In this essay, we discuss some differences between professional and popular perceptions concerning the identification and prevention of birthing difficulties among the rural Peul in Guinea. This difference in perceptions is evidenced principally by three key elements having an influence in the progress of the pregnancy and labor as well as in the prevention of birthing difficulties. These include the daily domestic tasks, the fast of Ramadan, and the diet appropriate for the pregnant woman. The analysis shows that the mechanisms of prevention elaborated by the health professionals (medical perceptions) and those of the pregnant woman's personal entourage (popular perceptions) are realistically based but arise from different assumptions. From the popular perspective of those in a pregnant woman's entourage, the fear of labor, based on the generally high elevated rate of maternal mortality—especially elevated among the Peul in rural Guinea—justifies in certain measure the preventative activities centered on diet and the execution of domestic tasks. By contrast, among the health professionals interviewed, the attention is placed on the prevention of anemia which arises in women during pregnancy. In sum, we have here two different logics on the prevention of birthing difficulties.

Efforts to transform the lives of colonized women and girls were integral to Christian missionary efforts throughout the world. This study of the attempts by a Quaker mission, in what is now Western Province, Kenya, to remake African womanhood indicates the limited success missionaries had in this effort. As with most evangelical missions, “women's work for women” involved domesticating African women and girls. According to one missionary, the purpose of the Girls' Boarding School (GBS) was to teach girls to be “better wives and mothers.” This goal, however, was subverted by both the missionaries and the schoolgirls. While the curriculum was designed to teach girls to submit to male authority, the female missionary in charge of the school refused to do so herself. Furthermore, the schoolgirls manipulated missionaries and mission institutions to delay marriage and to control their choice of marriage partners. Graduates also used the skills learned at the GBS to cross gender and class boundaries, and contributed to the restructuring of Luhya society. Thus, while missionaries undoubtedly caused many dramatic changes in the lives of Luhya women and girls and in Luhya culture, we see that they were manifestly unsuccessful in controlling the nature of these changes.

This article engages the very definition/meaning of diaspora as a concept at a moment when scholars are rushing to embrace the field of diaspora studies. Much of the current discussion continues to suggest that diaspora is merely a logical manifestation of dispersion, no matter how the diaspora was created or how long it had been in existence. This essay argues that linkages that tie the diaspora together must be articulated and are not inevitable, and that the diaspora is both process and condition. As a process it is always in the making, and as condition it is situated within global race and gender hierarchies. However, just as the diaspora is made, it can be unmade, and thus scholars must explore the moments of its unmaking. Indeed, the efforts to unravel the constituent elements of the diaspora(s) raise significant questions concerning how Africa is conceptualized in relation to its diaspora. These efforts also underscore the need to examine overlapping diasporas from many historical locations.

This essay examines the tensions that emerged when South Africa's newly democratic government attempted to deliver reforms rapidly in the interest of distributive equity, sidelining the slower and more inclusive process of consultation with stakeholders outside of government. Its focus is on policy debates in the welfare sector over the new Child Support Grant proposed in 1997. An analysis of these policy debates reveals that consultation with stakeholders outside of government strengthened the democratic process and provided a necessary venue for citizens to engage government and have a say in the development process. However, this essay also suggests that with the introduction of the government's Macro-Economic Strategy for Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), the policy terrain has become less consultative as the ANC government has increasingly centralized decision-making powers within the executive and cabinet. While in the short term this may be seen as a necessary measure in order to begin to address many of the pressing needs of the electorate, in the long run it has the effect of installing undemocratic practices and shifting the locus of power to those institutions of government that are least representative and accountable.

The Bambatha Revolt in South Africa is one of the most often cited rebellions against taxation in colonial Africa. Most discussions of the revolt have emphasized its material and political causes: the added costs of the new tax and the difficulty African farmers had in finding the cash to pay it; long-standing grievances between white settlers and Africans over control of the best farm and grazing land in Natal and Zululand; and generalized unrest among the African population caused by colonial policies and by social and economic circumstances. This article underlines that these were all real concerns for Africans and predisposed at least some of the population to act violently when the new poll tax was first collected in 1906. However, material grievances alone do not supply a complete explanation for the revolt, and there were additional causes linked to spiritual beliefs held by many Africans at the time of the rebellion. Africans resisted the poll tax in part because they feared that the state had acquired more potentially destructive power over them via the census that preceded the tax. Based on rumors that reportedly circulated prior to the rebellion, many Africans attributed their misfortune at the hands of the colonial state to their ancestors' having turned their backs on them; and people fully expected a coming thunderstorm to punish them severely for their neglect. One way of placating the ancestors and of undermining the power of the colonial state was through active participation in the rebellion. Moreover, rebels were not merely reacting to state actions; they were acting in accordance with their own belief systems that suggested that the ancestors strongly supported their resistance and would allow them to prevail. Thus, the Bambatha revolt was not, as other historians have suggested, a last-ditch, hopeless attempt to strike a blow against the colonial state and die; rather, it was an armed revolt that was seriously intended to overthrow the colonial state both by force of arms and by the power of supernatural actors.

