The Nigerian military state has used gender politics for its own ends, exploiting opportunities afforded by international concern with women. The highly publicized program for rural women enabled the regime of Babangida to gain international credibility. The Abacha regime did not seek or win international support, but sought to upstage the gender politics of their predecessors locally by mounting more broadly populist programs which promised benefits to “the family” and further reinscribed women within highly limited reproductive roles. Because Nigerian civil society has been so reluctant to engage with gender, the military have been able to appropriate the terrain they refer to as “women development” for their own ends. Through a series of high profile programs, they have neutralized the potentially subversive and inherently antimilitarist notion of women's liberation, and propagated a gender politics which normalizes military rule.

During the 1996–1997 academic year, students at the University of Ouagadougou went on strike for three months. This strike was the worst in Burkina Faso's history (or in the history of the former “Upper Volta”). The author, who was a visiting American professor at the time of the strike, details what happened at the university and in related incidents in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso. The author suggests that the strike may have resulted from the erosion of democratic rights within Burkinabè society, following the assassination of former President Thomas Sankara and the rise to power of current President Blaise Compaoré. Our attention is drawn to contributing factors behind the strike, including long-standing structural problems at the University of Ouagadougou and the politically motivated killing of popular professors and the former student body president Dabo Boukary, all of whom had spoken out against the Compaoré regime.

With the onset of the twenty-first century, power distribution has become a key factor in African security. In western and southern Africa, power has become more concentrated and hierarchical, especially with the growing assertiveness of three regional powers, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and organizations (ECOWAS and SADC) which have the authority, salience and capability to mount and lead security operations. In contrast, in central and eastern Africa, anarchy remains prevalent and helps to explain the failure to enforce peace in both Rwanda and Somalia. The indigenization of peace enforcement in western and southern Africa has been accompanied by high levels of salience, as regional forces have struggled to prevent spillover of conflicts into their home countries. African forces have been more willing than the United Nations and other outsiders to accept the costs of “crossing the line,” taking sides, and enforcing peace. The record of peace enforcement and interventionism for humanitarian purposes has been mixed. For example, ECOMOG peace enforcement in Liberia and Sierra Leone prevented seizures of power and retribution and allowed peace-making to begin in which agreements were reached and implemented and in which elected governments came to power. On the other hand, ECOMOG committed its share of abuses and prolonged conflicts and humanitarian crises that could have been ended fairly quickly by force.

Analysts of African business in the 1960s and 1970s stressed the weakness of the local private sector and its subordination to foreign capital and the government. Have economic liberalization and the shrinking of the state changed matters? This paper takes up this question in an analysis of Senegal. Here, relations between the state, foreign capital, and indigenous business interests have changed considerably since 1980, signaling what may be some of the most significant shifts in Senegal's political economy since Abdou Diouf's coming to power in 1981. There has been a shift of commercial control away from the state and foreign interests and toward the Senegalese “informal sector,” and clear moves away from the old pattern of clientelist-style relations between Senegalese business and the regime.

In this paper, we argue that in spite of changes, the political clout and economic ambitions of Senegalese business interests are still limited by their weak hold on productive sectors of the economy. This is clear in the economic policy fights of the 1990s. Much of the contest is a struggle for commercial-sector advantage that pits old-style politician-businessmen against the “informal sector” commercial interests that have been gathering force in Senegal since the 1970s. These changes seem to have less to do with the emergence of “indigenous capitalism” than with diminution of the regime's ability to constrain and canalize the development of indigenous commercial interests.

This paper traces these developments, grounding the analysis of the 1990s in a detailed empirical study of UNACOIS, a sometimes-militant business association that emerged in Dakar in 1990 to represent the Senegalese “informal sector.”

Sierra Leone's transfer election of 1996 was instigated by a resurgent civil society that came alive after thirty years of dictatorship. This electoral democratic renewal did not, however, alter the spoils logic that has defined the organization and exercise of political power in Sierra Leone since the late 1960s. Because performance by a popularly elected government is critical to the consolidation of public support for democracy, the SLPP's inability to distance itself from its discredited precursors endangered the country's fragile democracy.

This essay presents a current survey of the Africana research holdings and collections that are available at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) located at Chicago, Ill. The collection is composed of many formats of material, including foreign dissertations, monographs, newspapers, periodicals, official publications, pamphlets, political ephemera, manuscripts and archives, and miscellaneous materials. Each of these formats is described in the essay, including examples, collection development guidelines, and information on access. The primary institutional focus for the collection of these materials has been the Cooperative Africana Microform Program (CAMP). Over the past thirty-five years, representatives from the various CAMP member institutions have selected materials to be purchased or filmed. These decisions have reflected the changing research priorities and needs of the various individuals and the institutions they represent in these collection development efforts. Access to the Center's Africana holdings is also discussed. For researchers located at institutions that hold membership in CAMP or CRL, access and user policies are liberal. It is possible for a user at such an institution to acquire an extensive amount of material in a single interlibrary loan transaction and to have access to the material indefinitely or until needed by another researcher. Bibliographic access is provided by CRLCATALOG, the online catalog of the center, as well as through a variety of printed bibliographies, reference folders, collection inventories, and the center's web site. The forty-two institutions that currently hold membership in CAMP and their institutional representatives are listed on the Web at http://wwwcrl.uchicago.edu/info/campmem.htm.