This is an account of how artists and cultural workers have striven to gain and maintain the freedom to produce art in a milieu that threatened to either exploit their labors for political ends or to marginalize them as unimportant and unworthy of public and private patronage and support. It also seeks to explain how they have organized and sought to expand their influence and independence. Cultural politics has many dimensions, including the larger issues of defining and enriching the values and purposes of a community, establishing the identity and parameters of the community and its culture, and locating the bounds of social and political discourse. Such a perspective takes culture in its most expansive sense—the concepts, habits, arts, skills, languages and institutions of a people.

This article will focus on a more narrow view of cultural politics—the struggle over who represents the communities of cultural workers and practitioners, particularly in their dealings with the state and other dominant institutions, and how those communities have coalesced to pursue their perceived interests. Thus, culture is a synonym for those fine and popular arts that reproduce and reinforce systemic values, and those that corrode and undermine the social regime. And it is the battle for the control of the arts and those who create and disseminate the arts that will be examined here.

The straightforward logic of experience and the long route along the highways and byways of ethnography and theory have brought me to the same point: a conviction that in Africa in the centuries before its conquest social and cultural life was far more inventive from day to day than we can now easily imagine, steeped as old intellectual frameworks are in the equation between non-literacy and a repetitive “tradition,” and framed as our own social life has been by the organized repositories, routinized access and incremental growth patterns that ensure order and longevity to our own legacies of knowledge. Alongside the kinship, kingship and cult of classic social organizational analysis, attentive reading of African sources suggests another and different social project: the creation of variety amongst people in their skills and intellectual reach, not only reproducing a finite set of known roles and functions with respect to a “system of thought” but also endorsing a constant and volatile engagement on its boundless frontiers.

The 1980s has been described as Africa's “lost decade.” After the largely positive economic and social developments of the 1960s and 1970s, Africa began to lose ground in the 1980s: economic progress turned into economic decline; social development into social decay. The assumption in leading circles has been that this downturn was necessary because of the costs incurred by a largely state-centered approach to development. Economic liberalization would help bring back growth. Few tangible improvements, however, were recorded in the 1980s. Since 1990, calls for political democratization have been added to the armory of policy prescriptions for Africa. Faith in the significance of democratization among Africans and friends of Africa alike provided the continent with new breathing-space but half way through the 1990s, there is little evidence that Africa has begun turning a corner.

Although per capita GNP income is in itself a measure of neither economic welfare nor success in development and measures for countries with a balmy climate always are lower than those for colder countries —something that the World Bank is the first to admit—the statistical trend for African economies that can be gleaned from studying its World Development Report for the past ten years indicates that in comparison with the rest of the world Africa continues losing ground. Although quite a few countries have registered at least a modest economic recovery in the 1990s, the number of African countries that have dropped into the bottom category of least developed countries has increased. In 1980, the number of African low-income countries (under $700 GNP per capita) was eighteen. In 1995 it had gone up to 27 or half of those listed in this category (World Development Report 1995, 162). The debt burden continues to plague the continent. Although total debt service as percentage of exports has improved for some African countries since 1980, repayment obligations are still beyond what African governments can typically afford. The result is that African countries find themselves locked out from international credit other than that provided by the publicly owned international finance institutions. The little private capital that comes to Africa is usually provided by individuals or companies interested only in a “quick buck.”

The New Directions Papers is a new series of the Joint Committee on African Studies (JCAS) of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The purpose of New Directions is to open or re-open a field of African studies which has been neglected or in which not enough new work has been done. Thus, it is intended as a forum for challenging rather than surveying research agendas and received wisdoms that have shaped understandings about Africa. The Committee seeks papers that are empirically-based but methodologically- or theoretically-minded. For example, a case study would be viewed as an opportunity to show how a new perspective on African realities can be achieved through an innovative approach. In general, the Committee favors papers that can help colleagues who work in Africa to renew their practice of the field. The series will appear jointly in the African Studies Review and Cahiers d'etudes africaines, published simultaneously in English and French.

The lush wetlands and rich pastures of the Lower Jubba Region, replenished annually by the flooding of the Jubba River and nearby streams, define some of the finest livestock-producing areas of Somalia and of eastern Africa generally. Blessed with relatively good access to water and blanketed with perennial grasses and other vegetation, the area is home to literally hundreds of thousands of domestic animals, particularly cattle. Some of the more important seasonally flooded rangelands and water points, such as those around Afmadow town, figure strongly in local myths and oral historical accounts, and for any herder traveling across the dry, barren lands west of the region they seem like “the promised land” (Schlee 1989; Chevenix-Trench 1907). It is little wonder, therefore, that the conflict and turmoil recently characterizing this region stems in part from struggles over these lands and over the valuable commodities that they produce. A focus on the cattle trade and the social relationships in which it is embedded helps to explain 1) how the pastoral sector operated prior to the recent tragedy, and 2) how recent alliances and conflicts in the area are based at least partly on this commerce. It also provides an excellent lens for exploring some of the relationships that have so tragically exploded, pitting clan against clan and herder against merchant.

