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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.