Sometime during the increasingly tense European summer of 1938, the Anglo-Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski sat down to write an introduction to a new book by one of his students, Jomo Kenyatta—a book based on the graduate thesis the latter had written under his supervision at the London School of Economics. A scientific rationalist and atheist, as well as an antiracist, antifascist, and anticommunist, Malinowski was most of all in that fraught time a deeply frightened liberal watching Europe slide into war. During the 1930s he had shifted his focus from the South Pacific to Africa. Over the course of that decade he had become increasingly critical of European colonialism, particularly of what he regarded as its deeply destructive impact on indigenous societies. In his brief introductory essay, Malinowski reflected on Kenyatta's work and, no doubt, on their many long conversations during the three years Kenyatta had studied with him. He commented on the dilemma of the educated African who had “suffered the injury of higher education” and noted that “an African who looks at things from the tribal point of view and at the same time from that of Western civilization experiences the tragedy of the modern world in an especially acute manner” (1938:ix).

In 1976, in the middle of what was for us a second exile, my father's younger brother died. This death was shortly followed by the news of the death of his 112-year-old aunt, the only grandmother we had ever known. In accordance with custom and tradition, a few weeks later, and against the odds, the family in Wenchi, a town in the Brong-Ahafo region in the middle of Ghana, managed to send to Papa in Standlake, a small village in the countryside west of Oxford, the fragment of the burial cloth that was his aunt's and which he would have received on the day of the burial, had he been there.

The promotion of the private sector has become an integral part of Ghana's economic development strategy since it embarked on its structural adjustment program (SAP) in 1983. Private sector development, which involves the improvement of the investment climate and the enhancing of basic service delivery, is considered one of the necessary factors for sustaining and expanding businesses, stimulating economic growth, and reducing poverty. This article examines the policies of Ghana's New Patriotic Party (NPP) government and its strategies for making the private sector the bedrock of economic development and for achieving what it calls the “Golden Age of Business.” It argues that while the policies and initiatives being pursued have the potential to help in the development of the private sector in Ghana, the government has to play a more central role in this process, not only by creating the enabling environment for private businesses, but also by providing business with support and protection. While the “Golden Age of Business” is a neoliberal concept, its effective implementation requires a robust statist input.

This article explores stories that some central Africans in the middle Sangha River basin and in northern Gabon have told about gorillas and chimpanzees. Such tales have provided opportunities for Africans to debate the consequences of their engagements with outside people, resources, and processes. But their meanings have proliferated in different social, cultural, and historical contexts. Central Africans have used such stories to make claims about access to and control over human productive and reproductive labor, forest resources and spaces, and other forms of wealth; racial and ethnic relations; and human existence and death. These stories provide critical insights into the reasons people hunt or protect great apes, and they illuminate the complex social and political tensions generated by conservation interventions. Great ape tales thus offer conservationists insights into the challenges and promise of managing an important game population, as well as the potential social consequences of their interventions.

This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the popularity of Pentecostalism and the formation of religious identity in an Eritrean city. Examining the penetration of Pentecostal Protestantism into longstanding Christian churches in Asmara during a time of rapid socioeconomic change in Eritrea, it looks at how Pentecostalism discontinues its relation with the past, conceptualizes the present, and generates an autonomous image of itself in the highly competitive religious marketplace of an Eritrean urban space. The article discusses how and why this movement increasingly favors Bible reading and networks of religious meetings as the principal mediums of transmission of its teachings and the expansion of its denomination, breaking deliberately from traditional Christian churches and using local forces and resources.

Through an examination of the Tanzanian experience, this article takes up a challenge forcefully posed by Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject to examine connections between late colonial and postindependence state power on the African continent. The discussion is critical of Mamdani's argument that postindependence authoritarianism in Africa can be understood as an institutional legacy of late colonialism. However, connections to colonial times did exist in the frames of legitimation that underpinned the frequently authoritarian actions of the postindependence Tanzanian state. One such connection was the persistent paternalism vis-à-vis their “subjects” that characterized the political imagination of state elites; another was the fact that “the colonial past” served as an important reference point in the construction of a deeply Manichean discourse and practice of politics after independence.