Nigerian educational administrators find themselves engulfed by a tidal wave of swiftly swelling pupil enrollment. The rapid rate of growth poses the challenging question of how much time is left for solutions. Niger State is one example. In April 1976, 244 primary schools offered instruction to 15,796 pupils. Four months later, the state needed 931 primary schools for an additional 63,384 pupils: a growth rate of almost 400 percent. In 1978 there were 1,091 primary schools to serve 179,861 children. This amounted to a real growth of over 1000 percent in two years. This experience was repeated across a number of states. The comparison of enrollment in the first year of primary school between 1975/76 and 1976/77 school years, for example, shows a percentage increase of 557 percent in Niger, 491 percent in Kano, 442 percent in Kaduna, 263 percent in Benue. The smallest increase was 11 percent in Gongola State. Parallel to the pupil enrollment was the percentage increase of the number of primary schools between 1975/76 and 1976/77, 301.3 percent in Niger, 227.1 percent in Kano, 196.4 percent in Kaduno, 142.9 percent in Benue. The smallest increase reported was in Imo State, 1.5 percent.

This recent explosion in Nigerian primary school enrollment was the direct result of the Universal Primary Education (UPE) scheme launched in September 1976. It marked the dawn of an educational revolution with pervasive social and economic implications (Bray, 1981). The political expectations were that universal free primary education would enable the nation to overcome the hurdles caused by unbalanced educational and economic development which resulted in southern dominance and educational imbalances of urban opportunities over the rural, and the preponderance of male over female enrollment in schools.

Most press reports would have us believe that the genocide in Rwanda was the result of a “centuries-old” ethnic/tribal hatred. There is no denying that mass murder and genocide took place in Rwanda. It is estimated that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people died in the most appalling way. Those killed were from all ethnic groups, Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa; but the vast majority of those killed were Tutsi. However, it is important to understand the process by which this took place: we must stop and ask if this genocide was inevitable, if it was universal, and if it was the result of ancient irreconcilable hatreds.

The reference to tribal warfare, or even ethnic conflict, implies that there are (at least) two sides fighting, and that all members of society are caught up in the killings. But in this case, the great preponderance of deaths resulted not from “conflict” but from murder.

In a context of globalization and liberalization, Africa is increasingly confronted with the commercialization of its space. Various large-scale actors, including international private investors, investor states, and local entrepreneurs, are constantly seeking to expand their land holdings for the production of food crops or biofuels. This article presents two Rwandan case studies and analyzes how large-scale land acquisition by foreign and local elite players affects local livelihoods. It identifies broader agrarian and social changes taking place in Rwanda and Africa and provides suggestions as to how the tables might be turned in order to protect local livelihoods in the further evolution of Rwanda’s agriculture.

This study examines ways that political leaders influence the development of the unofficial economy in Congo. Using aggregate data as well as data from observation and two surveys conducted in 1991–1992, it demonstrates that the unofficial economy develops not only as a reaction against an over-regulated state, but also because of a market segmentation along gender lines, state policy in defining property rights, and networks of relationships that partly shape the behavior of bureaucrats who act to satisfy their own preferences. Although the unofficial economy creates institutions that can challenge state hegemony, it neither allocates resources equally among the participants nor provides an equal access to high-profit activities to all. The findings suggest that women are more likely to be involved in low-value profit sectors of the unofficial economy than men. Because the unofficial economy reinforces mutual trust and reciprocity, it tends to create a new idea of social order and interactions.

This article examines processes of economic inclusion in divided societies, with a focus on both religious and formal–informal divides. Drawing on recent fieldwork in the northern Nigerian cities of Kano and Kaduna, the article challenges the assumption that identity-based informal organization intensifies violent social divisions, and that taxation and linkages with the state foster more stable and inclusive governance. A range of informal sector activities provides insights into escalating religious conflict and uneven patterns of formal inclusion in interreligious relations. Attention is focused on the relative role of informal institutions and formal interventions such as taxation in diffusing or exacerbating conflict at the grassroots level.

