African studies are often characterized as interdisciplinary in nature. One wonders whether, as time passes and specific disciplinary studies become distinguished by ever more technical methodologies, this will be less true. However, since the objects of study are entire cultures that are for the most part alien to the researchers who study them, this interdisciplinary spirit may well endure.

With regard to the inventory of sub-disciplines within the general field of African studies, two relative late-comers are African art history and African philosophy. Previously the fields of interest that constitute their special concern were significantly influenced by anthropology. But when sufficient, relevant, fieldwork studies had accumulated to initiate the type of specialized inter-cultural understanding that is distinctive of these two sub-disciplines, there was reason to license them in their own right.

As African art history and African philosophy labored to accredit themselves these past decades, there are a number of expressed concerns which became common to the two disciplines. The aim of this paper is to reflect upon some of these, as expressed by African art historians, from the standpoint of students of African philosophy in the hope that their respective insights and problems may overlap, coalesce and perhaps prove mutually beneficial.

In 1856, as two young girls in the eastern Cape stood guarding their fields from the birds, they were approached by two strangers who entrusted them with a prophetic message:

Such millennial visions in Africa have varied over time and space. While some prophets predicted that great winds would arise, driving Europeans into the sea, others promised that wealthy black brethren would arrive by airplane from America to right the ills of white domination. In either case, the cataclysmic event would usher in a time of harmony, peace and prosperity. As the current millennium approaches, many scholars of Africa are voicing a comparable sense of crisis, a feeling that our understanding of the continent must be reimagined, reconfigured and reconstructed. Unlike Africans of earlier generations, however, we no longer predict a harmonious world emerging from the ashes of the old.

Since gaining independence in the mid 1970s, the economies of many Third World countries have been worsened by a number of external and internal causes such as the oil crisis, political strife and economic mismanagement, coupled with droughts, increased populations, distorted industrialization and lack of job creation. These and other factors have led to an attrition of civil servants' efficiency, a decline in real incomes, increased balance of payment problems and low productivity, both in rural and urban areas (World Bank 1995, 1994; Bukuku 1993; Nyang'oro and Shaw 1992; African Development Bank 1992). In an attempt to address the continuing decline of their economies, Third World governments have pursued a variety of policies and practices collectively designed to encourage the involvement of the labor force in informal sector economic activities. The principal objectives of such activities include subsidizing individuals' incomes and increasing food production. One of these activities has been urban agriculture that emerged as a major urban sector activity during the 1980s (Rakodi 1988; Yeung 1988; Tricaud 1987; Sanyal 1985). Urban agriculture in Tanzania, and especially in the city of Dar es Salaam, involves the raising of livestock and growing of crops (cash, food) both for earning extra money and nutritional purposes.

In spite of its perceived beneficial impact on individuals and society, urban agriculture is generally associated with serious problems relating to environmental degradation. Ironically, Third World countries have largely ignored this problem even though the environmental degradation that urban agriculture causes is rampant.

Investigating the sour grapes of the post-colonial order has led some scholars to revisit colonialism in ways antithetical to the nationalist “consecrated rhetoric” (Heesterman 1978, 31). In the perspective of this revision, colonialism is seen as its own grave digger. Constrained by conflicting local contexts, colonial administrations, it is argued, had to make ad hoc adjustments (Phillips 1989, 11-12). Decolonization is viewed by these revisionists as a “recognition of the failure of colonialism rather than a response to the powers of nationalism” (1989, 13). It is true, perhaps, that decolonization has been studied with an overemphasis on resistance. Resistance, of course, cannot be discounted in accounting for the shoddy performance of the colonial state. However, much of the self-serving discourse of the nationalists can be easily scrapped without hurting the cause of resistance. For a better understanding of resistance itself, scholars argue, it is useful to start discussing it in “a sceptical frame of mind” (Gledhill 1994, 82).

Basic to this revision of the reasons that led to the end of the empire is an investigation of the inherent disabilities of the colonial state (Robinson 1972; Phillips 1989; Darwin 1991). It has been graphically called a “facsimile of a state” (Phillips 1989, 11) for being taken out and set apart from society (Heesterman 1987, 54). This dramatic severing of the colonizer and the colonized is reminiscent of Fanon's characterization of the colonial condition, for being unswervingly divided into European and native quarters, as “manichaean.”

