This is an account of how artists and cultural workers have striven to gain and maintain the freedom to produce art in a milieu that threatened to either exploit their labors for political ends or to marginalize them as unimportant and unworthy of public and private patronage and support. It also seeks to explain how they have organized and sought to expand their influence and independence. Cultural politics has many dimensions, including the larger issues of defining and enriching the values and purposes of a community, establishing the identity and parameters of the community and its culture, and locating the bounds of social and political discourse. Such a perspective takes culture in its most expansive sense—the concepts, habits, arts, skills, languages and institutions of a people.

This article will focus on a more narrow view of cultural politics—the struggle over who represents the communities of cultural workers and practitioners, particularly in their dealings with the state and other dominant institutions, and how those communities have coalesced to pursue their perceived interests. Thus, culture is a synonym for those fine and popular arts that reproduce and reinforce systemic values, and those that corrode and undermine the social regime. And it is the battle for the control of the arts and those who create and disseminate the arts that will be examined here.

The lush wetlands and rich pastures of the Lower Jubba Region, replenished annually by the flooding of the Jubba River and nearby streams, define some of the finest livestock-producing areas of Somalia and of eastern Africa generally. Blessed with relatively good access to water and blanketed with perennial grasses and other vegetation, the area is home to literally hundreds of thousands of domestic animals, particularly cattle. Some of the more important seasonally flooded rangelands and water points, such as those around Afmadow town, figure strongly in local myths and oral historical accounts, and for any herder traveling across the dry, barren lands west of the region they seem like “the promised land” (Schlee 1989; Chevenix-Trench 1907). It is little wonder, therefore, that the conflict and turmoil recently characterizing this region stems in part from struggles over these lands and over the valuable commodities that they produce. A focus on the cattle trade and the social relationships in which it is embedded helps to explain 1) how the pastoral sector operated prior to the recent tragedy, and 2) how recent alliances and conflicts in the area are based at least partly on this commerce. It also provides an excellent lens for exploring some of the relationships that have so tragically exploded, pitting clan against clan and herder against merchant.

Some members of tine African-American community were aware of European activities in the African continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As early as the 1860s, Pan-Africanist Martin R. Delany and Henry Highland Garnet, a US ambassador to Liberia reacted differently to the British annexation of part of Yorubaland. In later years, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner also addressed the issue of the manner in which Europeans were taking over African territory, and chided African-Americans for not going back to re-take and protect the African continent from the European intruders (January 1882, 1). There were more responses from the community on the subject, during tine last stages of European imperial subjugation of Africa (Jacobs 1981, 38, 49, 53 and 75).

Although some African-Americans condemned the European annexation of Africa, they were not physically involved in the resistance effort of the Africans. The Africans' heroic and tenacious defense of their states collapsed in the face of the superior military tactics and warfare technology of the invading European armies (Crowder 1971, 1-16). Thus by the first decade of the 20th century, most of the continent had come under effective European colonial domination, with the two exceptions of Liberia and Ethiopia. The Europeans wished and actually attempted to colonize these two states. Ethiopia saved itself, while Liberia eventually had to rely on the assistance of the United States of America to thwart European designs against the State.

In the post cold war era, most of the wars in the international community have occurred in Third World countries, and African countries have experienced on the average more years of civil and external wars than other Third World countries. What are the consequences of war on African societies? Do states involved in war tend to fare worse than those not involved in war? In this paper, data on African countries involved in war and those that were not involved in war between 1960 and 1983 were examined for evidence of differences in development patterns after war. In contrast to the few studies on the consequences of war, where war was associated with positive development in the European countries, this study posits that wars in African countries are unlikely to produce similar outcomes.

Conflicts, which exist on a continuum from low to high intensity, range from individual acts of aggression and protest to organized extreme violence perpetuated by institutions, organizations and countries. Conflicts on the low intensity side of the continuum are less violent, involving few, if any deaths, while conflicts on the other end, called wars, involve numerous deaths. The most intensive end of the continuum—war, defined here as violence sponsored by countries which involves at least 1,000 military troops—was selected as the focus of this research because of an interest in the impact of war on the development of the state.