When the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement erupted at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015, it not only sparked the proliferation of student movements across South Africa, but also led to the formation of #RMF at the University of Oxford and similar movements at universities in the United States. By drawing on ninety-eight interviews with various actors involved in both movements, Ahmed’s empirical research contributes to the limited academic literature on the connections between the #RMF movements in Cape Town and in Oxford. The example of the #RMF movement in Cape Town inspired the #RMF Oxford movement to challenge the epistemic architecture of the University of Oxford.

The concept of civil society has gained currency in African studies. It is used in a variety of different ways, but usually refers to the emergence of new patterns of political participation outside of formal state structures and one-party systems (Bratton 1989, 407). In the absence of capable state institutions, the literature on Africa has started to shift attention away from the state and governing elites, and towards social actors who are devising various strategies to survive the nested crises of state action, economic development, and political legitimacy (Doornbos 1990). As an alternative conceptualization of possibilities of economic and social development, civil society is becoming an all encompassing term that refers to social phenomena putatively beyond formal state structures—but not necessarily free of all contact with the state.

Virtually no theoretical work, however, has been done on the concept as it relates to an African environment, with the exception of Bayart (1986) and, more recently, Bratton (1989). This essay explores in a more theoretical manner than has hitherto been the case what such a notion means within an African context by asking whether the growing use of the term contributes substantively to our understanding of new forms of participation and associational activity in Africa. The answer is affirmative, provided that this concept is elaborated and specified in ways which take into account the complex interaction between normative, economic, and organizational dimensions of civil society.

This article examines what urban displacement and resettlement can reveal about the nature of, and co-constitutive relationships among, property, authority, and citizenship. It focuses on an unusual case in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where long-term illegal squatters living under constant threat of violent displacement by various local and national authorities were formally resettled by the Bulawayo City Council on peri-urban plots with houses. What surfaces are some of the paradoxes of propertied citizenship and of attaining seemingly “proper” lives in conditions of sustained marginality, a result that is not entirely unexpected when impoverished squatters are resettled far outside the frame of the city and its possibilities.

Claude Ake (1982: 8, 3), in his Presidential Address to the 1982 Convention of the Nigerian Political Science Association, criticized Nigerian society, politics, and state behavior in damning terms:

A predatory capitalism has bred misery, turned politics into warfare and all but arrested the development of productive forces. The Nigerian ruling class has assaulted the masses with physical and psychological violence and thwarted their aspirations, particularly their escape from underdevelopment and poverty.

Legitimacy has receded to the background, making way for relations of raw power and the perception of right as being coextensive with might.

Ake's views reflect a common perception that the Nigerian state survives by coercion as other means of gaining the compliance of the populace-the capacity to create a legitimating consciousness or utilitarian pay-offs-have proven ineffective, or have been wasted by a rapacious ruling class and its clients. Coercion, of course, means the police and the military.

This paper focuses on the control and autonomy of coercion, concretely examined as the actions of the police, in the political economy of Nigeria. Who controls the police and how autonomous are they as an organization and as individuals? The paper argues that the state and the police are relatively autonomous from class control; that the police have interests of their own which will influence both what they do or refuse to do; and that the police are a very weak reed for the ruling class to relay upon.

This article investigates links between ilobolo (bridewealth) practices and marriage outcomes in contemporary Zulu society. It presents quantitative data showing very low marriage rates among Zulu adults, as well as interview evidence suggesting that the majority of Zulu adults identify ilobolo as a constraint to marriage. However, the interview evidence also suggests that ilobolo remains widely valued as a Zulu tradition and continues to be an integral and defining feature of a Zulu marriage. The article concludes that this tension—between the high cost of ilobolo and respect for ilobolo as a custom—contributes to the very low marriage rates observed among Zulu people today.