In the study of African sexuality, cultural studies and theories abound with examples of limited, unilinear approaches which tend to reinforce basic assumptions about the nature of social categories, often in a self-perpetuating dynamic that undergirds the social and material bases of their construction and hence solidifies their alterity. Even the most well-intentioned scholars writing historically on Africans and homosexuality (or blacks and homosexuality) tend to commit such acts of logical fallacy, most often by resorting to a circular cluster of arguments to refute the ahistorical without questioning either the manner in which such arguments are invoked and used, or the inherent ahistoricisms that determine them. This paper will attempt a reassessment of past arguments about African sexuality. Scholars and persons of African descent have a good deal invested in the affirmative acts both of reclaiming and of making history; however, these can never be achieved on the terms of unquestioned, false ideas of the ahistorical. Using a postcolonialist critique of writings on Africa and homosexuality, I use the excavatory tools of contradiction, denial, and reversal to examine the tropes that most often have been deployed in discourses on race, Africa, and the sexual in the writing of culture.

The scholars of Gabon have explained Bongo's political longevity by his corrupt appropriation of the country's economic resources. They have also attributed Bongo's long political survival to the creation of an impressive military machinery to repress rebellions, intimidate opponents, and discourage opposition to his regime. The objective of this article is to demonstrate that Bongo's political longevity is not due solely to his efficient use of economic and military resources. He was also able to establish domination over the symbolic sphere of Gabonese society. The manipulation of such religious institutions as Christianity, Freemasonry, and traditional secret societies allowed Bongo to gain control over the minds of the Gabonese by convincing die masses that he was die ideal leader for the country. Despite these manipulations, die Gabonese masses were able to use this very same symbolic system to challenge Bongo's regime and threaten the lives of members of his government.

With “Unfinished Migrations,” Patterson and Kelley have provided an indispensable overview of the recent resurgence of African diaspora scholarship. Describing this “rebirth” in light of contemporary concerns with globalization and transnationalism, they usefully update the work of scholars such as St. Clair Drake, Joseph Harris, and George Shepperson, who over the past thirty-five years have provided similar catalogues and calls.

Rather than contest any particular element of their overview, I will focus briefly on what I consider to be some crucial issues of epistemological strategy raised by their salutary attempt to conceptualize a “theoretical framework… that treats the African diaspora as a unit of analysis.” The first is that we need to consider in more detail the genealogy of the term diaspora itself. Patterson and Kelley are correct to note that “attempts to identify and make sense of the African diaspora are almost as old as the diaspora itself,” but surely it is also significant that the term diaspora has been appropriated so recently in black intellectual discourse. Writers and activists including Equiano, Blyden, Delany, Du Bois, and Nardal proposed varying visions of internationalism over the past two centuries, but only in the past three decades have black intellectuals turned to an explicit discourse of an “African diaspora.” It seems to me that we need to be able to explain why this term arises, as Patterson and Kelley point out, only in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

This article outlines some aspects of the history of West Africans in Britain during the colonial era in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular it focuses on the emergence of West African nationalism in Britain and highlights some of the political activities of those African sojourners abroad, who were also temporarily part of the diaspora. Their political organizations, especially the West African Students' Union and the West African National Secretariat, were influential in West Africa and throughout the diaspora and reflected changing political identities, consciousness, and historical conditions. Most important, they show that West Africans developed and maintained their own distinctive political aims, consciousness, and ideologies, while at the same time contributing to and being influenced by those of the diaspora. These aims and ideologies also reflected the particularities of political and social conditions in Britain, conditions that were shaped by the African presence itself. West African nationalism provided a distinctive philosophy and orientation even for West Africans' pan-African activities. Indeed they saw the future of Africa and the diaspora as determined by political and other advances in the West African colonies.

This article analyzes the historical ambiguity of the “purchase areas” in colonial Zimbabwe. Established under the 1931 Land Apportionment Act that segregated land in the colony along racial lines, the purchase areas were discrete areas of freehold tenure dotted throughout the country. African elites who setded in the area and Europeans who administered them held distinct notions about the value and proper use of purchase area farms. For the African landholders, the small farms expressed their elite status in society. The state expected that educated, elite Africans should maintain modern, efficient farms. However, African landholders remained extensive farmers. They increased production by extending their fields, rather than by adopting labor-saving techniques. When the state confronted Marirangwe purchase area farmers about their “poor farming” techniques, the farmers presented a brash defense of their family values which they connected to their farming methods. This family-centered defense of their farms forced the state to concede certain development patterns to the farmers, foremost being the permanence of family farms, thereby enabling extensive farming.

