This paper deals with the gender aspects of urban livestock keeping in Eldoret, Kenya. It shows that men and women play different but complementary roles in livestock keeping. Men show greater preference for and are more involved – in terms of decision-making and responsibility taking – with large livestock and where income is the primary motive for livestock keeping, and perform tasks of an outdoor nature and/or which require considerable technical knowledge. On the other hand, women prefer and exercise greater control over small livestock, make the most decisions about consumption use of livestock products, and perform home-based routine tasks. However, there are instances where men and women cross gender boundaries, for instance where labour of the opposite gender is absent in the household, or as a strategy to control benefits accruing to the livestock. In terms of livelihood outcomes, women's role in livestock keeping is geared more towards improving household nutritional and food security status, while men's role is motivated more by personal benefits.

The beast lives unhistorically; for it ‘goes into’ the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder ... But man is always resisting the great and continually increasing weight of the past; it presses him down and bows his shoulders.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (Indianapolis, 1949), p. 5.

If the past is ‘dead’, it dances, a lively corpse indeed, on new graves everywhere almost every day in whatever kind of time.

– Harold Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 121.

THE past has a social purpose of stressing the virtues of courage, endurance, and sacrifice. Picturesque folkloric characters such as Robin Hood and Nicholas Chauvin become models for selflessness and patriotism. The term chauvinisme, which appeared in France by the 1840s, for instance, did not carry any negative connotations. Instead, it helped the nation-state to inculcate a sense of oneness in its people, who began to say ‘Nouns sommes tous français, Chauvin’. The past, thus, has a double mission. It is both therapeutic and vital political ammunition.

Prospects for political change figure prominently on the research agenda in sub-Saharan Africa, and in current debates within individual countries. Democracy is advocated not only as a goal in itself, since it is also frequently argued that elections and openness are required to make governments really responsive to the needs of the population and properly accountable for their actions. In addition, greater transparency is held to be necessary in order to make the public service behave in accordance with bureaucratic norms. Although the general principles of responsiveness, accountability, and transparency are embraced by a large number of scholars and observers of the African scene as a means of countering the detrimental effects of clientelism and personalistic rule, important nuances are found in the literature with regard to the way in which democracy is perceived to facilitate economic development in general, and presently needed reforms in particular.

A unified élite means the end of freedom. But when the groups of the élite… become a disunity, it means the end of the state. Freedom survives in [the] intermediate free zones.1 Any system that restrains [solidification of the élite] however slightly can only excite awe.2

Under the title ‘The American Dilemma on the Horn’, Bereket Habte Selassie published in this Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2, June 1984, pp. 249–72, a lawyer's presentation of a client's case: that of the Eritrean separatists. Although my views do not necessarily represent those held by the régime in Addis Ababa, they do indicate why Ethiopians resolutely continue to defend the territorial integrity of their motherland with a degree of unity only admitted by a few writers.

The transfer of European farms to Africans began in Kenya a few years before independence in 1963. The main principles of the programmes for land transfer and settlement – the two elements cannot be separated – were laid down at that time and continued thereafter. This article describes their history and main features, sets out the principles on which they were based, and explains the financial arrangements. It then analyses the experience of land transfer and settlement, and suggests lessons that may be drawin form this knowledge.

Transnational medical research has become a common feature in many parts of Africa. This paper explores the contribution such activity makes to the social and economic lives of those involved, including both trial subjects and local staff. By considering the value of the ‘exposure’ that involvement brings to staff and research participants, we reflect on the conversion of scientific knowledge into practical knowledge and its value to sustaining precarious livelihoods in an economically fragile city. We consider the interplay between science and sociality and argue for a need to take seriously the circulation of scientific knowledge beyond the confines of expert spaces.

