This article considers the choices made during the apartheid era by Catholic sisters who were members of one of the largest orders for African women, the Montebello Dominicans, based in KwaZulu-Natal, and one of the smallest orders, the Companions of Saint Angela, based in Soweto, the sprawling African township to the southwest of Johannesburg. The Montebellos took an apolitical stance and embraced “silence,” but they could not avoid the political tensions that defined KwaZulu-Natal. The Companions became activists, whose “disobedience” brought them into direct confrontation with the state. History, region, ethnicity, and timing help explain what it meant for African women religious to be apolitical, and what it meant to be politicized, in the context of state repression so effective that every action could be interpreted as a political act.

In early October 1967, four months into the Nigerian Civil War, federal troops massacred hundreds in Asaba, a town in southeast Nigeria on the west bank of the Niger. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of Igbo-dominated Biafra. Through the reconstruction of this event, the article fills a significant gap in the historical record and contributes to the discussion on the impact of traumatic memory at the local and national levels. It also suggests that the Asaba massacres speak to larger issues of potential reconciliation that extend beyond Asaba and Nigeria.

This article explores the intellectual traditions of African studies, focusing on the central principles of interdisciplinarity and commitment to social and racial justice. Tracing the origins of the field to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African is t intellectuals such as Edward Blyden, it investigates these traditions historically and in the context of contemporary practice. Against the backdrop of concerns for the future of area studies, the author finds a vibrant field—both inside and beyond its traditional boundaries.

In a You Tube video, a young man performs a satirical poem about Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade. The author brilliantly sums up Wade's tenure in one minute. He compares the president to “a rat's hole” and makes fun of his physical features while emphasizing many ways in which Wade has failed the nation. Some viewers thought the performance was disrespectful of the president, and others feared for the author's safety. This article argues that although the World Wide Web gives voice to African youth, it can be a dangerous space, especially for artists. The viewers' negative comments and their concern for the author's life is a modern response to his art and a consequence of its presentation on the Internet. If viewed through the lenses of traditional Wolof oral forms, however, the poem's harsh rhetoric takes on less controversial meanings that the viewers did not seem to understand.

Across Africa in the early twenty-first century, autonomous women's movements have transformed the political landscape. With their support, African women are lobbying for constitutional reforms, entering political office in unprecedented numbers, and initiating legislation to expand women's rights. African women's movements have been emboldened by changes in international and regional norms concerning women's rights and representation, a new availability of resources to enhance women's status, and in many places, an end to conflict. In Botswana, the 1980s and 1990s were a period of heightened women's mobilization. Led by the women's organization Emang Basadi, the women's movement accomplished many significant victories, including winning a landmark citizenship case, prompting a comprehensive review of laws to identify instances of gender discrimination, issuing the first women's manifesto in Africa, and organizing workshops for political parties and women candidates. Some scholars have suggested that Emang Basadi's work was responsible not just for increasing women's representation in parliament, but also for broadening democracy in Botswana. Since 2010, however, a once vibrant women's movement has gone quiet. This article seeks to understand this development and to explore how the movement might be revitalized. The article concludes by drawing comparisons with other women's movements in the region and suggesting that the women's movement in Botswana, like others in the region, may be, in the words of one scholar, “in abeyance.”

The dominant trend in the literature on civil society in Africa, particularly in the context of undemocratic regimes, assumes that civil society activists (including progressive, radical, or guerrilla journalists) are committed only to counteracting the preeminence of a repressive state. Within such a paradigm, evidence of collaborations between agents of the state and elements within civil society—particularly in the interest of advancing political liberation, democracy, justice, and equity—tend to be understated, if not erased altogether. Based on ethnographic details of secret collaborations between the Nigerian security agencies and radical journalists in the fight against military fascism, this article argues that the commonly assumed division between the state and the media is in fact breached regularly in practice. Such evidence should draw scholarly attention to a largely neglected area of research on state–media relations in Africa: the penetration of the apparatuses of power and repression by their targets and victims.

