that creates winners and losers. Given the intensely redistributive potential of the impending changes in Kenya's land regime—and the implications of the downward shift in the locus of control over land allocation through decentralization of authority to county governments—there is no guarantee that legislators or citizens will be able to agree on concrete laws to realize the constitution's calls for equity and justice in land matters. This article traces the main ways in which state power has been used to distribute and redistribute land (and land rights) in the Rift Valley, focusing on post-1960 smallholder settlement schemes, land-buying companies, and settlement in the forest reserves, and it highlights the long-standing pattern of political contestation over the allocation of this resource. It then traces the National Land Policy debate from 2002 to 2010, focusing on the distributive overtones and undertones of the policy and of the debate over the new constitution that incorporated some of its main tenets.

In this article we draw on three years of ethnographic observation of postconflict humanitarian intervention in Liberia to consider the process whereby global efforts in the areas of gender-based violence (GBV) and human rights are interacting with local debates over kinship, entitlement, personal rights, and social responsibility. This article draws upon Liberian narratives, complaints, and efforts to regulate, in a national context, social norms and behavior in regard to gender-based violence issues in postconflict life while also engaging with an ongoing international human rights discourse on the subject of GBV. Our ethnography takes a multiscalar approach to give a sense of the process, multiple discourses, and dialectics of power involved in this issue, and to demonstrate how the definition of “the GBV problem” in Liberia, the target of complex GBV interventions, is different from the conception held by agencies, governmental ministries, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are responsible for implementing global mandates.