This paper offers an empirical study of a weaving enterprise in the southern African nation of Lesotho. The objective of the study was to test the theory and prescriptions of the liberal women in development (or WID) approach within the World Bank model of development as a whole. That is, through the analysis of a real life situation for a specific group of women in a specific Third World context, we sought to determine whether employment “empowers” women (as WID predicts), exploits them (as some of its critics assert), or otherwise affects their lives and consciousness. Throughout the following discussion, we bear in mind that development strategies do not only succeed or fail, but can profoundly affect the political, social and economic structures in developing societies as they unfold, often in unwitting ways (Ferguson 1990, xiv). What effect does a WID-type business actually have in this specific instance, and what can it tell us about the relevance of mainstream development discourse and practice with regard to women's employment throughout Sub-Saharan Africa?

In the 1980s, the World Bank became disillusioned with the African state as a vehicle for development. A World Bank report argued that there was a

…widespread impression of political decline. Corruption, oppression, and nepotism are increasingly evident. These are hardly unique to Africa, but they may have been exacerbated by development strategies that concentrated power and resources in government bureaucracies, without countervailing measures to ensure public accountability or political consensus (IBRD 1989b, 22).

The focus of the Bank then shifted from assisting African governments to foster economic growth, and towards restructuring the governments and economies of Africa.

1994 has witnessed the demise of apartheid in South Africa, thus signaling the end of an era in the history of Africa—the long night of European colonial rule. This momentous event, and the challenging process of transformation that it has set in motion, vividly illustrate the power of the rubric chosen for this year's annual meeting, Africa Reconfigured. But the reconfiguration of Africa is certainly not something new. So on this occasion I propose to look back selectively at some aspects of that reconfiguration as it relates to the European mapping and consequent representation of Africa; the political configuration of Africa; and, finally, the future of Africa and African Studies.

“Where is Africa?” asks Ali Mazrui in a characteristically provocative dissection of European ethnocentric projections about the mapping and perception of Africa (Mazrui 1986, 23-4). To which we might add, “And what do we know about it from maps?” For as Peter Barber emphasizes in his discussion of the European discovery of Africa, “it should always be borne in mind that maps show only what their makers wished to show and not necessarily all that they actually knew” (Barber 1987, 37). Indeed, the history of mapping Africa reflects virtually all of the problems one is likely to face in examining the representation of Africa. Ancient knowledge of the continent was limited to the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts, as well as the Nile Valley. Bound up with the acquisition of commercial information about the products of Africa, and then with the staking out of colonial claims from as early as the first Portuguese explorations down the Atlantic coast of the continent in the fourteenth century, Africa was arguably more thoroughly misrepresented than it was accurately mapped during the first millennium and a half of the Christian era.

I wish first to thank the National Panels Committee and the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association for extending this kind invitation to me.

Allow me to pay homage to the man after whom this series of lectures was named. Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola has been in detention for 134 days, that is more than four months, since June 24, 1994. I had the opportunity and honor to meet him about two years ago, when I headed the Department of Culture and Communications in Benin and was in charge of a project known as “The Slave Route Project,” which was similar to Bashorun Abiola's campaign for reparations. Mr. Abiola visited Benin and had long talks with President Soglo.

Without interfering with the domestic affairs of any particular country, but also without seeking to pour oil on the fire, let me mention that it is a shame for Africa and for human civilization at the end of the twentieth century that a man should be arrested for winning elections. Every additional day Bashorun Abiola spends in detention makes the crisis more serious and more intolerable.

Whatever difficulties they face, however complex the national situation, present rulers in Chief Abiola's country should realize that they are making a martyr at their own expense and that their interest is to release, as early as possible, a man whose innocence is evident to all. What in the eyes of non-Nigerians still makes Nigeria a great country and a model to all Africa is certainly not a reign of sheer force but the tenacity and courage of Nigerian democrats in their continuing struggle for human rights and the rule of law.