Population growth and the high levels of fertility in sub-Saharan Africa remain a significant impediment to development in the region. After nearly three decades of family planning programming in the region, fertility levels remain, for the most part, unchanged although substantial numbers of women continue to indicate a preference toward lowering their levels of childbearing. Some estimates indicate that almost 30 percent of married women in sub-Saharan Africa do not use family planning although they express a desire to stop, or delay, having children (Bongaarts 1994; Westoff and Bankole 1995).

Most African countries now have explicit population targets, a response to the exacerbating effect population growth has had on social, economic, and environmental resources. Population should not be held solely responsible for the economic quagmire in which many developing countries find themselves, although it is widely acknowledged that lower rates of population growth would ease the development burden in these societies.

Beyond the concern with sheer numbers and rates of growth, another perspective on population as a problem in the region relates to the gap between reproductive preferences and actual fertility, alluded to earlier, which affects one-half of the population's (the female half) inability to determine what happens to, or issues from, their own bodies.

This gap, referred to variously as the KAP-gap, or unmet need (Westoff 1988; Bongaarts 1991) has constituted the cornerstone of, or basis for, family planning programming. After all, if women say they want no more children, but are not using contraception (the fundamental conditions for inclusion in the KAP-gap/unmet need measure), then providing family planning services should serve to satisfy this apparent unmet need for contraception. Conceptually, then, unmet need can be represented as a demand for contraception which can be “met” by family planning programs.

Some members of tine African-American community were aware of European activities in the African continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As early as the 1860s, Pan-Africanist Martin R. Delany and Henry Highland Garnet, a US ambassador to Liberia reacted differently to the British annexation of part of Yorubaland. In later years, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner also addressed the issue of the manner in which Europeans were taking over African territory, and chided African-Americans for not going back to re-take and protect the African continent from the European intruders (January 1882, 1). There were more responses from the community on the subject, during tine last stages of European imperial subjugation of Africa (Jacobs 1981, 38, 49, 53 and 75).

Although some African-Americans condemned the European annexation of Africa, they were not physically involved in the resistance effort of the Africans. The Africans' heroic and tenacious defense of their states collapsed in the face of the superior military tactics and warfare technology of the invading European armies (Crowder 1971, 1-16). Thus by the first decade of the 20th century, most of the continent had come under effective European colonial domination, with the two exceptions of Liberia and Ethiopia. The Europeans wished and actually attempted to colonize these two states. Ethiopia saved itself, while Liberia eventually had to rely on the assistance of the United States of America to thwart European designs against the State.

Citizen influence on the modern democratic state most often occurs through social organizations demanding government responsiveness to member concerns. These organizations and their interaction with government constitute the core of modern civil society. The presence of organized groups does not in itself mean that a civil society exists. Such groups may engage in other activities such as producing collective goods for their members or controlling their members on behalf of the ruling elite. Civil society grows in a state as more and more groups engage in activities designed to maintain or change government policies.

Outside of Africa, civil society development has often preceded democratization and provided the impetus for establishing elections, as well as the leadership and resources for political parties contesting these elections. With the exception of South Africa and possibly Zimbabwe, the emergence of civil society has thus far been minimal in Africa. Social organizations are too weak to bring down authoritarian regimes, let alone shape their replacements. However, the recent democratizations are providing new opportunities for group influence relative to the state. The result is that civil society is coming into existence at the same time as the holding of elections, the organization of competitive political parties and the reforming of legislative assemblies. In effect, the development of civil society and democracy are occurring in much of Africa as parallel and related processes.

Postwar development discourse has been governed by two principal preoccupations. First, the will to knowledge, that is, a concern with expanding scientific understanding of the social structures and processes of so-called third world societies and the extrapolation of generalizable rules of the dynamics of their transformation. Second, the will to change, that is, a powerful impulse to engage accumulated knowledge to transform for the better the material conditions of “the wretched of the earth.” Together, these concerns account for the social engineering ethos of development discourse and the penchant for prescriptive, problem-solving theory. As a result, the contending post-war paradigms (modernization and dependency) have functioned as models of analysis and ideologies—normatively ordered proclamations of preferred pathways to social systems that are congruent with western-style modernity (Banuri 1990; Berman 1994, 235-36; Grendzier 1985, 1–21; Ferguson 1990; Manor 1991, 2-3).

