This study argues that in technical terms the usual economic models of international trade and development are misspecified because they deal only with market relations and omit important social and political equations (i.e., the social relations of production) which are important variables in the development matrix. This omission has led to development strategies which favor the “modern sector” at the expense of the traditional sector; the agricultural communities are undermined and impoverished. The traditional sector is maintained as a reservoir for cheap labor and as security for the old and the indigent to cushion off crisis in the capitalist modern sector. The traditional sector is undergoing a prolonged crisis without a smooth transition to capitalism or socialism. A more humane and viable process of development of the African economies is suggested: it is argued that Third World policymakers shift from the “dualistic” paradigm of economic development—a post World War II neoclassical paradigm associated with the work of Lewis (1954), Fei and Ranis (1964) and Jorgenson (1970)—to a version of the populist strategies of the Narodniki (Russian) and Maoism in transforming the backward agrarian economies of the Third World (Walicki, 1969; Gurley, 1975).

Most Third World economies may be classified as subsistence economies with industrial enclave sectors. The majority of the world's population live in an agrarian environment. Yet neoclassical and Marxist economists, having preoccupied themselves with the study of the capitalist system, have ignored agrarian economics (Georgescu-Roegen, 1970). Noncapitalist economies have simply not captured the interest of most economists.

A virtual crisis in Algerian agriculture has been experienced since the early 1950s. This crisis, which has its roots in the dislocations created by the seizure of the best lands by the French and the implantation of the colon regime of agriculture since the conquest of 1832, has been primarily a crisis of underproduction. The war of national liberation, which was fought primarily in the rural areas of the nation, the forced “regroupment” by the French army of approximately two million people during the war, and the massive destruction of livestock and of farm and forest lands resulting from the eight year war exacerbated the problem of underproduction. The relative contribution of agriculture to the GNP in 1954 was 34 percent, for example; whereas in 1968 it dropped to 15 percent, declining to less than 10 percent in the early 1970s (Viratelle, 1974: 196). The failure after 1962 of the post-revolutionary governments to stimulate agricultural production adequately or to create new or additional rural jobs helps to explain the constant decline in the peasant contribution to the Algerian GNP and to the development of the country after independence.

A massive rural-urban exodus also continues unabated. Approximately one hundred thousand farmers leave the lands, the villages, and small towns of the Algerian countryside each year swelling the already overcrowded cities of the north. This exodus, though not a recent development, has not been arrested in a sector where unemployment in the early 1970s reached one out of two persons (Ammour et al., 1974: 78).

This essay examines the history of the African Studies Association's engagement with the debates, concerns, and issues that have generated both tensions and creative energy within the association since its founding in 1948. The author argues that in the future, the association must maintain its preeminent role in fostering scholarly exchange, but that the association must also seek to engage in a much more active dialogue with the policy world; it must address issues of concern to academics in Africa, and it must work to encourage greater interest in Africa within and outside the academy.

“There is no conflict between the Church and the State in Zaire,” President Mobutu Sese Seko stated recently in a Kinshasa daily newspaper (Salongo, 28 Oct. 1973: 5). Despite the President's claim, the events of the last several years indicate a situation of high tension, if not of conflict. Zaire's only Cardinal was expelled from the country; the state banned all religious broadcasts, publications, youth groups, and Bishops' meetings, and a Bishops' Committee wrote that the government is moving towards totalitarianism and dictatorship—not exactly the kinds of actions which reveal close harmony.

This article discusses the steady deterioration and final stabilization of church-state relations in Zaire over the last five years. In an attempt to give both viewpoints, President Mobutu's public pronouncements and the state's concrete actions are presented, as well as the Bishops' statements and the Church's responses.

This conflict has been an important one to both sides. On the one hand, the Zairian Church is certainly the largest and most powerful Catholic Church in Africa, and thus one in which the Vatican takes a keen interest. On the other hand, the government is preoccupied with the Church, which has constituted the greatest threat to Mobutu's drive for absolute power. With its 3,900 Belgian priests and sisters and its close ties to the Vatican it represents both the colonial past and foreign domination. Worst of all, the Church professes a system of beliefs and practices which are different from those of the Zairian political party. Certainly one of the fascinating aspects of this topic is the contradiction between the President's public statements, which imply that he objects to the large foreign involvement in the Zairian Church, and the state's concrete actions, which are clearly directed against spreading the Catholic system of beliefs and practices.