I am man of the transition [because] of my age and my ideas.… I have one foot in with the elders because I have learned from them, and the other with the young.…The massive entry of young people [into the party] symbolizes the success of continuity.

Laurent Dona Fologo, Fraternité Matin, 19 April 1991

The theme of the Ninth Congress of the PDCI, which opened 1 October 1990 in the president's village of Yamoussoukro, was “renovation and continuity” (Fraternité Hebdo, 4 October 1990). With three thousand activists taking part, it was the most widely attended congress ever held. Earlier that year, the leader of the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire, President Félix Houphouët-Boigny (deceased 7 December 1994), had announced an end to one-party rule. The goal of the congress, then, was to revamp the PDCI so that it could compete effectively against the electoral challenge it would now face from opposition parties. Ten commissions were organized to restructure the PDCI and formulate a platform to deal with the political and economic problems plaguing the nation. When the delegates emerged, five days later, the party had been reorganized. Among other things, it now included a broader representation of generations, professions and interest groups in each of the party organs and committees.

Not surprisingly, differences of opinion have emerged within PDCI ranks as to how an open, efficient, “new and improved” party should function. Far from entering this new era of Ivoirian politics as a monolithic entity, as victorious election figures might suggest, the PDCI came rife with tensions between loyal members.

Of course [after graduation from high school] some things go, whistles, lights-out, uniform, parades, prefects,…and yet all the central ideas go on. There will still be chores to be done, and done well, without grumbles; there will still be the need to discipline, for men who can obey and can therefore—when called upon—rule…(Francis 1957, 2).

What we are practicing at Makere, day in and out,…is the subversion… of the African mind; the breaking down of mental tissues; their reconstruction in the Western mode; the reordering of thoughts, feelings, habits, responses, of every aspect of the mind and personality. This is what we are doing, and cannot avoid doing—this is the core of our activity (Murray Carlin in Stanley 1960, 11).

In 1957 a solemn third-former at Alliance High School wrote in the school magazine: “Superstition used to play an important role in Kikuyu society…It was the chief reason why the older order changed more slowly than many people desired” (Ngugi 1957, 21). Unequivocally rejecting “rigid” traditional society, the writer declares approvingly that with the advance of Christianity—“without doubt the greatest civilising influence”—many Gikuyu have come to regard “superstition and witchcraft…with derision.” After a well told anecdote tinged with humorous self-mockery, the essayist ends with sermonizing gratitude for “a most valuable lesson” (22).

This parrot-like bagatelle in The AHS Magazine—signed “J. T. Ngugi, Form 3A,” and his first published work—echoes the high moral tone of the missionary headmaster of Alliance High School, E. Carey Francis (Greaves 1969; Kipkorir 1980; Sicherman 1990, 389-92). The motto of the school, “Strong to Serve,” implied the kinds of “chores” that boys thus educated would have to do in Kenya when they became—in Ngugi's later caustic paraphrase of his headmaster's goal–“efficient machines for running a colonial system” (Sicherman 1990, 20).

In a review published almost two decades ago, Hopkins (1976, 29) observed that business history had “no following in African Studies.” A decade later, however, the situation had changed remarkably, though the important subject of the relationship between the State and the business community in colonial Africa still required further in-depth analysis based on case studies. Hence, Hopkins (1987, 131) stressed the “need to evaluate the precise balance of…[the] forces (which underpin this relationship) by placing them in the context of a particular colony at a specific historical moment.” He called for “additional research” in the form of case studies, such as is presented below, to shed light on the dimensions of business-government relations under colonial rule.

Although scholars acknowledge the centrality of the State in the colonies (Smith 1979; Cooper 1981), they differ on the characterization of its role in the contest between indigenous and expatriate economic interests in the colonies. The conventional view (Crowder 1968, 305; Hopkins 1975, 189) depicts the colonial state as the “Great White Empire” which limited itself to mediating between these competing interests. The opposing school of thought (Rodney 1972; Smith 1979; Lonsdale and Berman 1979; 1980) posits that the colonial state was interventionist; it collaborated with expatriate business groups to exploit the colonies in the imperial interest. The weight of empirical evidence clearly tips the scales in favor of the latter position but the relationship between these dominant actors in the colonial economies was much more complex than this. As Berman (1990) has shown in a Kenyan case study, it was characterized by crisis and contradictions.