During the colonial era, women in Ugogo in central Tanzania, like most of Africa, became increasingly marginalized as producers in a rural economy. A colonially imposed sexual division of labor saw men forced into a cash economy while women were officially regulated to subordinate subsistence activities. Women became the victims of a version of the “cult of domesticity” that limited their ability to control resources both within and outside the household. The marginalization of women came about as a result of an alliance between the colonial state and male elders yet it was also part of the marginalization of communities in Ugogo generally in which elders and all males also saw their economic autonomy destroyed. Ironically, by the end of the colonial era this process led to many men scapegoating women as the cause of their loss of autonomy and to many women seeing empowerment only in escaping the confines of the local community.

In one of the most thorough works on changing gender relations, Karen Sacks has explained this process in terms of the underdevelopment of African communities during the colonial era (1982). Majorie Mbilinyi has argued that in many parts of Tanzania colonial and post-colonial labor policies regulated women to the informal sector and even then often drove them out of the money economy entirely.

Are apparently successful “grassroots” conservation programs in Africa paradoxically a boon for the extension of central state authority? Can decentralization actually serve to bring about recentralization, giving governments not only new sources of revenue, but also more legitimacy in marginal rural areas? By exploring the current and historical relationships between Zimbabwean rural people and the wildlife that surrounds them, one can hopefully gain insights into why Zimbabwe's wildlife population is among one of the most diverse and thriving in Africa. The cases explored in this article clearly indicate that, in theory, the more rural people are allowed and encouraged to participate in the management of big game, and the more material benefits they accrue, the higher their stake will become in conserving those living resources. This seems to be the case as far as receiving financial benefits are concerned. Still, the implications of such sustainable utilization for the furtherance of the state's power have been unclear in scholarship to date. Zimbabwe's environmental programs have been hailed by scholars and the media alike as pathbreaking ventures into grassroots control over natural resources. This study proposes the following hypothesis, using Zimbabwe's Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) as an empirical test case: the establishment of wildlife utilization programs in agriculturally marginal rural areas also serves the interests of the Zimbabwean government to extend its authority in these otherwise neglected areas.

Since the 1980s, the Tanzanian state has been undergoing a transformation involving both the relations of power among the central organs of the state and the social role that the state plays in Tanzanian society. The dominance of the ruling party (CCM), with its goals of rural-based socialist development has eroded. Administration has triumphed over politics, and the state is coming increasingly under the sway of an administrative ethos. There is little indication that opening up politics through multi-party elections will counter this trend.

Several factors contributed to this transformation. The economic crisis of the 1980s was a catalyst, weakening the capacity and legitimacy of the state and the party in particular. A second element was international actors, particularly the IMF, empowered to intervene in Tanzania by the economic crisis. These actors played a significant role in defining policy shifts away from rural-based socialist development through their advocacy of structural adjustment. The crisis of capacity and intervention of outside influences might have generated some policy shifts, but did not necessarily determine that a transformation of the state would ensue. Adam Przeworski (1986) has suggested that transitions from authoritarian rule are possible only when there is a viable alternative to the authoritarian regime. Likewise, it is only when a sufficiently coherent counter coalition exists within the state to represent an alternative ruling elite that state transformation is possible. In Tanzania, the crisis of state capacity and intervention of foreign actors generated such a transformation because administrators presented a potential counter coalition. Never adequately incorporated into the CCM-dominated state, administrators retained elitist norms, viewing themselves as a development vanguard, contrary to the role specified for administrators by the CCM. Although political authorities explicitly sought to render administrators subordinate and responsive to the party which would define the social role of the state, bureaucratic autonomy remained high.

The steady beating of the war-drums grows stronger. An exotically painted black face peers out behind a bush. The African porters drop their packs and cower in fear, but the tall, courageous white hunter forces them on. Suddenly a spear flies out of the bush and hits a porter in the chest. The rest of the porters, screaming, disperse into the jungle, only to be cut down by the savages. With his trusty gun, the white man fends off the brutes and retreats to a nearby cliff. As the tension mounts, the audience sits spellbound.

Such images became the staple for “jungle” movies in the early part of this century. During the Depression era, the economic importance of the West's African colonies greatly increased. What these celluloid images suggest is that, consciously or not, the filmmakers were acting as cultural colonialists by reinforcing and legitimizing Western political practices in Africa. These images contributed to the viewing audiences' misperception of Africa and Africans and helped to perpetuate and strengthen racist and colonialist modes of thinking.

For this study, I have chosen nine films from the United States and Great Britain that can be considered “popular” films based on their box office success and wide distribution: Trader Horn (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Sanders of the River (1935), Tarzan and his Mate (1934), King Solomon's Mines (1937), Tarzan Escapes (1936), Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939), Four Feathers (1939) and Stanley and Livingstone (1939).