The spirit of geographical exploration in Africa is historically linked both to science as a social commitment and to anti-science as an intellectual rebellion. This article is a reflection on this basic ambivalence in the meaning and philosophical implications of a transient episode in African history. What needs to be remembered is that men cast in certain roles, such as explorers, become not merely historical figures but also intellectual symbols. I leave it to the historians to study the explorers as figures in history, being here concerned with them as symbols in thought. What have these men and their activities meant in the interplay of ideas between Europe and Africa? What impact have they had on African self-consciousness? What is their place in the evolution of the scientific spirit in Africa? What bearing do they have on the quest for a scientific approach to the study of Africa's past? These questions are, indeed, too large to be adequately handled in a short article. But they need to be asked, and may thus help to define its context.

The relatively peaceful decolonisation of British and French Africa in the 1950s and led, for the most part, to the capturing of state power by a new political élite rather than a throughgoing transformation of the state structures inherited at independence. Instead of refashioning institution in ways that might increase political participation and social justice, existing state capacities tended to be marshalled for exclusionary and, in many cases, authoritarian purposes.

During the early years of independence, a militant women's equal rights movement has developed in Kenya. Led by urban, educated women, the movement rejects what is now seen as the traditionally inferior role of women. It wants for them an equal share in the responsibilities and the opportunities of nationhood. This article will describe the message, tactics, and leadership of the early phase of the movement.

Corruption is a wide-spread phenomenon in the developing world. The term is usually reserved for ‘the practice of using the power of office for making private gain in breach of laws and regulations nominally in force’, or as more flamboyantly defined by M. McMullan, ‘a public official is corrupt if he accepts money…for doing something that he is under duty to do anyway, that he is under duty not to do, or to exercise a legitimate discretion for improper reasons’.1 Corruption is thus a description of activites emanating from and related to officialdom. Irregular activities among private individuals are a matter of private enterprise. They are not usually classified as corruption, but as straightforward theft, fraud, embezzlement, and the like.

The Central African Republic experienced unprecedented violence between 2012 and 2014. We analyse three recent ruptures that developed as a result of this crisis, suggesting a break with the country's past. First, the Séléka rebellion that started in 2012; second, the establishment of a robust UN Peacekeeping mission in 2014; and finally, the democratic election of a civilian president in 2016. However, three deep-rooted patterns of governance have in each case transformed these ruptures. A history of outsourced politics, a plurality of violence and peripheral neglect push actors to perpetuate the violent past rather than breaking with it. We conclude that after an initial attempt to break with the CAR's long-term political economic trends, rebel groups, the UN mission and the democratic government have backtracked and now risk reinforcing the violence that mark politics and everyday life in the country.

The popularity of unity governments to settle both internal political divisions and outright conflict has grown in the last 20 years. However, more often than not unity governments fail to mitigate the political dynamics baked into the political economies and suffer from being insufficiently anchored in local society. The Government of National Unity (GNU) in Zanzibar, formed in 2010 as the culmination of the ‘maridhiano’ political reconciliation process and following numerous attempts at reconciliation led to initial successes, is a case in point. Zanzibar's GNU turned out to be ‘position’ rather than ‘power’ sharing, constitutionalised through a hybrid format of the politics of continuity and collusion. As such the position sharing system broke down when voters in the 2015 election sought neither continuity nor collusion, but transformational change of governance. This was in turn blocked by veto actors in favour of continuity, resulting in the collapse and discontinuation of the GNU in Zanzibar.

This article explores attitudes of Ghanaian traders towards an increasing Chinese influx into Ghanaian trading spaces and the impacts of Chinese merchants on Ghanaian traders and trading spaces. Despite a late entrance of Chinese merchants into Ghanaian trading spaces relative to Lebanese, Indians and Nigerians, the abrupt change in size of the Chinese trading community along with its huge capital and cheap goods have had big impacts on local trading spaces. We maintain that relations between Ghanaian traders and Chinese counterparts may be roughly described as complementary, collaborative and competitive. While the Chinese impacts are seen as positive by some Ghanaian traders and landlords, they are negative for others. Yet, we argue that these relations are also nuanced and rooted in each Ghanaian trader's position amidst the Chinese presence. This article contributes to the literature on dynamics of South-to-South movements. It adds to growing studies on contemporary Chinese emigrations and accompanying impacts in host communities.

Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland are among very few countries which, in recent times, have for an extended period and without formal agreement used another national currency as their domestic circulating medium and legal tender. After many years of being de facto part of a larger monetary area using the South African currency, in 1972 the three smaller countries jointly initiated negotiations with Pretoria which led to the creation of an officially recognised Rand Monetary Area in December 1974. Thereafter they chose different arrangemènts which span the spectrum between continued integration with and separation from the monetary system of South Africa. The experiences of these countries, while of interest in themselves, may also be relevant to other governments with dependent currency systems which face similar options.

By 1994 Africa had only one major unresolved colonial question. Namibia and Eritrea having acquired their independence in March 1990 and May 1993 respectively, the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara remains controlled by the Kingdom of Morocco (as it has since 1975), despite the expenditure of thousands of human lives, billions of dollars, and strenuous diplomatic efforts to resolve the dispute through the Organisation of African Unity (O.A.U.) and the United Nations. Both Morocco, under the monarchical régime of King Hassan II, and the Frente popular para la Liberación de Saguia el-Hamra y Río de Oro (Polisario Front) composed of Saharawis dedicated to the establishment of an independent Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (S.A.D.R.), have found each other far more resourceful and less willing to compromise than they could possibly have surmised almost two decades ago.

The actual and perceived conflicts between customary law and human rights law, especially in issues dealing with gender equality, have remained a major challenge in Africa. Some of these conflicts are further complicated by the varying and contradictory interpretation of some customary laws by the courts. Different approaches have been adopted at different times and in different places to deal with some of these conflicts. One of the most controversial areas of customary law has been the traditional exclusion of women from property inheritance. This paper takes a critical look at how the courts in Botswana have dealt with the issue of the right to inherit the homestead or family home. It examines this issue in the specific context of the recent case of Ramantele v Mmusi in which the Court of Appeal had to consider the customary law rule of male ultimogeniture – which permits only the last-born son to inherit the homestead intestate to the exclusion of other siblings, especially females. It argues that courts need to be more proactive and progressive in their approach to dealing with such issues than they have been in the past in order to recognise the nature and extent of changes that are taking place today. The main lesson that can be drawn from the Botswana case is that if customary law is to survive and develop, more needs to be done to promote research and scholarship in this area and judges also need to take advantage of this research and deal with these customary law disputes with knowledge, understanding and sensitivity.

The attainment of independence by Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania has posed new and perplexing problems for the 360,000 Asians settled in these countries.1 They have to adapt themselves to new political régimes, which are determined to carry out far-reaching changes in the traditional roles of the different races in East Africa. In order to understand fully the complexity and magnitude of the problems faced by the Asian community in East Africa, it is essential to contrast the colonial pattern of race relations with that envisaged by the new African leaders.

After Many years of exhortations, it is now widely claimed that African governments are beginning to implement the reforms needed to fundamentally alter their economies.1 Zimbabwe, after achieving independence 15 years later than most of the continent, has been singled out as a country that immdiately recognised the lessons of African economic failures and therefore adopted more rational policies.2 However, efforts to rationalise the public sector have often proceeded much slower than other reforms designed to reverse ‘the trend of chronic economic decline’, notably by reducing over-valued currencies, increasing agricultural prices, and lowering real urban wages.3 Even Zimbabwe, despite its record of relatively good economic management, has not been able to adopt a package of policies which would resolve the severe problems of its parastatals, namely those companies/corporations/other organisations owned by the state that operate outside the formal governmental apparatus. In Zimbabwe specifically and in Africa generally, the political imperatives of leaders have often prevented the adoption, let alone the implementation of comprehensive public-sector reforms.