The analysis of popular songs in post-independence Zimbabwe has received little attention. The few analyses that have been attempted remain fragmentary and notoriously insist on a uniform worldview for the singers. This tends to blur ideological differences in the sensibilities of the singer's response to the realities of independence. Moreover, an overemphasis on a homogenous perspective on independence by the singers also tends to underestimate the contradictory response in the songs of an individual singer. This article analyzes popular songs of Zimbabwe in the Shona, Ndebele, and English languages. It argues that although the popular songs occur within the context of celebrating independence, the state sought to control the extent to which singers could define the meaning of independence. But the plurality of the singers' responses, their refusal to conform to a single definition of the idea of independence, indicates what is distinctively “popular” in the songs.

This paper acknowledges that states in Africa have contributed to the problems confronting social science research on the continent. It argues, however, that the causes of the problem go beyond the state. The paper undertakes an intensive exercise in introspection within the continental and external Africanist communities to explain the problems confronting social science research on the continent. The study identifies several factors as challenges facing research: intellectual distancing of the disciplines from society, the retrogressive sociopolitical atmosphere that characterizes some African universities, and the negative attitudes of individual academics. It argues further that these problems are compounded by the politics surrounding the hierarchical processes of intellectual validation and propagation at the global level. The paper concludes that without a correction of these internal and external deficiencies, it will be difficult to maintain a respectable and beneficial level of research endeavor, integrity, collaboration, and sustainability.

The African presence in the Indian Ocean world represents one of the most neglected aspects of the global diaspora of African peoples. Yet very significant numbers of people of African descent today inhabit virtually all the countries of the western Indian Ocean littoral. It is evident, however, that African voices have been actively silenced in this diaspora both by the cultural contexts of their host societies and by the way in which the scholarly production of knowledge has reflected such cultural domination. Consequently, to get at the experiences of Africans in the Indian Ocean world and assess their sense of being of or belonging to Africa, we must look to popular culture. In this paper I examine some of the evidence for recollecting Africa in the Indian Ocean world, citing examples of music, song, dance, religion and healing, language, and folkways from both first generation diaspora Africans and their descendants. I conclude by cautioning us not to impose paradigms developed from the experience of Africans in the diaspora of the Atlantic world, with its particular forms of Euro-American racism and concomitant black responses.

Mission-African relations in Gbebe and Lokoja between 1858 and 1880 were different from what obtains in the literature for other precolonial Nigeria mission towns. Missionary practice was as intransigent, culturally imposing, and conflictual in these communities as in other mission towns, but local opposition and aversion to the missionaries and converts were not the defining character of their relationship. This difference is due both to certain peculiarities in the corporate character of Gbebe and Lokoja CMS missions and die particular sociopolitical and cultural milieu in the host communities. These factors attenuated die force of missionary ideological and religious assault and demoted religious conflicts between them to a secondary position. Thus, other critical nonconflictual contexts of mission-African relations assumed predominance in these communities. The character of the missions beclouded much of their patently adversarial aspects in the sight of their hosts. It also compelled the missionaries to engage in close secular interactions with the people. Moreover, exigent conditions of internal sociopolitical instability and external dangers of wars forced on the two sides faith-blind informal encounters. Furthermore, a heritage of integrative management of diverse immigrant founding groups in the young communities equipped them to be accommodative of the latterly arrived missionaries.

To understand the grandness and emotion of Ghanaian funerals we need to look at the living rather than the deceased; we should think less of religion and more of politics, particularly the politics of reputation. The author takes the discrepancy between premortem and postmortem care as a starting point for his exploration of the meaning of funerals in a rural Akan community of Southern Ghana. The essay is based on conversations with elderly and younger people and on personal observations and attendance at funerals during anthropological fieldwork. Funerals are first and foremost occasions for the family to affirm its prestige and to celebrate its excellence. When thinking about their own funeral, the elderly are ambivalent. On the one hand, they criticize the overemphasis on funerals at the expense of proper care during their lives. On the other hand, they would certainly not want to turn the tables. For them, too, a poor funeral would be an unbearable disgrace.

As a new field and analytical category, the African diaspora promises to remap the histories of Africans and their dispersed descendants. In what ways has the promise of diaspora been confounded by a preceding intellectual legacy? By focusing on the nation-state and its genesis in nineteenth-century German Romantic thought and that of its critics, this article questions the unproblematic relationship that now exists between history and the African diaspora. Specifically, the audior suggests that the nation continues to inform the very meaning of diaspora despite the intentions of some scholars to challenge the conventional framework (history: the narrative of the nation). By drawing on a vast body of literature from various disciplines, this heuristic article explores, among other themes, specific reading and writing strategies that inform the work of scholars on the African diaspora.