Mirroring these attributes of development discourse, the study of political development has been guided by a preoccupation with two projects that are considered emblematic of political modernity: The nurturing of political communities coincident with the territorial boundaries inherited from colonialism (nation-building), and the elaboration of institutions and technologies for the effective governance of evolving political communities (state-building). For both dominant postwar paradigms, ruling elites who inherited colonial states were the primary “enablers” of these projects (Doornbos 1990, 180). Analysis of politics in developing societies has therefore been foremost concerned with explication of how the unfolding of both projects was determined by the political practices of these ruling elites.

In the post cold war era, most of the wars in the international community have occurred in Third World countries, and African countries have experienced on the average more years of civil and external wars than other Third World countries. What are the consequences of war on African societies? Do states involved in war tend to fare worse than those not involved in war? In this paper, data on African countries involved in war and those that were not involved in war between 1960 and 1983 were examined for evidence of differences in development patterns after war. In contrast to the few studies on the consequences of war, where war was associated with positive development in the European countries, this study posits that wars in African countries are unlikely to produce similar outcomes.

Conflicts, which exist on a continuum from low to high intensity, range from individual acts of aggression and protest to organized extreme violence perpetuated by institutions, organizations and countries. Conflicts on the low intensity side of the continuum are less violent, involving few, if any deaths, while conflicts on the other end, called wars, involve numerous deaths. The most intensive end of the continuum—war, defined here as violence sponsored by countries which involves at least 1,000 military troops—was selected as the focus of this research because of an interest in the impact of war on the development of the state.

In Nigeria, state creation was originally conceived as a solution to the problems of ethnic minority groups.

Louis Wirth (Hepburn 1978, 1) defined an ethnic minority group as a group of people who because of their physical or cultural characteristics, “are singled out from the others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination.” Stavenhagen (1983, 122) pointed out that the exploitative relationship, which often characterize the interaction between the minority and the dominant group can take the form of “unequal regional development (when ethnic groups are geographically localized) or of differential access to positions of privilege or power, or different forms of segregation and discrimination in social, economic and political life.” The inferior status imputed to ethnic minority groups explains the conflict potential in minority/dominant relationship.

The experience of ethnic minorities world wide has shown that several approaches can be adopted to eliminate or reduce minority situations. They include assimilation, ethnocide, genocide, constitutional safeguards, reversal of status and territorial solution.

Assimilation permits ethnic minorities to adopt the values of the dominant group at their own pace. This policy could be adopted where the minority situation resulted from immigration and where the minorities accept the authority of the dominant groups as legitimate. The approach has been adopted to some advantage in the United States.

War, drought and the failure of centrally planned economic policies have resulted in a reorientation of government priorities in Mozambique. Since the late 1980s, agricultural policy regarding food and cash crop production has shifted away from a dependence on state farms towards a reliance on commercial enterprises and the family sector. The government also has applied market principles to the purchase and processing of cash crops and allowed private companies to replace inefficient and poorly managed state enterprises. These decisions have not been adopted hastily; they have been accompanied by numerous studies that try to anticipate the possible impact of these changes at the micro and macro economic level.

Several of these studies are noteworthy in their attention to the position of rural women in Mozambique. They acknowledge the significant role played by women and they detail the numerous productive activities that rural women engage in, from planting and weeding to childcare and collecting firewood (Liberman 1988,1989,1992; Casimiro, Laforte, and Pessoa 1991; Andrade, Cardoso, Casimiro, and Louro 1992; UEM 1993). In light of the tremendous economic changes that the country is undertaking, many of the studies warn the government against policies that will marginalize women and urge officials to incorporate a gender component into projects and policies (Casimiro, Laforte, and Pessoa 1991; Liberman 1992).

Taking the Oromo as historical actors, the emergent Oromo studies identify some deficiencies of “Ethiopian studies” that primarily focus on the Amhara and Tigray ethnic groups and their rulers, and ignore the history of the Oromo people. Many Ethiopian and Ethiopianist scholars do not recognize the positive cultural achievements of this people. As Shack (1994, 642) notes, “The lack of critical scholarship has inadvertently distorted the human achievements of conquered peoples like the Oromo, including transformations of their social, cultural, and political institutions.” Although the Oromo have no political power, they are the largest ethnonation in the Ethiopian Empire, comprising about half of the 52 million Ethiopian population. Ethiopia (former Abyssinia), with the help of the European colonial powers, colonized and annexed the Oromo people during the last decades of the 19th century, when Africa was partitioned among the European colonial powers (Jalata 1995a). Since then they have been treated as colonial subjects and second-class citizens. With their colonization and incorporation into Ethiopia (Jalata 1991, 1993a; Holcomb and Ibssa 1990), the Oromo could not develop independent institutions that would allow them to produce and disseminate their historical knowledge freely. Currently, they are fighting for national self-determination: to regain their political freedom and rebuild independent institutions.