Electricity demand exceeds supply in many parts of Africa, and this often results in rolling blackouts. This article argues that blackouts tend to concentrate on poorer places within countries, due to both economic and political factors. This argument is tested with an analysis of electricity availability across thirty-two neighborhoods in Accra and survey data from thirty-six African countries. Across these analyses, poorer people with a grid connection experience lower electricity supply than richer people. This article concludes by discussing implications for research on electricity availability, policymakers working on energy, and the distributive politics literature.

Though children's labor has been critical to African economies historically, Africanist scholars tend to treat child and adolescent workers as invisible. In this essay, the reasons for this neglect are explored, as are the consequences of such neglect for theory and empirical research. Suggestions are made for pursuing research on child and adolescent labor that places young workers within the broader context of economic, social, and political relationships and processes. The essay critically reviews the extant scholarly literature on children and work in the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and concludes that child labor is either underresearched or undertheorized to the detriment of our understanding of gender, patriarchy, agency, the formation of worker and political consciousness, capital accumulation, and the state. The essay argues that children have shaped and continue to shape history in Africa and that childhood is a terrain of struggle in which numerous social and political forces (including children, patriarchy, capital, and the state) seek constructions that suit their particular (and changing) interests. The essay makes a plea to Africanist scholars to take children more seriously in their research.

Of course [after graduation from high school] some things go, whistles, lights-out, uniform, parades, prefects,…and yet all the central ideas go on. There will still be chores to be done, and done well, without grumbles; there will still be the need to discipline, for men who can obey and can therefore—when called upon—rule…(Francis 1957, 2).

What we are practicing at Makere, day in and out,…is the subversion… of the African mind; the breaking down of mental tissues; their reconstruction in the Western mode; the reordering of thoughts, feelings, habits, responses, of every aspect of the mind and personality. This is what we are doing, and cannot avoid doing—this is the core of our activity (Murray Carlin in Stanley 1960, 11).

In 1957 a solemn third-former at Alliance High School wrote in the school magazine: “Superstition used to play an important role in Kikuyu society…It was the chief reason why the older order changed more slowly than many people desired” (Ngugi 1957, 21). Unequivocally rejecting “rigid” traditional society, the writer declares approvingly that with the advance of Christianity—“without doubt the greatest civilising influence”—many Gikuyu have come to regard “superstition and witchcraft…with derision.” After a well told anecdote tinged with humorous self-mockery, the essayist ends with sermonizing gratitude for “a most valuable lesson” (22).

This parrot-like bagatelle in The AHS Magazine—signed “J. T. Ngugi, Form 3A,” and his first published work—echoes the high moral tone of the missionary headmaster of Alliance High School, E. Carey Francis (Greaves 1969; Kipkorir 1980; Sicherman 1990, 389-92). The motto of the school, “Strong to Serve,” implied the kinds of “chores” that boys thus educated would have to do in Kenya when they became—in Ngugi's later caustic paraphrase of his headmaster's goal–“efficient machines for running a colonial system” (Sicherman 1990, 20).

This article seeks to understand why Kenyans have responded so enthusiastically to the recent push, by the government and NGOs, for voluntary labor within health and development projects and interventions. It argues that voluntary labor gains meaning and value in relation to broader economies of work and unemployment, to anxieties about identity, recognition, and belonging, and to aspirations for personal as well as national development. In the context of precarious economies and the contraction of formal employment opportunities, voluntary labor constitutes valued, if unpaid, work; it offers opportunities for those excluded from formal employment to gain a valued identity and a sense of social worth; and it makes volunteers visible to powerful institutions (state and nonstate) that hold the keys to personal growth, social recognition, and developmental futures. Voluntary labor is a site of struggles about identity, social value, and recognition, which the decline of twentieth-century trajectories of progress has made acute.

The search for the African origins of contemporary socio-cultural forms found in black populations in the South Atlantic region is a well-established scholarly pursuit. Most scholars have argued that certain institutions and ideas brought from Africa were retained over time and survived in more or less recognizable form. It is further argued that specific institutions can be directly linked to the importation of Africans from specific areas in Africa. Although in the debate on Africanisms many writers have also argued the contrary, the emphasis in the scholarship has been on demonstrating the degree to which Africans in the diaspora managed to retain these socio-cultural institutions (Frazier, 1939; Herskovits, 1968).