Political change in Burundi has been influenced by a number of factors that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. In this paper, the impact of folklore on national unity and division is examined in the hope of shedding light on the cultural complexities—as expressed folkloristically—that have affected the formation of rigid ethnic identities and ultimately the violent political landscape of Burundi. This research builds on Liisa Malkki's work on identity construction among Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania (1989; 1990; 1995) and René Lemarchand's analysis of “political discourse as a system of possible definition of ethnic selves and on how, through such discursive techniques, ethnicity is transformed, mobilized and ultimately incorporated into the horrors and irrationality of genocide violence” (Lemarchand 1994, xxii).

The political and social manipulation of folklore has the potential to exacerbate conflict along ethnic and sub-ethnic lines while it can also facilitate national and sub-national unity. Both of these processes often occur simultaneously, thus complicating the academic quest for parsimonious explanation of complex social and political phenomena. We contend that the folkloric foundation of the long-term, transformative process of identity creation needs to be factored into analyses of political change in the multi-ethnic terrain of Burundi society.

Folklore is defined in this paper as a process of narration and interpretation, which serves as an “integrated framework that comprehends narrated event and narrative event within a unified frame of reference” (Bauman 1986, 6).

Let me first thank the organizers for inviting me to deliver the keynote address at this important gathering. It is indeed a great honor to me personally but I also take it as recognition of the endeavors of African social scientists to promote social science research in Africa. One such African social scientist was a colleague and friend, the late Professor Claude Ake who did so much to institutionalize social science research in Africa. I would like to use this occasion to pay him tribute.

Whatever the origins of the name of the series, it is today a salute to the many who struggle for democracy in Africa and a grim reminder that the scourge of militarism still haunts our continent and that those who would rule by the sword are either in power or lurk behind the corridors of power ready at any time to ambush the democratic process.

The title I gave to the lecture must already suggest how unwieldy the subject is. I obviously cannot deal adequately with all the constricting and enabling contingencies within which social science is practiced in Africa. Time and space demand that I be highly selective in my presentation. If I seem to emphasize problem areas in the social sciences in Africa and in the relationship between Africans and their non-African counterparts it will not be because I do not recognize the real gains made in the search for solutions. I should also state at the outset that I am aware of some of the travails of students of Africa in North America and it is not my intention to add more to them. If this is any consolation, let me assure you that your woes are nothing compared to ours.

An attack on Liberian government forces in Nimba County, Liberia, on Christmas Eve, 1989, ignited a full-scale civil war. It was carried out by the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) and consisted of Libyan-trained dissidents, headed by Charles Taylor, a former employee of President Samuel Doe's government. After six months of fighting, the NPFL controlled 90 percent of Liberia and was ready to launch a final assault on the capital, Monrovia. Eight months from the start of the war, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) sent a Nigerian-led peace-keeping force, ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) to put an end to the civil war. ECOWAS' military intervention failed to stop the war or to bring peace. Almost half of the Liberian population of two-and-a-half million was displaced, hundreds of thousands were killed or wounded, the economic and administrative infrastructures were destroyed, and law and order ceased to exist.

After more than a year of fighting in Liberia, the war spilled over into neighboring Sierra Leone. A force headed by Foday Saybana Sankoh, consisting of Sierra Leone dissidents of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), launched a military attack backed by NPFL units. After gaining control over the resource-rich area of Kailahun, the RUF fought its way to the capital, Freetown. The war in Sierra Leone appeared to follow the Liberian experience: with many casualties, displacement of population, destruction of economic and administrative structures and anarchy replacing the rule of law and order.

Research on the socioeconomic position of rural African women has been hampered by a lack of appropriate data. Indeed, macro-level data are not ideal to gain understanding of how the social and familial realities experienced by rural African women might limit their access to limited resources (Bryceson 1994; International Labour Office, 1984, 57; Whitehead 1994). Furthermore, a male head of household may not be able or willing to accurately evaluate women's economic contribution to the household. Therefore, it is necessary to interview or survey rural African women about their lives (Russell 1984). In this paper, we present Kaguru women's own opinions of how social and familial realities affect their access to resources.

In rural African societies, women are typically engaged in agricultural, household and income-earning work. Although African women often have a heavier workload than do men in these three spheres of their daily work, they typically do not experience equal access to resources, both educational and economic (Boserup 1970,1985; Goody 1976; Meena 1992; Staudt 1988). The fact that husbands and wives do not fully cooperate, and may even compete for economic resources, is problematic for many development programs.

