Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T21:54:56.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Back to Democracy: Presidential Address to the 1991 Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Martin A. Klein
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It gives me particular pleasure to be here. I think that I am the first Canadian citizen to be honored by the presidency of what has increasingly become an international organization. And yet, I am very much one of you. I was born and raised in the United States. I served in its army and represented it abroad as a Fulbright professor before becoming a Canadian. Passionate as my commitment to my adopted country is, my roots remain here, no place more than in this community of scholars.

Like many of my generation, my career has been marked by a tension between thought and action. As a historian, I wanted to understand the world in which I lived. As an activist, I wanted to change that world, to make it a more just, more tolerant and more egalitarian place. If you had asked me 25 years ago why I chose Africa, I would have stressed my scholarly objectives. I would have mentioned the problems that interested me and the questions I wanted to answer. In retrospect, the appeal of Africa for myself and many of my generation of Africanists was very much the excitement of watching the destruction of an oppressive colonial order and being involved in the creation of a new one. Furthermore, the quest for justice and self-determination abroad was linked, sometimes unconsciously, to the quest for equality and social justice at home. For myself, as for many of my peers, the conflict between thought and action often cut deep, and we sometimes paid a price.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , December 1992 , pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Achebe, Chinua. 1967. Man of the People. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Africa Watch. 1991. Academic Freedom and Human Rights Abuses in Africa. London, New York and Washington: Human Rights Watch.Google Scholar
An-Na'im Abdullah, Ahmed and Deng, Francis. 1990. Human Rights in Africa. Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Washington: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Anyong'Nyong'o, Peter, ed. 1987. Popular Struggles for Democracy in Africa. London: Zed.Google Scholar
Armah, Aya Kwesi. 1968. The Beautyful ones are not yet born. Boston: Houghton Miflin.Google Scholar
Bayart, Jean-Francois. 1989. L'Etat en Afrique. Paris: Fayard.Google Scholar
Bienen, Henry. 1971. The Military and Modernization. Chicago: Aldine.Google Scholar
Bryce, James. 1912. The American Commonwealth. (Repr., orig., 1912). New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Campbell, Bonnie and Loxley, John, eds. 1989. Structural Adjustment in Africa. London: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coulson, Andrew. 1982. Tanzania. A Political Economy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Decalo, Samuel. 1992. “The Process, Prospects and Constraints of Democratization in Africa.” African Affairs 91: 7–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diamond, Larry. 1988. “Nigeria: Pluralism, Statism, and the Struggle for Democracy.” In Democracy in Developing Countries. Vol. II. Africa. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donnelly, Jack and Howard, Rhoda, eds. 1987. International Handbook of Human Rights. Westport: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Helleiner, Gerald K. 1983. “The IMF and Africa in the 1980s.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 17/1: 17–33.Google Scholar
Helleiner, Gerald K. 1990. “Structural Adjustment and Long-Term Development in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Development Studies Working Papers. #18. Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University.Google Scholar
Howard, Rhoda. 1986. Human Rights in Commonwealth Africa. Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Jackson, Robert and Rosberg, Carl. 1982. Personal Rule in Black Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Janowitz, Morris. 1964. The Military in the Political Development of New Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joseph, Richard. 1987. Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria. The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Klein, Martin A. 1987. “Senegal.” In International Handbook of Human Rights, edited by Donnelly, Jack and Howard, Rhoda. Westport: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Lonsdale, John. 1986. “Political Accountability in African History.” In Political Domination in Africa. Reflections on the Limits of Power, edited by Chabal, Patrick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nyerere, Julius. 1966. Freedom and Unity. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nyerere, Julius. 1968. Freedom and Socialism. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nyerere, Julius. 1973. Freedom and Development. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nzongola-Ntalaja, . 1989. “The African Crisis: The Way Out.” African Studies Review 32/1:115–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onimode, Bade, ed. 1989. The IMF, the World Bank and the African Debt. London: Zed.Google Scholar
Pratt R., Cranford. 1976. The Critical Phase in Tanzania, 1945-1968. Nyerere and the Emergence of a Scholar of a Socialist Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shivji, Issa. 1989. The Concept of Human Rights in Africa. London: CODESRIA.Google Scholar
Sklar, Richard. 1983. “Democracy in Africa.” African Studies Review 26/3-4: 11–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Southall, Aidan. 1988. “‘The Rain Fell on Its Own’—The Alur Theory of Development and Its Western Counterparts.” African Studies Review 31/2: 1–16.Google Scholar
Welch, Claude and Meltzer, Robert, eds. 1984. Human Rights and Development in Africa. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Young, Crawford. 1976. The Politics of Cultural Pluralism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Zolberg, A. R. 1966a. Creating Political Order. Chicago: Rand McNally.Google Scholar
Zolberg, A. R. 1966b. “A View from the Congo.” World Politics 19/1: 137–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar