Primary among the criticisms that third-world scholars and “radical” social scientists have directed against applied social sciences in general and social anthropology in particular has been their alleged failures to study the colonial context in which much of its field work has been carried out (Cf. Asad, 1975; Lewis, 1973, for examples.) Although these critics usually exaggerate their arguments and typically do not prove that early scholars were either overt or covert racists, it is true, nonetheless, that social scientists have paid relatively little attention to the colonial milieu, Condominas's (1973) preterrain.

A number of scholars, including Pitt (1976) and Stavenhagen (1971), have urged that social scientists “study upwards” in order to discover the social and cultural foundations of the colonizing agency in the contact situation which determine its motivations and constrain its actions. Failure to do so entails serious theoretical and methodological consequences because it both narrows the range of societies among which we are able to make comparisons and masks a course of systematic bias. Although I have been deeply concerned with the problem of systematic bias (Salamone, 1976a, b), in this paper I address the issue of describing and analyzing a colonial society, of “studying up.” The reason is quite simple. It is necessary to know the nature of a systematic source of bias before deciding on whether and how to control it.

Attempts to further the study of popular culture in Africa face the difficulty of defining “popular” as distinct from traditional or folk culture on the one hand, and elite or dominant culture on the other. The features that emerge most often from the discussion of these distinctions center on the relative degree of separation between performers and audiences, and on change from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft as a basis for social interaction (Bigsby, 1976: 18). These contrasts have frequently been identified with movement from a rural to an urban social world, where communal, multidimensional relationships give way to associative forms characterized by a segmentation of roles, divided loyalties, and the primacy of hypothetical or contractual relations over categorical and personal ones. Thus we value traditional or rural folk culture for its idealized capacity to give integrated expression to all aspects of human life, and symbolic representation to the essence of the human condition. In contrast, the sociology of urban art forms focuses on the relations between class and culture, the artist and his work, market organization and cultural production (Barbu, 1976: 47, 55). As anyone familiar with its urban scene should recognize, these distinctions are not workable for Southern Africa. Yet their very inapplicability highlights the importance of both the struggle for cultural integration and the flow of people and communication between urban and rural areas in contemporary Africa.

The point has been made about the dangers inherent in attempts to analyze the underdeveloped world's problems purely in terms of the experiences or models of the industrialized, developed countries of the world. It is often warned that nations and cultures differ; and that what may have worked for one society may not necessarily work for another. Consequently, these critics caution against a blind transplantation of foreign tools or models to the distinctive conditions of the contemporary developing nations. Akeredolu-Ale (1972: 119-20) put it rather sharply in the Nigerian context:

… economic process cannot be studied in isolation but only in their social, political, and demographic setting…. Purely economic interpretations of the economic development process as it is going on in the less developed countries are bound to be incomplete. One striking feature of economic life in such countries, is the greater role which political factors (domestic and international) are playing in the determination of the process of economic evolution… Any investigation of the economic process in a contemporary underdeveloped country such as Nigeria, if it is to avoid superfidalism, must begin with an analytical framework that is much less restricted than that derived from orthodox Western economic theory. The transfer of Western theories, models and concepts to the study of economic problems… is not harmful per se, but it could be a source of great bias and distortion… when new facts require that they be seriously modified.

The Holy Ghost Fathers have been in Kastern Nigeria for about eighty-five years. Not until after the recent Nigeria-Biafra War has their influence been somewhat minimized. Arriving originally from France in 1885, the Roman Catholic missionaries, as we shall see later in this essay, exerted a considerable influence far out of proportion to their number. But despite that they had become a factor to be reckoned with ever since, their missionary activity has scarcely been studied systematically. One principal reason for this has been the reluctance of the Roman Catholic authorities to permit scholars to use their private archives in Paris.