One of the important factors that influences the successful implementation of decentralization is the support of, and commitment to, decentralization by the bureaucracy (Cheema and Rondinelli 1983; Rondinelli 1981). In other words, decentralization may be undermined if the bureaucracy opposes arrangements that threaten its power and control. In the Ghanaian case, for instance, the bureaucracy (made up of line Ministries in Accra and their deconcentrated offices in 10 regions and 110 districts) had been blamed by the government of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) that ruled the country from 31 December 1981 to 6 January 1993, as the main stumbling block to the implementation of the government's decentralization program launched in 1987. In the words of the Minister of Local Government:

By deconcentration, the Minister was referring to the delegation authority for the discharge of specified functions to the staff of a central government ministry or department at the local level to make administrative decisions on behalf of the central government or authority. In such a case, the delegated power continues to be subject to the central authority's supervision.

Gradually, feminist historians are building up a formidable challenge to androcentric studies of Africa; new thinking about the personal and public lives of men and women is beginning to reflect the breadth and depth of gender structures in African societies. This article focuses on the dynamics of one such structure in the society of colonial Zimbabwe (Ranger 1985; Phimister 1988; Sylvester 1991; Schmidt 1992). This was a construction at the intersection of nationality, gender, identity, and citizenship known as the pass laws. The pass laws were developed and used in complex, gendered ways. Sharing with neighboring South Africa a concern with enforcing racially exclusive definitions of nationality, identity and citizenship, the Southern Rhodesian preoccupation with reducing labor mobility meant that the pass laws transcended the merely bureaucratic. In combination with disenfranchisement, a severely discriminatory land tenure system and crippling labor legislation, the pass laws were used for nothing less than control of the economic options of working African people. For example, passes (generally known as chitupa or plural, zvitupa) stipulated for whom and for what level of payment an African man could work; where he could travel; where and with whom he could live. They were the linchpins in a system which routinely paid workers at levels below subsistence (Ibbotson 1943; Howman 1945; Plewman 1958).

The literature on the on-going transitions in Africa has largely ignored trade unions and workers, women, even the prodemocracy movements. Of course, they are mentioned in passing or used in examples. But there has been a dearth of detailed case studies of the role of these popular constituencies in Africa's transition and non-transition. There is enthusiastic interest in constitutional engineering, political parties, politicians and of course, elections and election monitoring. The role of workers has been particularly ignored even when the new and traditional political parties, human rights and prodemocracy movements have had to rely on this particular constituency in their contestations for power. Yet, we cannot afford to ignore the popular communities and constituencies which determine the dynamics of politics and shape the overall character of the transition from forms of authoritarianism to multiparty systems. Ironically, in spite of the initial enthusiasm for the “third wave” or “second liberation” the on-going struggle for democracy in Africa is beginning to attract a lot of pessimism leading to more nuanced and cautious evaluations of the nature, processes, institutions, actors, limitations, and prospects for democracy, democratization and the sustenance of plural politics (Lemarchand 1993; Muigai 1993; Zeleza 1994; Ihonvbere 1995a). While Harvey Glickman (1993, 3) notes that “Liberalization of politics may mean pluralization of interest articulation, but not democratic government,” Michael Bratton, Nicolas van de Walle, Samuel Decalo, Stephen Ellis and René Lemarchand have all expressed deep reservations about on-going liberalization in the continent (Glickman 1993; Bratton and van de Walle 1992; Decalo 1992; Lemarchand 1992; Ellis 1993).

Depending on who you listen to, structural adjustment has led to either rapid economic growth or a decline in living standards within Africa. And while in different places both circumstances are probably true, neither scenario describes what I have seen in rural Tanzanian villages since 1984. Despite the predictions about the effects of structural adjustment, my impression is that life goes on with only marginal changes in the daily economic activity of villagers. Economically, things are a little better on some fronts: the clothing is nicer, there are a few more bicycles, etc., but the changes are not dramatic; the daily economic activity is still hoe-based agriculture. It is also unclear whether such incremental improvements would not have occurred given any other macro-economic policy.

Indeed in such villages, past macro-economic policies including Ujamaa socialism, market capitalism or even mercantile colonialism can also be correlated with one economic improvement or the other. But as with these past cases, unraveling the relationship between correlation and causation is a tricky business. This paper does this for structural adjustment policies in a single village. This is done by comparing economic activity and relationships in 1985, before structural adjustment policies were adopted, and in 1995-6, well after the policies had had a chance to take effect.

