This article, which derives from the wisdom of my Koranic teachers in Kankan, Guinea, as well as the dedication of the Africanist community, discusses the question of the representation of Africa in general, and especially the claim made by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that Africans committed a Holocaust-type crime by selling other blacks to whites. To refute this allegation, I rely on my familiarity with the literature on the quasi-universality of slavery in human history and on the Atlantic slave trade. This leads me to assert that, though painful to acknowledge, some Africans of the slave trade era did participate as pivotal middlemen in the brutal, ignominious, and peculiar trade that drastically changed the image of the black in the white mind. But the wars and raiding that resulted in the enslavement of millions of Africans were not fought according to any theory of racial or ethnic purity such as the one that would emerge as a key Nazi ideology. Furthermore, sound historical evidence points to the European and American origins of the slave trade. Far from being an accident, the slave trade was a significant part of modern European expansion. The white businessmen, ship owners, mariners, and plantation owners played the dominant role in this business, a point to which Gates—unlike W.E.B. Du Bois, in whose grand tradition he aspires to follow—pays only lip service. Therefore, the notion of a black “Holocaust” perpetrated by Africans in the era of the slave trade is a flawed and objectionable analogy which tends to “relativize” the Holocaust and to sow discord in the relationship between Africans and black people of the diaspora.

Pastoralist societies in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda) face more demands on their way of life than at any previous time. Population growth, loss of herding lands to farmers, ranchers, game parks, and urban growth, increased commoditization of the livestock economy, out-migration by poor pastoralists, and dislocations brought about by drought, famine, and civil war are increasing throughout the region. These problems are intensified as international development programs encourage privatization and individuation of formerly communally held resources. The examples of the Maasai, Boran, and Rendille of Kenya demonstrate that East African pastoralists are responding to the social, political, and economic challenges with increased economic diversification including agro-pastoralism, wage labor, and increased market integration. These changes result in increased social and economic stratification, urban migration, and diminished nutrition for women and children.

How do African urban residents, who are conventionally assumed to operate within parochial, highly localized confines, operate at larger scales? How do they reach a “larger world”? The article looks at some of the overall effects on African cities and their residents of a global process of scalar recomposition and the reconfiguration of social cohesion that ensues. By examining renovations in a traditional Islamic institution, zawiyyah, an example is provided of ways in which urban Africans attempt to act effectively within larger domains.

The relation between philosophy and language in Africa seems to favor the languages of written expression to the detriment of the languages of “oraural” expression. Concretely, this has meant not only the exclusive use of Arabic and European languages in the philosophies in Africa, but also the assumption that philosophy is only possible in, with, and through written languages. This article argues that change is long overdue, and that African languages should play significant roles in both the exploration of the past and in contemporary and future philosophical inquiries in Africa. In other words, the real problem is not so much to determine how far philosophy is compatible or incompatible with specific languages and with language as a whole, or vice versa, as to discern what role African languages should play within the framework of the past, contemporary, and future philosophies in Africa. For if colonial experiences obliged Africans to confront this predicament without success, the contention here is that Africans cannot continue to philosophize sine die in European languages and according to European models of philosophy as if African languages cannot provide and play the same roles. Today more than before, both the lettered and “oraural” traditions of Africa invite Africans to practice self-reliance in such matters.

The Kingdom of Swaziland currently possesses one of the world's highest rates of HIV/AIDS infection. This research discusses some reasons for the rapid spread of the epidemic in Swaziland, and recent actions of Swazi officials to mitigate the pain and suffering of the Swazi people over the next quarter century. It also suggests some policy initiatives for the future.

This article focuses on the activities of women smugglers in Cameroon in the 1990s, the period during which the national currency was devalued. Despite the generally negative connotations of smuggling, it argues that this unorthodox form of trade has had certain positive effects on the lives of individual female entrepreneurs, if not on Cameroonian society in general. Usually marginalized economically, women in Cameroon—including, in many cases, former prostitutes—are able through smuggling to support themselves and their children, make up the deficit in the household budget, and attain a respected status in society. Through their contacts with beach worker assistants and government officials, they also have contributed, for better or worse, to the blurring of lines in Cameroon between the formal and informal economy.

Recognizing limitations associated with past reforms, and taking account of current efforts at democratization, this article suggests that public administration in contemporary African society should be conceptualized more broadly than it has been in the past, and that it should include building relationships and bridging gaps among public administrators, citizens, and communities. Drawing from Ghana's experience, it argues that over-reliance on a restrictive notion of administrative reform—one that emphasizes structures and material welfare—overlooks the normative public purposes central to the field of public administration. The paper concludes by suggesting ways to ground public administration reform in the concrete, lived experiences of the people in Ghana.

In Ghana, regional and local cultural festivals that recently have been created or “modernized” provide an interface between local communities and the state. At these festivals, local political elites formulate demands on the government, and conversely, the government attempts to popularize its policies. At the same time, cultural festivals function as public arenas where local cultural identities are articulated within a framework negotiated by the state and the media. The staging of local culture thus always has a national dimension, even when the material is of local origin. Public self-representation at cultural festivals can also be an important factor in internal integration of local societies. The article examines these themes with reference to cultural festivals in northwestern Ghana which the author has observed and whose organizers and participants she has interviewed since 1989.

This study analyzes the transformations in the relations among masculinity, sexuality, and femininity for the youth born after independence in Dakar (Senegal), where the constitution of recreational sites and of play have always been controlled by the state and maraboutic Islam. Following the multiform crisis, the youth—boys and girls—have innovated new forms of sexuality, while deconstructing the old forms and opening themselves to cosmopolitan ones

The privileging of representation as a means of securing epistemological or ideological systems has been regarded as a Western phenomenon. The employment of cultural exhibitions, documentaries, and spectacle to advance systems of authority, however, is also characteristic of African political systems in the pre- and postcolonial eras. This article examines cultural exhibitions, documentary films, representations of Nkrumah, and commissioned “national” art in the context of independence-era Ghana. It employs existing archival records to trace the positioning of discursive representations as mechanisms of social indoctrination, and as paradigms of the construction of the political subject in the postcolonial era.

This paper is an analysis of state practice in respect of racial classification and its epistemological underpinnings in twentieth-century South Africa. It shows how apartheid racial categories—drawing heavily on those enacted by the segregationist state—were wielded as instruments of surveillance and control by a state animated by fantasies of omniscience as much as omnipotence. The architects of apartheid racial classification policies recognized explicitly that racial categories were constructs, rather than descriptions of real essences—a version of the idea of race which enabled the bureaucratization of “common sense” notions of racial difference and which contributed direcdy to the enormous powers wielded by racial classifiers. If constructs, these categories were powerfully rooted in the materiality of everyday life. The ubiquity of the state's racial designations, and the extent to which they meshed with lived hierarchies of class and status, meant that apartheid's racial grid was strongly imprinted in the subjective experience of race.

This article focuses on constructions of whiteness in South African autobiographies and other narratives of the self. It attempts to understand how the category of whiteness—racial, social, political, and economic—is given meaning in this context. The essay departs from US- and British-based studies of whiteness, as well as from African studies of “settlers.” It aims to draw out the particularities of the South African context and the ways in which whiteness emerges within the tropes of looking, watching, masking, concealment, transfiguration, and secrecy in these texts. It shows that the play between visibility and invisibility emerges as a central paradox in this body of writing. Thus it attempts to shift contemporary South African discussions away from racism per se toward a discussion of how race works in psychical, symbolic, and political terms. It considers amplifications of whitenesses which may have been at odds with official and critical orthodoxies in order to approach registers out of which whiteness may come to be situated differently in this context.