This article examines how the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) sought to inscribe a nationalist monologic history in Zimbabwe in order prop up its claim to be the progenitor and guardian of the postcolonial nation. Since its formation in 1963, it has worked tirelessly to claim to be the only authentic force with a sacred historic mission to deliver the colonized people from settler colonial rule. To achieve this objective, ZANU-PF has deployed the ideology of chimurenga in combination with the strategy of gukurahundi as well as a politics of memorialization to install a particular nationalist historical monologue of the nation. After attaining power in 1980, it proceeded to claim ownership of the birth of the nation. While the ideology of chimurenga situates the birth of the nation within a series of nationalist revolutions dating back to the primary resistance of the 1890s, the strategy of gukurahundi entails violent and physical elimination of enemies and opponents. But this hegemonic drive has always encountered an array of problems, including lack of internal unity in ZANU-PF itself, counternarratives deriving from political formations like the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU); labor movements; and critical voices from the Matebeleland region, which fell victim to gukurahundi strategy in the 1980s. With the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999, which soon deployed democracy and human rights discourse to critique the ideology of chimurenga and the strategy of gukurahundi, ZANU-PF hegemony became extremely shaky and it eventually agreed to share power with the MDC in February 2009.

Since September 11, 2001, the aid component of American foreign policy toward Africa has undergone a significant evolution: U.S. security has come to rival development as an increasingly explicit rationale. Development programming and project implementation now contain a security dimension that is underpinned by Pentagon strategists working through AFRICOM as much as by USAID officers partnering with the State Department. This article argues that given the potential of terrorism for undermining development in Africa itself, soft counterterrorism should be envisioned as a strategic developmental defense activity. Making use of unpublished country risk assessments and the author's participant observation during USAID field mission consultancies in the Sahel, as well as the scholarly literature and relevant policy documents of the Bush and Obama administrations, this article explores the new agenda and grassroots dynamics of development projects as tools for terrorism prevention. It contends that policy and institutional responses to 9/11 have resulted in a greater convergence of operational goals among U.S. government agencies that in the past, at least according to publicly stated goals, had pursued distinctly different missions in Africa. Normative implications of this change are mixed. Because of differing expectations with respect to separation of powers, African public opinion, paradoxically, may be more sympathetic to U.S. military engagement with civilians for developmental purposes than American public opinion is.

Following a successful armed resistance against a dictatorial state regime, a new government of former rebels took control of the national state in Ethiopia in 1991. Prompted partly by unfolding sea changes in global politics in the early 1990s, the new Ethiopian government pledged to undertake radical governance reform. More than twenty years after the new government took office, contested assessments of its record vis-à-vis its human and minority rights pledge, among other issues, have generated waves of debate, criticism, controversy, and global protests. Based on observations from southern Ethiopia, this article takes an ethnographic look at both the process and the outcome of Ethiopia's experiment with ethnic self-government, with a special focus on understanding the value of minority rights as an ideological construct. Conceptually, the paper attempts to explain a disjuncture between the globally prescribed ideal of human/minority group rights and the realities of governance on the ground.

This article argues that Ethiopia's agricultural extension program, which received more government funding and donor support than other similar programs in Africa, reinforced the rural presence and authoritarian powers of the ruling party while largely failing to improve smallholder agriculture. The principal reason for this outcome has to do with the systematic entanglement of the Green Revolution package delivery system with the immediate goal of guaranteeing the party's political security. In one Amharic-speaking community that provided ethnographic information for this article, overzealous party leaders rewarded supporters at the expense of imagined opponents. This distortion, coupled with a culturally embedded concept of success (defined as upward mobility), caused pervasive fear, insecurity, suspicion, and rivalry among farmers. Not surprisingly, this insecurity has a deleterious effect on hardworking farmers. The article suggests that any meaningful attempt at improving the program must recognize the centrality of politics, especially at the community and household levels, where parochial interests interface with cultural expectations.

This article examines the early history of disability rights activism in Kenya. The transitional years from colonialism to independence were a period of great expectations. For persons with disabilities in particular, decolonization held additional possibilities and potential. National independence promised not just majority rule but also an all-inclusive citizenship and the commitment to social justice. Among the visually impaired of Kenya, such collective aspirations led to the birth of the Kenya Union of the Blind in 1959. In 1964, after years of futile correspondence with government officials, the Union organized a street march to the prime minister's office to attract attention to its grievances. The result was a government panel, the Mwendwa Committee for the Care and Rehabilitation of the Disabled, whose published report became the blueprint for social and rehabilitation programs. The government possessed limited resources, and the reforms that ensued were long overdue. Yet the sociohistorical dynamics behind the march are of particular significance. From the social historian's point of view, they affirm not only the historical agency of persons with disabilities, but also the need to recast and broaden the scope of African social history.

This article explores the representation of Africa in director Edward Zwick's 2006 film Blood Diamond, examining in particular the ways in which the film's liberal-humanitarian orientation works to demonize black African communities, nationalisms, and governments while constituting a white and largely American subject as the center of ethical value. The article also examines the film's account of diamond consumption as a global phenomenon, and considers the ways in which sound and vision operate to devalue black diasporic as well as black continental African subjects.

The recent emergence of homosexuality as a central issue in public debate in various parts of Africa has encouraged a stereotypical image of one homophobic Africa, often placed in opposition to a tolerant or depraved West. What is striking is that this image of Africa as homophobic is promoted by both traditionalists who insist that homosexuality is a Western intrusion and by the Western media that focus on homophobic statements from African political and religious leaders. What both neglect, however, is the existence of internal debate and disagreements among Africans on the subject of homosexuality. In this article we try to counter this image of a homophobic Africa with a more nuanced discussion, including a comparison of different trajectories in the emergence of homosexuality as a public issue in four countries (Senegal, Cameroon, Uganda, and South Africa). The comparison highlights considerable variations in the ways in which the issue became politicized. There is a world of difference, for example, between the image of the homosexual as un Grand (a rich and powerful “Big Man”) who imposes anal penetration as a supreme form of subjection (as in Cameroon or Gabon, where homosexuality is associated with witchcraft and other occult forces; compare Achille Mbembe's visionary evocation of a “phallocracy”) and the often quite marginal persons who become victims of gay persecution in other contexts. More insight into the variations of what is loosely and inaccurately called “homophobia” can help connect international pressures for decriminalization and protection to local circumstances. Working through local activists is crucial for the effort to counter homophobia in Africa.