Scholars of Africa have long expressed dissatisfaction with theoretical models that attempt to explain the political, economic and social dynamics of the continent. According to Chazan, Mortimer, Ravenhill and Rothchild (1988, 13), this situation means that “social scientists have had little alternative but to undertake a search for new conceptual frameworks that would afford a fuller insight into the dynamic processes unfolding on the continent.” Others, such as Hyden (1983, 193), argue directly that “Africa needs a new paradigm, or set of paradigms” to explain the continent's development processes. Although there often is a call to combine or integrate various paradigms, it seldom is accompanied by specific suggestions or guidelines about how to create a new theoretical approach for the study of Africa. Moreover, theoretical discussions are not normally accompanied by a call to use appropriate and innovative methodological strategies. Failure to utilize such strategies severely limits theoretical advancement, however. We introduce a relatively new strategy in social-science methodology that is ideally suited for advancing new theoretical approaches for the study of Africa.

Before introducing this strategy, we argue that current theoretical approaches to the continent are plagued by a fundamental problem. Specifically, most previous research has failed to examine how events are shaped by the interaction between phenomena at the global, national and local levels. The majority of studies focus on one or perhaps two levels, ignoring the fact that development processes are complex and depend on interaction between factors at different levels. This situation is further complicated by the fact that each level of analysis also contains a number of different categories or sub-levels.

Aesthetics is certainly not an easy concept to define or explain. The numerous problems often associated with identifying the aesthetic in terms of the properties of its particular objects, arts and culture, largely account for this difficulty. And so relative, open-ended and complex is aesthetics that philosophers, scholars and aestheticians, since Plato's time, are still far from reaching a definitive consensus about its properties, application and meaning. In its general application to the arts, the inherent criterial problems of aesthetics appear to be heightened and made even more complex by the fact that some works of art, like sculpture, consist of physical objects; others, like poetry and music, consist of verbal and gestural behavior and imagined and non-physical objects, even though poetry and music can at times consist of physical objects; and others still, like dance and drama, consist of kinesis and a variable combination of some or all of the other properties.

Generally, it should be correct to say that aesthetics is an articulated value concept, a relative and qualitative experience that is diffused throughout nature and the arts, and throughout human experience and behavior, even though the congeries of its qualities and coordinates are often irreducible in language and analysis. Aesthetics can, therefore, apply to the “theories about the nature of art as well as about the criteria of aesthetic judgement” (Wolff 1983, 27). This argument by Janet Wolff is based on the inherent relationship between an art concept and its corresponding aesthetic theory on the one hand, and on the relationship between a preferred or “adopted” aesthetic theory and the corresponding criteria for its application and analysis:

In Sub-Saharan Africa there has been a steady rate of urbanization. First, there are the large burgeoning cities which are in most cases industrial, commercial and administrative centers with a population ranging between 500,000 to 3,000,000 or more. Second, there are cities with populations between 100,000 and 500,000. Some have industrial, commercial and administrative activities. Third, there are medium sized towns with a populations between 20,000 and 100,000. Some are district or provincial centers. Fourth, there are small sized towns with populations below 20,000 which are dotted in the countryside.

In terms of urban studies, the first and second categories usually attract the attention of scholars (Mabogunje 1980; 1968; Coquery-Vidrovich 1991; Okafor 1988, 253-63). The third and fourth categories are left out as being insignificant in terms of urbanization, population size, commercial activity and administrative importance. They are lowly rated in terms of importance to urban studies.