In the last few years, however, the Roman Catholic authorities seem to have relaxed their one-hundred-year rule which has often been invoked to deny bone fide researchers access to the archival source materials. I am not sure, however, that this is yet an official policy, but I was permitted in 1968 and again in 1970 to use the archives. It is perhaps important to point out that the archival materials are still jealously guarded. During my research, for example, I was not permitted to examine certain dossiers perceived by the Archivist as “sensitive” and “not proper for public use.” The study that follows is partly based on the materials collected from the archives and partly from other sources, especially from the archives of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in London.

In this paper three interrelated topics are examined: First, the conflicts and strains prevalent in a matrilineal society are described. It is argued that these conflicts are the result of a central structural contradiction inherent in matriliny, namely, that between relations of production, which are individualistic in nature, and distribution processes, which involve social relationships that are communalistic in character. The contradiction results primarily from matrilineal inheritance practices which ensure that all wealth accrues to the matrilineage. Since spouses belong to different lineages and since the fruit of their labor cannot be inherited by affines, nuclear and bilateral extended family members do not cooperate nor invest in family or larger cooperative enterprises. As a result, Luapulans have become individual producers.

Second, the impact of the industrial-market system on the preexisting tensions is described. Specifically, it is argued that the contradiction in matriliny fosters a rural class structure and a capitalist route to rural development. The wealthy, who find the matrilineal distributive justice (Poewe, 1978) in conflict with their desire to accumulate capital for purposes of reinvestment, have disengaged from matriliny and adopted Protestant ideologies to justify and further their business interests. By contrast, the poor, who find that matrilineal inheritance holds out the hope of receiving initial endowments, continue to support matriliny because they see in it the means to propel them along the path of private enterprise.

This paper offers an empirical study of a weaving enterprise in the southern African nation of Lesotho. The objective of the study was to test the theory and prescriptions of the liberal women in development (or WID) approach within the World Bank model of development as a whole. That is, through the analysis of a real life situation for a specific group of women in a specific Third World context, we sought to determine whether employment “empowers” women (as WID predicts), exploits them (as some of its critics assert), or otherwise affects their lives and consciousness. Throughout the following discussion, we bear in mind that development strategies do not only succeed or fail, but can profoundly affect the political, social and economic structures in developing societies as they unfold, often in unwitting ways (Ferguson 1990, xiv). What effect does a WID-type business actually have in this specific instance, and what can it tell us about the relevance of mainstream development discourse and practice with regard to women's employment throughout Sub-Saharan Africa?

In the 1980s, the World Bank became disillusioned with the African state as a vehicle for development. A World Bank report argued that there was a

…widespread impression of political decline. Corruption, oppression, and nepotism are increasingly evident. These are hardly unique to Africa, but they may have been exacerbated by development strategies that concentrated power and resources in government bureaucracies, without countervailing measures to ensure public accountability or political consensus (IBRD 1989b, 22).

The focus of the Bank then shifted from assisting African governments to foster economic growth, and towards restructuring the governments and economies of Africa.

A large number of black workers from white-owned farms in the Albany and Bathurst districts have migrated to a small city, Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape. In an attempt to illustrate the process by which people from rural areas settle in and adjust to urban life, this paper focuses on the manner in which migration presently occurs. From the 1940s farms in the Albany and Bathurst districts were rapidly losing labor, largely on account of mechanization and land rationalization. At that time many farm dwellers were migrating to Grahamstown and to some extent Port Elizabeth. The past few decades witnessed a massive further migration from these farms and this, together with natural increase, contributed to the 53.9 percent increase in Grahamstown's black population in the 1970-80 decade. Most of those who emigrated to the town have tried to establish themselves in the urban area even though their new places of residence have apparently impossible demands and challenges.

In South Africa many researchers (e.g. Wilson, F. 1972) have rightly highlighted the economic and administrative constraints which prevent many migrant workers from accepting town as their permanent home. This paper seeks some understanding of the basic motivation of people who emigrate to town and decide (usually quite unequivocally) to live there permanently. Since fewer studies have been made of small towns than of the large cities, the case reveals some of the lesser known aspects of urbanization in Southern Africa: the interdependence between town and country, the immigrants' overwhelming commitment to urban living, the relevance of chain migration, the role of the extended family in facilitating urban adaptation and the utilization of rural resources by those who are settling in town.

