In many societies, especially those where individual and collective memory are marked by the trauma that can accompany authoritarian rule, people attempt to come to terms with the past by finding ways of making it relevant to the present. One way to understand this complex relationship with history is through a careful examination of the practice of mourning. Mourning constitutes, above all, a framework from which the deceased's relationship with the living is collectively inventoried, evaluated, and debated so that the social work of memory may graft the experiences of yesterday onto a horizon of expectations. Defining the status of the deceased means making important decisions about how to “move on,” since the moment of mourning is not only a moment for weighing the acts and deeds of the deceased, but also a way of testing more generally the criteria for becoming recognized as an ancestor. As death seems increasingly present in the lives of people in many parts of Africa, emerging forms of social mourning echo the need for new political futures, and mourning shows itself as an important terrain for the social production of meaning. The primary objective of this collection of articles is to look at how the process of mourning mediates between the past and the future, and how the practices and perceptions of mourning are linked to real and imagined divisions in political time. Mourning, in other words, is a way of rethinking time.

Temporality in contemporary Kinshasa is of a very specific eschatological kind and takes its point of departure in the Bible, and more particularly in the Book of Revelation, which has become an omnipresent point of reference in Kinshasa's collective imagination. The lived-in time of everyday life in Kinshasa is projected against the canvas of the completion of everything, a completion which will be brought about by God. As such, the Book of Revelation is not only about doom and destruction, it is essentially also a book of hope. Yet the popular understanding of the Apocalypse very much centers on the omnipotent presence of evil. This article focuses on the impact of millennialism on the Congolese experience, in which daily reality is constantly translated into mythical and prophetic terms as apocalyptic interlude.

Rwanda became a Belgian trusteeship under mandate of the Société des Nations after the first World War. With churches playing a prominent role in the political evolution of Rwanda, the two countries were closely bound together. After the 1959 revolution in Rwanda and independence in 1962, development cooperation with strong NGO input still linked them. While the genocide still has tragic influence on the new Rwanda, Belgium has undergone a political process leading to a federal state. The colonial past refers to a national past. Changes in Rwanda and Belgium question any collective attempt of mourning for a past that is very different for all parties involved.

The preoccupation with “autochthony” and the exclusion of “strangers” in many parts of present-day Africa, a paradoxical outcome of political liberalization, has given new importance to funerals as an ultimate test of “belonging.” However, the link between funerals and belonging is certainly not new. This article compares three different versions of this link from southern Cameroon. In the 1970s, Maka funerals in southeast Cameroon emphasized belonging in terms of local kinship and affinity. In the 1980s, Ewondo funerals in Central Province reaffirmed the belonging of urban elites to their village of origin. In the 1990s, funerals in the Southwest Province revealed the increased political significance of the funeral in the context of a growing preoccupation with autochthony and belonging under democratization. These three examples illustrate the continuing stretching of kinship as it bridges new inequalities and distances. They also raise quesdons as to its breaking point.

Following the successful coup d'état of Laurent Kabila's forces in May 1997, the Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was forced into exile in Morocco, where he died. This article looks at a lively transnational debate about what should be done with the former president's remains, and through this debate reflects on attempts by people in the Congo to determine what version of history should be told and how to understand the impact of Mobutu's political legacy.

This article considers a burgeoning literature on Johannesburg from the perspective of the sorts of questions it asks about the city. There is a substantial and lively literature on questions of poverty and equality, class and race. These studies are strongly informed by the idea that the mechanisms that produce such inequalities are key to understanding the nature of Johannesburg as a city: in terms of how its economy works and how political institutions function, but also in terms of what sort of city Johannesburg is and can be. I consider sociological and economic studies of the inner city that try to account for demographic shifts in the inner city and for processes of social and physical degeneration. I review urban anthropologies of inner-city society, considering in particular new forms of social and economic organization among inner-city residents. Related to these, I discuss debates among scholars about the prospects for governing the city, paying special attention to the consequences for such readings on partnerships. I also discuss an emerging literature, critical of that above, which seeks to shift analysis of the city toward studies of culture and identity. These literatures do not simply approach the city through different disciplinary lenses (sociology or economy or anthropology or cultural studies) . They come to their studies from different normative perspectives. For some, the key political question of the day is one about social and political equality in its various forms. For others, it is about the degree to which Johannesburg (or Africa) is different from or the same as other places in the world. This paper has tried to bring to the fore the political (and not simply policy) consequences of these different views. It concludes not by seeking to reconcile these perspectives, but by suggesting a way of retaining a commitment to equality and justice while not reducing them simply to questions of economy. At stake, I argue, are questions of democratic culture and of sociability.

This article analyzes the conflicting interpretations of famine, relief aid, development assistance, and human rights by the Ethiopian and American governments, and the complexity of each government's policy and motives. It argues that in the 1970s and 1980s, the Carter and Reagan administrations faced the moral and political dilemma of assisting people in Ethiopia who were in desperate need with-out strengthening the hostile Ethiopian government in the process. And the government of Ethiopia had to make the difficult choice of accepting American aid on American terms at a period in Ethiopian history when doing so was politically suicidal. That America provided the aid and Ethiopia accepted it exemplifies the conduct of international relations in which human dignity compels nations to accommodate one another even within the boundaries of their mutual antagonism.