Insistent calls to ‘decolonise’ African studies beg the question of what this quest actually involves. If it refers to an attempt to understand the continent's diverse and complex societies that builds on their indigenous structures and values, this was a task initiated during the decolonisation era of the 1950s and early 1960s. Led by historians and drawing heavily on insights from anthropology, it led to a revolution in the understanding of Africa, which nonetheless failed to maintain its impetus as a result of the political authoritarianism and economic decay of the post-independence period, which had a particularly damaging impact on Africa's universities. Of late, however, the phrase has come to refer to developments notably in North America and Europe, which in subordinating the study of Africa to agendas in the global North may appropriately be described not as decolonisation but as recolonisation. A genuine decolonisation of knowledge production for Africa must rest on a return to its roots within the continent itself.

This article examines political corruption and political party financing in multiparty Kenya. It uses the Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing mega-scandals to demonstrate the existence of political corruption, particularly campaign financing, arguing that it has increased under multiparty rule and affected the nature of governance. It has adversely affected political participation and competition, the rule of law, transparency and accountability. Illegal funds to finance the Kenya African National Union's elections in the 1990s were raised through the Goldenberg Affair, whereas those aimed at financing the National Rainbow Coalition's elections in December 2007 were to be raised through the Anglo-Leasing scandal. Corrupt campaign financing, therefore, poses a threat to democracy in the country. The democratic space created and expanded by multipartyism has, however, provided new opportunities for waging the war against corruption. It is in the context of these arguments that the conclusion raises broader issues for corruption and democracy in Africa.

With attention turning towards Kenya's second multi-party elections, due to be held before the end of 1997, it is imperative to look back to the flaws in the system which helped deliver President Daniel arap Moi and the Kenya African National Union (KANU) their victories in 1992. At present there is no sign of these defects being eradicated and the creation of new districts since then has demonstrated the Government's intention of enhancing an already biased structure. The underlying distribution of tribes and ethnic groups has had a fundamental impact on the electoral geography of Kenya, since they have controlled the delimitation of both the parliamentary constituencies and the administrative machinery of the whole country.1

Most discussions about development in the periphery during the 1950s to the 1980s tended to fall into two main camps. Those in the so-called ‘dependency school’ maintained that indigenous bourgeoisies, unlike their metropolitan counterparts, could not lead the accumulation and transformation process while in junior partnership with foreign capital, which entrenched a system that transferred resources to metropolitan economies through, for example, the repatriation of profits, loyalty payments, and other licencing schemes. In other words, ‘real’ capitalism in the periphery was improbable, if not impossible. On the other hand, orthodox Marxists, liberal scholars, and, subsequently, ‘modified’ dependentistas, held that foreign investments in the periphery need not forestall the emergence of transforming social forces, and that development was likely to be accelerated if/when some elements of the domestic bourgeoisie participated in joint ventures with international capital.

People in sub-Saharan Africa rely on a variety of informal mechanisms to gain access to land for urban farming. However, the literature on land tenure focuses on gaining access to land for housing, whereas farming, which is highly visible in the urban landscape of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, requires farmers to negotiate their access in ways distinct from housing. A close examination of four open-space farms in Dar es Salaam reveals that there are different methods of gaining access to land for farming as opposed to housing. Additionally, theorising this access reveals that the landowners who allow farmers on their land for food production also derive benefits. This can provide a framework for current efforts to integrate urban agriculture into the city zoning plans.

Drawing on a twenty-year study, we examine the effects of HIV-related illness and death on villagers in Malawi during 2006. Contrary to unidimensional images of an AIDS disaster, we found people striving for normality – trying to control the abnormal circumstances of the rising toll of HIV-related illness and death. Just over 40% of the sample households had experienced at least one death (certainly or probably) related to HIV, but only about 10% were found to be suffering acute or serious livelihood stress due to HIV deaths. The ability to deal with illness and death depended on households' pre-existing characteristics, particularly income level, and, critically, on their placement in the extended matrilineal family. But increasing pressures on an already severely stressed population, and failure of the current ‘community-based’ approach to deliver needed help, argue for more concerted efforts to link the HIV epidemic to broader-based development.

The history of the past three decades in Africa would seem to confirm that the rôle of the military in political and economic development may no longer be considered transient. Armed interventions have become institutionalised, if not constitutionalised, in many African states. By December 1985 no less than 60 successful and 71 attempted coups d'état had occurred in 37 states since January 1956.1 Just as most of the first generation of African politicians chose ‘socialism’ to explain and justify their policies, so ‘revolution’ has become the rallying cry for the military leaders, even though they have often quickly been content just to ‘take over’, and not to transform, the previous civilian régime.