This article considers the impact of globalization on peace and democracy, especially in Africa. Peace is essential for orderly life and democracy is the paramount political value of our epoch. Are democracy and globalization compatible? They can be under certain conditions. Can globalization guarantee peace? Yes, if it can help in addressing the problems of poverty. The Constitutive Act of African Union enjoins African leaders to promote and protect human and peoples' rights and to consolidate democratic insiiuilions and culture. It also requires the promotion of peace, security and stability in the continent. The conclusion: Globalization must be controlled and global institutions democratized.

This article examines how popular organizational strategies and coping mechanisms affect broader trajectories of urban governance in contemporary Africa. Does the proliferation of informal livelihood networks and associations foster economic empowerment and popular political participation, or do these informal processes breed poverty and organizational chaos? This article explores the link between popular organizational strategies and structural outcomes, focusing on how institutional process and power relations shape the access of the poor to resources and decision-making structures in decentralizing urban environments. Case studies from Nigeria trace how liberalization has fragmented informal organizational strategies into networks of accumulation and survival that tend to marginalize the interests of the poor within informal enterprise associations. Distinctive political strategies of informal enterprise associations are analyzed to show why dynamic informal organization is unable to break through the barriers of social and legal marginalization that trap the urban poor in cliental forms of political incorporation. This suggests that “social capital” within the informal economy may fail to improve popular political representation and governance outcomes even in contexts of decentralization.

This article examines two policies targeting the informal open-air market and fishing sectors in Jinja, Uganda. The informal sector has grown to become a significant source of livelihood for people in growing cities such as Jinja. At the same time, development policies have become increasingly concerned with encouraging formalization as well as the participation of local stakeholders in governance and decision-making. While there has been much debate about the potential impacts of formalizing previously informal, unregulated, unpermitted activities, the implications of these policies for informal vendors and fishers have received less attention. Despite their promises of addressing previous marginalization, the patterns of participation and formalization enforced by these two policies in Uganda have reduced the control of these individuals over their own livelihoods, as well as intensifying contestations of local authority and jurisdiction over resources.

This study focuses on the hegemonic struggles between two ethnic communities, the Mbo and the Bamiléké, in Santchou, West Cameroon. At issue is the sharing of political roles in this locality, which point to issues of political representation. In this district, these roles (mayor, representative, etc.) were under the single party rule of the ethnic minority Mbo, who are a majority in this area but a minority in the rest of the district, where the Bamileke are the majority. In this monolithic context, where all protests were banned, the Bamileke had given up and accepted this arrangement. With the advent of the multiparty system and democracy, in which mayors are now elected and no longer simply nominated, uncertainty has been hovering over this political stronghold of the Mbo. Nevertheless, the Mbo have been able to hold onto the post of mayor and acquire other political posts as well. However, unlike during the single party era, the situation created by the political liberalization has offered to the Bamileke a public space where they can discuss the allocation of local political positions, and manifest their disagreement with the hegemonic trend. In the footsteps of Habermas and many other authors such as Cottereau, this study underlines the need to talk about public spaces in a plural form, instead of a single public space, in order to put in context the internal dynamics of popular cultures engendering subcultural public spheres or places of emerging democracy.

What allocation strategy do hegemonic party regimes pursue in order to increase their level of electoral support? Although the literature has established that targeting resources to marginally supportive districts is the most effective distributive strategy for competitive democracies, it has not been possible to make a clear prediction about the best strategy for hegemonic party regimes. This article seeks to address this puzzle by examining the patterns by which expenditures were distributed by the Tanzanian ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), across the country's 114 mainland districts from 1999 through 2007. Overall, this study finds that CCM targeted expenditures toward those districts that elected the party with the highest margin of victory.

Among Africanists, one of the remarkable events of 1957 was the founding of the African Studies Association. Commentaries on the association's history are slight and understandably celebratory. Exploration of archival and related sources, however, reveals considerable uncertainty and struggle over the construction of the field in the 1950s and 1960s. Those sources range across changing continental, colonial, and racial boundaries and reveal racialized relationships among U.S. scholars and especially foundation officials, British scholars and colonial officials, and, in unexpected ways, scholars in Africa and particularly South Africa. This essay traces the interplay of these forces and the demise of the transnational study of Africa in this period—and points briefly toward today's uncertain future for the study of Africa.