1994 has witnessed the demise of apartheid in South Africa, thus signaling the end of an era in the history of Africa—the long night of European colonial rule. This momentous event, and the challenging process of transformation that it has set in motion, vividly illustrate the power of the rubric chosen for this year's annual meeting, Africa Reconfigured. But the reconfiguration of Africa is certainly not something new. So on this occasion I propose to look back selectively at some aspects of that reconfiguration as it relates to the European mapping and consequent representation of Africa; the political configuration of Africa; and, finally, the future of Africa and African Studies.

“Where is Africa?” asks Ali Mazrui in a characteristically provocative dissection of European ethnocentric projections about the mapping and perception of Africa (Mazrui 1986, 23-4). To which we might add, “And what do we know about it from maps?” For as Peter Barber emphasizes in his discussion of the European discovery of Africa, “it should always be borne in mind that maps show only what their makers wished to show and not necessarily all that they actually knew” (Barber 1987, 37). Indeed, the history of mapping Africa reflects virtually all of the problems one is likely to face in examining the representation of Africa. Ancient knowledge of the continent was limited to the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts, as well as the Nile Valley. Bound up with the acquisition of commercial information about the products of Africa, and then with the staking out of colonial claims from as early as the first Portuguese explorations down the Atlantic coast of the continent in the fourteenth century, Africa was arguably more thoroughly misrepresented than it was accurately mapped during the first millennium and a half of the Christian era.

Lagos, at present the political capital of Nigeria and the nerve centre of the country's economy, has been the meeting point for the commercial talent of Yorubaland since the opening of the port to trade with Western Europe. From the start, that trade had inspired and depended upon the activities of a large number of middlemen who linked the expatriate merchant firms in the principal coastal market towns with the young but promising Nigerian market in the hinterland. These indigenous traders, the first generation to take advantage of the, new economic opportunities, came from all the main Yoruba subcultural groups. But, as several historical accounts have shown (see among others Johnson 1921, Forde 1951, Bauer 1954), the Ijebu have turned out more prominently in the process and have distinguished themselves as commercial entrepreneurs above other Yoruba subcultural groups.

The constitutional tug-of-war between Great Britain and Rhodesia has been tentatively settled, primarily on Rhodesian terms. When Rhodesia unilaterally declared its independence in November 1965, the British initially assumed that Ian Smith's regime would collapse within a few weeks from internal pressure. This has proved to be incorrect. The British imposed stiffer economic sanctions to raise the costs of secession and thus encourage white dissatisfaction with government policy. These penalties evoked very little electoral dissatisfaction and may have strengthened the hand of Prime Minister Smith. After six years of sanctions, it was Great Britain that made the concessions.

The ability of Rhodesia to survive economic sanctions and get Britain to accept constitutional terms virtually guaranteeing permanent white rule was due mainly to the overwhelming support of the Smith regime by white Rhodesians. The government's ability to get around many sanctions moderated some discontent, but this circumvention could not have been accomplished without the active cooperation of major segments of the population, particularly the business community, a group which traditionally had aligned itself with the opposition party. If there had been disaffection toward the government, then the British sanctions could have created serious public morale and support problems.

African studies are often characterized as interdisciplinary in nature. One wonders whether, as time passes and specific disciplinary studies become distinguished by ever more technical methodologies, this will be less true. However, since the objects of study are entire cultures that are for the most part alien to the researchers who study them, this interdisciplinary spirit may well endure.

With regard to the inventory of sub-disciplines within the general field of African studies, two relative late-comers are African art history and African philosophy. Previously the fields of interest that constitute their special concern were significantly influenced by anthropology. But when sufficient, relevant, fieldwork studies had accumulated to initiate the type of specialized inter-cultural understanding that is distinctive of these two sub-disciplines, there was reason to license them in their own right.

As African art history and African philosophy labored to accredit themselves these past decades, there are a number of expressed concerns which became common to the two disciplines. The aim of this paper is to reflect upon some of these, as expressed by African art historians, from the standpoint of students of African philosophy in the hope that their respective insights and problems may overlap, coalesce and perhaps prove mutually beneficial.