The powers of impeachment provided under the Nigerian constitution provide a means of checking the excesses of certain executive officers who enjoy the privilege of constitutional immunity against civil or criminal proceedings while they remain in office. Instead of being invoked in appropriate circumstances, however, this article shows that these powers have been abused. It examines cases of impeachment at the state level during the Obasanjo administration and shows how constitutional provisions were flagrantly breached. It provides evidence that the federal government was complicit in such cases, even though under the federal structure by which Nigeria operates, impeachment at the state level is exclusively a state business. It argues that the abuses are a symptom of imbalance of power between the executive and the legislature as well as evidence of the limits of constitutionalism in the face of politics.

This article is an attempt to use some of the quantitative techniques of political science to provide a factual description of the voting behaviour of the African members in a selected session of the United Nations General Assembly. Drawing primarily upon methodology that has been used in studies of the United States Congress, 67 roll-call votes of the eighteenth session have been used to answer three questions which would seem primary to this description: (i) On what types of issues are the African states united and on what are they divided? (2) On divisive issues, into what groups are they divided? (3) How do the groupings vote, combine, and divide on these divisive issues?

These comments by South Africa's Minister for Trade and Industry, Trevor Manuel, were made in November 1994 in a speech to the African-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP)—European Union (EU) ministerial meeting in Brussels. Words, of course, can be interpreted in various ways. Contrary to the seeming clarity of Manuel's request, the underlying sub-texts illustrated both the past prevarication of the South African Government and the continuing uncertainty on the part of the EU as to the appropriate shape of a new long-term relationship.

At a time when radical reforms are being implemented not only in Eastern Europe and Russia, but also in a number of ex-socialist economies in Africa, a review of an earlier wave of relevant financial changes in the post-independence era can be instructive. Previously, currency and banking arrangements were largely equivalent to those of the colonial powers, but in or about 1960 for most states, and as late as 1975 for the ex-Portuguese territories, real choices had to be made, and the ruling régimes chose a variety of quite divergent paths.

Our country [Nigeria] is the largest single unit in Africa… we are not going to abdicate the position in which God Almighty has placed us… The whole black continent is looking up to this country to liberate it from thralldom.

The struggle against racial discrimination in South Africa, as many have argued, is theological as well as political. This is so, in the words of Ben Marais, because ‘Apartheid erodes the very basis of humanity’. It is also because the great majority of South Africans have some Christian identity and church affiliation, yet their faith commitments are heavily conditioned by class interests and particular ideologies. Consequently, prophetic Christianity, in relating biblical values to the analysis of society and the search for justice, has divided Christian communities by confronting the established churches as well as the state.

South Africa is the intellectual epicentre of the ideology of African renaissance and of the growing scholarly attention to decoloniality as an epistemological and aesthetic agenda of decolonisation. Paradoxically, the country is also a xenophobic crime scene: the continental state associated with endemic Afrophobic violence. This is a contradiction with both contemporary and historical significance. Positing this framing of a contradictory impulse should come with a caveat: Black South African intellectual investments in pan-Africanist projects were part of a broader cosmopolitan imaginary necessitated by South African colonial history and were thus partly projects of necessity. The origins of this politics of self-fashioning were not exclusively pan-Africanist.

This paper explores how the concept of ‘community policing’ has been understood and implemented in Tanzania. Whilst community policing is locally considered to be a very effective means of preventing crime and improving neighbourhood safety, the extent to which it constitutes a more accountable, responsive or ‘democratic’ form of policing, as assumed by proponents, is questionable. Based on research conducted in the city of Mwanza, this paper explains these outcomes in terms of continuities between forms of popular mobilisation that developed during Tanzania's socialist one-party era, and particularly the co-optation by the ruling party of sungusungu vigilantism, and understandings of the role of citizen participation in local development today. However, this paper suggests that as multiparty political competition becomes increasingly competitive, the sustainability of this model of community policing may be undermined, as citizens challenge the notion that they are obliged to provide resources for development directed from above.