Although they vary in size and population, small- and medium-sized towns play similar and crucial roles in the economic, social and political development of the areas in which they are located. They serve as links between the urban centers and the rural countryside. They also act as centers of innovation and diffusion of ideas from the urban areas to the countryside and vice-versa. From the urban point of view, small- and medium-sized towns are seen and treated as forward bases for the domination of the countryside. In the rural view, they are seen and treated as either markets or distribution centers at which the produce of rural areas are collected, marketed and absorbed in the local, regional or export market economy. In short, they are seen as points at which capitalist and peasant economies meet and co-exist.

Within African studies, one of the few generalizations that may be hazarded—without qualification—is that no area has been more deliberately, consistently, indeed agonizingly self-critical than African philosophy. “Western” academic philosophy is supposedly well-known for identifying, evaluating and defending the presuppositions upon which it grounds itself. With respect to African philosophy, however, a clear consensus has yet to be reached—after more than twenty years of intensive discussion—about what its presuppositions should be, much less whether they are plausible. The wrangling has been incessant and, at some points, counter-productive.

What is meant by “presuppositions”? Let us take, as one example, the cultural data-base in Africa from which such philosophy might be expected to arise, or with reference to which it might orient itself. There is still serious controversy within the ranks of African philosophers over the intellectual status, and therefore philosophical potential, of that amorphous corpus of oral literature: divination verses, lyrics, myths, maxims, tales, proverbs—indeed virtually everything in traditional African culture that can be classified as verbalized knowledge or belief—that came to be characterized as African Traditional Thought.

From the epistemological standpoint of philosophy in Africa, if ever there has been an unknown known, its perimeters are defined by this corpus. Initially most Anglophone African philosophers were predisposed (by their own overseas university training) to treat things that had already been labelled proverbs and myths—literature generally-as un-reasoned, non-critical raw data better fit for the maws of religious studies or cultural anthropology than philosophy. A supposedly “scientific” ideology of modernization dictated that knowledge that was in any sense non-critical and therefore unreasoned had to be rigorously expunged from academia before anything that would receive credibility as African philosophy could emerge (Bodunrin 1981).

A corpus on transition to democracy in Africa has been developed. This body of work has different constitutive elements: conceptualization, institutional arrangements, conditions for consolidation and the reasons for its reemergence in the 1980s as an agenda for political change (Ake 1994; Hyden and Bratton 1992; Gibbon, Bangura, and Ofstad 1992). Nigeria's experience of the transition to democracy has received more attention than that of any other country in the continent (Ihonvbere 1994; Campbell 1994; Reno 1993; Agbese 1991; Diamond 1991). However, the current preoccupations and dominant discourses have largely concealed the agencies in the struggle for democracy, even though civil society has received some attention. Likewise, there are very few empirical works. Similarly, the discursive community on transition has also privileged a particular form of democracy, liberalism, without questioning its gender bias. While there is an emerging literature on African women in political transition (Tripp 1994; Abdullah 1993; Campbell 1993; Nzomo 1993; Pepera 1993; Seidman 1993; Beall, Hassim, and Todes, 1989), compared with the dominant literature on the subject, it is inconsequential. Further, much of the literature on African women in political transition has treated women in isolation from the gendered structures of power and society. Moreover, in most of this literature as well as the dominant literature on transition, there is silence on the relationship between political and economic processes despite the similarity in their basic doctrine, liberalism and the linkage of these two issues in the donor community and by African governments (Beckman 1992; Bangura 1992).

This article hopes to fill in some of the gaps noted by including Nigerian women's conceptual challenge to democracy; the traditions from which women draw their discourses; the male-bias of the state; women's participation in democratic struggles both at the level of politics and economics; and the limitations of the women's movement.

