Culture is a central concept in the social sciences. It is also difficult to examine rigorously. I study the oldest university in East Africa and a cradle of political elites, Makerere University, where halls of residence developed distinct cultures in the 1970s such that some hall cultures are activist (e.g. Lumumba Hall) while others are respectful to authorities (e.g. Livingstone Hall) even though assignment to halls has been random since 1970. I leverage this unique setting to understand how culture forms and affects the values and behaviours of young adults. Participant observation, interviews and archives suggest that cultural differences arose from critical junctures that biased group (hall) composition and from intergroup (inter-hall) competition. Hall governments promote cultural and institutional persistence through the intergenerational transmission of norms and practices, thereby highlighting the role of political hierarchy in reproducing culture.

This article analyses how the state in Senegal has managed the hajj since the liberalisation era in the early 2000s. Although the essence of the hajj is religious, it is also deeply political and requires that the state manages complex relations with pilgrims, religious leaders, private travel agencies, politicians and Saudi authorities. This article argues that three inter-related imperatives structure the conduct of the Senegalese state: a security imperative, a legitimation imperative, and a clientelistic imperative. Security concerns lead the state to monitor and control pilgrims travelling to Mecca. Legitimation is seen in the collaborative relations with Sûfi orders and in the framing of the hajj organisation as a ‘public service’. Finally, given the magnitude of financial and symbolic resources attached to the hajj, clientelistic relations are constitutive of state officials’ actions. Overall, despite the post-2000 liberalisation of the hajj, the state has maintained its role as a gatekeeper, regulator and supervisor.

During colonial times, Italian studies on Africa were always concentrated within narrow academic limits. Even after the increasing Italian expansion in Northern Africa (Libya) and Eastern Africa (Eritrea and Somalia), when Italian interests in Africa increased considerably, only small groups of scholars focused their studies on the African continent. Today, by contrast, since the independence of the former Italian colonies (and of almost all the European colonies), there is in Italy, as throughout the world, a strong tendency to extend and encourage research work on Africa, and particularly to develop university teaching programmes on Africa.

This short article has two themes: it is prompted first by a feeling that many African countries, in their natural impatience for maximum economic development in the shortest possible time, are in some danger of getting their strategy and priorities not quite right in regard to the rural—urban, agricultural—industrial balance. More specifically, a plea is made for greater attention being given to traditional food farming (for subsistence or cash), which has been somewhat neglected in research, in spite of the fact that it must inevitably continue for a long time to support increasing numbers.

The Epistemological status of their own consciousness is the core contradiction of Marxist thought. This difficulty has not been acknowledged by African Marxists, nor do they explicitly admit to the varieties of radical scholarship which form their intellectual heritage, and which their own worl seeks to modify and elaborate. Marxist scholars have been unable to develop a cogent, persuasive justification for radical theorising as an alternative to positivist social science, largely because of their unwillingness to confront and affir, their own historical specificity. As argued by Bogumil Jewsiewicki:

In recent years South African cities have become home to a large number of undocumented migrant workers. If trade unions do not organise undocumented migrant workers, it opens up such workers to exploitation and maltreatment by employers, thereby creating a split labour market that undermines the entire labour movement. This article focuses on the responses of the national trade union movement in the private security sector to the presence of undocumented workers at the grassroots level. Using a case study approach, we find that the pressures of labour market informalisation in the industry prompt unions to seek to maintain and advance their position from their traditional support base of citizen workers rather than attempt to include new groups. The failure to engage is reinforced by anti-immigrant attitudes which link foreigners with problems in the industry such as low wages and portrays such workers as co-conspirators rather than comrades. While justice and solidarity have always been the foundation of trade unionism in South Africa, the movement is in danger of failing this test if the current situation in terms of the exclusion of undocumented foreign workers persists.

Events in Southern Africa during the early 1990s have re-opened a debate over the effectiveness of the Reagan Administration's policy of ‘Constructive Engagement’. This was a controversy that had previously been laid to rest with the US Congress passing its Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in October 1986, since the ensuing punitive sanctions imposed by the enactment of this legislation scuttled Ronald Reagan's strategy of using friendly persuasion to encourage the South African Government away from its practice of apartheid. Yet, with hindsight, it may appear that the President's method of drawing the Pretoria regime into the international community, through offering recognition and encouragement in exchange for reform, has been triumphantly vindicated. After all, has not the African National Congress (ANC) come to power via a democratic process, thereby avoiding a bloodbath on the scale that so many had predicted?

The Poets' conference held under the auspices of the Berlin Festival had the same theme as that of the entire festival this year, Africa's contribution and relation to the arts and culture of Europe. It is at once debatable whether a conference can decide what culture is: whether culture can be talked about across a table among 70 men and women from different parts of the world via tri-lingual instantaneous translations and other kinds of static that fill the air at such times. To appreciate the even subtler intervention of Africa into western culture, in these circumstances, might prove to be impossible. Fortunately conferences have a way of finding their working levels, even though these may not always coincide with the subject assigned them.

Many Nigerian intellectuals have persisted in their enthusiasm for a socialist revolution. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, economists, novelists, and playwrights in the universities have presented a Marxist critique of the political economy and society, and variously sought to provide a socialist solution to the multiple ills of their country. For example, in November 1985, Tunji Braithwaite was insisting that ‘socialism is the way out’ of the political and economic impasse besetting the nation, while Krees Imodibie was claiming that the Nigerian social ethos expressed the essential precepts of socialism. Even the National Political Bureau appointed in 1986 by President Ibrahim Babangida to devise the blueprint of a civilian government for the 1990s recommended, albeit rejected by the Armed Forces Ruling Council, ‘that Nigeria should adopt a socialist socio-economic system’.

Among the rights promised to individuals and groups, the ‘right of association’ frequently appears. It is enshrined in national constitutions, in international declarations and conventions, and in standard references to the liberties and privileges that citizens enjoy. Yet, as this article will illustrate, restrictions on this right have been justified in the name of higher objectives. The right of association, it would appear, is a conditional or second-order right, subordinated on occasion to more pressing rights. The strains of recent independence, regionalism, and labour unrest have brought about limits to the creation of association, whether political or non-political in nature.

Although the oldest independent African republic, Liberia ranks among the continent's poorest states,1 despite the existence of a small but prosperous foreign enclave dominated by iron ore and rubber plantation companies. Prior to 1950, even this sector was non-existent, with the exception of the Firestone rubber plantation at Harbel which was started in 1926.

What follows purports to give the opinions of three judges of the highest court of appeal in Newstate, Africa. The title is taken from a pregnant phrase of O. W. Holmes, an American writer on jurisprudence. He held that the result of a case depended upon ‘the inarticulate major premiss’ of the judge (or the unstated assumption which most influenced his judgement), at least in matters of first impression—i.e. cases in which the judges must determine for the first time what is the operative rule (‘norm’) of law. He urged this proposition in sharp opposition to the popular notion that a judge merely applied to the ascertained facts clear rules of law, which he found in earlier cases or in statutes.