The human body is a central entity and analytic within African life and Africanist scholarship. The source of perception and the seat of animation, of life, it grounds experience of the world while also providing a rich set of symbols from which humans draw in political, social, and religious life to create and communicate meaning. Livingston reviews approaches to the body as a key concept in Africanist scholarship, tracing regimes of bodily representation ranging from the deployment of bodily symbolism in ancient smelting furnaces to the hypervisibility of the black female body in the European colonial imagination. She discusses a welter of bodily experience, from the pain of childbirth and the vulnerabilities of illness and accident to the sensorium or the kinesthetic power of movement and dance. In the process, Livingston considers developments within the field of African Studies via the body.

In the years following World War I, the black population in Britain's port cities increased as a result of an influx of West Indian and African seamen who had been discharged from His Majesty's Service. Many of these new arrivals, along with long-term residents, suffered as post-World War I economic conditions worsened, causing hostility from the host communities to increase. Blacks in cities such as Liverpool not only had to endure overt racial attacks, but they were also victims of hidden racism.

There was no legal segregation in Liverpool, and just as many whites as blacks lived within Toxteth, an area in the city's south end near the docks. Blacks and whites mixed freely in the area's numerous pubs, and black men often married white women. Despite the city's historical relationship with the slave trade and slavery, many of those who lived in Liverpool during the 1920s and 1930s accepted the pervasive myth of racial harmony in the city. However, some blacks who were more observant recognized that they were being denied adequate economic and social opportunities. Indeed, the city was not free of racial prejudice. In reality, the legacy of the slave trade and slavery and the negative stereotypes of blacks which had been developed over many years were so ingrained in the minds, hearts, attitudes and actions of many Liverpudlians that, wittingly and unwittingly, racism adversely affected the quality of life for black people in the city.

Development research is often associated with issues of policy. Researchers aim to increase our contextual and theoretical knowledge to enhance the creation of “good” development policies. One way of doing this is to identify and learn from harmful policies of the past. The objective of this article is to examine such policy-choice explanations by looking at the dominant understandings of the modern history of agriculture in Malawi. These perspectives share the view that the high level of rural poverty is, to a great extent, an outcome of the agricultural policies implemented by the colonial and postcolonial governments. Of crucial importance are the mechanisms whereby the state actively tried to transfer resources from the smallholder sector to the state or to the estate sector. This had a negative impact on the production capacity of the smallholder sector. This article notes that the focus on policies alone is not a sufficient approach to understand the dynamics and limitations of the smallholder sector. The article also points to some methodological weaknesses with policy-choice explanations that are relevant for development research in general.

For several years, local radio stations in Uganda have broadcast “come home” messages that encourage the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army to demobilize. Since the rebels began carrying out attacks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic, several international actors have introduced the same messages to these regions. This new effort has internationalized radio programming, benefited local radio stations, provided new forms of messaging, and functioned in collaboration with military actors. This article provides an overview of how “come home” messaging functions in different contexts, examines the effects of these actions, and calls for research into an important shift in military–humanitarian relations.

Based on a classroom encounter of the author, this article explores the gendered nature of African university space. It discusses a 2007–8 policy that banned pregnant adult students from living in the student residence halls at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. The policy was implemented despite protests from the university’s students and staff. The article argues that the more visibly reproductive a student’s body became, the more alien it was considered to be in spaces of knowledge production. This alienation was incongruous at a university widely considered as the most politically progressive in South Africa. It was rooted, however, in Western-oriented traditions of masculinist knowledge production in which there is no space for the female, let alone the pregnant, body in intellectual spaces; and in South African traditions of marginalization, exclusion, and “passing” in public space. Exploring ideas of “body language” and “bodies of knowledge,” the article concludes that there is a need for an interdisciplinary politics and epistemology of “seepage” in higher educational institutions that recognizes women’s minds and their bodies.

