In early October 1967, four months into the Nigerian Civil War, federal troops massacred hundreds in Asaba, a town in southeast Nigeria on the west bank of the Niger. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of Igbo-dominated Biafra. Through the reconstruction of this event, the article fills a significant gap in the historical record and contributes to the discussion on the impact of traumatic memory at the local and national levels. It also suggests that the Asaba massacres speak to larger issues of potential reconciliation that extend beyond Asaba and Nigeria.

In a You Tube video, a young man performs a satirical poem about Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade. The author brilliantly sums up Wade's tenure in one minute. He compares the president to “a rat's hole” and makes fun of his physical features while emphasizing many ways in which Wade has failed the nation. Some viewers thought the performance was disrespectful of the president, and others feared for the author's safety. This article argues that although the World Wide Web gives voice to African youth, it can be a dangerous space, especially for artists. The viewers' negative comments and their concern for the author's life is a modern response to his art and a consequence of its presentation on the Internet. If viewed through the lenses of traditional Wolof oral forms, however, the poem's harsh rhetoric takes on less controversial meanings that the viewers did not seem to understand.

The dominant trend in the literature on civil society in Africa, particularly in the context of undemocratic regimes, assumes that civil society activists (including progressive, radical, or guerrilla journalists) are committed only to counteracting the preeminence of a repressive state. Within such a paradigm, evidence of collaborations between agents of the state and elements within civil society—particularly in the interest of advancing political liberation, democracy, justice, and equity—tend to be understated, if not erased altogether. Based on ethnographic details of secret collaborations between the Nigerian security agencies and radical journalists in the fight against military fascism, this article argues that the commonly assumed division between the state and the media is in fact breached regularly in practice. Such evidence should draw scholarly attention to a largely neglected area of research on state–media relations in Africa: the penetration of the apparatuses of power and repression by their targets and victims.

This study focuses on the hegemonic struggles between two ethnic communities, the Mbo and the Bamiléké, in Santchou, West Cameroon. At issue is the sharing of political roles in this locality, which point to issues of political representation. In this district, these roles (mayor, representative, etc.) were under the single party rule of the ethnic minority Mbo, who are a majority in this area but a minority in the rest of the district, where the Bamileke are the majority. In this monolithic context, where all protests were banned, the Bamileke had given up and accepted this arrangement. With the advent of the multiparty system and democracy, in which mayors are now elected and no longer simply nominated, uncertainty has been hovering over this political stronghold of the Mbo. Nevertheless, the Mbo have been able to hold onto the post of mayor and acquire other political posts as well. However, unlike during the single party era, the situation created by the political liberalization has offered to the Bamileke a public space where they can discuss the allocation of local political positions, and manifest their disagreement with the hegemonic trend. In the footsteps of Habermas and many other authors such as Cottereau, this study underlines the need to talk about public spaces in a plural form, instead of a single public space, in order to put in context the internal dynamics of popular cultures engendering subcultural public spheres or places of emerging democracy.

This article examines how multinational corporations, recognizing the symbolic value of oil pipelines, flow stations, and platforms as ancestral promises of wealth to subject populations, work with NGOs and communities (sometimes in collaboration with the latter, but sometimes in a more adversarial manner) in setting up governance structures that often compete with, and sometimes oppose, the state in struggles over territorial control and resource extraction. These forms of contestations, it argues, create new sites of power in which NGOs aid multinational oil corporations in negotiating new sites of governance that in themselves create new structures of power.

Based on an original dataset of university students, this article investigates Ghanaian collective memories of past events that are sources of national pride or shame. On average, young elite Ghanaians express more pride than shame in their national history, and they report shame mostly over actions that caused some physical, material, or symbolic harm. Such actions include not only historic events and the actions of national leaders, but also mundane social practices of average Ghanaians. Respondents also report more “active” than "receptive" shame; that is, they are more ashamed of events or practices that caused harm to others and less ashamed about events in which they were the “victims.” We advance the idea of a standard of “reasonableness” that Ghanaians apply in their evaluation of events, behaviors, or circumstances: they apply contemporary standards of morality to past events, but they temper their judgment based on considerations of whether past actions were “reasonable” given the power and material imbalances at that time. Ghanaian students identify strongly with both national and pan-African identities, and they frequently evoke their international image to judge a national event as either honorable or shameful. Ethnicity can be one factor in an individual's judgment of precolonial events, whereas political party affiliation is the stronger predictor of attitudes toward postindependence events.

This article analyses continuity and change of the agrarian doctrine in colonial and postcolonial Malawi. It engages in a classic debate about images and polices concerning African farming. The article argues that the agrarian doctrine must be related to the broader notion of agrarian populism, more specifically to Chayanov's notion of the logic of the peasant family farm. Employing this broader approach allows a striking continuity of the agrarian doctrine to be revealed. Calls for changes of local institutions did not signify attempts to promote rural transformation, but contained strategies to increase the economic independence of the precapitalist family farm.