Broadly defined, civil society is the “private sphere of material, cultural and political activities resisting the incursions of the state” (Fatton 1992, 4-5). While such a broad definition is incomplete and in-deed simplistic, and will acquire more specificity as the analysis proceeds, it will suffice for our immediate purposes. In this general and provisional configuration, civil society represents a counterweight to state power and can thus serve as a critical agent of democratization. Civil society is thus a constant thorn in the monopolizing political claims of the state. This is not to imply that there is an unbridgeable chasm and an unmitigated opposition between state and civil society. In fact, there is a dialectical interaction between state and civil society. The state is transformed by a changing civil society; civil society is transformed by a changing state. Thus, state and civil society form a fabric of tightly interwoven threads, even if they have their own in-dependent patterns.

The state penetrates civil society through its multiple economic interventions, its disciplinary regulations of private behavior and its ideological “interpellations.” The state aspires to become totalitarian because ruling classes are predators bent on maximizing their supremacy; they seek therefore a complete appropriation of civil society. Civil society, in turn, penetrates the state through the erection of protective trenches against coercive abuse, material extraction and political compliance. Civil society aspires to negate the state, and subaltern classes, who are the state's principal victims, are determined to minimize their losses by abolishing it.

The contradiction between state and civil society is, however, not that simple.

In April 1994, South Africans of all racial and cultural groups abandoned the dehumanizing experiment in physical, economic and political separation of races, apartheid, by conferring political power and authority on their new democratically elected government. The constitutional, institutional and legal changes to the South African state which brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power constitute the most extensive and closely watched example of the many efforts at democratic reform in Africa in the 1990s. While South Africa's new legal structure and peaceful transition of power via a popular election may encourage many to simply eagerly pronounce South Africa a “democracy,” much Africanist literature encourages caution before such a judgment. Africa's and Latin America's attempts at democratization are replete with abandoned constitutions, resurrected careers of corrupt discredited politicians, political parties which grow authoritarian and chop off their popular roots, military leaders who overthrow civilian regimes and reformist governments which quickly repeat the sins of their predecessors. Consequently, many scholars look skeptically on constitutional reforms (Decalo 1992) and mere “cracks in the edifice of autocracy” (Bratton and van de Walle 1992, 421) to suggest that the institutionalization of legitimate and accountable political leadership requires a vehicle through which citizens can participate in policy-making debates—a vibrant civil society.

This article probes one vital feature of South Africa's civil society—the relationship between the ANC and the Civic Association Movement, which was one social movement central to the insurrectionary liberation struggle carried out within South Africa. The ANC owes its current political power, in large part, to the sacrifices and dedicated efforts of members of the Civic Association Movement who mobilized black township residents to demand political reform and rectification of the misdeeds perpetrated against them by the white administration.

A problem which has complicated multilateral trade negotiations like GATT's Uruguay Round is that OECD countries have adopted important departures from the most-favored-nation (MFN) principle in their trade regimes. Recently these departures have taken the form of regional trade preferences, such as the Canada-United States Free Trade Arrangement, NAFTA, the Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Arrangement or European Community and EFTA preferences for Eastern Europe. Developing countries receive important trade preferences under the OECD countries' Generalized System of Preference (GSP) schemes, and through preferences extended under the EEC Lomè Convention and the US Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI).

Since the Uruguay Round will lower trade barriers on an MFN basis it poses a dilemma for preference-receiving countries. Specifically, MFN tariff reductions will erode these countries' margins of preference and cause their competitive position to deteriorate vis-à-vis other suppliers. Trade losses will occur as some preference-receiving goods are displaced (diverted) by exports from other (non-preference receiving) countries. As a result, preference-receiving countries could justifiably try to minimize reductions in MFN tariffs. Overall, the strategy which these countries might adopt vis-à-vis the multilateral trade negotiations could be determined by an assessment of whether the likely trade gains from lower MFN tariffs on their non-preference receiving goods would offset the expected losses from their preference-receiving exports.

This study examines the problem of preference erosion from the perspective of Sub-Saharan African countries. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was selected for analysis due to the extensive multiple tariff preferences these countries receive in OECD markets (i.e., GSP, Lomè Convention and, in many cases, least developed country preferences), and the fact that the region's export growth has been below that of most other countries (World Bank 1992).