The Ethiopian knowledge elites have treated the Oromo as historical objects or have ignored them because of their subordination and powerlessness. Current publications on Oromo cultural and social history challenge a top-down paradigm to historiography and make the Oromo subjects rather than objects of history. Studying people as subjects or agents helps scholars avoid producing false knowledge. As Haraway (1991, 198) expounds, “Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of ‘Objective’ knowledge.” The emergent Oromo studies attempt to replace colonial history by a history of liberation, and to refute historical myths that have been produced to justify Ethiopian colonialism. This essay explores how the emergent Oromo studies have identified some deficiencies of Ethiopian studies, and how many Ethiopian and Ethiopianist knowledge elites have reacted to these fields of study.

During the colonial era, women in Ugogo in central Tanzania, like most of Africa, became increasingly marginalized as producers in a rural economy. A colonially imposed sexual division of labor saw men forced into a cash economy while women were officially regulated to subordinate subsistence activities. Women became the victims of a version of the “cult of domesticity” that limited their ability to control resources both within and outside the household. The marginalization of women came about as a result of an alliance between the colonial state and male elders yet it was also part of the marginalization of communities in Ugogo generally in which elders and all males also saw their economic autonomy destroyed. Ironically, by the end of the colonial era this process led to many men scapegoating women as the cause of their loss of autonomy and to many women seeing empowerment only in escaping the confines of the local community.

In one of the most thorough works on changing gender relations, Karen Sacks has explained this process in terms of the underdevelopment of African communities during the colonial era (1982). Majorie Mbilinyi has argued that in many parts of Tanzania colonial and post-colonial labor policies regulated women to the informal sector and even then often drove them out of the money economy entirely.

This article explores the role that teachers in the Côte d'Ivoire played in the democratization process in the early 1990s. More specifically, it looks at the socio-economic and ideological factors that placed teachers at the helm of the contestation movements that contributed to the end of nearly three decades of autocratic one-party rule. While this is a case study, its implications are, mutatis muntantis, more general. The principal argument developed in this article is that teachers occupy a strategic but precarious position in many African societies (Diop and Diouf 1990). They, more than any other social group, with the possible exception of students, embody the contradictory dimensions of post-colonial African politics and society. On the one hand, as Robert Fatton (1987, 63–64) notes, they are connected to the ruling class in so far as those in power often turn to them as a way to legitimate their rule. On other hand, teachers are part of Africa's fragile middle class, since they benefit from the relatively high expenditures of African governments on education. Nevertheless, they, particularly secondary and university teachers saw themselves as an alternative elite to those in power (Oyediran 1993, 221).

It is from that perspective that I wish to examine a case study of Hausa law in the Yoruba city of Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. I argue that the Sarkin Sabo and his representatives, including the Waziri, in dispensing justice and governing Sabo provide just such a ritual manifestation of a “symbolic intercom between the level of cultural thought and complex cultural meanings, on the one hand, and that of social action and immediate event, on the other” to which Munn refers. Following Kiernan (1981, 6), moreover, I hold that a concept is needed to tie the sacred and secular together without slighting either one. In an article that aids in that task, Lubeck (1981, 70) reminds us that:

In his classic study of the Hausa Sabon Gari (new town) in Ibadan, Abner Cohen (1969; 1974) described a logical consequence of the amalgam of sacred and secular in an African society, the Hausa, as well as the manner in which Sabo was linked through the Hausa-British alliance with the capitalist world economy. Moreover, this study seeks to extend Cohen's work to the post-colonial period and note some ways in which that Hausa alliance to the colonial state served to establish an affiliation with the post-colonial state in Nigeria. It does so by focusing on a court case involving the Waziri of Sabo. A brief presentation of the history of Sabo further clarifies the case and enables contextual examination of the relevant social and cultural factors involved. Sabo, after all, must be understood as a consequence of the extension of British colonial power in Nigeria. The extension of that power enabled the Hausa to found dispersed trading centers throughout Nigeria and, indeed, British West Africa. Their power, however, rested on their ability to control those in their constituency. Appropriate analysis of the nexus of historical, political, social and cultural factors in this process will further the understanding of that unifying concept for interpenetration of the sacred and secular which Kiernan seeks.