From 7 April, 1994, onwards, a well planned and massively executed genocide began in Rwanda, which led to the brutal slaughter of up to one million defenseless children, women and men. This genocide was the culmination of a four year period during which civil war and extremist violence cost the lives of tens of thousands of persons. Both these processes took place against the background of the never-resolved consequences of previous instances of violence, in Rwanda and in Burundi, including a massive festering refugee problem. They heralded the beginning of further violence in Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire, which has lasted until now.

This article attempts to understand the socio-psychological causes of the dramatic and profoundly disturbing events that took place in Rwanda in 1994. Its starting questions are: how do situations come about in which people massively participate in brutal violence against their neighbors who have not harmed them? What kind of social and political processes have taken place that can bring people to lose the values, restraints and ethics that under normal circumstances make these actions impossible, and abhorrent to contemplate?

This article explores the relationship between France and Cameroon under the French administration from 1946 to 1956. Such a relationship has to be seen not as a conventional one, but as a relationship between two unequal entities: a European imperial state and an African society. The period being considered in this study, 1946 to 1956, is significant. Politically, it corresponds to the years during which the political changes that led to the process of decolonization occurred. Economically, it was the period during which the French implemented a long term program for the development and modernization of their overseas territories. This program led to large investments in Cameroon by France and therefore to development of an important financial and economic relationship between the two countries.

Although both political and economic aspects are important, the latter will be our main concern. Economic and financial factors will be emphasized here because in the few existing studies on the relationship between Cameroon and France, the main focus is on the political factor. It has been demonstrated that international relations are also influenced by economic and financial interests, what Pierre Renouvin has called forces profondes (underlying forces). As this French scholar wrote, “to understand the diplomatic action it is necessary to perceive the factors that directed its progress. Geographical conditions, movements of the populations, economic and financial interests, trends of the collective mentality, broad national feelings, are some of the underlying forces which shaped the framework of the relationship between human groups and which determined their character. The statesman, when making his plans and taking his decisions, cannot neglect these factors. He is subject to their influence and has to realize the limits they impose on his action” (Renouvin and Duroselle 1991, 2).

The end of the Cold War and the crisis of socialism (statism) have ushered in the emergence of a “new” cycle of capitalism, which is characterized by wide ranging deregulation, privatization and vigorous globalization of capital (Cox 1994; Bienefeld 1994; Barber 1995). With this unfolding order, the role of the state in economic activity, including its protection of the vulnerable segments of society either through direct redistributive welfare mechanisms or by encouraging poverty-reducing and labor-absorbing economic activities, has come under serious attack. An ideology of free market and open global competition that increasingly limits the role of the state in economic activity has risen to prominence. According to some, a unified global economy has emerged and the global system has already entered a postnational stage (Barber 1995). While recognizing the intensification of interdependence among countries, many disagree that such a transformation has already taken place in the global system (Underhill 1994; Holm and Sorensen 1995; Boyer and Drache 1996). In most developing countries, however, the role of the state has been reduced to essentially adjusting national economies to the global economy instead of autonomously charting its own development strategy.

Under the new global order, development in Africa and in the rest of the countries of the South is widely viewed to rest largely on integration with the global economy. Policy measures that are believed to advance integration with the global economy, including promotion of exports, attraction of foreign investments, correction of macroeconomic imbalances and decontrols of prices, exchange rates and imports are almost universally promoted in these countries.

From at least 1900 on, Africans in Southern Rhodesia, its successor Rhodesia and today's Zimbabwe, have demanded schools and education, leaving behind evidence of their demands in a wide variety of sources: mission records, government reports and the recollections of former students. Even more than demands for land, higher producer prices or higher wages, demands for education were explicit attempts to negotiate not just economic issues, but also a place within Southern Rhodesia's increasingly segregated culture and society. But what, exactly, did students, parents and would-be students want, and were these demands being met? Fathers petitioned for schools for their sons, sons and daughters actively sought or avoided schooling and missions and the administration offered schools as answers to diverse political, social and economic difficulties. This paper will use a close examination of the life of a single ephemeral school at Umchingwe, in the Insiza district of Southern Rhodesia, to explore how senior men sought a school in an effort to rebuild strained ties with young men and restructure their community in Depression-era Southern Rhodesia, and why they failed.

