On 17 August 1884, the flag was raised at Bimbia in Kamerun and the territory was annexed as a German colony. Gustav Nachtigal, Consul General, distributed Schnaps in celebration and then billed the liquor to the German government: “Schnaps shared at the festive celebration was to be paid by Berlin” (Stoecker 1960, 69; Hueckirtg and Launer 1986, 62). This fleeting event is a commanding metaphor for the crucial role which bottled alcoholic beverages came to play under German imperialism in Cameroon; spirits, above all other trade goods, helped to secure Germany's annexation of Cameroon, its control over indigenous labor, and access to the country's interior. The occasion sets the stage for a continuous history linking bottled European alcohol to capital accumulation, elite power structures, and changing social relations in Cameroon.

Today it is impossible to overlook the significance of bottled alcohol production and consumption in the Republic of Cameroon. Bars selling bottled beers mark rural commercial centers and proliferate on city streets. They are so pervasive that it is difficult to imagine city, town, or village without them, though this image is of relatively recent origin. Just as European alcohol played an important role in the penetration of West African trade, so too bottled European beers permeate many contemporary African economies as highly remunerative commercial activities serving both state and international interests.

The Healers, Ayi Kwei Armah's most recent novel (1978), has received less critical attention than it deserves given the importance of its theme—the sociopolitical liberation of Africa—and the compelling textual strategies it deploys towards that end. What scanty criticism it has attracted has concentrated only on the novelist's social vision, with the debates centering on the degree of faithfulness to the historical materials on which he bases his novel. Nevertheless, without due attention paid to the rhetoric, the peculiar idea of revolution that Armah advocates cannot be grasped fully. By rhetoric is meant the linguistic strategies employed by the writer to put his ideas forward-his style, the use of aesthetic means for achieving desired effects on the reader. This essay attempts to redress the picture and demonstrate the aesthetic elements that give Armah's novel its special stridency.

While it is true, as many critics have pointed out (Lindfors 1980, 91; Fraser 1980, 83-86; Wright 1989, 244-47), that The Healers uses the fall of the Ashanti empire in the 19th century as a paradigm of how other African societies were undermined during the period of Western imperialist incursions into the continent, fidelity to that history itself should never be at issue. Rather, since Armah is a novelist (and not a historian), of greater significance should be the quality of his imaginative use of the past for the purpose of furthering present sociopolitical objectives. If, as he has stated, “the human value of literature, after all, lies primarily in the interactions it makes possible between the way we live and the way we think-between our existence and the reflections we make of and on that existence,” it would not be inapposite to demand of the critics that they use “a high level of knowledge about technique, a craft, an art” (Armah 1985,356) to bring out the writer's total vision, his textual strategies, through aesthetic evaluations.

An intriguing, if little known, autobiography, Femme d'Afrique by Aoua Kéita (1975), is a valuable social document which allows us to reconstruct women's response to the independence movement in the French Soudan (now Mali). This response took the form of a nascent women's movement which emerged under the sponsorship of the Union Soudanaise du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (USRDA), an anticolonialist political party. Aoua Kéita's career as a pioneering midwife and political militant in the USRDA from 1931 to 1968 spanned the transition from colonial rule to independence in Mali (Morgenthau 1964; Foltz 1965).

Until recently, women were rarely included in scholarly discussions of African reactions to colonial rule. With few exceptions (Kanogo 1987; Ba 1989; Musisi 1991), most studies now available on the topic have been written by non-Africans and reflect the assumptions of western feminism (Riviére 1968; Dobert 1970; Van Allen 1974; Denzer 1976, 1981; Urdang 1979,1984; Rogers 1980; Geiger 1982, 1987; Johnson 1982; Mba 1982; O'Barr 1984; Wipper 1985; Cromwell 1986; Presley 1991). As an account by an African woman of the movement for independence in the French Soudan, Femme d'Afrique provides a welcome counterweight to discourse about third-world women by first-world women (Barthel 1975; Robertson 1984; Hay 1988; Staudt 1989).

From the onset of the post-World War II international campaign for the development of the Third World, much attention has been paid to the role of various media forms in the process of making Africa modern. In the discourses of many state officials, development agencies, Western economists, sociologists, and political scientists, development was defined in terms of a country's ability to urbanize, industrialize, and democratize. What was needed for development to occur in Africa, and in the rest of the Third World for that matter, was a transformation of societies from traditional to modern.

As channels for the dissemination of modern ideas and practices, mass media were seen as integral to the very process of social transformation. In the view of those working within this dominant modernization paradigm, a modern mass media system—radio, newspapers, television, and cinema—once established, would serve to prepare developing countries for modernity by transforming the values, attitudes, and behaviors of traditional society (Golding 1974; Fair 1989, 131). The mass media's role in the national development process, then, was to act as innovators and mobilizers of transformation, changing old habits and fostering a new ethic.

Essential to the modernization perspective was the assumption that backward societies remained mired in their traditional ways as a result of ignorance of the outside world and of the inarguable benefits of modernity. Sociologist Daniel Lerner, referring to the Middle East expressed the underlying sentiment of the role of the media in the national development process as well as anyone when he wrote, “what is required there to ‘motivate’ the isolated and illiterate peasants and tribesmen who compose the bulk of the area's population is to provide them with clues as to what the better things in life might be” (1958 411).