This paper analyses the role of cattle in the entwined dynamics of conflict and violence in the Fizi and Itombwe region of South Kivu province, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. On the one hand, agropastoral conflict intensifies armed mobilisation, allowing armed groups to draw upon particular conflict narratives that generate popular and elite support. It also creates incentives for armed actors to engage in cattle-looting, or the defence against it, for both symbolic and material reasons. On the other hand, the presence of armed forces and the use of violence profoundly shape agropastoral conflicts. Importantly, they change the perceived stakes of these conflicts, and hamper their resolution. By showing that the relations between cattle-related conflict and armed activity are indirect, complex and mutual, the paper refines both theories on agropastoral conflict and those highlighting the role of local conflicts in fuelling violence in the eastern Congo.

The efforts of American activists to pressure Asian corporations in Sudan have to date resembled a struggle to find the light switch in the dark, or swimming against a strong current. While the impact of the divestment campaign in the United States has been increasingly evident, its effectiveness in producing actual results in Sudan remains suspect. Thanks to China and a trio of Asian national oil companies, oil still flows in Sudan. The campaign's activities have failed to incorporate Sudan's wider international political and economic relations into its strategy. It has rather paradoxically sought to pressure state-owned corporations through financial market divestment. The nature of its Asian targets, reluctant Western investors and a distracted American government have obstructed the campaign from having a resounding impact in Sudan.

As peace returns to northern Uganda, a unique arithmetic of development is evident in the former Internally Displaced Persons camps. Small trading centres whose populations multiplied as they became camps now envision futures as Town Boards. Subtraction is necessary: the displaced people and the dead buried in the camps are being returned to their rural villages. Urban planners have produced meticulous drawings that envisage the division of land into plots for development. Donors are making additions in the form of new market buildings and water supplies. Yet this arithmetic must reckon with new problems as time passes. The article is based primarily on fieldwork in Awach, a former IDP camp now slated for status as a Town Board. In analysing material from interviews with landowners, ‘remainders’ who stayed behind after the camp closed, local leaders and officials, we emphasise the paradoxes, tensions and conflicts of this special path to development.

There has been a long controversy over the likely impact of population dynamics on economic growth and development. As long ago as 1789 the Reverend Thomas Malthus argued in his famous ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ that food production would not keep pace with the population's natural proclivity to grow in an unchecked fashion. In the absence of prudential checks, the result would be starvation, vice, and misery, with a tendency for economies to stagnate at a subsistence or poverty level of income.

The impact of nuclear weapons on the present and future trends in international relations continues to attract wide scholarship. While the literature on the subject has been growing apace, nuclear technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the dangers posed to the survival of mankind are becoming much more acute than hitherto. In broad terms, the fears expressed about these weapons tend to centre around the implications of three major issues: the emergence of greater first-strike inclinations in the two super-power nuclear forces; the possibility of a perceived strategic imbalance favouring either the United States or the Soviet Union; and the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

DURING the late 1950S and early 19605, Israel mounted an active campaign of aid to Africa, which took three main forms: technical help in agriculture, joint commercial ventures, and military assistance. Of the three, the military and quasi-military programmes made the most considerable mark in Africa;1 they were also an important part of Israel's overall foreign policy, in an attempt to gain political influence through military aid, and thus to help overcome her isolation in the Middle East. Israel's military assistance to Africa illustrates several important aspects of foreign aid. This article deals mainly with the political motives of the donor country, and the various ways in which it may be concerned to influence the actions of the recipient government. Later, there is some discussion of the social and cultural barriers to the transfer of military and para-military organisations from one culture to another.

During the last few inflation-ridden years many countries have experienced a severe crisis of industrial relations as workers tried, through collective action, to preserve their living standards against the pressure of rising prices. But Tanzania stands as a conspicuous example of one country where, during the 1970s, strikes seem virtually to have disappeared, as may be seen from Table I.1 It is true that the Tanzanian definition of a strike excludes disputes lasting less than one day; and it is also true that there have been occasions since 1972 when workers have ‘downed tools’ for brief protest periods. But the lack of reported strikes in Tanzania is not a statistical illusion. The Labour Officers of the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare keep a close watch on the state of industrial relations, and these occurrences are known to and are reported by them, as is shown by their recording of three strikes in 1977. This last fact also demonstrates that strikes can still occur in Tanzania.

