This issue of the African Studies Review is devoted to research in the African humanities. The appearance of new approaches to the study of literary texts, oral traditions, and the popular arts has inspired us to assemble this collection. Recently, the African humanities have been neglected as an important area in which new empirical and theoretical advances have been made for the study of oral texts, art, and performance.

The articles in this collection by Robert Cancel, David Coplan, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and V. Y. Mudimbe were presented at the Conference on Popular Arts and the Media in Africa held at the University of California, San Diego from May 17-19, 1982. This conference was sponsored by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. We would like to thank the Joint Committee for their support of this conference and our initial efforts to develop a research synthesis for the African humanities.

This collection begins with V. Y. Mudimbe's commentary on the nature of African art and the limitations of research models used to study it. He questions the role and position of African arts, especially visual arts, in the post-colonial world. He suggests that the time has passed where most of these works can be judged simply as self-enclosed cultural referents, isolated from the effects of the last two hundred years of history. The process of “aesthetization” that he describes is one which, in various transformations, informs each of the papers that follow. When Fanon suggested that to take on a language is to “take on a world,” he foreshadowed the ideas that acknowledge the development of Africa's humanities in a context of cultural interchange with other world traditions. This is not to accept the Victorian pronouncements that credited all African achievements to various forms of Western influence. Rather, it is a movement towards the view that African culture, always fluid and dynamic, has been responsive to all manner of influences, both local and foreign.

Africa is the second largest continent in the world. Partitioned into what is now fiftyone or more territorial units at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the continent presently has the largest number of states represented at the United Nations. This numerical strength has advantages and disadvantages for Africans. It is advantageous because it gives Africa greater visibility in the international voting process. It is disadvantageous because it turns this vast continent into a highly fragmented sector of the international community. Yet Africa's size and fragmentation have great significance for Africanists because together these factors make the continent a major laboratory for research on human society. Africa's numerous political and socio-economic units provide many examples of political and social engineering for students of underdeveloped world societies.

My presidential address tonight deals with Africa and its role and position in world history between two ages. The two ages addressed are the ancient/medieval and the modern/contemporary. As a historian, I see ancient African history as going back to the appearance of Homo Sapiens whose origins are now conclusively identified with East Africa. In tracing the historical past of Africa, I do not wish to travel so far back as to link up with those early Homo Sapiens, rather I wish to go only as far back on the world continuum as ancient Egypt to show in time how this magnificent civilization served as the birthplace of many cultural ideas that later travelled in all directions from the Nile Valley.

Is there more to Chad than the murderous idiosyncrasies of an improbable state which shares with its neighbors the vicissitudes of drought, famine, and environmental bankruptcy? The question is not merely rhetorical. In order to bring the present conflicts and confusions within the realm of comparative discourse, the uniqueness of the Chadian crisis must be assessed against its generic traits. To those of us who once debated whether Zaire was a unique or an extreme case, the issue has a familiar ring, and it carries intimations of inconclusiveness that may well apply to other states, including Chad.

All states are, in one way or another, unique and Chad in more ways than one. Its uniqueness goes far beyond its sudden emergence as a strategic pawn in a desert war among proxies. With its national territory semi-partitioned, its northern half under Libyan occupation and its southern flank threatened by rebel activity; with a government in exile comprising no less than eleven factions at the latest count, some in open warfare with others, some appealing to Libya for continued military support, and others perpetually casting about to form an anti-Libyan coalition; with a central government overwhelmingly dependent on outside donors for military, economic, and financial aid but, nonetheless, highly sensitive to attempts at external manipulation; with a capital city in shambles, an infrastructure thoroughly inadequate for the tasks of rehabilitation and national reconstruction, and anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 refugees living in neighboring states—what other state can make as many claims to being unique in coping with, or surrendering to, the blows of adversity?

After a long spell of description and prescription, the study of local government in the English speaking Third World has begun to find a historical context (see, for example, Mawhood, 1983; Okpala, 1982; Rowat, 1980, 1983; Bonney, 1982). This is not surprising given the reality of the decline of local government everywhere. That local government escaped rigorous analysis for so long is due in part to the grounding of the study of local government in administrative practice; practitioner-scholars were committed to the principle of local government, and thus the questions asked revolved around how to make it work, rather than around its precise nature in the colonial and postcolonial context.