Studies of education in Southern Africa have generally acknowledged that missions, with the help of state grants-in-aid, built and operated schools not merely from humanitarian impulses but because schools were one of the most powerful ways to attract Africans to a mission station and convince them to become Christians. The government helped fund mission schools and built two flagship institutions of its own as part of an effort to use schools to cultivate a useful, disciplined and controllable class of African workers and leaders. Schools were not merely imposed on a resisting African population, though. From the early years of the twentieth century, with increasing volume, Africans requested schools from missions, and from the government. Yet much of what we know about the development and expansion of the schooling in the region has focused less on what that education meant to students and their parents than on how the state, the white population and the Native Administration, worked to channel and modify Africans' educational demands through schools which were designed to produce useful subjects and workers for a settler state (Summers 1994a; Challiss 1982; Vambe 1972).

It is now widely accepted that, in many cases, the democratization process that began in Africa in 1990 has been crippled by several factors (Chazan 1994; Bratton 1994; Lemarchand 1992). These factors range from weak patterns of state-society relations to economic disequilibium. Another potential obstacle that has received little examination is the trend, particularly in West Africa, of military rulers resigning their commissions and competing in “democratic” elections designed and supervised by their regimes (The New York Times, 24 October, 1996). We call this phenomenon political transmutation. In the past five years successful transmutation has occurred in Ghana, Niger, Chad and the Gambia. The attempt failed in Nigeria in 1993, but may soon be resurrected by the current military regime. Both the incidence of this type of transition and the likelihood that there will be additional attempts requires that we carefully study the circumstances that facilitate this type of transition.

Recent democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa suggest that the ruling authoritarian regimes may seek, although not always successfully, to retain power by any means necessary. For example, Haggard and Kaufman noted that often “authoritarian regimes do not permit fully competitive elections and rely on intimidation, manipulation and cooptation to restrict the activity of independent interest groups, and political opposition” (1995, 11). In almost all the cases such regimes were characterized by single, dominant parties led by civilians. Rarely do these cases involve military rulers. It appears that the favored option for the military is to become the power behind the throne after disengaging from direct governing. Several factors account for the armed forces' reluctance to transmute their regime through elections. One is the fear that such an attempt would eventually seriously weaken the military's corporate interests.

In Japan, as in the United States, African studies is relatively new, gaining respectability only after World War II. African studies in Japan is considerably less prominent than its counterpart in the US although Africanist scholars from Japan have nonetheless made notable contributions. The increasing importance of Japan in Africa, both as a source of investment and as a source of foreign aid, is leading to an increased importance cf Japanese knowledge of Africa. In the increasingly interdependent world of the 21st century the quality of African studies in Japan will have an impact not only on Africa itself but on Africanists in other non-African countries as well.

The strengths and weaknesses of African studies in Japan are quite complementary to those of African Studies in the United States. Thus we as Africanists can learn important lessons from the Japanese experience in African Studies, and our Japanese counterparts can learn from us. This article is intended as an introduction to the nature of African studies in Japan for American (and other) Africanists in the hope that cooperation between American (and other) Africanists and their Japanese counterparts can be increased.

Perhaps as a result of the persistent developmental difficulties African economies have faced, a substantial amount has been written on the nature of African capitalism (Berman and Leys 1994; Iliffe 1983; Kennedy 1988; Sandbrook 1985; 1993). While this literature spans the ideological spectrum from advocacy of the free market to Marxian socialism, there seems to be a consensus on two points: first, that some form of capitalism has emerged in most African countries, and second, that this capitalism is flawed in fundamental ways that render its ability to promote growth problematic. One of the questions suggested by this literature is whether the social forces exist to support a more productive economic system. In other words, is there evidence of a social movement for African capitalism?

To date most analyses of the advance and/or stagnation of African capitalism have employed a structural and/or systemic framework, emphasizing factors such as class relations, role in the world economy, degree of proletarianization/peasantization and the emergence of a capitalist state. In this paper, we use a social movements approach to examine aspects of the development, consolidation and reform of capitalism in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Kano, Nigeria. We hope to illustrate that the business communities in both these cities can be viewed as coalitions of class, ethnic and sectoral interest groups with a shared common goal to facilitate political and economic reforms conducive to the advancement of a capitalist system. As opposed to structural approaches, a social movements framework highlights the role of ideas and human agency.