Two major omissions fault the published scholarship on the subject: first, the lack of details of the process by which Africans retained, reinterpreted, or abandoned these institutions; and second, given similar circumstances of transfer, an explanation of the varying degrees of faithfulness to the original institutions in different areas. In other words, the lack of survival, though equally interesting and potentially intellectually rewarding, is a neglected aspect of the scholarship.

The case of Yoruba religious ideas is an example of this bias. Yoruba religion apparently remained “so faithful to its ancestral traditions” that it is one of the most frequently cited examples of an African survival. The scholarship on the topic is rather extensive, but none of it is historically or ethnologically sophisticated. Attempts have been made to explain its persistence in some areas by reference to the late arrival of a large number of Yoruba as victims of the slave trade: it is argued that “both the strength of the continuities and their relative lack of modification probably are related to recency of migration and to the presence [in Trinidad] or nearness [in Cuba] of freedom” (Mintz and Price, 1973).

This article examines two policies targeting the informal open-air market and fishing sectors in Jinja, Uganda. The informal sector has grown to become a significant source of livelihood for people in growing cities such as Jinja. At the same time, development policies have become increasingly concerned with encouraging formalization as well as the participation of local stakeholders in governance and decision-making. While there has been much debate about the potential impacts of formalizing previously informal, unregulated, unpermitted activities, the implications of these policies for informal vendors and fishers have received less attention. Despite their promises of addressing previous marginalization, the patterns of participation and formalization enforced by these two policies in Uganda have reduced the control of these individuals over their own livelihoods, as well as intensifying contestations of local authority and jurisdiction over resources.

During a 2014 security operation in Kenya known as Operation Usalama Watch, Somali refugees spoke of money as their only valid ID, knowing that only cash, in contrast to identity documents, would be accepted by police and military. The article argues that such extortion should not be interpreted uncategorically as an example of refugees’ exclusion from state-derived citizenship rights. Rather, by paying bribes to resist forced removal from Nairobi, Somali refugees constructed a global diasporan identity tied to free flows of capital. By using money as a substitute for identity documents, refugees appealed to a notion of rights untethered to the state. At the same time, by speaking of money as their government, they articulated a critique against a political system that excluded them.

This contribution to the special issue of ASR on Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004) takes up two recent, and radically different, constructivist contributions to the field of economic sociology—those of Phillip Mirowski and Michel Callon. The article makes use of Marginal Gains to interrogate both these analytics, asking if they can meet the challenge posed by the diversity and multiplicity of African popular economic practice.

The analysis of popular songs in post-independence Zimbabwe has received little attention. The few analyses that have been attempted remain fragmentary and notoriously insist on a uniform worldview for the singers. This tends to blur ideological differences in the sensibilities of the singer's response to the realities of independence. Moreover, an overemphasis on a homogenous perspective on independence by the singers also tends to underestimate the contradictory response in the songs of an individual singer. This article analyzes popular songs of Zimbabwe in the Shona, Ndebele, and English languages. It argues that although the popular songs occur within the context of celebrating independence, the state sought to control the extent to which singers could define the meaning of independence. But the plurality of the singers' responses, their refusal to conform to a single definition of the idea of independence, indicates what is distinctively “popular” in the songs.

This article looks at the relationship between economic ideas and policymaking in Africa over the last half century. It discusses the ways in which the focus of economists working on Africa has moved from the structuralist-developmentalist and neo-Marxist perspectives of the 1960s and 1970s, through a neoliberal phase of the 1980s and 1990s, to a more eclectic combination of neo-institutionalism, growth orientation, and welfarist interests in poverty and redistribution issues. These shifts in development thinking, while not unique to Africa, have not been the subject of much debate in Africa. The article argues that such a debate is long overdue, including an interrogation not only of the leverage of foreign interests, but also of the profession of economics itself and the implications of its material underpinnings and social construction on the integrity and credibility of its research.