The purpose of this article is to explore the ideologies and political practices which illuminate the structure of local government in Kenya, and which in turn are rendered intelligible by that structure. Underlying this effort is the development of a new framework within which local government may be conceptualized: one that goes beyond the description of structures and the chronicling of events (often with little analytical link between the two), to contribute to a more comprehensive political economy of the post-colonial state. Such a political economy view the branches of the state, including local government, as sites of class competition: hence it considers knowledge of “subnational” political processes, and in particular of the local central competition manifest in local government politics, to be necessary for an understanding of class formation in the post-colonial state.

What I would like to present is a broad theoretical framework which could account for the significance of present-day African culture, particularly of African art, as a result of a process of “aesthetization.” I use this concept in the precise sense defined and illustrated by J. Baudrillard (1972) in his Pour une Critique de l'Economie politique du Signe. As a preliminary to the analysis of this concept, I would emphasize F. Fanon's (1967) statement about the ethnocentrism of European culture: “the unilaterally decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves our careful attention. One of the paradoxes immediately encountered is the rebound of egocentric, sociocentric definitions.”

African culture, and more visibly African art, are historical products of a complex process: the metamorphosis of concrete realities into abstract categories and, complementarily, the possible transformation of those realities into cultural objects with a financial value. In other words, African realities become, within anthropological frameworks, objects of knowledge; they are understood, classified, and defined as cultural signs from the perspective of the Western cultural and epistemological tradition. Subsequently, according to the socio-cultural rules of this new perspective and its matrix of cultural values or, more generally, from what is considered as a general and universal set of cultural values, some of these realities are given a financial value and, thus, become part of an economic process.

It is important to make clear from the beginning what this review will cover and what it will not. Its focus will be on “traditional” and Christian religious movements in the last hundred years. By movements are meant widespread and grassroots adherence to religious ideas, symbols and rituals, sometimes brief in duration, sometimes long-lasting; sometimes lacking and sometimes acquiring formal organizational structures. The review will deal, therefore, with questions of “popular conciousness” rather than with the development of formal theologies. It will not review the literature on African Islam nor have much to say about religious movements and politics in pre-colonial Africa. Both these, of course, are major omissions, not only leaving out topics which are of great importance in themselves but also depriving analysis of modern traditional and Christian movements of an invaluable comparative and historical context. To seek to cover them also in one review, however, would be to risk a mere listing. It seems more useful to develop an argument on the past, present, and future direction of work on the interaction of religious movements and politics by focusing on a limited, but nevertheless still huge, topic and period.

The study of the person, or self, is one of the most exciting areas of anthropological research today. Though it has recendy become a central concern of psychological anthropology and gender studies, the person has been a significant theme in African studies ever since the 1930s; reflection on this theme promises today not only to shed new light on data already collected, but also to stimulate important new research.

It is not my intention to write an intellectual history here, or give an explanation of how and why people have become interested in the issues I will be discussing. If I do write now and then about the historical context of some of these ideas and approaches, it is mainly with the goal of helping the contemporary reader see the relevance for our topic of a wide variety of sources regardless of their context and rhetoric. Thus, though my presentation will be vaguely chronological, my discussion and analysis will generally examine the various works in relation to one another regardless of when they were written.

The reader should bear in mind that in the United States, at least, the field I am surveying in this review essay does not yet exist as a sub-area or sub-speciality of any discipline. It is a goal of this essay to demonstrate that a convergence has been taking place, particularly in recent decades, in the thrust of African research on an apparently wide variety of topics.

Wole Soyinka's controversial stature as an African writer and intellectual derives from certain contradictions inherent in both his stance on important socio-political questions as well as in his artistic mediation of contemporary African experience. At the level of social action and thought, Soyinka could conveniently be regarded as a progressive idealist in the sense that his involvements in and utterances on specific social problems indicate a fervent preoccupation with social justice and an aversion to oppressive institutions. As a literary artist, however, much of his significant writing displays an unrelenting obsession with myth and its complex reenactments through ritual. Consequently, while his consciousness is ultimately historical, his imagination and idiom of creative expression derive from a fundamentally mythic source and a religious sentiment Says Stanley Macebuh (1976:79):

Biodun Jeyifo (1984:4) puts the matter even more devastatingly: “Soyinka has a deep, abiding penchant for mythology, metaphysics and mysticism.” Soyinka has complicated this ambiguity in his reputation by striving, in his earlier works at least, to proffer mythic “explanations” and resolutions for social problems which ordinarily belong in the realm of historical reality and empirical human experience. An important evidence of this feature of his art is the tendency to create human characters whose actions are circumscribed by the cosmic attributes of specific Yoruba deities.