Explaining Swaziland's political position in the context of Southern Africa has been difficult and never in vogue. This small Kingdom with a population of less than 700,000 has often been neglected in African analyses, and where facts and figures have been presented, these have not been sufficient to give us any real understanding as regards what has happened in recent years, and why. What to some has defied objective explanation has been the Kingdom's non-conflictual relationship with South Africa which, in a regionally polarised situation, has come to be interpreted as a ready willingness to collaborate with the apartheid state.

Whether he is called Le Sage (the Wise Man), Le Vieux (the Old Man), or more recently Nana (a Baule term for grandfather), the veneration implied by these words is unequalled by any other leader in West Africa today. It is clear that after over 50 years of political activism, the President of Côte d'Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, has brought together a combination of elements that has allowed him to gain and maintain the respect of western leaders, his African counterparts, and until recently, almost every Ivoirian.

During 1984 the citizens of Botswana will return to the polls for their fifth national election, the fourth since independence in 1966. While not an unusual exercise in Botswana, this will be a significant occurrence in an independent Africa where elections themselves have become increasingly rare and problematic, and still more so within a multi-party system which amounted to more than simply rubber-stamping party decisions. While other states in Africa concern themselves with the establishment of one-party régimes or with the need return to civilian rule, Botswana has had a successful series of multiparty elections uninterrupted by military coups. This article explores Botswana's experience, with attention to parties, the electoral system, voting trends, and prospects for the future.

Captain Thomas Sankara, Comrade President of Burkina Faso, was assassinated on 15 October 1987, allegedly in accordance with the wishes of Captain Blaise Compaoré, Major Jean-Baptiste Lingani, and Captain Henri Zongo. These three officers, said to have feared for their lives, had ordered the arrest of Sankara in order to avoid plunging their country into a blood-bath. The radio broadcast announcing the execution referred to Sankara as a ‘renegade’, a ‘traitor to the revolution’, ‘an autocratic mystic’, and a ‘paranoid misogynist’. It added that the ex-President's ‘high treason’ was illustrated by his trampling upon all organisational principles, his betrayal of the noble objectives of the democratic and popular revolution, his personalisation of power, and by his ambitious use of mysticism to solve the concrete problems of the masses. ‘This’, the broadcast concluded, ‘was inexorably leading us towards total chaos.’1 When he finally broke his silence, Compaoré, the alleged leader of the coup d'état, accused Sankara of ‘wanting to lead the world revolution’.

There is an understandable tendency to think that the first overt action taken by the British Government in respect of colonial education in Africa was the setting up of an Advisory Committee on Native Education in the British Tropical African Dependencies in 1923. This is not in fact true. There was for instance a Privy Council memorandum of 1847 on ‘industrial schools for coloured races’, in many ways a remarkable document, setting forth a number of ideas that were to be later accepted in colonial provision for education in Africa—ideas such as the interdependence of moral and physical training, the need for the school to make an impact on the local community in respect of agricultural development and improved sanitation, the need to adapt the content of the curriculum to local needs, and the advisability of the teacher being familiar with the local culture. And of course British experience in education in India provided some terms of reference for educationists in other parts of the world ruled by Britain. Often they tended to treat the Indian experience as a warning of what to avoid: for instance, it was believed that the use of English as a medium of instruction, as recommended in Macaulay's minute of 1833, might have contributed to the Mutiny of 1857; and also the structure of Indian education was considered rather top-heavy, following the establishment of universities whose students became leaders in the movements of political discontent. These “lessons’ were to be incorporated in British thinking about education in Africa in the following century.

Decolonisation in sub-Saharan Africa began in January 1956 when the Sudan joined long-independent Ethiopia and Liberia as a new, post-colonial state. Although the process is not yet complete because of the disputed status of Namibia and South Africa's continued rule by a white minority, over the past 30 years as many as 43 new states have achieved independence from colonial rule, the most recent being Zimbabwe in April 1980.