“Mandingization,” the gradual process of cultural change whereby Jola peoples of the Casamance region of southern Senegal are becoming more like their Mandinka neighbors, is analyzed in this article as comprising four distinguishable processes: ethnogenesis, ethnocultural drift, ethnic osmosis, and ethnic strategizing. By distinguishing among these four processes and analyzing their interaction, we can understand the dynamics of Mandingization more clearly and also derive insights for understanding ethnic change generally. The current moment of ethnic change in The Gambia includes a resurgence in Karon Jola ethnic identity, but we need to view this process as contingent, not yet accomplished, and a challenge to the pattern of Mandinka dominance in a time of broader social change.

This article examines how multinational corporations, recognizing the symbolic value of oil pipelines, flow stations, and platforms as ancestral promises of wealth to subject populations, work with NGOs and communities (sometimes in collaboration with the latter, but sometimes in a more adversarial manner) in setting up governance structures that often compete with, and sometimes oppose, the state in struggles over territorial control and resource extraction. These forms of contestations, it argues, create new sites of power in which NGOs aid multinational oil corporations in negotiating new sites of governance that in themselves create new structures of power.

This article examines two films by Raoul Peck—Lumumba: La mort du prophèle (1992) and Lumumba (2000) that offer vastly divergent methods for remembering, memorializing, and meditating on the life and death of Patrice Lumumba. Peck succeeds in creating films that do more than preserve or resuscitate a historical record. The earlier film in particular performs analytic historical work as it delves into the conflicted historical record in which Lumumba is remembered. Peck uses an experimental and confrontational approach to reveal the ongoing forms of cultural censorship that have attempted to erase Lumumba and his legacy.

Based on an original dataset of university students, this article investigates Ghanaian collective memories of past events that are sources of national pride or shame. On average, young elite Ghanaians express more pride than shame in their national history, and they report shame mostly over actions that caused some physical, material, or symbolic harm. Such actions include not only historic events and the actions of national leaders, but also mundane social practices of average Ghanaians. Respondents also report more “active” than "receptive" shame; that is, they are more ashamed of events or practices that caused harm to others and less ashamed about events in which they were the “victims.” We advance the idea of a standard of “reasonableness” that Ghanaians apply in their evaluation of events, behaviors, or circumstances: they apply contemporary standards of morality to past events, but they temper their judgment based on considerations of whether past actions were “reasonable” given the power and material imbalances at that time. Ghanaian students identify strongly with both national and pan-African identities, and they frequently evoke their international image to judge a national event as either honorable or shameful. Ethnicity can be one factor in an individual's judgment of precolonial events, whereas political party affiliation is the stronger predictor of attitudes toward postindependence events.

Although many scholars have noted the salience of mobility throughout the African continent, there has been little systematic investigation into the link between migration and conflict. Most scholarship has tended to see migration as primarily a by-product of conflict and not as a security issue in its own right. In analyzing and contrasting the different migration–conflict trajectories across two similar case studies—Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana—this article attempts to develop an empirically informed theoretical framework for understanding the nexus between migration and conflict in Africa and to shed light on key intervening variables linking migration processes with violent outcomes.

Over the last decade, African regional organizations have gained considerable scope in peacekeeping and peace enforcement. Two subregional organizations in particular, ECOWAS and SADC, have gathered significant experience in military interventions in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Lesotho, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This article assesses the decision-making processes of both organizations ahead of the interventions and concludes that African states participate in military interventions for reasons of national and personal interests rather than humanitarian reasons or out of a primary interest in preserving regional stability. The article draws from extensive fieldwork in four African countries.

This article analyses continuity and change of the agrarian doctrine in colonial and postcolonial Malawi. It engages in a classic debate about images and polices concerning African farming. The article argues that the agrarian doctrine must be related to the broader notion of agrarian populism, more specifically to Chayanov's notion of the logic of the peasant family farm. Employing this broader approach allows a striking continuity of the agrarian doctrine to be revealed. Calls for changes of local institutions did not signify attempts to promote rural transformation, but contained strategies to increase the economic independence of the precapitalist family farm.