Thirty-five years ago, Présence Africaine, along with many other institutions, embarked on a path to correct colonialism. In its role as an agent of change, the journal has continued over the years to reflect and inform the values of Black nations. Yet today, when former colonialist oppression has not infrequently given way to control by multinational businesses or inter-governmental consortia, the very term “neo-colonialism” addresses a new problematic for Présence Africaine. It is a problematic whose complexities lead to the following question. Simply stated, who is the oppressor now? This essay will examine that question in light of the journal's own history. How has its editorial policy changed? What writers are represented? What shifts in subject matter and author have captured the readers' attention and imagination? Indeed, has the reading public itself changed, representing new constituencies, both geographically and politically? What, finally, are the implications of its history in an age of neo-colonalism?

The definition of colonialism underlying this study is the following: “Colonialism denotes a relationship of domination and, like other forms of oppression, it is a structural system of hierarchically ordered and ranked relationships between at least two parties (Martin and Cohen, 1980: 21-60). An instance of oppression at work in francophone literature is found in the Pléiade edition of Histoire des littératures (Gallimard, 1958). The sanction of the Pléiade, most will agree, is one of the standards of admission into the privileged canon of French letters.

It is an article of faith in many African countries that education is not only a principle motor for development, but also an important instrument in assuring a more equitable distribution of wealth. In the eyes of policy-makers and the public at large, education and training permit a new generation to develop its talents and acquire the characteristics with which to find a well-deserved niche in the employment structure and thus contribute to the country's development. A central focus is on technical and vocational skills which are considered crucial in making people employable or otherwise enabling them to create their own work. Differences in jobs, along with differences in material and social rewards, are attributed to variations in skill levels. Ultimately these differences are associated with variation in ability and effort.

A more critical analysis of actual linkages between education, the labor market, and the employment structure reveals that often skill characteristics are rewarded differently, less because of variations in quality than because of structural conditions in the labor market. On the one hand important differences exist between enterprises which, depending on their mode of production, have a preference for specific worker characteristics and associate these with particular training arrangements. Different occupational or work-positions thus arise which carry diverging rewards and career prospects, even though the actual work done is similar. On the other hand there is ample evidence that factors like race, gender, and class strongly influence access to jobs, so that different social groups find their effective choices in the labor market severely restricted.

Patron/client relationships have fascinated scholars and students of the Third World for more than a generation. These relationships have emerged as an important paradigm in the literature on development and underdevelopment, to the point that there has recendy been a boom of work in this area (Schmidt et al., 1977). Patron/client relationships are usually conceived of as symbols of a persistent “tradition” impinging on, and/or retarding the transition to “modernity.” They are also presented as evidence of the limited theoretical and explanatory usefulness of class analysis. I shall seek to demonstrate, however, that while patron/client relationships are a useful heuristic tool to understand the politics of underdeveloped societies, they are neither a substitute for class analysis, nor should they be construed as an independent paradigm of their own. They should be used as complementary and not as contradictory variables to class, as a close examination of clientelism and patronage in Senegal shows.

The pre-colonial African culture of the Muslim brotherhoods (Foltz, 1977) and the rather liberal electoral patterns established by French colonialism in the eighteenth century (Johnson, 1971) imparted to Senegal patron/client relationships which have permeated its politics since independence (Schumacher, 1975). These relationships, which many scholars have considered to be part of the transitional mode of behavior characteristic of modernizing societies (Foltz, 1977; Lemarchand, 1977; Barker, 1973), represent serious road blocks to Senegalese development (Foltz, 1977; Schumacher, 1975; Cottingham, 1970; O'Brien, 1975).

Most contemporary historians of the colonial period in Kenya emphasize the importance of the state. The colonial state, it is argued, ensures the conditions of settler capitalism, provides the infrastructure of transport, credit, marketing and agricultural research, creates by administrative action a supply of African labor, and generally ensures the interests of settler capital against those of an emerging African class of landed capital (Brett, 1973; Leys, 1975; Swainson, 1980). Equally, the theme of tension between the colonial and metropolitan states is a classic one in colonial history, and one which in much of the Kenya debate is seen as refracting tensions and conflicts between the interests of settler capital and the interests of international capital (Swainson, 1980; Cowen, 1982). Yet, despite this emphasis on the colonial state, very little discussion of its distinctive political features has occurred. The economic functions of the colonial state are stressed to the exclusion of questions about the basis of its legitimacy, of its citizenship principles and of its authority. Gavin Kitching (1985) recently pointed out that we have no really adequate theory of the post-colonial state. We are constrained instead to making negative statements to the effect that it is not simply the agency of one particular class force in Kenya, nor is it a unified force but die site of contending and fractured forces. The argument could well be extended to the colonial state.