Popular arts are an effervescent and protean aspect of contemporary culture in Africa. Karin Barber's overview captures the styles, flavor, and general sociological significance of these art forms for both artists and consumers. Noting a lack of theoretical synthesis in the field, the author begins with a critique of the tripartite “European model” of folk, popular, and elite art. She aptly remarks that this model obscures analysis by relegating popular art in Africa to an “undefined and shapeless space” between folk and elite art. Moreover, Barber is concerned with the role that the popular arts play as expressive acts that reflect particular social, political, and economic relationships.

Attempts to increase food productivity, make the agricultural sector more cost efficient, improve diets of lower income people, and increase net incomes of farmers and livestock owners are receiving considerable interest on a worldwide basis. In many areas, however, these goals are not being met. In particular, livestock development programs in arid and semi-arid pastoral and sedentary regions in Africa have been especially discouraging. The general problem confronted in this article is to determine why the livestock industry is not developing, and to analyze alternatives related to one major source of concern: communally grazed areas.

Africa warrants a special place in development planning due to a multitude of non-economic factors. Political instability, language differences, and tribal and racial tensions have often tended to overshadow economic considerations (Bates, 1981). Perhaps most striking has been the heavy emphasis on equity considerations, possibly because many nations have recently emerged from colonial rule. The relatively short post emergence period (two to three decades in most cases) combined with the continent's economic and natural resource diversity, and a host of other factors such as trade policies, make analysis of economic development potential very difficult (World Bank, 1981).

It is evident that there is no one problem and no unique solution in denning policies related to Sub-Saharan Africa's livestock sector. Perhaps most important is to recognize that the various kinds of livestock systems themselves, as well as associated social institutions, are dynamic forces.

For the mission-educated men and women known as “New Africans” in segregationist South Africa, the pleasures and challenges of courtship and marriage were not only experienced privately. New Africans also broadcast marital narratives as political discourses of race-making and nation-building. Through close readings of neglected press sources and memoirs, this article examines this political interpolation of private life in public culture. Women’s writing about the politics of marriage provides a lens onto theorizations of their personal and political ideals in the 1930s and 1940s, a period in which the role of women in nationalist public culture has generally been dismissed as marginal by scholars.

This article draws on the concept of “identity interests” to explain why commitment to the territorial integrity norm in the context of African peace processes has persisted over such a long period of time, even as continental and international contexts have changed. One major implication of this commitment to the territorial integrity norm is that third parties involved in peacemaking in Africa have consistently refrained from promoting a negotiated settlement that might pave the way for independence; they have only pushed for a territorial revision in a few instances. The role of major powers has been crucial with regard to the few successful territorial changes in Africa since 1960. An overview of all outcomes of mediation in territorial intrastate conflicts in Africa—as well as seven case studies—support this argument.

This article explores questions of decolonization, in part through analyzing Belgium’s Africa Museum. Bernal considers the role of academia and knowledge production, as well as the technological developments that may create new concentrations of power faster than decolonial projects can dismantle established hierarchies. She concludes that decolonization must address material questions of reparations and restitution, and that digital media have been transformative in ways that bring northern models of social existence closer to African ones. Having lived under colonizers, despots, and states of exception, Africans bring important knowledge and experience to twenty-first-century global struggles.

This article investigates issues of identity construction and public memorialization in postapartheid South Africa. It focuses on the Sunday Times Heritage Project, a unique private-sector initiative that involved the installation of thirty memorials throughout the country between 2006 and 2008. The article discusses the conceptualization and implementation of the project, pointing out important differences between this private initiative and the state-directed heritage effort. By interrogating the nexus between race, space, and memory in the construction of memorials, the article highlights the significance of placement and location in the formation of new identity discourses.

Madagascar is often cited as an example of a country with a long history of local institutional strength and stalwart community participation in the decision-making process. This article explores the crisis of community life in southern Madagascar, particularly the changed nature of community involvement. Associational life is in decline—a result not only of challenging economic conditions, but also of eroded social norms, as the rule-making institutions of the past have been replaced by the loose guidelines of the present. This situation, which has the potential of exacerbating economic problems, is also likely to have grievous political and ecological consequences.