Though the issues of the 1989 Senegal–Mauritania conflict were deep-rooted, the unexpected passions unleashed within the respective populations caught both Governments off-guard, leading to a total stand-off and the failure of all attempts at resolution. This occured among states which previously had experienced peaceful relations, were making progress in joint economic development efforts, and whose markets were intertwined through trade and labour migration.

Since 1960, the Northern Frontier District of Kenya (N.F.D.) has become the centre of controversy between two African nations—the Somali Republic and Kenya. The area, about 102,000 square miles, includes the dominantly Somali-inhabited Mandera, Wajir, and Garissa Districts and the non-Somali (mainly Galla) districts of Marsabit, Isiolo, and Moyale.1 It consists of a vast, low plateau sloping rather uniformly from 2,000 feet east of Lake Rudolph towards Lamu on the Indian Ocean. Except for the Marsabit mountain region, it is semi-desert, covered by thornbush and useful only for grazing camels, cattle, goats, and sheep. The climate is hot, and the average annual rainfall is less than 12 inches. No commercially exploitable minerals have been found, and the flatness of the land often causes flash floods during and after the two rainy seasons.

A major challenge for transitioning states is to create a constituency of citizens to support and defend the new constitution. Participatory constitution-making is one of the most often recommended methods for enhancing constitutional legitimacy. This research tests the claim that public participation in the Ugandan constitution-making process built support for the 1995 constitution. Contrary to expectations, multivariate analysis of survey data demonstrates that citizens who were active in the process were no more supportive of the constitution than those who stayed at home. In-depth interviews reveal that local political leaders, not participation, caused citizens to view the constitution as legitimate or illegitimate. Constitutions are difficult for citizens to evaluate, so they rely on political elites for information and opinions. To predict whether participation will strengthen or weaken constitutional support, we must examine the messages that elites communicate to citizens about their participation, the process, and the resulting constitution.

The political status of strangers in African societies, particularly in urban areas, has been insufficiently analysed.1 This may be partly because studies of African politics and political development have been dominated by a conceptual framework which contrasts two types of society, the ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ and the ‘modern’ or ‘developed’. The former usually implies a rural community with a relatively self- sufficient political system.2 In such a society, the traditional leaders are usually associated with a particular ethnic group and territory; and their authority may be derived from sacred sources, such as tradition itself, ties to land, or genealogical links to ancestors. In the ‘modern’ society, leadership is assumed to be ‘rational’ and ‘secular’, oriented towards western rather than traditional values.3 Political development has often been somewhat vaguely conceived as the transformation of a society from the traditional to the modern type.

Despite earlier, negative experiences in East Africa, in early 1997 the government of Rwanda embarked on an ambitious programme for villagisation and resettlement. While the Rwanda authorities present the programme as entirely different from its predecessors, a review of those and of the implementation of villagisation and resettlement in Rwanda shows that this statement cannot hold. Nevertheless, the programme gets considerable support from international agencies. This article investigates how international agencies have accepted and upheld the ‘narrative of difference’ of the Rwandan authorities. It argues that, notwithstanding the claims of the government, lessons from the experiences with villagisation in Mozambique, Ethiopia and Tanzania are relevant for the Rwanda case and should be taken into account.

Rapid urbanisation in African democracies is changing the way that political parties engage with their constituents, shifting relations between hosts and migrants. This article examines the strategies that parties use to maintain and build electoral support in increasingly diverse contexts. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research in Accra, Ghana, we find that some urban political parties rely on inclusive forms of mobilisation, promoting images of cosmopolitanism and unity to incorporate a broad grassroots coalition. Yet in nearby constituencies, parties respond to changing demographics through exclusive forms of mobilisation, using narratives of indigeneity and coercion to intimidate voters who ‘do not belong’. Two factors help explain this variation in mobilisation: incumbency advantage and indigene dominance. In contrast to most scholarship on ethnicity and electoral politics in Africa, we find that these varying mobilisation strategies emerge from very local neighbourhood-level logics and motivations.

The African continent currently faces severe political and economic crises. Massive debts, unpopular structural adjustment programmes (S.A.P.s), spiralling population growth, democratisation, and régime transformation are all testing national cohesion. Externally, the rapidly changing global environment, marked by the demise of the cold war and the continuing difficulties being experienced in Europe and the Middle East, also provides immense challenges to African policy-makers.

Violence has been a recurring feature of political life in provincial Sierra Leone for a long time. In 1898, two years after the establishment of colonial rule, a mass rebellion, commonly known as the Hut Tax War, and directed against British political authority, took place over a large part of the Protectorate. Thereafter, the violence which periodically disrupted the chiefdoms of the hinterland, during both the colonial and post-colonial periods, resulted predominantly from conflicts amongst the indigenous peoples themselves. This article is concerned with the various disturbances that flared up in the Sierra Leone chiefdoms since the late 1940s.

