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.

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.

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.

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.