As demands for democracy have swept across the continent since 1989, dramatic change has affected states in sub-Saharan Africa. Frustrated by declining economies and the failures of incumbent governments, people from many different social strata have called for an end to authoritarian rule. Events in Eastern Europe have served as a catalyst, and donor pressures have sometimes acted to facilitate such movements; but the real impetus for change arises from internal struggles which have been incubating for several decades. In response, authoritarian states have moved to liberalize repressive structures, allow multiparty competition and move towards competitive elections. To many analysts such trends represent an important new departure that holds out promise for a more hopeful future. But others are less optimistic, noting the legacies of authoritarian systems and other structural obstacles to sustainable democratic rule. Whatever the outcome, the struggle for the future is now hotly contested.

Meanwhile, these processes present a potent challenge for political and social analysis. Why are these demands for change occurring now? What is the role of institutional arrangements and groups in “civil society” in transitions from single-party authoritarian regimes towards multiparty systems? Who are the key actors and which groups are excluded? Do multiparty elections lead to greater tolerance, expanded participation, respect for the rule of law and more accountability? What is required to sustain democratic rule? These and other questions have spawned a lively debate among Africanists, a debate with important theoretical and practical implications.

This paper reviews the appropriateness of a development intervention celebrated for its direct benefits to the rural poor: small farmer credit. It will focus on the degree of inappropriateness that results from a contradiction between the convenience of directing the credit to discrete compound units and the dependence of small farmers' success on the coordination of production activities among larger groupings. The case to be looked at is from the West African savannah of Central Mali.

The economic posture of Malian savannah farmers develops within the context of these larger groups of producers. Unlike peasant coalitions in Latin America (Ortiz, 1972), the Malian groupings have not arisen to provide mutual security by spreading market risk among a wider group. This occurs where peasants are dependent on returns from a commercial crop the demand for which leaves them uncertain about how much to produce at any given time. If this were the case, subsidized credit inasmuch as it improved the peasant's marketing options might be able to circumvent such coalitions in attracting the small farmer. But the Malian peasant's coalitions are organized to confront production rather than marketing constraints. As long as these production constraints remain, his loyalty will be to his coalitions rather than to a marketing opportunity should these conflict.

The Malian peasant is not limited by land scarcity in the amount he cultivates. Therefore, he is not dependent on income from commercial crops to buy food; he will increase cash crop production only when its marketing situation is stable. Dry season migrant labor opportunities have long been available to him as an alternative for raising money for the colonial and post-colonial head taxes. Migrant laborers come home to grow unmarketed, subsistence crops. The money uses of their labor are often better served elsewhere.

This article posits that a new and important transformation is occurring in Sahelian society. Westerners have tended to see the rise of “Islamism” as just another rejection of globalization and modernization. This article argues that another interpretation is possible, one that looks at the rise of movements like Izala as an attempt of embryonic Hausa capitalists to become part of globalization by substituting a much more individualized set of beliefs and behaviors for the older social and normative constructs of “traditional” Hausa society that obliged them to limit their accumulation of capital.

In his novels and essays and most recently in the pages of The New York Times, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has repeatedly claimed that the “trouble with Nigeria” lies with its leaders (1982, 1993)—and few of those who followed the pronouncements of General Babangida would say that the actions of the Nigerian head of state were without import for the political future of the country. Achebe finds an intellectual ally in social scientist Giuseppe de Palma (1992), who argues that the actions of decision makers at critical junctures in the process of political opening shape the range of choices and the kinds of risks they and their successors face subsequently. Although the conditions that make democratic consolidation more or less difficult may be a function of levels of socioeconomic development, the presence or absence of a civic culture, or the existence of a middle class, the decisions of leaders matter. Democracies are crafted, not born whole.

This essay tries to identify the sources of difference in leadership style during a period of political reform. It proceeds from two observations. First, tactical and strategic choices of leaders are partly a function of the incentive structures political and economic institutions offer. Electoral rules, the amount of central control over important electoral resources such as the media, participation in regional monetary agreements—all of these institutions shape the options available for building coalitions.