This paper challenges the conclusions of earlier writers regarding the roles of smallholder agriculture, commercial agriculture and wage labour in rural poverty alleviation in Mozambique. We review literature from across Sub-Saharan Africa and use recently collected household level data sets to place Mozambique within this literature. Results show that, as in the rest of SSA, wage labour earnings are concentrated among the best-off rural smallholders; these earnings increase income inequality rather than reducing it. Results also suggest that the same set of households, who are substantially better-off than others, has tended to gain and maintain access to the ‘high-wage’ end of the labour market over time. Key determinants of access to ‘high-wage’ labour are levels of education and previously accumulated household wealth. Income from wage labour plays a key role in lifting out of relative poverty those ‘female-headed’ households that can obtain it, yet only about one in five such households earns wage income. We stress that the rural development question in Mozambique, and elsewhere in SSA, should not be framed as an artificial choice between promoting either wage labour opportunities or commercial agriculture or smallholder agriculture. The issue is what mix of approaches is needed to develop a diversified rural economy with growing total incomes, improving food security and rapid reductions in poverty. We suggest that commercial agriculture and increased rural wage labour are important components in any such strategy, but that this strategy will fail without substantial and sustained increases in the productivity and profitability of smallholder agriculture.

This comparative analysis examines how large-scale agricultural land acquisitions are implemented in Ghana and Kenya, using embedded case studies of two specific investment projects. We find that insufficiencies in these countries' land governance systems are partly caused by discrepancies between de jure and de facto procedures and that powerful actors tend to operate in the legal grey areas. These actors determine the implementation of projects to a large extent. Displacement and compensation are highly emotive issues that exacerbate tensions around the investment. We also find that large-scale land acquisitions have a feedback effect on the land governance system, which suggests that large-scale land acquisitions can be drivers of institutional change. We suggest there may be a window of opportunity here to reform these land governance systems.

In Africa, the management of border disputes varies from sub-region to sub-region. Most puzzling is the difference between West Africa and the Horn of Africa. In the latter, border disputes are much more likely to escalate into war than in the former. Seeking to solve this puzzle, this study focuses on the territorial integrity norm. It departs from existing accounts of this norm in two ways: first, it does not choose the region but the sub-region as the level of analysis. Second, it does not isolate the territorial integrity norm from its social context but analyses the interplay of the norm with the social structure in which it is embedded. It concludes that the territorial integrity norm in West Africa is part of a social structure different from that in the Horn of Africa. It is this difference that explains the different patterns of conflict management in the two sub-regions.

The 2004 reform of the family code in Morocco has been held as one of the most significant liberal reforms undertaken in the country, and has led scholars and policy makers to argue that this demonstrates the democratic progress Morocco and the King are making. At the same time, the role of the women's movement in getting the reform approved has seemingly confirmed that associational life is crucial in promoting democratisation. This paper, building on theoretical work questioning the linkage between a strong civil society and democratic outcomes, argues that civil society activism does not necessarily lead to democratisation, and may reinforce authoritarian practices. Far from demonstrating the centrality of civil society, the process through which the new family code was passed highlights the crucial institutional role of the monarch, whose individual decision-making power has driven the whole process. Authoritarianism finds itself strengthened in Morocco despite the liberal nature and outcome of the reform.

The arrest and prosecution in March 2006 of the former Liberian warlord-President Charles Taylor by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, for war crimes including the recruitment and use of child soldiers, and the arrest and prosecution of the Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, by the International Criminal Court, accused of enlisting child soldiers in the DRC war, have raised expectations that finally international conventions and customary international laws protecting children in conflict zones will now have enforcement powers. But why has it taken so long to protect children in conflict situations despite the volume of international treaties and conventions? What do we know about the phenomenon of child soldiering, and why are children still routinely recruited and used in Africa's bloody wars? This article argues that against the background of unfolding events relating to prosecution for enlistment of child soldiers, the international community is beginning to wake up to the challenge of enforcing its numerous ‘paper protection’ instruments for the protection of children. However, a range of challenges still pose serious threats to the implementation and enforcement of the international conventions protecting children. Extensive research fieldwork in Liberia and Sierra Leone over three years reveals that the application of the restrictive and Western-centric definition and construction of a ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ raises inherent difficulties in the African context. In addition, most war-torn and post-conflict African societies are faced with the challenge of incorporating international customary laws into their domestic laws. The failure of the international community to enforce its standards on child soldiers also has to do with the politics of ratification of international treaties, in particular the fear by African governments of setting dangerous precedents, since they are also culpable of recruitment and use of child soldiers.