Are apparently successful “grassroots” conservation programs in Africa paradoxically a boon for the extension of central state authority? Can decentralization actually serve to bring about recentralization, giving governments not only new sources of revenue, but also more legitimacy in marginal rural areas? By exploring the current and historical relationships between Zimbabwean rural people and the wildlife that surrounds them, one can hopefully gain insights into why Zimbabwe's wildlife population is among one of the most diverse and thriving in Africa. The cases explored in this article clearly indicate that, in theory, the more rural people are allowed and encouraged to participate in the management of big game, and the more material benefits they accrue, the higher their stake will become in conserving those living resources. This seems to be the case as far as receiving financial benefits are concerned. Still, the implications of such sustainable utilization for the furtherance of the state's power have been unclear in scholarship to date. Zimbabwe's environmental programs have been hailed by scholars and the media alike as pathbreaking ventures into grassroots control over natural resources. This study proposes the following hypothesis, using Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) as an empirical test case: the establishment of wildlife utilization programs in agriculturally marginal rural areas also serves the interests of the Zimbabwean government to extend its authority in these otherwise neglected areas.

A decade and a half ago Chambers (1979) referred to African rural refugees as “What the Eye Does not See.” This was, inter alia, due to the remoteness of their inhabited areas and the urban bias which then characterized the responses of the international assistance regime. If rural refugees were, in the 1970s, “what the eye did not see,” today refugees in many of the African urban centers are what the eye “refuses to see.” One of the most dramatic and far-reaching impacts of war, drought and economic hardship in the 1980s in many sub-Saharan African countries has been the immense population shift from rural areas to the cities. This population shift is taking place in the absence of any structural transformation in the economies concerned. Structural transformation here refers to increases in labor productivity, a declining share of agriculture in total output, technological progress and industrialization. African host-governments see the situation in their urban centers being exacerbated by the presence of refugees who are said to compete with nationals for scarce employment opportunities and social services such as health, education, housing, water and transportation. In many African host countries where the public sector is the main employer, refugees are excluded from employment in this sector; in other countries such as Egypt and Djibouti, refugees are not allowed to take any paid employment (Wallace 1985). The policies of many African governments toward skilled urban refugees are succinctly described by Brydon and Gould (1984,4):

Since the 1980s, the Tanzanian state has been undergoing a transformation involving both the relations of power among the central organs of the state and the social role that the state plays in Tanzanian society. The dominance of the ruling party (CCM), with its goals of rural-based socialist development has eroded. Administration has triumphed over politics, and the state is coming increasingly under the sway of an administrative ethos. There is little indication that opening up politics through multi-party elections will counter this trend.

Several factors contributed to this transformation. The economic crisis of the 1980s was a catalyst, weakening the capacity and legitimacy of the state and the party in particular. A second element was international actors, particularly the IMF, empowered to intervene in Tanzania by the economic crisis. These actors played a significant role in defining policy shifts away from rural-based socialist development through their advocacy of structural adjustment. The crisis of capacity and intervention of outside influences might have generated some policy shifts, but did not necessarily determine that a transformation of the state would ensue. Adam Przeworski (1986) has suggested that transitions from authoritarian rule are possible only when there is a viable alternative to the authoritarian regime. Likewise, it is only when a sufficiently coherent counter coalition exists within the state to represent an alternative ruling elite that state transformation is possible. In Tanzania, the crisis of state capacity and intervention of foreign actors generated such a transformation because administrators presented a potential counter coalition. Never adequately incorporated into the CCM-dominated state, administrators retained elitist norms, viewing themselves as a development vanguard, contrary to the role specified for administrators by the CCM. Although political authorities explicitly sought to render administrators subordinate and responsive to the party which would define the social role of the state, bureaucratic autonomy remained high.

Throughout the history of Liberia, the Mandingo have stood at the margins of citizenship-always taken to be “something more” than the other indigenous groups of Liberia but “something less” than the full citizens the Settlers consider themselves to be. In the shifting definitions of Liberian citizenship, Mandingo marginality has always played a curiously ambivalent role, an ambivalence that reflects the ambiguities of the state's self-conception.

While the question of “who are the real citizens of Liberia” has been debated for many years by the various ethnic groups, no group has been more impacted by the debate than the Mandingo. Against this historical background, this paper seeks to address the issue of citizenship which is currently being discussed as Liberia attempts to reestablish itself as a nation state following its recent civil war.