In December, 1980, John Block, the Illinois farmer selected by Ronald Reagan as his new Secretary of Agriculture, told reporters: “I believe food is the greatest weapon we have for keeping peace in the world.” Mr. Block envisioned America shipping its agricultural surpluses to hungry nations in return for “more stability in the world.”

Contemporary Africa's Triple Heritage of indigenous, Islamic, and Western legacies is just the modern culmination of a much older Triple Heritage —the heritage of indigenous, Semitic, and Greco-Roman influences on Africa. The ancient Semitic strand has now narrowed and focused more firmly on Arab and Islamic influences; the ancient Greco-Roman strand has now expanded to encompass wider European and American intrusions.

The link between resource scarcity and group demands is apparent to many observers. Thus, David Easton (1957: 387) remarks: “The reason why a political system emerges in a society at all … is that demands are being made by persons or groups in the society that cannot all be fully satisfied. In all societies one fact dominates political life: scarcity prevails with regard to most of the valued things.” In modern Ghana, not only are desired resources in short supply generally, but the inherited subregional inequalities add a further dimension to collective demands for the allocation of goods and services by central government authorities. Longstanding subregional inequalities in amenities and services heighten and complicate competition over scarce resources. The resulting demands on the part of the relatively disadvantaged subregions therefore emerge as a dynamic aspect in the process of determining public policy.

African studies has gone through three well-known phases as a field of study. Up until 1950 or thereabouts, those studying Africa — they were not yet called Africanists — tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the capturing (or recapturing) of a description of Africa eternal: Launcelot the ethnographer in search of a holy grail of the past that was written in the present tense and was undefiled by contact and uncorrupted by civilization. What was once a myth is now a fairy tale and it would be silly to waste time tellling each other the obvious truth that fairy tales are modes of the social control and the education of children.

Africa is the second largest continent in the world. Partitioned into what is now fiftyone or more territorial units at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the continent presently has the largest number of states represented at the United Nations. This numerical strength has advantages and disadvantages for Africans. It is advantageous because it gives Africa greater visibility in the international voting process. It is disadvantageous because it turns this vast continent into a highly fragmented sector of the international community. Yet Africa's size and fragmentation have great significance for Africanists because together these factors make the continent a major laboratory for research on human society. Africa's numerous political and socio-economic units provide many examples of political and social engineering for students of underdeveloped world societies.

My presidential address tonight deals with Africa and its role and position in world history between two ages. The two ages addressed are the ancient/medieval and the modern/contemporary. As a historian, I see ancient African history as going back to the appearance of Homo Sapiens whose origins are now conclusively identified with East Africa. In tracing the historical past of Africa, I do not wish to travel so far back as to link up with those early Homo Sapiens, rather I wish to go only as far back on the world continuum as ancient Egypt to show in time how this magnificent civilization served as the birthplace of many cultural ideas that later travelled in all directions from the Nile Valley.

Anthropologists have long been interested in the sources and consequences of material inequality among African peoples. Societies in which such inequality existed during pre-colonial times have been investigated (cf. Maquet, 1970; Cohen, 1970; Hoben, 1970) but, especially since the close of the colonial era, attention has been directed toward societies originally without significant material wealth differences that have become internally differentiated due to exogenous social and economic forces. Emergent wealth differences have been related to a number of causes, including differential participation in labor migration (Mitchell, 1970; Watson, 1970; Wilson, 1977), differential incorporation into trade networks (Levine, 1962; Cohen, 1966; Mascarenhas and Mbilinyi, 1971), differential participation in ideological systems (Allan et el., 1948; Long, 1968; Barrett, 1974), and, especially, differential control over the factors of production (representative are: Ruthenberg, 1968; Vincent, 1971; Hill, 1972; Parkin, 1972; Feldman, 1974; Raid and Raid, 1975).

In East Africa today there is cause for particular concern regarding the extent to which differential access to land, labor and capital is generating patterns of rural inequality in which a few fortunate households are elevated while the majority remain poor. The concern exists not only because maldistribution of wealth and material well-being implies widespread suffering in rural areas, but because concomitant circumstances such as unequal educational opportunities (Sheffield, 1967; Court and Ghai, 1974), unequal access to development funds (Hyden et al., 1970; Heyer et al., 1971), and unequal nutritional intake (Gerlach, 1961, 1964; Dema, 1969; Kraut and Cremer, 1969), can lead to social, economic and physiological polarization of the rural population.