This article traces the history of how and why certain African groups became involved in the transnational indigenous rights movement; how the concept of the indigenous has been imagined, understood, and employed by African activists, donors, advocates, and states; and the opportunities and obstacles it has posed for the ongoing struggles for recognition, resources, and the rights of historically marginalized people like Maasai.

This article explores how international discourses on AIDS prevention have been incorporated into national-level programs that promote particular lifestyle and livelihood strategies in Zambia, particularly within the realms of wife inheritance, widowhood, and marriage. In response, Zambian communities have recast these narratives to inform local political economies, identities, and struggles for power. Often community and national-level efforts work at odds with each other, as each seeks to legitimize various moralities and codes of behavior. At the local level actors choose the strategies that most effectively mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS and also enhance their overall well-being.

The winds of political change have been sweeping across Kenya for the last two decades. However, as many sections of society—the media, the church, civil society, and even ordinary people—take advantage of the unprecedented democratic space in which to engage the political establishment, the country's intelligentsia has remained aloof. The aim of this article is to interrogate discourse patterns in the Kenyan university system. Adopting a historical lens, it argues that the curtailment of intellectual freedom in the postcolonial Kenyan university is a reproduction of the colonial suppression of discourses whose objective was to ensure the political survival of the ruling class. It also argues for the adoption of critical pedagogies that challenge the status quo.

This article addresses the question of identity in contemporary North African cinema, situating the issue within the larger context of Arab discourse on tradition and modernity. It concentrates on two filmmakers, the Moroccan Farida Benlyazid and the Algerian Nadir Moknèche, and their different perspectives on the formation of postcolonial identity (especially for women). While Benlyazid opts for a new form of Islamic feminism—spiritual Islam—Moknèche portrays, in a provocative style, how Algerian women choose practices that subvert the retraditionalization of their country.

The historiographic question that this article asks is: How can historians uncover actual social and economic practices without imposing anachronistic standards and terminologies on the available evidence? The analysis focuses on the relationship between landlords and zégoch—a hitherto unrecognized and socially subservient class of peasants—in the context of social, economic, and cultural realities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ethiopia. The thesis is that during this period the Ethiopian ruling classes gained their power and income primarily from ownership of rim land—a form of private property—and the labor of zégoch.

This article explores the question of how well South African defense policies and investments during the apartheid and postapartheid era have supported the country's overall political objectives. Perhaps not surprisingly, the single-mindedness of mission during apartheid contributed, in many ways, to a defense strategy that was more cohesive than that of the postapartheid era. In the postapartheid era, opportunities for using the country's defense assets to achieve political objectives and overall national priorities have not been fully exploited.

While interest in conducting fieldwork in conflict and postconflict societies continues to grow, literature addressing the specific challenges and dilemmas of this kind of research remains scarce. Based on four months of fieldwork and approximately seventy interviews, this article explores the complexities of conducting research in postgenocide Rwanda. I argue that what at first may appear to be data problems can also be important data points; problems such as historical memory, selective telling, and skewed participant demographics illuminate political structures, group relations, and societal cleavages. This article then illustrates this argument by examining how these challenges/opportunities help explain the difficulties involved in teaching history in postgenocide schools. These reflections on research in Rwanda suggest valuable lessons for fieldwork and data analysis in a number of settings by providing examples of pitfalls, dilemmas, and often unseen opportunities that are likely to present themselves in other divided societies.