In her remarks on Makombo Bamboté's novel in the Dictionnaire des oeuvres littéraires négro-africaines de languefrançaise, des origines à 1978 (1983), and going back to opinions already expressed in her African Literature in French (1976), Dorothy Blair points out that “Princesse Mandapu reveals a disquieting, hermetic, and at times oneiric action, which advances by fits and starts, on the strength of a jerky, elliptical, half-familiar and half-poetic style. It's up to the reader to fill in the gaps, to find out transitions and to interpret silences” (1983: 468). This essay proposes a possible way of “filling in the gaps” and “interpreting silences” after having made what I, as a Centrafrican reader and also a student of African literatures, have to assume are correct guesses about transitions in Bambote's novel.

Attempts to further the study of popular culture in Africa face the difficulty of defining “popular” as distinct from traditional or folk culture on the one hand, and elite or dominant culture on the other. The features that emerge most often from the discussion of these distinctions center on the relative degree of separation between performers and audiences, and on change from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft as a basis for social interaction (Bigsby, 1976: 18). These contrasts have frequently been identified with movement from a rural to an urban social world, where communal, multidimensional relationships give way to associative forms characterized by a segmentation of roles, divided loyalties, and the primacy of hypothetical or contractual relations over categorical and personal ones. Thus we value traditional or rural folk culture for its idealized capacity to give integrated expression to all aspects of human life, and symbolic representation to the essence of the human condition. In contrast, the sociology of urban art forms focuses on the relations between class and culture, the artist and his work, market organization and cultural production (Barbu, 1976: 47, 55). As anyone familiar with its urban scene should recognize, these distinctions are not workable for Southern Africa. Yet their very inapplicability highlights the importance of both the struggle for cultural integration and the flow of people and communication between urban and rural areas in contemporary Africa.

The art of filmmaking in the last two decades has been enriched by the works of various African filmmakers. This relatively modern form of visual representation seems more amenable to understanding at all levels of the social and cultural strata of the African populace than one would expect from even the earliest forms of the visual arts. Although many remarkable works have been produced by African filmmakers, few of these works have focused on the largely illiterate African majority as the target audience: this is not without reason. Filmmaking is arguably the most expensive form of art in any medium. It is difficult not to approach the profession primarily as a potentially viable business venture, or to continue in the pursuit of artistic excellence without healthy financial support. The governments of French speaking African countries, however, readily fund film projects, thereby mitigating the problem of finance for their filmmakers. As a result, for Ousmane Sembène of Senegal, filmmaking has become a very prolific enterprise. Despite the financial assistance received from the government of Senegal, Sembène does not compromise his artistic inclinations for this patronage. He has even had a serious disagreement with the government over the title of one of his films, Ceddo, 1977 (Gabriel, 1982).

Most discussions of African women as rural producers have either underscored African women's traditional roles in production, focused on female exclusion from the development process and the need for female inclusion, or they have documented the failure of agricultural development projects because of oversight of the female dimension (Hafkin and Bay, 1976; Etienne and Leacock, 1980; Bay, 1982; Burfisher and Horenstein, 1985). Observation of the intense involvement of Ghanaian women in both cocoa and food production, as well as their plight during the more recent crises in the Ghanaian economy, leads one to new insights into African economic relationships. This case raises some interesting questions about the exploitation of women in agricultural production, the relationship between declining cash crop and food production and the national economy, as well as the national consequences which flow from the failure to give women a proper role in the rural economy.

The present analysis uses historical, ethnographic case-study, survey, statistical, and political data from cocoa farming areas of Ghana (especially the Sunyani area) to examine the changing relationship of rural women to economic and national stability. It is argued that in the recent difficult political and economic climate in some African countries, pressures exerted on rural areas have contributed to a heavy reliance upon female producers. Over time these pressures further contribute to an unstable rural economy, because this exploitation of the female labor force, while itself a reaction to socioeconomic trauma, further discourages male involvement in agricultural production.